The Iron Shroud

"The Iron Shroud" or less commonly known as the "Italian Revenge" is a short story of Gothic fiction written by William Mudford in 1830 and published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and also as a twenty four page chapbook.

[1][2] It is a classic predicament story about a noble Italian hero who is confined in a continuously and imperceptibly contracting iron torture chamber.

The hero of the story is Vivenzio who is confined into an iron cell built deep inside solid rock by the revenge-seeking Prince of Tolfi.

Unbeknownst to the victim, the ceiling and walls of the cell, made of smooth black iron, are imperceptibly contracting through mechanical action.

[4] Edith Birkhead mentions that the "Iron Shroud" belongs in a type of horror story which is all the more striking because it is based on natural effects and not on the supernatural.

The "iron arms" analogy is apt because in the end the mechanical cell will replace everything Vivenzio knew while incarcerated, including his body.

[11][12][13][14] Jerrold E. Hogle in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction comes to the same conclusion as Tompkins and adds that the young Brontës were avid readers of Blackwood's Magazine.

[15] Edith Birkhead calls the "Iron Shroud" a "skillfully constructed" story and mentions that Mudford has been described by Sir Walter Scott as an author who "loves to play at cherry-pit with Satan.

[10][16] Alexander Hammond, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of English at Washington State University, in his essay "Subverting Interpretation: Poe’s Geometry in “The Pit and the Pendulum”" suggests that Mudford's countdown of windows in the "Iron Shroud" may have influenced Poe in using numerical and geometrical clues in the "Pit and the Pendulum" to confuse and frighten his narrator.

[17] Elizabeth Gaskell, in Mary Barton describes an Italian torture chamber where the victim is afforded many luxuries at first but in the end the walls of the cell start closing in and finally they crush him.