Rediscovered! Lost tales by Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker | review by Rafe McGregor

Rediscovered! Lost tales by Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, Newell & Newell, paperback (saddle stitch binding), £13.99, 6 April 2025

Newell & Newell is a small press run by husband and wife Adam and Sharon Newell in Penrith in Cumbria. The press is located in their secondhand bookshop, Withnail Books, which I found via The Book Guide, a website I cannot recommend highly enough for anyone who still enjoys the experiences of travel, old-fashioned browsing, and being able to hold books in your hands before you buy them. As far as I can tell (because I’ve not had the opportunity to visit yet), Newell & Newell publishes limited editions of 250 chapbooks every few months, which can only be ordered via the Withnail Books website and which sell out very quickly. Rediscovered! is my second purchase, following The Croglin Vampire: England’s Earliest Vampire Legend? in November last year. I think The Croglin Vampire sold out before its publication, but at the time of writing there are still a few dozen copies of Rediscovered! available. Rediscovered! is a pair of chapbooks from two of the three (or four, depending on whom one asks) masters of Gothic fiction in general and Victorian horror more specifically: Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and Bram Stoker, author of Dracula (1897). Along with Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), these two novels complete the trilogy of quintessential Gothic horror, with either Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) or Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895) sometimes expanding the trilogy to a quartet.

With such a pedigree, there is bound to be a great deal of interest in anything and everything Shelley and Stoker wrote and Stoker’s short stories, several of which I reviewed way back in TQF24, have aged surprisingly well. Stoker published about 50 in total and ‘Gibbett Hill’ is not available anywhere else either in print or online. It was published in the Dublin edition of the Daily Express on 17 December 1890 and is 11 pages long in its chapbook form, accompanied by a print of J.M.W. Turner’s ‘Hind Head Hill’ (1811), the etching that inspired the story. ‘Gibbett Hill’ describes the unnamed narrator’s three encounters with a trio of sinister children on the road between London and Portsmouth and is a beautifully written weird tale, albeit not one of Stoker’s best. My main interest was the extent to which it anticipates The Lair of the White Worm (1911), which I regard as his unfinished masterpiece and has fascinated me for many years. ‘Gibbett Hill’ shares several of the flaws of the novel, including Orientalism and a lack of internal logic, but is nonetheless well worth reading.

Shelley published about half as many short stories as Stoker, most of which appeared in The Keepsake, The London Magazine, and The Liberal. ‘The Ghost of the Private Theatricals: A True Story’ was published in The Keepsake at the end of 1843 and remained unavailable to the public until it was released by Newell & Newell in a limited edition of 100 in 2019. The chapbook, which includes the 23-page short story and an afterword by Adam Newell, is accompanied by a print of ‘Heidelberg’ (1845), an engraving after Turner that may have been Shelley’s source of inspiration. ‘The Ghost of the Private Theatricals’ is narrated by the aristocratic Ida Edelstein and set in Schloss Trübenstern, a fictional castle in Germany. Ida travels to the castle with her brother to attend the wedding of her sister and the story evinces all the typical and much-loved Gothic Romantic preoccupations with tortured family relationships, brooding ancestral homes, and unexplained deaths. The private theatrical of the title is an unnamed play that the characters agree to stage, a ghostly tale within a ghostly tale which serves as the engine of what is ultimately a delightful and suspenseful exemplar of its genre.