SOURCE: "The Castle of Otranto— Horace Walpole, His Life and Pursuits—Strawberry Hill—The Mysterious Mother," in The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1927. Reprint: Humanities Press, 1964.

In the following excerpt from The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism (1964), Railo discusses the importance of castle imagery—and specifically Strawberry Hill—to The Castle of Otranto.

I

The student of English literature is fairly certain at one time or another, as he arrives at the dawning romanticism of the latter half of the eighteenth century, to come across a small and unassuming booklet entitled The Castle of Otranto, with the subtitle A Gothic Story. The book consists of some hundred and fifty pages and has as frontispiece a fine steel engraving of an elderly man with a wide-awake expression dressed in eighteenth-century costume; underneath is the magnificent...