Charles Maturin

Irish · 1780 to 1824

Born Charles Robert Maturin on September 25, 1780, in Dublin, Ireland, into a family of Huguenot descent that traced its escape from France to a foundling left at a Paris gate, he was raised in genteel circumstances that his own life would steadily erode. He studied at Trinity College Dublin and took holy orders in the Church of Ireland, serving as curate of St. Peter's in the city, a poorly paid post that his eccentric and unorthodox manner did nothing to advance. He wrote at first under the pseudonym Dennis Jasper Murphy, publishing the Gothic novels Fatal Revenge (1807), The Wild Irish Boy (1808), and The Milesian Chief (1812) to small notice and smaller profit. His fortunes turned briefly when Walter Scott, an early admirer, recommended his tragedy Bertram (1816) to Edmund Kean, who performed it at Drury Lane to acclaim and to money that Maturin promptly lost covering a relative's debts. He is remembered now for Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a vast Gothic novel of nested narratives in which a scholar sells his soul for an extra century of life and then roams the earth seeking someone to take the bargain off his hands. Coleridge dismissed Bertram, and the church's disapproval of his fiction cost him all hope of preferment, so he wrote in financial desperation to the end, often at night, a wafer pasted on his forehead to signal that he must not be disturbed. He died on October 30, 1824, in Dublin, at the age of forty-four. Oscar Wilde, his great-nephew, took the name Sebastian Melmoth in exile after prison.