‘lord god! jesus! what a house!’: describing and visiting strawberry hill

‘Lord God! Jesus! What a House!’: Describing andVisiting Strawberry Hilljecs_271 357..380

S T E P H E N C L A R K E

Abstract: This paper analyses the transmission of the text of HoraceWalpole’s Description of Strawberry Hill from the printing of its firstcomponent in 1760 to its last appendix in 1791 and beyond. It uses Walpole’scopious manuscript amendments in a number of copies to consider thepurpose of the book in the context both of the steady stream of visitors toWalpole’s collection at Strawberry Hill and of Walpole’s passionateengagement in recording that ever-expanding collection. It also discusses anumber of unrecorded examples of printing from Walpole’s Strawberry HillPress, which the research for the paper has revealed.

Keywords: Gothic Revival, Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole, Description ofStrawberry Hill, country house visiting, history of collecting

Horace Walpole’s Description of Strawberry Hill is well known and has longbeen celebrated. It was printed at Walpole’s own Strawberry Hill Press in1774 and reprinted in an expanded edition in 1784 with plates, and hasalways been a collector’s item. For the exhibition ‘Horace Walpole’sStrawberry Hill’ (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, autumn 2009;Victoria & Albert Museum, London, spring 2010) it is the essential point ofreference. It is also, I would suggest, a very odd book, a fluid, frequentlychanging text of uncertain function, shot through with Walpolean anomalies– both more and less than it appears.

The basic facts are these. Walpole purchased Strawberry Hill in 1749 andover the next twenty-five years carried out a series of building campaigns thatconverted a coachman’s cottage into an extraordinary Gothic castle – orconfection, depending on your point of view. He filled it with a miscellaneousbut extremely important collection of miniatures, Classical antiquities,historical portraits, ebony furniture, china, bronzes, bound prints and theitems of association that were to attract so much publicity at the StrawberryHill sale in 1842: the spurs worn by William III at the Battle of the Boyne,Admiral van Tromp’s tortoiseshell pipe-case and the like. By 1774 thebuilding works were largely complete, and it was in that year that Walpolefirst printed the Description, recording the house and its contents in a quartoedition of 100 copies. In this format it had no illustrations and no preface, and

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 33 No. 3 (2010)

© 2009 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 GarsingtonRoad, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

consisted of 119 pages describing Walpole’s Gothic house and giving a room-by-room account of his collection. Walpole subsequently printed threeappendices listing additions to the collection, but he also printed 200 copies ofa new edition in 1784, which he provided with twenty-seven engravings,including a frontispiece and five folding plates, and an explanatory preface. Tothis edition in turn he was to add three appendices of additional treasuresaccumulated, the latest of them in 1791, six years before his death. A listshowing the chronology of these editions and their appendices, and of theother component parts and variants of the Description that are discussed inthis paper, is set out in Figure 1. Given the complex evolution of the text of theDescription over nearly forty years, for clarity the 1774 Description and thoseitems that relate to it are shown on the list in ordinary type, and the 1784

Description and those items that relate to it are shown in bold type.The Description was not, strictly speaking, a country house guide at all. It

was never handed out to the visitors that came to see Walpole’s house andcollections: indeed it was not published, or even circulated, until after hisdeath. Guides to English country house collections stretched back at least asfar as Gambarini’s Description of the Earl of Pembroke’s Pictures at Wilton of1731, although Wilton and Stowe were almost alone among the greatcountry houses in having their own dedicated guidebooks for visitors before1750. Such books would be carried around by the visitor on his tour: bookssuch as Seeley’s slim octavo Description of the House and Gardens ... at Stowe,

1760 Catalogue of Pictures and Drawings in the Holbein-Chamber 1774 Short Description 1774 Pictures, Curiosities, &c. in the Cabinet of Enamels and Miniatures 1774 Curiosities in the Glass Closet 1774 A Description of the Villa of Horace WalpoleFrom 1774 A Description of the Villa 1774 (Walpole’s annotated/Spencer Copy) 1781 Appendix to 1774 DescriptionBetween 1781-4 List of the Books Printed at Strawberry–Hill 1784 Additions since the Appendix to the 1774 Description1784 A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace WalpoleLate 1770s-1790 Plates to 1784 Description1786 More Additions to the 1774 Description * 1786 Appendix to the 1784 Description * 1786 Preface to 1784 Description1789 Curiosities Added to the 1784 Description1791 More Additions to the 1784 Description1784-c.1807 A Description of the Villa 1784 (Kirgate’s annotated proof copy) 1798 Reprinting of the 1784 Description in Walpole’s Works

1. Chronological listing of the Description of Strawberry Hill and itscomponent elements. The 1784 Description and items relating to it appear

in bold type

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© 2009 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

which went through some twenty-five editions between 1745 and 1832 andwas provided with helpful engraved views to assist in identifying the variousgarden temples, or Thomas Martyn’s The English Connoisseur (1766), whichlists in pocket-size small octavo format the pictures in some twenty or morecollections accessible to the respectable visitor, mostly at country houses. Thefunction of these books is fundamentally different from that of the Descriptionof Strawberry Hill.

Walpole explained his position in his correspondence. Replying in January1775 to the Earl of Hardwicke’s request for a copy of the 1774 Description, hewrote that he

neither thought it was known of, nor intended it should be yet, for it is both veryimperfect and very faulty. I printed a very few as a sample, intending to haveprints to it. Mr Lort [the Revd Michael Lort, antiquary and Walpole’scorrespondent] saw the specimen and begged one, but I desired it might be asecret, as I never design [sic] it should be published, but meant it for presents.1

This rather defensive account may have been tempered by Walpole’s dislike ofHardwicke, whom he accused of malice and (infinitely worse) dullness.2 Buthe also, twelve years later, refused a copy of the 1784 Description to LordOssory (the husband of his correspondent Lady Ossory), whose set ofStrawberry Hill Press publications Walpole had promised as far as possible tocomplete. Writing to Lady Ossory in a revealing letter of 15 September 1787,in which he affects to distance himself from the vanity of authorship (‘were Ito recommence my life, and thought as I do now, I do not believe that anyconsideration could induce me to be an author’ – a variant of the sin ofCongreve before Voltaire), Walpole writes of the 1784 Description as follows:

though printed, I have entirely kept it up [i.e. kept it back], and mean to do sowhile I live for very sound reasons, Madam, as you will allow. I am so tormentedby visitors to my house, that two or three rooms are not shown to abridge theirstay. In the Description are specified all the enamels and miniatures, etc., whichI keep under lock and key. If the visitors got the book into their hands, I shouldnever get them out of the house, and they would want to see fifty articles whichI do not choose they should handle and paw.

