#20: The Lancashire Witches
An obscure gothic tale of witch hunting
This review was originally posted to Twitter on January 2, 2019.
Initial release: 1849
Author: William Harrison Ainsworth
Modern horror fiction owes a great deal to gothic horror, which in turn borrowed heavily from folklore, myth and history. The Lancashire Witches is no different, and was a contributor to the “classic witch” archetype. Based, very loosely, on the real case of the Pendle witches, better known as England’s most famous witch trials (like Salem is for the US,) Ainsworth weaves a lengthy tale that, let’s be honest, plays pretty fast and loose with history and facts.
While the book presents a fairly large cast of characters, it mostly centers 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 Lancashire 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 entirely unfun. 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, but as it stands, it’s a rambling, ahistorical shitshow with some entertaining characters.
