Hugh Walpole: Wild Excursions into the Macabre with John Hartley

Our series of talks is funded exclusively by donations. The talks are free to access but if you can support the project and do not support it on ko-fi or patreon, please choose the 'pay-what-you-can' option to give a donation directly to the speaker.

If you'd like to support more regularly, you can use the links below

Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/romancingthegothic

Ko-fi - https://ko-fi.com/samhirst

When, during literary seances, Hugh Walpole is summoned to materialise from the astral plane, where he presumably currently resides, the words used to evoke his shade are ‘Gothic writer’. While happy to materialise, if only to see new editions of his books, Hugh would be a bit sniffy about the appellation, having a low opinion of the original Gothic of his ancestor Horace, and that of Mrs Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.

Walpole was not alone in his viewpoint. In her essay ‘Gothic Romance’, reviewing Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror (1921) for the TLS, Virginia Woolf famously had the tropes of Gothic fiction confined to ‘gibber in some dark cupboard of the servants’ hall’.

Despite his own dismissal of the Gothic, Walpole had been an avid reader, and happily described his own forays into ‘genre’ as ‘macabres’ and ‘shockers’, this latter term a direct link with the Gothic street-fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the so-called‘blue books’, ‘shilling shockers’, and ‘penny bloods’. Walpole now sought to embrace what he termed the ‘psychological-fantastic’, startling events set in a recognisable modern world, and with an added air of authenticity through an analysis of his characters’ mental landscape.I n his expressed ambition to blend tradition with modern technique and modern psychology,Hugh seemed to be echoing Horace Walpole when, in the second edition of The Castle ofOtranto (1756), his preface offered the motive for that work as an attempt to marry the creative imagination of ‘old romances’, with the naturalism of modern eighteenth-century fictions.

My paper will navigate, through his fiction, what Hugh Walpole meant when he identified as a ‘romantic’, at odds with literature dealing in ‘realism’ and ‘facts’, in an era – the 1920s &1930s – which he claimed had turned its back on the romance.