American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature

AMERICAN GOTHIC ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF ROMANTIC LITERATURE

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature

Kerry Dean Carso

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2014

© Kerry Dean Carso, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN     978-1-78316-160-7

e-ISBN  978-1-78316-162-1

The right of Kerry Dean Carso to be identified as author of her contribution has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Lilly Martin Spencer, Reading the Legend (1852).

By permission, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Dedicated to

Brian, Owen and Nathaniel

and to the memory of

Teddy Dean Carso

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of illustrations

Introduction

1 Gothic Monticello: Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Narratives

2 ‘Banditti Mania’: The Gothic Haunting of Washington Allston

3 ‘Arranging the Trap Doors’: The Gothic Revival Castles of Alexander Jackson Davis

4 Old Dwellings Transmogrified: The Homes of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving

5 Gothic Castles in the Landscape: Thomas Cole, Sir Walter Scott and the Hudson River School of Painting

6 The Theatrical Spectacle of Medieval Revival: Edwin Forrest’s Fonthill Castle

Conclusion ‘Clap It Into a Romance’: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Gothic Houses

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My greatest intellectual debt is to my graduate school advisor and mentor, Keith Morgan, of Boston University. Over the years, Keith has been very supportive of my work. This book began as a dissertation, and I would like to thank my dissertation committee: Keith Morgan, Patricia Hills, Adam Sweeting, Eliza Richards and Naomi Miller. All of them have assisted me in innumerable ways. Pat and Naomi have been especially helpful as mentors. I am grateful to William Vance, Professor Emeritus of English at Boston University, for introducing me to Washington Allston’s Lectures on Art and Monaldi during my preparation for my comprehensive exam. Thank you to Bruce Schulman for his encouragement and to the Boston University Humanities Foundation for awarding me a dissertation grant in 2000.

My fascination with the Gothic began during my junior tutorial in the English Department at Harvard University. I would like to thank my junior tutor Carolyn Dever for introducing me to the thrill of reading Gothic novels and my thesis adviser Cheryl Nixon for helping me to articulate connections between Gothic literature and architectural space. I doubt that Carolyn and Cheryl realized at the time how much they stimulated my intellectual interest in this subject.

Of course, this book would not have been possible without the work of scholars who have come before me. I owe a debt to the authors of the many books and articles I consulted on Gothic Revival architecture, Romantic paintings and Gothic literature. Particularly useful were Janice Gayle Schimmelman’s dissertation at the University of Michigan, Patrick Snadon’s dissertation at Cornell University, Donald Ringe’s work on American Gothic literature and John Zukowsky’s research on the Hudson River Gothic Revival.

I am grateful to the staffs of the many libraries where I have conducted research, including the Albany Institute of History and Art; the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University; the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello; the Newington-Cropsey Foundation; the New York Public Library; the New-York Historical Society; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Maryland Historical Society; the University of Pennsylvania’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library; the Harvard Theatre Collection; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Longfellow National Historic Site; the Princeton University Library; the American Antiquarian Society; and the New York State Historical Association. Sister Christine Murphy, the archivist at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, New York, was helpful to me on more than one occasion. I would like to thank Hugh MacDougall of the James Fenimore Cooper Society for sharing his research and expertise on Cooper with me.

Portions of this book appeared previously and have been revised: chapter 2 first appeared as ‘Banditti Mania: The Gothic Haunting of Washington Allston’, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 11, 1 (April 2007), 105–30; chapter 3 as ‘Diagnosing the Sir Walter Disease: American Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 35, 4 (December 2002), 122–42; chapter 4 as ‘To Loiter about the Ruined Castle: Washington Irving’s Gothic Inspiration’, The Hudson River Valley Review, 24, 2 (spring 2008), 22–41 and ‘The Old Dwelling Transmogrified: James Fenimore Cooper’s Otsego Hall’, in Hugh MacDougall (ed.), James Fenimore Cooper: His Country & His Art (Papers from the 2001 Cooper Seminar, No. 13) (Oneonta, NY: State University of New York College at Oneonta, 2002), pp. 26–35; chapter 5 as ‘Gothic Castles in the Landscape: Sir Walter Scott and the Hudson River School’, Gothic Studies, 14, 2 (November, 2012), 1–22; and chapter 6 as ‘The Theatrical Spectacle of Medieval Revival: Edwin Forrest’s Fonthill Castle’, Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture, 39, 1 (spring 2004), 21–41.

