Charles Maturin
Encyclopedia
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
Protestant clergyman (ordained by the Church of Ireland
Church of Ireland
The Church of Ireland is an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion. The church operates in all parts of Ireland and is the second largest religious body on the island after the Roman Catholic Church...
) and a writer of gothic plays and novels.
Biography
Descended from the Huguenots who found shelter in Ireland, one of whom was Gabriel Jacques Maturin who later became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin after Jonathan SwiftJonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
in 1745, Charles Robert Maturin was born in Dublin and attended Trinity College, Dublin
Trinity College, Dublin
Trinity College, Dublin , formally known as the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, was founded in 1592 by letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I as the "mother of a university", Extracts from Letters Patent of Elizabeth I, 1592: "...we...found and...
. Shortly after being ordained as curate of Loughrea
Loughrea
Loughrea is a town in County Galway, Ireland. The town lies north of a range of wooded hills, the Slieve Aughty Mountains.The town expanded in recent years as it increasingly becomes a commuter town for the city of Galway.- Name :...
in 1803, he became Anglican Curate of St. Peter's Church
St. Peter's Church, Aungier Street, Dublin
St. Peter's Church was a former Church of Ireland parish church located in Aungier St. in Dublin, Ireland, where the Dublin YMCA building now stands. It was built on land that formerly belonged to the Whitefriars in Dublin...
in Dublin. He lived in York St, Dublin with his father William, a Post Office official, and his mother, Fedelia Watson, and met and married on the 7th October 1804 acclaimed singer Henrietta Kingsbury, a sister of Sarah Kingsbury who married Charles Elgee, whose daughter, Jane Francesca Wilde (née Elgee), was the mother of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
. Thus Charles Maturin was Oscar Wilde's great-uncle by marriage. Wilde discarded his own name and adopted the name of Maturin's novel Melmoth the Wanderer
Melmoth the Wanderer
Melmoth the Wanderer is a gothic novel published in 1820, written by Charles Robert Maturin .- Synopsis :...
when he arrived in Dieppe, France, and lived out his remaining days known as 'Sebastian Melmoth'.
His first three works were published under the pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
Dennis Jasper Murphy and were critical and commercial failures. They did, however, catch the attention of Sir Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
, who recommended Maturin's work to Lord Byron. With the help of these two literary luminaries, the curate's play, Bertram (first staged on 9 May 1816 at the Drury Lane
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane is a West End theatre in Covent Garden, in the City of Westminster, a borough of London. The building faces Catherine Street and backs onto Drury Lane. The building standing today is the most recent in a line of four theatres at the same location dating back to 1663,...
for 22 nights) with Edmund Kean
Edmund Kean
Edmund Kean was an English actor, regarded in his time as the greatest ever.-Early life:Kean was born in London. His father was probably Edmund Kean, an architect’s clerk, and his mother was an actress, Anne Carey, daughter of the 18th century composer and playwright Henry Carey...
starring in the lead role as Bertram, saw a wider audience and became a success. Financial success, however, eluded Maturin, as the play's run coincided with his father's unemployment and another relative's bankruptcy, both of them assisted by the fledgling writer. To make matters worse, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
publicly denounced the play as dull and loathsome, and "melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind," http://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/Gothic/Maturin.htm going nearly so far as to decry it as atheistic. Coleridge's comments on Bertram can also be found in 'Biographia Literaria', chapter 23. The Church of Ireland took note of these and earlier criticisms and, having discovered the identity of Bertrams author (Maturin had shed his nom de plume to collect the profits from the play), subsequently barred Maturin's further clerical advancement. Forced to support his wife and four children by writing (his salary as curate was £80-90 per annum, compared to the £1000 he made for Bertram), he switched back from playwright to novelist after a string of his plays met with failure. One of his grandsons, Basil W. Maturin
Basil W. Maturin
Basil William Maturin was an Irish-born Anglican priest, preacher and writer who later became Roman Catholic. He died on board the RMS Lusitania, during the First World War....
, a Chaplain at Oxford University, died on the RMS Lusitania
RMS Lusitania
RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner designed by Leonard Peskett and built by John Brown and Company of Clydebank, Scotland. The ship entered passenger service with the Cunard Line on 26 August 1907 and continued on the line's heavily-traveled passenger service between Liverpool, England and New...
.
Charles Robert Maturin died in Dublin on 30 October 1824. Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
and Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
later expressed fondness for Maturin's work, particularly his most famous novel, Melmoth the Wanderer.
The play Bertram; or The Castle of St. Aldobrand was adapted in French by Charles Nodier
Charles Nodier
Jean Charles Emmanuel Nodier , was a French author who introduced a younger generation of Romanticists to the conte fantastique, gothic literature, vampire tales, and the importance of dreams as part of literary creation, and whose career as a librarian is often underestimated by literary...
and Isidore Justin Severin Taylor (Bertram, ou le Chateau de St. Aldobrand, 1821). This version was the source of the opera Il pirata
Il pirata
Il pirata is an opera in two acts by Vincenzo Bellini to an Italian libretto by Felice Romani from a French translation of the tragic play Bertram, or The Castle of St Aldobrando by Charles Maturin...
, libretto by Felice Romani
Felice Romani
Felice Romani was an Italian poet and scholar of literature and mythology who wrote many librettos for the opera composers Donizetti and Bellini. Romani was considered the finest Italian librettist between Metastasio and Boito.-Biography:Born Giuseppe Felice Romani to a bourgeois family in Genoa,...
, music by Vincenzo Bellini
Vincenzo Bellini
Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini was an Italian opera composer. His greatest works are I Capuleti ed i Montecchi , La sonnambula , Norma , Beatrice di Tenda , and I puritani...
, premiered at La Scala
La Scala
La Scala , is a world renowned opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as the New Royal-Ducal Theatre at La Scala...
of Milan in 1827.
Novels
- The Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio (1807)
- The Wild Irish Boy (1808)
- The Milesian Chief (1812)
- Women; or, Pour Et Contre; a Tale (1818)
- Melmoth the WandererMelmoth the WandererMelmoth the Wanderer is a gothic novel published in 1820, written by Charles Robert Maturin .- Synopsis :...
(1820) - The Albigenses (1824)
- Leixlip Castle (1825)
Plays
- Bertram; or The Castle of St. Aldobrand (1816)
- Manuel (1817)
- Fredolfo (1819)
- Osmyn the Renegade (published posthumously in 1830, but in rehearsal at Covent Garden in 1822)
Sermons
- Sermons (1819)
- Five Sermons on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church (1824)