And in many ways he was more powerful than any Prime Minister has ever been.
Robert Walpole was in effect the first Prime Minister of Britain, though the title did not exist then. Walpole was the son of the most powerful politician of eighteenth-century Britain, Robert Walpole, who was the leader of the government from 1721 to 1742. For a fuller account of The Castle of Otranto, click here. The Castle of Otranto is remembered now as inventing the Gothic novel, and while that is a bit of a simplification, it’s true to say that this book has been both popular and influential. The great exception, of course, is Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto, first published on Christmas Eve 1764 and always in print since then. Horace Walpole, painted by John Ecchart, around 1755. All of these works are interesting, and reflect the varied interests and enthusiasms of the cultured man of wealth and leisure that Walpole was, but it is not surprising that they do not have a lot of modern readers. He wrote another book on art ( Some Anecdotes of Painting in England, 1762), an essay trying to exonerate Richard III from having, among other things, killed the princes in the Tower ( Some Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III, 1780), a book on gardening, a book describing his house, and some poetry. His first published book, called Aedes Walpolianae (1743) catalogued his father’s painting collection. Most of Walpole’s other works are equally obscure to modern readers. But it has never been edited or anthologized for the general reader, and has therefore been read mostly by specialists in the field. His correspondence alone comes to forty eight modern printed volumes ( ) and is a tremendous resource for learning about his life and the high society in which he traveled. In his own lifetime, Walpole was well known as a writer of smart, witty, gossipy, and incisive letters.
But he is probably less well known than many other eighteenth-century British writers because the work he did was often in forms that do not fit well into the usual categories of texts that get taught and read now.
He had his own printing press at his amazing home, called Strawberry Hill (about which more in a moment), which published some of his own writings, and he saw himself as an important contributor to the literary and artistic culture of his day. Horace Walpole (1717-1797) is one of the most interesting literary figures of the eighteenth century in Britain.
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