Cloth binding. Black lettering with gilt title on front cover.

The Old English Baron is an early Gothic novel by the English author Clara Reeve. It was first published under this title in 1778, although it had anonymously appeared in 1777 under its original name of The Champion of Virtue, before Samuel Richardson’s daughter, Mrs Bridgen, had edited it for her. Apart from typographical errors, the revision was trifling.

Reeve noted in the 1778 preface that

“This Story is the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto, written upon the same plan, with a design to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient Romance and modern Novel, at the same time it assumes a character and manner of its own, that differs from both; it is distinguished by the appellation of a Gothic Story, being a picture of Gothic times and manners.”

Originally Reeve presented the story, as Walpole had done before her, as an old manuscript she had merely discovered and transcribed. Under Mrs Bridgen’s auspices this fiction was removed from the preface, but more subtle textual references to its authenticity were allowed to remain. These included the claim that the four-year interval was a lacuna in the manuscript, where the original author was supposed to have left off and a “more modern hand” continued the manuscript; there are many subsequent breaches in the narrative where the original was supposed to have been defaced by damp.

The Oxford World’s Classics edition notes that it was a major influence in the development of Gothic fiction. It was dramatized in 1799 as Edmond, Orphan of the Castle.

‘The story follows the adventures of Sir Philip Harclay, who returns to medieval England to find that Arthur Lord Lovel, the friend of his youth, is dead. His cousin Walter Lord Lovel had succeeded to the estate, and sold the family castle to the baron, Fitz-Owen. Among the baron’s household were his two sons and daughter Emma, several young gentlemen relations being educated with the sons, and Edmund Twyford, the son of a peasant, who had been brought to live with them. When Sir Philip saw him, he took an immediate liking to him, being struck by his resemblance to his lost friend. The Knight proposing to take him into his own family, being childless, Edmund preferred to remain with the baron, receiving however an assurance that if ever he was in need of it, Sir Philip would renew his offer.

The narrative then oversteps the interval of four years. By his manifestly superior nature and qualities Edmund had attracted the enmity of his benefactor’s nephews, and the coldness of Sir Robert, the eldest son. William, his younger brother, is his staunch friend however, and Edmund is in love with the Lady Emma.’

Clara Reeve (23 January 1729 – 3 December 1807) was an English novelist best known for the Gothic novel The Old English Baron (1777). She also wrote an innovative history of prose fiction, The Progress of Romance (1785). Her first work was a translation from Latin, then an unusual language for a woman to learn.

Written in response to Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, The Old English Baron was a major influence on the development of Gothic fiction, gaining popularity for the genre in universities and among general readers. A contextual introduction that looks at Reeve in the context of late 18th-century women’s writing and the history of the Gothic can be found in this book. Henrietta Mosse was to use this story as a model for her own novel, The Old Irish Baronet in 1808.

Although Reeve’s The Progress of Romance, was long overlooked by scholars, Garry Kelly has called it “not only a pioneering history and defence of “romance” from antiquity to the mid-eighteenth century but also a ground- breaking work of literary scholarship by a woman”.

Reeve’s contribution to developing Gothic fiction can be demonstrated on at least two fronts. First there is the reinforcement of the Gothic narrative framework as one that focuses on expanding the imaginative domain to include the supernatural, but without losing the realism that marks the novel that Walpole pioneered. Secondly, Reeve also sought to find an appropriate formula for ensuring that fiction is believable and coherent. She spurned specific aspects of Walpole’s style, such as his tendency to blend in humour or comedy that diminishes the Gothic tale’s ability to induce fear. In 1777, Reeve enumerated Walpole’s excesses:

a sword so large as to require an hundred men to lift it; a helmet that by its own weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched vault, big enough for a man to go through; a picture that walks out of its frame; a skeleton ghost in a hermit’s cowl…

Although successive Gothic writers did not fully heed Reeve’s emotional realism, she posited a framework that keeps Gothic fiction within the realm of the probable. This remained a challenge for authors after publication of The Old English Baron. Beyond its providential context, the supernatural often risked veering towards the absurd.