Revisiting Strawberry Hill

Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto and several other works, discovered Chopp’d Straw Hall in 1747 while it was one of the last remaining sites available on the banks of the Thames in fashionable Twickenham. Possibly inspired by Gibb’s Gothic Temple after a visit to Stowe, Walpole set about transforming what was then a couple of cottages into his “little gothic castle” (Walpole) with a veneer of pointed arches, fretworks and battlements set in vast grounds. The inner walls were papered with imitation stonework and it was on the central, dimly lit staircase he experienced his waking vision of a giant armored fist. This inspired what is continuously described as the first Gothic novel which was successively printed within Strawberry Hill on the first private printing press in the country.

In creating Strawberry Hill, Walpole inspired a new fashion for Gothic in both architecture and literature. While houses like nearby Marble Hill were based on classical traditions of order and symmetry, Walpole chose the architecture of Gothic cathedrals as the inspiration for his villa.

The chimney pieces, doors and ceilings are based on Gothic vaulting, medieval tombs and rose windows.

Winding corridors and gloomy passageways open into the sudden splendor of rooms like the gallery and the library where furnishings included a mixture of, “period pieces and quaint oddities.”

Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto in less than two months, he is often described at this time as a man possessed, “the castle possessed him like a spirit.

Walpole is quoted as saying that, “there is no wisdom comparable to that of exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams. "Old castles, old pictures, old histories make one live back into centuries that cannot disappoint one.” Walpole’s sensitive personality had accessed at an early point of the eighteenth century the stirrings of romantic influence. Literature in reaction to the Age of Enlightenment gave way from formality and reason to the wondrous unknown, to beauty intertwined with mystery.