Threads
26 sourced relations: 16 between works on this timeline, 10 to sources outside it, placed on the same true-scale years as the Loom. They are not all of one kind: solid arcs are documented borrowings, answers and parodies; the 9 faint arcs are a work standing in a tradition, or a critic's reading; a dashed arc joins two works with a shared origin. The 3 oxblood arcs join two vampire works. Dashed nodes are sources outside this timeline.
The Dictionary of National Biography’s entry on Lewis calls Radcliffe’s romances a form of literature of which Walpole’s Castle of Otranto ‘set the first example’; a genre-level link, not a documented borrowing.
The Dictionary of National Biography says Lewis was induced to go on with The Monk by his interest in Udolpho, and Summers reports he read it just before and after reaching The Hague in 1794, though he found its landscape passages dull.
Sources: Dictionary of National Biography, via Wikisource, Encyclopedia.com (Gale / Thomson Gale)
Lewis’s own Advertisement says the first idea of the romance was suggested by the story of the Santon Barsisa in The Guardian, and the Dictionary of National Biography gives the number as 148.
Sources: Project Gutenberg, Dictionary of National Biography, via Wikisource
Mary Shelley says volumes of German ghost stories translated into French fell into their hands and preceded Byron’s proposal; Rossetti and the 1819 Vampyre name the book as Fantasmagoriana/Phantasmagoriana.
Sources: Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg (Elkin Mathews, 1911 edition), Project Gutenberg
Both grew from the ghost-story contest proposed by Byron at Cologny in June 1816; the 1819 printing’s ‘Extract of a Letter from Geneva’ says the tales were undertaken by Lord B., the physician, and Miss M. W. Godwin, with a note that her tale was since published as Frankenstein.
Sources: Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg (Elkin Mathews, 1911 edition), Project Gutenberg
The DNB and Rossetti say Polidori knew Byron had begun a vampire tale in June 1816 and developed the theme himself; Polidori’s own letter says the groundwork was Byron’s but the development his.
Sources: Dictionary of National Biography, via Wikisource, Project Gutenberg (Elkin Mathews, 1911 edition), Washington University in St. Louis, Arts & Sciences
The Extract of a Letter from Geneva says the company read a German work called Phantasmagoriana before agreeing to write supernatural tales.
Sources: Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg (Elkin Mathews, 1911 edition)
In the Radcliffean tradition rather than a link to Udolpho by title: Maturin’s Preface reports a friend’s objection that the Spaniard’s Tale revives the horrors of ‘Radcliffe-Romance’, and defends it as drawing convent misery from petty daily torments.
Sources: Project Gutenberg
Encyclopedia.com says the novel draws on the Faust and Wandering Jew legends in following a seventeenth-century scholar who trades his soul for extended life.
Sources: Encyclopedia.com (Gale)
Margaret Alterton linked Poe’s gloomy house, a symbol of a family dying out, to Hoffmann’s story, as reported in Mabbott’s notes.
Sources: Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore
Alterton proposed it as a source for the cataleptic lady, the storm and the coffin; Mabbott records the suggestion without endorsing it.
Sources: Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore
In the story Dupin says Vidocq ‘was a good guesser and a persevering man’ who, ‘without educated thought, he erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations’, setting analysis against the practical policeman.
Sources: Project Gutenberg, Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore
Sam George calls Polidori’s aristocratic vampire a figure ‘later reincarnated as Sir Frances Varney’, and notes that Varney alone among later vampires keeps Polidori’s link between the vampire and the moon through repeated lunar resurrections.
In the Radcliffean tradition rather than a documented borrowing: an Oxford lecture series places Thornfield’s guilty secret in the Victorian Gothic revival that was ‘often modelled on the Medieval Gothic of Ann Radcliffe and Walter Scott’; it does not name Udolpho.
Sources: University of Oxford
In the Radcliffean tradition rather than a documented borrowing: Winifred Hughes, as summarised by the Victorian Web, ties the sensation fiction that The Woman in White initiated to a continued taste for the Gothic novel, naming ‘the goosebump gothicism of Ann Radcliffe’.
Sources: The Victorian Web
Martha Hailey DuBose writes that Poe, with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) and his later tales, ‘carved out the fundamentals of the genre’ and that Collins ‘made the next real breakthrough in detective fiction after Poe’ with The Moonstone in 1868; a genre-level succession, not a claim that Collins borrowed from the story.
Sam George traces the line of aristocratic vampires from Polidori’s Lord Ruthven and names Le Fanu’s Countess Mircalla Karnstein among those who follow him; a place in that tradition, not a documented borrowing from The Vampyre.
Doyle named Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin as the best detective in fiction in 1892, and Watson compares Holmes to Dupin in A Study in Scarlet.
Doyle ranked Gaboriau’s Lecoq second among fictional detectives (1892), and A Study in Scarlet has Holmes and Watson discuss Lecoq by name.
A critic’s reading, not a statement by Wilde: a Dublin Review of Books essay finds Maturin’s legacy in the work of his grand-nephew Wilde, ‘particularly’ in Dorian Gray, and notes that after prison Wilde took the name Melmoth.
Sources: Dublin Review of Books
Dorian Gray and The Sign of the Four were both commissioned by J. M. Stoddart for Lippincott’s at the same dinner on or about 30 August 1889.
Sources: Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia, Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia
Roger Bowen (Studies in the Novel, 1976, as summarised by Gale) argues that Moreau descends from Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, with Wells updating the myth for the Darwinian age by replacing galvanism with biological science.
Sources: Encyclopedia.com / Gale
The Victorian Web calls Carmilla ‘one of the sources of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, and Franck and Beresford report that Stoker’s 1890 notes set the story in Styria, the setting of Carmilla (and that the Styrian vampiress of ‘Dracula’s Guest’ owes much to it, per Auerbach).
Sources: The Victorian Web, Supernatural Studies, The Irish Times
The Wilkie Collins Society article calls The Woman in White, narrated by several people through letters, diaries and records, ‘the main influence behind the style of Dracula’, and pairs characters across the two books (Marian Halcombe and Mina Harker, Count Fosco and Count Dracula).
Sources: The Wilkie Collins Society
The governess explicitly asks whether she has stumbled on ‘a mystery of Udolpho’ at Bly (Chapter IV), marking the story’s debt to the Radcliffean secret-in-the-house plot.
Sources: Project Gutenberg
Doyle’s own dedication credits Robinson’s account of a West-Country legend with the book’s inception.
Sources: Project Gutenberg