To make matters worse, Samuel Taylor Coleridge publicly denounced the play as dull and loathsome, and 'melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind,' going nearly so far as to decry it as atheistic.

Financial success, however, eluded Maturin, as the play's run coincided with his father's unemployment and another relative's bankruptcy, both of them assisted by the fledgling writer.

With the help of these two literary luminaries, the curate's play, Bertram (staged at Drury Lane for 22 nights) saw a wider audience and became a success. They did, however, catch the attention of Sir Walter Scott, who recommended Maturin's work to Lord Byron. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.His first three works were published under the pseudonym Dennis Jasper Murphy and were critical and commercial failures. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Finally, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)-a novel in which the Commonwealth and Restoration scenes owe a considerable debt to Scott’s historical fiction-is often viewed as the culminating achievement of the Gothic novel in the historical period of its flourishing, a period that began with Walpole’s Castle of Otrtznto in 1764. Maturin is famous by association as the great-uncle of Oscar Wilde as well as a correspondent of Walter Scott, upon whose generosity with money, literary patronage, and critical advice he came to rely.

When Coleridge arrives at the moment in Maturin’s tragedy-the consummation of the adulterous relationship of Bertram and Imogine-that convinces him that the “shocking spirit of jacobinism” (2: 229) has migrated from politics to morals, he borrows language from Wordsworth’s attack on “sickly and stupid German Tragedies” (William Wordsworth 599) in order to condemn the audience’s “craving… for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants” (Coleridge, Biographie 2: 229). He is remembered for his Gothic drama Bertram (1816), mainly because Coleridge devotes a chapter to it in Biographie Literaria. While Charles Robert Maturin significantly influenced Balzac and French realism, as well as André Breton and surrealism, he has had only a minor reputation in English literary history.

Charles maturin