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34 unusual facts about Horace Walpole


1735 English cricket season

The source for this match is a letter from John Whaley to Horace Walpole dated Wed 13 August.

1762 in art

Horace Walpole begins publication of Anecdotes of Painting in England, based on George Vertue's manuscript notes.

Adriaen van Diest

He also painted portraits, but did not meet with much encouragement, although his pictures, particularly his landscapes, possess considerable merit; as a proof of which Horace Walpole states that there were seven pictures by Van Diest in Sir Peter Lely's collection.

Alexander van Gaelen

He also painted three pictures, representing two of the principal battles between the Royal Army and that of the Commonwealth in the time of Charles I, and the Battle of the Boyne. No mention, however, is made of Van Gaelen in Walpole's Anecdotes. He died in 1728.

Blades Club

White's, with which (like Blades), Beau Brummell, Horace Walpole, and Edward Gibbon had some association and where M’s real-life counterpart, Sir Stewart Menzies, was a member, and where Fleming too was a member until moving to Boodle’s; and

Carlton House

Construction commenced in 1784; when these rooms were visited in September 1785 by the usually critical Horace Walpole, he was impressed, writing that when completed, Carlton House would be "the most perfect in Europe".

Charles Bridgeman

A contemporary of Bridgeman’s, Horace Walpole, describing his colleague’s design style in his essay On Modern Gardening, wrote: ‘though he still adhered much to strait walks with high clipt hedges, they were only his great lines; the rest he diversified by wilderness, and with loose groves of oak, though still within surrounding hedges’ (Amherst, 1896, p. 249).

Club de l'Entresol

It was frequented by 20 of the finest forerunners of the Age of Enlightenment, with regular attendees including Montesquieu, Helvétius, the marquis d'Argenson, Andrew Michael Ramsay, Horace Walpole and Viscount Bolingbroke.

Derek Jarrett

He is best known for his edition of Horace Walpole’s Memoirs of the Reign of King George III, and perhaps for his sometimes acerbic reviews in the New York Review of Books.

Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm

The "Gothic House", started by Erdmannsdorff in 1774, modelled on the villa of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, was one of the first Neo Gothic structures on the continent.

Étienne François, duc de Choiseul

English writer Horace Walpole, in his Memoirs, gives a vivid description of the duke's character, accuses him of having caused the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), as a revenge on tsarina Catherine II, and says of his foreign policy: "he would project and determine the ruin of a country, but could not meditate a little mischief or a narrow benefit. ... He dissipated the nation's wealth and his own; but did not repair the latter by plunder of the former".

Eton v Harrow

Horace Walpole entered Eton in 1726, and later wrote that playing cricket was a common occurrence at the school.

Francis Thomas-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Earl of Kerry

Others took a more jaundiced view: Horace Walpole called Kerry " a simple young Irish peer that has married an elderly Irishwoman who was divorced on his account and wasted a vast estate on the idlest ostentation."

François-Charles Joullain

Joullain printseller, was mentioned in Horace Walpole's correspondence with the marquise du Deffand.

Gaetano Polidori

He translated various literary works into Italian, notably, John Milton's Paradise Lost and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, as well as other writings of Milton and Lucan.

Gawen Hamilton

Horace Walpole, who used Vertue's notes, makes no mention of Gawen Hamilton in his Anecdotes of Painting in England.

Green Park

At the time, the park was on the outskirts of London and remained an isolated area well into the 18th century, when it was known as a haunt of highwaymen and thieves; Horace Walpole was one of many to be robbed there.

History of English amateur cricket

Horace Walpole entered Eton in 1726 and later wrote that "playing cricket as well as thrashing bargemen was common".

Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford

Horace Walpole (1717–1797), writer who became Earl of Orford in 1791

John Thorpe

Little is known of his life, and his work is dubiously inferred, rather than accurately known, from a folio of drawings in the Sir John Soane's Museum, to which Horace Walpole called attention, in 1780, in his Anecdotes of Painting; but how far these were his own is uncertain.

London Borough of Richmond upon Thames

Most instrumental to founding a new mainstream style was avant-garde 18th century neo-gothic Strawberry Hill House by Horace Walpole.

Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand

Madame du Deffand is said by Horace Walpole (in a letter to Thomas Gray) to have been for a short time the mistress of the regent, the duke of Orléans.

Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte de Campet de Saujon

There she was fêted once again and met Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole, who she received in Paris and at the Château de Stors, granted to her by the Prince de Conti after the death of Mme Panneau d'Arty in 1765.

Pantheon, London

Horace Walpole compared Wyatt's work favourably with that of better established and very fashionable Robert Adam, "the Pantheon is still the most beautiful edifice in England" he said.

Richard Owen Cambridge

Horace Walpole in his letters makes many humorous allusions to Cambridge in the character of newsmonger.

