Diana Reynolds Roome

The Gothic Mystery of Francis Lathom’s Life

DIANA REYNOLDS ROOME

Despite Jane Austen’s impassioned defense of novel reading in Northanger Abbey, few modern readers are willing to labor through all seven novels recommended by Isabella Thorpe, even though she assures Catherine Morland that they are “‘all horrid.'” Clearly Isabella, Catherine’s new friend and a self-appointed expert on current fiction, hasn’t read them herself, but her friend Miss Andrews has, and she is as “‘beautiful as an angel'” (33). Isabella’s logic here isn’t altogether sound, but what is clear is the enthusiasm among young (and possibly older) ladies for horrid gothic mysteries. And of course, among some men too—Henry Tilney being one of them.

Austen’s references to Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and other novels have been well explored, but those on Isabella’s list of next-up must-reads were assumed to be fictional until John Louis Haney published evidence of their existence in 1901. Bibliophile and critic Michael Sadleir later found actual copies of the “horrid novels.” His homage to these books is delightfully expressed in an article published in 1927. Citing Isabella’s list from Northanger Abbey, he states that they will survive “as tiny stitches in the immense tapestry of English literature” (9).

One of these novels was mentioned by Jane in a 1798 letter to Cassandra written from the Bull and George, a stage stop where she was staying with her parents on the road back to Steventon from Godmersham: “My father is now reading the ‘Midnight Bell,’ which he has got from the library, and mother sitting by the fire” (24 October 1798). The date of this letter indicates that Jane’s family of avid readers had managed to get hold of a book that was fairly hot off the press. She does not say whether she has read it yet or what her father thinks of it, though it is clear that the novel was already a circulating library favorite.

The Midnight Bell was published anonymously earlier that same year, 1798, and it’s not clear that Austen knew who its author was, though she almost certainly knew the name of Francis Lathom from his subsequent books, whether she read them or not. In any case, The Midnight Bell proved to be such a success that Lathom’s books started to appear on an almost yearly basis under the author’s name. He found a willing publisher in Minerva Press, Leadenhall Street, London, by then a phenomenally successful and profitable publishing house that specialized in gothic fiction and mysteries.

Minerva’s books were in high demand. Its founder, William Lane, was the entrepreneur who had invented and instituted the first circulating library in London, in about 1770. Lane’s library contained over ten thousand volumes by 1794 (Blakey 113), and, with his active encouragement, circulating libraries were all the rage by the time Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey, as Isabella attests. The phenomenon made Lane a fortune and was responsible at least in part for the craze for gothic romance. These novels were not high literature, but they fueled an increasingly ravenous reading public, and Francis Lathom was one of their prominent authors until almost the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century.¹

Lathom was born in 1774, the year before Jane Austen, and he was twenty-four when The Midnight Bell came out. This was his second novel, as The Castle of Ollada appeared in 1795, when he was twenty-one (with a second edition to follow six years later). Of all his works, The Midnight Bell endured because “Lathom does not leave a single loose thread, and this well-knit, gloomy and horrific tale found admirers everywhere” (Varma xi).

A voracious reader, like Austen, Lathom’s early books were indebted to Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto had set the tone for the gothic fashion much earlier, in 1764. Ann Radcliffe was probably the most potent contemporary influence, mentioned often by Austen and probably also closely perused by Lathom, who was twenty when The Mysteries of Udolpho came out in 1794. Like Radcliffe’s stories of the supernatural, Lathom’s horrid happenings tend to find resolution eventually in rational explanations and optimistic finales.

Lathom seemed at pains to emphasize verisimilitude in his fiction, often prefacing his books with statements like that on the title page of The Midnight Bell, which insists that the story is “founded on incidents in real life,” though early critics doubted it, and Montague Summers believed that “Lathom should enjoy the full credit of the tale” (Varma x–xi). Of The One-Pound Note and Other Tales (1820), Lathom is still insisting, “Of the anecdotes and adventures which are detailed in the subsequent pages, the author can only assure his readers that they are most of them strictly true” (4). Lathom’s disclaimers might strain anyone’s credulity, at first glance, considering that the novels and stories are crammed with convolutions, mysteries, mistaken identities, secret sorrows, melancholia, unexplained disappearances, sudden revelations, kidnappings, murders, banishments, desperate lovers, and disinherited orphans, attributable to the fashion for extravagant themes in popular novels of the period.

Yet what makes Lathom’s insistence on the truth of his stories intriguing is that his personal history eventually comes to resemble his most overwrought plots. Several of the mysterious and shocking occurrences in Lathom’s fiction were reflected in his own life—not before but after he had written about them. Reading The Midnight Bell with the knowledge of what happened to Lathom long after he had written the book can provide a frisson of amazement and even horror worthy of his own best work. Like the hero of The Midnight Bell, Lathom was to be accused of some unspecified transgression, cast from his home, separated from his family, and forced to wander abroad alone, often assuming a different name.

A pervasive sense of insecurity haunts his life and is reflected in his work through repeated themes of secrecy, suspicion, and melancholy. Even his origins seem uncertain. He was apparently born to Sarah and Henry Lathom, a successful merchant of the East India Company, who were living in Rotterdam at the time; his baptism certificate from the English Episcopal Church in Rotterdam is still extant. Other versions of his biography mysteriously claim that he was the “illegitimate son of an English peer” (309), a statement perpetuated by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Taylor). This story might have been invented or at least encouraged by Lathom to explain his mystifying appearance in a rural Scottish community much later, as well as his much-remarked wealth. His apparent lack of any family in the latter half of his life would also have required a plausible explanation. In any case, confusion and subsequent revelations about parentage, and consequently about identity, are a recurrent trope in Lathom’s novels. The untangling of relationships that result from those confusions often form a major element in his stories. Yet it seems that in his own case, the confusions were never resolved. In a very literal but not necessarily positive sense, Lathom may have been living out his fictional dream.

