My dissertation explores the relationship between performance and fiction in the early Romantic period in Britain. Specifically by focusing on the Gothic, I examine how actors, authors, and artisans rendered spectacles and illusions of the supernatural for their audiences and readers. By examining dramatic adaptations of novels, novels that drew from live performance, and finally theatrical souvenirs and toy theaters that placed Gothic narratives into the hands of children, I argue that the experience of reading a Gothic novel was continuous with the experience of seeing a Gothic play, and moreover that the formation of the eighteenth-century’s most popular fictional mode must be understood in terms of its live analog in the theater.