The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, 1798
With an introduction by Peter Sabor
978 1 85196 492 5: 234x156mm: £425.00/$750.00
Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764), has long been hailed as one of the finest and earliest examples of the gothic novel. Its centrality to the genre is reflected by the number of paperback editions now available.
The Castle of Otranto was the most popular of Walpole's works during his lifetime and has been published in well over a hundred editions since his death. Despite its brevity it changed the course of English fiction and inspired the Gothic novelists of the 1790s. However, during his lifetime, Walpole suppressed the majority of his works, limiting publication to small editions published by his own press. Only with his death and the publication of his Works in 1798 was the range of Walpole's oeuvre revealed to a wider public.
In this facsimile edition of his Works, Walpole is revealed as a historian, dramatist, poet, essayist and literary critic, as well as showing his more widely known persona as novelist, correspondent and writer of political memoirs. Long out of print, the Works contains his iconoclastic theories on art, architecture and gardening, his polemical views on history and his own father, and his descriptions of his own gothic folly at Strawberry Hill and the remarkable collections it contained.
Edited by Walpole's close friend, Mary Berry, the Complete Works includes a selection of Walpole's correspondence. While far from the comprehensive Yale edition of his correspondence, this collection is significant in being the result of Walpole's own selection and arrangement and that of his chosen editor.