Upon the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, the reviewer for the Illustrated Times described Lewis Carroll’s fanciful text as “too extravagantly absurd to produce more diversion than disappointment and irritation.” The “grotesque objects” that Alice encounters serve merely to “prove the author to possess a most  fertile imagination.” Yet these imaginative elements,…

Rebecca, written in 1938, contains the traditional Gothic qualities of a disturbing atmosphere, a carefully described landscape and setting, a sense of the uncanny and the impression that events are out of kilter with the rational world. On the surface, this novel may appear as little more than a beautifully written, dark romance and yet, when…

Beckford's Gothic novel, Vathek, an Arabian tale, was originally written in French when the author was 21. It is the story of Caliph Vathek, whose eye can kill at a glance, who makes a pact with the Devil, Eblis. But why is it classified as Gothic literature? The literary genre called Gothic draws its name…

Join Courtney Fleming, the Tower's Manager, on a tour of Lansdown Cemetery, once William Beckford’s beautiful garden surrounding the Tower and where Beckford himself is buried. William Beckford had been buried in Bath Abbey Cemetery in 1844 but, at the instigation of one of his daughters, Lady Hamilton, the tomb was transported to the newly-created…