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Extending the discussion of Walpole’s architectural imagination in Chapter 1, this chapter pays sustained attention to the assumption that the eponymous castle in his The Castle of Otranto (1764) is based on, or inspired by, the author’s architectural work at Strawberry Hill. Having outlined the history of the Otranto/Strawberry Hill relationship, the chapter subjects these presumed correspondences between text and house to careful scrutiny, eventually arguing that if the two are related at all, it is primarily through the language of romance that is common to both. Both the Castle at Otranto and Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, the argument shows, are versions of the ‘enchanted castles’ that Walpole discovered deep in the annals of ‘Gothic story’. The chapter ends with an account of the extent to which Walpole arrogated to himself the ability to call up so many ‘enchanted castles’ in a number of contemporary literary and architectural experiments.

The landscape garden was considered a uniquely English, uniquely modern art form—a uniqueness derived in part from the intensity of immediate tasteful experience that places like Stowe elicited. The first of three sections shows that William Gilpin’s Dialogue Upon the Gardens of…Stow seeks to join spontaneous pleasure at Stowe with sense of nationalistic destiny, but comes to recognize the gap between them can never be quite closed. The second demonstrates that Joseph Warton’s poem The Enthusiast uses Stowe to represent the corrupting history of British taste, yet his alternative, the sensory immediacy provided by nature, gains meaning only within the corruption narrative that Stowe helps him tell. The third section argues that while Horace Walpole only indirectly looks at Stowe in his seminal History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, it models an immediacy of affect for all modern gardens that distorts and finally demolishes his attempt to narrate their past, present, and future.

This chapter discusses Hannah More's transition from playwright to Evangelical activist. She was now part of the bluestocking circle, a friend of Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter, and was depicted in Richard Samuel's The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (1779) as Melpomene, the muse of tragedy. The Bas Bleu, her poem that celebrated the bluestockings, was praised by Johnson. She became one of the many female friends and correspondents of Horace Walpole and her Bishop Bonner's Ghost was the last work to be printed by his Strawberry Hill press. She also tried to rescue a madwoman known as ‘Louisa’ or ‘the Lady of the Haystack’. Her patronage of Ann Yearsley, the ‘Bristol milkwoman’ was an ignominious failure. Her purchase of Cowslip Green near Wrington in Somerset was a sign that she was turning her back on fashionable Society.

Chapter 5 shows how Walpole and Poe refuse to imagine community as a simple collection of common things. They instead practice a philosophy of “uniquity” that values and collects the singular for its totally accidental and inessential forces of relation and difference. Eschewing the modern logic of belonging that ties the singular’s place in the common to some essential property that it somehow possesses, Walpole and Poe instead view being-in-common as an open and fugitive process that is enacted on the level of the verb rather than collected on the level of the noun. Walpole writes histories that foreground the contingency of time rather than offer any definitive account of its passing, and his always-expanding collection of curiosities exhibits the harmonious confusion of the Wunderkammer rather than the taxonomic pretensions of the modern museum. And for Poe, at stake in the speculative cosmology of “Eureka” is the aesthetic form of a “brotherhood among the atoms.” Poe attempts to think community as an assemblage of intensive differences that vibrates “among” atoms rather than as a collection of common, atomic things. I end with these “hospital[s] for everything that is Singular” because they show us how to reopen the problem of belonging’s form at a moment of crisis in our own conceptions of cultural, economic, and political community.

This chapter examines the presence of classical texts and objects in the work of Horace Walpole, in his writing and also among his vast collection of miscellaneous artifacts at his villa, Strawberry Hill. First, it considers the textual reuse of lines from Horace and Lucan in his novel The Castle of Otranto and his Gothic drama The Mysterious Mother. In each case, the classical images and ideas are startlingly, aggressively altered in their context and meaning to fit the aesthetic choices of those works. The chapter then turns to Walpole’s ideas on classical theater, as reflected in a periodical piece and in the prologue to The Mysterious Mother. Walpole praises Attic drama for its free expression of horror; the classical becomes associated with the wild imagination that has been dammed up and repressed in his own age. Finally, the chapter examines the classical objects in Strawberry Hill, arguing that Walpole was consistently attracted to objects that exemplified horror and hybridity, thereby challenging facile assumptions about symmetry and decorum in ancient art. Walpole establishes a paradigm for the presence of the classical within the Gothic: it is not absent or ignored, but rather irreverently fragmented and rearranged.

