Supernatural Essex

Since Robert Mighall wrote A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (1999), critics have been keen to explore various locations where Gothic fiction takes place. This includes regions (Southeast Asia), countries (Canada), subregions (Cornwall) and cities (New Orleans). In each, scholars adopt a historicist approach, identifying past events or cultural contexts that shape the Gothic fiction of these locations. Initially, the Celtic Fringes and London were considered the primary locations of Gothic fiction. However, as critics delved deeper into less canonical literature from various periods, Gothic locations have appeared across the globe. 

Regarding British Gothic, critics have started filling in the geographical gaps between the Celtic Fringes and London. Notably, Minna Vuohelainen identifies “University Gothic”, revealing how ancient university towns like Oxford and Cambridge serve as Gothic sites in fin-de-siècle fiction, where modern knowledge collides with archaic traditions, heightening narrative tensions. Similarly, Ilott and Weston expand the Gothic map by identifying Kent and the Suffolk coast as Gothic locations in contemporary literature. Their analyses suggest that these regions draw on Victorian Gothic tropes, such as Patrick Brantlinger’s “Imperial Gothic”, to explore lingering colonial anxieties. This shift toward more central and seemingly ‘civilised’ locales reflects a broader trend of recognising the Gothic’s pervasive influence across diverse landscapes. Ilott’s discussion of Kent underscores how contemporary Gothic literature reimagines Victorian anxieties within modern contexts. Likewise, Weston’s exploration of the Suffolk coast, through W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995), reveals how Gothic forms reflect historical traumas embedded in the landscape.

While contemporary literature has moved away from the Celtic Fringes, critical interest in earlier Gothic writing has yet to fully explore other regions. However, during the fin-de-siècle, Gothic tropes – the supernatural, outsiders, a fascination with the past, decay and madness – can be found in perhaps the most unexpected location: the Home Counties. Writers such as H. G. Wells, M. R. James, Arthur Machen, Henry James and Arthur Morrison relocated the Gothic to heighten the threat of irrational happenings invading suburban, middle-class life.  

Essex, in particular, offers a surprisingly rich source of material because of its geography (proximity to London, marshlands, flatness), history (witch trials, connections to the seventeenth century), imperial associations via the Thames, medieval and Tudor architecture, and an often-impoverished, superstitious population. Additionally, its Estuary English reinforces the local uniqueness of the setting, further distinguishing it from London and other Gothic landscapes.

Among Gothic literature set in Essex, the most well-known fin-de-siècle tale is Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898). The narrator, Douglas, reveals that the children’s uncle, an affluent and well-travelled bachelor, sends the governess to his country home in Essex rather than his grand London residence:

He had for his own town residence a big house filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it was to his country home, an old family place in Essex, that he wished her immediately to proceed. (76)

The subordinating conjunction “but” introduces a darker tone, shifting from the cosmopolitan world of London to an “old family place” in the countryside, which carries an eerie weight of ancestral history. While James does not explicitly state why he set Bly in Essex, its provincial nature heightens the horror: the governess is diverted from the most advanced city in the world to an isolated, archaic space where the supernatural can thrive.

Examining other fin de siècle fiction clarifies why Essex is a fitting Gothic setting. M.R. James viewed the county as stuck in the ages of the witch trials, which Arthur Morrison’s vast work on the county’s supernatural history reinforces. Although Morrison is best known for his realist portrayal of East End slums in A Child of the Jago (1896), he later moved to Loughton, Essex, and undertook a project on the county’s superstitions. His research, extending beyond witch trials to cunning men, smuggling, and medieval history, underscores Essex’s lingering pre-modern sensibilities.

Morrison’s novel Cunning Murrell (1900) recounts supernatural events based on the real-life cunning man James Murrell (1785 – 1860). His article in The Strand, “A Wizard of Yesterday”, further documents his findings. In a letter to his friend John Louis Wimbush, Morrison states, “Hadleigh was still the Hadleigh of another century”, reinforcing the idea of Essex as a space where time lingers rather than progresses. Cunning Murrell, set in 1860, reflects a tension between past and present: the railway, built in the 1850s, connects southern Essex to London, threatening to expose the region’s deep-seated superstitions to modernity. Morrison’s narrative reveals a fin-de-siècle anxiety: the collision of tradition with progress.

In fact, Morrison’s novel confirms many of David Stevens’ characteristics of the Gothic – a fascination for the past, the supernatural, psychological insights, representation or stimulation of fear – though it lacks exotic settings or plots within plots (46-7). Nevertheless, it possesses enough tropes to be categorised as Gothic. 

Another key characteristic of the Gothic is that it cannot help but transgress. Often, this concerns social mores, though sometimes, it manipulates traditional Gothic conventions. Stevens notes that “a liking for the strangely eccentric, the supernatural, the magical and the sublime” is “sometimes subtly intermingled with the realistic” in Gothic literature (46). However, Morrison was a realist, named “the English Zola” (Cubitt 102), and wrote an essay “What is a Realist” (1897), in which he calls himself “a simple writer of tales, who takes whatever means lie to his hand to present life as he sees it” (332).

