For over a decade, he devised appendices and additions to his catalogue of rarities at his house at Strawberry Hill, recording with equal care his valuable collection of English coins and medals and the magical speculum of the sixteenth-century astrologer Dr. Dee. With the same delight he composed a conventional set of verses welcoming a visitor to his house and a mock fairy tale crowded with barely controlled imagery of repression and desire. From earnest meditations on politics, he turned to a chaotic story of usurped kingdoms, tyrant princes, and absurd supernatural events. Attracted equally to (and equally adept in) these two realms of fact and fable, of public activity and private indulgence, and keenly interested in the tensions between them, Walpole in his writings provides the twentieth-century reader with a compelling view into the complexities of eighteenth-century social and political life and with an interesting example of the effects on fiction of the deliberate cultivation of an attitude of retirement.
The Castle of Otranto (1764), in some respects Walpole's favorite work and the one for which in literary circles he is best known, epitomizes this double stance: its frenzied pace bearing witness to Walpole's recent exasperated tangles in the political world, it offers, in its emphasis on the exaggerated and the supernatural, an avenue of escape from that realm into one of defiant imaginative excess.
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