In the gray early morning of 20 June 1837 the young Princess Victoria left her bedroom in a tumbledown St. James’s Palace, and with it the enclosure of her isolated youth under the authority of Sir John Conroy, to be greeted on bended knee by the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury with the news of her accession to the throne. The Victorian age began like the ending of an Ann Radcliffe novel: the bad uncles and despotic guardian give way to the true heir, who is now able to preserve and defend her national inheritance. This moment seemed to fulfill the description of the British constitution by the jurist William Blackstone as “an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant.”

In time the key elements of the Radcliffean Whig Gothic suggested in the above tableau – the politics of liberty and progressivism, freedom from the past, and the entrapped heroine – would indeed be revived in Gothic writing. But in the early years of Victoria’s reign, that was not possible. To some extent this was because of the ambivalence of many social groups toward the institution of the monarchy and the gender of the new monarch, all during the 1840s. The influence of this view of the Queen upon the modes of political and literary sensibility during this time may seem surprising, but it can be amply demonstrated. While