SOURCE: "The Castle of Otranto— Horace Walpole, His Life and Pursuits—Strawberry Hill—The Mysterious Mother," in The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1927. Reprint: Humanities Press, 1964.

[In the following excerpt from The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism (1964), Railo discusses the importance of castle imagery—and specifically Strawberry Hill—to The Castle of Otranto.]

I

The student of English literature is fairly certain at one time or another, as he arrives at the dawning romanticism of the latter half of the eighteenth century, to come across a small and unassuming booklet entitled The Castle of Otranto, with the subtitle A Gothic Story. The book consists of some hundred and fifty pages and has as frontispiece a fine steel engraving of an elderly man with a wide-awake expression dressed in eighteenth-century costume; underneath is the magnificent name: HORACE WALPOLE, EARL OF ORFORD. Acquaintance with the book in question, which appeared in 1764, is apt to awaken a varied series of visions of romantic authors and of the materials and history of romanticism, for scarcely a handbook of English literature exists in which some kind of mention is not made of it and of its noble author.¹

Horace Walpole, bom in 1717, was the third son of Robert Walpole, the all-powerful minister of George II. After the usual education at Eton and Cambridge, he was despatched on the Grand Tour to France and Italy, in the company of an Eton schoolmate of like age, the poet Thomas Gray. Their travels lasted two years, after which the friends fell out² and returned to England. Walpole was now entrusted with certain lucrative posts and for twenty-six years continued a Member of Parliament. At no time had he any particular reputation in political circles, and when his father's career closed in 1742, his private interests began gradually to gain the upper hand. In 1747 he purchased the property called Strawberry Hill, on the Thames, near Windsor, and there he spent the remainder of his life, wholly absorbed in antiquarian, artistic and literary interests. He inherited the title of Earl of Orford in 1791 and in 1797 he died.

We may regard Walpole as a typical upper-class dilettante who, living in comfortable circumstances and lacking a definite aim in life, is tempted to devote his time to congenial minor occupations. Feeling himself attracted by the past, by the "Gothic Era,"³ he commenced to study the period with all the spasmodic enthusiasm of the amateur. The antiquarian spirit has ever been strong in England, and in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the bonds of classicism were beginning to break and attention was concentrating upon those things which seemed to bear the ennobling and inspiring marks of time, it broke out in a laborious studying, describing and collecting of old coins, buildings and ruins, ancient poetry, etc. While better-equipped men were patiently creating a scientific basis for such study, devoted and enthusiastic laymen of the type of Walpole appeared; men of a class whose ludicrous side has been perpetuated by Scott in the person of Mr. Oldbuck, who provided the model for Dickens' immortal chairman of the Pickwick Club. To be sure, the satire hardly applies to Walpole, who was in his way a learned man, and whose keen intelligence and refined, even if sometimes mistaken, feeling for art awaken respect; nevertheless, the "Gothic" rubbish collected at his country-house recalls irresistibly certain of the best and most stupendous finds of Messrs. Oldbuck and Pickwick.⁴

The memory of Walpole as a collector of antiquities has been preserved chiefly through his whim of transforming Strawberry Hill into a kind of Gothic castle. The elements and basic outlines of Gothic architecture had not at that time been fully investigated, and the necessity for a thorough reconstruction on the basis of style remaining unperceived, the methods adopted were simple enough. In the measure permitted by the previous structure of Strawberry Hill and the disposition of its rooms, a round tower was added here, a chapel thrown out there, stained glass placed in the windows, old armour and weapons distributed in suitable spots, a mantelpiece made out of an altar, and so on, the result being fondly imagined to constitute a Gothic castle. Thus twenty years were occupied in these reconstructions and the collection of material, during which time Strawberry Hill acquired fame and became a resort for hosts of the curious. The proprietor and creator of the establishment was apparently well satisfied with the result, for he published an illustrated account of the place.⁵

Though Walpole had thus revealed his imperfect acquaintance with the Gothic style, Strawberry Hill helped considerably in bringing about renewed knowledge and appreciation of the period. It is permissible for us to smile at Walpole's building, but it has its own special significance as an expression of the conception which, despite the many well-preserved real medieval relics in England, Walpole and the majority of his contemporaries had formed for themselves of that almost legendary building, "the haunted castle," the notion of which he attempted to delineate in his new romanticism. The knowledge that this famous stage-setting of the "terror-romanticists" actually existed in two separate versions before its introduction into literature is not without interest.

