Works · Novel · 1796

The Monk

First appeared Mar 1796

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

Full title: The Monk: A Romance

In Madrid the Capuchin preacher Ambrosio draws crowds who call him a saint, a man who has never been tempted. Then a young novice named Rosario joins the abbey, and the abbot’s pride begins to give way. Once he has taken the first step, Ambrosio is led through lust, murder and the black arts, and fixes his desire on the innocent Antonia, whose mother stands between them. Lewis braids this fall with the story of Raymond and his lost love Agnes, and with a ghost, the Bleeding Nun, who walks a German castle at night. Behind everything stands the Inquisition, ready to try the abbot’s crimes.

As I listened to the mournful hollow sound, and heard it die away in the wind, I felt a sudden chillness spread itself over my body. I shuddered without knowing wherefore;

Chapter IV. Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #601 (Gutenberg’s text, which names ‘M. G. Lewis, Esq. M.P.’ on its title (so a post-first-edition printing) and has the original title ‘The Monk’, not the expurgated ‘Ambrosio’; Raymond’s narrative of the Bleeding Nun’s first midnight visit)

The publication record

The Monk: A Romance

Matthew Lewis

Novel

Volume, 3 vols Mar 1796 John Bell, London (148 Oxford Street) Three duodecimo volumes at nine shillings, anonymous; Bell’s first advertisement ran in the Monthly Magazine in March 1796 (Summers). [1][2]
Revised edition, 3 vols Oct 1796 John Bell, London Second edition, October 1796, with Lewis’s name and ‘M.P.’ on the title page. [1][2]
Revised edition 1798 London Fourth edition, retitled ‘Ambrosio, or The Monk’, with the most objectionable passages removed (Summers; month not established). [1][2]

Title page The Monk, 1796 Matthew Lewis (1775-1818), 1796. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Matthew Lewis, 1775–1818. The Monk first appeared when Matthew Lewis was 20.

Attribution and scope

First edition (March 1796) anonymous; the second edition (October 1796) named ‘M. G. Lewis, Esq. M.P.’ on the title page. The fourth edition (1798) was expurgated and retitled ‘Ambrosio, or The Monk’.

Facts

Lewis wrote The Monk at The Hague, where he was an attache at the British embassy; on 23 September 1794 he asked his mother what she thought of his having written, ‘in the space of ten weeks’, a romance of between three and four hundred octavo pages. His verse Preface is signed ‘Hague, Oct. 28, 1794’, and he says he has scarcely seen his twentieth year.[1][3]
The first edition appeared anonymously in March 1796 in three duodecimo volumes from John Bell of Oxford Street at nine shillings; a second edition in October 1796 carried Lewis’s name and the letters M.P., because he had been elected to Parliament.[1][2]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s review in the Critical Review (February 1797) called the book obscene and immoral while granting it was ‘the offspring of no common genius’; Lewis later had to issue an expurgated edition, the fourth, retitled Ambrosio, or The Monk.[1][4][2]
In his Advertisement Lewis lists his borrowings: the first idea came from the story of the Santon Barsisa in The Guardian, the Bleeding Nun from a legend still credited in Germany, and The Water-King from a fragment of a Danish ballad.[3][4]

Setting

Unspecified; a Catholic Spain of Capuchins and the Inquisition[3]

Madrid
the Capuchin abbey
Strasbourg
the castle of Lindenberg in Germany

Themes

Notes on dates 3 notes on disputed dates and attribution

Year of first publication: the DNB says the novel appeared ‘in the summer of 1795’; Encyclopedia.com entries give 1795 or 1796. Summers says some scholars wrongly date it to 1795 and gives March 1796 with Bell’s advertisement that month. March 1796 is shown.
Prosecution: the DNB says the attorney-general moved for an injunction; the McGill article, quoting Lewis’s 1818 obituary, says prosecution was only ‘talked of’. Neither is stated as fact.
Composition: ‘ten weeks’ is Lewis’s own claim in his letter of 23 September 1794 (via Summers) and is presented as his claim.

Threads

Threads in

Descends from The Mysteries of Udolpho 1794
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.[4][1]
Descends from The Guardian no. 148 (the Santon Barsisa story) (outside this timeline)
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.[3][4]

Threads out

No sourced relation from a later work on this timeline is recorded.

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1796, and the other writers alive when The Monk appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).