0:00:07 > 0:00:09Gothic.
0:00:09 > 0:00:12It began with the desire to revive something that was dead,
0:00:12 > 0:00:14a style of medieval architecture.
0:00:15 > 0:00:21But it grew like graveyard ivy, more sinister at every twist and turn.
0:00:23 > 0:00:24By the mid-19th century,
0:00:24 > 0:00:27Gothic had spread in all directions.
0:00:28 > 0:00:30There was Gothic painting, with
0:00:30 > 0:00:35its fears and phobias, the Gothic novel, rooted in terror and dread.
0:00:36 > 0:00:40But what happened to the Gothic ivy as it grew out of
0:00:40 > 0:00:45the Victorian age and into the 20th century, into our own time?
0:00:45 > 0:00:46It proliferated.
0:00:46 > 0:00:49British novelists, poets, film-makers,
0:00:49 > 0:00:53so many have seized on the Gothic or been seized by it.
0:00:53 > 0:00:55Nowadays, it's everywhere.
0:00:57 > 0:01:02It's infected our books, films, TV, music, fashion and beyond.
0:01:02 > 0:01:08Even technology's Gothic. There are ghosts in the machine.
0:01:08 > 0:01:12So Gothic can't be compared to ivy any more. It's gone viral.
0:01:13 > 0:01:15But how did it happen?
0:01:15 > 0:01:19To understand that, there's somebody you just have to meet.
0:01:52 > 0:01:54Count Dracula's waxen hue became
0:01:54 > 0:01:58greenish-yellow by the contrast of his burning eyes.
0:01:58 > 0:02:01And the red scar on the forehead showed on the pallid skin
0:02:01 > 0:02:03like a palpitating wound.
0:02:05 > 0:02:08"You think to baffle me, you, with your pale faces all in a row
0:02:08 > 0:02:10"like sheep in a butcher's.
0:02:10 > 0:02:12"You shall be sorry yet.
0:02:12 > 0:02:14"My revenge has just begun.
0:02:14 > 0:02:17"I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side.
0:02:19 > 0:02:22"Your girls that you all love are mine already,
0:02:22 > 0:02:25"and through them, you and others shall yet be mine,
0:02:25 > 0:02:28"my creatures to do my bidding,
0:02:28 > 0:02:30"to be my jackals when I want to feed."
0:02:34 > 0:02:39In the world of the Gothic, all roads lead to Dracula.
0:02:39 > 0:02:42And, in fact, I'm standing above a fictional crossroads
0:02:42 > 0:02:45here in Purfleet in Essex.
0:02:45 > 0:02:49The novelist Bram Stoker knew this area well and in Dracula
0:02:49 > 0:02:53he named the vampire's Essex estate Carfax,
0:02:53 > 0:02:55from the French "quatre faces",
0:02:55 > 0:03:00meaning "four faces" or cardinal points of the compass.
0:03:00 > 0:03:03And it's in this place, with its sense of four different
0:03:03 > 0:03:07directions, that the novel moves to its conclusion.
0:03:07 > 0:03:11Dracula has 50 boxes of Transylvanian earth -
0:03:11 > 0:03:15its vitalising properties help to keep him alive -
0:03:15 > 0:03:20transported to this spot from Whitby via Kings Cross.
0:03:20 > 0:03:23So when you look down at those buildings you're
0:03:23 > 0:03:27looking at Dracula's domain, but how did he really get here?
0:03:33 > 0:03:36In terms of the plot, the answer's straightforward.
0:03:36 > 0:03:39Carfax appears at the start of the novel.
0:03:39 > 0:03:42Dracula buys the house when the unsuspecting agent,
0:03:42 > 0:03:46Jonathan Harker, pays him a visit at his Transylvanian castle.
0:03:48 > 0:03:49Harker shows him
0:03:49 > 0:03:52some black-and-white photos of the place -
0:03:52 > 0:03:57Kodaks, taken with one of the first mass-produced cameras.
0:03:57 > 0:04:00Deal done, and Dracula has a little piece of England.
0:04:02 > 0:04:06Beyond the storyline, what I mean when I say
0:04:06 > 0:04:08"How did Dracula get here?"
0:04:08 > 0:04:12is also how did Dracula get up here?
0:04:12 > 0:04:14How did he come to enthral and fascinate us
0:04:14 > 0:04:18in such a powerful and all-pervasive way?
0:04:18 > 0:04:23There had been vampires before Dracula, but none like him.
0:04:23 > 0:04:27From the point of his creation in the mid-1890s, he looks both
0:04:27 > 0:04:30backwards and forwards.
0:04:30 > 0:04:35Backwards to the "gloomth" of the classic 18th-century Gothic novel
0:04:35 > 0:04:40with its dungeons and haunted castles in foreign parts
0:04:40 > 0:04:46and forwards through the 20th century and into our own time.
0:04:46 > 0:04:52His influence has infused our culture through a veritable
0:04:52 > 0:04:55blood bank of further novels,
0:04:55 > 0:05:00comics, films, TV series - you name it.
0:05:00 > 0:05:03And I think the question is how did it happen?
0:05:03 > 0:05:07How did this extraordinary mythical creature come to take
0:05:07 > 0:05:11possession of our collective imagination?
0:05:19 > 0:05:23Whitby, where Dracula lands before going on to take
0:05:23 > 0:05:25possession of his Carfax estate.
0:05:25 > 0:05:28But to understand the phenomenon of Dracula we need to go
0:05:28 > 0:05:32beyond the Yorkshire town with which he's become so associated.
0:05:34 > 0:05:37Dracula lives on - remains undead -
0:05:37 > 0:05:40because Stoker kept his tale chillingly simple.
0:05:44 > 0:05:47A terrible creature arrives from foreign parts.
0:05:47 > 0:05:50A vampire, which sucks the blood of its victims,
0:05:50 > 0:05:53each becoming a vampire in turn.
0:05:53 > 0:05:55Dracula's purpose?
0:05:55 > 0:05:57To travel to London, the heart of British society,
0:05:57 > 0:06:01and infect it with the vampire virus.
0:06:08 > 0:06:13He's elusive, difficult to catch, but that's the appeal.
0:06:13 > 0:06:17Onto his darkness we can project any anxiety we wish.
0:06:17 > 0:06:21He's been plague, famine, syphilis, AIDS,
0:06:21 > 0:06:23even computer viruses.
0:06:23 > 0:06:26But what would his first audience have made of him,
0:06:26 > 0:06:28in the late 19th century?
0:06:33 > 0:06:35Bram Stoker's Dracula gripped readers
0:06:35 > 0:06:40because it held up a mirror to a society full of foreboding.
0:06:40 > 0:06:44The novel's dark vision, of a world where there are only vampires
0:06:44 > 0:06:47and victims, played on a real anxiety -
0:06:47 > 0:06:49the fear that a terrible change
0:06:49 > 0:06:52was taking place in society,
0:06:52 > 0:06:57that the modern world really was being stalked by a monster.
0:06:57 > 0:07:01A monster who dwelled not in a Transylvanian castle,
0:07:01 > 0:07:04but in the citadel of the modern market.
0:07:06 > 0:07:09Capital is dead labour which vampire-like lives only
0:07:09 > 0:07:14by sucking living labour and lives the more the more labour it sucks.
0:07:22 > 0:07:2630 years before Stoker wrote Dracula, the economist
0:07:26 > 0:07:30and philosopher Karl Marx had written his own great book
0:07:30 > 0:07:31about a blood-sucking beast.
0:07:33 > 0:07:37Das Kapital, he called it, its subject a real-life vampire -
0:07:37 > 0:07:41the great demon Capital, which drains a drop of the worker's blood
0:07:41 > 0:07:44every second of the working day.
0:07:45 > 0:07:48Marx laid bare the workings of what he called capitalism,
0:07:48 > 0:07:51the mechanism behind its face.
0:07:52 > 0:07:54What made the market tick?
0:07:54 > 0:07:57The vast forces of production.
