As a younger son he did not inherit his father's title or ancestral home, but Walpole did receive a secure income. He constructed his own castle, bringing back a gothic motif which was both old-fashioned, and forward looking.
In his early 30s, he bought a box-shaped house—just an ordinary sort of house, sitting on a bit of hill in a fashionable country suburb—and decided to transform it into a Gothic castle. Room by room he went. Stained-glass window of a saint here, ancient suit of armor stowed in a wall recess there....
....
He was 30 when he bought his house in Twickenham, then still a bucolic little town considered the perfect, short distance from London. The previous owner was a Mrs. Chevinix, who kept a famous toyshop in Charing Cross. “It is a little play-thing-house that I got out of Mrs. Chevinix’s shop,” wrote Walpole to a friend, “and it is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. … Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around.” The house itself was small and shapeless, but it was set amid hedges and meadows, these dotted here and there with sheep and cows in best pastoral tradition, and it had a beautiful view overlooking the Thames. He called it Strawberry Hill.
Then he added some pinnacles. So, as you bumped along in a coach on your approach to old Horry’s cottage, you’d have seen a castle skyline peeping over the treetops. Intended to look as permanent as if they belonged to an ancient keep, these additions were made of plaster and lath. As Lewis notes: “It was said before he died that ‘Mr. Walpole has already outlived three sets of his battlements.'” (Not bad for a former potential grave-marker.)
Then he started on the interior. At first, his friends greeted his plans to re-do the house in a Gothic style with some mock-horror. As the biographer Ketton-Cremer notes, this was not because it was a new idea, but because it was a slightly out-of-date one. A fashion for Gothic recently had enjoyed a brief, bright flare of popularity in England and the style was now viewed, in Wapole’s set, as a little outré and (dread!) middle-class. So beyond the obvious eccentricity of the undertaking, his ambitions must have seemed strangely out of step at first...
Never mind! Walpole didn’t care. He convened the Committee of Taste with his friends, Richard Bentley, a gifted and fanciful designer, and John Chute, a talented hobbyist architect. The two advised him on the changes to be made to each room. An elaborate chimneypiece for the parlor was designed. Beautiful chairs and tables, too. Wallpaper was custom-painted in London, using a pattern borrowed from the tomb of Prince Arthur, Henry VIII’s brother. And so it went, room by room.
It was, remember, not a big house at the start. Many rooms were cramped, with one staircase so narrow it was a scrape to get up it. One addition, however, was built on an especially grand scale. This was the Hall, considered by Walpole as his castle’s “chief beauty.” He reveled in its “gloomy arches” and “lean windows fattened with rich saints in painted glass.” Its staircase and shadows, its coat of armor and broadswords, will feel familiar to any Castle of Otranto reader. Walpole lifted them and put them straight into his book.....
“Gloomth” was the word that Walpole coined for the effect he wanted in his house. That is, a mixture of warmth and gloom. So the swords and shadows of the Hall were offset by cheerful gardens outside, with sunning cats and well-annotated dogs, with comfortable places to roost around the house, and then, as the decades went on, Walpole’s own accreted layers of bric-a-brac. He was a helpless collector, a hoarder of beauty.
It is instructive to contemplate the results of a person's reliance on their own judgment. I am happy to think that cats are a part of gloomth.
No comments:
Post a Comment