William Mudford (1782-1848) is best known in the classic horror and science fiction genres for his excellent short story The Iron Shroud, where a prison room slowly collapses and turns into a coffin. Mudford's most Gothic novel was The Five Nights of St. Albans and the dark novel is often mentioned in company with the trifecta of early Gothic novels: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Ann Ward Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis.
Of Mudford, The Universal Anthology said:
William Mudford was born at London in 1782. In 1800 he became assistant secretary to the Duke of Kent, accompanying him to Gibraltar in 1802; then resigned to study for a journalist, and after a term as parliamentary reporter, and then writer on the Courier, became editor of that paper, but left it on its changing its politics. Losing his money in speculation, he took the editorship of, and finally bought, the Kentish Observer at Canterbury; and was long a voluminous contributor to Blackwood's, where one of his stories, "The Iron Shroud," was the model for Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum." His contributions as "The Silent Member" were very popular. In 1841 he succeeded Theodore Hook as editor of John Bull. He died in 1848. He wrote many books of fiction, history, etc.
Apart from being a tale of sensation and the lowering of an object, the similarities between Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum and Mudford's The Iron Shroud are few. Regardless, tomorrow I will provide a link to Mudford's best classic horror short story apart from The Iron Shroud. It was published anonymously and remains almost entirely unknown to this day.
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