Matthew Gregory Lewis

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Matthew Gregory Lewis, Henry William Pickersgill , 1809

Matthew Gregory Lewis (born July 9, 1775 in London , † May 14, 1818 at sea) was a British writer and playwright .

Life

Lewis was the oldest child of Matthew Lewis Sr. and Frances Lewis. His father was born in Jamaica in 1750 ; he was State Secretary at the War Ministry and had considerable salaries. Lewis' mother left her husband in 1781 to live with a musician. The related scandal made it necessary to file for divorce - a process which required the direct approval of Parliament but which did not allow the process. Since then, Lewis' parents have been separated.

While still studying at Westminster School and at Christ Church College , which was supposed to prepare him for a diplomatic career, Lewis spent some time in various European countries, in particular to improve his language skills. After visiting Paris in 1791 , he met Goethe , Schiller , Wieland and Kotzebue in Weimar that same year ; he gave his friend Byron the material for his fist . In 1794 he became cultural attaché to the British ambassador in The Hague ; During this time, perhaps inspired by the structurally related horror novel Das Petermännchen by Christian Heinrich Spieß , his most famous work, The Monk , was created, which made him famous at one stroke.

Lewis was a member of the British House of Commons from 1796-1802, where he represented Hindon . Although he came from a family of slave owners, he voted in 1807 for the abolition of slavery. After only a few years, he gave up his mandate to devote himself entirely to literature, an independence he could afford since his father had left him a considerable fortune in 1812. In 1815 he visited his estates in Jamaica for four months; During this time the Journal of a West Indian Proprietor was created (published posthumously in 1833). He made a stopover in Italy and Switzerland, where he met his friends Byron and Shelley . During a visit to his other estates in Jamaica in 1817, which he had used to campaign for an improvement in the living conditions of the slaves, he fell ill with yellow fever and died on the return journey; he was buried at sea.

plant

As a student he tried to convey the Weimar Classics and the literature of Sturm und Drang to the English public ; he translated Schiller's Kabale und Liebe , called The Minister , and Rolla , a play by Kotzebue. His anonymously published horror novel The Monk ( The Monk , 1796) was his first great success. Although most reviewers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge , disapproved of the work as fluffy and unnatural, and other reviewers even spoke of blasphemy and profanity to be punishable by law, it met with tremendous success precisely because of its notoriety. The heavily criticized first edition gave way in the year of its publication to a purged version, which had been cleared of sexually explicit, blasphemous and violent passages, but still retained the nimbus of the "indecent". When Lewis's authorship became known, public indignation exploded. Byron wrote that Lewis "turned Parnassus into a graveyard"; Even Satan could discover a hell in Lewis' head that he did not yet know.

The monk : content

The novel describes the seduction of the strict monk Ambrosio by the witch Matilda sent by Satan. With the help of her magic he wants to bring the underage Antonia into his power. Through a pact with the devil, he succeeds in gaining entry into her house. But before he can assault her, her mother Donna Elvira appears, whom he suffocates with a pillow in an act of desperation in order to preserve his reputation. Then he flees the house.

Later he lets Antonia fall into a deep sleep with the help of a magical potion, kidnaps her into the catacombs of the monastery and rapes her. When he realizes that the Inquisition is hot on his heels, he stabs them to death. Ambrosio and Matilda are imprisoned by the Inquisition. However, both can flee by the power of the devil. On a mountain top, Ambrosio reveals that Elvira was his own mother and that Antonia was therefore his sister. Because even hell is unwilling to accept such a monster, Satan plunges the monk into a mountain chasm, where Ambrosio exhales painfully his life.

A film adaptation of the novel entitled The Monk was published in 2011.

Influences and effects

Lewis is very much in the tradition of the English Gothic novel ; Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto is considered to be one of his most important influences . The monk is also heavily influenced by German pre and early Romanticism as well as by German trivial authors like Christian Heinrich Spieß . Lewis adopts elements from legends that he found in Johann Gottfried Herder and integrates translations of some poems by Johann Karl August Musäus that are not marked as such. Remains one Joseph Glanvills Sadducismus Triumphatus , an apology for witches and ghosts belief, the major sources of the book.

The book itself influenced Ann Radcliffe's The Italian , Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer , E. T. A. Hoffmann's Elixirs of the Devil in Germany and Victor Hugo in France . In her study Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection , the literary theorist Julia Kristeva deals with a psychology of prison that Lewis' novel indirectly quotes several times.

His especially dramatic late work, which remained true to the romantic romanticism, is largely forgotten today, but still enjoyed considerable attention at the time. Together with Walter Scott and Robert Southey , he wrote a number of anthologies of romantic stories.

literature

Web links

eTexts by Matthew Lewis

Other sides

personal data
SURNAME Lewis, Matthew Gregory
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British novelist and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1775
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH May 14, 1818
Place of death at sea