SOURCE: Baldick, Chris. “The End of the Line: The Family Curse in Shorter Gothic Fiction.” In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani and Peter Davidson, pp. 147-57. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.

In the following essay, Baldick examines several short British Gothic tales of the nineteenth century, focusing on the theme of family degeneration in these works.

My purpose in this article is to examine briefly the fate of shorter Gothic fiction in nineteenth-century Britain, with particular reference to the degree of coherence it manages to sustain by resort to the theme of dynastic extinction.

The shorter Gothic tale is a form little studied outside the works of Poe. There are some good reasons for this neglect, principally the fact that it is largely parasitic upon the more substantial and complex tradition of the Gothic novel or romance proper. Whereas the line of...