Charles Robert Maturin, also known as C. R. Maturin (1780–1824) was an Irish Protestant clergyman and a writer of Gothic plays and novels, and was married to the acclaimed singer of the time, Henrietta Kingsbury. His best known work is the novel Melmoth the Wanderer. His first three works were Gothic novels published under the pseudonym Dennis Jasper Murphy, and were critical and commercial failures. They did, however, catch the attention of Sir Walter Scott, who recommended Maturin’s work to Lord Byron. With their help, Maturin’s play Bertram was staged in 1816 at the Drury Lane for 22 nights (Samuel Taylor Coleridge publicly denounced the play as dull and loathsome, and “melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind”). The Church of Ireland took note of these and earlier criticisms and, having discovered the identity of Bertram‘s author (Maturin had shed his nom de plume to collect the profits from the play), subsequently barred Maturin’s further clerical advancement. Forced to support his wife and four children by writing, he switched back from playwright to novelist after a string of his plays met with failure. The exaggerated effectiveness of Maturin’s preaching can be gauged from the two series of sermons that he published. On the occasion of the death of Princess Charlotte, he declared: “Life is full of death; the steps of the living cannot press the earth without disturbing the ashes of the dead – we walk upon our ancestors – the globe itself is one vast churchyard.” In his obituary it was said that, ‘did he leave no other monument whereon to rest his fame, these sermons alone would be sufficient’.” Maturin died in Dublin on 30 October 1824. A writer in the University Magazine was later to sum up his character as “eccentric almost to insanity and compounded of opposites – an insatiable reader of novels; an elegant preacher; an incessant dancer; a coxcomb in dress and manners.” Charles Baudelaire was also an admirer of Maturin’s novel, equating it with the poetry of Byron and Edgar Allan Poe.