The letter continues by explaining how the existence of the Descriptionbecame known:

The mention of the Description came out by two accidents. I gave an imperfectaccount of my collection [that is, the 1774 edition] to an old Mr Cole aclergyman of Cambridge many years ago, and on his death it was sold to abookseller. It set some gossiping virtuosos on enquiry: Mr Gulston bribed myengravers to sell him some of my prints; Mr Gough, without asking my leave,published a list of ten of those engravings in his Topography, and has occasionedmy being teased for specimens, which I have refused.3

These two paragraphs provide essential information for our understanding ofthe Description. They confirm that, far from assisting or guiding visitors, it was

Lord God! Jesus! What a House! 359


kept from them, to prevent them from seeing more of the house and collectionthan Walpole was prepared to show. The ‘old Mr Cole’ was the Revd WilliamCole (1714-1782), rector of Milton, near Cambridge, and an antiquary, whose114 folio volumes of manuscripts now rest in the British Museum. He becamea friend when Walpole was at Cambridge, and they corresponded for twentyyears. Walpole gave Cole his copy of the 1774 Description – one of only sixlarge paper copies – when Cole visited him at Strawberry Hill. Cole’s copy,which survives at the Lewis Walpole library at Farmington, is inscribed on thetitle page ‘Donu Hon: Hor: Walpole Oct: 29 1774, Gul° Cole’. When Cole died,his books were catalogued and sold by Benjamin White, a bookseller in FleetStreet, and although the Yale edition of Walpole’s Correspondence notes thatthe book is not listed in the catalogue, it none the less entered the trade. The‘Mr Gulston’ referred to was Joseph Gulston, an insatiable print collector, andto have your prints listed in Richard Gough’s British Topography, ‘an HistoricalAccount of what has been done for illustrating the Topographical Antiquitiesof Great Britain and Ireland’, was, in that great age of grangerising, an openinvitation to all the print collectors in the land. Walpole could only lamentthat Gough’s ‘curiosity is a little impertinent’.4

Walpole, ever uncomfortable with the burgeoning world of commercialauthorship, did manage to keep the book largely out of circulation, althougha few copies of the updated and extended 1784 edition were given toparticularly favoured friends. This edition entirely superseded the usefulnessof the 1774 edition, and the plates were of a size fitted to the larger format ofthe 1784 edition – 30.5 ¥ 24.5 cm uncut, whereas the 1774 edition was only23.8 ¥ 19 cm.5 Walpole’s intention was to bequeath copies of the 1784 editionafter his death, and in or soon after 1784 he drew up a list of eighty people towhom he wanted copies given, a list he revised shortly before his own death in1797.6 Many of these copies have survived; they are typically inscribed by hisexecutors ‘Mrs Damer and Lord Frederick Campbell have great pleasure inexecuting the directions of the late Earl of Orford’, and dated June 1797.

So what was the function of the Description, and how did its text evolve? Toanswer this, one needs to go back to 1760. In that year Walpole wrote in theJournal of the Printing Office, his record of the activities of the StrawberryHill Press, ‘Oct. 20

th printed a few Catalogues of the pictures in the Holbeinchamber’.7 Only five copies are known to have survived. The HolbeinChamber had been added to the house in the preceding two years andconsisted of a room with a plaster vaulted ceiling taken from the Queen’sdressing-room at Windsor, a bay window with decorative painted glass, alarge chimneypiece designed by Richard Bentley from the tomb ofArchbishop Warham at Canterbury and a screen, also designed by Bentley,with pierced arches taken from the gate of the choir at Rouen Cathedral. Itwas named after the set of portraits taken on oil paper by George Vertue fromthe original Holbein pictures in Queen Caroline’s closet at Kensington. Apartfrom this, it contained ebony furniture, early pictures, stained glass, stone andboxwood sculptures of Henry VIII, an enamel model of the shrine of Thomas

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à Becket (subsequently moved to the Tribune) and curiosities such as CardinalWolsey’s hat. It also contained a bed of purple cloth lined with white satinthat, so far as we know, was never slept in, for this room was designed not foruse but for display, as perhaps the first museum room. The Holbein and Vertueimages, the sculptures of Henry, the tour de force of the chimneypiece and theebony furniture that Walpole believed to be sixteenth-century were allintended to evoke the Tudor court, and the concentration of objects in thismodestly sized room – including the Vertues, there were nearly ninetypaintings – was a theatrical display to be seen and admired by the visitorswhom Walpole allowed to marvel at his treasures.

The ‘Catalogue’ notes the origin of the design for the ceiling and screen,lists the seals placed over the chimney and, in a final entry, mentions whatWalpole believed to be the Abbot of Glastonbury’s chair; but essentially it is ahand-list of the pictures and drawings. It is possible that copies may have beenused to assist the housekeeper to show the room and its portraits after Holbeinto visitors, given that the pictures did not bear labels. Although the earliestreference to Walpole’s issuing tickets to see the house is from 1764, the houseis likely to have been shown increasingly often from 1760, when the principalbuilding work was completed, though it seems clear from the extreme rarity ofthe ‘Catalogue’ and Walpole’s reference to a ‘few’ copies that it was neverhanded out to visitors.8 It is also interesting that in Henrietta Pye’s somewhatbreathless Short View of the Principal Seats and Gardens in and aboutTwickenham, privately printed in 1767, the Holbein Chamber (which shedescribes as the State Bedchamber, the Great North Bedchamber not beingcompleted for another five years) is the only interior of the house described inany detail.9 But the fact that Walpole printed a list of his own holdings, of theidentity of which he was already aware, does not necessarily mean that heprinted it purely for the benefit of visitors. Listing his collections was as muchfor his own satisfaction, and for the benefit of posterity, as for the immediatebenefit of his contemporaries, recording what he had created against the daywhen the collection would be dispersed.

We then come to the anomaly of the Short Description of Strawberry Hill,printed at Walpole’s press in 1774. This consists of 65 pages and is essentiallya shortened variant of the 1774 Description, omitting any description of theexterior of the house, or of the Waiting Room, China Room, Little Parlour,Yellow Bedchamber, Walpole’s own Bedchamber, the Bedchamber in theRound Tower and the garden. There are only two surviving copies: one at EtonCollege, the other at the Lewis Walpole Library. Tellingly, the former isannotated in the hand of Thomas Kirgate (Walpole’s printer and, in later life,amanuensis), ‘Catalogue for Shewing the House. Little better than Wastepaper’ and further annotated by Walpole as ‘Very imperfect for manyadditions & alterations since this was printed’. The Lewis Walpole Librarycopy, formerly belonging to Lord Waldegrave, had previously been owned byLord Harcourt, by whom it is inscribed: ‘This description of Strawberry hill,intended for the use of persons who go to see the house, was given to me by



the Honble. Anne Seymour Damer, 1801 and is so rare that a copy has beensold for 6 guineas.’ It has been suggested, following a comment by thebibliographer Thomas Lowndes, that the Short Description is a differentlyarranged early draft of the 1774 Description that was used by the servants toshow the house to visitors.10 Given Kirgate’s and Lord Waldegrave’s notes, itseems hard to argue with this as its primary function.

