Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection

Abstract

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.