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Chapter 1 - Origins: Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

James Watt
James Watt
Affiliation:
St Catharine's College, Cambridge
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Summary

In mazes monastic of Strawberry Hill,

Sir Horace first issu'd the marvellous pill;

His brain teeming hot with the chivalrous rant, O!

Engender'd the Giant, and Castle Otranto:

A stupid, incongruous, blundering tale,

The rank of whose writer alone caus'd its sale;

Since, had Leadenhall's Lane seen the work, I'll be bound,

To possess it he would not have proffer'd five pound

‘Anser Pen-Drag-On, Esq’, Scribbleomania, 1815

To this day it is by no means easy to be certain what Horace Walpole really meant to write, or thought he was writing in The Castle of Otranto

George Saintsbury, The English Novel, 1913

I

While literary critics have often signalled their confusion about the meaning of The Castle of Otranto, they have nonetheless been virtually united in seizing upon the second edition's subtitle, ‘A Gothic Story’, and locating the work as the point of origin for a whole genre. It is still widely assumed both that Walpole's preface to the second edition offered the manifesto for a new kind of writing, and that the tale itself paid the first fictional tribute to an emergent Gothic aesthetic and an ‘unreason’ which had been ‘silenced throughout the Enlightenment period’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Contesting the Gothic
Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832
 , pp. 12 - 41
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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