27. Walpole’s X

Posted on July 25, 2018 by Susan Walker

27. Walpole’s X

by Sean Silver, Associate Professor, English Language and Literature, University of Michigan

I’d like to write a bit about the letter X—one X in particular, but also the shape of the letter in general. It’s not a popular letter. It is sort of stashed away at the end of the alphabet; we mostly use it when we mean to refuse something else. We say that we “X” or “cross” something out. We “exclude” it, “ex-“ being the Greek prefix for “out,” like exile, exit, or exotic. And we use X’s in this way. John Locke used to cancel pages of his manuscript notes with a large “X,” stretching its limbs from corner to corner. Pages so marked are obsolete, or have been copied elsewhere, thereby excluded from the current pages of his thought. As I look out the window of my hotel room, which happens to be on a busy street, I count no fewer than three x’s, instructing us not to smoke, not to litter, and not to park.

It isn’t that an X isn’t elegant, in its own way. Alexander Pope loved X’s—I mean syntactically or as a rhetorical choice rather than a letter. The Greek X is pronounced Chi. It has been used to abbreviate the name of the Son of God: Chi for Christ. (This also had the virtue of reminding us, ideogrammatically, of the Cross.) But it was also, in Pope’s moment, used to name a certain kind of poetic crossing, where ideas are made to reflect one another, or to cross on the page. So begins his Rape of the Lock with a sort of puzzle or question, almost brought to a paradox by the magic of the cross-like Chi:

Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel

A well-bred lord t’ assault a gentle belle?

O say what stranger cause, yet unexplor’d,

Could make a gentle belle reject a lord?

In tasks so bold, can little men engage,

And in soft bosoms dwells such mighty rage?

You don’t have to squint too hard to see it. It is a kind of country-dance of ideas, a crossing or a passing on the page: the well-bred lord who assaults the gentle belle; the gentle belle who rejects the lord. If we were to put these lines on the chalkboard, which, in lectures to my undergraduates, I generally do, we draw the x that associates ideas, linking lord to lord, belle to belle. “We call this chiasmus,” I say, “for the Greek letter X”, then I spell “Chiasmus.” In case you didn’t see what Pope was up to, he does it again in the very next couplet. A bold task finds its echo in a mighty rage—which is tucked away in the opposite corner of the following line; “little men” are crossed with “soft bosoms,” in what seems to me to be a summary repetition of the chiastic pairing of lords and belles. There is ideological work happening, here: a philosophical contrapposto or exchange. Its figure is the letter X.

The thing about the X is that it is the simplest letter of two strokes: two bare lines made to cross. As a letter, it is almost unnecessary. Turkish, for instance, dispenses with it altogether; in Istanbul, you hail a Taksi. But as an ideogram, it seems to me to be indispensable, as a sign of emphasis or cancellation. A single line might be an accident; two lines, crossed, define a point and a plane. Something new, in short, happens when two lines are made to meet. This is precisely because it is the most primitive woven letter, where elements are not stacked, but crossed; it is for this reason that William Petty, in his Early Modern treatise on textiles, describes the crucial element of any woven good as the “little X’s” that are made on the loom. A single fiber: it might have tensile strength and possibly some other bare qualities. But with an X, other qualities begin to emerge, like elasticity, or softness. So, too, with the letter itself, which connects and complicates, or, in Petty’s moment, makes “complex.”

This brings me to a somewhat more prosaic, somewhat more tendentious chiasmus, which is suggested by a remark in an appendix in the Yale edition of Walpole’s Correspondence. The appendix refers to Horace Walpole’s letter to Horace Mann of 28 January, 1754. This letter, the editor writes, “inspired more inquiries [to the staff of the LWL] than all the other passages of the Walpolian correspondence put together.” This is a curiosity, but not a crossing; the other half of the chiasmus is this: Walpole, for this passage alone, remains among the most-cited eighteenth-century men of letters in publications on the sciences. People at the Walpole are hearing from science writers for a certain passage in Walpole’s letters; Walpole, for this passage alone, is appearing in their work as a representative of his age. What is more, the passage remains important because it, itself, names a kind of crossing; it gives a name to a species of transformative event, when we come across something we didn’t know we were looking for. It is the very passage where Walpole coins serendipity.

“Serendipity” is a word which is paradoxical in a special way that Walpole perfected. A serious word of deliberate lightness, it names moments where we find what we didn’t know we were looking for. Put more sharply: we go into the world looking for one thing, but, in the looking, find something that we could not have known to want before we started the search. It is transformative in a transformative way; we think that we are accumulating knowledge like a bag accumulates marbles or a book accumulates print: bag and book are untouched by the contact. But, in fact, we are learning learn in the way that a sculptor shapes clay, in which clay and sculptor undergo continuous change. In other words, it isn’t just that the discovery changes the search; it changes the searcher, for what we have found has transformed the way we imagine the world. This is what makes it chiastic, like a letter x. The transformation runs both directions. “Serendipity,” therefore, names two things: we go out into the world, seeking one thing; the world, as compensation, transforms the seeker. This is the crucial crossing, the return route where the total project is altered by its accidental success.

Walpole christened “serendipity” in a 1754 letter penned to his longtime friend and correspondent Horace Mann, the British Minister of Florence. He was sending his thanks for a gift he had just received, a portrait of Bianca Cappello Walpole believed to have been painted by Vasari. It was in bespeaking a custom frame for the painting that Walpole made his discovery; the frame was to bear the arms of the Cappellos on one side, and the arms of the Medicis on the other, for the celebrated Bianca Cappello was the second wife of Francesco I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. “À propos,” Walpole writes, “in an old book of Venetian arms” (the very book which is now at the LWL[1]),

there are two coats of Capello, who from their name bear a hat, on one of them is added a flower-de-luce on a blue ball, which I am persuaded was given to the family by the Great Duke, in consideration of this alliance; the Medicis you know bore such a badge at the top of their own arms. This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity.[2]

Appearing on the same page of this book are two versions of the same coat of arms, two caps with blue balls, identical except for a tiny smudge of a fleur-de-lis in the second (and a typographical error, “Capello / Caepllo”). It is a question, in Walpole’s words, of “persuasion”: events and context have caused a detail, the merest blot of color, to bear rhetorical force, convincing him that he is witnessing the sign of a political union. Not quite satisfied with this story, Walpole adds a definition: serendipity is an “accidental sagacity,” for “no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description.” It is, he suggests elsewhere, what you discover when you are “a la chasse of something very different” (31.325). Thus does “Capello’s portrait open,” writes James Lilley, “onto an interlocking, ever-expanding nexus of image, history, and text. It is as if each object in the [collection] ineluctably unfolds its own history, a history that is tied to other images, other places in the text.”[3] This perfectly captures, I think, the magic of serendipity as a fundamental principle of discovery, of where persons and things are made repeatedly to cross in an archive.

You might wonder why Walpole called this sort of discovery “serendipity,” rather than of some other, less whimsical word—and for that, any number of other studies exist, because Walpole tells us himself that the word comes from a Sherlock-Holmesian tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip.” Walpole fancied himself just such a seeker; his whimsy was, I suppose, the metric of his susceptibility to these sorts of transformative moments. It takes “sagacity” to witness a mere “accident,” but experience it as a transformative lesson.

I would like instead to wind up these remarks by sharing my own serendipitous discovery—which bears in a small way on the intellectual history of the concept itself. I had come to the Lewis Walpole Library as the Charles J. Cole Research Fellow in the summer of 2012. My wife was six months pregnant, but we had decided to reserve this month so I could substantially complete research on the last couple of tricky objects for The Mind Is a Collection, a virtual museum of objects people used to model cognitive theories. Horace Walpole’s copy of his own play, The Mysterious Mother, was one of these objects. I was doing what you can do when you have the time, space, and resources for research: during the day, I was reading deeply in Walpole’s letters, and in the archives held at the LWL; at night, I was staying at the Root House, and reading broadly in the history of the fact, which is to say, the idea of facts, of “fact” as a concept which had to be learned. I was reading William Eamon’s Science and the Secrets of Nature, which traces a major part of this history. It was there that I ran across an early modern theory of knowledge-acquisition, in which we discover things by accident. It was commonly compared to a certain kind of hunt, but where we continually happened upon objects we didn’t know we were seeking. It is, Eamon suggested, a form of “accident”; it requires, (he suggests), “sagacity.”

