A touch of paganism in the boudoir: an ornate gallery designed by Thomas Pitt between 1759 and 1762 at Strawberry Hill

At the end of 1764 literature’s first horror story, The Castle of Otranto, was published in London under disguise. It was an immediate success, despite its fatuousness, and has never since been out of print. It didn’t take long before its author was obliged bashfully to step forward: Horace Walpole, man of fashion, antiquarian, member of the House of Commons, unwavering bachelor and youngest of the five children of Sir Robert Walpole.

Otranto established a genre, the gothic novel, but Horace Walpole had long been delving into spiky realms. In 1747 he had acquired a property outside London overlooking the Thames at Twickenham, a spot already renowned for Pope’s villa. Walpole proceeded to turn a plain little house into a glamorous sham castle, pretty vaults within, battlements without. He named it Strawberry Hill, installed his eccentric collections, and it became one of the sights of Europe, initiating the Georgian phase (known as gothick) of the gothic revival.

This summer, another revival will finally be completed as—after a 250-year interruption—a restored Strawberry Hill is opened up as an attraction for the public, as it was when Walpole lived there. The opening is preceded by an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum from 6th March, devoted to “Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill” and promising to re-create for the first time since the 18th century his pioneering collection of art.

Gothic had never died out entirely in Britain but the adoption of its churchy flourishes as a style for the home was quite new. In the 19th century it would again be associated with spiritual uplift but Walpole wasn’t at all religious—the Chapel at Strawberry Hill was a garden folly where he interred his pets (he loved animals, dogs particularly). He invented the word “gloomth,” combining ‘“gloomy” and “warmth,” to describe the effect he was after; and the taste for witchy gothick, like that for chinoiserie, was a characteristically English response to the domestication of baroque which is called rococo. The baroque was public and religious; the rococo was paganism in the boudoir.

Walpole’s other achievement, his correspondence, some would say was his greatest, since it is in the correspondence that all his aspects are incorporated. The man had plenty to write about. Eighteenth-century politics ran on social connections and, as the son of England’s first prime minister, Horace knew the great world from within. He’d always been a celebrity—and he lapped it up but paid the price. To the Reverend William Mason he wrote in 1773: “…it is not pleasant to read one’s private quarrels discussed in magazines and newspapers.” Through his relations he was attached to all levels of society, except the lowest: his brother Edward, for example, lived with a milliner’s apprentice and had four children by her, one of whom, Horace’s niece Maria, married the Duke of Gloucester, brother of George III. In addition he was good to his servants, who stayed long in his service.

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