In comparison of the modern novels The Castle of Ortranto and The Old English Baron, we can clearly see the similarities of Gothic genre or sometimes referred to as Gothic horror. The novel Horace Walpole had written is a classic gothic fiction of horror with a twist of romance. It follows the traditional features of a horror story that pertains a spooky mysterious location, supernatural occurrences, a suffering protagonist and a distressed maiden. In essence The Old English Baron holds a somewhat similar output to Walpole’s novel. Although Clara Reeve’s novel is a gothic novel, it does not go to the extremes of representing horror and romance. There were no extraordinary supernatural occurrences that would surprise the readers like Walpole had done.

This leads to Clara Reeve’s Preface to the second edition, The Old English Baron. In the preface I believe she is confident that “Mankind are naturally pleased with what gratifies their vanity; and vanity, like all passions of the human heart, may be rendered subservient to good and useful purposes”. That being said, Reeve’s novel is a typical ghost story with egotistic characters that majority of the readers would like to read about. She believes the goal of a romance novel is to excite the reader, cause the reader to feel directed to “some useful, or at least innocent, end”. Refer to the image of The Old English Baron and from this image, it excites no sign of horror or gothic elements but a sign of a happy story to a happy ending.

Clara Reeve was staggered and annoyed by Walpole’s writing of its sudden reduction of “enchantments” in the novel. In the preface she claims that Walpole allowed the reader to expect astounding enchantments in the novel such as a “sword so large as to require an hundred men to lift it”. From Reeve’s analysis of the early novel it allowed me to understand the mechanics of Walpole’s gothic novel.