By the time he was two years old, the boy Francis was living in Norfolk, England. His parents moved to the city of Norwich in East Anglia, which lies almost directly across the North Sea from Amsterdam. They were living well in retirement—at one point in Catton Place, just northeast of the city. This imposing house still stands and is known for some appropriately gothic architectural features (N. and P. Milne 8). Nothing has been discovered about Lathom’s education, but by age eighteen he had emerged as a successful man of the theater. His sophisticated, satirical-farcical plays were being produced at the Theatre Royal in Norwich—second in importance at that time only to Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London. The author was described as a “youthful prodigy,” and his comedies, with names like All in a Bustle and Curiosity, were so popular that he had three plays staged in as many years (Varma ix, x). His involvement in the theater went beyond the play script, and in 1800, at age twenty-six, he was producing Dash of the Day at the Norwich Theatre Royal. A musical farce titled Dash, or Who but He? was produced at London’s premier theater at the time, known popularly as Drury Lane Theatre (Mackie 35). All this must have made Francis Lathom something of a celebrity.

The Theatre Royal in Norwich, built by Thomas Ivory, was “designed on the model of Drury Lane and capable of housing an audience of a thousand” (Rawcliffe and Wilson 216). It also attracted some of London’s leading actors and actresses, including Sarah Siddons, who played in Norwich in 1788 (“Our History”). Francis was fourteen years old at the time and would almost certainly have been aware of this event, whether he actually saw the famous tragedian or not. Since the Austen family was enthusiastic about theatricals, it’s possible that they could have heard of Francis Lathom initially due to his success as a playwright, both in Norwich and in London.

Just before the publication of The Midnight Bell, in 1797, Lathom made an advantageous marriage to Diana Ganning, the daughter of a prominent lawyer. Over the next five years, four children were born in short order (though one died in infancy). The last of these children, my great-great-grandmother Jessy Ann, was born in 1803. Everything appeared to be going along splendidly, but soon afterwards, catastrophe struck. For reasons no one has ever ascertained, Lathom was banished from his home, separated from his wife and children, and rejected by his own father.

Divorce in those days was a serious religious as well as legal issue that usually required an Act of Parliament, thus calling for both the right connections and considerable financial resources. Clearly, Diana’s family did not lack money, and they might have had the right connections to obtain a Parliamentary divorce. But a divorce would have taken many years, meanwhile exposing any scandal involving Lathom—whatever that might have been—to wider public airing. In the case of divorce, the wife usually lost her property rights as well as any children. A legal separation, to which the husband agreed, though carrying heavy social consequences, might have offered a better solution and would have avoided the public humiliation of a Parliamentary divorce.

On the evidence available, it is impossible to tell when the rift with Lathom’s family began. Equally puzzling is the question of where he was living at that time, and with whom. His name has been found as a resident of 15 St. Martin-at-Palace Street, Norwich, from 1800 to 1810, and during the last three years of that period he was assessed as his own landlord and taxed on “£200 personal.” A deed from 1809 shows that Francis Lathom sold ownership of a house to his father, Henry Lathom, and father-in-law, Daniel Ganning,² expressly to benefit his estranged wife and children, since a married woman could not legally own property. He also handed over all his personal property, including his books and pictures. For a man who lived for literature, losing his library must have been devastating. That was apparently the last time Francis Lathom’s name appeared in any records for almost a decade.

In 1809, the Minerva Press published The Romance of the Hebrides, suggesting that Lathom had been visiting Scotland or was possibly already living there. Soon afterwards, aged thirty-five and a well-established novelist, he went suddenly underground. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography vaguely states that he moved to Inverurie in Scotland “sometime after 1801” (Taylor). Yet his daughter Jessy Ann was born in July 1803, indicating that the marriage was still intact around that time. Wherever he was residing, Francis Lathom’s books were much in evidence during the first years of the century, but nothing was published for a decade after 1810, and no documents have been found from that period. His novels ceased to appear in publisher’s announcements and newspaper advertisements, as they had done regularly from 1798 to 1809, when London, or Truth without Treason came out.

Lathom had stopped writing plays rather abruptly many years earlier; the last, a five-act comedy called The Wife of a Million, went on to Lincoln and Canterbury after a successful run in Norwich in 1803 (Varma x). His fans must have been curious to know why there were no more. Fashions change fast, however, and his success in novel writing might have been explanation enough. Or did something else happen to force him away from his career as a dramatist? Did his businessman father and lawyer father-in-law disapprove of the looser way of life the theater was deemed to encourage; or did his wife feel threatened by relationships he struck up there?

Curiously, in the middle of that first decade, another Minerva Press author was busy producing gothic romances. Sophia Frances wrote three novels in several volumes, including Vivonio, Constance de Lindendorf, and The Nun of Miserecordia, all appearing in the years 1806 and 1807.³ After that, Sophia Frances’s name disappeared as suddenly as it had surfaced. Nothing is known of her life, and the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists her name as a pseudonym of Francis Lathom. An informal survey reveals stylistic similarities in the work of the two authors, though similarities could be claimed of the genre in general. Sophia Frances’s novels are overblown near-parodies of the gothic romance, with the heroines constantly fainting away in a style that made one early reader pencil disdainful comments all through his or her copy of The Nun of Miserecordia. Could Lathom have decided to try his hand as a female author at a time when the circulating library readership, especially of gothic novels, was predominantly female and when increasing numbers of women were establishing themselves as authors?⁴ Or if he were being forced underground by a scandal that had reached the public ear, or at least that of his publisher, did he decide to establish himself under an entirely different name? By coincidence—or maybe not—Lathom had a cousin named Sophia and an aunt named Frances.