This is not to be taken as implying that Walpole's Gothic building activities at Strawberry Hill were the sole generators of his desire to experiment with the Gothic spirit in literature. The attention of those days was in general, and in a manner expressly calculated to inspire authors, directed towards the Gothic. Edmund Burke had, in 1756, published his study of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, thereby formulating the theory which the whole school of terror followed in practice. And in 1762, two years before the appearance of The Castle of Otranto, Bishop Hurd (1720-1808) had published those Letters on Chivalry and Romance, which furnished powerful support to the brothers Warton in their delight and interest in antiquities. Hurd appears as an enthusiastic advocate of the "Gothic Era," propounding the question whether Gothic romance might not contain something peculiarly suited to the views of a genius and to the ends of poetry, and whether the philosophically inclined people of his own day had not gone too far in making of it a perpetual source of ridicule and contempt. He avers that if Homer had known it, he would have preferred it to the manners of his own times, as he would have found in it more "gallantry" and "superior solemnity of superstitions." The influence of such views and of Hurd's book in drawing attention to Gothicism cannot be overestimated. Among those in whom a desire was born to attempt practical results in this field was Walpole. His knowledge of medieval conditions was, however, fragmentary and inexact. He had his own conception of its architecture, but he knew nothing of its literature, with the exception, perhaps, of a few popular ballads. When speaking of Gothicism in the prologues and epilogues to the Castle of Otranto and to his play The Mysterious Mother, he instinctively appeals to Shakespeare who was, as we shall see later, an important guide for the author in matters and conceptions connected with Gothicism.

Walpole was a busy letter-writer, his correspondents including the poet Gray and Madame du Deffand, whom he had met in Paris in 1765. As a composer of lively and witty letters he was among the foremost writers of his day. Of the rest of his productions I have mentioned only his play The Mysterious Mother, written in 1768, that being the only work except The Castle of Otranto, which falls within the sphere of this study.⁶

3

During his constant endeavours to provide his "Gothic" castle with relics of medieval days, the idea seems to have occurred to Walpole that it might be worth while trying to affix and to present to others, in the form of fiction, some of the Gothic fancies with which his own brain was teeming. As to the manner in which this idea was realized, he himself has left us, in a letter to a friend, the following original account: "Shall I even confess to you, what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover 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 armor. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it. Add, that I was very glad to think of anything rather than politics. In short, I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drank my tea, about six o'clock, till half an hour after one in the morning, when my hands and fingers were so weary, that I could not hold the pen to finish the sentence, but left Matilda and Isabella talking in the middle of a paragraph."⁸

We observe the author's satisfaction with his work and that he was no longer afraid to disclose himself as its writer. In this he was affected by the reception accorded to the book, as until he was assured of its success he had attempted to hide his paternity. The first edition of The Castle of Otranto, printed at his own printing-press at Strawberry Hill, had been given out as a translation by "W. Marshall, Gent.," from the Italian manuscript of a certain "Onuphrio Muralto." To mislead the public Walpole had written in his preface: "The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savours of barbarism. The style is the purest Italian. If the story was written near the time when it is supposed to have happened, it must have been 1095, the era of the first crusade, and 1243, the date of the last, or not long afterwards." … The author had obviously been afraid that the strangeness of his book might well, at a time when his father's enemy, Doctor Johnson, and the school of taste represented by him still wielded an unshaken and formidable power over the reading public, expose him to ridicule, and had therefore deemed it prudent to hide for the time being behind a pseudonym and the artifice of a literary hoax. But critics and the public are not so easily misled. Was not the book printed at Strawberry Hill, whose owner's Gothic interests were widely known? Even the name "Onuphrio Muralto" carried a faint oral suggestion of "Horace Walpole." The preface, too, contained unmistakable hints that the author had had some actual castle in his mind, which could be none other than Strawberry Hill. Therefore, when the book was favourably received, Walpole emerged from his hiding-place, in the next edition defending his tactics by explaining that he had mistrusted his own abilities and the novelty of the attempt. He had "resigned his performance to the impartial judgment of the public, determined to let it perish in obscurity, if disapproved; nor meaning to avow such a trifle, unless better judges should pronounce that he might own it without a blush."⁹

