The Iron Shroud

"The Iron Shroud" or less commonly known as the "Italian Revenge" is a short story of Gothic fiction written by William Mudford in 1830 and published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and also as a twenty four page chapbook. It is a classic predicament story about a noble Italian hero who is confined in a continuously and imperceptibly contracting iron torture chamber. In the story, the chamber walls and ceiling are slowly contracting, day by day, through mechanical means, to the point of eventually crushing and enveloping the victim, thus metaphorically becoming his iron shroud. The story is considered to have provided Edgar Allan Poe with the idea of the shrinking cell in his short story "The Pit and the Pendulum" and it is viewed as Mudford's most famous tale.

The story takes place in the torture chamber of Tolfi castle in Sicily. The hero of the story is Vivenzio who is confined into an iron cell built deep inside solid rock by the revenge-seeking Prince of Tolfi. Vivenzio is portrayed as a noble man, a warrior and hero of Naples but one who fell out of favour with the Prince of Tolfi and now he was about to be subjected to the subtle and remorseless punishment of the Prince. Unbeknownst to the victim, the ceiling and walls of the cell, made of smooth black iron, are imperceptibly contracting through mechanical action. At first the noble victim is unaware of the contracting action of the walls. With the passage of time however the prisoner becomes aware through visual cues that something is afoot. He notices that the irregularly spaced windows of the chamber start decreasing in number each passing day. With only two days left Vivenzio notices an inscription on the iron walls of his cell. The message was written by the engineer of the iron cell, Ludovico Sforza. Sforza explained in his message that at the command of the prince of Tolfi he created the mechanical cell in three years' time. When the chamber was completed, Tolfi ordered the incarceration and death of Sforza in the very chamber he had created. Through a deadly countdown the windows continue decreasing in number, from seven at the beginning of the story, until the end when only one window is left and the iron walls and ceiling contract around him enveloping him in a lethal embrace; the bed in his cell having transformed through mechanical spring action into a "funeral couch or bier". Ominously a large bell starts tolling loudly and frequently near the end, as his death approaches. The victim's ears are pierced by the sound and the bier gets crushed as the walls reach their final contraction. The flattened bier becomes the iron shroud of Vivenzio's dead body.

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Wikipedia