The Monk

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Matthew Gregory Lewis, born in London on July 9, 1775, led a short but full life as a novelist, playwright, translator, poet, and humanitarian that was often clouded by his notorious and sensational talent for gothic romance. After his parents separated, Lewis was raised by his father, a War Office secretary who owned plantations in Jamaica. Although his mother encouraged young Lewis’s writing abilities from afar, later acting as his literary agent, his father sought a diplomatic career for him. After following in his father’s footsteps through Westminster School and Christ Church College at Oxford, and traveling to Paris and Weimar, Germany, the multilingual Lewis became an attaché to the British Embassy in Holland in 1794.

During his travels, Lewis had already begun to write songs and plays, some of which would not be published for years, in an effort to financially support his mother. Lewis later claimed that, at nineteen, bored by his work at The Hague, he wrote The Monk in ten weeks; he later wrote of the novel, “I am myself so much pleased with it that, if the booksellers will not buy it, I shall publish it myself.” When he returned to England in late 1794, his father tried, unsuccessfully, to get him appointed to the War Office; meanwhile, he continued to write. The Monk was published in 1796, anonymously in the first edition, just as Lewis entered the House of Commons. Later editions acknowledged Lewis as the author of this frightening tale of a monk gone astray, and the book brought him wealth, fame, and a nickname: “Monk” Lewis. Many critics, however, most notably Samuel Coleridge, found Lewis’s debut—which blends sex and religious scandal—guilty of immorality, blasphemy, and plagiarism.

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