Horace Walpole

Horace Walpole (1717–1797) was an English writer, collector and man of letters, the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister. After Eton, Cambridge and a Grand Tour with the poet Thomas Gray, he sat in Parliament for nearly thirty years without distinction and devoted himself to Strawberry Hill, the Gothic villa he built at Twickenham, and the private press he ran there. The Castle of Otranto (1764), written after a dream, began the Gothic novel. His Anecdotes of Painting in England was the first history of English art, and his thousands of letters are the liveliest record of eighteenth-century society. He became Earl of Orford in 1791.