Diana eventually changed her surname and that of her children to Ganning, her own family name. Permission had to be formally granted her by the Prince Regent (later George IV) via letter patent, which was dated July 4, 1815. The children were re-christened with Ganning as their surname in St. Giles Church, Norwich. With this ceremony, her rejection of her husband was complete.

Three children, by now fully old enough to understand at least partially what was happening, had already lost their father, and they now lost their patrimony and their patronymic, the Lathom name. What was the explanation offered by their mother and grandparents for this amputation of half their heritage? Whatever it was, the results were dire and irreversible. Their grandfather, Francis’s own father, effectively forbade his son from communicating with his children or taking any part in their lives.

Henry Lathom’s will, written shortly before he died in 1812, grants his only son a stipend of £200 a year, to be paid in two installments, on the strict condition that Francis never try to interfere in his children’s lives. The wording in the will is harsh, stating that Francis Lathom “shall release and relinquish. . . the custody care and guardianship of Henry, Frederick and Jessy Ann. . . and shall not in any way or manner whatsoever assert controul or interfere in or with the. . . education arrangements or bringing up of the said three children.” If this condition were in any way violated, the “said annuity. . . shall cease and no longer be payable to him.”⁵ An annual stipend of £200 was an impressive sum for those days, especially in the impoverished rural economy of northeast Scotland where Lathom took up residence. Living in a tiny town among farming people, he had little to spend his money on aside from whisky, of which he was reportedly fond, and the four newspapers that he had delivered from London every day, an extravagance that would have cost more than many people’s weekly income. He read the theatrical gossip avidly and tried to make up for being away from the real action by putting on plays with the locals, another way he gladly spent his stipend. But all this could hardly have made up for the pain of being barred from his children and receiving such a harsh rejection from his own father, with no opportunity for reconciliation.

This scenario was oddly foreshadowed by The Midnight Bell, written more than ten years earlier. In this his second and most successful novel, Alphonsus, the only son of a count and inheritor of the Castle Cohenburg in Saxony, is forced to flee when his father is slain in mysterious circumstances. His mother blames his much-loved uncle, Frederic, for the murder but is unwilling to provide reasons for her conviction. She insists that Alphonsus should avenge his father’s death, but soon changes her mind and accuses Alphonsus himself of somehow ruining their lives. She orders him to flee the castle and not return. Alphonsus, “stretched on the rack of doubt, suspicion and perplexity” (8), leaves the castle to go he knows not where and to find some kind of anonymity. In both the fictional story and the real one, loss of family and birthright precedes banishment to strange lands and an uncertain future. Lost or estranged fathers are a repeated theme in Lathom’s novels. David Punter and Alan Bissett use the term Nachträglichkeit to describe the way certain events in The Midnight Bell seem to contain a kind of deferred meaning, “as though something had been deposited in the text that was destined to be acted out, performed later” (68).

Where Lathom went during those first years after the rift nobody knows, though scholars have theorized that he traveled in Europe (Summers 316– 17; Varma ix). The Napoleonic Wars were still raging, so travel there might have been hazardous. Lathom was clearly fluent in French, translating Pierre Roussel’s Castle of the Tuileries (1802, with a two-volume, leather-bound set appearing in 1803).⁶ The Italian Mysteries (1822) reveals a detailed knowledge of parts of northern Italy, especially Padua.

Indication of renewed activity eventually came with a letter from Lathom to his London publisher, Minerva Press, written from New York on 24 October 1819—almost ten years after any evidence of his whereabouts. The letter stated in polite and measured terms that Lathom had received “a very handsome offer” from a publisher in America but preferred to “move under the auspices of an old friend” (Italian Mysteries 1). This approach has the flavor of reconciliation, especially if (as one might speculate) Lathom had become persona non grata in the British publishing world. By then the publishing house was headed by A. K. Newman rather than the irrepressible William Lane, who died in 1814.

During the previous year, 1818, Northanger Abbey had been published at last. Written many years before (“about the years 98 and 99,” according to Cassandra Austen), it had also spent years in purdah, languishing on a shelf with a publisher who had bought it for ten pounds in 1803 but never brought it out. A mystified (and miffed) Austen eventually bought the manuscript back for the same sum, amended it, and penned an “Advertisement” in 1816, in which “[t]he public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes” (NA 1).

By the time Northanger Abbey was finally published, after Austen’s death, the gothic craze was more or less over, which might have made satirical treatment of that overwrought style somewhat irrelevant. It took twenty years for Isabella’s list of “horrid novels” to reach the eyes of the reading public, and by 1818 many of those books had sunk into oblivion. Yet, for Lathom, the highlighting of his early novel The Midnight Bell, by such a well-established and widely read author, could have been enough to jog people’s memories and pull his name back into some kind of prominence. In any case, after an eleven-year hiatus, Lathom began to write—and to publish—again. Both The One-Pound Note and Italian Mysteries appeared in 1820 and were later translated into French. There is a satirical flavor in Italian Mysteries that seems to exaggerate and spoof the gothic style, now fading from popularity. If Austen could implicitly satirize Francis Lathom’s book in Northanger Abbey, he could also now satirize the style that had first made him famous.

