M. G. Lewis, one of the most popular novelists and playwrights of the Romantic period, was well placed to articulate the ambivalence many Britons felt about the changes facing their society and its place in the world. In works such as The Monk (1796) and The Castle Spectre (1797), he gave contemporary political issues the Gothic disguise common in writings of the period; in The Captive (1803) and Journal of a West India Proprietor (posthumously published in 1834), he addressed them more directly.

Lewis's father, Matthew Lewis, had been born in Jamaica and owned extensive sugar plantations there. At the time of his son's birth he was chief clerk of the War Office; that December he was given in addition the post of deputy secretary at war. Lewis's mother, Frances Maria Sewell Lewis, also came of a family of Jamaican planters. Thus, Lewis's immediate family was directly involved in the two most...