Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford

Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford’

Horace Walpole (1717-1797), Earl of Orford, was fourth son of Sir Robert Walpole, widely acknowledged as the country’s first Prime Minister. Horace followed his father into politics, sitting as an MP from 1741-1767, but is remembered as a man of letters, in every sense. Although he was a poet, publisher and novelist — his Gothic novel ‘The Castle of Otranto’ (1764) was one of the first of the genre — it is his voluminous correspondence that has been most avidly read, as it furnishes social historians with a wealth of information about Georgian London.

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‘The Helmet! The Helmet!’ by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford

On the day that Manfred, Prince of Otranto, expected his son Conrad to marry the Marquis of Vicenza’s daughter, grotesque tragedy struck.

Horace Walpole’s ‘Castle of Otranto’ (1765) was suggested by a dream, and the tumbled nightmare of a tale, masquerading as an historical document, left many a Georgian reader cowering under the bedclothes. It opens with Manfred, Prince of Otranto, waiting impatiently for the marriage of his son Conrad to Isabella, daughter of the Marquis of Vicenza.

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Ranelagh Gardens by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford

Horace Walpole, a loyal patron of Vauxhall pleasure gardens, visits newly-opened rival Ranelagh gardens in Chelsea.

Richard, Viscount Ranelagh, opened the formal gardens of his house next to the Chelsea Hospital to the public in 1742. Horace Walpole was there the very next evening, but told his friend Horace Mann that he still preferred the older (and more rumbustious) pleasure gardens at Vauxhall.

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