The assumption that one or more copies of the Short Description were usedwhen showing the house is strengthened by a comparison of its text withthat of the 1774 Description as printed, and also with two other very rareStrawberry Hill imprints of the same time. These are the ‘Curiosities in theGlass Closet in the Great Bedchamber’, a listing of the contents of the glasscloset in the corner of the Great North Bedchamber, where Walpole keptsuch iconic objects as Dr Dee’s speculum and the wedding gloves of JohnHampden’s wife, and a list of the ‘Pictures, Curiosities &c. in The Cabinet ofEnamels and Miniatures, and in The Glass Cases on each Side of it’, recordingthe heart of Walpole’s collection of miniatures enshrined in the cabinet in theTribune. Both were separately printed and sewn into wrappers, and only ahandful of copies of either title are known to have survived.

The first person to attempt to address the relationship between these itemswas the Boston collector Percival Merritt.11 Merritt laboured under thedisadvantage that he had never seen a copy of the Short Description, but he didknow something of the provenance of what is now the Eton copy, and hisaccount has since been expanded by A. T. Hazen.12 The Eton copy providesa roll-call of early Strawberry Hill Press collectors. The item appeared inKirgate’s sale catalogue of 1810 and then reappears in the 1825 salecatalogue of George Baker, who in 1810 had printed for circulation amonghis friends the Catalogue of Books &c., Printed at Strawberry Hill.13 At his sale itwas bought with much other Strawberry Hill material by R. P. Cruden, ofGravesend. Two unpublished letters from Cruden of March 1819, addressed toSylvester and G. P. Harding, show his intention to sell his Strawberry Hillcollection and are useful in telling us something about it; he asks the Hardingsto handle the sale (evidence of their continuing involvement after Walpole’sdeath in the dissemination of Strawberry Hill material) and provides thewording for an advertisement in the press, stressing that ‘What makes myCollection valuable, is that not only those I purchased from you – but all theothers I have, are uncut.’14 It appears that Cruden’s collection was not sold atthe time, but Merritt records that it was subsequently bought by J. W. K.Eyton, and at his sale in 1848 this copy of the Short Description re-entered thetrade, before eventually being acquired by Eton some time after 1904. TheWaldegrave copy, meanwhile, had been given by Anne Seymour Damer toLord Harcourt and subsequently passed to the Waldegrave family, from whomit was extracted with relentless charm and determination by the greatWalpole collector W. S. Lewis in 1948.

By comparing page numbers Merritt had postulated that the ShortDescription might be a set of sheets taken from the press while the 1774

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Description was being printed, but omitting the four pages of the ‘Curiosities inthe Glass Closet’ and the eighteen pages of the ‘Pictures, Curiosities &c. in theCabinet of Enamels and Miniatures’. He was correct that the content of theseis omitted from the Short Description, and that they appear to come from thesame setting of type as the equivalent pages in the 1774 Description, but therelationship of the Short Description to the 1774 Description is rather morecomplicated than that of a mere offprint.

The 1774 Description differs from the Short Description in three main ways.First, the 1774 Description has an opening passage describing the history ofthe house, the approach to it and its entrance hall; second, it adds sectionsdescribing the garden and those rooms omitted from the Short Description;third, the text of the rooms previously described has in some cases additionalmaterial. For those rooms where there is no additional material, either thetext is identical with the type reset or the 1774 Description uses the samesetting of type, changing only the page numbers; this is the case for pages 34

to 46 of the 1774 Description, which are identical (save for page numbers) topages 17 to 29 of the Short Description, as is the account of the Gallery (pages64 to 73 of the 1774 Description, and pages 38 to 47 of the Short Description).Some sections are, however, clearly reset, such as the first two lines of theentry for Vasari’s portrait of Bianca Capello in the Round Drawing-Room,which lies at the top of page 75 of the 1774 Description but at the foot of page48 of the Short Description. The main additional material for rooms alreadydescribed consists of a list of the rare books, prints and drawings in theLibrary, with a catalogue of the twenty-five most precious coins and medalsand a couple of sentences on the weights of Anne Boleyn’s clock, and thecontent of the ‘Curiosities in the Glass Closet’ in the Great North Bedchambersection, and of the ‘Pictures, Curiosities &c. in the Cabinet of Enamels andMiniatures’ in the Tribune section, the text of the remainder of the account ofthe Tribune being generally reordered.

The effect of these changes is that the Short Description omits precisely thoserooms or items that Walpole would not want shown, such as the China Room,his own bedchamber and the miniatures within the closed cabinet in theTribune. As noted above, Walpole had written to Lady Ossory that he kept hisenamels and miniatures under lock and key, and, in addition to that, Chalcraftand Viscardi claim that visitors to the house shown round by Margaret thehousekeeper would not even have been allowed beyond the Tribune’s grilleddoorway, let alone seen inside Walpole’s precious miniatures cabinet.15 Hencealso the fact that Walpole’s China Room was not normally shown (and wasaccordingly omitted from the Short Description), consisting, as it did by 1784,of about 560 breakable items in one small room.16

It is accordingly totally possible that Margaret and any other servant at thehouse who showed it to visitors may well have used a copy of the ShortDescription; Walpole accompanied only the more eminent visitors or thosepersonally known to him. One would imagine that any housekeeper atStrawberry Hill would need a crib to work from quite as much as the



housekeeper at Fonthill Splendens, whose gaffes provoked the composition ofWilliam Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters.17 This isnot to say, however, that this was necessarily the sole, or even the principal,purpose of its creation. It is certainly interesting that one of the extremelyrare copies of the ‘Curiosities in the Glass Closet’ (one of only three survivingcopies) is bound in at the end of the Waldegrave copy of the Short Description(one of only two surviving copies), which is not necessarily consistent withthe use of that copy of the Short Description as an aide-mémoire for thehousekeeper when escorting visitors. As early as 1768 Walpole had writtento Cole that ‘When the round tower is finished, I propose to draw up adescription and catalogue of the whole house and collection’, and the ShortDescription appears to be a preliminary draft in that process, and (mostimportant for Walpole the annotator and recorder) it is both description andcatalogue, apparently used by the housekeeper to show the house but a partof Walpole’s larger recording project.18

The function of the 100 copies of the 1774 Description, however, was as acatalogue and a record of the collection. As already noted, it is a small quarto,originally consisting of 119 pages, being the title page and text, withoutpreface or plates. Walpole appears to have printed it for his own purposes as acatalogue, and its self-evident aspiration to completeness is supportive of this.It is far beyond the scope of this paper to purport to pass judgement on thequality and importance of Walpole’s collection, but accounts of it haverecurrently commented on the juxtaposition of the significant and the trivial,with (at least to the non-specialist) the trivial perhaps nowhere more inevidence than in the China Room, whose thirteen-page list of contentsincludes such apparently insignificant items as:

Two blue and white beakers.Two small coloured ditto.Two square blue and white bottles.An odd green and white tea-pot.

