The Lancashire Witches
William Harrison Ainsworth
Initial release: 1849
People have always told each other scary stories going back to the year dot when we jumped at shadows beyond the range of the fire. The scary stories we tell now might seem alien to our forebears, but there's always a line we can trace from the present, to the past, to the abyss of time. Modern horror fiction would not exist if not for gothic horror; gothic horror in turn owes much from folklore, myth, and history. 17th century England was a hotbed for superstition; the Pendle Witch Trial of 1612 was arguably the trial of the century. Today it's regarded as the English version of America's own Salem Witch Trials, with a similar festive approach, but the truth is, this is still a story about women accused of witchcraft. This, then, is the world of The Lancashire Witches, the most famous and enduring work by William Harrison Ainsworth, a prolific yet lesser-known Victorian-era writer of historical fiction with a notoriously loose grasp on factual accuracy in the service of drama.
The Lancashire Witches is a pretty fat work, originally told in serialized format before being published as a full novel in 1849. Ainsworth presents a fairly large cast of characters, with his focus centering around Richard and Nicholas Assheton, two noble cousins, and their adventures in dealing with a pair of warring witch families and an unscrupulous witch-hunting lawyer in the early 1600s. Lurking in the background, and told in the lengthy intro, is the legend of John Paslew, a disgraced Catholic abbot, who participated in a rebellion against Henry VIII’s dissolution of Catholic monastaries, only to lose and be executed, and who is rumoured to haunt the old abbey.
The intro works well by itself, a thrilling gothic tale of rebellion, ambition and revenge, with Abbot Paslew brought low as the Pilgrimage of Grace fails against the king’s armies, his downfall engineered by a strange, swarthy warlock in revenge for a 30-year-old betrayal. The rest of the tale is set some 80 years after, during King James’ time, though exactly when seems to be unclear, as the events of the actual witch trials, as well as King James’ visit to Houghton Tower, don’t occur so closely together in actuality as they do in the novel.
What
struck me the most about this book was how much these characters simply
don’t fucking shut up. Each is prone to lengthy speeches that would
often just as well be narrative prose; and much is written in a dialect
ostensibly peculiar to England's Lancashire country that can be difficult to read. The
book wouldn’t be nearly as long if not for this. Gothic fiction is known
for lengthy descriptive passages, and you go in knowing that — lengthy
attempts at atmosphere are the whole point of the genre. But this is the
worst case of overwrought dialogue I’ve ever seen.
That’s not to say the book is unreadable. While it drags miserably in places, and often goes for the cheap dramatic trick, there’s several funny moments to provide some levity in between the lengthy dialogue and sinister happenstance. While the book has an unflattering view of witch-hunting (“in cases of witchcraft, suspicion is enough,” says one character) it strikes me how it seems to make villains out of victims for the sake of story, which in turn feeds into the misogyny behind witch panics. Historically those accused of witchcraft were often women who knew a little about some kind of science or medicine, or victims of a plot to remove an obstacle to the accuser’s ambition. Case in point: the real witch accusations in Lancashire were mostly two families accusing each other in the midst of a lengthy feud.
Ainsworth instead operates on the assumption that they really were witches, and worse, that the Demdike family was cursed to be evil by the abbot in revenge for their ancestor’s actions against him (which in turn were his revenge for Paslew’s betrayal 30 years prior.) It’s this particular cursing that seems to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, with Paslew’s ghost hanging about to achieve some final goal against the villainous mother Demdike, the very child he’d cursed some 80 years prior. In other words, Paslew created his own villain.
I
dislike literature that makes real witches out of real victims,
particularly when they’re villainous, because the victims of these
historical moral panics have always been women and marginalized people
(like Jews.) The same pattern repeated with the “Satanic Panic” of the
80s. And in fact, in general, I’m suspicious of literature where
witches, or other female practitioners of magic, are portrayed as
villainous, because there’s always lurking in the background that
misogynist history. Heinrich Kramer would be proud.
I don’t regret reading this book, but I don’t know that I’d read it again; a more dutiful editor might have gone through it with a hacksaw. Its characters are entertaining and its descriptive prose is exemplary, but Ainsworth proves that bending historical fact to the will of a narrative is nothing new.