I have been thinking a good deal recently about the night side of the arts of Regency England. Choosing a selection of reverse-lit, partly transparent Regency prints for a small exhibition has led me into a world of lonely lights in wild country, spectral Gothic abbeys in fitful moonlight, midnight processions of cowled, torch-bearing monks. These prints reflect many of the preoccupations of Romantic England on either side of the turn of the 19th century.

As Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) testifies, ‘devils, witches, dreams and fire’ became favourite subjects with Regency readers. Perhaps the Europewide interest in traditional songs and narratives (represented by Bishop Percy in England and the Grimm brothers in Germany) played a part in this shift of sensibility. The rediscovery of the wild and dark elements in the works of Shakespeare and Milton, especially Macbeth and Paradise Lost, arguably played a more vital role for British readers. Perhaps Piranesi’s shadowy, subterranean etchings of decaying ancient Rome, which were a popular purchase on the grand tour, played their part as well.

If a single painter embodies this turn to the night side, it is the Swiss expatriate Johann Heinrich Füssli, known in England as Henry Fuseli (1741–1825). He was, as the title of Christopher Baker’s lucid biography styles him, a ‘creator of nightmares’, and fittingly the book begins with Fuseli’s celebrated