Selected Letters of Horace Walpole: Edited and Introduced by Stephen Clarke (Everyman's Library Classics Series, Band 350) - Hardcover

Walpole, Horace

 
9781101907894: Selected Letters of Horace Walpole: Edited and Introduced by Stephen Clarke (Everyman's Library Classics Series, Band 350)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101907894 ISBN 13: 9781101907894
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A new and newly annotated selection of letters--the only selected edition available in hardcover--from the English eighteenth-century historian, novelist, and politician whose correspondence is one of the most admired in English literature.

Author of the first gothic novel and son of the first prime minister of Great Britain, Horace Walpole had wide-ranging interests that included literature, politics, world affairs, collecting, antiquities, and architecture. He wrote to his numerous correspondents on these and other topics in prose that is celebrated for its charm, eloquence, and wit. This new Everyman's edition offers an extensive selection of Walpole's letters, helpfully arranged by subject so the reader can choose from themes including social life, the Court, politics, literature, and the evolution of his Gothic castle and art and book collections at Strawberry Hill. This edition offers new annotations throughout, with introductions to its various sections and a general introduction on Walpole as a letter writer. In addition, the text of the letters has been corrected and previously excised passages have been restored.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HORATIO WALPOLE, 4th Earl of Orford (1717-1797), also known as Horace Walpole, was an English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, printer/publisher, and Whig politician. He wrote the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, and is famous for his correspondence and for his Gothic Revival villa, Strawberry Hill, and its vast art and book collections.

STEPHEN CLARKE is a leading Walpole scholar. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquities, an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Liverpool, and a trustee both of Strawberry Hill and of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University.

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from the INTRODUCTION: HORACE WALPOLE AND THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING
 
The letters of Horace Walpole have always been recognized as one of the most outstanding collections of correspondence in English literature. Throughout his long life Walpole maintained an extensive correspondence with a wide circle of friends—it is estimated that he may have written over seven thousand letters, of which some three thousand survive, and those figures exclude notes and letters of business. His letters open a window onto the eighteenth century and allow the reader to engage with the panorama of contemporary life: to listen to the talk, to hear the scandal, to participate in the debates, and to watch the events of the day unfold. What Walpole offers is a sense of immediacy, an unrivalled ability to re-create a scene and to tell a story, and that gift the modern reader can share with the letters’ original recipients.
 
Walpole was insistent that letters should not be fine or studied, but should rather, as he explained to his friend Lady Ossory, be ‘‘extempore conversations upon paper’’. But he was so well placed and had such broad interests that those conversations are extremely wide-ranging. As the son of Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister, and a Member of Parliament himself for over twenty-five years, he knew and watched the politicians of the time and observed and participated in their schemes. As a young man on the Grand Tour he had thrown himself into ridottos and carnivals, and for the rest of his life he attended events of all kinds: from balls and routs to gatherings of the Bluestockings, and from the salons of Paris to Coronations and royal funerals and state trials. He moved freely through London society, meeting familiarly with statesmen, writers, artists, actors, scholars, historians, courtiers, and clerics. When he wrote about the unfolding dramas of his time, whether foreign wars or political upheavals, he did so with personal knowledge of many of the actors involved. We can hear from him the conversation of the wits and celebrities of the day, and observe its cultural life: as an historian and writer he was engaged with and had informed views on contemporary art and architecture, on the latest novel and the newest play. In addition, the letters reveal much of his own complex personality, of his friendships and achievements, and of the extraordinary house that he created at Strawberry Hill and filled with his collections.
 