0:07:57 > 0:08:01And what made them tick was labour, workers grinding away under
0:08:01 > 0:08:04the heel of their capitalist masters and the tyranny of the clock.
0:08:06 > 0:08:08He backed up his thesis with facts and figures,
0:08:08 > 0:08:13but to get his readers' blood up Marx used the imagery of Gothic.
0:08:16 > 0:08:19The time during which the labourer works
0:08:19 > 0:08:22is the time during which the capitalist consumes
0:08:22 > 0:08:25the labour-power he has purchased of him.
0:08:25 > 0:08:30The prolongation of the working day beyond the limits of the natural day into the night
0:08:30 > 0:08:32only slightly quenches the vampire thirst
0:08:32 > 0:08:34for the living blood of labour.
0:08:38 > 0:08:40Time is money, blood money.
0:08:41 > 0:08:45Capitalism, as we think of it thanks to him, is presented by Marx
0:08:45 > 0:08:50as predatory and ghoulish - red in spooky tooth and claw.
0:08:52 > 0:08:55For Marx, the wiles of the vampire were at work
0:08:55 > 0:08:57everywhere in the modern world.
0:08:58 > 0:09:02Not just at the point of production, workers drained of blood,
0:09:02 > 0:09:05but also at the point of consumption,
0:09:05 > 0:09:08where purchasers were beguiled
0:09:08 > 0:09:12by the new advertising and window displays of the 19th century.
0:09:14 > 0:09:19Marx saw shopping as an unsettling experience, in which we're
0:09:19 > 0:09:24mesmerised by commerce, just like victims seduced by a vampire.
0:09:26 > 0:09:30Norman Mailer once said that Das Kapital is a great novel.
0:09:30 > 0:09:34What he forgot to add is that it's a Gothic novel.
0:09:34 > 0:09:39Because if Karl Marx's capitalists are the new vampiric villains
0:09:39 > 0:09:44sucking the blood of the workforce, what are the consumers?
0:09:44 > 0:09:49In Marx's view, they are the deluded devotees of a new sect.
0:09:49 > 0:09:53When he looked at the shop window fronts of Victorian London
0:09:53 > 0:09:58he didn't see fine porcelain, fob watches, beautiful furniture.
0:09:58 > 0:10:02He saw a row of false idols beguiling
0:10:02 > 0:10:05and enchanting people into purchasing them.
0:10:05 > 0:10:10That's why he said "The commodity is a fetish".
0:10:10 > 0:10:12This was voodoo economics.
0:10:17 > 0:10:20For all its Gothic elements, Das Kapital was still
0:10:20 > 0:10:23a dense theoretical study written by a German emigre.
0:10:25 > 0:10:29Is that why its importance to British Gothic has gone unnoticed?
0:10:30 > 0:10:34But Gothic without Marx is like Dracula without blood.
0:10:34 > 0:10:38Bram Stoker never read Das Kapital, but it certainly
0:10:38 > 0:10:43contributed to the fin-de-siecle mood that made Dracula so powerful.
0:10:45 > 0:10:49It was Marx who'd first raised the vampire from mere horror to
0:10:49 > 0:10:51modern myth.
0:10:51 > 0:10:55He'd seeded the sinister thought that there was something
0:10:55 > 0:10:58essentially vampiric about the modern world.
0:11:00 > 0:11:04Marx certainly inspired the great optimist of late Victorian Gothic -
0:11:04 > 0:11:07a man who was no writer of dark fantasy,
0:11:07 > 0:11:09but the very opposite.
0:11:09 > 0:11:13He was an idealist, an artist and designer who hoped
0:11:13 > 0:11:16he could redeem the world of commerce from within.
0:11:18 > 0:11:23Here we are. Number 449 Oxford Street.
0:11:23 > 0:11:28This is where Morris and Company used to display their commodities.
0:11:28 > 0:11:33The wallpaper and designs of William Morris, founder of
0:11:33 > 0:11:35the Arts and Crafts movement,
0:11:35 > 0:11:37associate member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
0:11:37 > 0:11:41supporter of the Gothic Revival in architecture,
0:11:41 > 0:11:44visionary poet and pamphleteer.
0:11:44 > 0:11:49Now the idea that there was a kinship between Karl Marx and
0:11:49 > 0:11:51Gothic Revivalists like Morris
0:11:51 > 0:11:54wouldn't have surprised him in the slightest
0:11:54 > 0:11:58because he was one of the first Englishmen to read Das Kapital.
0:11:58 > 0:12:00He had it in a French copy.
0:12:00 > 0:12:02He designed his own gilt-edged cover for it.
0:12:04 > 0:12:07Morris, like Marx, was a revolutionary socialist
0:12:07 > 0:12:12and he wanted to change the world, to halt the advance of
0:12:12 > 0:12:16this newly named beast - "consumer capitalism".
0:12:16 > 0:12:19To drive a stake through its heart.
0:12:19 > 0:12:21As if anyone could stop all of this.
0:12:25 > 0:12:29But Morris had a go, and one of his strategies was fighting
0:12:29 > 0:12:33capitalist quantity, the endless conveyor belt of tatty
0:12:33 > 0:12:37factory commodities, with the quality of his own goods,
0:12:37 > 0:12:40individually crafted in the workshop.
0:12:40 > 0:12:43Of course, they were far too expensive for ordinary
0:12:43 > 0:12:47working people - the very people Morris wanted to empower.
0:12:47 > 0:12:51But that is just one of the hazards of being a revolutionary.
0:12:51 > 0:12:53You keep hitting contradictions.
0:12:54 > 0:12:57You can't fault Morris's idealism, though.
0:12:57 > 0:12:58Here he was in his twilight years,
0:12:58 > 0:13:04miles away from the cliched view of him as an artist in rural retreat,
0:13:04 > 0:13:07living in West London to be close to the action.
0:13:09 > 0:13:12As Morris grew older he became more political
0:13:12 > 0:13:14and he spent more time in London.
0:13:14 > 0:13:19He had become a member of the Social Democratic Federation
0:13:19 > 0:13:21but it wasn't radical enough for him.
0:13:21 > 0:13:27So, he co-founded the new, more militant Socialist League.
0:13:27 > 0:13:30Eleanor Marx, Karl's daughter, was one of the signatories
0:13:30 > 0:13:34and Morris even set up its Hammersmith branch.
0:13:34 > 0:13:40He lobbied, he made speeches and he went to rallies which were
0:13:40 > 0:13:44met with a level of police brutality that appalled him.
0:13:44 > 0:13:50Now, this was the house, the house where Morris and his workers,
0:13:50 > 0:13:55freed from the vampiric clutches of capitalism,
0:13:55 > 0:13:57created their carpets.
0:13:57 > 0:13:59It was also their printing press
0:13:59 > 0:14:01and where they held their political meetings.
0:14:01 > 0:14:03Now, what were the foundation stones
0:14:03 > 0:14:07of Morris's revolutionary socialist politics?
0:14:07 > 0:14:10Two books - Marx's Das Kapital, of course,
0:14:10 > 0:14:15but also a text he had read in his youth and which he believed in
0:14:15 > 0:14:19so passionately that he personally re-printed it in this house.
0:14:20 > 0:14:24The book? John Ruskin, The Nature Of Gothic.
0:14:27 > 0:14:30John Ruskin was the most influential art critic
0:14:30 > 0:14:33of the 19th century, but he was also a critic
0:14:33 > 0:14:38of society, arguing that the Industrial Revolution was a blight.
0:14:40 > 0:14:47Ruskin writing about the Gothic, printed by William Morris.
0:14:47 > 0:14:50And I love the way they've placed the book for me
0:14:50 > 0:14:54here at Kelmscott House on a little cushion.
0:14:54 > 0:14:57It's almost as if it's asleep. So let's wake it up.
0:15:01 > 0:15:03Beautiful thing.
0:15:04 > 0:15:07So this really is an absolutely mint edition.
