Summary

The events which the story narrates are supposed to have occurred sometime in the twelfth or the thirteenth century, and although there is a real Otranto (on the Strait of Otranto, in southern Italy) the location is essentially dreamlike, while the names of Manfred, the Prince of Otranto in the story, and of Conrad, his ailing son, sound more German than Italian.

The story opens as Manfred is making hasty preparations for the marriage of Conrad to Isabella, daughter of the Marquis of Vicenza, whom he has secured in the castle with the connivance of her guardians and during the absence of her father. Manfred's servants attribute the haste to his dread of an old prophecy which declares 'That the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it.'

Before the wedding can be solemnized, Conrad is crushed to death by a giant helmet which suddenly crashes into the courtyard. Afraid of being left without a male heir, Manfred determines to divorce his devoted wife, Hippolita, and to marry Isabella himself. Horrified by the proposal, Isabella escapes through an underground passage to the nearby church of St Nicholas and the protection of Father Jerome. She is aided in her escape by a handsome young peasant named Theodore, who bears a striking resemblance to the portrait of Alonso, the original Prince of Otranto (poisoned by Manfred's grandfather so that he could usurp the principality).

Theodore, already under suspicion of playing some part, through sorcery, in the death of Conrad, and now also suspected of helping Isabella, is imprisoned but secretly released by Manfred's daughter Matilda, with whom Theodore falls in love.

All kinds of complications follow, including the arrival of Isabella's father to demand the restoration of his daughter and to challenge Manfred to a duel; the flight of Isabella to a nearby cave, where she is protected by Theodore, who wounds her father when he mistakes him for one of Manfred's retainers; and a treaty between Isabella's father, who has recovered from his wounds, and Manfred whereby the former gives his consent to the match between !sabella and Manfred. Attending these complications are a number of mysterious and supernatural manifestations, all full of dire warning to Manfred.

Eventually Manfred, believing that Isabella and Theodore are in love, and hearing that Theodore and a lady are praying together before the tomb of Alonso, hurries to the church himself, and stabs the lady—only to discover that he has killed his own daughter, Matilda. The supernatural forces that have been at work in the background now bring matters to a climax. The ghost of Alonso, a gigantic figure (the owner of the helmet and of an equally outsize sword) has, in accordance with the prophecy, grown too big for the edifice and begins to break it asunder. Terror at last drives Manfred to admit that he is a usurper. Theodore turns out to be the son of Father Jerome and also the rightful heir to Alonso. Manfred and his wife Hippolita retire to houses of religion, while Theodore is established as prince of Otranto and, although still sorrowing for Matilda, marries her best friend Isabella 'persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.'

Critical commentary

It will be seen from the summary that supernatural elements play as important a part in The Castle of Otranto as the mediaeval trappings, and contemporary readers were duly terrified. Gray, for example, wrote that he and his Cambridge friends were 'afraid to go to bed o'nights'. Besides the mysterious appearance of the giant helmet and sword accompanied by 'a hollow and rustling sound', there are a huge armoured hand on a bannister (as in Walpole's dream), a skeleton in a monk's habit, drops of blood that fall from the nose of Alonso's statue, and a portrait of Manfred's grandfather, the original usurper, that suddenly comes to life. This last device—which has, of course, grown stale over the years by constant repetition—was long regarded as particularly horrifying—especially as the portrait, with 'an audible sigh', steps down from the frame, causing Manfred to exclaim (with echoes of Hamlet when confronted by his father's ghost):

'Do I dream? … or are the devils. themselves in league against me? Speak, infernal spectre! Or, if thou art my grandsire, why dost thou too conspire against thy wretched descendant?'

Then, as the vision gestures him to follow:

'Lead on!' cried Manfred; 'I will follow thee to the gulph of perdition!' The spectre marched sedately, but dejected, to the end of the gallery, and turned into a chamber on the right hand …

That gives something of the flavour of the novel, which was an important harbinger of certain aspects of the Romantic Revival, in which fondness for supernatural terrors was to some extent symptomatic of the desire to break out of the imaginative and emotional restraints imposed by the realism of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding and Smollett.

The contribution of The Castle of Otranto to the future of the English novel was twofold. First, it initiated the Gothic novel, which soon began to be called also 'the novel of terror', and which had a long progeny. There were a number of genuinely original works of fiction inspired by it, among them Mrs Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1796)—which was so popular that its author was nicknamed 'Monk' Lewis. Later, famous writers of tales of horror and the supernatural who were indirectly influenced by Walpole's example included Charles Maturin, author of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Sheridan Le Fanu in Uncle Silas (1864) and the early nineteenth-century American, Edgar Allen Poe, as well as numerous later writers in the same genre—not to mention the makers of horror movies in our own times.

Second, the fact that Walpole had turned to the historical past, no matter how amateurishly, was of considerable importance in itself. At the height of the Augustan period, the past (except for that of classical Greece and Rome) was regarded as something dark and barbaric with little to teach a society which, to the Augustans, marked the highest possible point of cultural development—even Shakespeare was considered an 'untutored genius', several of whose plays had been 'civilized' by being put into heroic couplets.

The Castle of Otranto helped to shake a cultural confidence that showed signs of degenerating into complacency, and to point the way to that fruitful rediscovery of the past and of a sense of history, which was one of the most striking outcomes of the Romantic Revival. It was not surprising, therefore, that Sir Walter Scott should, in 1811, have praised The Castle of Otranto as 'remarkable not only for the wild interest of the story, but as the first modern attempt to found a tale of amusing fiction upon the basis of the ancient romances of chivalry.'

When The Castle of Otranto was reissued in 1964, to mark the two hundredth anniversary of its first publication, it was its hundred and fifteenth appearance at least—with many more editions still unaccounted for. It was obviously, in its day, very popular indeed. It still arouses sufficient interest to make the reader want to know how it works out, especially as, in marked contrast to most eighteenth-century novels, it is only about a hundred pages long. But its importance today is that it was a kind of bridging novel, published within the Age of Reason but inaugurating a number of developments usually associated with the period that followed it. As such, no account of the growth of the English novel would be complete without some examination of it.