Timothy Mowl - Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider

A nyone who supposes that Horace Walpole was, in any normal sense, a pleasant and acceptable person should consider the following comical anecdote which he included in a letter of 15 May 1752 to his friend, the British minister in Tuscany, Horace Mann:

A young Mr Winstanley happened to go into a coffee-house in the City, where some grave elders were talking over a terrible affair, that had just happened in the country, where a man broke into a house, ravished the mistress and killed the master. Winstanley said very coolly, It was well it was no worse! The citizens stared, were shocked! An old alderman could not bear it, but cried Zounds! Sir, what do you mean? What could be worse? Why, replied tother as coolly as before, if he had murdered the wife, and buggered the husband what would one give to have seen the faces of the company? Adieu.

If the two Horaces they were distant cousins found that humorous, then readers should be prepared for a certain moral register and standards.

Walpole wrote the greatest letter sequence of the eighteenth century; wrote more than four thousand letters to chosen friends like Mann, then retrieved as many as possible and edited them to reflect a history of his life and times. This produced an infinitely readable and quotable source for the activities of the English ruling classes over a period of four decades during which the first British Empire was created and lost. No subsequent social or political historian of the period has been able to ignore the treasure trove of anecdote and informed gossip which these letters represent. In addition, with an even more deliberate intention of influencing posterity, Walpole wrote memoirs of the reigns of George II and George III which virtually created that Whig interpretation of English history which later nineteenth-century historians would think they had invented.

No commentator, contemporary or subsequent, has ever quite trusted Horace Walpole as a source. He was a notably effeminate bachelor with a strong vein of malice in his writing; but if he had homosexual tendencies, he appeared to have been too fastidious ever to have given way to them. To compensate, he wrote a celebrated Gothic novella, TheCastleofOtranto, built an even more famous Gothic castlevilla, Strawberry Hill at Twickenham, gave an impetus to the whole drive of the Gothic Revival and wrote a number of antiquarian tracts, scholarly and contentious, many of them printed on his own private printing-press.

And there, until the 1920s, Horace Walpoles reputation survived: inescapable because he had been so helpfully prolix and so well-connected, the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, Britains longest-serving, though far from triumphalist, Prime Minister. But he remained an indeterminate figure, not quite a literary giant, a ranking historian or an architect; and there remained a tantalizing ambivalence as to his motivation how precisely had he interacted within his own society?

Then there was a change.

At Farmington, a small town in Connecticut connected with Yale University, in a modest house built by one of Washingtons retired generals, an American scholar of great distinction Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis a man of eminently conventional sexual identity, made it his lifes work, beginning in 1924 and ending only with his death in 1979, to build up a library and a museum devoted to Horace Walpole. The collection Lewis made of manuscripts, letters, books and relics of his subject is awesomely comprehensive. Anyone who wishes to make a serious study of Walpole must go to Farmington.

Quite what attracted Wilmarth Lewis to a lifetime of Walpole scholarship is a fascinating question. Lewis was, from all accounts, happily married to a wife who shared his Walpole interests. He was a scholar in the fine gentlemanly sense of that term, born in 1897 and no natural rebel against the assumptions of his age. When he began his collections, he was bidding in a buyers market. Most collectors of belles-lettres were content to have one or two examples of the four thousand-odd surviving Horace letters. Lewis would only have been satisfied with them all. Travelling widely on this side of the Atlantic, he absorbed, like some scholarly chameleon, every sympathetic nuance of the English class system the arcane assumptions of life in aristocratic country houses, the complexities of rank and the conventions of insular spelling. English lords with packets of Walpole papers lying in rarely opened library cupboards responded favourably to the breadth of his background knowledge and to his cheque-book. The war years and the economic winter of a Labour government, 194551, worked to the advantage of an experienced researcher. Today, much of what is significant that Horace Walpole committed to paper or published, together with charming oddments, pictures, prints, scraps of silk, busts, coins and curios from Horaces enormous collection is at Farmington, generously accessible to serious scholars, all catalogued and ordered in a purpose-built, fireproof library behind the original eighteenth-century house.