A short life of the author
Horace Walpole invented the Gothic novel, built the most famous house in eighteenth-century England, wrote the finest letters of his age, and did more than any other single person to shape the taste of late Georgian England. Yet he would have resisted being called a professional anything — he was a younger son of the Prime Minister (Robert Walpole), a gentleman of means and leisure who turned his passions for architecture, antiquarianism, literature, and gossip into works of permanent influence while maintaining the pose of a dilettante who merely dabbled.
The Castle of Otranto
The Castle of Otranto (1764) is one of the most consequential short novels in the history of English literature. Written, by Walpole’s own account, in the course of a few weeks after a dream about a gigantic hand in armour on the staircase of Strawberry Hill, it combined a medieval setting with supernatural terrors — a giant helmet crushes the heir to a usurped throne, a portrait bleeds, a statue has a nosebleed, underground passages lead to mysterious encounters — in a way that had no precedent in English fiction.
Walpole published the first edition as a supposed translation of a medieval Italian manuscript by “Onuphrio Muralto.” When the novel’s success emboldened him to acknowledge his authorship in the second edition (1765), he added a preface that amounted to a literary manifesto: he had attempted, he said, to blend “the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern” — to unite the imaginative freedom of medieval romance with the naturalistic characterisation of the modern novel. The result was the foundation of Gothic fiction. Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and the entire tradition of horror and supernatural fiction descend from Walpole’s short, wild, half-comic novel.
The Letters
If Walpole had never written Otranto, he would still be one of the most important figures in eighteenth-century English letters for his correspondence. His letters — over 4,000 survive, addressed to dozens of correspondents including Horace Mann (British envoy in Florence), George Montagu, the Countess of Upper Ossory, and William Mason — are a panoramic record of English life from the 1730s to the 1790s, covering politics, society, literature, art, architecture, and personalities with a wit, malice, and descriptive brilliance that have never been surpassed.
The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (48 volumes, 1937–1983), edited by W.S. Lewis, is one of the great scholarly enterprises of the twentieth century and provides the definitive text of the letters.
Strawberry Hill
In 1749, Walpole purchased a small villa at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, and over the next three decades transformed it into a Gothic fantasy — adding battlements, towers, pointed arches, fan vaulting, and stained glass windows inspired by medieval cathedrals and Tudor country houses. The house was a calculated aesthetic provocation: at a time when Palladian classicism was the dominant architectural taste, Walpole insisted that Gothic forms were not barbarous but beautiful, and that architecture should evoke feeling and association rather than conform to classical rules.
Strawberry Hill became a tourist attraction in Walpole’s own lifetime. He printed guidebooks and issued tickets. The house inaugurated the Gothic Revival in architecture, which would culminate in the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster (1840–1876) and spread across Europe and America. Walpole also established a private press at Strawberry Hill — the Strawberry Hill Press — which printed his own works and those of his friends, including Thomas Gray’s Odes (1757), in editions that are now among the most prized products of eighteenth-century English printing.
Antiquarian Works
Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England (4 volumes, 1762–1771), based on the notebooks of the engraver George Vertue, was the first systematic history of English art. His Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England (1758) was a pioneering work of literary biography. His Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), which argued that Richard III was not the villain of Tudor propaganda, anticipated modern revisionist history. These works established Walpole as one of the founders of English art history and cultural criticism.
Legacy
Walpole coined or popularised several words that have entered the language, most famously “serendipity” (in a letter of 1754, after the fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip). He was the fourth Earl of Orford, though he succeeded to the title only three years before his death and never used it.
His reputation has fluctuated. The Victorians admired his letters but found his Gothic taste frivolous. The twentieth century rediscovered him as a serious aesthetic thinker and a pioneer of the Romantic sensibility. Today he is recognised as a figure of genuine importance in the history of English literature, architecture, and taste — a man who, from his Gothic villa on the Thames, changed the way England imagined its own past.
Collecting Walpole
The Castle of Otranto (Thomas Lownds, London, 1765, second edition with Walpole’s name — the first edition of 1764 was anonymous) is one of the most important English novels of the eighteenth century. The Strawberry Hill Press editions of Gray’s Odes (1757), Walpole’s own Fugitive Pieces (1758), and The Mysterious Mother (1768, a tragedy about incest too shocking to be performed) are highly prized by collectors of private press books. The forty-eight-volume Yale Edition of the correspondence is the essential scholarly set.