The Midnight Bell

The Midnight Bell is a Gothic novel by Francis Lathom, first published anonymously in 1798. It has sometimes been attributed to George Walker, an ascription that the book's print history has had to correct.

The story opens in Saxony at the castle of Cohenburg, where two adult brothers have made their lives. Alphonsus has inherited the title of Count after their father's death, and Frederic has married Sophia of Luxembourg, who dies giving birth to their third child after burying the first two. Grief drives Frederic away from the castle, he returns only three times over the next eleven years, and he settles back when his nephew Alphonsus is seventeen. Some months afterwards the elder Alphonsus is called away to the city, and the household he leaves behind becomes the site of the misfortunes the novel is remembered for.

The book is one of the seven horrid novels that Isabella Thorpe names in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which is how many readers first encounter the title, and it is a useful example of what the Gothic looked like in the hands of a writer other than Radcliffe or Lewis.