Introduction

Matthew Gregory Lewis, who professed to have translated this romance
out of the German, very much, I believe, as Horace Walpole professed
to have taken The Castle of Otranto from an old Italian manuscript,
was born in 1775 of a wealthy family. His father had an estate in
India and a post in a Government office. His mother was daughter to
Sir Thomas Sewell, Master of the Rolls in the reign of George III.
She was a young mother; her son Matthew was devoted to her from the
first. As a child he called her "Fanny," and as a man held firmly
by her when she was deserted by her husband. From Westminster
School, M. G. Lewis passed to Christ Church, Oxford. Already he was
busy over tales and plays, and wrote at college a farce, never
acted, a comedy, written at the age of sixteen, The East Indian,
afterwards played for Mrs. Jordan's benefit and repeated with great
success, and also a novel, never published, called The Effusions of
Sensibility, which was a burlesque upon the sentimental school. He
wrote also what he called "a romance in the style of The Castle of
Otranto," which appeared afterwards as the play of The Castle
Spectre.

With his mind thus interested in literature of the romantic form,
young Lewis, aged seventeen, after a summer in Paris, went to
Germany, settled for a time at Weimar, and, as he told his mother,
knocked his brains against German as hard as ever he could. "I have
been introduced," he wrote, in July, 1792, "to M. de Goethe, the
celebrated author of Werter, so you must not be surprised if I
should shoot myself one of these fine mornings." In the spring of
1793 the youth returned to England, very full of German romantic
tale and song, and with more paper covered with wild fancies of his
own. After the next Christmas he returned to Oxford. There was a
visit to Lord Douglas at Bothwell Castle; there was not much
academic work done at Oxford. His father's desire was to train him
for the diplomatic service, and in the summer of 1794 he went to the
Hague as attache to the British Embassy. He had begun to write his
novel of The Monk, had flagged, but was spurred on at the Hague by a
reading of Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, a book after his
own heart, and he wrote to his mother at this time, "You see I am
horribly bit by the rage of writing."