Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford’
In The Copybook
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford’
In The Copybook
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Walpole’s ‘Castle of Otranto’ (1765) was suggested by a dream, and the tumbled nightmare of a tale, masquerading as an historical document, left many a Georgian reader cowering under the bedclothes.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.
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.