This chapter addresses the privileged but vilified position of Germany and its Schauerroman in Germany and Britain around 1800. German Gothic was discussed almost from the outset in material terms, and one notable medium in this regard was pharmacological discourse. In British and German political rhetoric and literary criticism, German Gothic itself was considered a poisonous instance destroying the readers’ health. Using this guiding pharmacological rhetoric of horror, this chapter provides an introduction to the German ‘School’ of horrors in its late-Enlightenment and Romantic contexts, paying particular attention to the often overlooked but immensely important role of dramatic adaptation as a medium for the productive interactions between Germany and Britain. Drawing on writers and directors such as Johann Karl August Musäus, Benedikte Naubert, Heinrich Zschokke, James Boaden, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Matthew Gregory Lewis, this chapter locates the aesthetic models of the Gothic within emergent anthropological paradigms of the imagination and affective patterns of literary reception in the expanding popular literary market around 1800.

Despite its seeming defeat at the hands of the new domestic melodrama and, later, the innovations of dramatic realism, the Gothic, beyond its heyday during period 1790–1830, continued to stalk the English stage well into the nineteenth century. Shape-shifting and refusing to die outright, the Gothic mode would inform melodrama, domestic drama, sensation drama and even the emerging realist dramas to the end of the century. Moreover, while according to received narratives of theatre history, the new modes of realism would claim a victorious precedence over the archaic drama of immured heroines and haunted castles, this chapter argues that as the fin de siècle loomed, attempts to repress the theatrical Gothic were met with an increasingly Gothic representation of the theatre itself within the wider popular and literary imagination.