By 1823, Lathom was in Philadelphia, writing from “my address. . . at the sign of the Goose-quill and Printer’s Devil, Poet’s Alley” (Live and Learn xi). Did he discover in himself a new creative energy emerging in the new-minted United States? Or could his renewed acceptance by his old London publisher have made him nostalgic for home, or allowed him to judge that he could return to Britain? If so, it was not to be to London or to Norwich.

Nothing is known of his four or more years in America, apart from those two letters to his London publisher. Did he go on a lecture circuit, as Dickens would do later? Was he holed up somewhere, experimenting with new kinds of fiction and recasting his brand? John Nause characterizes Lathom as an early experimental writer, arguing that “the novel of manners underwent some significant growth in Lathom’s capable and creative hands” (277). In any case, his romances and historical fictions sold well. A second edition of The Midnight Bell came out in 1825. The appearance of several novels with Scottish themes and settings reinforces the likelihood that Lathom returned to Scotland directly after his sojourn in America. What is certain is that he turned up in a rural area of Aberdeenshire, living among people entirely unlike himself, whose very language—”a dialect called Doric, a version of Scots particular to the North East region” (Bissett, e-mail) must have been alien to him, though he was fascinated by dialect and made a point of including it in his Scottish novels.

Critic and bibliophile Montague Summers wrote a history of the gothic novel in 1938, and his notes on Lathom were for a long time among the few biographical sources available. He painted a portrait of Lathom as a sociable and rather dandified raconteur, who entranced the townspeople with his extravagant stories and wit while drinking a bit too much whisky. He was also notorious for taking long, solitary walks. In addition, Summers speculated that he took to Scotland to live there with his male lover (Summers 316; qtd. in Varma vii). As Punter puts it, “for Lathom to uproot to . . . Scotland was the equivalent of sudden death. Questions of this kind need answers, and if none are available, then they must be invented. The answer to the question that is most frequently found is that Lathom was homosexual” (viii).

According to James Jenkins, whose extensive research has resulted in reissues of several of Lathom’s novels and many other neglected works of the period through Valancourt Books, Summers’s account of Lathom’s life “is almost entirely a mixture of inaccuracy and surmise” (vii). Despite this skepticism, others have taken up Summers’s flimsy claim, including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which has perpetuated other dubious claims about Lathom, including inaccuracies about his date and place of birth and speculations about his illegitimacy. By degrees, from the time that Jane Austen and her father read him, to Sadleir’s recovery of the “horrid novels,” to his transmutation today as “one of the first gay novelists,” Lathom has been rolled through a mill of enthusiastic interpretation, possibly fictional, potentially justified, but mostly unproven.

What is documented—though in anecdotal style—is that wherever he went, Lathom caused a stir. In Scotland there were disputes about where he should live. More than one household wanted to adopt him as he was clearly generously funded. He may even have earned his keep in entertainment value. At one point an “Inverurie Bailie” (or magistrate) tried to kidnap him and bring him back to board at his place for a tidy rent. Actual fistfights ensued between the bailiff who had originally taken Francis in and Alexander Rennie, a farmer who lived with his wife and children in Fyvie, a few miles away (Milne 157). Francis was persuaded to accept the Rennies’ offer of a home, and when the family moved later to the nearby village of Monquihitter, an extension was built especially for him at their house, known as Millfield.⁷

These stories emerged many years later, expanding on a brief description of Lathom that had appeared in Scottish Notes and Queries in 1857. Written in 1901 by the Reverend A. J. Milne, in response to a query reprinted by P. J. Anderson, the details were apparently gleaned from people who remembered hearing about Lathom—then known as Mr. James Francis—all these years later:⁸ Anderson provides the information that “[a] gentleman who was generally called Mr. Francis lived for many years with a farmer in the parish of Fyvie in Aberdeenshire at their home called Bogdavie” and that “[a]t the time of his death, he was amusing himself by training up a few young rustics for the stage, and had fitted up a theatre, the dresses and scenery of which cost him upwards of £100” (Anderson 156). According to Milne, “Mr. James Francis” was reported to be the son of an English nobleman or wealthy Englishman who, for some reason best known to himself, was willing to pay handsomely for the board and lodging of his son at a distance from the English home”; he was “popularly known in the parish as ‘Boggie’s lord'” (156, 157). Milne adds:

I am told that he was very peculiar in his dress—”he didna wear the clothes of hereabouts”—he had parti-coloured garments as if he had been a play-actor; he wrote a great deal—novels for the Minerva Press, poems, songs, which he himself sang; and that he had an unfortunate partiality for whisky, owing as much as £30 to the Burnside dram shop for forenoon “nips.” He was harmless, fond of talking, had an English “tongue” and was a general favourite. He received the London newspapers regularly, and enjoyed their gossip… He was exceedingly interested in theatrical news. (157)

Whether the play he was rehearsing with the locals went on or not has never been discovered, despite searches through archives from the area.

When he died, in May 1832, Francis Lathom was fifty-eight. He was buried in the Rennie family burial plot, in the graveyard of the parish church of Fyvie. Church records show that he was buried in the same gravesite as “Ann, a child, daughter of Alex Ranie, Millfield,” who had died in April, only a month before. This burial seems to imply a very close relationship, as Francis Lathom, novelist and scion of a wealthy family, could easily have paid for his own grand plot. No will has been traced, though he almost certainly had money to bequeath. How his family in Norwich heard about his death is uncertain, since it seems that nobody in Aberdeenshire knew where he came from. There is no gravestone, and his burial was recorded in parish documents under the name of Mr. James Francis, not the name he had made famous and borne for most of his life. For this reason, as well as because his children were officially rechristened with their mother’s maiden name, the surname Lathom never appears in the annals of my family history. I did not know until recently that Francis Lathom was my great-great-great-grandfather.

