Gothic 'artefictions': fabricating history in Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill and The Castle of Otranto (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Foundationalist, 2021
{Nina Merkofer, University of Basel} Ancient castles and ivy-covered ruins with spiral staircases, eerie dungeons, and hidden trap doors set the scenery for terrific tales of lurking villains, mysterious outsiders, fair maidens, valorous heroes, and supernatural on-goings. These dark, uncanny, and suspenseful stories draw the readers into the mysterious and fantastic world of the Gothic. Surrounded by the ideas of enlightenment, Gothic literature presented a backlash against the predictability and regularity of the literature of the Age of Reason. The core ideas of this literary trend were retrieved from the stories of traditional folksay and from gripping mysteries of the gloomy past.
Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection
Scholars of eighteenth-century literature have long seen the development of the Gothic as a break from neoclassical aesthetics, but this article posits a more complex engagement with classical imitation at the origins of the genre. In Horace Walpole's formative Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, his Gothic drama The Mysterious Mother, and in the curiosities in his villa, classical elements are detached from their contexts and placed in startling and strange juxtapositions. His tendency towards the fragmentation of ancient culture, frequently expressed through the imagery of dismemberment, suggests an aesthetic not of imitation, but of collection. Moreover, rather than abandoning or ignoring the classical, Walpole reconfigures literary history to demonstrate elements of monstrosity and hybridity already present in Greek and Roman texts.
Horace Walpole (1717–97) is well known for two important Gothic projects realised in mid eighteenth-century Britain: his villa, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham (1747/8–80); and The Castle of Otranto (1764), a Gothic novel. These two manifestations of Walpole’s ‘Gothic imagination’ are frequently linked in critical literature on the Gothic Revival and medievalism more broadly; the relationship between Strawberry Hill, Otranto and manuscript illustrations visualising Otranto’s narrative has, on the other hand, received far less attention. This article brings together a number of important and hitherto overlooked sources that help address this imbalance. In particular, it examines two large-scale watercolours by John Carter (1748–1817) that narrate some of Otranto’s pivotal scenes, allowing critically overlooked subtleties in their iconographies to emerge. The work establishes how Carter’s pre-existing interests — in particular, in Gothic architectural forms and heraldry — are harnessed to govern his representations of Otranto. These paintings, together with Carter’s other illustrations, demonstrate Walpole’s authorship of Otranto, expressed through codes hidden in plain sight. Unlike the frequently touted link between Strawberry Hill and Otranto in secondary criticism, Carter’s illustrations, the argument reveals, does not explicitly make this connection.
The panelled heraldic apartment of Horace Walpole (1717–1797) at Strawberry Hill
The British Art Journal in association with the Berger Collection Educational Trust, 2018
's Gothic villa at Twickenham, was built over the course of three major campaigns between 1748 and 1776. As one of the most famous products of the Georgian Gothic Revival, the house, now under the care of the Strawberry Hill Trust, has justifiably been subject to repeated scrutiny by scholars: explored in studies devoted exclusively to the house, it has also been addressed also within the broader contexts of the Gothic Revival, Georgian architecture, design, literature and eighteenth-century medievalism. 1 Michael McCarthy's Origins of the Gothic Revival (1987), Michael Snodin's Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill (2009), Marion Harney's Place-Making for the Imagination: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill (2013), and my monograph, Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Interiors and Furniture (2016), bring together new interpretations of and evidence concerning the house, its architecture, collections and imaginative connexions. Timothy Mowl, George Haggerty and Matthew Reeve have also framed Walpole and his architectural project to various degrees in terms of queer theory, regarding it and the buildings it immediately inspired as and the product of a queer family romance. 2 Kenneth Clark, who famously rejuvenated the
2018
Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole’s Gothic villa at Twickenham, was built over the course of three major campaigns 1748–1776. As one of the most famous products of the Georgian Gothic Revival, the house, now under the care of the Strawberry Hill Trust, has justifiably been subject to repeated scrutiny by scholars. Not only has it been explored in studies devoted exclusively to the house, it has also been addressed also within the broader contexts of the Gothic Revival, Georgian architecture, design, literature and 18th-century medievalism. Michael McCarthy’s Origins of the Gothic Revival (1987), Michael Snodin’s Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (2009), Marion Harney’s Place-Making for the Imagination: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill (2013), and my monograph Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Interiors and Furniture (2016) bring together new interpretations of and evidence concerning the house, its architecture, collections and imaginative connexions. Timothy Mowl, George Haggerty and Matthew Reeve have also set Walpole and his architectural project in relation to various degrees in terms of queer theory, regarding it and the buildings it immediately inspired as the product of a queer family romance. Kenneth Clark, who famously rejuvenated the study of the Gothic Revival in the early 20th century, claimed as early as 1928 that ‘Strawberry Hill has been studied as least as much as it deserves’. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, the indefatigable collector and executive editor of the magisterial Yale edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (1937–83), acquired almost every piece of Walpoliana in existence in the 20th century, using much of it as the foundation for his important essay on Walpole’s villa in 1934. His collection has been systematically surveyed and published by Michael McCarthy and Clive Wainwright in their respective monographs on the Gothic Revival and the Romantic interior. Given the rich and ever expanding corpus of work on Walpole and Strawberry Hill, it seems unlikely that significant new pieces of evidence concerning the most studied and written-about Gothic Revival building of its age can materialise, and can illustrate a significantly different interpretation of and engagement with medieval and historic aesthetics that articulate family pedigree. Undocumented and otherwise unknown manuscripts can, however, still come to light: in this case, a collection of previously uncatalogued loose papers in the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. These documents in Walpole’s hand delineate a proposed, although ultimately unrealised, scheme for a panelled and heraldically ornamented room that, given its armorial embellishment, could only make sense at Strawberry Hill. Along with a working drawing for this fugitive proposal on the same size stock, the manuscripts also include, in Walpole’s hand: genealogical tables tracing his pedigree back to Catherine Parr and William Cecil, Lord Burleigh; Walpole’s own quartered coat of arms, captioned ‘My Arms’ and inscribed with Walpole’s heraldic monogram, HW, surrounded by cross-crosslets from his shield; the arms of Walpole’s nephew, George, 3rd Earl of Orford; and the 24 coats of arms making up the quarterings of Catherine Hastings, wife of Philip, 1st Earl of Chesterfield. These last arms were of interest to Walpole not least because the quarterings comprise a significant number of noble and armigerous ancestors from his maternal line, and the revised marshalling of these quarters – moving the Nevil arms from the second to sixteenth position – reflects the manuscripts’ nature as works-in-progress. This assemblage of fragmentary notes and working drawings on loose sheets confirms and underscores what we already know about the importance and relevance of heraldry, ancestry and pedigree to Walpole and Strawberry Hill, his villa self-consciously styled as the ‘castle … of my ancestors’. The present essay addresses three folios from this group of papers that relate directly to the hitherto entirely unknown heraldic panelled room planned by Walpole.