The Castle of Otranto

Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto (1764)
This is a very important novel, so I've been told, having originated the gothic tradition which led to Frankenstein and arguably to the entire science-fiction genre, amongst many other things. Brian Aldiss reckons it owes a lot to Piranesi, but I don't know who that is and don't feel sufficiently enthused to find out. The element which made The Castle of Otranto such a massive chart-busting smash back in the late 1700s was its fusion of realism with spooky or otherwise supernatural elements. Walpole was the first to do this, apart from a few other writers who sort of got there first, albeit with perhaps less emphasis on atmosphere.

It begins well, and even grips, as a wedding is postponed due to the groom having been crushed by an inexplicable giant helmet of the kind generally belonging to a suit of armour rather than to a male generative member. The father of the deceased has certain concerns regarding his familial claims to the castle of the title which will come to seem tenuous in the absence of a male heir and the grandchildren he was accordingly expecting. With this in mind, he decides to tell his wife to fuck off and become a nun so that he can marry the conspicuously younger woman who would have been his daughter-in-law had her fiancé not been crushed by a huge helmet. A series of supernatural occurrences follow - ghosts, a painting coming to life, and most notably an appearance of the former owner of the helmet - all representing fearful omens regarding our man's claim on his castle. Then a load of other people show up and talk about romance, inheritance, marriage and so on, which I found fairly difficult to follow and reminded me of eighteenth century novels which spend hundreds of pages debating what a certain young lady meant by leaving her handkerchief in the drawing room knowing it would almost certainly be discovered by some viscount she intends to shag.

The strangest thing for me was that The Castle of Otranto reads like a novel that wants to be a play performed on a stage with a full cast, much like certain examples of Who fiction reading like novels pretending to be telly. Walpole apparently admitted to the influence of Shakespeare in a later edition, presumably because it would have been pointless to deny it; and while we're here, I'm almost certain I recall old Billy including ghosts, fairies, and other supernatural beings in a few of the plays what he wrote.

I'm not widely read once we go back past the turn of the last century, but I've read enough to know the form, and enough to recognise the difference between that which is written in an archaic style with which I am unfamiliar, and that which simply could have been better. Gulliver's Travels was published forty years before The Castle of Otranto, for one example, and quite frankly pisses all over it - although to be fair Gulliver's Travels pretty much pisses over more or less everything which has been written since in most respects. The Castle of Otranto clearly has it's place and isn't entirely lacking in charm, mood, or merit, but as a landmark of literary history, it's kind of underwhelming.