[In this excerpt, Birkhead enumerates the qualities of The Castle of Otranto that appealed to the popular taste of Walpole's contemporaries and briefly describes its legacy for later romances.]

To Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto was published on Christmas Eve, 1764, must be assigned the honour of having introduced the Gothic romance and of having made it fashionable. Diffident as to the success of so "wild" a story in an age devoted to good sense and reason, he sent forth his mediaeval tale disguised as a translation from the Italian of "Onuphrio Muralto," by William Marshall. It was only after it had been received with enthusiasm that he confessed the authorship. As he explained frankly in a letter to his friend Mason: "It is not everybody that may in this country play the fool with impunity."¹ That Walpole regarded his story merely as a fanciful, amusing trifle is clear from the letter he wrote to Miss Hannah More reproving her for putting so frantic a thing into the hands of a Bristol milkwoman who wrote poetry in her leisure hours.²The Castle of Otranto was but another manifestation of that admiration for the Gothic which had found expression fourteen years earlier in his miniature castle at Strawberry Hill, with its old armour and "lean windows fattened with rich saints."³ The word "Gothic" in the early eighteenth century was used as a term of reproach. To Addison, Siena Cathedral was but a "barbarous" building, which might have been a miracle of architecture, had our forefathers "only been instructed in the right way."⁴ Pope in his Preface to Shakespeare admits the strength and majesty of the Gothic, but deplores its irregularity. In Letters on Chivalry and Romance, published two years before The Castle of Otranto, Hurd pleads that Spenser's Faerie Queene should be read and criticised as a Gothic, not a classical, poem. He clearly recognises the right of the Gothic to be judged by laws of its own. When the nineteenth century is reached the epithet has lost all tinge of blame, and has become entirely one of praise. From the time when he began to build his castle, in 1750, Walpole's letters abound in references to the Gothic, and he confesses once: "In the heretical corner of my heart I adore the Gothic building."⁵ At Strawberry Hill the hall and staircase were his special delight and they probably formed the background of that dream in which he saw a gigantic hand in armour on the staircase of an ancient castle. When Dr. Burney visited Walpole's home in 1786 he remarked on the striking recollections of The Castle of Otranto, brought to mind by "the deep shade in which some of his antique portraits were placed and the lone sort of look of the unusually shaped apartments in which they were hung."⁶ We know how in idle moments Walpole loved to brood on the picturesque past, and we can imagine his falling asleep, after the arrival of a piece of armour for his collection, with his head full of plans for the adornment of his cherished castle. His story is but an expansion of this dilettante's nightmare. His interest in things mediaeval was not that of an antiquary, but rather that of an artist who loves things old because of their age and beauty. In a delightfully gay letter to his friend, George Montagu, referring flippantly to his appointment as Deputy Ranger of Rockingham Forest, he writes, after drawing a vivid picture of a "Robin Hood reforme"; "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. Old castles, old pictures, old histories and the babble of old people make one live back into centuries that cannot disappoint one. One holds fast and surely what is past. The dead have exhausted their power of deceiving—one can trust Catherine of Medicis now. In short, you have opened a new landscape to my fancy; and my lady Beaulieu will oblige me as much as you, if she puts the long bow into your hands. I don't know, but the idea may produce some other Castle of Otranto."⁷ So Walpole came near to anticipating the greenwood scenes of Ivanhoe. The decking and trappings of chivalry filled him with boyish delight, and he found in the glitter and colour of the middle ages a refuge from the prosaic dullness of the eighteenth century. A visit from "a Luxembourg, a Lusignan and a Montfort" awoke in his whimsical fancy a mental image of himself in the guise of a mediaeval baron: "I never felt myself so much in The Castle of Otranto. It sounded as if a company of noble crusaders were come to sojourn with me before they embarked for the Holy Land"⁸ and when he heard of the marvellous adventures of a large wolf who had caused a panic in Lower Languedoc, he was reminded of the enchanted monster of old romance and declared that, had he known of the creature earlier, it should have appeared in The Castle of Otranto.⁹ "I have taken to astronomy," he declares on another occasion, "now that the scale is enlarged enough to satisfy my taste, who love gigantic ideas—do not be afraid; I am not going to write a second part to The Castle of Otranto, nor another account of the Patagonians who inhabit the new Brobdingnag planet."¹⁰ These unstudied utterances reveal, perhaps more clearly than Walpole's deliberate confessions about his book, the mood of irresponsible, light-hearted gaiety in which he started on his enterprise. If we may rely on Walpole's account of its composition, The Castle of Otranto was fashioned rapidly in a white heat of excitement, but the creation of the story probably cost him more effort than he would have us believe. The result, at least, lacks spontaneity. We never feel for a moment that we are living invisible amidst the characters, but we sit aloof like Puck, thinking: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" His supernatural machinery is as undignified as the pantomime properties of Jack the Giantkiller. The huge body scattered piecemeal about the castle, the unwieldy sabre borne by a hundred men, the helmet "tempestuously agitated," and even the "skeleton in a hermit's cowl" are not only unalarming but mildly ridiculous. Yet to the readers of his day the story was captivating and entrancing. It satisfied a real craving for the romantic and marvellous. The first edition of five hundred copies was sold out in two months, and others followed rapidly. The story was dramatised by Robert Jephson and produced at Covent Garden Theatre under the title of The Count of Narbonne, with an epilogue by Malone. It was staged again later in Dublin, Kemble playing the title role. It was translated into French, German and Italian. In England its success was immediate, though several years elapsed before it was imitated. Gray, to whom the story was first attributed, wrote of it in March, 1765: "It engages our attention here (at Cambridge), makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights." Mason praised it, and Walpole's letters refer repeatedly to the vogue it enjoyed. This widespread popularity is an indication of the eagerness with which readers of 1765 desired to escape from the present and to revel for a time in strange, bygone centuries. Although Walpole regarded the composition of his Gothic story as a whim, his love of the past was shared by others of his generation. Of this Macpherson's Ossian (1760-3), Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), and Percy's Reliques (1765), are, each in its fashion, a sufficient proof. The half-century from 1760 to 1810 showed remarkably definite signs of a renewed interest in things written between 1100 and 1650, which had been neglected for a century or more. The Castle of Otranto, which was "an attempt to blend the marvellous of old story with the natural of modern novels" is an early symptom of this revulsion to the past; and it exercised a charm on Scott as well as on Mrs. Radcliffe and her school. The Castle of Otranto is significant, not because of its intrinsic merit, but because of its power in shaping the destiny of the novel.