My friends George and Nancy Madison played a role in the final stages of my research. They hosted my husband and me in Florence, Italy, for a week and took us to see the Villa Montauto where Hawthorne lived in 1858. Thank you, George and Nancy, for a splendid morning on the Bellosguardo Hill. In 2013, Theresa Flanigan hosted me in Florence, allowing me a second visit to the villa. Theresa has been unflagging in her support over the years, and I am grateful for her friendship. Rachel Dressler has also acted as a sounding board for my ideas, and her expertise as a medievalist and neo-medievalist has been extremely helpful.

I want to thank my graduate school colleagues at Boston University, especially my friends Laura Kay, Laura Driemeyer, Elysa Engelman, Laura Johnson, Stacey McCarroll Cutshaw, Thomas Denenberg, David Brody and Cheryl Boots, as well as my good friend Jane Marsh Manzi whom I first met at Radcliffe College in 1992. In 2002–3, I taught at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where I had the privilege of working with wonderful people, including Kay Arthur, David Ehrenpreis, Diane Ehrenpreis, Karen Gerard and Rachel Malcolm Ensor. I especially want to thank Diane for encouraging me to apply for a Batten fellowship at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, where I spent a month doing research in 2003. Thank you to the scholars and staff of the ICJS for their assistance, especially William Beiswanger.

My colleagues at the State University of New York at New Paltz have been very supportive, as have all of my students over the years. Thank you to my art history colleagues Elizabeth Brotherton, Keely Heuer, Jaclynne Kerner, Ellen Konowitz, William Rhoads, Susan DeMaio Smutny, Beth Wilson and Reva Wolf, and thank you to Andrea Varga of the Theatre Arts Department. Susan assisted me with some of the illustrations for this book, and I am very grateful to her. Thank you to Laura Silvernail for administrative support. The Dean’s Office of the School of Fine and Performing Arts and the Art History Department at SUNY New Paltz contributed financial support for the rights and reproductions of this book’s illustrations. The Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Leave Award from the United University Professions in 2010 and a sabbatical from SUNY New Paltz in 2013–14 allowed me to complete this book. I want to thank the Gothic Literary Studies series editors, Andrew Smith and Benjamin F. Fisher, and the editors and staff of University of Wales Press, especially Sarah Lewis, Siân Chapman, Elin Lewis and Catrin Harries.

James Fenimore Cooper called himself and his family ‘great hunters after the Gothic’, and I could say the same about myself and my family. I would like to thank my parents, Robert and Mary Dean, for their patience and love, and Frank, Megan, Jackson and Madeline for entertaining me on breaks from work. I am grateful to my husband Brian and his family, especially his father Brian, Sr. and his late mother Betty. Brian has edited and proofread this book and has accompanied me on site visits and research trips. He has been with me from my first day in graduate school, supporting me every step of the way. Our young sons Owen and Nathaniel have developed (not surprisingly!) a taste for spooky stories, allowing us to share our love of reading as a family. This book is dedicated with love to Brian, Owen and Nathaniel, and to the memory of Teddy Dean Carso.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Colour plates

I. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sedgeley, Philadelphia, 1799; Thomas Birch, ‘Southeast View of Sedgeley Park,’ the Country Seat of James Cowles Fisher, Esq., c.1819, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1993.41.

II. Mount Vernon and Washington’s Tomb by Day, William Matthew Prior, c.1859 [M-3701/A-B]. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.

III. James Gillray, Tales of Wonder!, c.1802, etching, coloured by hand, 29.3 x 41.2 cm © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Jones Bequest, 1232-87-1882.

IV. Washington Allston, American, 1779–1843, Donna Mencia in the Robber’s Cavern, 1815, oil on canvas, 141.92 x 111.12 cm (55 7/8 x 43 ¾ in.), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–65, 47.1239. Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

V. The Flight of Florimell, 1819 (oil on canvas), Allston, Washington (1779–1843)/Detroit Institute of Arts, USA/City of Detroit Purchase/The Bridgeman Art Library.

VI. Washington Allston, The Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, 1811–13, oil on canvas, 156 x 122 in. [396.2 x 309.9 cm], Acc. No. #1816.1, courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy purchase, by subscription.

