Horace Walpole

Horace Walpole wrote the first Gothic novel, invented the word serendipity, and left about four thousand letters that are among the best sources for eighteenth-century England. He was the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister, and sat in the Commons for twenty-six years without much troubling it. His energy went elsewhere. He remodelled a small house at Twickenham into Strawberry Hill, a confection of battlements and fan vaulting that started the Gothic Revival decades before the Victorians took it up, and set up a private press there. In 1764 he published The Castle of Otranto, presenting it as a translation of an old Italian manuscript before admitting authorship in the second edition; it established the machinery of Gothic fiction, from the haunted castle downwards. He coined serendipity in a letter of 1754, from a Persian tale about the three princes of Serendip. His letters, edited at Yale in forty-eight volumes, cover sixty years of politics, war, gossip and taste, and it is on them that his reputation now rests. He was contemptuous of the elder Pitt's war policy in America, sceptical of the whole imperial project, and one of the few English writers to describe the Seven Years' War as a series of conquests he did not want. He died unmarried in 1797. He was also an early opponent of the slave trade and wrote with disgust about the wealth being made from it. His Anecdotes of Painting in England was the first serious survey of English art. The house at Strawberry Hill survives and has been restored to something close to what he built.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history