Tag Archives: Horace Walpole

2. Pedigree showing descent of Lord and Lady Pomfret from King Edward I, circa 1750

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From a Gothic Villa to a Gothic Pineapple?

by Peter N. Lindfield, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Stirling

Horace Walpole (1717–97), son of Sir Robert Walpole, first Earl of Orford and Britain’s first ‘Prime Minister’, was a prolific Georgian letter writer, art historian, aesthetician and wholehearted supporter of what he termed ‘venerable barbarism’ (HW Corr. 20, 372)—Gothic design. Creating his own ancestral seat in the Gothic style from 1748, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, Walpole was at the forefront of a select antiquarian subset of the broader mid-Georgian movement to domesticate medieval architecture and architectural forms and to make them fit for polite Georgian society. The Lewis Walpole Library (LWL), given its peerless collection of Walpole’s printed and manuscript material, together with objects and furniture from Strawberry Hill, is a fundamental research library for anyone working upon Walpole, his villa, the Gothic Revival, and almost any aspect of eighteenth-century life that Walpole engaged with.

The LWL has numerous other cognate gems, not least the Pomfret Pedigree (Quarto 498 P77 MS) —a pedigree tracing the lineage of Henrietta Maria, Countess of Pomfret, and her husband, the Earl of Pomfret, back to the two wives of Edward I. Made in 1750 in the style of a richly illuminated manuscript, with a pineapple plant—a derivative of the family name—supporting their ancestors’ arms, the document illustrates how Gothic design was

interpreted and harnessed by competing Gothicists. Courtesy of this manuscript, which Walpole knew and wrote about to Sir Horace Mann on 1 September 1750 (HW Corr. 20, 180–81), the Countess emerges as an even more connoisseurial supporter of the medieval beyond the creation of a Gothic cabinet (c.1752–53) for the family seat at Easton Neston, Northamptonshire, and her London town house, Pomfret Castle, Arlington Street, London (1755–61) (Lindfield, 2014). The LWL collection is quite remarkable and replete with equally important manuscripts that propel our understanding and examination of Britain’s Georgian architectural, intellectual, social, and material past.

Bibliography

 MS

Farmington, Lewis Walpole Library, Quarto 498 P77 MS.

Secondary Sources

Lindfield, Peter N. ‘The Countess of Pomfret’s Gothic Revival Furniture’. The Georgian Group Journal XXII, 2014: 77–94.

Walpole, Horace. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, edited by W.S. Lewis et al. 48 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1937–83.

Welcome to the Lewis Walpole Library’s blog HORACE WALPOLE AT 300

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Welcome to the Lewis Walpole Library’s blog HORACE WALPOLE AT 300.

In this year 2017-2018, the Lewis Walpole Library, a department of Yale University Library, is celebrating the life, works, and collections of Horace Walpole through a variety of programming including lectures, seminars, an exhibition, conference, dramatic reading, and more.

This year-long blog will feature items from the Lewis Walpole Library’s collection associated with Walpole. Each week, a new blog post will look at something that Walpole either owned, wrote, had printed at his house in Twickenham called Strawberry Hill, or in some way was closely connected with him. Alternating with entries by current Lewis Walpole Library staff and former Fellows will be chapters from W.S. Lewis’s Rescuing Horace Walpole, reproduced here with permission of the Yale University Press.

As noted in the dustjacket blurb of Rescuing Horace Walpole, “Leslie Stephen wrote, ‘The very large segment of the eighteenth century is simply a synonym for the works of Horace Walpole.’ In the early 1920’s Wilmarth S. Lewis began to collect not only Walpole’s own writings, but the publications of his private press at Strawberry Hill, books from his library, and pictures, prints, and drawings he owned. Today the Lewis Walpole Library, in Farmington, Connecticut, is one of the most extraordinary collections of eighteenth-century books, papers, and works of art to be found anywhere in the world.”

WSL and HW

W.S. (“Lefty”) Lewis, Yale ’18, in his autobiography One Man’s Education, described the beginnings of his collecting of Horace Walpole, “…in London Walpoliana were everywhere, lying about unwanted, the books that Walpole wrote and printed, and unique items, which Lefty later called ‘Bits of the True Cross’: presentation copies of the Strawberry Hill Press and books from Walpole’s library. The harvest was ready and Lefty reaped and gathered it in.”

As Lewis wrote about the 250th anniversary of Walpole’s birth, “There will be celebrations throughout Walpoleshire–bonfires and dancing on the green….Walpole would be pleased, embarrassed, and not at all surprised by these tributes to his memory.” We hope Walpole would feel the same about this current tribute to Walpole at 300.

–Susan Walker, Head of Public Services, the Lewis Walpole Library