1887 — TALES OF TERROR AND WONDER, M.G. Lewis, 1st/1st GOTHIC HORROR STORIES

  TALES OF TERROR AND WONDER — Collected by Matthew Gregory Lewis — 1st Edition / 1st Printing, 1887 — Gothic 18th / 19th Century English Horror and Mystery Stories

 Publisher: George Routledge and Sons, London (1887)

The boards and binding are solid and tight, with one bumped corner and very little other shelf-wear. The pages are crisp and clean save for very small ink stain on outer fore-edge. Interior pages are free of markings. This is a compendium of late-eighteenth-century Gothic ballads, published in 1887 and comprising the contents of two collections: the anonymous Tales of Terror (1801) and M.G. Lewis’s collection, Tales of Wonder (1800). The style and subject matter of the poems will be familiar to all readers of Gothic literature from this period, being full of maidens in distress, brave knights, medieval trappings, ecclesiastical ruins and an array of ghosts, demons, goblins and sprites. Some of the pieces are not for the faint-of-heart — the word ‘gore’ appears twenty times across the two collections! Indeed, Lewis’s writing approaches knowing self-parody at times and his approach is often as blackly comic as it is horribly gruesome.