"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.[3][4] In the story, the chamber walls and ceiling are slowly contracting, day by day, through mechanical means, to the point of eventually crushing and enveloping the victim, thus metaphorically becoming his iron shroud. The story is considered to have provided Edgar Allan Poe with the idea of the shrinking cell in his short story "The Pit and the Pendulum" and it is viewed as Mudford's most famous tale.[2][5][6][7][8][9]
Gothic Fiction
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).