HORACE WALPOLE’S PLAYTHING

JEREMY MUSSON is delighted by a new account of the story of Strawberry Hill compiled with the same imaginative wealth of curiosities that characterise the house.

Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole's Gothic Castle

Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi

(Frances Lincoln, £25)

Horace Walpole's house Strawberry Hill began as a private indulgence and became a public wonder. He called it his ‘little plaything house', where he and his friends, who formed a Committee of Taste, indulged a part-serious, part-silly, love of Gothic. Over several decades, it was transformed from an anonymous little retreat to one of the most talked-about houses in England. The public flocked to see it, and no fewer than three guidebooks were produced for paying visitors, who received, probably none-too-accurate accounts from his long-suffering housekeeper, Margaret, who nonetheless grew rich on the takings.

He drew inspiration from Westminster Abbey and King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, and called his Long Gallery, with its luscious fan vault moulded in papier-mâché, richer than the roof of paradise'.

Walpole's little house had a chequered history in later years, and spent a long time in institutional use, but is being triumphantly restored. This new book is a wonderful account of this unusual house.

The authors, both seasoned campaigners for Strawberry Hill's future, have based it on Walpole's own guidebook - inspecting the house as the 18th-century visitor would have done and bringing together the hordes of evocative illustrations and fragments that are part of this story - to create the fullest published account of the home yet written, glorious in all its colour and detail.

They have created a cabinet of curiosities in book form that exactly captures the flavour Walpole himself sought. Even he wrote, in 1784, of the ‘conventual gloom of the inside, which however, when the sun shines, is gorgeous, as he appears all crimson and gold and azure through the painted glass’. His house was a place for the imagination to run riot, and in this lay the magic for all those who tramped to the door in the 18th century, and those who will tramp again.

Country Life, 18^th October 2007