Melmoth the Wanderer

A Gothic novel. The story begins in the autumn of 1816 in Ireland, in County Wicklow, where a student from Dublin’s Trinity College, John Melmoth, arrives to visit his dying uncle—and more simply, to take possession of his estate. The uncle dies, but in his will, alongside purely practical items, there are also two additional mystical ones: first, to destroy a portrait hanging in the study with the inscription “J. Melmoth, 1646”; and second, to find and burn a manuscript stored in one of the desk drawers. This is the first time John Melmoth encounters his legendary ancestor, nicknamed the Wandering Melmoth.

“Melmoth the Wanderer” is the most famous work by C. R. Maturin (1782–1824), an English writer of Irish origin. A characteristic example of the late Gothic genre of the Byronian era.
The protagonist of Maturin’s novel inherited “Byronic” traits from Child-Harold, with his romantic disenchantment, as well as signs of characters in “Gothic novels”: mystery, a touch of the mystical, stamped by the mark of Fate that dominates him.