This encouraged commentators such as Charles Burney to suggest of theDescription that

The minute catalogue of cups and saucers, and saucers without cups, willperhaps seem frivolous, and impress some readers with no magnificent idea ofthe noble collector’s magnitude of mind; and if, in his defence, we should saythat the most trifling part of the collection are links in a chain, we shall,perhaps, be told that it is a hair-chain to fetter fleas.19

But for our purpose the interest of such lists lies not merely in the varietywithin the collection that they display (the immediately following item is atile from the kitchen of William the Conqueror at Caen) but also in theirencyclopaedic nature. The numerous appendices, editions and manuscriptadditions that this paper describes represent Walpole’s attempt to maintainthat comprehensiveness.

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Walpole also intended that copies of the Description might be given tofriends, although few copies seem to have been given away. This is partlybecause of Walpole’s concern to avoid being further tormented by visitorsand antiquarians (as we have seen with Cole’s copy) and partly because thecatalogue could not keep up with the growing collection. The visitors toStrawberry Hill were a source both of pride and of exasperation to Walpole,and it is easy to select quotations from his correspondence where he lamentshis own vanity, which had reduced his house to an inn, an attraction on theroad for the amusement of the passers-by who had had the forethought torequest a ticket for admission. ‘I am tormented all day and every day by peoplethat come to see my house, and have no enjoyment of it in summer’, he hadcomplained to Sir Horace Mann, and, more particularly, in 1793 he lamentedto Mary Berry that ‘Two companies had been to see my house last week, andone of the parties, as vulgar people always see with the ends of their fingers,had broken off the end of my invaluable eagle’s bill, and to conceal theirmischief, had pocketed the piece’.20 Tickets for admission were printed from atleast 1774, and the rules for obtaining a ticket (‘Mr Walpole is very ready tooblige any curious Persons with the Sight of his House and Collection’) wereprinted in 1784.21 Walpole’s own ‘Book of Visitors’, covering the period 1784-1796, shows an average of between sixty and one hundred parties a year.22

According to Kirgate’s annotated copy of the Description, which will bementioned later in this article, in 1807, after Walpole’s death, his heir MrsDamer noted that eighty or ninety tickets were still being dispensed annually– although the house became increasingly inaccessible after Lady Waldegravetook over the property in 1810.

What is most odd about the apparently endless succession of visitors thatplagued Walpole for the best part of thirty years is how few of them leftrecords of their visit. Apart from the accounts published after Walpole’sdeath, there is a distinction to be drawn between Walpole’s friends andacquaintances, to many of whom he would show the house, and tourists whohad applied for a ticket. Most of the accounts we have are provided by friendssuch as Thomas Gray, William Cole, Lady Mary Coke, Fanny Burney andMary Hamilton. Fanny Burney recorded many years later how in 1786

(actually September 1785) she and her father, Dr Burney, made a visit of somedays to Strawberry Hill and ‘Mr Walpole paid them the high and wellunderstood compliment of receiving them without other company ...Strawberry Hill was now exhibited to the utmost advantage. All that waspeculiar, especially the most valuable of his pictures, he had the politeness topoint out to his guests himself.’ He displayed ‘the elegant apartments,pictures, decorations, and beautiful grounds and views; all which, to speak inhis own manner, had a sort of well-bred as well as gay and recreativeappearance’; the evenings were devoted to showing manuscripts from hislibrary, to literature and to conversation. Looking back after nearly fifty years,Burney is careful to distance herself from Walpole, whom she characterises asa ‘witty, sarcastic, ingenious, deeply-thinking, highly-cultivated, quaint,



though evermore gallant and romantic, though very mundane, old bachelorof other days’, and she concludes that ‘Strawberry Hill itself, with all itschequered and interesting varieties of detail, had a something in its whole ofmonotony, that cast, insensibly, over its visitors, an indefinable species ofsecret constraint; and made cheerfulness rather the effect of effort than thespring of pleasure.’23

One of the tourists who visited Strawberry was Caroline Lybbe Powys, thatindomitable visitor of country houses, who in 1787 ‘found a memorandum ofmany curious pictures I had seen there, and some other things; but I supposethere never was a house which contained so many valuable rarities’. Shelisted some of the pictures and curiosities, concluding that there were‘numbers of curiosities in cabinets, that we hardly had time to see one quarterof them’.24 But the most detailed account dates from long after Walpole’sdeath, when, in 1825, the novelist Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, visited thehouse. She arrived by water, was let into the house by ‘a smart, comely,rondelette little housekeeper ... playing with her keys’ and saw and describedthe hall, the Refectory, the China Closet, the Yellow Bed-Chamber, theBreakfast Parlour, the Green closet, the Armoury, the Library, the StarChamber, the Holbein Chamber, the Gallery, the Round Drawing Room, theTribune, the Great North Bed-Chamber, the Beauclerk Closet, and the RoundBed-Chamber, before ‘attention is exhausted, eyes are dazzled, andexpectation satiated ... and it is with a pleasure unspeakable, that one passesthrough the great cloister, into the refreshing grounds and gardens’. She isvaluable in capturing the way in which the superfluity of precious andcurious objects converted sometimes potentially small and ordinary spacesinto ‘precious museums’ and is particularly useful for her description of theChina Closet, with its ‘Regiments of Worcester china bowls, phalanxes ofSevres mustard-pots, with cups, and dishes, and narrow-necked bottles, andwide-mouthed ewers, and mugs, and jugs’, and the Tribune and its collectionof miniatures.25

The curious absence of visitor accounts from Walpole’s lifetime, combinedwith the fact that the Short Description opens with an account of the Refectory,has led to the suggestion that visitors did not enter the house by the front doorand hall but instead entered by the Waiting Room.26 There is, however, noevidence for this other than the fragmentary nature of the Short Description,and, apart from the inherent unlikelihood of visitors not arriving at the frontdoor of the house, there is one piece of evidence to the contrary. One of thelots in the Strawberry Hill sale of 1842 (lot 117 on day 17) was an Elizabethanarmchair from the entrance hall, engraved with the arms of Warburton,purchased by the Earl of Derby for £21. An article on it in The Builder of May1844 noted that the chair, ‘being occupied by the person who sold thecatalogue, escaped the observation of many of the numerous assemblage ofvisitors’. But another note, in a copy of the sale catalogue belonging to J. H.Anderdon, adds the information that this was the chair ‘On which on a labelis a notice evidently in Walpole’s time requesting Ladies & Gentlemen to leave

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their “Sticks & Switches” in the Hall! –’.27 The presence of such a notice on ahall chair suggests that that was the room where tourists’ visits to StrawberryHill began.