0:15:07 > 0:15:12But it's actually a book with, I think, a very modern message and
0:15:12 > 0:15:16it certainly would have seemed very modern to William Morris.
0:15:16 > 0:15:21Here he is railing against modern factory production.
0:15:21 > 0:15:24In particular, the production of glass beads. He says,
0:15:24 > 0:15:26"Glass beads are utterly unnecessary.
0:15:26 > 0:15:29"They are formed by drawing out the glass into rods,
0:15:29 > 0:15:32"the rods are chopped up into fragments of the size of beads
0:15:32 > 0:15:33"by the human hand.
0:15:33 > 0:15:36"The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands
0:15:36 > 0:15:41"vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy.
0:15:41 > 0:15:46"The beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail." C-c-c-r-r-r...
0:15:46 > 0:15:49You can hear it - what a wonderful description
0:15:49 > 0:15:51of a horrible factory job,
0:15:51 > 0:15:55and Ruskin goes on to say to his well-bred readership,
0:15:55 > 0:15:58"Every young lady therefore who buys glass beads
0:15:58 > 0:16:00"is engaged in the slave trade."
0:16:02 > 0:16:03Strong words.
0:16:08 > 0:16:11Why was Morris so keen to republish those words,
0:16:11 > 0:16:1440 years after they had been written?
0:16:14 > 0:16:20Partly because Ruskin's views chimed so well with those of Karl Marx.
0:16:20 > 0:16:22But it was also because Morris was drawn to
0:16:22 > 0:16:24Ruskin's aesthetic theories.
0:16:25 > 0:16:28To fight the blood-sucking beast of capitalism,
0:16:28 > 0:16:31Morris turned to his hero's core beliefs.
0:16:31 > 0:16:34Ruskin had preached for a return to the Christian values
0:16:34 > 0:16:37of the Middle Ages, and he'd argued that the spirituality
0:16:37 > 0:16:40and love which medieval craftsmen had brought to their work
0:16:40 > 0:16:43must somehow be recovered in the modern world.
0:16:45 > 0:16:48Morris tried to turn Ruskin's ideas about art and craft
0:16:48 > 0:16:50into a reality -
0:16:50 > 0:16:53and hoped that one day everybody would live in surroundings
0:16:53 > 0:16:56of handcrafted beauty.
0:16:56 > 0:16:57Naive?
0:16:57 > 0:17:00Maybe, but there's still one place where you can see
0:17:00 > 0:17:02the beauty of the idea.
0:17:05 > 0:17:08Welcome to Number Seven Hammersmith Terrace.
0:17:09 > 0:17:14Now, no original Morris interiors survive at Kelmscott House, which is
0:17:14 > 0:17:18just around the corner, but here they do,
0:17:18 > 0:17:20and it's quite something.
0:17:21 > 0:17:26This, this was once the home of Emery Walker, who was a close
0:17:26 > 0:17:28friend of William Morris.
0:17:28 > 0:17:32They collaborated on Morris's publishing ventures -
0:17:32 > 0:17:34Walker was a typographer himself -
0:17:34 > 0:17:38and they were also comrades, fellow members of the Socialist League
0:17:38 > 0:17:41and you can feel that sense of their close attachment to one another
0:17:41 > 0:17:45in this house, which, extraordinarily, has remained
0:17:45 > 0:17:49almost untouched since Walker lived here 100 years ago.
0:17:49 > 0:17:54Every inch is decorated with William Morris fabrics, William Morris
0:17:54 > 0:17:59wallpapers, ceramics, even the sconce is a William Morris design.
0:17:59 > 0:18:04It's almost uncanny, you expect Morris to call up
0:18:04 > 0:18:07on the phone at any minute or walk through the door
0:18:07 > 0:18:10and his spirit does still haunt this place.
0:18:10 > 0:18:14He's there, present in the ghostly form of photographs.
0:18:14 > 0:18:15It's just wonderful.
0:18:26 > 0:18:29Wonderful too the Gothic Revival on a larger scale,
0:18:29 > 0:18:31and equally poignant.
0:18:32 > 0:18:35Keble College, Oxford, founded in 1870,
0:18:35 > 0:18:37designed by William Butterfield,
0:18:37 > 0:18:41is its last gasp, captured in patterns of polychrome stone.
0:18:43 > 0:18:47Built according to Ruskin's blueprint for the true Gothic style,
0:18:47 > 0:18:51it also looked back to Pugin's early Victorian dream
0:18:51 > 0:18:55of refashioning all of Britain in the image of a medieval town.
0:18:56 > 0:19:00But this was a final flowering of a style soon to be cut off
0:19:00 > 0:19:05by the onslaught of the modern, the pragmatic, the utilitarian.
0:19:05 > 0:19:09Elaborate detail? Waste of time and money.
0:19:09 > 0:19:13Late Victorian Gothic might flourish a veritable forest
0:19:13 > 0:19:15of crosses at its vampire enemy.
0:19:15 > 0:19:20But the vampire, irresistible, carried on regardless.
0:19:25 > 0:19:28In the middle of the 19th century, as a young man,
0:19:28 > 0:19:32Morris had singled out the train as a shrieking abomination,
0:19:32 > 0:19:36the symbol of all that was bad about industrialisation and the machine.
0:19:38 > 0:19:41By the end of the century the train had certainly not stopped
0:19:41 > 0:19:45shrieking, and the steam engine couldn't be halted.
0:19:45 > 0:19:48Even entertainment was becoming industrialised.
0:19:48 > 0:19:51Machines were becoming a source of pleasure.
0:19:51 > 0:19:55William Morris was left behind, isolated,
0:19:55 > 0:19:57a prophet in the wilderness.
0:19:58 > 0:20:02One man's wilderness is another's paradise -
0:20:02 > 0:20:04even a man with the same name.
0:20:04 > 0:20:09By a strange quirk, in 1913, barely 15 years after William Morris's
0:20:09 > 0:20:14death, another William Morris, the car manufacturer,
0:20:14 > 0:20:18started up his factory in Cowley, on the outskirts of Oxford.
0:20:19 > 0:20:23City of dreaming spires, stronghold of the Gothic Revival.
0:20:23 > 0:20:27Adding to the irony, the first William Morris had been a student
0:20:27 > 0:20:32here and later returned to lecture on the evils of the modern world.
0:20:36 > 0:20:39The world doesn't come much more modern than this.
0:20:39 > 0:20:43The second William Morris introduced the very latest production
0:20:43 > 0:20:45techniques to early 20th-century Britain,
0:20:45 > 0:20:49namely the assembly line used by the American Henry Ford
0:20:49 > 0:20:52in his Detroit car plants.
0:20:52 > 0:20:55The same division of labour that had horrified Ruskin had now
0:20:55 > 0:21:00intensified, each worker given a single task to perform
0:21:00 > 0:21:01again and again.
0:21:06 > 0:21:08100 years later, and automation
0:21:08 > 0:21:13has reached its logical conclusion, robots doing most of the work.
0:21:13 > 0:21:16Seen through Gothic eyes, it's a nightmare come to pass.
0:21:17 > 0:21:21Human beings replaced by Frankenstein monsters.
0:21:21 > 0:21:24Or by mechanised Draculas, with soldering-iron fangs.
0:21:26 > 0:21:29Is this what the second William Morris's workforce
0:21:29 > 0:21:31looks like once Marx's great vampire
0:21:31 > 0:21:36has drunk all the blood - an army of the living dead,
0:21:36 > 0:21:38capable of working 24 hours a day?
0:21:39 > 0:21:43It looks different, but it's really just Fordism brought up-to-date.
0:21:46 > 0:21:49Robots and new technology aside, I think William Morris would
0:21:49 > 0:21:52probably have felt very at home here.
0:21:52 > 0:21:56He certainly would have recognised this modern chart
0:21:56 > 0:21:59following the progress of the car through the production line
0:21:59 > 0:22:02because, after all, it's very similar to the blueprints he'd
0:22:02 > 0:22:05introduced all the way back in 1913.
