It is the business of literary criticism to test the myths of literary history. The contemporary reception of what we now call the Gothic has furnished us with two enduring stories about its rise: that the Gothic novel began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and that the 1790s witnessed an explosion in what was most commonly referred to then as the “terrorist system of novel writing.” The chapters prior to mine in this volume address the first proposition. My purpose here is to explore the second, of which there are two main aspects. Was there in fact an effulgence of terror fiction in the 1790s? And if so, what did it mean?

Was the novel-writing market flooded by the Gothic in the 1790s, as the reviewers claimed? With only one small qualification, the answer is a resounding “yes.” The qualification rests on the meaning of “Gothic.” As E. J. Clery in the previous chapter reminds us, the term Gothic novel was retrospectively applied to such works, for the most part. Although this ought to caution us against overlooking the heterogeneous nature of 1790s romance, the fact remains that terror fiction of the period is easily identifiable, despite its variety. The recently published English Novel 1770–1829: a Bibliographical Guide (Garside et al.) permits a simple yet decisive exercise. It contains the full titles of virtually all of the novels published during the period, which generally include key items of marketing information, thus giving us useful generic pointers. It also includes extracts from the Monthly and Critical Review, which dominated reviewing at this time, so that we can observe the period’s own acts of critical categorization.