“Gothic” novels are frequently textual patchworks combining found documents (letters, diaries, manuscripts) with the direct and indirect speech of unreliable narrators, forensic evidence (news reports, inscriptions, paintings), and other forms of writing and performance (poetry, ballads). They may also include stories-within-stories, fragmentary or illegible writings, rumours, riddles, folklore, and obscure dialect. And of course they are also characterized by the supernatural (manifest or implied) and weird significations that spiral beyond the real into mystery, mysticism, magic, and the occult.

            Consequently, Gothic writers are often self-consciously experimental and idiosyncratic in their use of punctuation. Ellipses and asterisks signify breaks and unknowable gaps in broken texts while simultaneously asserting that these texts are authentic physical artefacts; dashes of various lengths can speed or slow the narrative, indicate switches in dialogue, or expose the failure of language to communicate the inexpressible or ineffable; sentences are armed with daggers and double daggers; elsewhere, the whole panoply of commas and dashes, colons and semi-colons, parentheses and exclamations can come together into symphonic passages of sublime grandeur. With the Gothic, then, punctuation becomes uncanny.

            This essay will accordingly outline such innovative use of punctuation in writers from Walpole to De Quincey. But it would be a mistake to isolate punctuation in Gothic literature from its wider contexts, and so the broad aim of this piece will be to provide a framework for understanding the political import of eighteenth-century Gothic and the role played by punctuation within Whig thinking. In other words, Gothic punctuation goes profoundly further than what Alexander Pope dismissed as the mere “haberdashery”’ of “Points and Particles” of textual criticism. If punctuation in general is a system for aiding interpretation, then the Gothic in the full sense of the term was itself a system for interpreting history, a political theory, a way of pointing the past towards the present and the present towards the future.

            Such ideologically Gothic writing was first characterized by quirky stylistic inflections: “the little Gothick Ornaments of Epigrammatical Conceits, Turns, Points, and Quibbles” which were “directly contrary to the Example of the Greeks and Romans, altogether of the Gothick Strain”. This deeper genealogy of Gothic punctuation explains, for example, why dashes are instrumental to Walpole’s Castle of Otranto; why Capell proposed a new set of punctuation marks for editing the pre-eminent Gothic dramatist Shakespeare; and how experimental concrete Gothic verse emerged in the eighteenth century in literally the darkest poem ever written.

            Lord Byron imperiously dismissed punctuation as an artisanal job beneath him. However, the close attention given to pointing in early Gothic texts reflects Whiggish values of individualism and a personal and egalitarian responsibility towards writing, valuing subjective inspiration and creative entrepreneurship. As such, punctuation was not only a way of fixing words and meaning on the space of the page, it could ultimately be a gateway to imaginative expression and a portal to the Burkean sublime. The paper will (probably) end with a short coda on Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. [2 images]