Creatures of the deep also exceed pre-existing taxonomies as strange, hybrid forms - eerie counterparts of terrestrial creatures (some delightfully weird-looking illustrations here)

Popular science writing offers the most sustained interrogation of the haunting, Gothic formlessness of the seafloor – the ooziness of the seabed is widely discussed, and deeply unsettling, frequently figured through negations

Victorian popular science writers also struggle to fully articulate and imagine the affecting strangeness of the seabed. Frank Bullen writes that ‘imagination can (and does) run riot’ when thinking of the ‘silent depths where life, according to our ideas of it, is impossible’.

Drawing on Freudian notions of the uncanny – an unsettling feeling created when we encounter what should’ve remained secret and hidden but has come to light – helps us to understand exactly what might be so unsettling about the seabed, and human encounters with it in particular

Turning to Thomas Hardy's 'The Convergence of the Twain', the linguistic unsettlement of the benthos is clear – in revisions to the poem between 1912-14, he struggles to track the transition from seabed to surface – 'something has gone missing in the journey between worlds'

A submarine gothic is a mode ‘of awe and wonder’, dramatising what we might think of as uncanny forms of unsettlement and drawing from a long historical tradition of these science writings alongside deep sea horror by authors such as Conan Doyle, Hugo, and Wells

These encounters ‘do strange things to us’ across a vast historical sweep – with Victorian science writings working alongside a Gothic imaginary to influence the later nature writings of figures such as Rachel Carson

Encounters with the seabed, both in actuality and in imagination, confront us in ways that are, ‘sometimes wonderstruck, and sometimes horrifying and disquieting, with our own forms of epistemologies’

Because of this inaccessibility, the benthos, Jimmy says, is realm ‘known foremost through the imagination’. This imaginative appeal owes much to the ‘apparently confounding spatialities, temporalities, and ontologies’ of the seabed, a space so far out of human reach

Starting from the ‘relatively straightforward proposition’ that the depths of the sea are difficult to access, both literally and in terms of imagination – something that is made particularly clear in Victorian science writings of the nineteenth century

The final encounter between father and son on a cliff edge brings not just the extremes of land, but the intense and extreme depths of the sea, into the tragedy

The tragic destiny of the Griffiths – ‘the murder of the eighth generation Griffiths by the ninth’ – and their lives is shadowed by a dark and stormy sea, almost propelling the events to their conclusion

The Welsh backdrop of Gaskell’s story is significant – Wales was increasingly popularised across the nineteenth century as a site of almost mythic fascination

Gaskell loved old customs and legends, and in the particular case of her short story ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’, her attention was captured by a historical event occurring at the beginning of the fifteenth century in Wales

The haunting ends, but no explanation is offered – ‘the dead retreat as silently as they arrive’. The Gothic becomes a philosophical exercise, and an acknowledgement of the drowned and resurfaced self and past

Whilst men in the novel attempt to rationalise the haunting, the women of the story attempt to understand and to listen – formulating a gendered economy of control vs care