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HORACE WALPOLE. (1717 - 1797)
Although Horace Walpole is famous for being the son of the longest-serving Prime Minister in British history, Robert Walpole, it is likely that he was in fact the son of Walpole's wife, Catherine, and ! her lover, Lord Hervey. Horace was over ten years younger than his older brothers and he looked nothing like them. Moreover, Robert and Catherine Walpole had been estranged for years. Fortunately Horace seemed to be ignorant of these rumours and was devoted to his parents all of his life, especially his mother, who he mourned extravagantly when she died in 1737. Six months after this, his father married his long-term mistress, Maria Skerrett.
After private tutoring, Walpole entered Eton in 1727, remaining there for seven years. It was there that he became a close friend of his cousins, the Conways, and one of the inseparable 'quadruple alliance' with Richard West, Thomas Ashton, and Thomas Gray. In 1735 he entered King's College, Cambridge, but left without a degree in 1739 to make the Grand Tour of the Continent with Gray. They quarrelled on the journey, not to be reconciled for years. Walpole preferred the life of 'animal sensations' (dancing, drinking and sight-seeing); Gray was more retiring and scholastic. Walpole was seriously ill in Italy, and finally cut his journey short because in his absence he had been elected a Member of Parliament for Callington, Cornwall. His first speech was in defence of his father. He served for various constituencies until 1768, when he retired. Politics never really interested him much except as a spectator. Thanks to his father, however, he held several small sinecure appointments in the Exchequer throughout his life.
In 1747 he leased a house which he called Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, on the Thames, and in 1753 he began the building and gardening which made it a show place, a sort of combined museum and park, overrun by vis! itors who secured tickets to see it. 'It is a little play-thing-house that I got out of Mrs Chenevix's shop and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw', he wrote to Henry Conway. He spent most of his life redesigning, expanding and rebuilding Strawberry Hill, slowly turning it into a world-famous Gothic folly. Only William Beckford's Fonthill would be a more powerful and imaginative monument to English eccentricity.
In 1757 Walpole started his own press, with a man and boy to operate it, and during his lifetime all his own books were published from it. He also published Gray's poems, a Life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the Memoires de Grammont, and other important works. He sometimes called the press his 'Elzivirianum', in honour of the pioneer printer, but officially it was the Strawberry Hill Press.
The Castle of Otranto appeared in 1764 and is Walpole's most famous literary achievement. It was published anonymously as if it was translated by 'William Marshall' from a sixteenth-century Italian romance. Although it was not particularly accomplished, it was hugely influential, creating a vogue for 'Gothic' stories and pseudo-medieval fiction. He claimed that it was inspired by a dream. He told William Cole that he woke up and all he could remember 'was that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.' The gigantic hand would belong to the ghost of Alfonso, who would burst through the ruins of Otranto. In his introduction, Walpole initially wrote that his novel was 'an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern'. In other wor! ds, he wanted to mix the natural and supernatural, realism and fantasy. However, reading the novel now, there seems to be very little connection with reality or the natural world. Walpole's comment in a letter to George Montagu seems more apposite: 'Visions, you know, have always been my pasture, and so far from growing old enough to quarrel with their emptiness, I almost think there is no wisdom comparable to that of exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams.'