To my ear, this was a clear echo of Walpole. The problem is, Eamon wasn’t quoting Walpole—he was quoting Francis Bacon, or, really, the standard translation of Bacon, which wasn’t made until nearly a century after Walpole’s coinage. How this precise formulation, how it was that Walpole, like Eamon, thought of discovery as “accident” crossing with “sagacity,” became one of the principle projects of the next year or so of my life—happily interrupted by the birth of a beautiful daughter. That story is now in print, and has become useful to people working on the serendipity concept—for it shows us some of the ideas Walpole himself was weaving together when he coined his term.

This drove me back to Walpole’s collection, and to his remarks on serendipity, as I put together the parts of what would become a piece on “The Prehistory of Serenidipity.” But it also drove me to Walpole’s library, to the “old book of Venetian arms,” which against the odds, survived the teeth of time to find its way into Lewis’s collection of Walpole’s books. There, on page 12, are the coats of arms Walpole describes, and, in the margin, a little X, penned there to register the frisson of his discovery. This is of course the X which is the subject of these remarks. Walpole, with his joints not yet suffering from the gout that would cripple him late in life, held open that tightly bound little book, and placed a neat ideogram in the margin. You may still see it there. It is the first serendipitous discovery so-called. It reminds us that an X doesn’t just wipe things out. It also marks a spot: and not just a spot of special note, but a place where a transformation occurred, both in Walpole, but also in theories of discovery.

[1] Le arme overo insegne di tutti le nobili . . . di Venetia (Venice, 1578), p. 12, Lewis Walpole Library, Farmingham, Connecticut, call no. 49 2051. It’s probably worth pointing out at this point that Walpole commonly marked passages suggesting surprising discoveries with a marginal “x.” See, e.g., Walpole’s commonplace book, which he called his Book of Materials (1777), at the Lewis Walpole Library, pp. 6, 27, 29, etc.

[2] Walpole, Correspondence, Vol. 26, p. 307.

[3] James D. Lilley, “Studies in Uniquity: Horace Walpole’s Singular Collection,” ELH 80.1 (2013): 93-124, p. 119.

24. Choice 14: Walpole’s Chattertoniana

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Susan Walker

24. Choice 14: Walpole’s Chattertoniana

by Wilmarth S. Lewis

“Coming back on the Olympic in 1925, I met Dr Edward Clark Streeter, to whom I later dedicated my Collector’s Progress. He had been at Yale twenty years ahead of me, had formed a fine library of medical history, and was then making his notable collection of weights. After I held forth on Walpole he looked at me quizzically and asked, ‘But what about the Marvellous Boy?’ He was quoting Wordsworth,

“‘Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
“The sleepless soul that perished in his pride.’

“This was the youthful genius, Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide in his eighteenth year, a victim of opium as well as of pride and whose brief life fills twenty columns in the Dictionary of National Biography, as compared to Boswell’s sixteen and Walpole’s eleven. While we walked the decks of the Olympic I explained to Ned Streeter that I couldn’t collect Walpole if I wasn’t convinced he was innocent of Chatterton’s death and Ned accepted his innocence when I finished.

“The Choice in this chapter is Walpole’s collection in four volumes of sixteen pieces dealing with Chatterton. To appreciate them one must know the boy’s story and how he, a precocious adolescent in Bristol, the son of a poor schoolmaster, secured a special place in English literature.

“In 1776 Chatterton, aged sixteen, sent Walpole ‘The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, wrote bie T. Rowleie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge.’ Rowley was a fifteenth-century monk of Bristol invented by Chatterton who allegedly composed a treatise on ‘peyncteynge,’ that might, Chatterton wrote Walpole, be ‘of service to you in any future edition of your truly entertaining Anecdotes of Painting.’ He added ten explanatory notes to ‘The Ryse of Peyncteynge.’ The first of them was on Rowley whose ‘Merit as a biographer, historiographer, is great, as a poet still greater . . . and the person under whose patronage [his pieces] may appear to the world, will lay the Englishman, the antiquary, and the poet under an eternal obligation.’ This was a hook well baited for Horace Walpole who sent Chatterton ‘a thousand thanks’ for his ‘very curious and kind letter’ and went so far as to say he would ‘not be sorry to print’ a specimen of Rowley’s poems. What pleased Walpole most in Chatterton’s letter was the confirmation of the conjecture in Anecdotes of Painting that ‘oil painting was known here much earlier than had been supposed, ‘ but before long Walpole began to suspect, with the aid of Mason and Gray, that the examples of the fifteenth-century manuscripts that Chatterton had sent him were forgeries.

“It was odd that Rowley wrote in eighteenth-century rhymed couplets.

“Meanwhile, Chatterton disclosed to Walpole his age and the condition in life. The letter in which he did so has been almost entirely cut away. Walpole’s recollection of it nine years later was that Chatterton described himself in it as ‘a clerk or apprentice to an attorney, [that he] had a taste and turn for more elegant studies,’ and hoped Walpole would assist him with his ‘interest in emerging out of so dull a profession,’ The learned antiquary turned out to be an ambitious youth. Walpole sent him an avuncular letter to which Chatterton returned, according to Walpole, ‘a rather peevish answer’ in which he said ‘he could not contest with a person of my learning (a compliment by not means due to me, and which I certainly had not assumed, having consulted abler judges), maintained the genuineness of the poems and demanded to have them returned, as they were the property of another gentleman. . . .’

When I received this letter, I was going to Paris in a day or two, and either forgot his request of the poems, or perhaps not having time to have them copied, deferred complying till my return, which was to be in six weeks. . . .
Soon after my return from France, I received another letter from Chatterton, the style of which was singularly impertinent. He demanded his poems roughly; and added, that I should not have dared to use him so ill, if he had not acquainted me with the narrowness of his circumstances.
My heart did not accuse me of insolence to him. I wrote an answer expostulating with him on his injustice, and renewing good advice–but upon second thoughts, reflecting that so wrong-headed a young man, of whom I knew nothing, and whom I had never seen, might be absurd enough to print my letter, I flung it into the fire; and wrapping up both his poems and letters, without taking a copy of either, for which I am now sorry, I returned all to him, and thought no more of him or them, till about a year and half after, when [a gap in all printed versions].
Dining at the Royal Academy, Dr Goldsmith drew the attention of the company with an account of a marvellous treasure of ancient poems lately discovered at Bristol, and expressed enthusiastic belief in them, for which he was laughed at by Dr Johnson, who was present. I soon found this was the trouvaille of my friend Chatterton; and I told Dr Goldsmith that this novelty was none to me, who might, if I had pleased, have had the honour of ushering the great discovery to the learned world. You may imagine, Sir, we did not at all agree in the measure of our faith; but though his credulity diverted me, my mirth was soon dashed, for on asking about Chatterton, he told me he had been in London, and had destroyed himself. I heartily wished then that I had been the dupe of all the poor young man had written to me, for who would not have his understanding imposed on to save a fellow being from the utmost wretchedness, despair and suicide!—and a poor young man not eighteen—and of such miraculous talents—for, dear Sir, if I wanted credulity on one hand, it is ample on the other.

“Seven years after Chatterton’s death an article on him in the Monthly Review for April 1777 stated that he had applied to Walpole, but ‘met with no encouragement from that learned and ingenious gentleman, who suspected his veracity.’ A month later in the same magazine George Catcott of Bristol went a step further. Chatterton, said Catcott, ‘Applied . . . to that learned antiquary, Mr Horace Walpole, but met with little or no encouragement from him; soon after which, in a fit of despair, as it is supposed, he put an end to his unhappy life.’ ‘This,’ comments E. H. W. Meyerstein, in his Life of Chatterton, 1930, ‘was a perfectly monstrous accusation, considering that Walpole never saw Chatterton, whose application to him was made over a year before he came to London and seventeen months before his death.’ The accusation was repeated a year later by the editor of Chatterton’s Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. These statements fastened the responsibility for Chatterton’s death on Walpole in many minds. . . .

“In 1933 I found out that sixteen pieces of Walpole’s collection of Chattertoniana bound in four volumes were in the Mercantile Library in New York; a seventeenth piece was (and is) in the British Museum. The Mercantile Library, a lending library of contemporary books, acquired the four volumes in 1868. I of course hurried to see them. Only the first volume was in its Strawberry covers with Walpole’s arms on the sides, but all the pieces had his notes and formed a major Walpolian recovery.

