The parameters of the British imaginary of the East were significantly expanded in the final third of the eighteenth century, as the Seven Years War (1756–63) and the East India Company’s establishment of sovereign power in Bengal directly or indirectly helped to circulate new and more culturally specific understandings of difference (Watt 2019, 1–2). As Nigel Leask has shown, ‘coterminous with a more systematic exploration and codification of the colonial, contact zone’, a distinctive ‘Romantic exoticism’ began to develop, constituted by ‘new technologies and genres of aesthetic illusionism’, and providing ‘new and “all-embracing” ways of seeing and telling’ (Leask 1998, 170). Topographical paintings, plays performed against spectacular backdrops, and panoramas depicting actual sites or events offered their viewers novel kinds of absorbing, immersive experience in scenes that were at once ‘particularised’ and exotic. This ‘aesthetic of particularism’ (Leask 1998, 176) also characterised many contemporary literary works too. The epic poems of Robert Southey, notably Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810), demonstrate especially well the overlap between visual and literary techniques of representation, since (according to the Critical Review’s description of Thalaba) they appeared to readers to consist of ‘successive pictures’ in which ‘the personages, like the figures of landscape-painters, are often almost lost in the scene’ (cited in Leask 1998, 184). Other critics likened Southey’s epic poetry to pantomime and panorama as well, often complaining, however, that despite their extensive accompanying footnotes, these poems ‘engrossed’ their audience in ways which were at once disorientating and vulgar (Leask 1998, 184–5).

As well as helping to generate innovative and challenging forms such as the Romantic Orientalist epic (Southey’s Kehama was made possible by the British encounter with Hinduism from around the 1760s onwards), the late eighteenth-century ‘imperial turn’ initiated a diverse range of cultural productions which more overtly responded to Britain’s new position in the world. The absorptive aesthetic of Romantic exoticism stimulated not only greater metropolitan awareness of empire but also vicarious pleasure in Britons’ exploits overseas: one of the most renowned panoramas of the period was Robert Ker Porter’s ‘The Storming of Seringapatam’, depicting the final defeat of Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1799.

This chapter focuses on Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), published during the early years of Britain’s war in America. It discusses how Reeve responded to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), not only by rejecting the extravagance of his work but also by situating her tale in fifteenth-century England. Attempting to recover the political significance of this decision in the context of the American war, it considers the way in which the novel offers an allusive narrative of national reconciliation and repair. Even as Reeve claimed that her ‘picture of Gothic times and manners’ served the improving purposes of ‘Romance’, however, her work also acknowledges that its resort to the Gothic past is unable entirely to escape the ‘melancholy retrospect’ of ‘History’. With Reeve’s distinction between history and romance in mind, the chapter concludes by suggesting that, through its mediation of Otranto, The Old English Baron helped to make the diverse resources of the Gothic past available to subsequent writers, and at the same time to ensure that its questioning of Britain’s Gothic inheritance remained integral to the tradition of ‘domestic Gothic’ that it inaugurated.

It is tempting to cite the so-called Grub Street edition of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, translated from Antoine Galland’s Les mille et une nuits between ca. 1706 and 1721, as a primary point of origin for the amorphous genre of eighteenth-century prose fiction often referred to as “the Oriental tale.” The Arabian Nights is famously premised on the idea of an uncontainable narrative proliferation, as Princess Scheherazade tells story after story in order to save her life, and in the early eighteenth century it generated further story-cycles organized around frame narratives that conjure up analogous kinds of foundational scenario – Persian Tales (1714), Tartarian Tales (1716), Chinese Tales (1725) and Mogul Tales (1736), to name but a few. The Nights offered rich inspiration to a wide range of eighteenth-century writers, not least because it was itself a compendious textual composite, constituted by processes of interpolation and redaction as well as translation. Some of its best-known stories, including those of Aladdin and Ali Baba, may actually have been authored by Galland himself, and one aspect of the history of the Oriental tale in English that I will address in this chapter concerns the form’s initial reliance on, then increasing rejection (or occlusion) of, French cultural mediation. The Nights’ stories can variously be seen to “reveal the Orient” and to open “infinite possibilities of fantastic invention and fabrication,” as Marina Warner has argued, and in what follows I will focus in particular on the way in which the association of the form both with exotic customs and manners and with enchantment and magic allowed the Oriental tale to pull and be pulled in different directions across the period.