The Castle of Otranto would be a dream narrative, a string of absurd and improbable events. Manfred, the evil usurper of Otranto, wants his son Conrad to marry the innocent and virginal Isabella. However, just before the wedding, Conrad is crushed by a giant helmet: 'an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.' After a brief interval of grief, Manfred recovers and decides to marry Isabella himself. This is in spite of the fact that he is married to the innocent and kind Hippolita. His daughter, the innocent and helpless Matilda, protests. But Manfred the tyrant presses on. When Manfred tells Isabella that he is going to divorce Hippolita and marry her, Isabella flees through an underground passageway. She ends up in a Church, sheltered by the kindly monk, Jerome. A virtuous peasant called Theodore also helps her to escape. The second half of the novel focuses on Manfred's continual pursuit of Isabella, and Jerome and Theodore's attempts to save her. Frederic, the worthy pretender to the throne, appears, and Theodore accidentally wounds him. Matilda meets Theodore in secret, Manfred overhears them, mistakes Matilda for Isabella, and ends up killing his own daughter. Just as things become impossibly complex, a giant ghost emerges from the rubble of Otranto and proclaims Theodore the true ruler of Otranto. Jerome explains to everyone how Theodore the peasant is actually the secret heir of Alfonso the Good. Although he is still grievi! ng for Matilda, Theodore agrees to marry Isabella, persuaded that 'he could know of no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul'.
It is not just the plot of Otranto that is implausible. The characters are also two-dimensional melodramatic caricatures. The dialogue is imported from the worst kind of sentimental romance. When the good Theodore offers to rescue Isabella from her evil pursuers, she replies, 'Alas, what mean you, sir? Though all your actions are noble, though your sentiments speak the purity of your soul, is it fitting that I should accompany you alone into these perplexed retreats? Should we be found together, what would a censorious world think of my conduct?' When Hippolita is told that she will be divorced and possibly killed so that her husband can marry a girl half his age, she exclaims: 'It is not ours to make election for ourselves. Heaven, our fathers and our husbands, must decide for us.'
However, in spite of this stiltedness, Otranto can justifiably be called one of the most influential texts in the English language. It introduced Gothic fiction into Britain. Clara Reeve called her novel The Old English Baron 'the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto'. As well as Reeve, Walpole influenced Anne Radcliffe, Matthew 'Monk' Lewis and William Beckford. These writers, in turn, inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Jane! Austen's parody, Northhanger Abbey. Gothic emblems and conceits, forged by Walpole, would reappear in the fiction of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. In the twentieth century, Gothic novels, energised by the perversity and grotesqueness of Poe, would be metamorphosed into the 'horror' stories of Stephen King and James Herbert.
So what was new about Otranto? It introduced a template for Gothic landscapes, characters and themes. The setting would be a castle or monastery, full of underground tunnels and crypts. The characters would be kings or peasants, or both. The plot would involve male tyranny and female persecution. Men fought each other; women swooned. There would be a supporting cast of monks, virgins, long-lost sons, mummies, skeletons and ghosts. Prophecies would also structure the narrative, in the shape of either dreams or poems. Set pieces would include the unjust sentence of death, the revelation of royal parentage, the moonlit tryst, the impetuous kill, and the death-bed confession ('"if Isabella is at hand -- call her -- I have important secrets to --", "He is dying!" said one of the attendants'). Lurking behind the medieval Italian setting, there is also an implicit streak of anti-Papist propaganda. The novel revels in exotic tyranny and extravagant self-sacrifice; the reader feels the macabre strangeness and malignancy of Catholicism. Above all, the tone of Gothic fiction is established. Beckford, Radcliffe and Lewis would all preserve Walpole's potent blend of chilling horror and high camp. By looking rampantly silly, Gothic novels could safely explore the twilight world of sexual deviancy.
The other aspect of Walpole's output which is often celebrated is his correspondence, which some critics have called the best in the language. Although Walpole's epistolary style is less popular today, with many readers preferring the enthusiastic perceptiveness of Keats or the casual brilliance of Byron, Walpole's letters still have their adherents and still contain a intriguing range of aesthetic insights and political observations. The well-known formulation that 'life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel' is from his correspondence. His letters also form an interesting commentary on the French Revolution; Walpole's casual republicanism soon turns into hysterical Toryism as the Terror gathers pace. 'Savages, barbarians' were terms that were meant to apply to 'poor ignorant Indians', not Europeans. 'It remained for the enlightened eighteenth century to baffle language and invent horrors that can be found in no vocabulary', Walpole wrote in 1793. Byron called these letters 'incomparable'.