“The first volume has a title page written by Walpole on a fly-leaf: ‘Collection/of/Pieces/relating to/Rowley/and/Chatterton;/containing,/the supposed poems/of Rowley; the acknowledged works/of/Chatterton; by/Mr Walpole himself./’ The first piece is ‘Poems, supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley, and others in the fifteenth century The Greatest Part Now First Published From the Most Authentic Copies, with An Engraved Specimen of One of The MSS to Which are added A Preface An Introductory Account of The Several Pieces and A Glossary,’ 1777. . . .The second piece in this volume is Miscellanies in Prose and Verse; by Thomas Chatterton, the supposed author of the poems published under the names of Rowley, Canning, etc. . . . The third piece in the first volume is Walpole’s Letter to the Editor of the Miscellanies of Thomas Chatterton, Strawberry Hill, 1779.

After ‘Letter’ he wrote ‘From Mr Horace Walpole.’ He made a dozen annotations in ink, and pasted the relevant newspaper cuttings and a romantic view of ‘Monument to the Memory of Chatterton.’ If the Almighty allows me to rescue only one of the four volumes this is the one I shall choose without hesitation. . . .

“The runner-up in this Choice is a collection of manuscripts and letters that belonged to Thomas Tyrwhitt. Among them are six pages in Chatterton’s hand, including his poem ‘Happiness’ and several drawings and inscriptions inspired by the documents and monuments in St Mary Redcliff, Bristol. ‘Happiness’ concludes:

Content is happiness, as sages say-
But what’s content? The trifle of a day.
Then, friend let inclination be thy guide,
Nor be by superstition led aside.
The saint and sinner, fool and wise attain
An equal share of easiness and pain.

“Chatterton’s handwriting is so mature it is easy to see why it was mistaken for that of an older man. As his manuscripts are chiefly in the British Museum and the Bristol Library, we are fortunate at Farmington to have these pages that bring us into the most vexed chapter of Walpole’s life.”

Lewis, Wilmarth S. Rescuing Horace Walpole. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978.

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22. Mortarboarding Horace Walpole – or Who moved the Gates?

Posted on March 6, 2018 by Susan Walker

22. Mortarboarding Horace Walpole – or Who moved the Gates?

By Nicholas J.S. Knowles, Independent Scholar

An amusing little homage to Horace Walpole as the indubitable high priest of the picturesque imagination can be found in the Lewis Walpole library in the form of a print, The Temple at Strawberry Hill, depicting a solitary capped and gowned scholar seated in the garden, absorbed in reading a book (Figure 1).

A view of the front of the temple at Horace Walpole's home Strawberry Hill includes the circular garden and the ornamental urns planted with small trees leading to the temple's entrance. To the left the doors of the large iron gates are closed. A man sits reading in a bench in the middle of the image, beside the circular garden in front of the temple.

Figure 1 Temple at Strawberry Hill. Thomas Rowlandson. (Lewis Walpole Library)

Figure 2 Wrapper label for Sketches from Nature 1822 (Beinecke Library, Yale)

The Lewis Walpole Library impression, signed in the plate Rowlandson del 1822 and lettered drawn & etched by Rowlandson, Stadler aquatinta [i] is one of seventeen plates from Thomas Rowlandson’s Sketches from Nature, a collection of views of beauty spots in England, mostly in the West Country but including several taken along the Thames, that make up one of Rowlandson’s most engaging exercises in the picturesque. The series was first published in parts in 1809 by Thomas Tegg [ii]; an advertisement in Jacksons Oxford Journal for 23 Sept 1809 [iii] tells us: “Rowlandsons Sketch book / or, Choice Views from Nature. This day is published in Royal 4to. Containing four beautiful Views from drawings, made on the spot by T.Rowlandson. Esq price in colours to imitate drawings, 2s.6d. No 1. (to be continued every fortnight) The whole intended to assist the young artist, in the various branches of this delightful and fascinating science. All the prints will be etched by T.Rowlandson Esq. from original drawings, by himself, during a tour made in various counties of England in the summers of the years 1803-4-5-6-7 and 8.”

Rowlandson’s frequent presence in the vicinity of the upper Thames as he made his scenic tours is borne out by numerous (enough for a whole exhibition [iv]) surviving drawings of the area from the period, including several relating to Strawberry Hill and one of which, the well known North Entrance of Strawberry Hill, is also in the LWL collection. Whether designing The Temple at Strawberry Hill print actually involved a

Fragment from Rowlandson's Grotesque Borders for Rooms & Halls, Thomas Rowlandson Collection (GC112), Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Figure 3 Fragment from sheet 14 of
Grotesque Borders for Rooms and Halls, Thomas Rowlandson Collection (GC112), Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

visit to Strawberry Hill at all by Rowlandson is moot, as discussion in this blogpost will show, but the appearance of the print in the same year as the first appearance of Rowlandson & Combe’s bestselling parody, Dr Syntax in search of the Picturesque (first published in parts in Ackermann’s Poetical Magazine), is a definite and affectionate nod to Walpole as the figurehead of the picturesque tradition and underlines of his continuing aesthetic reputation as the progenitor of Gothicism after his death in 1797.

An earlier droll comment by Rowlandson on the raging fashion for the Gothick can be found in one of the twenty-four sheets of Ackermann’s Grotesque Borders for Rooms and halls) (Figure 3), a series of comic friezes intended for decorating rooms, full of topical jokes and allusions [v].

The Gothick revival continued apace in the early 1800’s with William Porden’s extravagantly gothic Eaton Hall (extravagantly built at a cost of over £100,000 between 1803 and 1812 for the 2nd Earl Grosvenor), which was even to be visited by Doctor Syntax himself in a sequel; Dr Syntax’s Second Tour in Search of Consolation (1820). Rowlandson depicts the Reverend Doctor in one of Eaton Hall’s ornate chambers, engaged in a dialogue with his guide on the relative merits of the gothic and the classical styles. Syntax proves to be a good Walpolean disciple, advocating Gothic as the appropriate style for the stately homes of old families, in words that assert its chivalric connotations and bring Horace himself to mind:

“The new rais’d structure should dispense

The style of old magnificence:

The grandeur of a former age

Should still the wond’ring eye engage,

And the last Heir be proud to raise

A mansion as of former days.

…

The last successor claims the praise,

For virtue in these later days,

And walls bedeck’d with traceries;

Windows with rainbow colour’s bright,

With many a fancied symbol dight;

And when he views the turret rise

In bold irregularities;

He feels what no Corinthian pile

Would tell, though of the richest style,

That warriors, statesmen, learned sages,

Had borne his name in former ages,

While he, by ev’ry virtue known,

Does honour to it in his own.” [vi]

Figure 4 Portrait of Horace Walpole in his Library 1755-59
(image Lewis Walpole Library)

In the Temple at Strawberry Hill print, Rowlandson upholds the fictionalising, idealising Walpolean fancy; he shows two of the sights of Strawberry Hill, the ‘Chapel in the Woods’ (Figure 8) and the ‘Garden Gate’ (now lost), which in reality were some distance apart, placed in artificial but harmonious proximity, adds a high-backed gothic chair from Walpole’s collection; and furthermore inserts a young hermit-scholar lost in sublime contemplation – surely intended to be read as a teasing reference to Horace Walpole himself as the genius loci – and who also serves neatly to place the viewer in the picture as well. That the slight figure is intended for Walpole is hinted by the characteristic cross legged pose, seen in the 1750’s drawing of Horace Walpole in his Library by Johann Heinrich Müntz (Figure 4).

A likely basis for the print, in reverse and with some small variations, is a drawing by Rowlandson of the same scene, now in the Courtauld Institute in London, (Figure 5) [vii].

Garden and entrance to a Neo-Gothic house - Strawberry Hill, 1809 (circa), Thomas Rowlandson (1757 - 1827). Accession number D.1952.RW.3600. © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.

Figure 5 Garden and entrance to a Neo-Gothic house – Strawberry Hill, © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.

