Francis Lathom

Francis Lathom (14 July 1774 – 19 May 1832) was a British gothic novelist and playwright.

Francis Lathom was born on 14 July 1774, either in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where his father, Henry, conducted business for the East India Company and returning to England around 1777, settling near Norwich, or he was born in Norwich and may have been the illegitimate son of an English peer. He joined the Norwich Stock Company, a stock theatre company, in 1791 and began his literary career there.

Lathom was a precocious writer, beginning to write plays before he had turned eighteen. His first play, All in a Bustle, was produced on the Norwich stage at the Theatre Royal Norwich in 1795; he would go on to write six other plays, including The Dash of the Day (1800), which went into three Norwich editions as well as a reprint published in Dublin.

Lathom's first novel, The Castle of Ollada (1795) was published in two volumes, anonymously, by William Lane's Minerva Press. This work, like most of Lathom's later Gothic novels, owed much to the earlier works of such writers as Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe. Although Lathom would occasionally employ bloody and horrific scenes reminiscent of M. G. Lewis, he typically followed Radcliffe's method of the "explained supernatural."

His next novel, The Midnight Bell (1798), is his most famous, not only because it is his best Gothic novel, but more significantly because Jane Austen lists it as one of "the horrid novels" in her Northanger Abbey. Lathom would go on to publish many more Gothic novels, all with sensational titles such as Astonishment!!!, The Fatal Vow, The Unknown, and The Impenetrable Secret, Find it Out!

But Lathom was not only a Gothic novelist: about half his works are works of contemporary satire or attempts at fiction in the mode of Walter Scott. Montague Summers called Lathom's Men and Manners (1799) his masterpiece and worthy of Dickens. Very Strange, But Very True! (1803), despite its enticing title, is not a Gothic novel, but a rollicking farce which still retains much of its humour after two centuries.

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