In this case, there seems to be a dilemma: how can a realist write the supernatural? Especially considering his experience writing about urban environments, surely, he would not be able to write about rural environments convincingly. However, bearing in mind his description of his writing style, it would seem he portrays the reality of the superstitious beliefs of southern Essex inhabitants and the crime that pervaded the area. As a less well-known writer who has never been identified as a Gothic writer, it has been easy for critics not to see the evidence that suggests Essex became a Gothic location during the fin de siècle. Unlike many Gothic writers, he does not sensationalise the supernatural but instead portrays the reality of Essex’s superstitious inhabitants. Unlike many Gothic writers, he avoids melodrama, allowing the events themselves to evoke unease.

These events took place in the ancient southeastern area of Essex – the Rochford Hundred. Morrison’s precise location provides a dense examination of an area of approximately 90 square miles. By pinpointing this ancient region, Morrison confines this variety of Gothic, positioning himself and the reader as outsiders peering into a world of superstition. The reader assumes the role of Jonathan Harker or Sergeant Howie, observing an insular community with its own unsettling logic. To take an example from the novel, Morrison’s opening descriptions immediately establish a Gothic tone: 

The sun was low in the haze that hid the hills about Tilbury Fort, ten miles up the Hope. Here, at the Thames mouth, where there was no more river, but salt sea, green marshes made the shore, and Canvey Island lay broad and flat and low, like a duller, thicker water rather than land, marked off from the shore by the Ray, pale gold in the reddening light. Deep in coarse grasses and salt sedge, with purple thistles between, Casey Marsh lay low and level for half a mile inland. Thence the ground rose, gently at first, then more steeply, to the irregular green ridge that backed the marshes far as eye could see. Stately and grey on the boldest hill rose the ruined towers of Hadleigh Castle, mighty still in their decay, and imposing even because of their rent flanks and the vast thickness of wall there displayed. About their foundations and clogged under-passages the fallen masonry was half covered with bramble and bush, and, lower, a thicker coppice fringed the hill and marked the foot of its steeper slope. From the ruins the view was wide. Two miles along the marshes below, toward the east and the open sea, stood the fishing village of Leigh, its jumble of red roofs seeming to rest on the broad water itself, thick trees clothing the hill behind it, and its grey church tower standing high over all. Across the estuary, five miles away at its nearest, lay the Kent shore, now growing misty, and the quiet, smooth water between was dotted with the Leigh boats, like gnats on a pond. (1)

This Gothic landscape is new compared to the Yorkshire moors of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) or the Cornish cliffs of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). Yet amid the amphibious “green marshes” appears the traditional Gothic building – castles – with “Tilbury Fort” appearing in the first sentence before later describing “the ruined towers of Hadleigh Castle”. In finding supernatural events in Essex, Morrison redefines the Gothic for this new location; his experience as a realist writer becomes useful because he doesn’t change the landscape to suit the established Gothic conventions. He builds on them, expanding this genre’s definable landscapes. Essex presents a peculiar variety of Gothic that twists expectations: mountains and moors are replaced by marshland. There is something more terrifying about Essex Gothic; the description of the area appears exotic, yet it exists in a home county – a supposedly safe, ‘non-Gothic’ location.

The expanding geographical focus of Gothic fiction studies demonstrates how the genre continually adapts to reflect historical anxieties and cultural shifts. While early criticism centred on the Celtic Fringes and London, more recent scholarship has illuminated how Gothic elements permeate diverse locations, from university towns to coastal regions and suburban landscapes. Essex, in particular, emerges as a compelling fin-de-siècle Gothic setting because of its geographical liminality, historical associations with superstition and crime, and its uneasy relationship with modernity. Works like The Turn of the Screw and Cunning Murrell encapsulate key genre tropes – haunted pasts, psychological terror, and the collision of tradition with progress – without relying on the exotic or overtly supernatural. Instead, Essex Gothic thrives on the eerie tension between the familiar and the uncanny, demonstrating that even the most mundane landscapes can harbour deep-seated horrors.

Works Cited

Cubitt, Eliza. Arthur Morrison, “the Jago”, and the Realist Representation of Place. 2015, discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1493459/1/Cubitt_Thesis%20PDF%20Eliza%20Cubitt%202016.pdf. Accessed 3 Apr. 2025.

James, Henry. Daisy Miller and the Turn of the Screw. 1898. Penguin, 2012, p. 76.

Morrison, Arthur. “What is a Realist?” The Chap-Book; Semi-Monthly.A Miscellany & Review of Belles Lettres (1894-1898), vol. 6, no. 8, 01 Mar., 1897, pp. 322. ProQuest, https://uoelibrary.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/magazines/what-is-realist/docview/125504537/se-2.

Morrison, Arthur. Spirit of Old Essex. Edited by Steven Kay, 1889 Books, 2022.

Stevens, David. The Gothic Tradition. Cambridge UP, 2000, pp. 46–47.