In the drawing, the similarly posed figure of a reader has not been guyed with a mortarboard and gown, but rather has short, natural hair and the knee stockings of the Müntz portrait. He sits serenely absorbed amidst Rowlandson’s swirling rococo penmanship, the lush vegetation flowing into the gothic ornament. Richard Jeffree suggests the drawing is itself fictional ^iv; a pastiche based on two prints that are among the illustrations to Walpole’s own guide to Strawberry Hill (for which see the Birthday Blog post #15; Walpole’s Two Chief Copies of his “Description of Strawberry Hill,” Printed there in 1774 and 1784). Firstly, a print etched by John Godfrey after a drawing by William Pars of the tiny ‘temple’, whose design Walpole had based closely on the perpendicular gothic Chantry Chapel in the chancel of Salisbury Cathedral; “The Chapel in the south-west corner of the wood, is built of brick, with a beautiful front of Portland stone, executed by Mr. Gaysere of Westminster, and taken from the tomb of Edmund Audley bishop of Salisbury, in that cathedral” [viii].

View of the Chapel in the Garden at Strawberry Hill, uncolored print

Figure 6 View of the Chapel in the Garden (Lewis Walpole Library)

Godfrey’s print (Figure 6) shows the same four plants on pedestals flanking the entrance to the chapel that are found in Rowlandson’s versions, as well as the two tall trees with distinctive foliage either side, definitely “hanging down poetical” [ix] and the semi-circular lawn in front.

Garden gate print from the "Description of the Villa"

Figure 7 The Garden Gate. Description of Strawberry Hill 1774 (Lewis Walpole Library)

The second component of Rowlandson’s image, the Garden Gate, was also based on a 13th century tomb, described by Walpole as “The piers of the Garden-gates are of artificial stone, and taken from the tomb of William de Luda bishop of Ely, in that Cathedral” [x] and illustrated in Walpole’s description by a print by Thomas Morris after a drawing by Edward Edwards (Figure 7).

The design for the gates is mentioned originally in a letter by Walpole to Henry Cole in a sally almost as contrived as the artificial stone from which they were to be made: “Imprimis then, here are the directions for Mr Essex for the piers of my gates. Bishop Luda must not be offended at my converting his tomb into a gateway. Many a saint and confessor, I doubt, will be glad soon to be passed through, as it will at least secure his being passed over”[xi]. In the ‘Plan of the Estate’ made about c1790, posted into HW’s extra-illustrated copy of the 1784 Description, the ‘Gothic Gate’ is marked as being located on the southeast boundary, some distance from the chapel. Mainly on the strength of Rowlandson’s drawing, WS Lewis suggests that the gate might have been subsequently moved to a position near the chapel [xii]. However Rowlandson was seldom concerned with exact topographical niceties and it is surely more likely that he transposed it by a stroke of his pen than that Walpole did so with a team of workmen – especially if Rowlandson invented his whole scene from Walpole’s prints in the first place. As can be seen from many other drawings by Rowlandson of known locations, the play of pattern and composition are more important in his depiction of places than precision. This is well illustrated by two very different images of Strawberry Hill by him taken from more or less the same vantage point and shown below in Figure 10. Rowlandson freely takes liberties with the road and building elements to create the movement and composition he wants.

Color Photo of the Chapel in the Woods at Strawberry Hill

Figure 8 The Chapel in the woods today (Trip Advisor)

While it is of course also perfectly possible that elements of Rowlandson’s sketch of The Temple were actually drawn from life, the similarity of various aspects of the design, in particular, the façade, the window tracery, the half open door, and the curious patterning of the foliage, support the idea that it is based on prints in Walpole’s Description rather than being taken direct [xiii]. This would be entirely unsurprising – there are numerous other examples of Rowlandson using another print as the source for a background; for example, for several of the series of twelve comic prints of Oxford and Cambridge that Rowlandson made for Ackerman between 1809 & 1811, he simply copies prints of Oxford Colleges taken from the Oxford Almanack [xiv] and populates them with lively figures cavorting in the foreground. (This is taken to its logical conclusion in Ackermann’s massive Microcosm of London (1808-1810) where Rowlandson provides the figures for over 130 backgrounds provided by Pugin and others).

Figure 9 Monastic Fare (Lewis Walpole Library)

The scholar figure in The Temple is clearly fanciful; Rowlandson’s other drawings of Strawberry Hill have similarly invented figures appropriate to the spirit to Walpole’s creation. In North Entrance of Strawberry Hill [with Procession], also in the LWL, a procession of nuns and monks are introduced amidst the stream of carriages and pedestrians. Given that Rowlandson’s views on monasticism are very typically represented by prints such as The Holy Friar (1807) or Monastic Fare (Figure 9), just two of a steady output of anti-clerical satirical prints made throughout his life, and monks are almost invariably depicted by him for comic effect, the procession can happily be read as a jeu d’esprit playing along to Walpole’s medieval fantasy. That said, it is not impossible that Rowlandson actually encountered real monks in the vicinity ─ a significant number of refugee monks and nuns from both English Catholic and French orders had fled to England in the previous decade to escape repression, especially after the September massacres of 1792 [xv]. Walpole himself subscribed to a fund for their relief (though “much against my will and practice”) [xvi]. And in the sketch of Strawberry Hill with a Procession of Monks which, by its loose and rapid pen work, of all Rowlandson’s drawings of Strawberry Hill is most suggestive of a drawing actually made on the spot (Figure 10a), there is indeed a band of monks; forming a dejected crocodile trudging up the road on the left. The second view, from the V&A, shows Rowlandson’s carefree editing of the elements to create his own composition.

Drawing by Rowlandson "SStrawberry Hill with a procession of monks"

Figure 10a. [Strawberry Hill With a Procession of Monks]. Private Collection
Image from Lowell Libson 2016. Catalogue entry #24 in Jefferee 1992 iv

Drawing by Rowlandson [Strawberry Hill from the West]

Figure 10b. [Strawberry Hill from the West], Victoria & Albert Museum London DYCE.79. Catalogue entry #25 in Jefferee 1992 iv

Figures 10a & b Two views of Strawberry Hill

The drawing of the chapel in the Woodward is not the only drawing by Rowlandson of Strawberry Hill that is almost certainly fictive. Another illustration from Walpole’s Description, a print of the Tribune by Thomas Morris, is highly plausible as the source for Rowlandson’s drawing of Nuns at Prayer in the Tribune at Strawberry Hill (Figure 11) in which a group of pretty young nuns kneel in ardent supplication before an altar flanked by large candlesticks. This should be read in particular as mischievous ─ nuns appear almost invariable with an erotic charge in Rowlandson prints of the period, ranging from the mildly titillating , such as this 1811 Tegg satire of a visit to a nunnery, to the out and out pornographic; such as this illustration to a Fable by La Fontaine, (undated, but probably made between 1800 and 1810). One cannot fault Rowlandson’s Walpolean sensibilities here however, since Walpole himself wrote of the Tribune that he intended “a cabinet, that is to have all the air of a Catholic chapel – bar consecration!” [xvii]

Figure 11a Nuns at Prayer. Private Collection

Figure 11b The cabinet at Strawberry Hill, by Edward Edwards, (Lewis Walpole Library), Folio 49 3582 fol.55 .From Horace Walpole’s extra-illustrated copy of A Description of the Villa…at Strawberry-Hill (Strawberry Hill, 1784, fol.55)

Figures 11a & b The Tribune at Strawberry Hill

By rather a biting irony, both Walpole and Rowlandson’s visions of the chapel proved to be truly visionary – in 1923 Strawberry Hill was bought by the Catholic Education Council for use as a Catholic Teacher Training College and the Vincentian fathers subsequently consecrated the Tribune room as a chapel.[xviii] The joke is definitely on Rowlandson. Would this fate have pleased the shade of Walpole one wonders? Certainly he would be delighted to see his “paper buildings” lasting into another age to become a revered ancient monument in their own right, but his enthusiasm for the architecture, ornaments and ‘relicks’ of the old Catholic Church seems to have belied a dislike of its priggishness and of religious enthusiasm in general; “For the Catholic religion, I think it very consumptive. With a little patience, if Whitfleld, Wesley, my lady Huntingdon, and that rogue Madan live, I do not doubt but we shall have something very like it here. And yet I had rather live at the end of a tawdry religion, than at the beginning; which is always more stern and hypocrite”[xix]. Elsewhere his put down of Catholic bigotry and its excesses is mordant: ‘You know I have ever been averse to toleration of an intolerant religion” going on to observe tartly how religions encourage and feed off the conflict they generate “for modes of religion are but graver fashions: nor will anything but contradiction keep fashion up” [xx] The designer of a Catholic closet does not come over as a closet Catholic.

