Melmoth the Wanderer  

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A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)
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A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)

Melmoth the Wanderer is a gothic novel published in 1820, written by Charles Robert Maturin (uncle of Jane Wilde who was mother of Oscar Wilde).

The central character, John Melmoth (a Wandering Jew type), is a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for 150 extra years of life and spends that time searching for someone who will take over the pact for him; the novel actually takes place in the present, but this backstory is revealed through several nested stories-within-a-story that work backwards through time (usually through the Gothic trope of old books).

The story was one of the many inspirations for the Anne Rice novel Memnoch the Devil.

The novel was cited by Karl Edward Wagner as one of the thirteen best supernatural horror novels.

Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Melmoth the Wanderer" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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