We couldn’t have Tim Burton and Lemony Snicket without Edward Gorey’s influence. Sorry, I misspoke. I mean we literally can’t have Tim Burton and Lemony Snicket without Edward Gorey’s influence. Whether contextualising him for the uninitiated or showing off just how initiated they are, it feels like critics invoke the Grandfather of Goth whenever they come across work that is “whimsically macabre”, “delightfully sinister” or your choice of similarly oxymoronic phrase.
But if we can all agree that Edward Gorey helped make these writers and artists who they are, then who made Gorey who he was? A cultural vampire with famously insatiable thirst*, Gorey once told an interviewer that he was always considering ways he might incorporate what he’d seen and read: “I keep thinking, how can I use that?”
So, what did he see and read? How did he use it? Who were Edward Gorey’s biggest influences? Join me in looking back through the centuries at the writers and artists who influenced Edward Gorey’s unique style.
*Insatiable and, in my case, inimitable. I haven’t yet read everything on this list. It’s as much a note to my future self – “come back to these” – as it is a series of recommendations.
Writer and illustrator Edward Gorey would have celebrated his 100th birthday on 22 February 2025. Join the Gothic Dispatch in admiring the life and work, influences and influence of the Grandfather of Goth.
Max Ernst
The German surrealist was perhaps best known for his paintings, but it was his 1934 novel-in-collage that caught Gorey’s attention. Une Semaine de Bonté is assembled from the contents of Victorian and Edwardian magazines. The results are black and white engravings of sea monsters, winged women and other similarly uncanny sights. Gorey was enamoured with how Ernst took perfectly un-sinister subjects and made them “look nothing but sinister.”
Agatha Christie
There’s a clear similarity between the contents of Gorey’s little books and that of Agatha Christie’s legendary mystery novels. Over more than 60 stories, shocking, often violent crimes creep into the domestic lives of Christie’s unwitting characters. But she had a clear influence on Edward Gorey’s structure, too. It’s the feeling that many of his panels are being overheard, out of context. Like the hints throughout a Christie novel, Gorey’s clues beg to be stitched together to solve whatever crime has interrupted an otherwise very customary English afternoon.
Hokusai
The Japanese wood-cut artist is best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa. I use him here to exemplify the juxtaposition of simplicity and intricacy that Gorey took from many other ukiyo-e artists. Gorey pays obvious tribute to Asian aesthetics (and parodies Orientalism) in The Blue Aspic. But it’s in The Object Lesson, with its sparse yet supernatural landscapes, all spindly trees and untrustworthy boulders, that the influence is made its most Gorey-esque.
Murasaki Shikibu
Gorey also loved the minimalism he found in Asian literature. The continent’s writing, especially Murasaki Shikibu’s classic novel Genji, entrenched Gorey even further into his habit of sparse, fragmented prose, leaving more details out until his writing was almost haiku-like.
E. F. Benson
Gorey attributed his discovery of E. F. Benson, and especially the author’s Mapp and Lucia novels, to fate. Set in the 1920s and 30s, these comedies of manners recount the social struggles and small-town gossip of a group of upper-class ladies in the fictional English settings of Riseholme and Tilling. For an anglophile such as Gorey, these books were a firm favourite – he claimed to have read the novels so many times that he could almost recite them by heart.
Ronald Firbank
Gorey biographer Mark Dery asserts that, “if Gorey’s aesthetic cult had a patron saint, it was Firbank.” He was, perhaps, Edward Gorey’s greatest influence. Gorey and Harvard roommate Frank O’Hara pillaged the English writer of his dry witticisms, elliptical structure, coded queerness and, of course, English idiosyncrasies. More than any of Gorey’s other influences, I think, Firbank most thoroughly (and most entertainingly) turned the norms of Victorian England on their head. In 1971, while working in New York, Gorey would illustrate the cover for an edition of Two Early Stories by Firbank.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Asked in an interview why he studied French at Harvard (instead of English), Gorey explained that, although he really wanted to read all of French literature, he never would have done it on his own. His French, he insisted, still left much to be desired. He read “only” one French novel a year. But among them was La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes – 504 morals from the 17th century with a snappiness recognisable in Gorey’s own books.
Louis Feuillade
The French filmmaker may have died only three days after Gorey was born, but Feuillade’s silent serials left an immutable mark on the writer/artist’s work. Look at any frame of Fantômas or Les Vampires and you’ll recognise the familiar dark eyes and fin-de-siècle aesthetic of a Gorey book. Gorey believed that films took a turn for the worse when they started talking. Indeed, his captions often have the feel of silent film intertitles.
I put this list together with great help from two books, which both offer even more of Edward Gorey’s influences. As for my own quite incomplete list, I might update or add to it as I work my way through some of the writers and artists listed here. I might not.
- Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey edited by Karen Wilkin, 2002
- Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery, 2018