The Castle Of Otranto – Horace Walpole

Gothic revival architecture is something I’ve always found appealing, it’s all that exuberant decoration bordering on excess and then taking it a step further, it makes it look like someone was having fun (though clearly no one was thinking about what a nightmare it would be to dust) and that can’t be a bad thing (unless you have to dust it). Horace Walpole was an early champion of the Gothic revival, his Strawberry Hill a stage set for his imagination to play on.

Having discovered the architecture the literature soon followed but I’ve been better at collecting gothic novels than reading them. I bought ‘The Castle of Otranto’ 18 months ago on the back of the excellent Strawberry Hill exhibition at the V&A and still hadn’t read it when I saw it come up on the classics circuit. It’s a short book and this seemed like a good opportunity to buckle down – after all if you’re going to read gothic at all you really should get the book that started it all ticked off the list.

Having read Otranto my overall feeling is just that – one of box ticking, I’ve done it and I don’t need to do it again. Horace Walpole is not a brilliant novelist - though he does have some dazzling ideas. It’s hard to gauge how I’d have felt about ‘The Castle of Otranto’ if I hadn’t already read ‘Northanger Abbey’, or ‘Frankenstein’ or a good chunk of ETA Hoffman and plenty of others besides. I can just about imagine that it must have caused something of a stir when first published; with its collection of walking portraits, creaking doors, visions, death via giant mystical helmets, mysterious knights and damsels in distress there’s plenty to enjoy. It’s a testament to Walpole that plenty of people did enjoy Otranto and more than that took up his ideas and made some great books out of them.

 Reading some of the other responses to ‘The Castle of Otranto’ from the classics circuit I find myself wanting to defend it – there are plenty of redeeming features; Manfred is a decently complex villain with a lot on his shoulders, Theodore the pattern book hero with a positively suicidal desire to show his heart and soul are pure just manages to stay on the right side of parody, and Bianca the maid - well she belongs to eighteenth century London rather than 11^th century Italy and is a great comic touch.

I’m pleased to have finally read this book, just for the curiosity value alone it was time well spent. I think it will add to my appreciation of Scott when I come to read him again, and hope that it will help me with Thomas Love Peacock and Ann Radcliffe when they come off the shelf. Mostly though it’s inspired me to want to reach for Georgette Heyer’s ‘Sylvester’ where she does her own parody of the Gothic novel, it’s a while since I’ve read it and I’m wondering how it will hold up. 

The V&A

I find the V&A entrancing and infuriating in almost equal measure. I’ve been visiting it for the best part of twenty years yet its layout is still a total mystery to me. There was a whole run of rooms devoted to furniture that I saw in 1995 and have never found again, also a staircase with a scale model of (I think) Ranelagh Gardens at the top – it was a big model so I wonder what happened to it. I know I didn’t imagine these things because I was with twenty other History of Art students at the time – we had quite a lecture on the garden model.

It’s maddening but it’s also part of what makes the V&A so magical – rather like Hogwarts perhaps. The cast court is pretty amazing as well – some of the casts are just mind bogglingly huge, it was a real pleasure to be able to introduce the Scottish one to it; like discovering it for the first time all over again. At this point I have to say if you don’t know the V&A or haven’t bothered with the cast court then do check it out – it’s amazing (as I’m sure Rachel from Book Snob will confirm if she reads this), although to be fair the whole place is just the most amazing collection of stuff ever – truly one of the world’s great museums.

The reason for being at the V&A was for the ‘Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill’ exhibition (6th march to 4th July). I’ve wanted to visit actual Strawberry Hill ever since the same professor who guided us around the V&A lectured on it, my ambition should finally be realised this autumn when it re-opens. In preparation I mean to read ‘The Castle of Otranto’. I was going to read it before the exhibition only to discover that I’ve never acquired a copy, a situation now fixed (I’m pleased and a little impressed to report that the V&A bookshop stocks the Oxford World Classics edition of ‘The Castle of Otranto’ which happens to be the cheapest...)

I will admit that it’s the sort of book that I read, if not actually out of a sense of duty, at least partly as a box ticking exercise in an attempt to get as complete a picture as possible of whatever is currently interesting me. Having seen the exhibition I’m keener to read it for itself. Horace Walpole is a fascinating character; if I was having the fantasy dinner party he would certainly be on the guest list (I wonder what he would make of Vita Sackville-West who would also be at the table.) and he pops up in the most unexpected places; for example first encountered by me in Georgette Heyer, which isn’t so unexpected given her level of research, but still seems a little unlikely. I wonder also what Walpole would have made of that – his portrait, at least the Reynolds versions, show a shy looking man, which he seems to have been. On the other hand he loved to show off his ‘little gothic castle’ so maybe he would have enjoyed his guest appearances in historical romances, and he would have been delighted to know how much admired Strawberry Hill still is, and that it's still a source of inspiration to artists like the wonderful Claire Dalby (who's woodcut has pride of place on my wall).