We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Horace Walpole is pivotal to the early Gothic Revival as the author of what has long been hailed as the first Gothic novel, and as the creator of the most influential of all early Gothic Revival houses. This essay explores his intuitively imaginative response to Gothic, and how his love of the decorative profusion and allusive richness that it could offer was played out in his novel The Castle of Otranto (1765) and his play The Mysterious Mother (1768) – as well as in in his ‘castle’ at Strawberry Hill. That house, with its subtle management of scale, colour and light, and in the suggestive riches of the collection it contained, created a heady mixture of fantasy and atmosphere, displaying an historically informed but archaeologically unrestrained imagination. These are qualities that it shared with Walpole’s Gothic fictions. There is hardly a feature of Gothic romance that does not appear in Otranto, and its gloomy castle, predatory patriarch and pursued virgin, along with the guilt-tormented Countess and evil friars of The Mysterious Mother, like the Gothic battlements and evocative interiors of Strawberry Hill, engendered a lasting and pervasive progeny.
The Gothic Revival is generally considered to have begun in eighteenth-century Britain with the construction of Horace Walpole’s villa, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, in the late 1740s. As this chapter demonstrates, however, Strawberry Hill is in no way the first building, domestic or otherwise, to have recreated, even superficially, some aspect of the form and ornamental style of medieval architecture. Earlier architects who, albeit often combining it with Classicism, worked in the Gothic style include Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, William Kent and Batty Langley, aspects of whose works are explored here. While not an exhaustive survey of pre-1750 Gothic Revival design, the examples considered in this chapter reveal how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gothic emerged and evolved over the course of different architects’ careers, and how, by the time that Walpole came to create his own Gothic ‘castle’, there was already in existence in Britain a sustained Gothic Revivalist tradition.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.