Walpole’s world

We can’t know what Horace Walpole would make of the continuing popularity of serendipity, a word he coined in 1754 to describe the accidental happy discovery of a Renaissance portrait he had long been seeking. In 2001 it became the title of a romantic comedy and this year of a song by a South Korean boy band, which has had 74 million hits on YouTube. But we can imagine that he would be pleased that his lifelong effort to leave his mark on posterity has been so successful.

He was born (in 1717) with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, the youngest son of the all-powerful Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford and effectively Britain’s first prime minister. At 21 he was given government sinecures producing some £2,000 a year, and at 24 a seat in Parliament, freeing him from the need to earn a living. Undistracted by the responsibilities of high government office, a great estate or of family (he never married), he was able to devote his life to politics, writing, scholarship, obsessive collecting and the creation of his pioneering Gothic villa, Strawberry Hill.

Walpole was a complex character, in public a man of taste at the centre of politics and fashion, but in private a hardworking scholar and historian. His vivid record of these different worlds in some 4,000 often brilliant letters, published in 48 volumes, has been a main resource for historians ever since. That is exactly what he would have wished, for he saw the present as history in the making, although he came to prefer what he regarded as the certainties of the past, writing in 1766: ‘I almost think there is no wisdom comparable to that of exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams. Old Castles, old pictures, old histories, and the babble of old people make one live back into centuries that cannot disappoint one.’