William Marshal and the Origins of The Castle of Otranto

Abstract

ABSTRACTHorace Walpole’s account of the genesis of The Castle of Otranto is well known. One night, he dreamt of “a gigantic hand in armour” and next “sat down … to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say.” To take Walpole at his word, critics have had to overlook the novel’s historiographic tenor. That is problematic, for at stake here is our ability both to probe the intersecting connections between Walpole’s novel and eighteenth-century historiography and to read The Castle of Otranto against contemporaneous bids for power. This paper first reviews some of the historical sources that call into question Walpole’s dream narrative and outlines what these sources tell us about Walpole’s historiographic practice. Next, this paper points to another plausible historical source for the novel, an early thirteenth-century biography, and explores its overlap with both Walpole’s political identity and the political landscape of the novel.