Can other references to Walpole be found in Rowlandson’s work? While antiquaries and connoisseurs, always ancient and invariably grotesque, sporadically feature as the butt of caricatures throughout Rowlandson career – from the Chamber of Taste (1786); to Modern Antiques; (1811) to or The Antiquaries Last Will and Testament (1816) – yet none of the depictions appear particularly slanted at the elegant Walpole.

Figure 12 Tales Of Wonder!
James Gillray on Lewis Mark’s The Monk . (Lewis Walpole Library)

But there is, apart from the Strawberry Hill drawings and print, one other, slightly surprising place where one can find Rowlandson burning the Walpolean flame, albeit with somewhat fishy oil. The author of the Castle of Otranto and the Mysterious Mother (LWL Birthday Blog #19) , stands of course as progenitor of The Gothic Novel, which, besides its many legitimate literary heirs, Vathek, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, Frankenstein, etc, also begat an entire bastard genre of cheap and popular ‘tales of sensation’.

The downmarket publisher Thomas Tegg, for whom Rowlandson made over 200 large caricatures between 1807 and 1815 ─and who published the 1809 edition of Sketches from Nature ─ also in the same period published a successful series of inexpensive chap books for the burgeoning mass market for such fare. Figure 13 Wrapper for Castle of the Appennines with advertisement for Tegg’s New Pamphlets (Author’s Collection)Tegg’s New Pamphlets came loose stitched in a duodecimo paper wrapper; the advertisement printed on the front (Figure 13) lists nineteen such works and shows that at least fourteen of them are gothic or exotic tales (the rest are popular songs – and a book on fortune telling). At least eight of them include frontispieces and title page vignettes etched by the prolific Rowlandson [xxi]. Compared to his illustrations to Smollett or Fielding from the 1790’s they are slight works, but nonetheless helped to carry the thrills of Walpole’s Gothic sensationalism out to a wider audience. Rowlandson enters wholeheartedly into their world of high melodrama and preposterous terror ridden plots of lost heirs, lost parents; imprisoned maidens, decayed noble families, cloisters, ghosts and banditti, choosing lurid scenes and illustrating them vigorously and with exemplary accuracy to their parody-defying text (Figures 14a & b), to make a cracking sixpennyworth of illustrated schlock.

Castle of the Appennines title page spread

Figure 14a The Castle of the Appennines, c1808 (AC)

Figure 14a. p14: … the sigh was repeated, when a door opened opposite to that by which he had entered, now was made visible by a gentle bluish light, which shone through the dungeon. Appalled and in anxious expectation, he fixed his eyes on it; it slowly opened and a tall figure enveloped in a travelling cloak entered the vault and walked with solemn steps to the centre….

“Tell me,” said Alberto, “who thou art, and whither do you lead me?”

The stranger, without answering, slowly unfolded the cloak, and discovered to the astonished Alberto the form of his beloved father. His face was pallid, and wore the yellow hue of the grave; in his side appeared a ghastly wound, from which issued streams of blood; with a mournful smile he surveyed his son, and in hollow accents thus addressed him :-

“Alberto, your savage uncle Cavigni inflicted this wound, having, under a false pretence, decoyed me from the castle. In a cavern near the west end of the forest you will find my remains; till you pay them due honour I can never rest. Your Emily is still in the power of the Murderer; be quick! Rescue her, and revenge me!”

p18: “You have no doubt heard” said she “of your father’s sudden departure from his castle, in consequence of intelligence he received at a late hour of the night. …. For several hours we travelled through the gloom of night, when, as we emerged from a thicket through which we had been passing, the cabriolet was stopped by a band of ruffians, who bore torches in their hands. Petrified with surprise, the Marchese inquired what they wanted, and commanded them to let him proceed without obstruction. Vain were my cries, vain supplication and resistance; the remorseless villains dragged the Marchese from the carriage and plunged their daggers into his body. Horror struck at the agonizing sight, I sank into insensibility, from which I recovered only to the appalling sense of the miseries which surrounded me. ”

Book "Female Intrepidity, or the Heroic Maiden", c1808 (AC) title page spread

Figure 14b. Female Intrepidity, or the Heroic Maiden, c1808 (AC)

Figure 14b. p6: Maud, petrified at the spirit of Judaism which she thought prevailed in the soul of the babe, wildly seized the knife and was going to stab her infant to the heart, when ‘suddenly the door ﬂew open; her husband rushed into the room, and wrenching the knife from the vengeful mother’s hands, at the same time exclaimed, “Is this the careful mother? Heavens! what a sight I have returned to witness!” “Quit your hold !” exclaimed Maud, in a fiend-like voice. p21: When they separated that night Maud endeavoured to read, as she found herself not inclined to sleep. After perusing several pages she happened to raise her eyes, when to her great astonishment, she saw a female form seated opposite her. Maud composedly trimmed the lamp, and then held it up to view her unknown companion. She seemed an emaciated female of the middling size, a long thin nose, which nearly met her chin, a pair of small eyes, which were almost hid under a high forehead; her dress appeared as if she had stripped a coffin of its shroud; in one bony hand she held a crutch, while the other was placed on the table, which displayed long fingers with hideous sharp nails. “Do you forget me, Maud?” said the hag…”

Figures 14a & b Gothic chap books illustrations by Rowlandson with relevant excerpts

Rowlandson’s drawings of Strawberry Hill, together with the tales of sensation, show a playful engagement with Walpole’s visual and aesthetic legacy. The fanciful invention of both Walpole and Rowlandson is celebrated par excellence in The Temple at Strawberry Hill, a print that still invites the modern reader, even as it would have the 18 viewer, a gripping gothic novel in hand, to contemplate Walpole’s beautiful fictions of an imaginary past ─ with or without their tongue in cheek.

_____________________________________

[i] There are three separate impressions of the Temple at Strawberry Hill at Yale, all from the 1822 edition; a second detached copy is in the Beinecke Library Francis Harvey Album https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3958773. The Yale Center for British Art has a full set of Sketches from Nature. [ND497.R78 S54 1822+ Oversize]. The 1822 edition was originally issued in a wrapper with a title page in letterpress – Yale also has a very rare surviving example of the wrapper label, found in volume 14 of Frances Harvey album along with the title page. (Figure 2)

[ii] A plain impression of the first state of the plate from my own collection shows a date of 1809 in the plate and Tegg’s imprint additionally below; the removal of the imprint in the later impressions implies a different publisher for the 1822 edition. Some of the copper printing plates for Sketches from Nature may have been owned by Rowlandson himself – one of them is listed by name in lot 449 of the catalogue for the 1828 Sotheby sale of Rowlandson’s studio & collection and survives to this day.

[iii] Payne, Matthew & Payne, James Regarding Thomas Rowlandson Hogarth Press, London, 2012.

[iv] Jeffree, Richard; Mr Rowlandson’s Richmond. Thomas Rowlandson’s drawings of Richmond upon Thames, Museum Of Richmond 1992.

[v] Detail from the copy in Princeton University Library [GA 2014.00795]

[vi] Combe, William The second tour of Dr. Syntax in search of Consolation : a poem . Ackermann, London 1820.

[vii] Witt, bequest; D.1952.RW.3600. Also illustrated #143 p207 in John Hayes, Rowlandson Watercolours and Drawings, London 1972. Hayes dates the drawing as c1815 but the 1809 print would necessarily place it earlier. A second version of the drawing in the Art Institute of Chicago is probably not by Rowlandson; for example, the trees do not “hang poetic” enough for a Rowlandson.

[viii] Walpole, Horace. A description of the villa of Horace Walpole, youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford at Strawberry-Hill, near Twickenham with an inventory of the furniture, pictures, curiosities. Strawberry Hill, 1774.

[ix] 2. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, Yale Edition: To BENTLEY, 19 December 1753 (Vol35 p157): “Walpole telling him [Mr Ashe , a nurseryman at Twickenham; he had served Pope] he would have his trees planted irregularly, he said, ‘Yes, Sir, I understand: you would have them hang down somewhat poetical’.”