VII. William Marlow, The North and West Fronts of Strawberry Hill, 1776–80, watercolour, 340 x 535 mm © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, W. A. Sandby Bequest. D. 1838–1904.

VIII. Alexander Jackson Davis (1803–92), Glen Ellen for Robert Gilmor, Towson, Maryland (perspective, elevation and plan), 1832. Watercolour, ink and graphite on paper, sheet: 21 ¾ x 15 5/8 in. (55.2 x 39.7 cm). Harry Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924 (24.66.17). Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

IX. Christ Church, Cooperstown, NY. Photo by the author.

X. John Quidor, The Money Diggers, 1832, Brooklyn Museum, 48.171, gift of Mr and Mrs Alastair Bradley Martin.

XI. John Quidor, Ichabod Crane Pursued by the Headless Horseman, 1858. Smithsonian American Art Museum, museum purchase made possible in part by the Catherine Walden Myer Endowment, the Julia D. Strong Endowment and the Director’s Discretionary Fund.

XII. Thomas Cole, The Departure, 1837, oil on canvas, 39 ½ x 63 in., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, gift of William Wilson Corcoran, 69.2.

XIII. Thomas Cole, The Return, 1837, oil on canvas, 39 ¾ x 63 in., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, gift of William Wilson Corcoran, 69.3.

XIV. 1978.12.1 Jasper Cropsey, The Spirit of War, Avalon Fund, image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1851, oil on canvas, overall: 110.8 x 171.6 cm (43 5/8 x 67 9/16 in.) framed: 151.8 x 211.5 x 17.2 cm (59 ¾ x 83 ¼ x 6 ¾ in.).

XV. NCF PID#573, Jasper Cropsey, The Olden Times–Morning, 1859, 32 x 48 in., Newington-Cropsey Foundation Collection.

XVI. Lilly Martin Spencer, American (1822–1902), Reading the Legend, 1852, oil on canvas, 50 3/8 x 38 in.; 127.9525 x 96.52 cm, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, gift of Adeline Flint Wing, class of 1898 and Caroline Roberta Wing, class of 1896. Copyright: public domain.

Figures

Figure 1. Monticello, west front, photograph by the author. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.

Figure 2. Seated Figure of Bearded Man in White, Looking at Wraiths of Man and Woman Walking Over the Sea.

20 July 1797. Watercolour on paper by Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Museum Department. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID# 1960.108.1.3.9.

Figure 3. Monticello garden pavilion, photograph by the author. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.

Figure 4. Monticello: castellated tower. Drawing by Thomas Jefferson [1778]. Original manuscript from the Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts. N93; K64. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Figure 5. Monticello: temple or portico. Drawing by Thomas Jefferson, 1807. Original manuscript from the Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts. N184; K165. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Figure 6. ‘Mount Vernon’, Gleason’s Pictorial, V, 18 (29 October 1853), p. 273.

Figure 7. Early photograph of the east facade of the manion at Mount Vernon seen from the south-east, photographer unknown, c.1858. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.

Figure 8. Engraving after Washington Allston’s Spalatro’s Vision of the Bloody Hand, 1831, from Clara Erskine Clement, A Handbook of Legendary and Mythological Art (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1871), frontispiece.

Figure 9. Romantic Landscape, c.1800, Washington Allston (American, 1779–1843). Sepia Wash on paper © Image courtesy of the Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association, 1922.003.0001.

Figure 10. Washington Allston (1779–1843), Tragic Figure in Chains, 1800, watercolour on paper mounted on panel, 12 5/8 x 9 5/8 in. (32.07 x 24.45 cm), Addison Gallery of American Art, Philips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, museum purchase, 1941.24.

Figure 11. Alexander Jackson Davis (1803–92), diary, nineteenth century, pen and ink, gift of Richard H. Pratt, 1946 (46.114.81). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

Figure 12. ‘A Prison Scene Drawn by A. J. Davis in 1818. Done in Alexandria, aged 15 and without any knowledge of architecture or perspective’. Alexander Jackson Davis Architectural Drawings and Papers Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

Figure 13. Abbotsford, from William Beattie, Scotland Illustrated (London, G. Virtue, 1838), before p. 39.

Figure 14. Otsego Hall, from James Fenimore Cooper, The Works of J. Fenimore Cooper (New York: P. F. Collier, Publisher, 1891), vol. II, frontispiece.