Serendipity 3

Serendipity was named after the three legendary princes of the island once known as Serendip (now Sri Lanka), from which the 18th century writer Sir Horace Walpole coined serendipity.

Serjeant Painter

It is not recorded that he was officially appointed serjeant-painter, though Horace Walpole believed that he was.

Horace Walpole provided information about some of the tasks de Critz performed in his Anecdotes of Painting in England, which he based closely on the notes of George Vertue, who had met acquaintances of de Critz and his family.

Sir Gilbert Elliot, 3rd Baronet

Horace Walpole said Elliot was "one of the ablest members of the House of Commons".

Strawberry Hill, London

The nineteenth-century development is named after "Strawberry Hill", the fanciful Gothic Revival villa designed by author Horace Walpole between 1749 and 1776.

Thomas Nuthall

Horace Walpole used Nuthall to get Margaret Nicoll freed to marry George Walpole in 1751, but he thought Nuthall corrupt and mistrusted him.

Tudor myth

However, Horace Walpole and Sir George Buck contradicted this dominant school of historiography during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Walpole Society

The Walpole Society, named after Horace Walpole, was formed in 1911 to promote the study of the history of British art.

William Fermor, 1st Baron Leominster

‘Coming back,’ writes Horace Walpole to George Montagu on 20 May 1736, ‘we saw Easton Neston, where in an old greenhouse is a wonderful fine statue of Tully haranguing a numerous assembly of decayed emperors, vestal virgins with new noses, Colossus's, Venus's, headless carcases, and carcaseless heads, pieces of tombs, and hieroglyphics’.


Adventures into the Unknown

The premiere included a seven-page, abridged adaptation of Horace Walpole's seminal gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, by an unknown writer and artist Al Ulmer.

Charles Fane, 2nd Viscount Fane

He was in Florence in person between 3 October 1734 and spring 1738; when Horace Walpole's later friend Horace Mann, his deputy, replaced him (as the Chargé d'Affairs).

Critical approaches to Hamlet

From the growing madness of Prince Hamlet, to the violent ending to the constant reminders of death, to, even, more subtly, the notions of humankind and its structures and the viewpoints on women, Hamlet evokes many things that would recur in what is widely regarded as the first piece of Gothic literature, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, and in other Gothic works.

Edith Birkhead

This work described the fascination with supernatural fiction in English literature from the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1764 to Charles Maturin's 'Melmoth the Wanderer' in 1820 on to modern times.

Edward Harley, 3rd Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer

Nearly all the leading men of the day, including Horace Walpole, attended or were represented at this sale, and the prices varied from five shillings for an anonymous bishop's "head" to 165 guineas for van Dyck's group of "Sir Kenelm Digby, lady, and son".

Edward Rooker

Art historian Horace Walpole termed him the "Marc Antonio" of architecture.

Gilly Williams

Williams made up, with George Selwyn, Richard Edgecumbe and Horace Walpole, a group who met at stated periods in the year at Strawberry Hill.

Henry Pelham-Clinton, 2nd Duke of Newcastle

At Turin, Italy, where he was studying fencing, he was joined by his schoolfriend, Horace Walpole.

Houghton Lodge

The antecedents of Houghton's style of architecture, known as cottage ornée, can be traced to the 'Strawberry Hill Gothic' style made popular by Horace Walpole at his fantasy castle at Strawberry Hill in the final quarter of the eighteenth century and further popularised by the writings of James Malton in his 1802 Essay on British Cottage Architecture.

James Hervey

In addition to this, the sombre and sweeping tone of his Meditations Among The Tombs (for example, "the dreadful pleasure inspired by gazing at fallen monuments and mouldering tombs") has led to his being placed amongst the 18th Century 'Graveyard School' of poets, rendering his work an important influence on Horace Walpole’s 'The Castle of Otranto' of 1764 and consequently, the entire genre of Gothic Literature and the later Romanticism which the genre fuelled.

Lady Diana Beauclerk

Beauclerk illustrated a number of literary productions, including Horace Walpole's tragedy The Mysterious Mother, the English translation of Gottfried August Bürger's Leonora (1796) and The Fables of John Dryden (1797).

Sir Cecil Bishopp, 6th Baronet

In addition to Parham Park, Sussex he was also the owner of a house at 11 Berkeley Square, London which Horace Walpole purchased from Bisshopp's heirs in 1779 and in which Walpole lived until he died there in 1797.

Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn

Horace Walpole (the son of Robert Walpole, the First Lord of the Treasury, who had pushed through the Licensing Act) rated Strolling Actresses as Hogarth's greatest work "for wit and imagination, without any other end", but Charles Lamb, while acknowledging the sense of activity and camaraderie, found the characters lacking in expressiveness.

Thomas Pitt, 1st Baron Camelford

Horace Walpole introduced Pitt to Sir Horace Mann at Florence, and praised his conduct in cutting off the entail to pay his father's debts and to provide for his sisters.