Odd this day

2 March 1797

On this day, Horace Walpole died, having had, according to Robert Chambers’ Book of Days

twenty-eight years of parliamentary life, without acquiring any distinction as a politician

Politics, however, was not where his talents lay. Horace was a chap of letters, writing the first supernatural novel in English, The Castle of Otranto, creating the gothic fiction genre.

Chambers, though, so disparaging about Walpole’s achievements in public life, was perhaps deluded or in denial about what the man got up to in private.

The pride of his life, old bachelor as he was, was to see pretty duchesses and countesses wandering through [his house’s] corridors and basking on its little terrace.

Well.

The house in question was Walpole’s other great work, Strawberry Hill, which he bought when it was “a mere cottage” in 1747, and spent the rest of his life transforming into a vast, flamboyant, crenelated, turreted villa. Young Horace was so effeminate that — according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography — one political opponent, William Guthrie, compared him to a “hermaphrodite horse”, and he was known for his close friendships with men, notably Lord Lincoln, with whom he was supposed to have been in love. (Lincoln, however, was rather more typical of men of his generation, and seems to have undertaken his Grand Tour groin first.)

Mind you, Walpole was believed to have broken the heart of one Elisabetta Capponi, wife of a Florentine nobleman — so, while he may not have been as straight as a flagpole, he wasn’t necessarily as gay as a maypole, either. One 20th century biographer, Timothy Mowl (in 1996’s Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider), said:

if he had homosexual tendencies, he appeared to have been too fastidious ever to have given way to them.

Either way, The Castle of Otranto seems like the work of a man of… some passion, let’s say.

A giant helmet (stop it) falls onto the heir to the lord of Otranto just before he’s due to be married, and his grieving father, the lord, thinks a heinous prophecy is about to be fulfilled. So, he decides to prevent this by banishing his wife to a nunnery and marrying his son’s bereaved fiancée. There follows a twisting tale of ghosts, mistaken identity, revelations of ancient wrongs, and stabbings.

It purported, on first publication, to be a translation of a 16th-century Italian version of a story that dated back to the Crusades, and successfully established all the tropes of gothic horror: castle, posh tyrant, supernatural happenings, young virgin, prophecies, and a pleb with a heart of gold. It was well-received until it turned out to be a completely new work passing itself off as an old one (even though that surely increases the level of achievement). He also wrote two other novels, and reams of non-fiction, including history, art history, and a treatise on gardening.

And he wrote letters. This is putting it mildly, given that the collected edition of them runs to 16 volumes. One day, perhaps, one day, I might find time to read them, and to learn more about a curious figure who, once again, I’ve barely touched the surface of, but until then, I’ll finish with a snippet from one, written on his own Grand Tour:

The most remarkable thing I have observed since I came abroad, is, that there are no people so obviously mad as the English.

Mind you, he didn’t live in the 21st century. As in so many other areas of life, this is one where we seem to have been outdone.