Review on BBC' The Art of Gothic'

Characterising the 19thcentury as a time of suppressed emotions and barely articulated fears is hardly new, but the scope of tonight’s episode extended far beyond sensational Gothic novels to find the Gothic lurking in the most unlikely places. Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting,Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, shows a family gathered around to watch as a travelling scientist slowly suffocates a bird in a jar, and it tends to be broadly interpreted as a celebration of science, a rebuttal to those who worried that the age of enlightenment might also usher in an age of unprecedented uncertainty.

The great thing about Graham-Dixon’s exuberantly hammed-up delivery is that it is entirely in keeping with the subject. Throughout the series so far, he has switched between razor-sharp insight and Hammer Horror-style kitsch that emphasises not just his own enjoyment of Gothic but the endlessly malleable and enduring entertainment it represents. The Gothic sensibility is one of conflicting impulses and it moves constantly between moralising and titillation, conjuring nightmarish visions of the future and idealistic reimaginings of the past. To Graham-Dixon, the extreme lighting that makes this scene such a compelling piece of drama is not the benevolent light of scientific progress, but the eery flash of a lightning strike, or perhaps something else entirely. The moon, glimpsed through the window, is a shorthand for the kind of haunted house so essential to Gothic novels while the wild-haired scientist, hardly the image of a man of reason, is recast as a magus or sorcerer from an ancient age of magic and superstition. Despite the dark turn taken by Gothic in the 19th century, it retained a brighter side that found expression though architecture. While the many Gothic ruins dotted across the landscape were a constant reminder of an ancient, lost Britain, their gargoyles and decaying masonry powerfully evocative of a primitive, superstitious past, for many, Gothic was a comforting reminder of a better time.