[x] P.G. Lindley: The Tomb of William de Luda: An Architectural Model at Ely Cathedral. Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society. Volume: 73 (1984)

[xi] HWC: To COLE, 15 July 1769 (Vol1 p178)

[xii] Ibid: The footnote on i.p178 of the Yale edition takes the Rowlandson drawing as evidence that the gate was subsequently moved to the chapel.

[xiii] On the 24^th day of the 1842 sale of the Strawberry Hill contents, Lot 85 under ‘The Chapel in the Grounds’ is described as “A very fine ancient Stained Glass Window, in Seventeen Compartments”. The window depicted in both Parr and Rowlandson’s prints, which has distinctive asymmetric compartments, was presumably replaced after the sale with what we see now. However both Parr and Rowlandson’s prints show twenty three compartments rather than the seventeen described in the catalogue, consistent with Rowlandsons having made a copy of the print rather than looking at the real window.

[xiv] Petter, Helen Mary. The Oxford Almanacks OUP 1974.

[xv] Moutray, Tonya J. –Refugee Nuns, the French Revolution, and British Literature and Culture, Routledge Abingdon 2016

[xvi] HWC: To HANNAH MORE, 23 March 1793. (Vol31 p383)

[xvii] HWC: To MANN, 8 July 1759 (Vol21 p306)Letter CCXXXVIII July 8 1759 p400 Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford to Sir Horace Man, Vol 2, Edited by Lord Dover, Dearborn New York 1833

[xviii] Young, Robert A History of Roman Catholicism in Strawberry Hill. The newsletter of the Strawberry Hill Residents’ Association. December 2010 in Bulletin no 144.

[xix] HWC: To COLE 19 December 1767 (Vol1 p124)

[xxi] HWC: To MANN, 8 November 1784 (Vol 25 p541)

[xx1] Gothic and exotic chapbooks for Tegg illustrated by Rowlandson include The Irish Assassin, The Castle of the Black Isles, Female Intrepidity, The School For Friends, The Iron Chest, The History of the Young King of the Black Islands, Sindbad The Sailor, The History of the Nourreddin, The history of Agib. Another chapbook The Complete Fortune Teller, uses an image by Rowlandson recycled by Tegg in a chapbook edition of Breslaw’s last Legacy, a book of magic tricks. A different hand (probably George Cruikshank and others) illustrated other Tegg Pamphlet titles named on the advertisement, viz: The foundling of the Lake, Vancenza, The Enchanted Ring, The Daemon of Venice, The Fatal Vows, The Solemn Warning, Itanoka the Noble Minded Negro.

18. Strawberry Hill Theatricals

Posted on December 1, 2017 by Susan Walker

18. Strawberry Hill Theatricals

By Judith Hawley, Royal Holloway, University of London

Horace Walpole maintained a lifelong interest in the theatre and is associated with leading theatrical personalities such as Kitty Clive and David Garrick. He also wrote for and about the stage. Best known in this connection is his tragedy, The Mysterious Mother (written 1768, soon to be performed as a staged reading https://walpole.library.yale.edu/event/staged-reading-horace-walpoles-play-mysterious-mother-1768).

This notorious play whose scandalous subject matter made it unperformable in his lifetime has perhaps caused his other contributions to theatrical culture to be overlooked. Not only did he write an afterpiece, Nature Will Prevail (1778) that was frequently performed in the eighteenth century, he contributed various prologues and epilogues for performances by friends by theatrical friends. Moreover, he was a serious critic of the state of the contemporary stage, writing a stinging Letter to David Garrick, Esq; On Opening the Theatre. In which, with great Freedom, he is told how he ought to behave (London: I. Pottinger, 1769) and the more measured Thoughts On Tragedy In Three Letters To Robert Jephson, Esq. and Thoughts on Comedy (1775, 1776) both published in The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, and J. Edwards, 1798). The aim of all these works is to reform the stage by encouraging original and experimental writing. One of his implications is that this kind of writing is more likely to come from amateurs of his class than professional playwrights who churn out formulaic works from commercial motives. He knew whereof he spoke. He amassed a library of eighty volumes of plays in two series. One series – ‘Theatre of the Reign of George the 3d’ (Hazen 1810) – comprising 58 volumes with an additional volume of prologues, epilogues and newspaper clippings, contains plays dated 1760-95. The other, known as ‘A collection of plays’ (Hazen 1818), is in 23 volumes and contains plays dated 1730-60. Each volume contained multiple works and his collection ran to over 700 plays. The volumes in Hazen 1818 each had a contents page written by Walpole and many bear his notes and markings in pen. The ‘Theatre of the Reign of George the 3d’ was more systematically annotated by Walpole with information such as the date of first performance and authorship; many were tagged with gossipy anecdotes (see Hazen, vol. II, pp. 98-143, 145-56).

One play in this vast collection stands out because it is annotated in a substantially different way. The sixth item in volume five of Hazen 1818 is The Devil to Pay; or, the Wives Metamorphosed (1731). It is heavily scored in pencil throughout. This three-act ballad opera by Charles Coffey (d. 1745) and John Mottley (1692-1750) was adapted from Thomas Jevon’s Devil of a Wife (1686). The plot contains Shakespearean elements in the form of the taming of a shrewish wife and the humiliation of a puritanical character who tries to ban Christmas revels. The termagant, Lady Loverule, is encouraged by her hypocritical non-conformist parson, Ananias, to persecute her pleasure-loving husband and servants. At the same time, a drunken cobbler, Jobson, abuses his lovely wife, Nell (played, when it opened at Drury Lane in 1731, by Miss Raftor, i.e. Kitty Clive). By means of magic, the two wives are swapped with the result that Jobson whips Lady Loverule into submission. Sir John Loverule, delighted that his wife has been tamed, pays Jobson to take back Nell on condition that he ceases beating her. This nasty comedy was further adapted by Theophilus Cibber who reduced it to one act in 1748 by stripping out the non-conformist sub-plot and various minor characters. Hazen suggests that the pencil markings make the text correspond with the one-act version: ‘the text has been marked in pencil for extensive cutting, as shortened by Theophilus Cibber.’ (Hazen, II, p. 147) We can tell that Walpole knew this play as he alluded to it several times in his correspondence (Correspondence, 12: 150; 13: 167; 18: 51). But did he mark these cuts, and if so, why did he depart so much from his usual practice?

A further mystery resides in the fact that the cuts do not entirely coincide with Cibber’s one-act version. For example, pages 22-34 are crossed out thus omitting all of act one scenes four and five and act two scene one. Cibber’s version retains I.iv in which the doctor conjures up his spirits to effect the wife-swap, but cuts the other two scenes in the first of which Lord Loverule complains about his wife to some old friends and in the second, the servants torment Ananias.

1818 v.5:6, pp. 22-23

A volume which fairly recently found its way back to Strawberry Hill sheds some light on this mystery. An octavo volume with half calf binding and worn marbled paper boards lettered ‘PLAYS’ on its spine reveals who annotated Walpole’s copy of The Devil to Pay and why. The volume is listed as ‘Collection of seven play scripts’ and described in the exhibition catalogue, Anne Damer: Sculpture and Society, ed. Michael Snodin (Twickenham: Strawberry Hill Trust, 2014), p. 18. (I am grateful to Michael Snodin for drawing it to my attention and to Nick Dolan for allowing me to view and photograph it.) It collects together the prompt books Anne Seymour Damer used in her private theatricals. A prompt book is the copy of the script marked up for the use of the prompter during the performance; it includes cuts to the text and details such as cues, entrances and exits as the prompter had duties which overlapped with those of the modern stage manager. Private theatricals – amateur performances staged in private houses for an invited audience – were extremely popular in the second half of the eighteenth century, especially in Walpole’s circle. His niece, the sculptress Anne Damer was a keen participant in the theatricals staged at Richmond House in 1787 and 1788. The LWL holds copies of the playbills, prologues and epilogues for these performances.

[Folio 35 89B Copy 1]

After she inherited responsibility for Strawberry Hill House, she continued to stage performances there. Two performances are known from playbills held at LWL: in 1800 Damer and her friends staged The Old Maid (1761) by Arthur Murphy and Henry Fielding’s The Intriguing Chambermaid (1733).