What such accounts as we have of the house share is the sense ofsuperfluity of objects; as Lawrence Lipking has put it, ‘visitors wereoverwhelmed by an intimate barrage of objects, a sort of museum of relicsand re-creations that intrigued and bewildered the eye’, an experience hedescribes as the ‘suffocation of thought by a love of elaboration’.28 MaryHamilton, who visited Walpole in July 1783, complained that ‘It is impossibleto make memorandums of the things I saw, from the great variety’ and on asecond visit, in June 1784, added: ‘One ought to live in this house at leasta month to see everything. It is filled with virtu.’ On both occasions as aprivileged guest she was after dinner shown by Walpole the china closet, andon both occasions he showed her the much-favoured Lady Diana Beauclerk’sincomparable drawings illustrating his tragedy The Mysterious Mother, in theBeauclerk Tower, ‘which he opens only to his most particular friends’.29

Another friend, Lady Mary Coke, recorded of Strawberry Hill in her journalsthat ‘’tis the most amusing House I ever was in: so many pictures & things tohelp one to ideas, when one wants a fresh collection.’30 None, however, was asdirect as Lady Townshend. When climbing from the hall up the highlyoriginal but compact stairs designed by Richard Bentley after the librarystaircase at Rouen Cathedral, between walls papered and painted inperspective to represent Gothic fretwork, she was heard to exclaim (hence thetitle of this paper) ‘Lord God! Jesus! What a house! It is just such a house as aparson’s, where the children lie at the feet of the bed!’31

Meanwhile, Walpole’s collection continued inexorably to expand. As hewrote to Cole on 16 June 1781: ‘I must add an appendix of curiositiespurchased or acquired since the Catalogue was printed. This will be awkward,but I cannot afford to throw away an hundred copies.’ In the same letterWalpole explained that he had procured the artist Edward Edwards to make adrawing of the Tribune and finish Sandby’s drawing of the Gallery so theycould be engraved ‘with a few of the chimneypieces, which will complete theplates’.32 As early as 1774, in the same breath as announcing to Cole thecompletion of printing the Description, Walpole had added, ‘I propose in timeto have plates of my house added to the catalogue.’33 This was the firstmention of the engravings that are now the most familiar images ofStrawberry Hill, and it is symptomatic that Walpole was planning them assoon as the Description was printed. The ‘Appendix of Pictures and Curiositiesadded since the Catalogue was First Printed’, together with a ‘List of the BooksPrinted at Strawberry-Hill’, was printed in 1781 and consisted of twenty-eight pages; this was in turn followed in 1784 by four pages of ‘Additions sincethe Appendix’ and again, in 1786, by six pages of ‘More Additions’.

We accordingly have a layering of texts as Walpole struggled to record hisexpanding collection, and to see how the text was transformed, and how the1774 Description evolved into the 1784 Description, we need to consider



Walpole’s own copy of the 1774 Description, subsequently part of the Spencercollection in the New York Public Library, and hence known as the Spencercopy. Such was the indefatigable determination of W. S. Lewis that byexchange he prised this copy from New York and it is now at the LewisWalpole Library at Farmington, Connecticut.34 The Spencer copy is anextremely important document in the history of Strawberry Hill, as Walpolebound into it numerous drawings, plans, sketches and caricatures relevant tohis house and his family – including, for example, his often reproduced roughsketch of the appearance of the house when he first rented it in 1747 – but itis the annotations and additional manuscript material added to the text,rather than any added illustrations, that are relevant here. The extra-illustrated copies of the Description assembled by Walpole himself, RichardBull and other collectors, who transformed the book with watercolours,drawings, prints and other ephemera to create not only an illustrated recordof the collection but an alternative virtual collection in itself, is matter for aseparate study.

2. Richard Bentley, View of the Hall and Staircase at Strawberry Hill,watercolour, 1753. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

368 STEPHEN CLARKE


Walpole’s manuscript additions to the Spencer copy are of two kinds.Where Walpole writes a note of a new acquisition, it will generally be lightlycrossed out in red crayon, having subsequently been transferred to the printed‘Appendix’ of 1781, which is bound into the back of the copy – for example,the MS note of the two leather shields painted by Polidore, presented by SirWilliam Hamilton and hung by Walpole on the staircase, as added inmanuscript to page 41 and then crossed through, reappears in the text onpage 131 of the printed ‘Appendix’. But where the annotation merely providesadditional information to an existing item in the collection, such as the othermanuscript note on page 41, which adds details of provenance to thedescription of the painting of Henry V and his family, then that note will beincorporated into the 1784 edition of the Description.35 Similarly, whereWalpole adds an account of further building work – such as the BeauclerkCloset, built in 1776 to house Lady Diana Beauclerk’s drawings from TheMysterious Mother – then that appears in the text of the 1784 Description.

It has already been noted that Walpole in October 1774 gave the RevdWilliam Cole a large paper copy of the 1774 Description. Cole, whoseantiquarian need to record was in its different way quite as strong asWalpole’s, noted on the last page of the text of his copy, that Walpole

said, that he gave me this Copy in large Paper, of which Sort only 6 were printed,& 100 only in the whole, that I might transcribe on the Margins such additionalNotes as he had already made, & entered into his Copy. I took the Notes on aPiece of Paper, & shall enter them in their proper Places with H. W. to each: orrather W. C. the initials of my own Name, to any such as I may add, leaving Mr.Walpole’s, which are numerous, without any Mark at all.36

A comparison of Cole’s copy with the Spencer copy confirms that it was theSpencer copy from which Cole copied Walpole’s notes; they are generallysimilarly placed on the page, using the same wording. They do not includethose of Walpole’s notes made subsequently by Walpole, after Cole copiedthem on to his piece of paper in October 1774; the notes to Cole and Spencer,when read together, accordingly tell us which of Walpole’s additional itemswere acquired after October 1774: for example, the last item added by Walpoleon page 20 of the Spencer copy, medallions in Staffordshire ware of Sir W.Hamilton and Lady Catherine Walpole, and all the items added by him onpages 21 and 22, including the well-known painting of the royal gardenerRose presenting to Charles II the first pineapple raised in England, none ofwhich is copied by Cole into his copy.

Cole’s own notes are far more occasional than Walpole’s and provideinformation on his own recollections or information given him by Walpole.On page 27 of his copy, against the entry for the view of the Hôtel deCarnavalet in the Breakfast Room, he adds, ‘I went with Mr Walpole oneAfternoon to view this House, which had nothing remarkable to draw one’sAttention, but having been the Habitation of so Famous a Woman. W. C.’; andagainst the small tripod of ormolu in the last paragraph of the Breakfast



Room entry he writes: ‘I was with him in Paris in 1765, when he bought theTripod for 3 Louis & half or 3 Guineas & half of Madame du Lac. W. C.’ Also,on page 59, Cole takes Walpole’s note in the Spencer copy on an additionalchair Walpole had commissioned for the Holbein Chamber ‘covered withpurple cloth, made from one in a pane of painted glass in the breakfast room’and adds to it the anecdote that ‘Mr Walpole told me, that he had this elegantpurple Chair made on Purpose against a Visit made to him by the presentArchbp of Canterbury [the Hon. Frederick Cornwallis], his Countryman,Schole-Fellow, & Acquaintance at the University. Wm. Cole 1774.’