Why was Francis Lathom cast out of his family and community, where he had been a success and even a celebrity? Political and religious dissent, the Revolution in France, and the Napoleonic wars could have caused heated disagreements, though it is hard to imagine that Lathom could have been rejected so thoroughly by his entire family for such reasons. In the preface to The Impenetrable Secret (1805), Lathom declares that he would be sorry to introduce into society any book that “might leave any of its members more lax in their morals than it found them, especially the younger branches, for whom it becomes the writer to be particularly cautious in drawing praiseworthy examples” (ix). This rather pious statement was made shortly before Lathom was banished for a nameless moral transgression. No reliable evidence of homosexual relationships has ever come to light, though Varma mentions that “a great deal of ill-natured gossip was whispered against him,” without elaborating further (xv).

As David Punter asks, “Was Francis Lathom considered queer not because of what he was but because of what he wrote?” (xix). Other literary critics and commentators today turn this question on its head, arguing that the work itself provides evidence for his “queerness.” Yet the traces are subtle enough to go unnoticed by anyone not seeking them out. Certainly, Lathom’s books seethe with instances of close male friendships—though life and literature would be sadly impoverished without them.

In Lathom’s own time, despite a punitive attitude to homosexuality, his readers did not appear to see anything amiss in the portrayals or the guises. The editor of a magazine with the highly respectable name The Ladies’ Monthly Museum detected nothing remarkable in The One-Pound Note and Other Tales, mentioning only that “[t]hese volumes are the production of that ingenious and industrious novelist Mr. Lathom. They will not detract from his reputation” (98). Since he had produced no work to keep up his reputation for the past decade, it is surprising to hear that word mentioned in such casual terms, with no query about his absence. Even after the long silence, there is no taint of scandal or even surprise at his comeback, though The Morning Post of Saturday, February 5, 1820, contained an intriguing item in its advertising section: “The Novel and Romance Readers will be gratified to learn, that after a silence of ten years, Francis LATHOM, author of The Mysterious Freebooter and many other esteemed productions, has announced a new Work, entitled Italian Mysteries, which for dramatic effect, is spoken of as even superior to any of his former works” (Advertisement 3).

The critique in The Ladies’ Monthly Museum admires the originality, characters, and quality of the writing in The One-Pound Note and Other Tales and suggests that it will please “those who are fond of the marvelous and surprising” (98). The title story revolves around two men whose close friendship can be explained by the fact that Sandiman saves William’s father from the executioner’s scaffold at the last moment, and both are on the run. The review does frown somewhat at the “unfortunate Sandiman,” with whom the reviewer is “not quite satisfied . . . in a moral point of view” (98). Debt and bigamy are Sandiman’s sins, the last certainly a sexual transgression but not in any way suggesting what Sir Robert Peel, addressing the British Parliament of 1828, termed “the crime inter Christianos non nominandum” (the crime not to be named among Christians) (Dale 13). Sandiman is one of Lathom’s many sympathetic sinners, and his zest for life almost makes up for his errors of judgment. The two protagonists are passionately devoted to women they have been forced to abandon due to the wildly improbable circumstances that Lathom concocts with inventive zest. Yet an extravagant emotionality to their expressions of loyalty at times seems startlingly out of place.

In The Midnight Bell, the devotion between Count Byroff and his servant Jacques also seems understandable at first, since they share a kind of comradein-arms experience of being imprisoned in the Bastille. Jacques helps Byroff to escape because, as he puts it, “I had taken a liking to you above any of the prisoners I attended” (155). Jacques had advised Byroff to don women’s clothes and “pretend to be my wife; your features are very delicate and you may easily pass for a woman” (152). This transformation is curious, since Byroff is earlier described as “handsome” by his “destined spouse” and later disguised as Ralberg, a villain of “scowling mien and haggard looks” (54).

In one of the many imbedded stories in The Midnight Bell, a hermit is asked to share a bed with another man at an inn, and a scene of “domesticity and affection” is followed by a bloody drama early the next morning (81). Travelers were often obliged to share flea-ridden beds with strangers, and the sense of potential threat in sleeping at close proximity to an unknown person must have invaded the imaginations of many regular travelers. One scholar, however, sees this scene as written with more authenticity than many of the more conventionally gothic scenes in the book (Grove 41). James Jenkins calls Live and Learn “one of the first gay novels written in English” (Foreword xii), and he is not the only one who thinks so. Though the vast majority of Lathom’s plots center on relationships between men and women, it is not hard to find nonconforming scenes in Lathom’s work once one is on the track. The clues are sometimes puzzling, however, not pointing necessarily to homosexuality but possibly to a variant position on the gender spectrum: “The lack of a neat definitive biographical narrative with ‘evidence’ to prove Lathom’s sexuality in fact makes him more queer, because he does not fall into any neat, easy categories like ‘homosexual'” (Fincher, Preface viii).

Cross-dressing is a recurring theme, one instance occurring soon after the escape from the Bastille in The Midnight Bell, when Jacques persuades Byroff to dress up as his wife in order to avoid recognition. A cross-dressing monk in “The Prophecy” (from The One Pound Note and other Tales) is “remarkable for a beauty of person closely approaching to feminine loveliness” (166)— but “he” turns out in fact to be a woman whose assumption of masculine guise allows her to play an important role in resolving the central conflict. Lathom, as a man of the theater, would have found such devices quite acceptable, and useful, in creating mysteries and thickening plots. In Shakespeare’s plays, after all, cross-dressing and gender shifting provide rich fuel.

