Matthew Lewis

English · 1775 to 1818

Born Matthew Gregory Lewis on July 9, 1775, in London, he was the son of a wealthy deputy secretary at the War Office and a mother who loved music and the theater, and whose separation from his father shadowed his childhood. He was educated at Westminster School and at Christ Church, Oxford, and spent stretches abroad in Paris, Weimar, where he met Goethe, and The Hague, learning German and steeping himself in the gothic and the supernatural. It was at The Hague, as a teenage attache to the British embassy, that he wrote The Monk (1796) in ten weeks, publishing it at nineteen. The novel of a Capuchin friar undone by lust, sorcery, and matricide made him notorious overnight, drew prosecution for blasphemy and obscenity, and fixed him forever in the public mind as Monk Lewis. He turned next to the stage, where The Castle Spectre (1797) ran for sixty nights and brought him real money and wider fame. He sat in the House of Commons for Hindon for several years, kept friendships with Byron and Walter Scott, and translated and adapted German romances and ballads with restless industry. He had inherited large sugar plantations in Jamaica, and twice sailed there to improve the conditions of the enslaved people he owned, recording the visits in a Journal of a West India Proprietor, published posthumously in 1834. On the second return voyage he contracted yellow fever. He died at sea on May 14, 1818, at the age of forty-two, and was buried in the Atlantic, his weighted coffin reportedly slipping its shroud and floating back toward Jamaica.