0:22:05 > 0:22:08Henry Ford's methods brought to Britain.
0:22:08 > 0:22:12In those days it was 20 cars a week, now it's 900 a day,
0:22:12 > 0:22:17and there's another difference too - the modern consumer can
0:22:17 > 0:22:23choose the car any colour he likes, any type of wheel, the upholstery.
0:22:23 > 0:22:25You name it, it's your car to design.
0:22:26 > 0:22:29I wonder what the other William Morris might have made of that.
0:22:32 > 0:22:33Would he have seen it as a good thing,
0:22:33 > 0:22:36a little bit of power given back to the individual?
0:22:37 > 0:22:40Or just another of the vampire's traps?
0:22:42 > 0:22:45When Morris looked at the modern world he could only see
0:22:45 > 0:22:49a relentless juggernaut, a huge, impersonal machine.
0:22:51 > 0:22:54But factories and trains weren't the whole story.
0:22:54 > 0:22:57The industry of the late 19th century brought other things
0:22:57 > 0:22:59in its wake too -
0:22:59 > 0:23:03more personal, almost human technologies were being developed,
0:23:03 > 0:23:06what would come to be known as the new media.
0:23:08 > 0:23:12They were destined to play a leading part in the story of Gothic,
0:23:12 > 0:23:14and they should have been on Morris's radar.
0:23:14 > 0:23:15Before he bought it,
0:23:15 > 0:23:19his home in Hammersmith was where the telegraph had been invented.
0:23:20 > 0:23:24But these new phenomena were certainly on Bram Stoker's radar.
0:23:24 > 0:23:27In fact, they haunt his famous novel Dracula
0:23:27 > 0:23:30every bit as much as the figure of the vampire.
0:23:41 > 0:23:44You might expect Bram Stoker's Dracula
0:23:44 > 0:23:46to be all about ruined abbeys
0:23:46 > 0:23:49and castles, vampires and blood,
0:23:49 > 0:23:54but in fact the novel is obsessively full of references to
0:23:54 > 0:23:58the new technology, the new media of the late 19th century.
0:23:58 > 0:24:03The telephone, the typewriter, the phonograph and the Kodak camera.
0:24:08 > 0:24:13The very form of the novel draws on the possibilities of new technology.
0:24:14 > 0:24:17Its narrative is composed from several characters'
0:24:17 > 0:24:21voices or rather their raw materials, their diaries,
0:24:21 > 0:24:26their journals, their letters, newspaper cuttings.
0:24:26 > 0:24:30And it's the typewriter which Bram Stoker used to write the novel,
0:24:30 > 0:24:34but IN the novel, Mina Harker's typewriter,
0:24:34 > 0:24:38with its many-fanged mouth, its metal teeth,
0:24:38 > 0:24:43ingests all this material and records it as print on paper.
0:24:49 > 0:24:50Typing becomes a weapon,
0:24:50 > 0:24:54the resulting documentation used to track Dracula to his lair.
0:24:54 > 0:24:59The sharing and circulation of evidence is what brings him down.
0:25:00 > 0:25:05So copying, and shortcuts to copying, like shorthand,
0:25:05 > 0:25:07are an essential part of the plot.
0:25:07 > 0:25:09This is where the manifold comes in,
0:25:09 > 0:25:14enabling the typewriter to produce carbon copies.
0:25:14 > 0:25:18Jonathan Harker's wife, Mina, uses it to churn out and duplicate
0:25:18 > 0:25:22so much information she's virtually a one-woman printing press.
0:25:24 > 0:25:30But it's the psychiatrist Dr Seward who takes copying to an extreme.
0:25:30 > 0:25:33His journal relates the escape of Renfield,
0:25:33 > 0:25:37the lunatic - in fact he's a vampire - who leaps over the walls
0:25:37 > 0:25:42of his asylum in Purfleet, ominously close to Dracula's Carfax estate.
0:25:45 > 0:25:49The doctor's observations take the form of a voice recording onto
0:25:49 > 0:25:52the wax cylinder of a phonograph.
0:25:53 > 0:25:55Then he has Mina transcribe it,
0:25:55 > 0:25:59a process which she in turn writes up in her personal journal.
0:26:09 > 0:26:11Mina Harker's journal, 29 September.
0:26:13 > 0:26:16After dinner I came with Dr Seward to his study.
0:26:16 > 0:26:21He brought back the phonograph from my room, and I took my typewriter.
0:26:21 > 0:26:24He placed me in a comfortable chair, and arranged the phonograph
0:26:24 > 0:26:25so that I could touch it without getting up,
0:26:25 > 0:26:29and showed me how to stop it in case I should want to pause.
0:26:29 > 0:26:33Then he very thoughtfully took a chair, with his back to me,
0:26:33 > 0:26:36so that I might be as free as possible, and began to read.
0:26:37 > 0:26:40I put the forked metal to my ears and listened.
0:26:44 > 0:26:47Bram Stoker's description reminds me
0:26:47 > 0:26:50of a seance or a session in psychoanalysis.
0:26:50 > 0:26:54This is typing beyond the call of duty for a woman who is part of
0:26:54 > 0:27:00a whole new class of female worker, the secretary or stenographer.
0:27:00 > 0:27:03A little later on, Mina says that she is typing out the words
0:27:03 > 0:27:07precisely so that other people won't have to listen to
0:27:07 > 0:27:12the machine's cruel recording of the anguish in Dr Seward's voice,
0:27:12 > 0:27:16like a soul crying out to Almighty God.
0:27:16 > 0:27:20She is the secretary in touch with the dark or other side.
0:27:20 > 0:27:25A spiritualist medium using the new medium or media
0:27:25 > 0:27:27of the phonograph and the typewriter.
0:27:30 > 0:27:34What's the subtext of all this, as they say?
0:27:34 > 0:27:38The new technology might be used to fight the vampire,
0:27:38 > 0:27:40but at the same time it can be read as another version
0:27:40 > 0:27:45of the vampire virus - multiplying as it feeds
0:27:45 > 0:27:49not on blood but on the information confided to the QWERTYUIOP keys
0:27:49 > 0:27:52of the typewriter or spoken into the machine.
0:27:56 > 0:28:00Stoker implies that it's not just our facts, information,
0:28:00 > 0:28:03but a bit of us that's being copied in the process,
0:28:03 > 0:28:05and that the modern age makes
0:28:05 > 0:28:09vampires us of all, ghosts who live on,
0:28:09 > 0:28:14in the phonograph or the photograph or in the moving picture.
0:28:15 > 0:28:18Perhaps it's no wonder that Dracula's image,
0:28:18 > 0:28:20which can never be seen in a mirror,
0:28:20 > 0:28:23would multiply in the darkness of the auditorium.
0:28:25 > 0:28:30The most thrilling new technology of the 1890s was cinema, which
0:28:30 > 0:28:32started out as a fairground sideshow
0:28:32 > 0:28:38but soon moved into cinemas like this, The Granada in Tooting,
0:28:38 > 0:28:41less picture palace than movie cathedral,
0:28:41 > 0:28:44complete with Gothic decoration.
0:28:44 > 0:28:48Now, there's no film in Bram Stoker's Dracula
0:28:48 > 0:28:53apart from that in the Kodak stills camera used by Jonathan Harker,
0:28:53 > 0:28:56but the book would lend itself to countless adaptations for
0:28:56 > 0:28:59the big screen, a multitude of spin-offs,
0:28:59 > 0:29:01and a fair number of spoofs.
0:29:01 > 0:29:05More than any other medium it was cinema that propelled
0:29:05 > 0:29:07Gothic around the globe.
0:29:13 > 0:29:16The genre was already well-established by 1931,
0:29:16 > 0:29:18when Bela Lugosi played Dracula.
0:29:19 > 0:29:23The floodgates had been opened nearly a decade before with
0:29:23 > 0:29:27Nosferatu, which, much to the chagrin of the Bram Stoker estate,
0:29:27 > 0:29:30did not acknowledge its literary source.
