Horace Walpole: A memoir

Horace Walpole lived at the heart of eighteenth-century English life yet remained utterly uncategorizable: the son of Britain's first prime minister who became a Gothic novelist, an MP who mostly preferred antiquarian pursuits, a man who built a fake castle filled with medieval armor and called it home. Austin Dobson's biography captures these contradictions with characteristic Victorian grace, tracing Walpole from his privileged childhood through his years at Eton and Cambridge, his Grand Tour of Europe, and his long career as a patron of the arts and keeper of English cultural memory. Dobson gives us the Walpole who matters: the man who invented Gothic fiction with The Castle of Otranto, who built Strawberry Hill and filled it with painted glass and fabricated ancestry, and who wrote thirty thousand letters that remain one of the great reservoirs of Georgian wit and observation. This is biography as portrait, interested less in political machinations than in the temperament that could produce a fake ruined abbey in Twickenham and call it home. For anyone curious about where Gothic literature came from, or how English culture learned to love its own past, Dobson's memoir is the ideal entrance.