Walpole worshipped his father and attempted all his life to be worthy of his parent's mighty fame. Horace Walpole was himself a Member of Parliament from 1741 to 1768, yet he is remembered more for his legacy as a novelist, a builder, and an antiquarian than for his work in Parliament. Horace Walpole was the third son of the prominent statesman and Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. The next day, all that Walpole could recall of the dream was that 'I had thought myself in an ancient castle.and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.' Later that evening, Walpole 'sat down, and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.' A classic was born. Yet, far from being the fruit of deliberate and painstaking planning or tentative drafts, The Castle of Otranto was born of a dream that came to haunt Walpole's sleep one night in June 1764.

Walpole's novel accomplished what no other novel had attempted before: to delight its readers with a tale of horrors, to make them enjoy what they shuddered to read, in other words to find beauty amidst literary materials ostensibly laced with ugliness and horror. With its fantastic apparitions, its ominous prophecies, and its complicated underground passages, The Castle of Otranto heralded a new genre, the Gothic novel, still present in our literary landscape today. The novel was a success all over Europe, and the poet Thomas Gray commented in a letter to Walpole that it made ‘some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o’nights.ExcerptsThe Castle of Otranto was published pseudonymously in 1765 by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), son of one of England's most influential eighteenth-century prime ministers, Sir Robert Walpole. The Castle of Otranto blends elements of realist fiction with the supernatural and fantastical, laying down many of the plot devices and character-types that would become typical of the Gothic: secret passages, clanging trapdoors, hidden identities and vulnerable heroines fleeing from men with evil intent. Faced with the extinction of his line, Manfred vows to divorce his wife and marry the terrified Isabella himself. The novel begins with the death of Manfred’s son, Conrad, who is crushed to death by an enormous helmet on the morning of his wedding to the beautiful princess Isabella. It tells the story of Manfred, the prince of Otranto, who is keen to secure the castle for his descendants in the face of a mysterious curse. Its first edition, published in 1764, claimed to be a translation of a work printed in Naples in 1529 and newly discovered in the library of ‘an ancient Catholic family in the north of England’. The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, is generally viewed as the first Gothic novel.

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