While sharing the Faustian conceit of the Herne the Hunter subplot of Windsor Castle (1843) and the incomplete Auriol (1865), both of which in rushing headlong towards abrupt and unsatisfying conclusions had caused the author much critical ridicule, The Lancashire Witches was subject to uncharacteristically detailed preparation. The Lancashire Witches is the first of Ainsworth’s ‘Lancashire novels,’ and it is perhaps because of the author’s love for the county of his birth that the book does not suffer from the obviously hasty, and consequently often clumsy, composition that so often marred Ainsworth’s originally interesting ideas. This ‘classic tale of the supernatural’ (1) although generally overlooked by scholars of the gothic, therefore continues to exist quietly both as a popular cultural curio and, rather more erroneously, in an extra-literary sense as a genuine history. As the Dick Turpin narrative of Rookwood seamlessly passed into the national myth, Ainsworth’s romance of Pendle Forest has supplanted the unusually well-documented history of these unfortunate men and women in Lancashire folklore. The novel is also one of the mainstays of the Pennine tourist industry, and at time of writing, it is still available in many local museums, railway stations and gift shops. The original Lancashire witch cases are also discussed, as it Ainsworth's writing process and the book's publication history: Largely because of a popular fascination with the occult, The Lancashire Witches is the only one of Ainsworth’s novels to have remained consistently in print to this day, often shelved alongside the work of Dennis Wheatley and Montague Summers (both of whom it undoubtedly influenced). A contextual close-reading of Ainsworth's gothic masterpiece, exploring its intertextual links to Elizabethan and Restoration drama, as well as the English gothic tradition, feminist readings of Eve and the Romantic reading of Milton's Satan.

Of Wheels and Witches by Stephen Hayes