Matthew Gregory Lewis, who professed to have translated this romance
out of the German, very much, I believe, as Horace Walpole professed
to have taken The Castle of Otranto from an old Italian manuscript,
was born in 1775 of a wealthy family. His father had an estate in
India and a post in a Government office. His mother was daughter to
Sir Thomas Sewell, Master of the Rolls in the reign of George III.
She was a young mother; her son Matthew was devoted to her from the
first. As a child he called her "Fanny," and as a man held firmly
by her when she was deserted by her husband. From Westminster
School, M. G. Lewis passed to Christ Church, Oxford. Already he was
busy over tales and plays, and wrote at college a farce, never
acted, a comedy, written at the age of sixteen, The East Indian,
afterwards played for Mrs. Jordan's benefit and repeated with great
success, and also a novel, never published, called The Effusions of
Sensibility, which was a burlesque upon the sentimental school. He
wrote also what he called "a romance in the style of The Castle of
Otranto," which appeared afterwards as the play of The Castle
Spectre.
With his mind thus interested in literature of the romantic form,
young Lewis, aged seventeen, after a summer in Paris, went to
Germany, settled for a time at Weimar, and, as he told his mother,
knocked his brains against German as hard as ever he could. "I have
been introduced," he wrote, in July, 1792, "to M. de Goethe, the
celebrated author of Werter, so you must not be surprised if I
should shoot myself one of these fine mornings." In the spring of
1793 the youth returned to England, very full of German romantic
tale and song, and with more paper covered with wild fancies of his
own. After the next Christmas he returned to Oxford. There was a
visit to Lord Douglas at Bothwell Castle; there was not much
academic work done at Oxford. His father's desire was to train him
for the diplomatic service, and in the summer of 1794 he went to the
Hague as attache to the British Embassy. He had begun to write his
novel of The Monk, had flagged, but was spurred on at the Hague by a
reading of Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, a book after his
own heart, and he wrote to his mother at this time, "You see I am
horribly bit by the rage of writing."
The Monk was written in ten weeks, and published in the summer of
1795, before its author's age was twenty. It was praised, attacked,
said by one review to have neither originality, morals, nor
probability to recommend it, yet to have excited and to be
continuing to excite the curiosity of the public: a result set down
to the "irresistible energy of genius." Certainly, Lewis did not
trouble himself to keep probability in view; he amused himself with
wild play of a fancy that delighted in the wonderful. The
controversy over The Monk caused the young author to be known as
Monk Lewis, and the word Monk has to this day taken the place of the
words Matthew Gregory so generally, that many catalogue-makers must
innocently suppose him to have been so named at the font. The
author of The Monk came back from the Hague to be received as a
young lion in London society. When he came of age he entered
Parliament for Hindon, in Wiltshire, but seldom went to the House,
never spoke in it, and retired after a few sessions. His delight
was in the use of the pen; his father, although disappointed by his
failure as a statesman, allowed him a thousand a year, and he took a
cottage at Barnes, that he might there escape from the world to his
ink-bottle. He was a frequent visitor at Inverary Castle, and was
fascinated by his host's daughter, Lady Charlotte Campbell. Still
he wrote on. The musical drama of The Castle Spectre was produced
in the year after The Monk, and it ran sixty nights. He translated
next Schiller's Kabale und Liebe as The Minister, but it was not
acted till it appeared, with little success, some years afterwards
at Covent Garden as The Harper's Daughter. He translated from
Kotzebue, under the name of Rolla, the drama superseded by
Sheridan's version of the same work as Pizarro. Then came the
acting, in 1799, of his comedy written in boyhood, The East Indian.
Then came, in the same year, his first opera, Adelmorn the Outlaw;
then a tragedy, Alfonso, King of Castile. Of the origin of this
tragedy Lewis gave a characteristic account. "Hearing one day," he
said, "my introduction of negroes into a feudal baron's castle" (in
The Castle Spectre) "exclaimed against with as much vehemence as if
a dramatic anachronism had been an offence undeserving of benefit of
clergy, I said in a moment of petulance, that to prove of how little
consequence I esteemed such errors, I would make a play upon the
Gunpowder Plot, and make Guy Faux in love with the Emperor
Charlemagne's daughter. By some chance or other, this idea fastened
itself upon me, and by dint of turning it in my mind, I at length
formed the plot of Alfonso."