Walpole's other works are now forgotten. As a gentleman-amateur, he published constantly on a wide range of subjects. He wrote a bizarre and ill-judged defence of Richard III: Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third. He wrote a blank verse tragedy called The Mysterious Mother (which Fanny Burney called 'horrible'). He wrote a one-act moral satire (Nature Will Prevail). In 1785, he publi! shed Hieroglyphic Tales, a series of 'whimsical trifles written chiefly for private entertainment'.
Walpole made a long visit to Paris in 1765, and there first met Mme. du Deffand, the salonnière, twenty-five years his senior and going blind. They corresponded until her death in 1780, and she fell in love with him, which must have been most embarrassing to a man who never showed any real interest in women. Although her letters to him were preserved, his letters to her were destroyed, because he was ashamed of his unidiomatic French.
Walpole's brother, the second earl, died, and a nephew succeeded as third earl. This nephew, unfortunately, was insane for a good part of the time, and prodigally extravagant when he was not. It therefore devolved on the uncle to take charge of the family fortune, and a good part of Walpole's time and energy in his later years was devoted to this task. In 1791 the nephew died, and Horace Walpole succeeded. He refused to enter the House of Lords, and seldom signed his name as Earl of Orford. He was always independent in such matters; christened Horatio, he always preferred the 'good English name' of Horace.
In 1789 the Berry family, father and two grown daughters, became his close neighbours, and Agnes and Mary Berry became his most intimate friends. (He is reported even to have been willing to marry Mary Berry, if necessary, in order to keep them near him.) After his death Mary Berry edited his works, though in conformity to the prejudices of the time she gave her father's name as editor.
Walpole's posthumous reputation was badly affected by his harsh treatment of Thomas Chatterton. The sixteen-year-old Chatterton sent Walpole a collection of writings ostensibly by the fifteenth-century priest, Thomas Rowley, but actually by ! Chatterton himself. Walpole liked the poems and asked for more, but his friends told him that they were forgeries, and Walpole reacted badly, rejecting the verses outright. Chatterton launched a series of attacks on Walpole in the Town and Country Magazine. A year and half after this, Chatterton killed himself. When the young poet began to achieve a posthumous fame, Walpole was condemned for driving Chatterton to suicide. Although this was completely unmerited criticism, it stalled a formation of a critical canon on Walpole and his work. Today, the situation has improved and Walpole is rightly admired for his pioneering Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto and his witty, intelligent correspondence. Horace Walpole: the Critical Heritage (1987), edited by Peter Sabor, is an invaluable collection of essays and reviews, by and about Walpole. Horace Walpole (1971) by Martin Kallich is a solid introductory study.
Walpole's high standing has also been affected by the current scholarly interest in the history and development of the Gothic genre. Gothic novels have not always been admired: in the early twentieth century, they were completely ignored by writers and critics, and modernists like Woolf and Joyce were privileged over more popular writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker. Literary experimentation was favoured over the simplistic characterisation and lurid sensati! onalism of Gothic fiction. In the 1940s and 1950s, this continued, as F.R. Leavis's criterion of 'moral seriousness' dominated the teaching of English Literature in universities and schools. Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad were the models of excellence, while Dickens, with his Gothic and 'demonic' imagination (in Evelyn Waugh's terms), was not initially granted a place in the 'Great Tradition'. Only in the 1970s, with the rise of feminist and Freudian literary criticism, did the situation change. Freudians resurrected the Gothic form because it nurtured and encouraged the free play of the unconscious. Feminists were interested in the prevalence of women in the Gothic canon (Radcliffe, Reeve, Shelley) and the subversive potential of female protagonists. In the 1980s, queer theorists also became interested in the Gothic novel because of its pioneering exploration of same-sex desire. The best new studies of the genre are: Robert Miles's Gothic writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy (1993), The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980) by David Punter. They all include a discussion of Walpole's Otranto.
