The Pit and the Pendulum The Pit and the Pendulum "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual "The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843". The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, though Poe skews historical facts. The narrator of the story describes his experience of being tortured. The story is especially effective at inspiring fear in the reader because of its heavy focus on the senses, such as sound, emphasizing its reality, unlike many of Poe's stories which are
Spanish Inquisition was primarily a genre developed in Protestant countries, frequently associated Catholicism with terror and repression. This vision of the Spanish Inquisition appears in, among other works, "The Monk" (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis (set in Madrid during the Inquisition, but can be seen as commenting on the French Revolution and the Terror); "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin and "The Manuscript Found in Saragossa" by Polish author Jan Potocki. Literature of the 19th century tends to focus on the element of torture employed by the Inquisition. In France, in the early 19th century, the epistolary novel "Cornelia Bororquia,