Visiting Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Historiography

The “antiquarian” attitude is not an imperfect approximation to something else—which would be the maturity of scientific, professionalised historiography. It is a specific, lived relationship to the past, and deserves to be treated on its own terms.¹

Halfway up the central stairwell at Strawberry Hill is an alcove roughly the size of an adult man. Today, it contains only a light bulb and a layer of dust, but during the final thirty years of Horace Walpole’s life it held the largest single piece of Gothic antiquity in a collection of Gothic artifacts famous for its range and variety. With the recent transfer of Walpole’s sprawling neo-Gothic villa from St Mary’s University College to the Strawberry Hill Trust, scholars now have an unprecedented level of access. The house has likewise been restored to one of its original functions; Walpole built it to be toured, and, under the guidance of resident scholars Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi, Strawberry Hill is once again an object of the tourist industry. But, if my experience is at all representative, visiting the house as it now stands is as much an experience of absence as of presence. Without the collection for which it was famous, the house feels empty, a collection of alcoves without objects, walls without paintings, and cabinets without curiosities. Despite the Trust’s best efforts to supply reproductions, replicas, and period artifacts, and despite the surprising survival of the house itself against the work of time, Strawberry Hill nevertheless feels a bit insubstantial. All these niches, gaps, shelves, and secret spaces, for what? Surely not to display a few contemporary engravings and a handful of period chairs.

The difference between Strawberry Hill as it was and Strawberry Hill as it is can be felt in the scholarship which has sprung up around it. Take, for example, two books. Chalcraft and Viscardi’s Visiting Strawberry Hill (2005), among the earliest returns of the new scholarly access to Walpole’s villa, provides a compelling argument about the order in which Walpole intended his rooms to be toured, and remarks on their internal “themes,” colour schemes, external views, and so forth. But placed up against Walpole’s own published Description of the Villa (1774, 1784), which was, as a number of critics have observed,² a handlist for visitors experiencing the tour of the house during Walpole’s lifetime, Visiting Strawberry Hill is surprisingly barren of precisely the antiquities that Strawberry Hill was designed to display. Walpole’s own descriptions of his house are remarkable less for their interest in space, which he assumes the reader is in, than for their obsession with the objects that a visitor would presumably be consulting during the tour. The disparity between Chalcraft and Viscardi’s interest in space and Walpole’s in objects is of course a reflection of the diaspora of Walpoliana following the infamous estate sale of 1842, which saw virtually all of Walpole’s collection sold and scattered.³ But the point is that while Chalcraft and Viscardi’s study is impressive as an anatomy of a house—the kind of house that could be “listed” by the Historic Buildings and Monument Commission—Walpole’s Description is the record of a museum, a house flexible enough to meet the demands of the objects he accrued. Visiting Strawberry Hill therefore reminds us that it is important to consider Walpole’s fragments of the Gothic past in the context of their one-time display, and the one-time display in the context of the fragments it contained. In the economy of Strawberry Hill, house and antiquities together tell a story that neither can tell apart.

This essay is an experiment in reassembling the villa and its collection. The years surrounding the completion of Strawberry Hill were Walpole’s most productive; during the 1760s, Walpole edited his four-volume Anecdotes of Painting in England, researched and composed his Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard iii, and wrote his most famous piece—The Castle of Otranto—all while maintaining his copious circle of...