Horace Walpole was born on 24 September 1717 in Arlington Street, London. The youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, he became a writer, collector and antiquarian whose interests helped establish the Gothic fashion in eighteenth-century Britain.

In 1747 Walpole bought a house at Twickenham which became known as Strawberry Hill. Over the following decades he enlarged and altered it, adding towers, battlements, Gothic windows and interiors based partly on medieval buildings. The house attracted visitors during his lifetime and became an early influence on the Gothic Revival.

Walpole carried the same interest into his writing. In 1764 he published The Castle of Otranto anonymously, presenting the first edition as a translation of an old Italian story. He acknowledged authorship in the second edition.

The novel combined a medieval setting with supernatural events and is widely regarded as the first Gothic novel. Walpole’s surviving letters also record much of the political, social and cultural life around him.

Strawberry Hill and The Castle of Otranto placed Walpole at the beginning of two related developments in eighteenth-century Britain: Gothic Revival architecture and Gothic fiction.