During the last decades of the eighteenth century, England found itself in the midst of a societal unravelling. The philosophies of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and David Hume, which for most of the century had provided the intellectual classes with theories of action and motivation that justified their self-interested behaviour, began to reveal themselves as insupportable. The contradiction between the English ideology in which "individual desires and collective needs participated in perfect reciprocity" (Poovey, 307) and actual economic and political conditions began to surface. Incidents like the Gordon riots in 1780 (as well as the utterly terrifying reality of complete Revolution just across the Channel) revealed a rupture in what had been thought of as the time and place of "the well-bred gentleman."

It is out of this social climate that the Gothic novel grew: a new and fearful genre for a new and fearful time. The spectre of social revolution is manifest in the supernatural "spectres" of the Gothic: a crumbling way of life emerges as a crumbling and haunted Gothic manor; the loss of English social identity becomes the Gothic hero or heroine's search for identity. The Gothic is often criticised or even dismissed for its overly melodramatic scenarios and utterly predictable plots. But the incredible popularity of the genre in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as the "comeback" of gothic narratives within the past two decades, points to a resilience that cannot be overlooked.

The Gothic novel springs forth rather suddenly as the increasing preoccupation with individual consciousness that begins in the early 18th century collides with the unique cultural anxieties of the late 18th century. The effect of the former has already been well established in literature, as Richardson and other "novelists of sensibility" invest their characters with unprecedented psychological depth. The Gothic novelists are less skilful and subtle in their depictions, and are often accused of populating their novels with stock or "flat" characters. Yet the emotions of these characters are externalised in a radical new way; their deepest passions and fears are liberalised as other characters, supernatural phenomena, and even inanimate objects. At the same time, the nature of the fear represented in these novels--fear of imprisonment or entrapment, of rape and personal violation, of the triumph of evil over good and chaos over order--seems to reflect a specific historical moment. This moment is characterised by increasing disillusionment with Enlightenment rationality and by bloody revolutions in America and France.