The Spencer copy has bound in at the end not only the first (1781)‘Appendix’ and the ‘List of the Books Printed at Strawberry-Hill’ (up to 1781),but also the second of the three appendices to the 1774 Description, the‘Additions since the Appendix of 1784’. What has not previously been noticed,and is not recorded by Hazen, is that the Spencer copy has in fact two versionsof this second appendix; the two-leaf version that has always been known andis present in many copies of the 1774 Description, and, immediately beforethat, an apparently unique earlier printed version of the ‘Additions’, of justone leaf, an unrecorded piece of Strawberry Hill Press printing. It was printedsome time between 1781 and 1784 and is clearly a superseded draft of thetwo-leaf ‘Additions’, where all its entries reappear, but supplemented withadditional items. Needless to say, the one-leaf version of the ‘Additions’ is itselfsupplemented with further MS notes of additional acquisitions, whichreappear as printed in the two-leaf Additions and in the appendices to the1784 Description; but these notes are almost sparse when compared to theannotations Walpole has added to the last page of the two-leaf version ofthe ‘Additions’. This is positively encrusted on all four margins with MS notes.These list new items, the group of objects listed at the foot of the page beingheaded ‘Added 1787’, while those in the upper-right margin are dated 1788

and 1789. They were crossed through when they appeared in the second andthird of the appendices that were printed for the 1784 Description in 1789 and1791 – so Walpole was annotating an already outdated version of theDescription, compulsively updating the 1774 edition when the 1784 editionhad already been printed and also needed to be updated.

In addition, the Spencer copy has line drawings of the picture hangs of theHolbein Chamber, Gallery and Tribune. These were produced as part ofWalpole’s recording process, quite possibly in conjunction with thepreparation of the text of the Description. Where pictures had been moved,Walpole crossed out the description of the old picture and wrote in the nameof its replacement beside it – so, for example, whereas The Countess ofDesmond, by Muntz, used to hang to the top left of the chimneypiece in theHolbein Chamber, and is recorded as such in the Catalogue of the HolbeinChamber of 1760, by 1774 it had been replaced by Vertue’s Lady ArabellaStuart, which is duly listed in the 1774 Description.

In a bibliographically simple world, that would be that. But Walpole is not sostraightforward as to have just one author’s copy of his book, annotated by him

370 STEPHEN CLARKE


3. ‘Additions since the Appendix’; recto of an unrecorded leaf of StrawberryHill Press printing, from the Spencer copy of A Description of the Villa of

Horace Walpole ... at Strawberry-Hill, 1774. Courtesy of the Lewis WalpoleLibrary, Yale University



for a future edition, or even updated by him after the printing of the subsequentedition. We know of two other copies of the 1774 Description that belonged toand were annotated by him: the first subsequently in William Beckford’scollection, the second inscribed by Walpole on the title page as being ‘with theprices of such pieces as I can recollect’.37 To make a random comparison, page27 of the Spencer copy is marked up heavily with additional items that were

4. Walpole’s notes on page 152 of the final printed page of the Spencer copyof the 1774 edition of the Description. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole

Library, Yale University

372 STEPHEN CLARKE


then printed in the 1781 ‘Appendix’ – these, as previously mentioned, are theentries faintly crossed out in red crayon. But this can be compared with thesame page from the Beckford copy, which has just five totally different, later,annotations by him, of which one is dated 1788 and one 1789.Two of those fiveitems, the Lely of a shepherd which he believed to be Cowley, and the Romneyof Lady Craven, were inserted in the 1781 ‘Appendix’; the other three, writtenin a different ink, appeared in the second, ‘Curiosities Added’, appendix of 1789

to the 1784 Description. We have already noted how the last printed page of theSpencer copy (page 152, the final page to the second appendix to the 1774

Description, the two-leaf version of the ‘Additions since the Appendix’) isheavily marked by Walpole on every margin with additional items. TheBeckford copy has all three of the appendices to the 1774 Description, so thefinal page of printed text is page 158, not page 152. But ‘final’ is here a relativeterm. Immediately beneath the printed ‘Finis’ Walpole has added a list headed‘Added Since’, recording the same items as on page 152 of the Spencer copy. Ifone then turns over a couple of pages, that list continues for a page and a halfof dense manuscript of yet further objects, with acquisition dates given forsome of them between 1787 and 1790.

The Beckford copy also has Walpole’s effusive handwritten note on hisniece and protégée Anne Seymour Damer’s restoration of the head of JupiterSerapis that he bought in 1786. He writes (with the passionate bias reservedfor his favourites) on page 157 of the third, 1786, ‘More Additions’ appendix,where the sculpture is described:

In 1787, Mrs Damer modelled a neck to it (as it was a meer head when broughtfrom Rome) & had it cast in bronze, with a gilt modius, which had been lost, & shesupplied in wax some lower curls that were wanting, and mounted the whole ona white marble plinth, so that it is now as perfect as ever it had been, & still morevaluable from being repaired by the greatest Female Artist ever known.

Walpole’s third known copy of the 1774 Description has his notes onprovenance and the prices he had paid. For example, on page 71 the price of£1 3s 0d is noted against the portrait of Katherine Philips, ‘the MatchlessOrinda’. But at the foot of the same page he also added a note on the pictureof Lord Falkland that hung in the Gallery: ‘The picture walking out of itsframe in the Castle of Otranto was suggested by this which is all in white.’ Ifone turns back to the same page in the Spencer copy, he has added an almostidentically worded note. So these three copies show that he not merely usedmultiple copies of the older edition to annotate with additional material, insome cases the same additional material, but he even duplicated some of hisanecdotal notes.

But this is to jump ahead. In 1784 Walpole noted in the Journal of thePrinting-Office at Strawberry Hill that he had “printed 200 copies of theDescription of Strawberry hill on larger paper for the cuts [engravings], andappendixes to that & the former small Edition which had no cuts.” Theengravings were views of the exterior and interior of the house, and images of



some of the dramatic and original chimneypieces. Among the plates areparticularly evocative views of the Gallery and of the Tribune, or Cabinet, twoof Walpole’s most architecturally ambitious interiors. They are bothinvaluable records of how the collection was displayed, the Tribune plateshowing not only the proliferation of small paintings, antiquities andcrowded shelved niches covering the wall surfaces but also the rosewoodcabinet, mounted like an altarpiece, in which Walpole kept the miniaturesrecorded in his Pictures, Curiosities &c. in the Cabinet of Enamels and Miniatures.This edition of the Description incorporates into the text the items contained inthe 1781 ‘Appendix’ and also the 1784 ‘Additions since the Appendix’ to the1774 Edition, which was clearly printed in the same year as the new editionof the Description in order to keep the 1774 Description up to date. The sheetof the ‘List of the Books printed at Strawberry-Hill’ was also reprinted, addingthe 1784 Description as its final entry. The 1784 Description did not contain thethird appendix to the 1774 edition, the ‘More Additions’, which was not toappear until 1786. As mentioned by Merritt, though not by Hazen, the text ofthis last appendix to the 1774 edition is the same as the text of the first of theappendices to the 1784 Description, the ‘Appendix’ of 1786, so we havedifferently titled and differently typeset appendices of identical content addedat the same time to both editions of the Description; accordingly, in Figure 1