Several modern critics think Lathom’s nonconformist attitude to gender has deeper psychological and sociological import. “Lathom’s gender-bending characters call into question accepted patterns of masculine and feminine behavior. The themes of secrecy, disguise and forbidden love often appear throughout his work,” observes Max Fincher (Editing), one of a growing number of scholars who link gothic literature with gender exploration. Fincher shows how a narrative of suspicion appears in the books of many male gothic writers who are also gay, including Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Lord Byron, and John Polidori: “The culture of policing same-sex desire” creates “anxiety and paranoia . . . about being watched or looked at (in sexual terms) by other men” (Queering 18–19). Fincher argues that Lathom “is a particularly interesting case for queer scholars because he draws on conventions of cross-dressing and mistaken identity (ultimately derived from Shakespeare’s plays)” (Editing).

Characters with ambiguous sexuality are a feature of Lathom’s novels, unusual for the times. The strangely masculine character of Gertrude Lambton seems oddly irrelevant to the plot of The Wife, the Mistress, and the Friend. In The Midnight Bell, after Lauretta is kidnapped, she is brought to “a miserable inn” where she faints (as she often does) and wakes to find herself “still on the ground, with her head reclined on the knees of a woman, whose expanded features and brawny limbs seem to deny her sex” (56). The reader immediately suspects that this development is a ruse for someone—probably the villain of the moment—to get his hands on the heroine. But as with the manly Gertrude Lambton, this instance seems to be a gratuitous case of gender anomaly.

Lathom’s fascination with people who did not accord with conventional models of femininity or masculinity made him unusual at a time when societal pressures to conform rigorously to masculine or feminine stereotypes were taken for granted. Assumptions about male desires for women, plus most women’s desire for a place in society via marriage despite the high price they often had to pay in personal happiness, underlie the plots of much of the fiction of the time. But the accepted types clearly bore Lathom, with male characters sometimes defined as possessing the robust manly virtues with a love of sport and hunting, or alternatively described as “bookish” and delicate. Women characters in Lathom’s early books especially seem lifeless, constantly weeping, fainting, and protesting their virtuous intentions. More interesting and more powerful female characters, not necessarily with masculine characteristics, appear in later books. In gothic fiction, young maidens are forever being shut up in castles by sinister older men who purport to be their guardians or uncles, and Lathom’s plots contain their fair share of such scenarios. But many were not so straightforward. His evident interest in people who did not conform, either to societal norms or to gender stereotypes, gives him a modernity that accords well with this era of LGBTQ self-identification.

In 1809, a period of prolific production shortly before his output ceased for nearly a decade, Lathom states in his preface to London, or Truth without Treason that he considers himself a close observer of human nature:

I continue. . . to make nature my study, and the model from which I draw. . . . Many incidents, likewise in fiction are pronounced by the critic to be unnatural, whilst the author knows them to have really taken place; in contradiction to which error, it can alone be replied, that those who conceive the limits of nature and of probability to be contracted, require only farther acquaintance with the world at large, to be convinced how irregular and extensive are the bounds of them both. (vi).

Lathom’s declaration here seems to accord with those of Horace Walpole, a famously gay novelist whose work he must have known. Anne Williams argues that Walpole “sees that an accurate—a truly natural—representation of the human self can only be achieved by including its mysteries and inconsistencies. And these, he believes, must necessarily disturb any neoclassical rage for order. Fidelity to ‘human nature’ justifies—even demands—a ‘Gothic’ aesthetic” (29). Lathom also demonstrated a certain sympathy for people who had gone astray. Many of his characters put themselves on the wrong side of the law by ingenious means ranging from gambling, debt, forging banknotes, dueling, even bigamy—always with a cast-iron excuse for their actions—and most of them express deep remorse, citing impossible circumstances that drove them to leave the straight and narrow path. His real villains are cut from a different cloth altogether, their unforgivable sins being cruelty or violence and lack of compassion or forgiveness.

The characters who display what today might be deemed queer characteristics are essentially benign and positive influences, though in Lathom’s day, such characteristics could be equated with the worst of crimes. Being convicted of a homosexual act could bring down a death sentence until 1835, three years after Lathom’s death. Nineteenth-century Britain was especially intolerant of male homosexuality, and there was a severe crackdown in the early 1800s. On July 8, 1810, around the time that Francis Lathom’s literary silence began, the Bow Street Runners (London’s first professional police force) raided the White Swan, a tumbledown pub in London’s premier theater district, also described as a molly house of Tudor origin—as were the laws on sodomy, which dated from Henry VIII’s reign. Twenty-seven men were arrested on suspicion of sodomy or attempted sodomy; two were executed and others pilloried. The Drury Lane Theatre, not far from the White Swan, had staged at least one of Lathom’s plays, and he would have known that area of London well. Men of means, of course, could buy their way out of punishment. Although by this time Lathom had already handed over his property in Norwich, so that the likelihood that he was in any way involved is slim, even the smallest taint of involvement in any such scandal—for example, knowing someone who had been there—might have been the ultimate push that drove him from his family and hometown.

David Punter and others have pointed to the repeated themes of secrecy in Lathom’s works and theorize (with references to Freud) about the connections between secrecy, melancholy, and suppressed homosexuality (xv–xvii; Punter and Bissett 65–66). Melancholy occurs repeatedly in the work of the early Romantics, often with no apparent homosexual undertones. But it is a notable element in Lathom’s work, along with recurring themes of separation and suspicion. Secrecy even functions as a springboard for plot, suggests Punter, and also accounts for the sometimes convoluted, contrived, and highly improbable developments in the narrative: “any move towards verisimilitude is fractured from the outset, not so much by the plot itself or the many unexplained secrets the narrative has to carry from the beginning until nearly the end, but by the sheer time and space required in order for the characters to give their various explanations one to another” (xi).