The variety of Walpole’s various correspondents reflected the range of his contacts and activities, and each series of letters has its own centre of gravity and dynamic. The letters are as informal as any conversation with its asides and incidental digressions, but there are recurrent themes to individual correspondences, whether politics, or literature, or social life, or antiquarianism. Perhaps the most striking example of this is the largest of all Walpole’s series of letters, that written to Sir Horace Mann, the British plenipotentiary at Florence. From 1740 about two thousand letters passed between them. Walpole did not see Mann after staying with him in Florence in 1741, but they wrote to each other regularly until Mann’s death forty-five years later. Mann needed news of British politics and policy, and of world affairs that might impact on the court of the Duke of Tuscany. This Walpole supplied, interspersing it with incident and entertaining detail on the talking-points of the moment. Mann responded with a picture of evolving Florentine society, of the cares of his official duties (which included benignly overseeing the endless succession of young men passing through Florence on their Grand Tour) and the rigours of the gout to which, like Walpole, he was a martyr. Walpole knew the charm and value of anecdotal asides, and lamented that Mann’s residence abroad meant he could only employ them sparingly. He noted to Lady Ossory (herself isolated from London society after a scandalous divorce) that ‘‘Nothing is so pleasant as the occurrences of society in a letter. I am always regretting in my correspondence with Madame du Deffand and Sir Horace Mann, that I must not make use of them, as the one has never lived in England, and the other not these fifty years, and so any private stories would want notes as much as Petronius. Sir Horace and I have no acquaintance in common but the kings and queens of Europe.’’
 
Principally, however, Walpole provided Mann with news, and his ability to provide news, or frustration in its absence, is a leitmotif throughout their correspondence. On occasion he plays with his correspondents, as when he suggests to Lord and Lady Hertford (newly arrived in Paris on Hertford’s appointment as British Ambassador) in letter 207: ‘‘Consider you are in my power. You, by this time, are longing to hear from England, and depend upon me for the news of London. I shall not send you a tittle, if you are not very good, and do not (one of you, at least) write to me punctually.’’ Similar gestures as to the power of giving or withholding information can be seen in the opening of letter 277 to Mann on the victory of Culloden (‘‘You have bid me for some time to send you good news – well ! I think I will. How good would you have it?’’), and again in letter 293 to Hertford on the Wilkes riots, where Walpole opens his letter by asking ‘‘Well ! but we have had a prodigious riot: are you not impatient to know the particulars?’’ It is through his access to news that Walpole controlled his correspondences – hence his irritation when in later life he became dependent on newspapers that were as readily available to his recipient.
 
The letters to Mann evolved into a prospect of the eighteenth-century world, as seen from London and Strawberry Hill and delivered to Florence. Walpole was aware of their significance, and from as early as 1748 asked Mann to give him back his letters: the first set was returned the following year, the last following Mann’s death in 1786. From 1754 Walpole started to prepare transcripts of the letters, on occasion pruning some of the text, and adding explanatory footnotes. He then delegated the task of transcription to his secretary Thomas Kirgate (who also conducted the printing press Walpole had established at Strawberry Hill), and ultimately there were six folio volumes of transcripts: it is these, rather than his original letters to Mann, which have survived. To the first of these volumes Walpole attached the following Advertisement:
 
“The following collection of letters, written very carelessly by a young man, had been preserved by the person to whom they were addressed. The author, some years after the date of the first, borrowed them, on account of some anecdotes interspersed. On the perusal, among many trifling relations and stories which were only of consequence or amusing to the two persons concerned in the correspondence, he found some facts, characters and news, which, though below the dignity of history, might prove entertaining to many other people: and knowing how much pleasure, not only himself, but many other persons have often found in a series of private and familiar letters, he thought it worth his while to preserve these, as they contain something of the customs, fashions, politics, diversions and private history of several years; which, if worthy of any existence, can be properly transmitted to posterity, only in this manner.”
 
This introductory note is typically Walpolian in its familiar, relaxed tone and its underlying seriousness. Walpole’s letters were not studied, but neither were they ever careless. He employs a tone of self-deprecation, apologising for the trifling nature of some of the...

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Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101907894
ISBN 13 
9781101907894
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
696
Herausgeber
Clarke Stephen
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Everyman's Library
https://myeverymanslibrary.com

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