Cornish Gothic: a new anthology

A new short story anthology plumbs the depths of Cornwall’s darker side

mariner inherits a skull that screams incessantly along with the roar of the sea; a phantom hare stalks the moors to deliver justice for a crime long dead; a man witnesses a murder in the woods near St Ives, only to wonder whether it was he himself who committed the crime. Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson find their Cornish Riviera holiday scuppered by a series of horrible murders in what Holmes describes as “the strangest case I had ever handled”.

These chilling yarns are all set in Cornwall, and come from the pens of Victorian Gothic luminaries such as Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and a host of underappreciated and forgotten writers from the past two centuries.

Together they form the anthology Cornish Horrors: Tales From The Land’s End, edited by Joan Passey and published by British Library. The collection capitalises on the surge in interest in the likes of Winston Graham (Poldark) and Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca), and explores Cornwall’s rich folklore and traditions in a journey through mines, mythology, shipwrecks, seascapes and the arrival of the railway and with it, tourism.

A teacher and researcher at the University of Bristol specialising in transhistorical Gothic fiction, Joan was partial to chillers from an unusually early age. “My dad had to give special permission for me to have an adult library card when I was eight, because I’d already read every Point Horror and Goosebumps book in the children’s section,” she laughs. “I was reading Stephen King far too young, and have dined on a steady diet of Gothic horror ever since.”

As an undergraduate, she studied at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus, with lectures in the Daphne du Maurier building. “I fell in love with Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek at the same time I fell in love with living in Cornwall,” she says. In her third year, she took the Gothic unit with Professor Nick Groom - “the Prof of Goth!” - and wondered whether there was a Gothic Cornwall before du Maurier. Her persistent digging led to an undergraduate dissertation on the use of Cornwall as a Gothic space, followed by a PhD to define a Gothic Cornwall (with the intriguing title Corpses, Coasts And Carriages).

“The Gothic has been a really rich field for study since the 1970s, with lots of work on Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gothic,” says Joan. “But despite a wealth of narratives, many by some of the most famous authors of the 19th century, a Cornish Gothic hadn’t yet been considered.

"I started by Googling, and relied a lot on word of mouth – at conferences, people would recommend their favourite Cornish Gothic wonders. I trawled through archives with increasingly elaborate search terms, and found many short stories while working as an intern at the wonderful Royal Cornwall Museum. Those included in the anthology are just a few of what turned out to be hundreds, and I’m finding more all the time.”

With its Celtic roots, myths and legends and lively history, particularly during the Civil War, Cornwall had long been viewed by both locals and outsiders as a land of mystery and otherness. While we take a more educated stance on this in the 21st century, with the Cornish being granted EU minority status in 2014 to celebrate and protect their unique identity, opinions were less kind in the 1800s.

In her introduction, Joan explains how the Cornish were seen as “ungovernable miners, fiery Celts and potentially even smugglers, wreckers and pirates”. Of a group of Cornish miners encountered on his overseas travels, Robert Louis Stevenson, no less, wrote: “A division of races, older and more original than that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen … This is one of the lessons of travel – that some of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.”

Rather than repelling would-be visitors, this reputation had precisely the opposite effect: “Tourists flocked to this strange, frightening land on England’s doorstep.” In 1859, when Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the Royal Albert Bridge and extended the Great Western Railway into Cornwall, it saw a sudden influx of visitors who were as fascinated by the locals as they were appreciative of the “Mediterranean” climate. While the income from tourism filled the void left by the increasing decline of mining, there were concerns – then as now – that the hordes would spoil the very things that made Cornwall so special. For that reason, authors hurried down west, eager to see it before it was changed irrevocably. Joan points out how many stories “feature the county somewhat rejecting the unwary visitor”.

Some tour operators were only too happy to exploit Cornwall’s newly discovered dark side; among the ghoulish experiences on offer was a special train transporting rubbernecking visitors to Bodmin Jail for a ringside seat for the latest round of hangings.

Why haven’t these stories been collected before? “Historically, Cornwall has been somewhat marginalised and occluded from literary and cultural histories,” says Joan, “for reasons including sheer distance and inaccessibility, historical administrative neglect, a radical and tumultuous reputation throughout the 19th century, and perhaps just bad luck!

“Humphry Davy offered Samuel Taylor Coleridge a tour of Cornwall the same summer William Wordsworth offered a trip to the Lakes. What would literary landscapes look like if Cornwall had become the nation’s heart of Romantic poetry?”

While renowned anthologist Denys Val Baker collected a number of Cornish Gothic tales in the 1970s, Joan admits: "There has been very little love for this rich, bountiful and very particular genre of fiction.” She predicts a sea-change, with the forthcoming release of Gothic Kernow by Ruth Heholt and Tanya Krzywinska (Anthem), as well as her own Cornish Gothic (University of Wales Press). “Poldark led to a renewed popularity in Cornwall’s brooding coasts, and Mark Jenkin’s Bait offered a modern spin on the haunted county. Hopefully there’s much more to come!” l

Words by Kirstie Newton Illustrations by Sandra Gómez, with design by Mauricio Villamayor

Cornish Horrors: Tales From The Land’s End is published by British Library, paperback £8.99.