0:29:32 > 0:29:35It's also as if the property had been whipped from under
0:29:35 > 0:29:38the nose of the British film industry.
0:29:38 > 0:29:40But that was about to change.
0:29:40 > 0:29:45Watching the director of Nosferatu, FW Murnau, at work on his next
0:29:45 > 0:29:49picture in the Bioskop-Atelier studios in Potsdam was
0:29:49 > 0:29:51the young Alfred Hitchcock.
0:29:53 > 0:29:57The lessons he learned in Germany he would bring home to
0:29:57 > 0:29:59Gainsborough Studios in Islington,
0:29:59 > 0:30:02where he directed The Lodger in 1927.
0:30:04 > 0:30:07This "Story of the London Fog", as it was called,
0:30:07 > 0:30:09was about the Avenger,
0:30:09 > 0:30:12a serial killer in the mould of Jack the Ripper, whose bloody true
0:30:12 > 0:30:16crimes Bram Stoker acknowledged as an influence on Dracula.
0:30:17 > 0:30:20The chief suspect in the film is Jonathan Drew,
0:30:20 > 0:30:24played by Ivor Novello, and he makes an entry out of the London fog
0:30:24 > 0:30:28worthy of Dracula emerging from the mists of Transylvania.
0:30:29 > 0:30:31SCREAMING
0:30:33 > 0:30:36Is there something about the disembodied nature of
0:30:36 > 0:30:40the film image that lends itself to Gothic?
0:30:41 > 0:30:42I'd say that there is.
0:30:42 > 0:30:46In fact, I'd argue that the cinema is the ultimate Gothic
0:30:46 > 0:30:49haunted house because what does it present you with?
0:30:49 > 0:30:54Apparitions, images of people who aren't really there
0:30:54 > 0:30:57and if you're watching an old film the fact is that
0:30:57 > 0:31:02you are watching people who are dead but they seem alive.
0:31:02 > 0:31:04You are communing with ghosts.
0:31:07 > 0:31:09SCREAMING
0:31:15 > 0:31:18The film industry in Britain never established itself to
0:31:18 > 0:31:21the commercial and artistic degree which it did in Germany, France,
0:31:21 > 0:31:24Italy and, of course, America.
0:31:25 > 0:31:27Hitchcock was soon off to Hollywood, taking with him
0:31:27 > 0:31:31his predilection for murder and his penchant for the Gothic.
0:31:32 > 0:31:36It's certainly there in the dream house of Manderley in Rebecca,
0:31:36 > 0:31:40and the house of Oedipal necrophile horrors in Psycho.
0:31:41 > 0:31:43For the British film industry, though,
0:31:43 > 0:31:47there'd be a sting in the tail, a return of the repressed.
0:31:51 > 0:31:52Come with us if you dare,
0:31:52 > 0:31:54into a twilight world of unspeakable horror.
0:31:56 > 0:31:58You must die. Everybody must die!
0:31:58 > 0:31:59SCREAMING
0:32:07 > 0:32:09DRAMATIC FILM MUSIC CONTINUES
0:32:14 > 0:32:15Beware the vampire lovers.
0:32:22 > 0:32:24You can't keep a good vampire down.
0:32:24 > 0:32:28This is Oakley Court Hotel, once owned by
0:32:28 > 0:32:32the 19th-century Liberal politician Lord Otto Fitzgerald.
0:32:33 > 0:32:36During the 1960s it was used as a set for some of the most
0:32:36 > 0:32:40commercially successful British films ever made.
0:32:40 > 0:32:47Hard to believe now, but once these very walls dripped with blood.
0:32:51 > 0:32:53SHE SCREAMS
0:33:09 > 0:33:12Conveniently, Oakley Court's just a few hundred yards
0:33:12 > 0:33:17from the studio which made some of its films there - Hammer Horror.
0:33:17 > 0:33:21Now, Hammer closed down in 1979 and the studio hasn't been used
0:33:21 > 0:33:23since 2010.
0:33:23 > 0:33:26These days it's closed up, it's in private hands, but how
0:33:26 > 0:33:30appropriate that Britain's most famous makers of horror films should
0:33:30 > 0:33:35have worked out of an 18th-century Gothic-style mansion, like a piece
0:33:35 > 0:33:41of Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole's Gothic house, blown upriver.
0:33:41 > 0:33:44But I'm headed in the opposite direction. I'm going east.
0:33:49 > 0:33:54Dracula's afterlife in the cinema is a well-known part of his story,
0:33:54 > 0:33:55the story of Gothic.
0:33:55 > 0:33:59But the Gothic has many tributaries, irrigating
0:33:59 > 0:34:02the hinterlands of the British imagination.
0:34:02 > 0:34:04And never more so than
0:34:04 > 0:34:07with Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness,
0:34:07 > 0:34:11published in 1899, just two years after Dracula.
0:34:11 > 0:34:14It tells the tale of the evil Kurtz,
0:34:14 > 0:34:16a trader in African ivory.
0:34:16 > 0:34:19With his foreign-sounding name, his ability to stay
0:34:19 > 0:34:21one step ahead, and his bloodthirsty nature -
0:34:21 > 0:34:24well, does that remind you of anyone?
0:34:25 > 0:34:28In chasing Kurtz's Dracula-like shadow,
0:34:28 > 0:34:31the novel builds up a picture of the horrors wrought upon
0:34:31 > 0:34:35Africa by Europeans along the banks of the Congo.
0:34:35 > 0:34:37It might be a deeper, darker river than the Thames,
0:34:37 > 0:34:40and one capable of swallowing it whole,
0:34:40 > 0:34:43but it's the British river, as gateway to Empire
0:34:43 > 0:34:47and the carve-up of Africa, which is the real villain of the piece.
0:34:49 > 0:34:53In Heart Of Darkness, the Empire comes home to roost,
0:34:53 > 0:34:56to London and the Thames estuary.
0:34:56 > 0:35:00On the first page of the novel, Conrad describes the sky above
0:35:00 > 0:35:07this reach as "dark, condensed to a mournful gloom, brooding motionless
0:35:07 > 0:35:10"over the greatest town on Earth."
0:35:10 > 0:35:13And then Charles Marlow begins his story
0:35:13 > 0:35:18about the plunder of African ivory, telling it to the assembled company
0:35:18 > 0:35:24of a boat called The Nelly, moored right here, just where
0:35:24 > 0:35:29Conrad himself in real life moored his own boat, also named The Nelly.
0:35:30 > 0:35:34There's a strong sense in Heart Of Darkness that
0:35:34 > 0:35:37although it was the Belgians who first exploited
0:35:37 > 0:35:43and colonised the Congo, we Europeans are all in it together.
0:35:43 > 0:35:46We are all responsible for the atrocities of Empire.
0:35:50 > 0:35:53The enslavement of millions of Africans was one of the great
0:35:53 > 0:35:55historic crimes against humanity.
0:35:57 > 0:36:00The point's brought home by Conrad's narrator,
0:36:00 > 0:36:02Marlow, with a dark little fantasy.
0:36:03 > 0:36:06Having described the actual abandoned dwellings
0:36:06 > 0:36:11of Africans fleeing slavery, he then imagines the reverse -
0:36:11 > 0:36:15black slavers coming here and rounding up the English.
0:36:17 > 0:36:21A solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut.
0:36:22 > 0:36:25The population had cleared out a long time ago.
0:36:26 > 0:36:30Well, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds
0:36:30 > 0:36:31of fearful weapons suddenly took to
0:36:31 > 0:36:35travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching
0:36:35 > 0:36:39the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy
0:36:39 > 0:36:42every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon.
0:36:47 > 0:36:52Conrad is widely seen as part of the canon in the great
0:36:52 > 0:36:54tradition of the English novel,
0:36:54 > 0:36:58but, like Dickens, he was a writer who drew deeply on the Gothic.
