The Vampire, the Ghost and the Northern Coastline
By Sophie Barkley | December 2024
When I was a child, my family and I would take frequent trips to Whitby during the school holidays and on weekends. Hailing from the industrial town of Middlesbrough, I was always just a short drive away from the deliciously gothic town and have been enamoured of its splendour since my childhood. There’s something inexplicably atmospheric about Whitby’s jagged cobble streets, its Hundred and Ninety Nine Steps, and the sloping East Cliff that rolls its tongue down and into Whitby Harbour.
It is no secret that the north of England is rich in gothic inspiration, with its tall, advancing cliffs, roaring winds and
pelting, spitting coasts. From the Brontës and their association with the wildness of the Yorkshire Moors, to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridges’s retreat to the Lake District for the working of Lyrical Ballads, the north has been a generational breeding ground for some monumental works of literature.
This is a branch of literature that I like to term ‘the Gothic North’.
The Count
One of the first gothic texts that comes to mind at the mention of northern England is undeniably Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There is much speculation surrounding the real inspiration behind Stoker’s infamous novel, but critics seem to have settled on the fact that Stoker’s own visit to Whitby was the catalyst.
In the summer of 1890, Bram Stoker explored the very town that I spent my childhood dipping in and out of. He stayed at number 6 Royal Crescent atop the West Cliff and has since changed the social and historical trajectory of the small seaside town. It is interesting to imagine whether or not Stoker expected that his novel would become integral in the rhizome of Whitby, or that its darkness would inspire the biannual Gothic Festival and many other celebrations that still take place today.
Stoker spent his coastal holiday questioning local fishermen and taking long strolls around the town, past the gravestones that stick out like the teeth in a skull, and up to the shell of Whitby Abbey. It was down at the famous harbour that members of the Royal Coast Guard told Stoker the horrific tale of a sailing vessel that turned up battered on Tate Hill Beach. The ‘Dmitri’ ran aground off the shore, and was found carrying only a handful of living crewmates and an abundance of mysterious cargo: boxes of earth. It was also suggested that a large black dog had leapt from the ship and bounded up the Hundred and Ninety Nine Steps toward the Church of St Mary. Sound familiar?
Stoker’s Dracula is almost symmetrical to the tale, only we read the story of ‘The Demeter’, whose captain managed to sail into Whitby Harbour whilst deceased and tied to the helm.
The town has since become shrouded in the darkness and dread of Stoker’s gothic world. Dracula’s pages seem to ruffle in the coastline’s salty winds, their words injected into Whibty’s very veins. When standing atop the East Cliff, looking over the town that slopes downward and into the pool of choppy water outside the harbour, the following words of Bram Stoker’s take on an even more macabre tone:
‘I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events here described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight.’
(Bram Stoker, Preface to Makt Mrykranna, the original manuscript of Dracula)
The Brontës of Yorkshire
‘I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always- take any form- drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss where I can not find you!’
(Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights)
Charlotte and Emily Brontë were both integral figures in creating the literary phenomena of a brooding and dangerous north. Wuthering Heights is a novel that bubbles with gothic and supernatural elements, situated in the wild and unpredictable Yorkshire Moors.
It is believed that Brontë’s description of ‘Wuthering Heights’ was based on the real estate of High Sunderland Hall. The manor house was situated in Halifax, West Yorkshire, but unfortunately was demolished in the mid-twentieth century. Once again it is clear that literary gothic landscapes and their geographical models are inextricably intertwined.
The wildness of the Yorkshire Moors is a driving force of one of the novel’s central themes: the supernatural.
The plain of feral and untamed moors becomes even more haunting through Brontë’s lens, through which ghosts and spectres stalk them. But it is the very setting of the moors that enables such spirits to walk.
‘stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch: instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand.’
The hands of Catherine Linton’s ghost and the protruding branches of an outside tree are almost one and the same. And it is Heathcliff’s wild and passionate character who pleads with her ghost to haunt his days on earth. The safety of the home is infiltrated by the gothic splendour that lay just outside of it, and the dark brilliance of the natural northern world is the invader.
This brings me to the question: would the events of Wuthering Heights be so harrowing if it weren’t for the novel’s backdrop of the lashing Yorkshire Moors?
Somewhere in the North of England
Turning to a more recent monument of gothic literature, it becomes clear that the direct allusion to a geographical location might not be necessary to the construction of a gothic north. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is assumed to be set “somewhere” in the far north east of England.
Setting is integral to the establishment of a terrifying tale in The Woman in Black. The theme of isolation is a crucial facet of the gothic genre, which is something that Hill certainly plays on in her text. The fact that Eel Marsh House is situated far from London and in the north of England immediately creates a sense of haunting seclusion.
Eel Marsh House can only be found by travelling up a dark and dangerous causeway, which often gets cut off by the high tide and becomes completely impassable. Hill manipulates the physicality of the northern landscape and, in turn, Arthur Kipps finds himself completely isolated from the outside world:
‘Enough of solitude and no sound save the water and the moaning wind and the melancholy calls of the birds, enough of monotonous grayness, enough of this gloomy old house.’
(Susan Hill, The Woman in Black)
Without even having to directly name a geographical location, Hill is able to instil the brooding atmosphere of northern England and puppeteer the establishment of a haunting tale. Its melancholy air blows so strongly that its stench lingers without even having to be named.
The Northern Gothic Today
It is clear that literature has a tendency to explore the most remote corners of northern England, and I am still in the early stages of this investigation myself.
I am currently reading Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney, an impossibly bleak and unsettling novel set in Morecambe Bay, north west England. Hurley’s evocation of the northern landscape and its yearning misery supplements the novel’s tone of gothic horror.
I like to keep a pocketbook with me at all times in case I need to note down some inspiration or notable quotes when on the tube or in University, and here is one of the quotes that I borrowed from The Loney:
‘Time didn’t leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along. It collected as the black water did on the marshes and remained and stagnated in the same way.’
(Michael Andrew Hurley, The Loney)
For Hurley, the landscape is so intrinsically linked to the metaphysical. You become sucked into his grim world, a world simply and unavoidably bound up with the cold and looming northern coastline.
I lean on the memories of my childhood as my first flirtations with the gothic elements of my hometown in the north, but even from busy London find myself crawling back to its dark and dingy corners. ‘The Gothic North’ is a phenomena that I find myself both enticed and repulsed by, and one that is undoubtedly applicable in today’s interpretation of horror and gothic literature.
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