Figure 15. Melrose Abbey, from William Beattie, Scotland Illustrated (London, G. Virtue, 1838).

Figure 16. Sunnyside from Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field-book of the Revolution, vol. II (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1852), p. 193.

Figure 17. First-floor plan of Sunnyside, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS, NY, 60-TARY.V, 1.

Figure 18. William Hart, Sketch of Abbotsford, 1851, William Hart (1823–94), pencil on paper, 14 ½ x 10 1/8 in., inscribed, lower right: Abbotsford 1851/Scotland/Wm. Hart, gift of Alan Lewis in honour of Janice Hart White, 2004.46.223, Albany Institute of History & Art, Albany, NY.

Figure 19. Engraving of Fonthill, from Benson John Lossing, The Hudson: from the Wilderness to the Sea (Troy, NY: H. B. Nims and Co., c.1865), p. 365. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

Figure 20. The great hall at Fonthill Castle. Nathalie Bailey Morris photographs of American Gothic Revival architecture, 1853–1937. Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

Figure 21. Alexander Jackson Davis, Elevation and plan of Fonthill Castle. Alexander Jackson Davis Architectural Drawings and Papers Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

Figure 22. ‘Fonthill Abbey: View of the West, and North Fronts’, designed by James Wyatt, 1796–1812, from John Rutter, Delineations of Fonthill and Its Abbey (London: Charles Knight and Co. [etc.], 1823), plate 11, ‘Fonthill Abbey: View of the West, and North Fronts’. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

Figure 23. ‘Macbeth, at the Boston Theatre’, from Ballou’s Pictorial 9, no. 25 (22 December 1855), 396. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

Figure 24. Frank O. Branzetti, photographer, exterior, front and side, looking north-east, The Wayside, Lexington Road, Concord, Middlesex County, MA. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, HABS, Reproduction number HABS MASS, 9-Con, 9-2.

Figure 25. Villa Montauto, on the Bellosguardo Hill, Florence, Italy; photo by the author.

Introduction

In 1821, Sir Walter Scott defended Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel The Romance of the Forest (1791) against its critics by noting the ‘actual pleasure which it produces’, and the ‘real sorrow and distress which it alleviates’.¹ In this passage, Scott identifies an essential characteristic of Gothic fiction: the delight experienced by the reader. Gothic literature created a fantasy world for an enraptured audience. The Gothic genre transported its readers to an imaginary realm, a pseudo-medieval place filled with dungeons, caverns and all manner of subterranean labyrinths. Haunted castles, lascivious monks, disembodied voices – the trappings of the Gothic novel gripped late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century readers with spine-tingling tales of treacherous villains and virtuous heroines. Without risking a hair on one’s head (but perhaps raising more than one), the Gothic reader vicariously experienced supernatural happenings and gained access to the awful and sublime secrets of the human soul. Although some Gothic novels also contained moralistic messages, the main purpose was to release the reader’s imagination. Horace Walpole wrote his novel The Castle of Otranto as a method of escapism, a way of ‘exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams’.²

The genesis of the Gothic Revival in both architecture and literature was Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, an eighteenthcentury castellated villa in Twickenham, England. Strawberry Hill represents a pastiche of medieval forms, knitted together by lath and plaster rather than traditional Gothic stonework. Walpole and his committee on taste ignored medieval building methods to create a whimsical building, more a work ‘of fancy than of imitation’, as Walpole admitted.³ It was Walpole’s residence that inspired him to write what is considered the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764. In the first preface, written anonymously, Walpole states that the author seems to describe certain parts of a presumably real castle: ‘The chamber, says he, on the right hand; the door on the left hand; the distance from the chapel to Conrad’s apartment: these and other passages are strong presumptions that the author had some certain building in his eye.’⁴ The building the author had in mind was his own castle, Strawberry Hill. The link between Gothic literature and Gothic Revival architecture is certainly strong, beginning with Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Indeed, as Anne Williams has pointed out, Walpole’s castle itself was in part inspired by Alexander Pope’s poem ‘Eloisa to Abelard’.⁵ From the very beginning, the Gothic Revival has been a phenomenon that crosses modern disciplinary boundaries. Therefore, the Gothic as an aesthetic movement should not be studied in isolation. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship, literary scholars and art and architectural historians often note the obvious connections between literature and the arts when discussing the Gothic. Mention of these correlations has become almost obligatory. But while interdisciplinary studies of the Gothic are more common in investigations of British Gothic, American Gothic has languished in the shadow of studies of the British tradition. Bringing together architecture, painting and literature, this book analyses the impact Gothic novel reading had on American art and architecture between 1776 and 1850. My broad approach to the topic will provide a necessary context for understanding the interconnectedness of the arts in this period.⁶