Rambling plots, however, were far from new. The picaresque novel had long been popular, and Homer’s digressions, after all, form the roots of Western literature. Shakespeare weaves into his plots numerous improbable tales of banishment, hidden identities, lost patrimony, disguises, sudden catastrophic jealousies, and ecstatic recognition of long-lost relatives or friends. It’s clear that Lathom loved Shakespeare and was an avid reader in general. The title of his first big success, The Midnight Bell, comes from Anthony and Cleopatra (“Let’s mock the midnight bell” [3.13]). The ending of his novella The Prophecy is strongly reminiscent of Twelfth Night. Eccentric characters in Italian Mysteries and Live and Learn spout Shakespeare at every opportunity. Lathom relished quotations, and, though it was the convention to place a few aptly chosen lines from the literary giants at the start of each chapter, the majority of his were from Shakespeare.

Though best known for his gothic novels, Lathom was versatile, writing social satire, romance, historical novels, and contemporary regional fiction. James Jenkins calls Lathom “a writer of many talents and considerable depth” with a “long and prolific writing career, which was both popularly and critically successful” (Introduction iii). Montague Summers describes Men and Manners (1799) as a “novel of contemporary satire” and goes on to name it “his masterpiece and worthy of Dickens” (333). Described as an early experimental novelist by John Nause (10), Lathom was also one of the first writers to attempt a “Scots novel” with dialect—even prior to the appearance of Walter Scott’s novels—and also one of the first historical novelists, with books on Mary, Queen of Scots, Anne Boleyn, and Richard I (Lionheart), which radically recast the popular views of those characters.

What did the Reverend Austen think as he sat near the fire in the Bull and George Inn reading The Midnight Bell? He would have had to put up with byzantine plots and extravagant sentiments that must have strained the credulity of an English country parson. Did Jane recommend Lathom’s books to him, or did he pass the books on to his daughters? In either case, it’s unlikely that any of them had qualms about undercurrents of sexuality.

Clearly, Lathom had thought much about suspicion, even by the time he wrote The Midnight Bell in his early twenties. Suspicion is the emotion that sets off the novel’s narrative, and a theme that runs throughout the book. The last page of the last chapter ends with a passage about suspicion that at first paints a picture of domestic bliss, which Lathom might have been on the verge of claiming for himself just before his banishment:

Alphonsus and his Lauretta, living together in the splendor of rank, yet deriving their comforts from domestic happiness; count Byroff revered by his son and daughter; beloved and caressed by their offspring; that offspring growing up in the sanctioned felicity of innocence, sweetened by the indulgence of a fond grandfather, the endearments of a doating mother, and the instruction of a father, competent to give them. (223)

As Lathom lived the uncomfortable life of an exile with a hidden identity, this vision of family harmony must have echoed in his mind with painful irony. The advice of Alphonsus to his children comes in the last paragraph of the book.

Learn above all, my children. . . to avoid suspicion; for as it is the source of crimes, it is also the worst of crimes, attaching itself with equal mischief to the guilty and the innocent; it is an endless pang to him who harbours it; for it dies only when he dies, and then too often leaves a curse on those that follow him; it is the influence of evil that breeds suspicion, the noble spirit of charity that subdues it! (224)

The suspicion that banished Lathom may reveal less about him than about the darker aspects of life in the early nineteenth century: intolerance, respectability at all costs, and matrimony in order to gain status, wealth, or political advantage.

Lathom’s struggle to find an identity (especially with regard to his apparently uncertain paternity), an accepting community, and a home where he was not under suspicion has struck chords with wider audiences. A new play about his life was performed in northeast Scotland in the summer of 2019 (Bissett, Mr. Francis). Live and Learn was recently retold as a modern story (Goodman). Several of Lathom’s novels have been republished by Valancourt Books, making them easily accessible to readers after almost two centuries of obscurity. His work is being discussed in the context of the increasingly popular and academically respected gothic literary tradition.

Victorian critic George Saintsbury thought that Northanger Abbey‘s “horrid novels” were invented by Jane Austen as a spoof on the types of “unprofitable” and “undelightful” stories that were populating the shelves of circulating libraries at the time (ix). While Sadleir tracked down the actual “horrid novels” and compared them to “stitches in the immense tapestry of English literature” (9), there are signs that Lathom’s legacy may turn out to be more than a stitch. As long ago as 1901, The Inverness Review, and Northern Farmer expressed “the desirability of erecting some memorial on his hitherto nameless grave” (qtd. in Varma xv). Pleas for recognition have emerged through the nearly two centuries since his death, with literary critics, scholars, and readers discussing his legacy and trying to reinstate his name as an author and an individual. Summers believed he was “lamentably neglected” (qtd. in Taylor). Now that modern scholars and psychological studies have “outed” him, his current celebration as an early author of gay or queer fiction is bringing him well-deserved renewed attention. Yet he remains essentially an enigma who can only be known through his work.

To co-opt the words of Julio in Italian Mysteries, Francis Lathom is being slowly revealed in a way that, as a man who reveled in drama and the gothic spirit, he would have appreciated: “Too long have I been to you an enigma; but the time has come for me to unveil the mystery in which I have been clouded, and to unfold to you myself as I really am” (119).

