ing scholar and historian. His vivid record of
these different worlds in some 4,000 often
brilliant letters, published in 48 volumes, has
been a main resource for historians ever
since. That is exactly what he would have
wished, for he saw the present as history in
the making, although he came to prefer what
he regarded as the certainties of the past,
writing in 1766: ‘I almost think there is no
wisdom comparable to that of exchanging
what is called the realities of life for dreams.
Old Castles, old pictures, old histories, andthe babble of old people make one live back
into centuries that cannot disappoint one.’
Strawberry Hill, his summer villa by the
Thames in Twickenham, was the centre of
his scholarly and creative endeavours and
the setting for his huge collection of art and
artefacts. Built between 1749 and 1790, it
was very largely designed by Walpole and
a group of his friends, as he said, ‘to please
my own taste, and in some degree to realise
my own visions’. Twickenham, being close to
London, had many summer villas, but nearlyBOOKS & ARTS
Strawberry Hill was Gothic in and
out, complex and irregular, suggesting
organic developmentARTS SPECIAL
Walpole’s world
Michael Snodin celebrates the splendours of Strawberry Hill revived
W
e can’t know what Horace Walpo-
le would make of the continuing
popularity of serendipity, a word
he coined in 1754 to describe the acciden-
tal happy discovery of a Renaissance por-
trait he had long been seeking. In 2001 it
became the title of a romantic comedy and
this year of a song by a South Korean boy
band, which has had 74 million hits on You-
Tube. But we can imagine that he would be
pleased that his lifelong effort to leave his
mark on posterity has been so successful.
He was born (in 1717) with the prover-
bial silver spoon in his mouth, the youngest
son of the all-powerful Sir Robert Walpole,
1st Earl of Orford and effectively Britain’s
first prime minister. At 21 he was given gov-
ernment sinecures producing some £2,000 a
year, and at 24 a seat in Parliament, freeing
him from the need to earn a living. Undis-
tracted by the responsibilities of high gov-
ernment office, a great estate or of family
(he never married), he was able to devote
his life to politics, writing, scholarship, obses-
sive collecting and the creation of his pio-
neering Gothic villa, Strawberry Hill.
Walpole was a complex character, in
public a man of taste at the centre of poli-
tics and fashion, but in private a hardwork-all were in the classical style. Walpole’s West
End townhouse was also classical, but at
Strawberry Hill he created ‘the castle (I am
building) of my ancestors’, pinnacled and
battlemented. Houghton Hall, his father’s
Palladian palace in Norfolk, was built as an
expression of power and wealth; Strawberry
Hill, filled with coats of arms, celebrated his
family’s illustrious ancestry. Although the
Gothic style was occasionally used in other
buildings at the time, Strawberry Hill pio-
neered ideas that led directly to the more
serious Gothic revival of later years. It was
Gothic both inside and out, it lifted ‘quota-
tions’ of details from ancient buildings for
its architectural features, and dramatically
broke the classical rule of strict symmetry.
The result was a building that was both com-
plex and picturesquely irregular, suggesting
an organic development over centuries.
Walpole’s word for the effects of Gothic
— ‘gloomth’ — did not mean the vision of
dark and terrifying masses we associate with
Gothic today, but rather an ‘irregular light-
ness and solemnity’. But for Walpole, Gothic
crucially had a unique ability to summon up
ideas and emotions. In the interiors at Straw-
berry Hill he enhanced the effects by the use
of old stained glass and an extremely sophis-KILIAN O’SULLIVAN