0:36:58 > 0:37:01He understood that it wasn't merely a genre.
0:37:01 > 0:37:05It could be a way of seeing, a way of thinking,
0:37:05 > 0:37:08and in Heart Of Darkness he plunges the reader
0:37:08 > 0:37:13into a labyrinth, at the centre of which lies a terrible secret.
0:37:13 > 0:37:15What could be more Gothic than that?
0:37:16 > 0:37:20And the whole tale is spoken - it comes
0:37:20 > 0:37:25out of the mouth of a haunted man like a spell or an incantation.
0:37:32 > 0:37:35Marlow is a mesmerising, magical narrator,
0:37:35 > 0:37:38though he conjures with hideous images.
0:37:38 > 0:37:41On the riverbank settlement that is his ultimate destination
0:37:41 > 0:37:44he encounters the handiwork of Kurtz,
0:37:44 > 0:37:49the enigmatic European trader, who has been applying his "philosophy"
0:37:49 > 0:37:51of "exterminate all the brutes".
0:37:55 > 0:37:58There was no enclosure or fence of any kind, but there had been
0:37:58 > 0:38:01one apparently, for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts
0:38:01 > 0:38:05remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented
0:38:05 > 0:38:07with round, carved balls.
0:38:09 > 0:38:13Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result
0:38:13 > 0:38:16was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow.
0:38:18 > 0:38:21These round knobs were not ornamental.
0:38:21 > 0:38:24Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way.
0:38:24 > 0:38:28Black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids -
0:38:28 > 0:38:33a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the sunken
0:38:33 > 0:38:38dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth smiling continuously
0:38:38 > 0:38:42at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.
0:38:47 > 0:38:50Marlow first sees the heads - Kurtz the vampire's human prey -
0:38:50 > 0:38:55through his binoculars, "glasses" in the story.
0:38:55 > 0:38:59He might almost have been filming or using a viewfinder.
0:38:59 > 0:39:01No wonder that soon after publication and in the wake of
0:39:01 > 0:39:04photos of mutilated African workers,
0:39:04 > 0:39:08the novel was seen as a form of documentary,
0:39:08 > 0:39:09a "Kodak on the Congo".
0:39:11 > 0:39:14From the wizardry of Conrad's words comes a clear image,
0:39:14 > 0:39:17the sort of reflection you'd expect from a writer who called
0:39:17 > 0:39:19another book The Mirror Of The Sea.
0:39:19 > 0:39:21In Heart Of Darkness
0:39:21 > 0:39:25the Congo, for all its murky depths, is the river as mirror.
0:39:28 > 0:39:31Telling the truth through a distortion -
0:39:31 > 0:39:34it's one of the oldest tropes of Gothic fiction.
0:39:34 > 0:39:38The idea of the wonky mirror which yet reveals
0:39:38 > 0:39:42is at the heart of a much neglected section of Ruskin's essay on
0:39:42 > 0:39:45the Gothic, which deals with the fearful and dark side,
0:39:45 > 0:39:47the grotesque,
0:39:47 > 0:39:50and might almost be a description of Conrad's method
0:39:50 > 0:39:51in Heart Of Darkness.
0:39:53 > 0:39:58In Ruskin's definition of the Gothic he places great weight
0:39:58 > 0:40:03on its more horrifying, distorted imagery.
0:40:03 > 0:40:05"The fearful grotesque" he calls it.
0:40:05 > 0:40:10And yet he argues that it shows us a kind of truth.
0:40:10 > 0:40:15Paraphrasing St Paul, he says, "The minds of men are dim.
0:40:15 > 0:40:18"We see the world as if through a glass darkly."
0:40:18 > 0:40:21And for Ruskin it's worse than that because...
0:40:21 > 0:40:22HE EXHALES
0:40:22 > 0:40:26..for him the mirror of our perception
0:40:26 > 0:40:29is misted by the breath of Satan
0:40:29 > 0:40:33and that is where the Gothic, with its grotesquery, comes in.
0:40:33 > 0:40:35It cleans that mirror.
0:40:35 > 0:40:42What it shows us might be distorted, might be terrifying,
0:40:42 > 0:40:45but we see it, we know it is the truth, and we see it clearly.
0:40:49 > 0:40:51Ruskin understood the dark side of the Gothic,
0:40:51 > 0:40:55its potential to tell us truths we don't want to hear.
0:40:55 > 0:40:59Kurtz's heads on sticks are pure Gothic grotesque.
0:41:00 > 0:41:03They hark back to the bloodlust of Vlad Dracula,
0:41:03 > 0:41:05also known as the Impaler,
0:41:05 > 0:41:12the real-life 15th-century Romanian Prince who inspired Bram Stoker,
0:41:12 > 0:41:15another reason to think of Kurtz as a kind of imperial vampire.
0:41:18 > 0:41:22But those same heads, staring sightlessly into the Congo,
0:41:22 > 0:41:26also indicate that there are even bigger fish in Conrad's river.
0:41:29 > 0:41:34Heart Of Darkness has been described as Imperial Gothic but
0:41:34 > 0:41:39it's a novel of ideas which goes far beyond anxieties about Empire alone.
0:41:39 > 0:41:42Like HG Wells's The Time Machine,
0:41:42 > 0:41:46published in 1895, just four years before,
0:41:46 > 0:41:52Heart Of Darkness has the ambition to contemplate us as a species.
0:41:52 > 0:41:58As the 20th century loomed, some writers looked forward with dread,
0:41:58 > 0:42:01revising Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
0:42:01 > 0:42:05Were we not in fact de-evolving rather than evolving?
0:42:05 > 0:42:08Regressing rather than progressing.
0:42:08 > 0:42:12Our civilisation merely a veneer beneath which
0:42:12 > 0:42:16we were no more advanced than so-called primitive peoples.
0:42:19 > 0:42:23Africa in Conrad is the site of utter human degeneracy.
0:42:24 > 0:42:25But it is a European,
0:42:25 > 0:42:29and a highly sophisticated one, Kurtz, who
0:42:29 > 0:42:34goes beyond all moral limits to "the Horror, the Horror!",
0:42:34 > 0:42:36as it is put at the end of the novel.
0:42:40 > 0:42:43This is what Conrad brings back home to that stretch of the Thames -
0:42:43 > 0:42:48his "Kodak on the Congo" is also a portrait of his own doorstep,
0:42:48 > 0:42:50Great Britain and Europe.
0:42:58 > 0:43:02Whether they were confronting the monsters of modern market forces
0:43:02 > 0:43:05or the horrors of global colonialism,
0:43:05 > 0:43:09the writers of the fin-de-siecle and early 20th century
0:43:09 > 0:43:11found themselves increasingly drawn
0:43:11 > 0:43:16to the terror and cruelty of the Gothic tradition.
0:43:16 > 0:43:19And as the world itself seemed to descend into nightmare,
0:43:19 > 0:43:23with the outbreak of the First World War, so too did
0:43:23 > 0:43:28literature descend ever deeper into the realm of the Gothic.
0:43:34 > 0:43:37One of the greatest poems in the English language would be
0:43:37 > 0:43:39written in the immediate aftermath of that war.
0:43:41 > 0:43:44Most of it's set in London, but a phantom London,
0:43:44 > 0:43:49where even the commuters seem to be sleepwalking their way to Hell.
0:43:50 > 0:43:55TS ELIOT: A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
0:43:55 > 0:43:58I had not thought death had undone so many.
0:43:59 > 0:44:04Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
0:44:04 > 0:44:07And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
0:44:08 > 0:44:12Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
0:44:12 > 0:44:15To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
0:44:15 > 0:44:18With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
0:44:22 > 0:44:27TS Eliot's The Waste Land conveys a deep sense of personal crisis,
0:44:27 > 0:44:30possibly triggered by the breakdown of the poet's marriage.
0:44:30 > 0:44:34His reading of his own poem, made possible by technology,
0:44:34 > 0:44:36allows us to hear his ghost.