---

Notes

1. According to T. Medwin’s Life of Shelley (1847), Percy Bysshe Shelley resorted “under the rose” to a “low circulating library” to borrow the wild romances he loved (Blakey 112).
2. Norwich St. George Tombland: House conveyed by Francis Lathom to Henry Lathom and Daniel Ganning, 13 May 1809 (Norwich Record Office BRA 239/1–26, 716X2).
3. Sophia Frances’s novels are digitized by Google (from Oxford University).
4. In a prospectus of 1798, Minerva lists its ten most popular novelists; all are women (Blakey 53).
5. Probate copy of the will of Henry Lathom formerly of Rotterdam (Netherlands), late of Catton, now of Norwich esq. 17 May 1812, proved 16 Oct. 1812 (Norwich Record Office NRS 26585. 148X3).
6. In February 2018, a copy of Lathom’s translation of Castle of the Tuileries was for sale at $2,500.
7. Millfield is now categorized as a building of national importance, due to its historic or architectural interest, on the National Heritage List for Scotland.
8. Best sources for local history come from parish reports written by Church of Scotland ministers, which can be found at https://stataccscot.edina.ac.uk/static/statacc/dist/home.

Works Cited

Advertisement. The Morning Post 5 Feb. 1820: 3. newspapers.com/image/396809733 (paywall)

Anderson, P. J. “Local Biography: Francis Lathom.” Scottish Notes and Queries ser. 2, 2 (Apr. 1901): 156.

Austen, Jane. Jane Austen’s Letters. Ed. Deirdre Le Faye. 4th ed. Oxford: OUP, 2011.
_____. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Barbara Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye. Cambridge: CUP, 2006.

Blakey, Dorothy. The Minerva Press 1790– 1820. Oxford: OUP, 1939.

Bissett, Alan. E-mail to the author. 28 June 2019.
_____. Mr. Francis and the Village of Secrets [Play]. Prod. Inverurie and Aberdeen, 2019.

Dale, Alan. Introduction. A Marriage Below Zero. Ontario: Broadview, 2017. 9–44.

Fincher, Max. Preface. The One-Pound Note and Other Tales. Chicago: Valancourt, 2013. vii–xvi.
_____. Queering Gothic Writing in the Romantic Age: The Penetrating Eye. London: Palgrave, 2007.
_____. Editing: Academic Editing. Max Fincher. maxfincher.com

Frank, Frederick S. The First Gothics. New York: Garland, 1987.

Goodman, Wayne. Fortune’s Lot: A Retelling of Francis Lathom’s Live and Learn. 2018.

Grove, Alan Whitlock. “Coming Out of the Castle: Renegotiating Gender and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Gothic Fiction.” Diss. U Pennsylvania, 1996.

Haney, John Louis. Letter to the Editors. Modern Language Notes 16.7 (1901): 446–48.

Jenkins, James D. Foreword. The Castle of Ollada. Chicago: Valancourt, 2005. vii–x.
_____. Introduction. Italian Mysteries. Chicago: Valancourt, 2005. i–viii.

Jenkins, Lucien. Introduction. The Midnight Bell. London: Skoob, 1989.

Lathom, Francis. The Castle of Ollada. 1795. Chicago: Valancourt, 2005.
_____. The Impenetrable Secret. 1805. Chicago: Valancourt, 2007.
_____. Italian Mysteries. 1820. Chicago: Valancourt, 2005.
_____. Live and Learn. London: Newman, 1823.
_____. London, or Truth without Treason. London: Lane, 1809.
_____. The Midnight Bell. 1798. Kansas City: Valancourt, 2007.
_____. The One-Pound Note and Other Tales. 1820. Chicago: Valancourt, 2013.

Mackie, Charles. Norfolk Annals: A Chronological Record of Remarkable Events in the Nineteenth Century. Vol. 1: 1801– 1850. Norwich: Norfolk Chronicle, 1901.

Milne, A. J. “Local Biography: Francis Lathom.” Scottish Notes and Queries ser. 2, 2 (Apr. 1901): 156–57.

Milne, Naomi, and Peter Milne. “Catton Place.” Aspects of Norwich (Spr. 2019): 8–12.

Nause, John. “The Eclipsed Orb: A Study of Francis Lathom, His Life and Gothic Romances, Plays and Experiments in Forms of Fiction.” Diss. Dalhousie U, 1989.

“Our History.” Norwich Theatre Royal. 2019. Web.

Punter, David. Introduction. The Midnight Bell. Kansas City: Valancourt, 2007. vii–xxviii.

Punter, David, and Bisset, Alan. “Francis Lathom in the Eighteenth Century.” Gothic Studies 5.1 (2003): 55–70.

Rawcliffe, Carole, and Richard Wilson, eds. Norwich since 1550. London: Hambledon, 2004.

Rev. of The One-Pound Note, and Other Tales by Francis Lathom. The Ladies’ Monthly Museum 12 (July 1820): 98.

Sadleir, Michael. The Northanger Novels, A Footnote to Jane Austen. English Association Pamphlet No. 68. Oxford: OUP, 1927.

Saintsbury, George. Introduction. Tales of Mystery. The Pocket Library of English Literature. Ed. George Saintsbury. New York: Macmillan, 1891. vii–xxix.

Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. London: Fortune, 1938.

Taylor, Clare L. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: OUP, 2016. Web.

Varma, Devendra. Introduction. The Midnight Bell. London: Folio, 1967. vii–xv.

Williams, Anne. “Reading Walpole Reading Shakespeare.” Shakespearean Gothic. Ed. Christy Desmet and Anne Williams. Cardiff: U Wales P, 2009. 13–36.