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marooned on a desert island, a young girl forced to marry against her will, a German couple reduced to poverty and a pair of lovers dominated by a greedy mother. Finally, Melmoth returns to his estate and the Devil comes to collect his due. Maturin also wrote The Fatal Revenge, or the Family of Montorio (1807) and Albigenses (1824).
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    I was fourteen years old when I first discovered a copy of Melmoth the Wanderer in my father's library and tried to read it. "Tried" because I was obviously not sufficiently mature to understand the complexities of that masterpiece of Gothic horror. I merely skipped a lot of pages to get down to the "spooky bits"! However, since then I have read and re-read Melmoth many times and each time extracted nuggets of pure literary gold from what I have come to regard, with many others, as one of the great works of the horror genre of any generation. Melmoth the Wanderer was published in 1820 when its author, Charles Robert Maturin, an Irish clergyman living in Dublin, was 40 years old. Maturin, who was to die four years later, had already established his reputation with several novels and plays which had brought him praise from literary luminaries such as Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Melmoth was initially seen by its publisher Archibald Constable, as a competitor to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , published two years earlier. However, the literary world soon realized that here was a work that needed no comparison with any other. Melmoth combines all the Gothic terrors. It is replete with dungeons, castles, ghosts, cannibalism, monsters (both real and imaginary) and some truly monumental instances of terror. Walter Scott, Thackeray, Baudelaire, Rossetti and Honore de Balzac were quick to hail it as a milestone of literature in any genre. Balzac, in those days before copyright, immediately wrote a sequel to the novel entitled Melmoth Reconciled , which was a little too whimsical to stand comparison with its progenitor. The book was an instant success. Numerous editions, translations and a long-running dramatization quickly followed the initial publication. H. P. Lovecraft, in acknowledging it as a masterpiece, has said that it made "the Gothic tale climb to altitudes of sheer spiritual fright which it had never known before". Professor Leonard Wolf has written that it has "the most sustained and certainly the most complex vision of any Gothic fiction -- not excepting Dracula ." The Irish literary critic, Aodh De Blacam, in his First Book of Irish Literature , sees Maturin as "manifestly in the tradition of Swift", another Dubliner. He goes on to say "in works like this we see a definite vein of Irish genius, a horrific imagination which dramatizes the insane universe of the sceptic". De Blacam went further and saw Maturin as the founder of the Irish school of horror fantasy writing in which he included later horror writers such as Fitzjames O'Brien, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker and, much later, Dorothy Macardle (author of the classic The Uninvited ). He argues that were it not for Maturin, then there might not have been such classics as "Carmilla", or Dracula . To this I would argue that were it not for Melmoth the Wanderer , there might not have been the classic The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Oscar Wilde, yet another Dubliner, was a great admirer of Maturin's work. In Melmoth there is reference to a portrait of "J. Melmoth, 1648" hanging in an obscure closet in the ancient Melmoth mansion in Co. Wicklow. The portrait is the hidden reminder that Melmoth has lived nearly two centuries. Wilde took this theme and imbued it with his own genius to write his own vivid contribution to weird literature. Indeed, Wilde paid Maturin an unusual tribute in the fact that, during his last sad days in exile in Paris, he chose the name "Sebastian Melmoth" as a pseudonym. Melmoth is only fitfully in print. Critics and literary morticians often pay tribute to it but it seems that it is hardly ever read nowadays