Strawberry Hill House, Horace Walpole’s gothic plaything

Like a deathbed revelation or receding hairline, gothic architecture was an essential piece in the game of hereditary power. Its revival in England and Scotland was the nobility affecting that their power was rooted in history – and assured for the future. For Horace Walpole, however, the pretence was obvious. In the 1740s, he acquired a “little plaything house” of his own. And with the gothic Strawberry Hill House, set about poking fun at the shaky power behind sham castles.

At Strawberry Hill House, painted wallpaper gave the illusion of gothic groining surrounding the staircase. Reliefs on the gallery ceiling were really papier-mâché. At one time, the battlements were supposed to be made of cardboard. “Irreverent, jocose and unpatriarchal,” writes Richard Davenport-Hines of the architecture in Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin.

It was here, under papier-mâché and encased in cardboard, that the first gothic novel came to Horace Walpole in a nightmare. The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, continued the amusement.

Though described as “fast-paced, hectic, high-camp” by Davenport-Hines, the novel casts a long shadow. In it, great lords become prisoners in their own castles. Ordinary people inherit unprecedented power. These inversions continue to dominate gothic literature today.

Inside Strawberry Hill House, the “little gothic castle”

For visitors in Walpole’s day, he provided A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, a guidebook to his “little gothic castle”. You, dear reader, must settle for my own.

Though it doesn’t loom overly large, Strawberry Hill House is densely packed. Gothic battlements, towers and spires cluster as though for warmth; windows and finials fight for space. Inside, each room – painstakingly restored to match Walpole’s vision – presses against the next.

In the Great Parlour, the dining chairs are reproductions of Walpole’s own. William Hallett designed them to cast gothic lancets on the walls by candlelight. Upstairs, the Green Closet collects some of the portraits of family members near and distant that once covered the walls. And in the Gallery, the remains of Walpole’s collection – all ignoble lords and Italian landscapes – mingle with new additions.

I spoke but mostly listened to the guides as they described a space, for all its showiness, slow to unfurl. For every immediate moment, there were as many or more to be missed. The volunteers – knowledgeable and enthusiastic to a person – recalled visitors schooling them on minor details or asking questions they couldn’t answer. They held themselves with the serenity of those who accept that there are some things we can’t control, some games we’ll never win.

Walpole might have been proud.

Winners and losers in Walpole’s gothic game

“This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” So said Walpole later in life.

For those that thought, Strawberry Hill House and The Castle of Otranto were jokes at the expense of those who had once subordinated or stigmatised him. Criticism, asserted friends of Walpole, came from those who took his work seriously. These were the people he was parodying – those uncomfortable with the inversion of power, even in play.

Yet if The Castle of Otranto had little room for those that feel, the literary genre it initiated is more accommodating. For more than 250 years, the same devices Walpole used to amuse have unsettled in equal measure. The labyrinthine castle, the family curse, the found manuscript…

So, perhaps it doesn’t matter whether visitors and readers knew the rules of the game Walpole was playing. The result was the same. Strawberry Hill House and The Castle of Otranto captured imaginations. Then locked them in a dark vault and threw away the key.