The outline of the plot is worth recording for the sake of tracing ancestral likenesses when we reach the later romances. The only son of Manfred—the villain of the piece—is discovered on his wedding morning dashed to pieces beneath an enormous helmet. Determined that his line shall not become extinct, Manfred decides to divorce Hippolyta and marry Isabella, his son's bride. To escape from her pursuer, Isabella takes flight down a "subterraneous passage," where she is succoured by a "peasant" Theodore, who bears a curious resemblance to a portrait of the "good Alfonso" in the gallery of the castle. The servants of the castle are alarmed at intervals by the sudden appearance of massive pieces of armour in different parts of the building. A clap of thunder, which shakes the castle to its foundations, heralds the culmination of the story. A hundred men bear in a huge sabre; and an apparition of the illustrious Alfonso—whose portrait in the gallery once walks straight out of its frame ¹¹—appears, "dilated to an immense magnitude,"¹² and demands that Manfred shall surrender Otranto to the rightful heir, Theodore, who has been duly identified by the mark of a "bloody arrow." Alfonso, thus pacified, ascends into hea'ven, where he is received into glory by St. Nicholas. As Matilda, who was beloved of Theodore, has incidentally been slain by her father, Theodore consoles himself with Isabella. Manfred and his wife meekly retire to neighbouring convents. With this anti-climax the story closes. To present the "dry bones" of a romantic story is often misleading, but the method is perhaps justifiable in the case of The Castle of Otranto, because Walpole himself scorned embellishments and declared in his grandiloquent fashion:

"If this air of the miraculous is excused, the reader will find nothing else unworthy of his persual. There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe."¹³ But with all its faults The Castle of Otranto did not fall fruitless on the earth. The characters are mere puppets, yet we meet the same types again and again in later Gothic romances. Though Clara Reeve renounced such "obvious improbabilities" as a ghost in a hermit's cowl and a walking picture, she was an acknowledged disciple of Walpole, and, like him, made an "interesting peasant" the hero of her story, The Old English Baron. Jerome is the prototype of many a count disguised as father confessor, Bianca the pattern of many a chattering servant. The imprisoned wife reappears in countless romances, including Mrs. Radcliffe's Sicilian Romance (1790), and Mrs. Roche's Children of the Abbey (1798). The tyrannical father—no new creation, however—became so inevitable a figure in fiction that Jane Austen had to assure her readers that Mr. Morland "was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters," and Miss Martha Buskbody, the mantua-maker of Gandercleugh, whom Jedediah Cleishbotham ingeniously called to his aid in writing the conclusion of Old Mortality, assured him, as the fruit of her experience in reading through the stock of three circulating libraries that, in a novel, young people may fall in love without the countenance of their parents, "because it is essential to the necessary intricacy of the story." But apart from his characters, who are so colourless that they hardly hold our attention, Walpole bequeathed to his successors a remarkable collection of useful "properties." The background of his story is a Gothic castle, singularly unenchanted it is true, but capable of being invested by Mrs. Radcliffe with mysterious grandeur. Otranto contains underground vaults, ill-fitting doors with rusty hinges, easily extinguished lamps and a trapdoor—objects trivial and insignificant in Walpole's hands, but fraught with terrible possibilities. Otranto would have fulfilled admirably the requirements of Barrett's Cherubina, who, when looking for lodgings demanded—to the indignation of a maidservant, who came to the door—old pictures, tapestry, a spectre and creaking hinges. Scott, writing in 1821, remarks: "The apparition of the skeleton-hermit to the prince of Vicenza was long accounted a masterpiece of the horrible; but of late the valley of Jehosaphat could hardly supply the dry bones necessary for the exhibition of similar spectres." But Cherubina, whose palate was jaded by a surfeit of the pungent horrors of Walpole's successors, would probably have found The Castle of Otranto an insipid romance and would have lamented that he did not make more effective use of his supernatural machinery. His story offered hints and suggestions to those whose greater gifts turned the materials he had marshalled to better account, and he is to be honoured rather for what he instigated others to perform than for what he actually accomplished himself. The Castle of Otranto was not intended as a serious contribution to literature, but will always survive in literary history as the ancestor of a thriving race of romances.

Notes

¹ April 17, 1765.

² Nov. 13, 1784.

³ June 12, 1753.

⁴Remarks on Italy.

⁵ Aug. 4, 1753.

⁶Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay, vol. ii. Appendix ii.: A Visit to Strawberry Hill in 1786.

⁷ Jan. 5, 1766.

⁸ July 15, 1783.

⁹ March 26, 1765.

¹⁰ Nov. 5, 1782.

¹¹ It has been pointed out (Scott, Lives of the Novelists, note) that in Lope de Vega's Jerusalem the picture of Noradine stalks from its panel and addresses Saladine.

¹² Cf. Wallace, Blind Harry.

¹³Preface, 1764.