Horace Walpole

Horace Walpole was born in 1717, the son of the prime minister Robert Walpole, sat in Parliament from 1741 to 1768 and lived on the income from sinecures his father had given him. At Twickenham, near London, he bought a small house that he turned into a Gothic villa, Strawberry Hill, from which the Gothic Revival fashion in English domestic architecture started, and in 1757 he set up a private press there, where he published his own books. His some four thousand letters are regarded as a major source on the eighteenth century. He died in 1797.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelThe Castle of OtrantoHorace Walpole · 1764Literature