Chapter II -  The Beginnings of Gothic Romance

Walpole's admiration for Gothic art and his interest in the middle ages; the mediaeval revival at the close of the eighteenth century; The Castle of Otranto ; Walpole's bequest to later romance- writers; Smollett's incidental anticipation of the methods of Gothic Romance; Clara Reeve's Old English Baron and her effort to bring her story "within the utmost verge of probability"; Mrs. Barbauld's Gothic fragment; Blake's Fair Elenor ; the critical theories and Gothic experiments of Dr. Nathan Drake.

To Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto was published on Christmas Eve, 1764, must be assigned the honour of having introduced the Gothic Romance and of having made it fashionable. Diffident as to the success of so "wild" a story in an age devoted to good sense and reason, he sent forth his mediaeval tale disguised as a translation from the Italian of "Onuphrio Muralto," by William Marshall.

It was only after it had been received with enthusiasm that he confessed the authorship. As he explained frankly in a letter to his friend Mason: "It is not everybody that may in this country play the fool with impunity."

That Walpole regarded his story merely as a fanciful, amusing trifle is clear from the letter he wrote to Miss Hannah More reproving her for putting so frantic a thing into the hands of a Bristol milkwoman who wrote poetry in her leisure hours. The Castle of Otranto was but another manifestation of that admiration for the Gothic which had found expression fourteen years earlier in his miniature castle at Strawberry Hill, with its old armour and "lean windows fattened with rich saints."

Strawberry Hill

The word "Gothic" in the early eighteenth century was used as a term of reproach. To Addison, Siena Cathedral was but a "barbarous" building, which might have been a miracle of architecture, had our forefathers "only been instructed in the right way."

Pope in his Preface to Shakespeare admits the strength and majesty of the Gothic, but deplores its irregularity. In Letters on Chivalry and Romance , published two years before The Castle of Otranto, Hurd pleads that Spenser's Faerie Queene should be read and criticised as a Gothic, not a classical, poem.

He clearly recognises the right of the Gothic to be judged by laws of its own. When the nineteenth century is reached the epithet has lost all tinge of blame, and has become entirely one of praise. From the time when he began to build his castle, in 1750, Walpole's letters abound in references to the Gothic, and he confesses once: "In the heretical corner of my heart I adore the Gothic building."