4

The stage-setting with which before long the student of horror-romanticism is inevitably confronted is a species of old "Gothic" castle, the scene of innumerable horrors, capable of touching the imagination each time we see it, as when the curtain rises on ramparts and towers bathed in the spectral moonlight of Hamlet. The reader quickly observes that this "haunted castle" plays an exceedingly important part in these romances; so important, indeed, that were it eliminated the whole fabric of romance would be bereft of its foundation and would lose its predominant atmosphere. The entire stock-in-trade of horror-romanticism in its oldest and purest form consists, as will be shown in the following pages, chiefly of the properties and staff of this haunted castle, and, as we proceed farther in time, of motives based in the first instance upon these, so that to my mind acquaintance with the materials of horror-romanticism is best begun with this central stage and its appurtenances. Let us start, therefore, with a visit to the ancient vaults of Otranto Castle.¹⁰

Of the castle's outward appearance no actual description is given, nor does the rapidity of the narrator's style permit him to linger over a calm and detailed picture of his setting. Nevertheless, the reader's imagination is soon aware of a concentration on the limited sphere of what seems to be a medieval castle. We are taken into the castle-yard and the chapel, where a marriage is taking place, and into various rooms, of which one contains the collection of ancestral portraits indispensable to such an edifice. The underground portion is full of bewildering vaulted passages, one of which leads through a secret door to a cave beyond the castle confines, another to the church of St. Nicholas. An awesome silence reigns in these subterranean vaults, a silence broken only by the creak of rusty hinges as a breath of air somewhere sets an old door moving. In their gloomy shade the maiden, flying from the lord of the castle, can at first hardly make out the faintly gleaming object in some hiding-place, and then only with difficulty does she perceive it to be the key to the complicated lock of a secret trap-door. The banqueting-hall is fitted with galleries whence the young heroine can, unseen, regard her lover and where she can fall into the inevitable swoon when the tyrant sentences him to death or lifelong confinement in the deepest dungeon of the darkest tower. Over the gate hangs a brazen horn which one cannot fail to notice, especially as the reason for its being there is hard to understand.

With some few such strokes Walpole conjures up his castle before the reader, avoiding overmuch detail, but continually stimulating the imagination. It must be admitted, too, that he has succeeded, for some hint of strangeness and austere majesty is undoubtedly left in the mind.¹¹ A good example of what his fantasy of a Gothic castle betokened to him in importance and atmosphere is provided by the opening lines of The Mysterious Mother, into which he has effectively condensed the whole of Gothic horror:

What awful silence! How these antique towers
And vacant courts chill the suspended soul,
Till expectation wears the cast of fear;
And fear, half-ready to become devotion,
Mumbles a kind of mental orison,
It knows not wherefore.

Notes

¹ A portrait of Walpole accompanies the 1907 edition (Chatto & Windus) which I have used. He was refined to the point of effeminacy. "He always entered a room in a style of affected delicacy, chapeau bras between his hands, knees bent and feet on tiptoe. He usually dressed in lavender, with partridge silk stockings and gold buckles, and with lace ruffles and frill." R. Garnett and E. Gosse: English Literature, III, p. 367 (1903). A fine edition de luxe (containing also The Mysterious Mother), with a preface by Montague Summers, was issued by Constable in 1924 (vide article by E. Gosse in The Sunday Times, Nov. 2). The above description of Walpole hails originally from Letitia Matilda Hawkins's Anecdotes, Biographical Sketches, and Memoirs, where pp. 87-117 and 307-312 are devoted to Walpole. The father of this author, Sir John Hawkins, was a friend and neighbour of Walpole and wrote the biography of Doctor Johnson which was so severely handled by Boswell. She gives the further information regarding Walpole's personal appearance: "His figure was … not merely tall, but more properly long, and slender to excess; his complexion, and particularly his hands, of a most unhealthy paleness." Quoted from De Quincey's article Anecdotage.

² The cause of the quarrel was Walpole's inability to refrain from boasting of his position as the son of the omnipotent minister. In any case they were not well-matched travelling companions; Walpole danced and amused himself, while Gray studied Art and Music. Later they were reconciled and Walpole acknowledged himself to have been at fault. E. Gosse: Gray, pp. 43-44.

³ "Gothic, a term of reproach, synonymous with barbarous, lawless and tawdry." W. L. Phelps: The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, p. 15 (1893).

⁴ Scott makes good-natured fun of this description in The Antiquary. Mr. Oldbuck's find, a stone with what he takes to be an important ancient inscription, appears in much the same way as that of "Bil Stumps His Mark" in Pickwick Papers.