In the preface to Hellas (1822), Percy Shelley cited Thomas Hope’s ‘admirable novel’ Anastasius (1819), subtitled ‘Memoirs of a Greek’, as a ‘faithful picture’ of corrupted Greek manners before the recent return of ‘the flower of [Greek] youth, … from the universities of Italy, Germany, and France, … communicated to their fellow-citizens the latest results of that moral perfection of which their ancestors were the original source’. This chapter begins by examining Hope’s Anastasius and its protagonist’s complex relation to his Greek cultural heritage. The novel displays obvious debts to Byron and Byronism, and as the quotation just cited demonstrates it indirectly at least addresses the question which both Byron and Shelley were to raise about whether modern Greeks might already be too debased to throw off the Ottoman yoke. Rather than discuss Hope’s intervention in debates about Greek independence, however, I want instead here to consider some of the other implications of Shelley’s claim that the novel offered a ‘faithful picture’ of manners. Anastasius was regarded by some as an irredeemably Orientalized figure, and situated in a broader literary-historical context, Hope’s work can be seen as the prototype of a mode of fictionalized autobiography featuring native informants, written by men with experience of diplomacy and/or imperial administration such as James Morier, James Bailie Fraser, and William Browne Hockley.

Like Rasselas and other works of the previous decades, the Irish novelist Charles Johnstone’s The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis (1774) uses a minimally substantiated ‘Eastern’ setting with an allegorical function. Its main narrative describes the predicament of the ‘Byrsans’, who had founded colonies which ‘drained their own country of its most useful inhabitants’, and which over time ‘felt their own strength’ and asserted their independence, ever after ‘carr[ying] themselves like states allied upon equal terms, rather than subjects’. As he wrote in the preface to his tale, Johnstone assumed that readers would not expect to find closer description of ‘the manners of the times and countries, in which the various scenes of the work are laid’, since he drew ‘the universal manners of Nature, which suit all climes and ages’, and it ‘would only have been pedantry’ to do otherwise. In his next work, The Pilgrim: Or, A Picture of Life (1775), by contrast, Johnstone followed Goldsmith’s example instead, introducing the figure of a Chinese philosopher writing to a fellow countryman about his experiences in Britain. The Pilgrim addresses the state of the nation (including Britain’s relationship with its American colonies) in a similar fashion to Arsaces, but its adaptation of the genre of informant narrative means that its attention to contemporary detail is very different. Albeit that it names India as ‘Mogulstan’, The Pilgrim refers to a more specific milieu than Johnstone’s previous work, as is demonstrated by the fact that its protagonist, on the sea voyage from China, encounters a number of Britons returning home from the subcontinent.

In 1761 Richard Owen Cambridge published An Account of the War in India, telling the story of a decade of conflict between British and French forces in the south of the subcontinent. While this work says nothing about the 1757 battle of Plassey and the subsequent revolution that led to the East India Company (hereafter EIC) gaining sovereign power in Bengal, it testifies to ‘the great reputation which the nation, and so many individuals have acquired in the East-Indies’. Cambridge suggested that those, like him, without first-hand experience of India might already be primed to receive news of Britons’ fantastic exploits there because of the ‘Eastern’ fictions to which they were accustomed: ‘It will not appear strange that the generality of the world, through the habits of reading novels, and works of the imagination, should expect from an history of the East (… the scene of most of their ideal stories) a tale of adventures full of wonder and novelty, and nearly bordering upon romance.’ Even as he recorded the improbable story of how ‘a handful of Europeans’ had been able to dominate ‘a multitude of Asiatics’, however, Cambridge emphasized that his own narrative was soberly factual. He also sought to mediate what he presented as – for himself and his audience – a hitherto unknown reality, prefacing his text with a ‘Glossary of Persic and Indian Names’, from ‘Arzee’ (‘a request, or petition’) to ‘Vakeel’ (‘an agent or minister for the Moors’). Cambridge therefore identified two different and apparently opposing registers of representation in and through which ‘the East’ might be apprehended by Britons – the fictional extravagance of ‘ideal stories’ and a new lexicon of more precise and detailed reference that was the product of an ongoing global conflict.