these two matching appendices are marked with an asterisk.This again shows Walpole struggling to maintain both editions. His printing

in 1784 and again in 1786 of appendices to an already superseded edition,which by 1784 he had described as ‘a very imperfect list’, goes to the heart of hiscataloguing exercise – the need to record and annotate, to add information lestit be lost.38 But it is not merely a matter of adding a note of provenance here oran anecdote there: it is also a multiplication of the recording process,duplicating material over multiple copies. Heather Jackson has written ofWalpole’s compulsive habit of annotating his books that, consistent with theidea of Walpole as historian of his age, his notes supplement information andcorrect errors, providing facts, without being in any way personallyrevealing.39 Walpole supplemented printed texts with additional or correctedinformation that might be lost to future generations, exercising theantiquarian impulse to preserve and record and correct errors – including hisown. For instance, when in 1747 he published AedesWalpolianae, the catalogueof his father’s collection of pictures at Houghton, he corrected by hand theembarrassingly numerous typographical and other errors and added furtherinformation, thus enabling generations of booksellers to advertise their copiesof the book as annotated by the author: accuracy and fullness of informationmattered. I would suggest that it is the same habit of mind at work in thesuccessive appendices and addenda to his catalogue of his collection, with thedifference that here the annotator has control of the printing press, soannotations can almost at will be converted to printed appendices.

It is also worth noting that the catalyst for these two 1786 appendicesappears to have been the celebrated sale of the Duchess of Portland’s

374 STEPHEN CLARKE


5. Engraved view of the Cabinet (or Tribune) at Strawberry Hill, facing page55 of A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole ... at Strawberry-Hill,

1784. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University



collection in April and May of that year, where Walpole acquired what hebelieved to be a missal by Julio Clovio, and the head of Jupiter Serapis in ‘greenbasaltes’, among lesser treasures; hence the need to celebrate their arrival.

The 1784 Description also contains Walpole’s evocative and typically self-deprecating ‘Preface’, beginning with the sentence ‘It will look, I fear, a littlelike arrogance in a private Man to give a printed Description of his Villa andCollection, in which almost every thing is diminutive’, and concluding byrecalling that the fantastic fabric, ‘built to please my own taste, and in somedegree to realize my own visions’, was ‘a very proper habitation of, as it wasthe scene that inspired, the author of the Castle of Otranto’. The ‘Preface’includes the beguiling statement that the Description ‘is not, however,intended for public sale, and originally was meant only to assist those whoshould visit the place’. This may have been true of the Short Description, but,as we have seen, any such guidebook function had long been superseded.

Walpole records in the ‘Preface’ the main collections from which heacquired his collections, and includes the Portland Collection in the list – sothe ‘Preface’ itself was not printed until at least 1786, two years after the textof the Description.40 The plates that illustrated the book were themselvesprinted over a long period; first mentioned in 1774, and described as nearlycompleted in 1781, they were in fact only completed by the elevation and planof Walpole’s offices in about 1790, the year the offices were built to the designsof James Essex – although probably not, as usually cited, built by JamesWyatt.41 A further suite of the plates was, as noted by Hazen, printed later onpaper watermarked ‘J. Whatman 1822’, which accounts for the detachedcopies of Strawberry Hill plates sometimes encountered.42 Meanwhile, the1784 Description itself was provided with appendices as the collectioncontinued to receive further additions; apart from five items of ‘Additions’printed at the end of the main text, there was the four-page ‘Appendix’ of 1786

(which we have just mentioned as replicating the ‘More Additions’ to the1774 Description), the two pages of ‘Curiosities Added’ of 1789, and a furthertwo pages of ‘More Additions’ (confusingly replicating the title of the final1786 appendix to the 1774 Description) of 1791.43

These last two appendices reveal how an ageing Walpole continued tocollect and provide a printed record of his ongoing acquisitions. The quality ofthe additions is mixed and does not generally reach the heady heights of thePortland acquisitions of 1786 but contains the same bizarre combination ofauction purchases, the works of his paid artists, gifts from his acquaintanceand the productions (one can hardly use the word work) of that honouredband of friends who were amateur artists of aristocratic birth. For example,the final appendix, ‘More Additions’, has a portrait of Samuel Cooper theminiaturist, from the Royal Collection, bought at Dalton’s sale, John Carter’spresumably commissioned large watercolour of the Procession in the Castle ofOtranto, and drawings by Miss Berry.

By 1791, when ‘More Additions’ was printed, Walpole was aged seventy-four and seriously incapacitated by gout; in his correspondence he portrays

376 STEPHEN CLARKE


himself as a Methuselah; six years earlier he had, in apologising to Sir HoraceMann for asking him to send him a piece of Florentine porcelain, self-mockingly lamented, ‘Am not I an old simpleton to be wanting playthingsstill?’44 In 1790 he in jest acknowledged the primary function of theDescription; writing to Hannah More in July 1790, he explained that heemployed his time ‘at auctions and in buying pictures and baubles, and hoardingcuriosities, that in truth I cannot keep long, but that will last forever in mycatalogue and make me immortal!’45 Consistent with this declaration, thecollection did not ossify in 1791 with the last printed appendix. There is in aprivate collection Kirgate’s annotated proof copy of the 1784 Description,interleaved and without the plates. This is a bibliographically significant item,in that it contains notes by Walpole and Kirgate, correcting proofs (some ofthe corrections being incorporated into the printed text, some not), and in thecase of the second, ‘Curiosities Added’, appendix, not one but two unrecordedproof states of the text.46 Most of the annotations provide supplementaryinformation describing the appearance of the pictures, but in some entries,although in Kirgate’s hand, we can hear the voice of Walpole dictatingfurther corrections; for example, on page 19, against the listing in theBreakfast Room of a self-portrait by Holbein, there is the pencil note ‘Holbein,did not, as has been asserted, paint with his left hand; for in this picture,painted by himself, he has the pencil in his right hand; but the Print, engravedfrom it, is reversed.’ On the same page, though, is a note clearly purely byKirgate; against the portrait of Charlotte de Tremouille he writes that ‘MrWalpole discovered, after printing this Catalogue, that the portrait so called, isnot Charlotte de la Tremouille, Css. of Derby. Nor did he know whose portraitit is.’