This chapter examines the complex, often antagonistic relationship between Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Hume’s The History of England (1754–62). As Walpole’s correspondence reveals, he had read numerous volumes of Hume’s history before writing Otranto (the first Gothic novel) and did not think very highly of its content or the methods used to write it. Reassessing the significance of the Gothic in the eighteenth century, this chapter discusses the extent to which Walpole’s novel can be viewed as a bold response to, and critique of, Hume’s historiography. Discussing the proliferation of violent and supernatural occurrences in Otranto, it is argued that the Gothic functions as Enlightenment history’s other; it exploits its insecurities, plagues its vulnerabilities, and imaginatively provides fictional presences for its many absences and omissions. Taking into account a wealth of historical evidence, this chapter proposes that Walpole’s novel can be read as an imaginative revolt against Hume’s multi-volume work of historiography and that it marks the beginning of the genre’s contentious relationship with Enlightenment historiography and the philosophy that underpins it.

This introductory chapter explores the primary concerns of the book. Having provided an account of how the long eighteenth century conceptualized ‘Gothic antiquity’, it explores the perceived links between the antique past, its architectural remains, imaginative response, and eighteenth-century political discourses. Through a reading of Horace Walpole’s confounding of the differences between historiography and romance, it situates the rise of Gothic literature in a liminal space between these two practices. Analysing two competing visual representations of scenes from Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the discussion introduces a concern that runs throughout the remainder of the book: far from being a monolith, ‘Gothic antiquity’ for the eighteenth century was a divided and politically disputed construct. While conservatives tended to celebrate the Gothic past as a vanished golden age of political stability and great cultural achievement (the ‘white Gothic’), radical writers invoked it as a ‘Dark Age’ of tyranny, violence, and oppression.

Chapter One explores how the historical novel emerged in the 1760s as a form which at once employed and interrogated the dominant political narrative of ‘ancient liberties’. The notion of ancient constitutionalism allowed proposals for reform or for limits on monarchical power to be seen as attempts to ensure stability or, at most, (as with the theory of the Norman Yoke) to return to political origin. Yet for Horace Walpole ancient constitutionalism seems at times a troubled jest; Clara Reeve senses that the motif desperately needs reinforcement; and even after the more radical uses of the theory of the Norman Yoke by the Constitutional Society in the 1780s and 90s, Ann Radcliffe considers it a frozen political fable. Haunted by the spectre of the divine right of kings, in the historical novel the narrative of tradition ultimately proves an insufficient underpinning for the constitution.

Chapter 3 shows how the heterocosmic model of art invites the reader to consume fiction with the wonder associated with new world encounters. However, writers must also find new ways of sustaining wonder because once fiction’s non-referential status is made explicit, its truth status ceases to be a source of wonder. Within this context, this chapter shows how Fielding’s Tom Jones and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto use the discourse of the marvelous to define fictionality’s parameters. Moreover, they illustrate how suspense and admiration emerge, in the mid-eighteenth century, as new forms of wonder. In both novels, suspenseful literary techniques defamiliarize cause and effect by prolonging the gap between introducing and resolving narrative mysteries. Simultaneously, each novel solicits a detached admiration for the authors who invent these plots. The dynamic tension between this engrossing suspense and reflective admiration invites the contemplation of each fiction with a provisional assent.

The emphasis on political continuity in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution leads to a specifically Whig providentialism, examined in Chapter 3 through the work of Clara Reeve, Horace Walpole, and Matthew Lewis. In Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron, the country Whig version, stressing links with the medieval past, unites with Newtonian theology in which God’s finger is at work in every ‘natural occurrence’ to render the supernatural revelatory of this providential care. Divine justice and historical inexorability, romance, and realism are conjoined. By contrast, the sceptical Horace Walpole, representative of the Walpolian Whig narrative of political rupture, questions Providence in The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, and substitutes himself as quasi-divine author, whose originality lies in the grotesque mixture of realist and supernatural elements. Matthew Lewis essays an eschewal of Providential mechanisms in The Monk but here grotesque features such as the bleeding nun disclose an aporia which reveals the limit of libertine desire and a negative supernatural.

Part One of this book explores Britain up to the Napoleonic wars. The eighteenth century saw a proliferation of terms referring to a class of effeminate men supposedly prominent amongst the monied classes. One of the most prominent of such terms was the ‘macaroni’ and this provides the focus for chapter 2. The first mention of these figures, men who had supposedly brought a variety of peculiar tastes (including for Italian food) back from their time on the Grand Tour, came from the pen of Horace Walpole in 1764. By the early 1770s the book and print sellers of London were deluging the public with humorous images of macaronis. At the height of this craze a series of sodomy scandals established various connections between the image of the macaroni and that of the sodomite. This section of the book explores this phenomenon by examining key examples of such satirical prints. It is established that homosocial communities of British men in Italy played a key role in the development of the genre of visual caricature in the mid-eighteenth century.