0:44:38 > 0:44:42Behind one man's pain, you sense that of a whole society struggling
0:44:42 > 0:44:47through the aftermath of First World War death and destruction.
0:44:47 > 0:44:49And that society is sleepwalking,
0:44:49 > 0:44:53without spiritual comfort or moral compass, towards an even
0:44:53 > 0:44:59bigger unspecified Apocalypse of biblical, even cosmic proportions.
0:44:59 > 0:45:01The poet plays the prophet
0:45:01 > 0:45:04but he is like a 20-century century Hamlet, too.
0:45:04 > 0:45:07Something is rotten in his mental state,
0:45:07 > 0:45:10not to mention the state of Denmark
0:45:10 > 0:45:15and the state of every other nation and the whole blasted world, for that matter.
0:45:15 > 0:45:18You forget the joins in a poem so hypnotic.
0:45:20 > 0:45:24And although it works on the reader like some demonic incantation,
0:45:24 > 0:45:28through it all there flows a sense of religious yearning.
0:45:30 > 0:45:34In this decayed hole among the mountains
0:45:34 > 0:45:37In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
0:45:37 > 0:45:40Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
0:45:40 > 0:45:43There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
0:45:45 > 0:45:49Although any Holy Grail is a tantalising absence, there is
0:45:49 > 0:45:52the odd spiritually uplifting moment in the poem,
0:45:52 > 0:45:54a sort of pessimist's epiphany.
0:45:56 > 0:45:59O City City, I can sometimes hear
0:45:59 > 0:46:02Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
0:46:02 > 0:46:05The pleasant whining of a mandoline
0:46:05 > 0:46:08And a clatter and a chatter from within
0:46:08 > 0:46:12Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
0:46:12 > 0:46:15Of Magnus Martyr hold
0:46:15 > 0:46:20Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
0:46:23 > 0:46:25It's often been said that there is something almost
0:46:25 > 0:46:28cinematic about The Waste Land,
0:46:28 > 0:46:33the way in which Eliot takes "a heap of broken images" in his words
0:46:33 > 0:46:36and flashes them up, one after the other,
0:46:36 > 0:46:38upon the screens of our imaginations.
0:46:38 > 0:46:42But I also think you can see the whole poem
0:46:42 > 0:46:47very much as a modern version of a medieval illuminated manuscript,
0:46:47 > 0:46:52lit up throughout by flashes of Gothic brilliance, terror and decay.
0:46:52 > 0:46:58There is barely a line in the poem which isn't laden with Gothic associations.
0:46:58 > 0:47:05Eliot gives us bats, spectres, hooded figures, ruins, churches,
0:47:05 > 0:47:07the Tarot, clairvoyants,
0:47:07 > 0:47:11and that old occult force of nature, the Thames.
0:47:15 > 0:47:19Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
0:47:21 > 0:47:25Eliot uses his sense of place - of places -
0:47:25 > 0:47:27to paint a mental landscape,
0:47:27 > 0:47:31an anguished "unreal city" of the mind full of dreams,
0:47:31 > 0:47:34dreams of the realities of all the rubble and destruction of war.
0:47:36 > 0:47:39This fevered, spectral vision has its counterpart in the work
0:47:39 > 0:47:42of certain British painters also haunted by war.
0:47:45 > 0:47:47Eliot's bleakness is already there
0:47:47 > 0:47:50in Paul Nash's We Are Making A New World,
0:47:50 > 0:47:54which shows the real wasteland of World War I.
0:47:54 > 0:47:56But no dead, no bodies.
0:47:56 > 0:48:01And yet every image - amputated tree stumps, gangrene
0:48:01 > 0:48:04swellings of earth - indicates the presence of war.
0:48:07 > 0:48:10There's a yet more unsettling version of this abstract,
0:48:10 > 0:48:14literally disembodied sense of the horrors of the Great War
0:48:14 > 0:48:18in Algernon Newton's London paintings of the 1920s and '30s.
0:48:20 > 0:48:24The city, a forlorn film set, eerie in the sunlight,
0:48:24 > 0:48:27waiting for a generation that will never come back.
0:48:29 > 0:48:32The greatest Gothic painter of the 20th century was
0:48:32 > 0:48:35Francis Bacon - part of a later generation,
0:48:35 > 0:48:38he was only 13 when The Waste Land was published.
0:48:38 > 0:48:42But he was inspired by all of Eliot's poetry
0:48:42 > 0:48:45and drew on it for the titles of some of his pictures.
0:48:45 > 0:48:49And like Eliot, but in a far more visceral way,
0:48:49 > 0:48:53Bacon filled his work with the Gothic - snarling mouths,
0:48:53 > 0:48:55bodies in basements, blood everywhere.
0:48:57 > 0:49:01The popular image of Bacon, and one which he was only too happy
0:49:01 > 0:49:07to project, was that of the habitue of old Soho, a London bohemian.
0:49:07 > 0:49:10But to get to the root of him - and ever closer to the vampire
0:49:10 > 0:49:14heartland of Gothic - you've got come to Ireland.
0:49:19 > 0:49:22In fact, Bacon's London studio is now here -
0:49:22 > 0:49:26after his death it was transported, lock, stock and paintbrush,
0:49:26 > 0:49:29to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.
0:49:30 > 0:49:35Is this an installation or is it a reliquary?
0:49:35 > 0:49:39A shrine to St Francis Bacon, painter.
0:49:39 > 0:49:42It was amidst this clutter, the chaos he loved,
0:49:42 > 0:49:48that Bacon created his bloodied triptychs and his mock crucifixions.
0:49:48 > 0:49:52I think this is a very apt expression of the true,
0:49:52 > 0:49:57awkward place he occupies in modern British Irish art.
0:49:57 > 0:50:02The rest of this building is textbook neo-Classical.
0:50:02 > 0:50:04This is a Gothic crypt.
0:50:11 > 0:50:13Ireland's central to the history of Gothic,
0:50:13 > 0:50:16not just because it was Bacon's birthplace
0:50:16 > 0:50:18but because so much else that is Gothic
0:50:18 > 0:50:21was born kicking and screaming here.
0:50:22 > 0:50:28Charles Maturin's Melmoth The Wanderer, in which a man sells his soul to the devil,
0:50:28 > 0:50:32was one of the first great Gothic novels, followed by many others,
0:50:32 > 0:50:37including Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, the lurid tale of lesbian
0:50:37 > 0:50:41vampirism on which Hammer's The Vampire Lovers would later be based.
0:50:42 > 0:50:46Oscar Wilde also got in on the act with The Picture Of Dorian Gray,
0:50:46 > 0:50:50his novel about a beautiful but damned young aesthete
0:50:50 > 0:50:54haunted by a portrait that predicts his own decay.
0:50:56 > 0:51:00And the Gothic fascinated Ireland's most famous modern poet,
0:51:00 > 0:51:04WB Yeats, who wrote ghost stories, dabbled in the occult,
0:51:04 > 0:51:07and revived Irish folk tales and myths,
0:51:07 > 0:51:09for reasons as much to do with politics as poetry.
0:51:10 > 0:51:13Yeats was part of the Anglo-Irish elite
0:51:13 > 0:51:15and wanted to get in with the Catholic nationalists who
0:51:15 > 0:51:17distrusted his whole class.
0:51:18 > 0:51:20He was saying,
0:51:20 > 0:51:23"Look, I'm one of you really - very Irish, very superstitious,
0:51:23 > 0:51:25"I believe in magic."
0:51:30 > 0:51:32Ireland was fertile ground for the Gothic precisely
0:51:32 > 0:51:34because it was a divided place.
0:51:36 > 0:51:40It was the earliest British colony, bloodily repressed.
0:51:40 > 0:51:43The very first heart of darkness, you might say.
0:51:45 > 0:51:48And Ireland was also Bram Stoker's birthplace.