In the previous chapter I discussed how in his essay ‘On Fable and Romance’ James Beattie presented ‘oriental tales’ as bearing the indelible imprint of Eastern despotism. In correspondence with Elizabeth Montagu in 1772, Beattie claimed that the works collected in Sir William Jones’s Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages were just as revelatory about ‘the minds and manners of the people among whom they [were] produced’. One explanation for the ‘glaring images, exaggerated metaphors, and gigantic descriptions’ of the poetry of ‘eastern nations’, he suggested, was that Eastern peoples were ‘unfriendly to liberty’ – their ‘ignorance and indolence’ disposing them ‘to regard their governors as of supernatural dignity, and to decorate them with … high-sounding titles’, so as to ‘infect their whole conversation with bombast’. In the letter to which Beattie responded, however, Montagu – who, unlike Beattie, had read the works in question – praised the mastery of ‘oriental languages’ and versification that they displayed: ‘there is a gaiety and splendour in the poems,’ she stated, ‘which is naturally derived from the happy soil and climate of the poets, and they breathe Asiatic luxury.’ While Montagu signalled her awareness that Jones’s poems were ‘imitations of Asiatic poetry’, she nonetheless confessed to her absorption in their literary novelty: ‘the descriptions are so fine, and all the objects so brilliant, that the sense akes at them, and I wished that Ossian’s poems had been laying by me, that I might sometimes have turned my eyes, from the dazzling splendour of the eastern noonday, to the moonlight picture of a bleak mountain.’ Montagu was much more enthusiastic than Beattie about the possibility of an ‘Oriental’ poetry, then, and she invoked ‘northern’ climes as a relief from sensory overload, rather than, as Beattie did in The Minstrel (1771–4), the locus of a vitalizing ‘freedom’ or a ‘boundless store/ Of charms’ requiring no external supplement.

The conclusion to Hartly House, Calcutta invites readers to recognize the plight of those who ‘shared with English women their common oppression by English men’. During the impeachment of Hastings, Burke-inspired works such as Hugh Mulligan’s poem ‘The Virgins’ similarly made use of the rape metaphor in order to symbolize the effects of EIC rule. Other fictions of the 1770s and 1780s depicted English and Indian women who were victims of Indian men, however, and in doing so drew on and further circulated an already well-established sense of sexual despotism as a specifically ‘Eastern’ phenomenon. Where India is concerned, much recent criticism has emphasized the intellectual and creative cross-fertilization that took place under the EIC’s aegis during the Hastings era. There is a parallel story to tell about British metropolitan imaginings of ‘the East’ in the late eighteenth century, though, and it concerns the ossification of unexamined claims about the benighted condition of seraglio-bound women across ‘Asia’ as a whole – the seeming inescapability of this notion an index of its ideological usefulness. In schematic terms, it might therefore be said that if a ‘Burkean’ or ‘Jonesian’ Orientalism sought to identify forms of affinity and resemblance between peoples and cultures, this account of a generalized state of Oriental despotism in which men tyrannized over women in turn eschewed any such imaginative openness to the East.

At the beginning of his 1840 essay ‘Lord Clive’, Macaulay lamented that ‘the great actions of our countrymen in the East should, even among ourselves, excite little interest’. Macaulay’s various writings and speeches on India in many respects provide an appropriate end point now, not least because they recognize the significance of the era of the Seven Years’ War with which this book began. Echoing Richard Owen Cambridge’s reference to how ‘a handful of Europeans’ subdued ‘a multitude of Asiatics’, Macaulay in his 1833 speech on the renewal of the EIC charter described the remarkable conquest of India by ‘a handful of adventurers from an island in the Atlantic’ who ‘subjugated a vast country’. He reprised this story of Britain’s accession to power in Bengal in his essays on Clive and Warren Hastings, while at the same time accentuating the claim which he made in his earlier speech that the ‘character’ of ‘Hindoos’ qualified them only to be the subjects of an enlightened despotism. Adapting the typificatory discourse of Hockley’s Pandurang Hari, Macaulay declared in his essay on Clive that ‘the Bengalee … shrinks from bodily exertion; and though voluble in dispute, and singularly pertinacious in the war of chicane, he seldom engages in a personal conflict, and scarcely ever enlists as a soldier.’ The conclusion which Macaulay drew from this sketch of ‘Bengalee’ effeminacy was that ‘[t]here never, perhaps, existed a people so thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke.’