In the late 1890s, the US scientist Alexander Agassiz set sail for a second voyage aboard the research vessel Albatross to investigate coral reef formations in the South Pacific. The Washington Post relayed that Agassiz’s team had discovered ‘a vast hollow in the sea-floor extend[ing] over nearly thirty degrees of latitude’ with a ‘depth of nearly four miles’. Quite what lay within these abyssal regions was unclear, but, the Post noted, ‘[u]nquestionably there are many kinds of monsters and chimeras dire in the depths of the ocean which no mortal eyes has ever seen, or imagination pictured … If any snarks exist in the ocean one would naturally expect to find them at great depths, for … the bottom has its own peculiar fauna, certainly rich and assuredly strange to the point of weirdness’.
Despite the newspaper’s conviction about the existence of the monstrous denizens of the deep, the
swift building up of literary allusion – to Lewis Carroll’s snark and Shakespeare’s ‘Ariel’s Song’ – in this article suggests the distinct lack of knowledge pertaining to the seabed; instead, popular literary texts and imaginative speculation stand in for that knowledge, filling in the blanks, as it were.
The question of whether there was life in the deep sea and along the seabed – and if there were, what sort of life it might be – was a matter of significant debate across the nineteenth century, a period which saw extensive, globe-spanning efforts to fathom these regions. As a consequence, and as I explore in this paper, much reportage and fiction that dwells on oceanic abysses and the seafloor articulates simultaneously a sense of the emergent marvels of the deep and a distinctly gothic imagination, conjuring up ‘monsters and chimeras dire’ in order to frame the region as deeply – and often literally – alien and unworldly. This paper, then, examines the emergence of what might be termed a ‘submarine gothic’, the development of which begins in the 1830s, in the work of Lord Tennyson and Edgar Allan Poe, and finds its fullest expression in the late nineteenth century submarine gothic of H. G. Wells.
Dr. Jimmy Packham is Associate Professor in North American Literature at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on Gothic fiction and on maritime writing, both as separate and overlapping areas of study. His books include Coastal Gothic: Haunted Shores and Littoral Cultures (2024), Our Haunted Shores: Weird Tales From the Coasts of the British Isles (2022) and Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic (2021) and he has recently been exploring the 'Haunted Midlands'.
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