My Selection of Tracy

Montague Summers' A Gothic Bibliography is infamous in the field of the Gothic for being the first large scholarly project to take the Gothic seriously, and for being riddled with inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and non-Gothic books. It remains the primary large-scale attempt to list all the titles which could reasonably fall within the category of the Gothic, but Summers seems to have included everything he personally enjoyed reading, and everything anyone had mentioned to him as being Gothic; many of his entries, therefore, refer to perfectly ordinary novels, or, in some cases, to books that do not actually exist.

More recent bibliographic works tend to address the entire output of the period, without guessing at genre or giving details of the work's contents. The Oxford bibliography of The English Novel 1770-1829, edited by Peter Garside and James Raven, for example, is invaluable for its accuracy and comprehensiveness-- and unenlightening for my particular quest.

Indeed, any attempt to find a less haphazardly-selected list-- the publication lists of the Minerva Press, for example-- would immediately remove the information which makes Tracy's work so rich for future study: the deep level of detail.

As such, although Tracy's bibliography is not widely used for other purposes, in this case, hers is the only text that will do.

Tracy's Selection Methods

Tracy describes the creation of her bibliography as somewhat haphazard:

"My guiding principle was to produce the reference work that I sorely needed, and did not have, when I began my Gothic research some years ago. Wishing at that time to read a great many of the more lurid Gothics, preferably ones with demons and other supernatural personnel, I set off to rare book collections with a copy of Montague Summers's A Gothic Bibliography and never a clue as to what might lie behind the titles. Some quite promising titles led to disappointingly bland novels, while some rather neutral titles... proved satisfyingly horrid. This discrepancy accounts for the not-very-Gothic summaries included in this collection; having learned what is behind the titles, it seems best to tell, thereby saving someone else the experiment" (15).

During the assembly of the book itself, she "fill[ed] in obvious gaps" (15), with particular emphasis on Gothic novels that were either readily available or subject to more widespread critical attention, but the end result is still by no means comprehensive or systematic. But then, comprehensiveness would be a lifelong undertaking, at the level of detail she includes-- and perhaps no method of identifying Gothic genre could be scientifically systematic.

Addressing Tracy's Biases

Although Tracy was certainly scouring the archives with a very particular mission in mind, her final work is still useful for more general purposes, largely because she had so much difficulty accomplishing that mission. Despite intentionally seeking out demons, for example, she only found 21 books that contained them, of the 208 ultimately described.

Moreover, my goal in broadening my view of the Gothic is to define the genre in terms of "what a reader might have encountered while seeking out new Gothic texts," so even the not-very-Gothic texts do not seem entirely inappropriate to include, given that they convinced both Summers and Tracy to pick them up.

At this stage in my project, I would be most concerned about selection methods which might have caused Tracy to sample unevenly from men and women's books. If she searched equally for demons, and found them predominantly in books written by men-- as she seems to have done-- that seems sufficient indication that demons are written about more by men. As such, the only computational correction I have undertaken is a re-weighting of the sample to account for the fact that she has included seven more books by women than by men.

Comment on this page