[767 P69B R532 1788]

The following year, they performed Fashionable Friends, the satirical comedy written by her dear friend, Mary Berry and Lovers’ Quarrels.

[Quarto 33 30 Copy 6]

Damer’s prompt book does not seem to tally with the repertoire as recorded on these playbills. It comprises an unmarked copy of Colley Cibber’s Richard III; two copies of Susannah Centlivre’s The Wonder: a Woman Keeps a Secret (1714), one marked up for performance; Sir John Vanbrugh’s The Mistake (1705), marked up for performance; Henry Fielding’s The Intriguing Chamber Maid (1733) (also prepared for performance) and two copies of The Devil to Pay in the one-act version, both marked up but with some differences between them. There are recorded performances of some of the texts: The Wonder was performed at Richmond House in 1788; The Intriguing Chamber Maid was on the bill with The Old Maid at Strawberry Hill in 1800 (though there is no prompt copy of the latter in this volume). Others are puzzling. There is no record of a performance of Richard III associated with Damer and the text is not annotated. It doesn’t seem as if Damer produced The Mistake but actually Lover’s Quarrels is based on Vanbrugh’s five-act comedy: Thomas King (1730-1805) reduced it to the two-act farce Like Master Like Man in 1766 and it was later performed under the title Lover’s Quarrels: or Like Master Like Man. Damer’s cuts to The Mistake, which include deletions in pen and the cancellation of scenes by sticking pages together with sealing wax, are thus comparable to the pencil markings on Walpole’s copy of The Devil to Pay.

So, the Strawberry Hill prompt book provides evidence that Damer edited longer versions of a play to create a performance script. It is possible that she scanned the shelves of Walpole’s library looking for a play that might work for her troupe. Perhaps she tried to adapt the three-act Devil to Pay herself, then decided to work with the one-act version. Perhaps they didn’t have enough copies of the script so had to mark up this one. Further mysteries remain. The first is the date of performance: in the absence of a playbill, we cannot date this performance with certainty, but there is a Dramatis Personae which provides some clues.

[The Devil to Pay, copy 2 in Collection of Seven Play Scripts. Courtesy of Strawberry Hill Trust]

Dramatis Personae

Sir John Loverule = Mr Mercer

[The Music Master in Fashionable Friends and Don Carlos in Lover’s Quarrels (1801)]

Jobson = Mr North

Conjuror [i.e. Doctor] = Earl of Mt Edgcumbe

[Clerimont in The Old Maid and Valentine in Intriguing Chambermaid (1800); Sir Dudley Dorimont in Fashionable Friends and Sancho in Lover’s Quarrels (1801)]

Butler = Mr Campbell

[Slap and Security in Intriguing Chambermaid (1800); John in Fashionable Friends and Lopez in Lover’s Quarrels (1801)]

Cook = Mr Burn

[Mr Harlow in The Old Maid and Goodall in Intriguing Chambermaid (1800); Lapierre in Fashionable Friends (1801)]

Coachman = Mr Berry

[Captain Cape in The Old Maid and Oldcastle in Intriguing Chambermaid (1800); Sir Valentine Vapour in Fashionable Friends (1801)]

Lady Loverule = Mrs Burn

[Mrs Harlow in The Old Maid and Mrs Highman in Intriguing Chambermaid (1800); Mrs Racket in Fashionable Friends (1801)]

Nell = Miss A Berry

[Trifle in The Old Maid and Charlotte in Intriguing Chambermaid (1800); Miss Racket in Fashionable Friends (1801)]

Lucy = Mrs Damer

[Lettice in Intriguing Chambermaid and the Epilogue (1800); Lady Selina Vapour in Fashionable Friends and Jacintha in Lover’s Quarrels (1801)]

Lettice = Lady Eliz. Cole

[Trimming in Fashionable Friends (1801)]

I suggest The Devil to Pay was staged in 1798-99, after she had taken charge of the house and before the performances detailed on the surviving playbills. Why not after then? In 1802, Damer and some of the company, perhaps buoyed by their success at Strawberry, engaged in two ambitious schemes which went disastrously wrong. Damer, Mr Campbell and Richard Edgcumbe, 2nd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe and many other friends who had engaged in private theatricals for years, formed the Pic Nic Society, a subscription theatre-and-supper club which briefly occupied the Tottenham Street Theatre in London. The managers of the patent theatres saw it as a direct threat to their revenues so mounted a press campaign that brought an end to the Pic Nic within a year. The furore also affected the other ambitious project that came from ‘the Theatre Strawberry’: Mary Berry’s Fashionable Friends was staged at Drury Lane in May 1802 but, because ‘the pit-filling public’ believed it to be ‘the production of some one of a certain Pic-nic Club then existing … they indignantly determined to stifle in it birth, and come to the first night determined to damn, without hearing it.’ (Preface to Fashionable Friends in Mary Berry, A comparative view of social life in England and France … To which are now first added, the lives of the Marquise Du Deffand and of Rachel lady Russell–Fashionable friends, a comedy, &c., by the same author, a new ed. (London: R. Bentley, 1844).)

Horace Walpole was intimately involved in theatrical culture as a fan and patron of actors, as a critic, playwright and collector. He eagerly transmitted gossip about both the professional stage and the private theatricals staged by numerous members of his circle. His library and house then fostered the theatrical activities of his beloved Damer and the Berrys. There is one final oddity about his copy of The Devil to Pay which demands explanation. There is a series of tiny deletions which is particularly intriguing. Among the revellers who celebrate Christmas in the home of Sir John Loverule is a character who does not appear in the Dramatis Personae: ‘the blind Fidler’. He appears in only one scene: act I, scene ii. The first reference to him occurs when the Butler wishes he were there so they could rejoice that the Lady has gone out (i.ii.5). Shortly after, he enters with Jobson and some neighbours and the Butler calls on ‘blind Will’ to strike up the music so they can sing a catch (I.ii.9-10). His only line is spoken when Lady Loverule breaks up the party and ‘Beats the Fiddle about the blind Man’s Head.’ (I.ii.15) The poor fellow exclaims ‘O Murder, Murder! I am a dark Man, which way shall I get hence? Oh Heav’n! she has broke my Fiddle, and undone me and my Wife and Children.’ Sir John pays him some compensation and sends him on his way.

1818 v.5:6, p. 15

He does not play a major role in the action, but the annotator pays a disproportionate amount of attention to him, striking out references to his blindness albeit very faintly on three of the four occasions on which it is mentioned.

1818 v.5:6, p. 5

1818 v.5:6, p. 9

These deletions are clearer in Damer’s prompt book, and particularly emphatic in the second copy (this copy includes the Dramatis Personae reproduced above so I think it is the actual performance text).

[The Devil to Pay, copy 2, p. 4 in Collection of Seven Play Scripts. Courtesy of Strawberry Hill Trust.]

[The Devil to Pay, copy 2, p. 5 in Collection of Seven Play Scripts. Courtesy of Strawberry Hill Trust.]

[The Devil to Pay, copy 2, p. 7, in Collection of Seven Play Scripts. Courtesy of Strawberry Hill Trust.]

As well as deleting references to his blindness, the fiddler’s speech is deleted altogether. Why? Walpole’s letter to Horace Mann dated 20 August 1776 perhaps provides the answer. ‘On Thursday Mr Damer [who had amassed huge gambling debts] supped at the Bedford Arms in Covent Garden, with four common women, a blind fiddler and no other man. At three in the morning he dismissed his seraglio, bidding each receive her guinea at the bar, and ordering Orpheus to come up again in half an hour. When he returned, he found a dead silence and smelt gunpowder.’ The blind fiddler was to report John Damer’s suicide. (Correspondence 24:234-35.)

I am grateful to the staff of the LWL and to Nick Dolan at Strawberry Hill who made this research possible. Images from Anne Damer’s prompt book are reproduced with permission of the Strawberry Hill Trust.

10. Doutes Historiques sur la Vie et le Regne de Richard III

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Susan Walker

King Louis XVI’s Translation of Horace Walpole’s Historic Doubts

by Loftus Jestin, Professor Emeritus of English, Central Connecticut State University

Among the curious artifacts at the Lewis Walpole Library, one of the truly rare and startling manuscripts is Louis XVI’s translation of Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III.

