In my 1977 Mississippi State University M.A. thesis, “Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly:  Ironic Distance and the Supernatural,”  I pointed out that Le Fanu may have borrowed the idea of linking and framing the stories of Le Fanu’s famous collection (1872) as from the papers of Martin Hesselius from a very popular Victorian short story collection, Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine and later in book form (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1835).  This was first noted by the anonymous contemporary reviewer of In a Glass Darkly in The Athenaeum, 6 July 1872, p. 13.  The reviewer wrote:  “Considerable skill is displayed in the mechanism by which the series of wonders is connected . . . .  A certain verisimilitude is given to the most extravagant flights of fancy by this method, which resembles, perhaps, the successful machinery which Mr. Warren employed in ‘The Diary of a Late Physician’ more closely than do the numerous parodies of that now celebrated book.”

 

            I will show that Le Fanu’s book is only in a few ways similar to Warren, but also markedly different. I will turn first to offer some information about Warren and his checkered literary career.  He was very successful, and in a sense, a colossal failure. As Bege K. Bowers notes in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 190: British Reform Writers, 1832-1914.  Detroit:  Bruccoli Clark Layman/Gale, 1998:  “In sales and popularity Warren’s works threatened for a while to surpass those of Charles Dickens.”  But clearly Warren is no Dickens or Le Fanu, and he must be viewed essentially as a literary curiosity.  Bowers goes on to say, “the Diary was a candid and realistic picture of the newly professionalizing medical practice in nineteenth-century Britain;  however, it was also a series of tales attributing physical and emotional illnesses to patients’ moral indiscretions.”

 

            It is this aspect of “moral indiscretions”, or sin, that figures in Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly.  Basically Le Fanu’s stories present “a landscape of sin”  in which animals, things, and people symbolically convey a world in which the truth is unknowable.  In “Green Tea,” Le Fanu conveys a sense of evil, sin and guilt symbolically expressed by a demon-monkey that haunts the Rev. Mr. Jennings until he commits suicide. As William Hughes has noted, there is “a discrete theological dimension quite unlike the more conventionally Gothic atmosphere which permeates Warren’s work (“The Origins and Implications of J. S. Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea,’” in Irish Studies Review 13.1 (2005): 46). It is Le Fanu’s blackest story.  As William E. Buckler has said:  “ . . . each [narrator] is a fallible authority: the editor is a confessed ‘enthusiast’ who has taken Dr. Hesselius as his ‘master’;  Dr. Hesselius, besides suffering from an acutely sensitive ego, is theoretical and categorical, and seems unduly  intent upon rationalizing the perfect record of his ‘cures’ (Buckler, Minor Classics of Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1967, II, 27-28)”.

 

            Similarly, Warren in The Diary of a  Late Physician, asserts his conviction, that all the uncanny tales, are the absolute truth. The assertion that the stories are true is highly ironic, because they are certainly not the truth. As for the irony of this aspect of Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly see Frederick Burwick, “Romantic Supernaturaslism: The Case Study as Gothic Tale,” Wordsworth Circle 34.2 (2003): 73-80.

 

 In the words of Meegan Kennedy:  “ . . . the physicians of the clinical era did not disguise their efforts to achieve a new kind of discourse, productive of a ‘realist vision,’ few acknowledge how often the ‘clinical’ case history of the nineteenth century also shares the romantic discourse of the Gothic, especially its interest in the supernatural and the unexplainable and its narrative aim of arousing suspense, horror, and astonishment in the reader” (“The Ghost in the Clinic:  Gothic Medicine and Curious Fiction in Samuel Warren’s Diary of a Late Physician,” in Victorian Literature and Culture 32.2 (2004): 327). She goes on to say, “Gothic medicine demonstrates the importance of clinical medicine to literary romance, and it cannot help but reveal the ghost of ‘the curious’ in the clinic” (327).

 

            Warren himself, a doctor and a lawyer, presents himself as the narrator, who is a specialist in lunacy.  The many “curious” case histories of Warren’s book, like the “curious” case histories of Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius, show a kind of ‘metaphysical medicine’.  There is thus a conflict between the rational, or scientific objectivity, and the irrational, or Romantic subjectivity. This contradiction is also found in the theological works of the eighteenth-century scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, from which Hesselius bases his studies. There is at once a combination of the rational and the irrational.  In both Le Fanu and Swedenborg the truth cannot be known. All is mystery.  This is the aspect of Le Fanu that gives the tales such a power after almost two centuries.

 

            There is one major similarity in the plots of  “Green Tea” and Warren’s tale “The Spectral Dog—An Illusion.” In Warren’s tale, a clergyman encounters  “a large Newfoundland  dog of a blue color!” that follows him into a coach (Warren, 1872  reprint published by William Blackwood, p. 74).  In Le Fanu’s “Green Tea,” the Rev. Mr. Jennings encounters a small black monkey in an omnibus (Le Fanu, Oxford University Press reprint, 1993).

 

            Warren’s tale, however, contains none of the horror that does Le Fanu’s book. Still, it is rather obvious that Le Fanu read Warren’s book and lifted the idea about the monkey and the frame narratives from it.  The whole structure of the two books is highly ironic.   There is no questioning in Warren’s tale (the causation is reduced to madness), but there is religious questioning in Le Fanu’s tale;  but in Warren, the ghosts are presented as coldly detached, thus making them funny.  There is no tension between the real and the supernatural in the Warren, and ultimately, the mystery of the “evil animals” is reduced to insanity that grows out of “moral indiscretion.”

 

            Insanity itself figures in much Victorian fiction.  Warren’s “true” case histories of madness, hallucination, and delusion influenced Poe. Especially Warren’s “The Thunder-Struck and the Boxer” may have influenced Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  Poe wrote a humorous piece “How to Write a Blackwood Article” that is a parody of Warren’s work and the other sensational tales in Blackwood’s Magazine, where Warren published his stories anonymously.  It has been suggested that Warren’s “The Spectre-Smitten” may have influenced Charles Dickens’s “A Madman’s Manuscript” in The Pickwick Papers.  For a discussion of the Blackwood sensational tale and its influence, consult Tales of Terror from “Blackwood’s Magazine,” edited with an introduction by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick (Oxford:  Oxford Universtiy Press, 1995).  The idea of insanity as depicted by Warren may have influenced Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

 

            To return again to Warren’s influence on Le Fanu, the primary difference in Le Fanu and Warren is that no one can really take Warren’s case histories seriously.  For this reason, Warren was often parodied.  Le Fanu,  however, is very serious and very black indeed.  He only borrowed from Warren’s “The Spectral Dog” and Warren’s use of frame narratives.  He made works that were truly his own.

 

            Thus, these two Gothic works approach the supernatural in similar and yet in different ways.  The tension between faith and doubt is at the heart of Le Fanu, and this “Gothic medicine” is shown “as it plays out in the nineteenth-century novel” (Kennedy 327).  Ultimately, in Le Fanu the truth cannot be known, a common idea in Victorian literature.  For Le Fanu, man must forever see “in a glass darkly.”