⁵A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, 1768. I have not had the opportunity of reading this work. Descriptions of Walpole's villa are included in all works written about him, amongst which I would mention Austin Dobson: Eighteenth Century Vignettes (undated), "A Day at Strawberry Hill," pp. 206-217, 2nd ed. A picture of Strawberry Hill is given by Garnett and Gosse. The most exhaustive source is Paul Yvon's book La Vie d'un Dilettante, Book IV, pp. 487-646; "Walpole 'gothicisant"'; p. 551: "Strawberry Hill et le Château d'Otranto, le roman de Walpole, sont donc, selon la volante de leur createur, indissolublement lies."

⁶ "Gray and Horace Walpole exceeded all their English contemporaries in the composition of charmingly picturesque familiar letters." (Gamett and Gosse, op. cit., III, p. 363.) Information regarding Walpole: the work by Dobson mentioned in the preceding note; Sir Walter Scott: The Lives of the Novelists (1821), originally published as an introduction to Ballantyne's edition of The Castle of Otranto (1811) and included with the latter in Ballantyne's Novelists' Library, Part V; my own copy is from the Everyman's Library Series, London, pp. 188-203; Henry A. Beers: A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 229-243 and 249-255 (1906); Oliver Elton: A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830, I, p. 203; Wilbur L. Cross: Development of the English Novel, pp. 101-103 (1911); Fr. Hovey Stoddard: The Evolution of the English Novel, p. 95 (1913); Helene Richter: Geschichte der Englischen Romantik, I, pp. 172-191 (1911); Austin Dobson: Eighteenth Century Studies, pp. 166-177; Dictionary of English Biography; Macaulay: Critical and Historical Essays, in which is a murderous criticism of Walpole as a politician and an author; Chamber's Cyclopedia of English Literature (1901); Henrik Schuck: Allmän litteraturhistoria, V, pp. 372-376; P. v. Tieghem: Le mouvement romantique, 2nd ed., Paris (1923).

The most noteworthy and exhaustive sources of information regarding Walpole are Paul Yvon's La Vie d'un Dilettante; Horace Walpole, 1717-1797; Essai de Biographie psychologique et littéraire (XV + 872 pages, large 8vo); and his Horace Walpole as a Poet (XV + 217) (1924), both of which I have utilized. The passage relating to Hurd has been compiled from the textbooks mentioned and the preface written by Montague Summers. Schuick declares Walpole to have been ignorant of medievalism.…

⁸ March 9th, 1765, to William Cole. Quoted also by Beers, p. 236.

⁹ Walpole founded his printing-press, Officina arbuteana, as he called it, at Strawberry Hill, in the summer of 1757; its first publication was Gray's Odes. He had been so severely criticized for his earlier literary production that he had become timid. The Castle of Otranto was at first ascribed to Gray, which made Walpole remark that people msut be fools indeed to think such a trifle worthy of a genius like Gray. Gosse: Gray, p. 169. Doctor Johnson admitted that "Horry Walpole … got together a great many curious little things, and told them in an elegant manner." By this the Doctor did not however intend The Castle of Otranto, which it is hardly likely that he had read, as Boswell is silent on the matter. Walpole did not belong to the admirers of the "Great Bear," or even to his circle of acquaintance, for the Doctor had made acquaintance difficult by his Parliamentary Reports in The Gentleman's Magazine, in which he invariably made out a poor case for Sir Robert Walpole. Moreover, Walpole was a Whig, and thus in the Doctor's eyes a "dog" and a "rascal." The only question on which Walpole and Johnson were of the same opinion was in regard to Ossian. Phelps, op. cit., p. 110.

¹⁰ Both Beers, p. 253, and Dibelius: Englische Romankunst, I, pp. 290-293, 2nd ed. (1922), and other investigators of terror-romanticism take into account the central position of the Haunted Castle, but they have not arrived at the synthesis of the material, at its decisive significance, to which my own studies have led. Yvon, op. cit., p. 490: "Comment cet Anglais du milieu du XVIII siecle (Walpole), grand seigneur, homme en place et homme a la mode, s'etait-il ainsi epris du charme du passe? Pour le comprendre, il suffit de garder sans cesse, presente a l'esprit, l'image du petit chateau gothique de Strawberry Hill a travers toutes ses transformations, et de rappeler que ce chateau est moins une tentative de reconstitution archeologique, que l'expression d'un etat d'ame."

¹¹ The account given in the paragraph can be compared with pp. 18, 19, 21, 62 and 72 of The Castle of Otranto.