Select Letters of Horace Walpole

by Horace Walpole, Alice Drayton Greenwood

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Genres: British Literature

422 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1959

About the author

Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford — also known as Horace Walpole — was an English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician. He is now largely remembered for Strawberry Hill, the home he built in Twickenham, south-west London where he revived the Gothic style some decades before his Victorian successors, and for his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. Along with the book, his literary reputation rests on his Letters, which are of significant social and political interest. He was the son of Sir Robert Walpole, and cousin of Lord Nelson.

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually read another, out of print, collection of selected letters of Horace Walpole. His opinions (he was a Whig politician) struck me as often being closer to those now current than to those which many writers of the next century expressed:

".. a company [The East India Company] of
merchants who were sovereigns of Bengal !
They starved millions in India by monopolies
and plunder and almost raised a famine at
home by the luxury occasioned by their opulence
.... Conquest, usurpation, wealth, luxury,
famine"



When, in 1780, England was waging and losing an expensive war against the new United States of America and also with France, Spain and the Dutch Republic, he thought back to the days of his father, the great Whig minister :

"...like Hamlet on the sight of Yorick's
skull, I recollected the prosperity of Denmark
when my father ruled and compared it with the
present moment ! I look about for a Sir Robert
Walpole ; but where is he to be found ? . . . "


"Fashion is always silly - for before
it can spread far it must be calculated
for silly people (as examples of sense,
wit or ingenuity could be imitated only
by a few.)"


"We cannot live without destroying animals, but shall we torture
them for our sport — sport in their destruction?"


I meant to include an example or two of his relish for the absurd but thought they would lose their charm by being quoted out of context.

[E Owen · Rating 1 out of 5]

The musings of an entitled son of the Prime Minister who built a silly house who made a lot of famous friends.

Can you imagine people buying a book of the letters of Mark Thatcher or Euan Blair? Adieu!

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

He's not quite as captivating as Strachey says. I can't imagine reading volume after volume of him--and the Yale Edition of the letters runs to 39! This slim selection will more than do for now. But I do like reading him; there's no better social chronicler of his milieu; he can be ingeniously witty. And his science fiction-like fancies are amusingly bizarre: picture an 18th century English gentleman going on and on about the possibility of extraterrestrial women with quadruple vaginas! Ha!