The Monk Study Guide

English novelist and playwright Matthew Lewis was born in London, England in 1775 to parents Matthew Lewis and Frances Maria Sewell Lewis. Lewis attended the Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, though he spent much of his degree abroad in Germany serving as a German diplomat. He served as a member of Parliament from 1796 to 1802. Lewis’s diplomatic career allowed him to travel extensively, including to Scotland, Paris, and Weimar, Germany, during which time he began translating foreign-language texts into English as well as writing his own works. Lewis apparently wrote a novel in his late teens, though only fragments exist today. Through his father’s connections, he obtained a position as an attaché to the British embassy in the Hague (in the Netherlands). While in the Netherlands, Lewis wrote The Monk, his most famous work, which he published anonymously. The book immediately faced backlash for its blasphemous content, and Lewis was forced to remove  certain scandalous passages for the publication of the work’s second edition. Nevertheless, The Monk was praised by such important literary figures as the Marquis de Sade and Lord Byron. Lewis is known for his contributions to the genre of Gothic horror. He is best remembered for his novel The Monk—a critical work of Gothic fiction—and his play The Castle Spectre. Lewis inherited two estates in Jamaica (and the enslaved people who served there—records show that Lewis owned 500 enslaved people) later in life. Lewis contracted yellow fever on a visit to Jamaica and died aboard a ship sailing back to England in 1818; he was buried at sea.

The Monk was published in 1796, when England was working to establish a Protestant national identity. As such, anti-Catholicism was common among the English during this time. England’s history of institutional anti-Catholicism began during the Enlightenment under the rule of Henry VIII. The Acts of Supremacy were two acts passed by Parliament that established English monarchs as head of the Church of England, a role previously held by the Pope. The first act, passed in 1534, established King Henry VIII and his successors as the head of the Church. The second act, passed in 1558, established Queen Elizabeth I and her successors as the Supreme Governor of the Church. Anti-Catholicism was in large part rooted in a fear that the pope would impose unjust religious and secular authority over the English populace. Assassination plots spearheaded by Catholics further heightened anti-Catholic sentiments. One such plot was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Guy Fawkes and other English Catholics schemed to blow up the House of Lords when Parliament was in session in response to decades of religious persecution. The Gordon Riots of 1780 was a violent protest in opposition to the Papists Act of 1778, a law passed by Parliament that aimed to reduce institutional discrimination against English Catholics. The riots spanned several days and led to attacks on the Newgate Prison and the Bank of England.

Lewis is best known for The Monk, but his 1797 play The Castle Spectre, a Gothic drama set in medieval Wales, was also enormously popular. Gothic fiction is a literary genre that features a foreboding, frightening atmosphere and frequently contains elements of horror or the supernatural. The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Henry Walpole was the first work to call itself “Gothic.” Other early authors of Gothic fiction include Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho) and Clara Reeve (The Old English Baron). Other notable authors whose works contain Gothic elements include Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), E. T. A. Hoffman (Hoffman’s 1815 novel The Devil’s Elixirs was based on The Monk), Bram Stoker (Dracula), and the Brontë sisters (Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë). American authors whose works contain elements of Gothic fiction include Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.