With a historical lens, then, this thesis will attempt to reconcile the two and delineate the nature of their relationship. Much criticism has been devoted to Strawberry Hill, and even more to The Castle of Otranto, but often this scholarship is kept exclusive the two entities are considered either separately, or in disciplines outside the field of English literature. The Castle of Otranto will serve as a focal point for this thesis, as I seek to place it in the context of its physical correspondent, Walpole’s abode of Strawberry Hill. And at forty-seven, Walpole sat down to write his most famous literary work, and the first Gothic novel: The Castle of Otranto. 3 At thirty-two, Walpole had bought the blank cottage which he would rewrite into Strawberry Hill, a villa that would reinvigorate Britain’s appreciation for the Gothic style. 2 By twenty-eight, he had begun his Memoires, which he instructed to be published posthumously.

By eighteen, he was already planning to publish and circulate his own letters in a move to gain literary renown. 1 The young Walpole indeed had an unusual eye for his own posterity. The son of Britain’s first prime minister Robert Walpole, the Walpole junior enjoyed unusual privilege, and it is this privilege that explains his influence on the fields of antiquity and architecture as well as literature. There is perhaps no figure on the stage of eighteenth-century England so intriguing as that of Horace Walpole. Strawberry Hill therefore moves us toward a modern conception of authorship and ownership, and toward our understanding of the novel as an unstable, reader-constructed object. Significantly, too, it’s Strawberry Hill that is cited in the preface of The Castle of Otranto as evidence that the fictional account stems from a physical translated manuscript. Walpole’s construction of Strawberry Hill relies heavily on Lockeian rhetoric, which in turn evokes contemporary concerns of textual reproductions and replicas, reliant as the villa is upon “plagiaristic” materials. This article seeks to establish a relationship between The Castle of Otranto and Strawberry Hill, given that the latter was constructed at a point in literary history where writing shifts from a private patronage system, heavily linked to the physical manuscript, to a commercial economy wherein text is abstracted. And yet the conversations surrounding these two entities have largely been kept exclusive. Much contemporary literary criticism has been devoted to Horace Walpole’s novel, The Castle of Otranto so, too, has much criticism been directed toward the author’s villa, Strawberry Hill.

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