Portrait of a Man with Red Hair: An Ironic Romance was published by Macmillan in 1925, and it represents Walpole’s most deliberate venture into the Gothic tradition — a novel of cruelty, terror, and psychological domination that drew comparisons with Poe and anticipates the psychosexual horror of later writers.
Charles Percy Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle Harkness is a timid, passive American traveling in Cornwall who encounters Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle Crispin, a man of extraordinary personal magnetism — tall, red-haired, wealthy, cultured — whose philosophy of life is based on the proposition that pain is the supreme aesthetic experience. Crispin collects people the way other men collect art: he draws them into his orbit, establishes dominance over them, and then subjects them to carefully calibrated torments designed to break their will and demonstrate his power.
Harkness, weak and lonely, is mesmerized by Crispin and cannot escape — even when the nature of Crispin’s designs becomes clear. The novel explores the psychology of domination with a frankness unusual for its time: Walpole shows how the submissive personality is drawn to the dominant one, how cruelty generates its own form of intimacy, and how the victim becomes complicit in his own victimization.
The novel was a bestseller and was twice adapted for film. Its influence can be traced in later works of psychological horror, from Daphne du Maurier to Thomas Harris — the figure of the cultured sadist who combines aesthetic refinement with absolute cruelty.
Collecting Portrait of a Man with Red Hair
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1925): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $60–$200
- Without jacket: $10–$25