In chapter 1, I read the preface to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto—the first work of modern fiction to identify itself as a romance—in order to discuss the ways in which the singular text belongs in communities of genre. In particular, I argue that Otranto rejects the essentializing, symbolic logic that produces the common, generic things of the modern collection. While antiquarians and poets plumb the relics of ancient poetry for signs of a shared national history or the symbols of a common literary tradition, Walpole refuses to tie the idea of generic community to any timeless and transcendent symbols that the text possesses. By inventing an ancient romantic manuscript that Otranto’s pseudonymous narrator claims to have uncovered, the performative origins of the Gothic romance demonstrate how generic community—and belonging itself—is enacted as a singular creative force as well as collected as a common symbolic thing. Throughout this chapter, I read Walpole’s Otranto alongside the concept of allegory developed by Walter Benjamin in the Trauerspielbuch, bringing forward the ways in which these texts help us to rethink the limitations of recent work in genre and set theory by opening up new forms of relationship between the singular and the common.

In the mid-eighteenth century, a series of literary debates over English aesthetics disrupts the intimate relationship between English identity and Chinese things established by earlier literature. The “Chinese taste,” once a measure of Englishness, is increasingly posited as antithetical to Englishness. The English enthrallment with chinoiserie does not disappear, but is rewritten as an aristocratic perversion in texts that prefigure modern sexuality.

This chapter tells the story of the Conway Papers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the manuscripts were discovered by Horace Walpole in the 1750s they had been severaly damaged by rodents, damp, and over-enthusiastic pastry-chefs. Walpole realized how important his find was, but was too busy to do anything with the archive. The collection was given to John Wilson Croker, who sorted through it and donated it to the state. The chapter captures the excitement and confusion that the Conway Papers have inspired in scholars and antiquaries over 250 years; it casts new light on Croker, ‘a man who would go a hundred miles through snow and sleet on top of a coach to search a parish register and prove a man illegitimate or a woman older than she says she is’, and on the formation of collections at the British Library and UK National Archives.

This chapter takes the investigation of the effect of the dramatic unities in the novel into the thick descriptions of characters’ experience in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. While Walpole disavows neoclassicism, he nevertheless makes use of the spatial and temporal constraints of the unities to create a tightly constrained situational logic in his Gothic novel. The chapter pays particular attention to the prototypical Gothic passage scene, where heroines rush away from would-be ravishers and find their way to safety. Second-generation, embodied cognitive approaches show how the scene’s close quarters (in terms of space and time) and the ambiguity of the characters’ surroundings (in terms of distinguishing friend from foe) work together to create prose that is highly immersive for readers. In the final section, these observations on the unities and embodied immersiveness are connected with stylistic issues of focalization and free indirect discourse.

George II, king of Britain, has long been neglected by historians. Most of the British monarch's contemporaries focused more on ministers than the Crown, especially in the last years, which were dominated by William Pitt. This stance was reinforced during the long reign of George III (1760–1820) by the vigour of the Whig myth that presented him as an innovator who overthrew the stable world of ‘Old Corps’ Whigs politics and the constitutional monarchy that was established after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. The perception that George II was a cipher led by Pitt and Thomas, Duke of Newcastle was of great importance in the early 1760s, although it was already strong in his reign. The king's influence has been minimised in particular by Horace Walpole and John, Lord Hervey in their respective memoirs. Other writers presented George II as very much influenced by his wife, Queen Caroline, including John Morley, David Starkey, Kenneth Baker, and Edward Pearce.

This chapter interrogates classical collection and homosexual identities, and the relationship between homosexuality and aestheticism, by revisiting the relationship between domestic space and homo-sociality from the 1760s onwards, questioning how we can recognize queer spaces or homosexual self-fashioning, and examining the role played by the display of classical artefacts. It is interested in the ways in which men such as William John Bankes, William Beckford, Horace Walpole, and Edward Perry Warren performed their masculinity through the art and architecture of their homes, and the place of Greece, and especially Rome, within these performances. This chapter exposes the range of solutions that were found for constructing an identity visually (and by what was not made visible) which championed male–male desire without seeming overly normative or effeminate.

This chapter explores the genre of gothic fiction that emerged in the eighteenth century. It was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) that is said to have initiated the genre, which continues to flourish to this day—although in a more debased form. Walpole's intention with this work was to blend two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. The modern romance pertains to the evolving genre of the novel, which continually tried to embody reality in representing its characters. Walpole's Gothic mode incorporated two elements: the supernatural and the psychologically believable. The rest of the chapter explores the context in which the Gothic mode emerged, and the elements that formed and created it.