Epistolary Relations: Walpole and Cole

Epistolary Relations: Walpole and Cole GEORGE E. HAGGERTY The twenty-year epistolary relation between Horace Walpole and Rev. William Cole began in 1762 when Cole sent Walpole a detailed response to his Anecdotes of Painting in England, and it ended only with Cole's death in 1782. When W. S. Lewis began editing Walpole's correspondence for Yale University Press, the first two volumes to appear were those comprising the letters between Walpole and Cole. From early on these volumes were celebrated as a detailed account of the later-eighteenthcentury fascination with English antiquities. Walpole and Cole share anecdotes, information, and discuss the exchange of various concrete objects that expand their collections of manuscripts, books, pictures and other kinds of architecturally impressive materials and ephemeral knickknacks . Lewis and his co-editor Darryl Wallace argue in their preface to these volumes that in no correspondence is "the subject so uniform as this."1 The lists of what interested these men and the depictions of their pursuit of desired objects make fascinating reading. Even more fascinating, however, is a different subject that emerges in these letters, albeit indirectly. This is the subject of masculine friendship. In addition to this theme of collecting, that is, a special and increasingly idiosyncratic friendship between Walpole and Cole makes this correspondence constantly engaging. The relationship between them began 175 176 / HAGGERTY when they were boys at Eton in the 1720s (Cole was three years Walpole's senior) and it reemerged when Cole wrote the letter mentioned above. As important as these letters are from the point of view of antiquarian studies, they are also valuable as examples of male epistolarity in the eighteenth century. Epistolary relations tell us a great deal about different versions of eighteenth-century masculinity and male-male interaction.2 Indeed, they tell us more than we have been led to believe. Masculinity was a central preoccupation in the later eighteenth century, as critics like Helen Deutsch, Claudia Johnson and Andrew Elfenbein have argued.3 The epistolary articulation of male relations that Horace Walpole develops in correspondences such as this one offers a valuable complement to these studies. When Lewis's edition of Walpole's letters started to appear, it was greeted with enormous fanfare. Press releases and reviews appeared in dozens of newspapers and journals, and taken together they articulate the official line about Walpole that the editors were hoping to promulgate. In so far as they could control responses to these volumes, they did; and at the same time, in their preface they established the terms in which this correspondence would be discussed.4 Some articles attempted to educate the public about Walpole and to explain why his letters would be interesting (William S. Ament's article for the LA Times, November 28, 1937, "Gouty Gentleman Discuss Antiquities"). Others were obsessed with Wilmarth Lewis himself (Bridgeport Post, October 24, 1937—"Son-In-Law of Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss of Fairfield, Owner of Finest Collection of Great Letter Writers outside of British Museum, to publish 50 volumes"). Some thought more directly about the correspondence (New York Herald Tribune, October 17, 1937: "It was a happy idea to begin the publication of the long-awaited Yale Edition of the Correspondence with the letters which passed back and forth between these two old friends.") Most of these accounts accept without question the assertion that Walpole selected Cole in order to have a correspondent to whom he could write about antiquities. While many see this as a landmark publication, few explore its full personal or cultural significance. One reviewer, R. W. Chapman, writing in the Times Literary Supplement (October 30, 1937) claims that "If the [publishing] event is equal to its promise, it may well eclipse the Variorum Shakespeare as the greatest achievement of editorial scholarship in the United States." Chapman makes his review the occasion to theorize about British and American collecting, and private versus public ownership. He even has something to say about Cole, who was previously known as a diarist, and whose letters appeared Epistolary Relations: Walpole and Cole / 177 here for the first time:5 "Cole's [letters] are fuller, and in many ways better, than Walpole's, for Cole was the...