ABSTRACT
It is conventional – and perhaps inescapable – to begin any consideration of the concept of the ‘uncanny’ by referring to Freud’s essay under that title of 1919. Before doing so, however, it is worth recording some of the meanings ascribed to the word in the Oxford English Dictionary, which include ‘mischievous’, ‘malicious’, ‘careless’, ‘incautious’, ‘unreliable’, ‘not to be trusted’, ‘partaking of a supernatural character’ and ‘mysterious, weird, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar’. The earliest usage of the word recorded in the OED is in 1596; but it is the last sense on which Freud picks up, and which provides the clearest link to the Gothic. Here the OED cites three exempla, all from the nineteenth century, and they are all of interest. The first is from Bulwer-Lytton: ‘If men, gentlemen born, will read uncanny books . . . why they must resolve to reap what they sow’; the second is from Emerson, speaking of Stonehenge: ‘We walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh look at the uncanny stones’; and the third is from Mary Braddon, who refers to a ‘slate quarry under the cliff’ as ‘a scene of uncanny grandeur’.
