ABSTRACT
The first English Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, centres on the restoration of Theodore, the politically dispossessed hero, who can only be acknowledged as the rightful heir after the appearance of the gigantic ghost of his ancestor, Alfonso. In discussing the psychological origins of ghosts, Roger Money-Kyrle notes that they were most frequently believed to be ancestors, rulers, or sacrificial victims associated with the totemic beings worshipped by earliest humanity. Gothic bluebooks and chapbooks have been something of the stepchild of Gothic scholarship. Montague Summers claims that they were the reading material of “schoolboys, prentices, and servant-girls, by the whole of that vast population which longed to be in the fashion, to steep themselves in the Gothic Romance”. The Gothic drama was popular because it was invested in presenting for its audience a magical and imaginary space wherein the immanent and transcendent could coexist.
