Horace Walpole

English novelist, essayist, and historian

• Born: September 24, 1717
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: March 2, 1797
• Place of death: London, England

Biography

A brilliant essayist, historian, and letter-writer and a notable novelist, dramatist, and amateur antiquary, Horace (christened Horatio) Walpole (WAWL-pohl) was born in London on September 24, 1717. He was the third son and youngest child of Catherine Shorter and Sir Robert Walpole, the great eighteenth century British prime minister. Walpole was raised at Houghton Hall, a miniature palace that had an art collection rivaling the best in Italy and a seminaturalistic garden that provided Walpole with a frame of mind through which he later looked on life. The grand scale of the building seems to have convinced Master Walpole that he belonged to the nobility.

At the age of ten Walpole was sent to Eton, where he formed friendships with boys like Thomas Ashton, Henry Conway, Thomas Gray, and Richard West and belonged to the Quadruple Alliance, a literary group whose members included Gray and West. This involvement stimulated Walpole’s love of literature. After graduating from Eton, Walpole went to Cambridge. In March of 1739 he left Cambridge without earning a degree and invited Gray to be his companion on a Grand Tour of the Continent, which lasted about two and a half years. The Grand Tour has been regarded as one of the major events of Walpole’s life. It gave him the friendship of the famous American Horace Mann, whom Walpole met in Florence and with whom he corresponded extensively for the next fifty years of his life, although he never saw him again; his correspondence with Mann was the largest of his many correspondences. The tour also furnished Walpole with the friendship of John Chute, who later helped him design his toy castle Strawberry Hill. Furthermore, it provided Walpole with a perspective with which to create the Italian settings for The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother.

Following his return to England, Walpole became a member of Parliament, serving from 1741 to 1768. In 1748 he purchased a cottage in Twickenham, which for the remainder of his life he spent remodeling into a pseudo-Gothic castle. Strawberry Hill became famous as Walpole’s home, as the center of his enthusiasm for Gothic architecture, as the home of Strawberry Hill Press, and as a kind of park-museum-showplace. By his work on Strawberry Hill, Walpole—an eighteenth century celebrity who knew everybody and went everywhere—was to make a name for himself as a gardener and an architect. His tragic drama, The Mysterious Mother, a punishment dream, was published by Strawberry Hill Press, but his famous gothic novelThe Castle of Otranto was not.

The supernatural elements of The Castle of Otranto were designed to provide terror for Walpole’s readers; they do so no longer. In The Castle of Otranto Walpole delineates the customs of the Middle Ages, a period he regards as rife with superstition. In doing so, he conveys anti-Catholic feelings. Notably, the novel contains a strict unity of action, for everything therein occurs over a period of three days and two nights at the castle and its surroundings. The genesis for the novel was a dream about a gigantic hand in armor on a staircase. This dream can be associated with life at Strawberry Hill. What Walpole discloses in The Castle of Otranto is his infantile desire for a sensual relationship with his mother. Incest and patricide are the novel’s themes. In the resolution of the dream, Theodore, a young peasant with a strawberry birthmark, marries the virtuous princess Isabella and is transformed into a noble prince.

The Castle of Otranto was inspired by Walpole’s rage over the problems of his cousin, Henry Conway, who was dismissed in 1764 from his regiment of dragoons’ command for voting in Parliament against General Warrants. For Walpole, Conway was a mother substitute. Walpole’s mother had died in 1737, when he was twenty. The relationship between Walpole and Conway has been called a homosexual one, a kind of Oedipal attraction. Walpole came to Conway’s defense with a pamphlet called A Counter Address to the Public on the Late Dismission of a General Officer. He tried to show that Conway did not merit banishment for his conduct in Parliament and claimed that the total ruin of Conway was not proper. Without question, Walpole’s anger and frustration over the Conway affair in 1764 affected the writing of The Castle of Otranto in that year. The Castle of Otranto is a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Other facets of Walpole’s life are also important. His memoirs, covering the last half of the eighteenth century, were written in a conscious effort to be the historian of his times. Few men have planned their engagement with posterity so carefully. Walpole was determined to achieve a lasting reputation independent of his father. A vast amount of information on the culture and affairs of England and the Continent is contained in Walpole’s letters. They are a source of extensive historical knowledge and have been compared in value to a thousand of the documentary films of the twentieth century.

Walpole became the fourth earl of Orford in 1791. He never married. Mme du Deffand, the famous blind sixty-nine-year-old French debauchée of wit, was in love with him; his relationship with her represented a gratification of hidden impulses. She personified his protective mother, whom he overvalued as a child. Mary Berry, a twenty-one-year-old neighbor, seems to have been in love with him as well. He called her one of his “twin wives.” Walpole’s most famous aphorism is this: “Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.” He died in London on March 2, 1797, at the age of seventy-nine and was buried in the vault beneath the Lilliputian church on the grounds of the Houghton Hall estate.

Bibliography

Brownell, Morris. The Prime Minister of Taste: A Portrait of Horace Walpole. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. A biography focusing on Walpole’s career as a collector and patron of the arts.

Fothergill, Brian. The Strawberry Hill Set: Horace Walpole and His Circle. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983. An intellectual biography and sociological study of Walpole in the context of his time.

Jacobs, Edward H. Accidental Migrations: An Archeology of Gothic Discourse. Lewisberg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2000. Evaluates Walpole’s contribution to the development of the gothic genre.

Kallich, Martin. Horace Walpole. Boston: Twayne, 1971. A solid bio-critical study of Walpole. It contains a useful chronology and chapters on Walpole’s life, his political career, and his role as a social butterfly in eighteenth century England, as well as analyses of The Castle of Otranto, The Mysterious Mother, and Hieroglyphic Tales.

Ketton-Cremer, R. W. Horace Walpole: A Biography. 3d ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964. The standard biography of Walpole.

Mowl, Timothy. Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider. London: Murray, 1996. An intellectual biography emphasizing Walpole as a legislator, writer, collector, and homosexual.

Sabor, Peter, ed. Horace Walpole: The Collected Critical Heritage, Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 1996. A substantial collection of critical essays on Walpole’s works.

Van Luchene, Stephen Robert. “The Castle of Otranto.” In Essays in Gothic Fiction from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley. New York: Arno Press, 1980. Considers The Castle of Otranto’s influence on gothic fiction to be threefold: It ushered in stock characters, established set narrative techniques, and conveyed an idealized view of the Middle Ages.