“Rats is bogies I tell you, and bogies is rats”: Rats, repression and the gothic mode

Rats are inherently Gothic animals—uncannily intelligent, cannibalistic, constantly present, often unseen but constantly watching. As a single entity, or as part of a pack, the rat is a powerful vehicle for delivering horror in the popular Gothic imagination. In this essay, Crofts and Hatter examine how the social commentary showcased in James Herbert’s The Rats (1974) has its roots in the treatment of rats in the Victorian popular press. This rhetoric is rearticulated into Gothic fiction in Bram Stoker’s ‘The Judge’s House’ (1891), ‘The Burial of Rats’ (1914), and Dracula (1897), demonstrating that the rat is not mere background vermin but a potent signifier of past crimes and repression. Rats in these texts produce a sustained commentary on society’s failings as they act as signposts to the poverty society wilfully ignores, undertaking a vital role in exposing, not causing, the horrors of deprivation.