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Introduction
Horace Walpole at 300
Jakub Lipski – Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz
Abstract
This special issue is published in the context of the tercentary of Horace Walpole’s birth (1717-1797). It introduces the main topics and research interests of the collection.
Résumé
Ce numéro spécial est publié à l’occasion du tricentenaire d’Horace Walpole (1717-1797). Il introduit les grands thèmes et les sujets de recherche de l’ensemble.
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This special issue of Image [&] Narrative is devoted to the work of Horace Walpole (1717–1797) (Fig. 1) —
the writer, antiquarian and grand arbiter of taste in Georgian England. The tercentenary year 2017 has been an occasion for revisiting Walpole’s life and work, both of which left a permanent imprint on British and European culture. The essays collected in this issue look at one of the most significant aspects of his versatile cultural activities – the word and image crossovers, characterising such diverse fields as fiction, non-fiction, drama, architecture and design, all of which will come under scrutiny in what follows. As a matter of fact, it can be argued that the paradigms of image and narrative, or the policy to uncover narratives behind images, on the one hand, and treat the narrative as a sequence of images, on the other, underpin Walpole’s best known and most successful projects. His life achievement – the Gothic restructuring and renovation of the Strawberry Hill villa, widely imitated in Britain and Continental Europe – is an outstanding display of a fruitful arrangement of architecture, design, painting, sculpture and the written word.
Walpole’s opus magnum was a product of his life-long devotion to the visual arts sparked by his artistic education and his father’s impressive collection of painting, and then reinforced during his travels through Italy in 1739–1741. As a Grand Tourist, Walpole indulged his antiquarian passions. In a letter to Henry Conway for 23 April 1740, he writes: “How I like the inanimate part of Rome you will soon perceive at my arrival in England; I am far gone in medals, lamps, idols, prints, etc. and all the small commodities to the purchase of which I can attain; I would buy the Coliseum if I could” (Correspondence, vol. 37, 57). The list of his Italian
Fig. 1: Horace Walpoleby John Giles Eccardt, oil on canvas, 1754, NPG 988. © National Portrait Gallery, London —
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“baubles” is remarkable and includes ancient artefacts, such as tables, mosaics, urns, vases or medals, and Baroque paintings by Paolo Pannini, Carlo Maratti or Pietro da Cortona, among others (Correspondence, vol. 26, Appendix 1, 3–8.). Such interests culminated in the renovation of Strawberry Hill, itself a kind of collection, and by extension, gave way to the writing of The Castle of Otranto (1764), which transposed the Gothic revival onto the realm of fiction.
A painter and drawer himself (see Lewis), Walpole continuously revealed his expertise in the visual in his writings. His correspondence and memoirs are richly peppered with art commentaries, and there are also autonomously published texts devoted to the arts exclusively. His first publication was Aedes Walpolianae (1743), which catalogued his father Robert Walpole’s famous collection at Haughton Hall. Then, in the midst of the renovation works at the Strawberry Hill house, Walpole started editing and rewriting George Vertue’s notes on English painters, which eventually came out as Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–1780) – the first history of English art. Finally, in response to the growing “tourist” interest in his “little Gothic castle”, he wrote A Description of Mr. Walpole’s Villa at Strawberry Hill (1774), commenting, for the most part, on the highlights of the collection inside the house. The second, lavishly illustrated edition of the Description (1784) makes it clear that to Walpole Strawberry Hill depended for its aesthetic effect on the interplay of image and narrative. The author imposes a pattern for visiting the subsequent rooms, collectively making up a series of scenes to be admired on the house tour, and a series of images with captions and commentaries on the pages of the volume. Such an entanglement of image and narrative also lies at the core of The Castle of Otranto, which features images as narrative catalysts and conceptualises seeing, or the so-called “gaze”, as a multi-faceted plot motif.
The above aspects of Walpole’s work are given the most critical attention in the following thematic cluster. In the opening article, Kirstin Mills presents the three best known Gothic projects undertaken by Walpole – Strawberry Hill, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother (1768) – the first Gothic play. Mills focuses on what she terms “liminal spaces”, and addresses the paradigms of vision, perception and seeing, arguing that the liminal Gothic spaces distort the word-image correspondence, thus posing a threat to the subject’s cognitive powers. Some of the issues tackled by Mills are developed in the other essays. Tymon Adamczewski elaborates on the political, social and psychoanalytical dimensions of the “gaze” in The Castle
of Otranto, while Marion Harney discusses the Strawberry Hill villa as a “visual narrative” taking the viewer
on a journey into the past. Strawberry Hill and The Castle of Otranto are also juxtaposed in the essay by Peter Lindfield. Lindfield’s starting point is Otranto’s “myth of creation”, that is, Walpole’s claim that the story was inspired by the villa. However, Lindfield points out that there is little information on architectural substance in the novel and the visual afterlife of the castle in book illustration does not in any way support the conventional pairing of Walpole’s architectural and literary projects. The next two articles concentrate on the literary afterlife of Walpole’s Gothic. Jakub Lipski elaborates on the motif of the animated portrait and its narrative and ideological implications, while Jacek Mydla evaluates how two post-Otranto narratives tackled the “mimetic challenge” posed by Walpole’s supernatural Gothic. The final study by Nataliia Voloshkova offers a change of perspective, as the central figure here is Mary Hamilton. Through a reading of previously unpublished manuscript material, including diary entries and correspondence, Voloshkova recreates an image of Walpole as friend, story-teller and connoisseur.
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This year’s tercentenary is an appropriate moment to acknowledge the fact that Walpole’s monumentally voluminous legacy of personal documents as well as his highly influential architectural and literary achievements are not likely to cease inspiring both scholars of various disciplines and also non-professionals who are continuously attracted to Walpole’s Gothic villa, now perfectly preserved and looked after by the admirably dedicated Strawberry Hill Trust. The anniversary essays that follow are then meant as fresh contribution to a debate that will certainly continue.
References
Lewis, W. S. 1961. Horace Walpole. New York: Pantheon Books.
Walpole, Horace. 1937–1983. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. Ed. W.S. Lewis et al. 48 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