0:51:48 > 0:51:52It's been argued that Count Dracula feeding on the Transylvannian
0:51:52 > 0:51:56peasantry is a grim caricature of the absentee Anglo-Irish landlord,
0:51:56 > 0:51:59a bloodsucking parasite exploiting his tenants -
0:51:59 > 0:52:03plausible, because when researching his novel Stoker did
0:52:03 > 0:52:06compare Transylvanian peasants to "our Paddy".
0:52:07 > 0:52:11So Stoker's Dracula, written in 1897, can be
0:52:11 > 0:52:15read as a veiled commentary on problems that would boil over
0:52:15 > 0:52:19two decades later, during Bacon's formative early years.
0:52:20 > 0:52:22Bacon's background was grander than Stoker's
0:52:22 > 0:52:26but they were both part of the Protestant ruling elite
0:52:26 > 0:52:30and both inherited the same deep-rooted fears.
0:52:30 > 0:52:33In fact, the Anglo-Irish had been on the defensive
0:52:33 > 0:52:34since the mid-19th century.
0:52:36 > 0:52:40By the 1860s, the Anglo-Irish ascendancy felt
0:52:40 > 0:52:42more like a descendancy.
0:52:42 > 0:52:44They were hemmed in,
0:52:44 > 0:52:48threatened by the rise of anti-British Irish nationalism
0:52:48 > 0:52:52and by the growth of the Catholic middle class.
0:52:52 > 0:52:55There were anxieties and panics, most of them pure fantasies,
0:52:55 > 0:53:00about attacks on "The Big House", the generic name for
0:53:00 > 0:53:03these great Georgian slabs of granite
0:53:03 > 0:53:06in which the ruling class mostly lived.
0:53:06 > 0:53:12An Anglo-Irishman's home was fast becoming his haunted castle.
0:53:16 > 0:53:20Francis Bacon's Anglo-Irish home was haunted by his sadistic,
0:53:20 > 0:53:24manipulative father, a military man and racehorse trainer,
0:53:24 > 0:53:28who had the young Bacon horsewhipped by his stable grooms.
0:53:28 > 0:53:32Bacon was fascinated by the cruelties inflicted by authority.
0:53:33 > 0:53:36Does that constant recurring image in his work
0:53:36 > 0:53:38of the snarling vampire mouth
0:53:38 > 0:53:43represent Bacon's own father? The Anglo-Irish class, even,
0:53:43 > 0:53:47crying out not just in defiance but also in paranoia?
0:53:53 > 0:53:57One thing is certain - for the young Bacon, the Irish countryside, with
0:53:57 > 0:54:01its ancient peat bogs and all the old folklore,
0:54:01 > 0:54:03was a landscape of fear,
0:54:03 > 0:54:06especially in the 1920s, when trouble had brewed up,
0:54:06 > 0:54:09as so often in Ireland, into The Troubles.
0:54:11 > 0:54:17Bacon's sense that he was part of a threatened class was sharpened
0:54:17 > 0:54:20when he stayed with his maternal grandfather, who,
0:54:20 > 0:54:26as a chief of police, was a prime target for the Irish Republicans.
0:54:26 > 0:54:30And one night, Bacon would have been around ten or 11,
0:54:30 > 0:54:33he and his grandfather were driving along
0:54:33 > 0:54:37when their car broke down somewhere round here in the Bog of Allan.
0:54:37 > 0:54:40They had to abandon it and go on by foot.
0:54:40 > 0:54:46It was dark, they could hear cries and halloos and see flashing lights.
0:54:46 > 0:54:49The rebel groups were out to get them.
0:54:49 > 0:54:51They made their way to safety.
0:54:51 > 0:54:55They found refuge in a friendly house, a Big House, of course.
0:54:55 > 0:54:59But Bacon never forgot the sense of terror he felt that night.
0:55:04 > 0:55:08It was Bacon's achievement to make from his anxiety images that
0:55:08 > 0:55:12could speak - scream - to Everyman.
0:55:12 > 0:55:16He'd soon leave Ireland and feed on terrors far beyond its shores,
0:55:16 > 0:55:19but I'm not sure Ireland ever left him.
0:55:22 > 0:55:26Three Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion, 1946.
0:55:26 > 0:55:29An altarpiece for the generation of Auschwitz.
0:55:29 > 0:55:33The memory of the screaming father figure is still there,
0:55:33 > 0:55:37but there's far more to the painting than a Freudian childhood trauma.
0:55:37 > 0:55:41This was Bacon's way of saying that we in the modern world aren't
0:55:41 > 0:55:45just living the Gothic nightmare, we may never wake up from it.
0:55:46 > 0:55:48And who can say he was entirely wrong?
0:55:51 > 0:55:55It was true by mid-20th century and it's even truer today -
0:55:55 > 0:55:59Gothic's everywhere. We're all Gothic now.
0:55:59 > 0:56:01What do I really mean by that?
0:56:02 > 0:56:06Not just that Gothic's in our paintings, our books,
0:56:06 > 0:56:08the films we go to see.
0:56:08 > 0:56:10It's in our minds.
0:56:10 > 0:56:14Many of the worst Gothic nightmares, like Frankenstein and Dracula,
0:56:14 > 0:56:17were once branded weird or sensationalist.
0:56:17 > 0:56:21But they were so prophetic that now they're everyone's bad dreams.
0:56:27 > 0:56:30But the influence of Gothic's optimists is still with us too,
0:56:30 > 0:56:34the influence of Marx and Morris, who saw the negative side
0:56:34 > 0:56:37of the modern world but wanted to change it
0:56:37 > 0:56:39into a better place.
0:56:39 > 0:56:40As Morris said,
0:56:40 > 0:56:42"We shall be our own Goths,
0:56:42 > 0:56:48"and at whatever cost break up the new tyrannous empire of capitalism!"
0:56:48 > 0:56:52You don't have to be an anti-capitalist to feel the pressure
0:56:52 > 0:56:56modern advertising puts on us all to consume and conform.
0:56:56 > 0:57:02So, the Goths of today are actually true to Morris in their own way -
0:57:02 > 0:57:04asserting their individuality,
0:57:04 > 0:57:06marking themselves out.
0:57:06 > 0:57:09And if they all look different in the same kind of way -
0:57:09 > 0:57:12well, maybe they're just finding out, like Morris,
0:57:12 > 0:57:15that being a rebel comes with contradictions.
0:57:18 > 0:57:20Yes, the legacy of Gothic's everywhere.
0:57:20 > 0:57:25Which brings me back, one last time, to Bram Stoker's Dracula.
0:57:25 > 0:57:29Not Count Dracula, but the book's other vampire, new technology.
0:57:30 > 0:57:35I think Stoker was well and truly spooked by the idea that people,
0:57:35 > 0:57:41or their traces, might continue to live, ghost-like, in the machine.
0:57:43 > 0:57:47What would he have made of our main machine, the mobile?
0:57:48 > 0:57:52It grips us by the ear and the eye, if not the neck,
0:57:52 > 0:57:55and connects us constantly to a realm of the spirits.
0:57:57 > 0:58:00Real life is elsewhere, a poet once said.
0:58:00 > 0:58:04Well, now, it really is elsewhere, because this little device
0:58:04 > 0:58:09doesn't just let us speak to people who aren't really here,
0:58:09 > 0:58:12it allows us to listen to their music, to see their pictures.
0:58:14 > 0:58:17But there's a cost because you have to disconnect
0:58:17 > 0:58:20from your own immediate reality
0:58:20 > 0:58:23to connect to the life that's in the machine.
0:58:23 > 0:58:27I had not thought Google had undone so many.
0:58:27 > 0:58:30Perhaps what this little piece of Gothic - all Gothic -
0:58:30 > 0:58:34really proves is that we yearn to be haunted,
0:58:34 > 0:58:39to be taken outside and beyond of ourselves.
0:58:39 > 0:58:41You can call it megabytes,
0:58:41 > 0:58:44but it's really just the bite of Dracula.
0:58:46 > 0:58:47MOBILE PHONE RINGS