Among the nineteenth-century Gothic enthusiasts were many leaders of the Boston and New York artistic communities. But the popularity of Gothic novels was certainly not confined to the elites of the north-eastern United States. Gothic readers could be found in every social class. In his preface to his satirical book The Algerine Captive; or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill (1797) Royall Taylor writes:

Dolly, the dairy maid, and Jonathan, the hired man, threw aside the ballad of the cruel stepmother, over which they had so often wept in concert, and now amused themselves into so agreeable a terror, with the haunted houses and hobgoblins of Mrs. Radcliffe, that they were both afraid to sleep alone.⁷

In addition, southerners were particularly enamoured with the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott.⁸ This book focuses on individual artists and architects who incorporated their reading of Gothic novels into their artistic expressions. Although this book is not a regional study, most of these national figures lived and worked in New York state and the Hudson River Valley.⁹ The exceptions in this book are the Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, and Washington Allston, who was a southerner by birth but lived abroad and in Boston for most of his life.

This study begins with Thomas Jefferson and his plantation house Monticello. The first chapter, ‘Gothic Monticello: Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Narratives’, reveals the Gothic sensibilities of an historical figure most commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Although Monticello itself is neoclassical, Jefferson envisioned a garden full of mystery and suspense, complete with Gothic Revival garden structures, including a castellated prospect tower. This chapter revises our understanding of Jefferson as an architect by examining his reading habits, particularly his interest in Ossianic and graveyard poetry. The chapter also presents George Washington’s Mount Vernon through a Gothic lens. Like Monticello, Mount Vernon appears neoclassical to its core; however, this chapter will show how the picturesque and the Gothic pervade the Mount Vernon landscape in unexpected ways.

The American Romantic painter Washington Allston, the subject of the second chapter, was a reader of Gothic novels, and Radcliffe in particular. ‘Banditti Mania: The Gothic Haunting of Washington Allston’ examines how Allston’s youthful literary indulgences found their way into his artistic practices throughout his life, despite his insistence that what he called his ‘banditti mania’ subsided as he matured into adulthood. Pursued by personal demons and engulfed in grief after the loss of his first wife, Allston often engaged in supernatural subject matter in his paintings and even wrote his own Gothic novel, Monaldi. The novel features an artist who descends into madness in much the same way Allston appeared to his friends to become mentally unstable. Allston was not alone in his Gothic obsession. Numerous artists, architects and their patrons indulged in Gothic novel reading. As the nineteenth century continued, these readers became engrossed with the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, himself a devotee of Gothic literature.

Chapter three, ‘Arranging the Trap Doors: The Gothic Revival Castles of Alexander Jackson Davis’, deals with the influence of Gothic literature and Scott’s historical romances on Davis, the prominent Gothic Revival architect whose designs brought to life the fictional architecture of Gothic novels. Although Davis never travelled to Europe, his partner Ithiel Town toured England, France and Italy in 1829–30. From Europe, Town sent Davis hundreds of architectural books that he and Town then used to create Gothic Revival designs such as Glen Ellen in Maryland (1832). The client for Glen Ellen was a young man named Robert Gilmor III, who had visited both Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and Scott’s Gothic Revival home, Abbotsford, in Scotland. These Gothic Revival homes inspired the design of Glen Ellen, which was the first of many Davis-designed castellated residences in the 1830s and 1840s in the United States. This chapter examines the importance of literature in shaping mid-nineteenth-century American domestic architecture.

The fourth chapter, ‘Old Dwellings Transmogrified: The Homes of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving’ looks at two famous American authors’ homes. The novelist James Fenimore Cooper visited European Gothic and Gothic Revival sites, and then Gothicized his federal-style house, Otsego Hall in Cooperstown, New York. In redesigning Otsego Hall, Cooper brought the latest architectural fashion to his provincial hometown and introduced the literary Gothic into American architecture. One of his characters uses the word ‘transmogrified’ to describe the eclectic concoction of a fictional