Horace Walpole

Horace Walpole was considered one of the most brilliant men of his era. A writer, connoisseur, collector, letter-writer, and aesthete, he shaped British culture in manners, taste, and fashion. He was the youngest son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Although he was a witness to the shifts and machinations of politics and power (later to be the basis of a two-volume memoir), he was destined in terms of direct power for a largely undistinguished public life. 

But it is as a creator of fiction that he left his mark. Walpole opened up the British imagination to the workings and trappings of our darkest fears and fantasies, which found their fullest expression in his most popular work, The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first Gothic novel in English. 

Walpole also built Strawberry Hill, a physical expression of his imaginative meanderings. It was to be an inspiration to the Gothic Revival in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Walpole’s letters (some sources suggest as many as 7,000) provide a vivid insight into the manners, mores, and taste, of his age. They are, in their fashion, as important a collection as Pepys’ diaries. 

About the author 

Neil Curry is a poet, translator, and literary critic with a particular interest in the eighteenth century, having published works on Alexander Pope, Christopher Smart, William Cowper, Samuel Johnson, and William Shenstone. Among his nine poetry collections are Ships in Bottles, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Walking to Santiago, in which he recounts his 500-mile walk along the medieval pilgrim route, and Other Rooms: New & Selected Poems. He has also published The Fable of the World, translations from the French poet Jules Supervielle. His most recent collection is On Keeping Company with Mrs Woolf. He has also edited the Collected Poems of Norman Nicholson. 

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No of Pages: 268 pp 

ISBN: 978-1-910996-70-6