The original publication in 1768 of Horace Walpole’s attempt to exonerate the reputation of Richard III caused quite a stir. The book generated much controversy with rebuttals and vilifications by such luminaries as Hume and Gibbon, many of which Walpole answered tartly over the next twenty years or so. William Cole and Thomas Gray affirmed Walpole’s argument, as, in fact, did Voltaire. The execution of the French king on January 21st, 1793, so upset Walpole that he wrote an angry, vituperative letter eight days later of nearly a thousand words to Lady Ossory, in which he could find no terms sufficiently strong to describe the murderers: “It remained for the enlightened eighteenth century to baffle language and invent horrors that can be found in no vocabulary” [Corres., p. 177, vol. 34, 1965]. The death of this “best-natured and most inoffensive of men” [p. 176], not to forget his reputation, which was so thoroughly traduced by the revolutionary mob, seemed to him a parallel to, if not a vindication of, his assertion in Historic Doubts that Richard III was maligned and his name thoroughly blackened by Lancastrian and Tudor propagandists.

It would have heartened Walpole had he known of the French king’s translation of the book before he died in 1797. Apparently, having been purloined by the mob from the king’s cell at the Tuileries, the manuscript escaped destruction and ended up in the hands of the publisher Roussel d’Epinol, who printed it at his shop in Paris in 1800. The manuscript was then purchased by Louise Comtesse de Ponthon, who married Henry Seymour; it descended down the generations of the Seymour family until its sale in 1949 at Sotheby’s to Dr. James Hasson of Berkshire for £300, who then sold it through Maggs Bros. Ltd. in 1950 to Wilmarth S. Lewis for £350. The manuscript remains in the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut.

It appears from the manuscript that the king wrote out his translation in an already bound notebook of 82 octavo-sized pages, rather than on loose sheets. Written in a tiny and very neat cursive hand over each side of each leaf, the script forms a continuous, uninterrupted flow, albeit in a slightly cramped hand. There are many cross outs and corrections, especially in the early part of the text, but with far fewer emendations in the latter half, suggestive of a greater confidence, or perhaps, more alarmingly, of the need for speed, given the king’s awareness of his approaching doom.

Many years ago, Mr. Lewis told me the following anecdote, which I have not been able to confirm. Not long after his purchase of the manuscript, authorities at the Bibliothèque nationale informed him that his manuscript was only a copy of the original, which was housed there in Paris. “Not at all,” Mr. Lewis rebutted. “You have the copy. The original manuscript in the king’s hand is here in Farmington. Come and see it for yourself!” No doubt annoyed by this pesky American millionaire, the French national library sent two experts to examine the manuscript. “Quite supercilious they were, too!” Lewis testified, until they held his copy in hand, whereupon one of the men had to sit down, quite faint. There was no question who had the original, and who the copy.

Twenty years ago or so, I used to take my graduate students on a field trip to the Lewis Walpole library to look at some the rare books there, books they had read in modern editions for my seminar on eighteenth-century literature. Pope’s own copy of Homer’s Odyssey with his pencil drawing of his grotto at his house in Twickenham on the inside of the back cover, volumes of the original publications of many seventeenth and eighteenth-century plays, Bentley’s hand-drawn illustrations for Gray’s poems, the second folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and other such treasures. When I opened for them the slip case holding Louis XVI’s manuscript translation of Historic Doubts, many of the students gasped and looked at each other bug-eyed with a wild surprise, having never seen such an astonishing rarity before.

8. J.H. Müntz’s designs for Dickie Bateman’s Grove House, Old Windsor

Posted on August 22, 2017 by Susan Walker

J.H. Müntz’s designs for Dickie Bateman’s Grove House, Old Windsor

by Matthew Reeve, Associate Professor and Queen’s National Scholar, Department of Art History & Art Conservation, Queen’s University

In one of Horace Walpole’s clever commentaries on the new Gothic style, he described the transformation of Dickie Bateman’s villa at Old Windsor in two characteristically witty turns of phrase: “[I] converted Dicky Bateman from a Chinese to a Goth…I preached so effectively that every pagoda took the veil”; and that Bateman’s house had “changed its religion […] I converted it from Chinese to Gothic”. Walpole positions himself as a teacher and Bateman as a disciple whom he convinced to change his tastes from Chinoiserie (“the fashion of the instant”) to the Gothic, the style “of the elect”.[1]

“The elect” was not a socio-economic category, but a tongue-in-cheek reference to Walpole’s own circle of friends and associates and their shared Gothic idiom. Walpole’s allegory of stylistic change as national and religious conversion was based in part on the fact that he provided the conduit for two of his closest designers in the Strawberry Committee—Richard Bentley (1708-82) and Johann Heinrich Müntz (1727-98)—to design Gothic additions to the Priory. Rebuilt and expanded in the fashionable mode of Strawberry Hill and by its designers, from Walpole’s perspective at least, Bateman’s works at Old Windsor served to reinforce his role as arbiter of the Gothic taste and Strawberry Hill as its paradigm. Plans to renovate the house began in 1758, coinciding with Walpole’s visit in that year.[2]

The three drawings at the Lewis Walpole Library are for Bateman’s new dining room and are dated to 1761. They are now part of LWL Folio 75 M92 761, the Library’s stunning oversized portfolio of Müntz’s works. They are important testaments to Bateman’s architectural patronage and they provide vital visual testimony of the eighteenth-century history of the house of which precious little now survives.[3] Another part of the house is probably also preserved at the Lewis Walpole Library—Richard Bentley’s drawing of a cloister very likely relates to the original cloister at Old Windsor that connected the house to Müntz’s dining room (49 3585c). Although aspects of the ornament of the dining room is common to Müntz’s other drawings—particularly the screen of St Alban’s Abbey that he favoured—the octagonal form is unprecedented in Walpole’s oeuvre.

Walpole’s account of Bateman’s Old Windsor demands nuancing. Framing himself as the reigning doyen of the Gothic taste, he carefully sidelines Dicky Bateman, a senior man of taste, who in fact built some of the most significant statements of the Gothic and Chinese taste in the 1730s through 1750s at Shobdon Church and Court in Herefordshire, the early building works at Old Windsor, and in a series of garden and “interior design” commissions for aristocratic patrons. His role as an arbiter of the modern styles and of Chinoiserie in particular was celebrated in Robert Levrac-Tournières’s 1741 portrait (now Birmingham Art Gallery) and Walpole’s description of him as “the founder of the Sharadwagi [Chinese] style”.[4] A member of the homoerotic circle around Lord Hervey, Stephen Fox, and others, Bateman was a leading man of taste in London when Walpole returned from the Grand Tour and one of the models Walpole emulated in the early 1740s and 1750s. Emulation of Bateman undoubtedly informed Walpole’s thwarted attempt to acquire the White House at Old Windsor directly beside Bateman in 1746 (then owned by their mutual friend Sir Charles Hanbury Williams), prior to purchasing Strawberry Hill.[5] Old Windsor was, as Walpole hoped Strawberry Hill would be, a cause célèbre of London society from the 1730s through 1760s. But it was also a building that visitors understood to elide Bateman’s queer persona with the its fussy, hybrid style. Described as “fribble” or “fribblish”, the house was considered an architectural projection of the outrageously effeminate character Mr Fribble from David Garrick’s 1747 Miss in Her Teens, who was, in turn, apparently based on Bateman himself or on Walpole.[6]

[1] Yale Correspondence vol. 37, 359; Yale Correspondence vol. 10, 43.

[2] Yale Correspondence vol. 14, 102.

[3] The fullest account of the house is now Matthew M. Reeve, “Dickie Bateman and the Gothicization of Old Windsor: Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole”, Architectural History 56 (2013), 99-133.

[4] Yale Correspondence vol. 35, 359.

[5] Yale Correspondence vol. 9, 39 to Montagu 2 Aug 1746; T. Eustace Harwood, Windsor Old and New, 319–20.

[6] On the reception of Old Windsor, see Reeve, “Dickie Bateman”, 118-24.

Bibliography

Harwood, T. Eustace. Windsor Old and New, (London: 1929).

Lewis, W. S. (ed.). The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–83).

Reeve, Matthew. “Dickie Bateman and the Gothicization of Old Windsor: Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole”, Architectural History 56 (2013), 99-133.