Paul’s, and Windsor Castle are read as epic tragedy rather than simply as bad romance. The novels The Tower of London, Guy Fawkes, Old St. The second half of the book examines the later ‘Lancashire novels’ and the legacy of Ainsworth’s subsequent historical novels, taking The Lancashire Witches to be his final, major work and the last of the ‘original’ gothic novels. This study examines Ainsworth’s literary career from a writer of magazine tales of terror in the 1820s to the massive influence of his gothic/Newgate romance of 1834, Rookwood his friendships with Lamb, Lockhart, and Dickens his fall from literary grace during the Newgate controversy (a moral panic engendered by the supposedly pernicious effects of cheap, theatrical adaptations of Ainsworth’s underworld romance Jack Sheppard).
William Harrison Ainsworth, a prolific writer now as obscure as he once was famous, reinvented the gothic novel in an English setting, a radical re-write of Scott’s model of the historical romance and an antecedent of the contemporary urban gothic of Dickens and Reynolds.
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