GOTHIC FANTASY
Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, was a man whose extraordinary dreams found expression both on the page and in his extraordinary home. “Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn’t,” he once wrote. “A sense of humour was provided to console him for what he is.” By his own logic, then, his richness of imagination must have compensated for a near-total absence of character. His letters, which number some 7,000 and chronicle the Georgian era with more colour than any of other correspondent of that period, beg to differ.
A writer, art historian, modish man-about-town, Whig politician and collector, Walpole’s most celebrated literary creation was , his gothic 1764 novel based on a nightmare he once had at his Strawberry Hill House. It is said to be the first English language example of a horror story and responsible for spawning a whole literary genre that would take in
