Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford

Horace Walpole
Horace Walpole by Joshua Reynolds 1756 National Portrait Gallery, collection London .
Born	September 24 1717(1717-09-24) London, England, UK
Died	March 2 1797 (aged 79) Berkeley Square, London, England, UK
Occupation	Author, Politician
Parents	Robert Walpole and Catherine Shorter

Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (24 September, 1717 – 2 March, 1797), more commonly known as Horace Walpole, was a politician, writer, architectural innovator and cousin of Lord Nelson. His Letters are highly readable, and give a vivid picture of the more intellectual part of the aristocracy of his period.

Biography

Horace Walpole was born in London, the youngest son of British Prime Minister Robert Walpole. After he graduated from at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, he toured the Continent with his friend Thomas Gray from 1739 to 1741, when the two quarreled and parted. He was elected to Parliament in 1741 and served as an MP until 1767, confining himself largely to the role of spectator and defender of his father's memory. In 1747 he acquired a country house, Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, where he built a pseudo-Gothic castle, which became the showplace of England. His lasting architectural creation is Strawberry Hill, the home he built in Twickenham, south-west London in which he revived the Gothic style many decades before his Victorian successors. This fanciful concoction of neo-Gothic began a new architectural trend.

He was reconciled with Gray in 1745 and later published his friend's Pindaric odes, as well as many first editions of his own works from the private printing press he started at Strawberry Hill in 1757. Walpole's literary reputation rests primarily on his letters, which have great charm and polish and are invaluable pictures of Georgian England. More than 3,000 of his correspondences are extant and cover a period extending from 1732 to 1797. Among his more famous correspondents are Gray, Sir Horace Mann, Thomas Chatterton, and Mme Du Deffand. Walpole succeeded to the earldom of Orford in 1791. Besides his enthusiasm for medieval architecture and trappings, he anticipated the romanticism of the 19th cent. with his Gothic romance The Castle of Otranto (1765). His other important works include Historic Doubts on Richard III (1768), an attempt to rehabilitate the character of Richard; Anecdotes of Painting in England (4 vol., 1762–71); and posthumous works, Reminiscences (1798) and memoirs of the reigns of George II (1822) and George III (1845, 1859).

Politics

Following his father's politics, he was a devotee of King George II and Queen Caroline, siding with them against their son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, about whom Walpole wrote spitefully in his memoirs.

Walpole was a frequent visitor to Boyle Farm, Thames Ditton, to meet both the Boyle-Walsinghams and Lord Hertford.

His father was created Earl of Orford in 1742. Horace's elder brother, the 2nd Earl of Orford (c.1701–1751), passed the title on to his son, the 3rd Earl of Orford (1730–1791). When the 3rd Earl died unmarried, Horace Walpole became the 4th Earl of Orford. When Horace Walpole died in 1797 the title became extinct.

Writings

Strawberry Hill had its own printing press which supported Horace Walpole's intensive literary activity.

In 1764, he published his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, setting a literary trend to go with the architecture. From 1762 on, he published his Anecdotes of Painting in England, based on George Vertue's manuscript notes. His memoirs of the Georgian social and political scene, though heavily biased, are a useful primary source for historians.

In one of the numerous letters, from January 28, 1754, he coined the word serendipity which he said was derived from a "silly fairy tale" he had read, The Three Princes of Serendip. The oft-quoted epigram, "This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel," is from a letter of Walpole's to Anne, Countess of Ossory, on 16 August, 1776. The original, fuller version was in what he wrote to Sir Horace Mann on 31 Dec., 1769: "I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel – a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept."

The Orford Walpoles were not related to the popular Twentieth Century novelist, Hugh Walpole (1884–1941).

Personal life

Walpole's sexual orientation has been the subject of speculation. He never married, engaging in a succession of unconsummated flirtations with unmarriageable women, and counted among his close friends a number of women such as Anne Seymour Damer and Mary Berry named by a number of sources as lesbian. Many contemporaries described him as effeminate (one political opponent called him "a hermaphrodite horse"). The architectural historian Timothy Mowl, in his biography Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider offers the theory that Walpole was openly homosexual, and infers that he had an affair with Thomas Gray, dropping him during their Grand Tour in favour of Lord Lincoln (later the 2nd Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne). Nevertheless, there is no explicit evidence despite Walpole's extensive correspondence, and previous biographers such as Lewis, Fothergill and Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer have interpreted him as asexual.

Formal styles from birth to death

• Mr. Horace Walpole (1717-1741)
• Mr. Horace Walpole, MP (1741-1742)
• The Hon. Horace Walpole, MP (1742-1768)
• The Hon. Horace Walpole (1768-1791)
• The Rt. Hon. The Earl of Orford (1791-1797)

Trivia

When Walpole's cat Selma died, Thomas Gray wrote a poem Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Chalcraft, Anna. Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole's Gothic Castle, Frances Lincoln, 2007. ISBN 978-0711226876
• Harfst, Betsy P. Horace Walpole and the Unconscious: An Experiment in Freudian Analysis, Ayer Co Publications, 1980. ISBN 978-0405126451
• Walpole, Horace. The Yale Editions of Horace Walpole's Correspondance (Vol. 36), Yale University Press, 1973. ISBN 978-0300016673
• Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0192834409

External links

• The Literary Encyclopedia.
• Works by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford. Project Gutenberg
  • The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1
  • The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2
  • The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 3
  • The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 4
  • Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume I
  • Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume II
  • The Castle of Otranto
• The Friends of Strawberry Hill
• The Twickenham Museum - Horace Walpole

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