For our purposes, perhaps the most valuable notes appear at the foot of thefinal, ‘More Additions’, appendix, and on one of the blank pages at the rear;these consist of two manuscript lists, hitherto unrecorded, of Walpole’sacquisitions after 1791. The most significant appears to be a ‘Dead Christ, byCarrache, small oil painting on Copper, from Sir Laurence Dundas’s Sale, in1794’. There is also a miniature portrait of the Young Pretender, given to himby Mrs Hunter in the same year, and (perhaps previously unlisted, rather thanrecently acquired) ‘Six Portraits, with Pen and ink, of Mr Walpole, Mr Chute,Mr Spence, &c. drawn by Rosalba, when those Gentlemen were in Italy,unknown to them, when at some public Place; yet very like’.47

Walpole died on 2 March 1797. The following year were published hiscollected Works in five fat quarto volumes, edited by his friend Mary Berry. Inthe second volume of this she reprinted the 1784 Description with its plates,and the one change she made was to incorporate into the main text theadditional items listed as ‘Additions’ at the end of the text and the first twoappendices, the ‘Appendix’ and ‘Curiosities Added’. This was not complicated,as all the items were listed by the rooms in which they were situated, so forexample ‘IN THE ARMOURY. A curious royal lock, made as early as the reignof Henry 7

th. from one of the palaces’ is duly added to the end of the section



of text dealing with the Armoury. Walpole’s final appendix, however, thesingle 1791 list of ‘More Additions’, was, unlike the others, simply a list ofitems, beginning with a two-leafed screen by Lady Diana Beauclerk andconcluding with a Scottish mull, made of a large ram’s horn, mounted insilver, a present from Sir James Colquhoun – their position in the houseunspecified. At this point Mary Berry appears to have conceded defeat, andthe list of ‘More Additions’ is simply reprinted by her as an appendix under thetitle ‘Additions’.

This effectively completes the convoluted bibliographical history of theDescription of Strawberry Hill, a text that evolved over a period of nearly fortyyears. It shows how Walpole the collector struggled to keep abreast of hisnew acquisitions, and Walpole the historian continually added additionalinformation on provenance and description, ever enhancing and duplicatingthe register that would ‘last forever in my catalogue and make me immortal’– while Walpole as the proprietor of his own private press took full advantageof the opportunities this gave him to maintain the record.

In conclusion, it is perhaps worth mentioning that in his will, in which heleft a life interest in Strawberry Hill to Anne Seymour Damer, with a reversionto the Waldegrave family, Walpole particularly directed that the ‘householdgoods, furniture, pictures, books, china, curiosities, plate, implements, andother things’ at Strawberry Hill should be treated as heirlooms, and kept andpreserved entire at the house.48 Somewhat bizarrely, he then adds the proviso‘in confidence of which I have not appointed any inventory to be taken of thesaid things’. This paper has set out to show how wildly inaccurate that provisowas.

NOTESI would like to thank the staff of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, for their invariableenthusiasm and helpfulness in making available the material on which the large part of thispaper is based, and also Peter Sabor and Charles Sebag-Montefiore for their much-valuedassistance.

1. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (ed.), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937-1983), Vol. 41.285. Subsequent references in the notesare to this edition, abbreviated as Correspondence.

2. Correspondence, Vol. 2.268.3. Correspondence, Vol. 33.573-5.4. Correspondence, Vol. 2.249.5. Correspondence, Vol. 1.338.6. As explained in A. T. Hazen, A Bibliography of the Strawberry Hill Press (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 1942), p.123, which adds that the list is bound into T. Crofton Croker’sexpanded and extra-illustrated copy of the ‘Catalogue’ of the Strawberry Hill sale of 1842, nowat the Lewis Walpole Library, call number 485 842 C76 VI c.5. Subsequent references in thenotes are to this edition, abbreviated as Bibliography.

7. Paget Toynbee (ed.), Journal of the Printing-Office at Strawberry Hill (London: Constable;and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), p.9.

8. Bibliography, p.210.9. It was described by Walpole to Cole (Correspondence, Vol. 1.367) as ‘a silly little book’ and

as ‘a most inaccurate, superficial, blundering account’.10. William Thomas Lowndes, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature, new edn

(London, 1857-1864), appendix, p.239; and Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi, Visiting

378 STEPHEN CLARKE


Strawberry Hill: An Analysis of the Eton Copy of ‘The Description of the Villa’ (London: Chalcraftand Viscardi, 2005), p.2.

11. Percival Merritt, An Account of Descriptive Catalogues of Strawberry Hill and of StrawberryHill Sale Catalogues together with a Bibliography (Boston: privately printed, 1915), p.7-12.

12. Bibliography, p.105. Hazen also had not seen a copy of the Short Description whenpreparing the first edition of the Bibliography.

13. The appearance of a copy in Kirgate’s sale was also noted by Paget Toynbee, Journal of thePrinting-Office at Strawberry Hill, p.61. Toynbee, who appears to have inspected both theWaldegrave and Eton copies, does not (unlike Hazen) presume that the copy in Kirgate’s sale wasnecessarily the Eton copy.

14. Holograph letters from R. P. Cruden dated 21 March 1819 to Sylvester Harding and 26

March 1819 to G. P. Harding (private collection). For the activities of Harding, father and son,see W. S. Lewis, The Forlorn Printer, Being Notes on Horace Walpole’s Alleged Neglect of ThomasKirgate (Farmington: privately printed, 1931), p.12.

15. Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi, Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Castle(London: Frances Lincoln, 2007), p.95.

16. Timothy Wilson, ‘ “Playthings Still?” Horace Walpole as a Collector of Ceramics’, inHorace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009),p.210. Wilson suggests that there were about 670 items of porcelain, earthenware, glass andenamel in the China Room and in the adjoining Waiting Room.

17. Robert J. Gemmett (ed.), Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (Madison, NJ:Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969), p.12-13.

18. Correspondence, Vol. 1.151.19. Charles Burney, review of Walpole’s collected Works in The Monthly Review 27 (September

1798), p.51-66. See, however, Timothy Wilson for an account of the significance of Walpole’schina collection.

20. Correspondence, Vol. 25.423, and Vol. 11.293. See also Vol. 1.166.21. Bibliography, p.225-9.22. The Book of Visitors is printed in Correspondence, Vol. 12.217-52.23. Fanny Burney, Madame D’Arblay, Memoirs of Doctor Burney (London, 1832), Vol. III.64-

70. There is a curious parallel in the comment on Beckford’s admittedly far larger Gothic houseand collection at Fonthill Abbey made by the artist William Hamilton, in conversation withJoseph Farington in 1800: he ‘remarked on the extraordinary effect which that species ofbuilding when suitably furnished, as is here the case, has on the mind. It fills the mind with asentiment which is almost too much to support, certainly of too melancholy a cast to be longdwelt upon’. A. McIntrye and K. Garlick (eds.), The Diary of Joseph Farington (New Haven, CT, andLondon: Yale University Press, 1979), Vol. IV.1452.

24. Emily J. Climenson (ed.), Passages from the Diaries of Mrs. Philip Lybbe Powys of HardwickHouse, Oxon. A.D. 1756 to 1808 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), p.227-8.

25. ‘Strawberry Hill. – By Lady Morgan’, New Monthly Magazine 17 (August 1826), p.121-8;(September 1826), p.256-7.

26. Chalcraft and Viscardi, Visiting Strawberry Hill, p.8, 5.27. A Catalogue of the Classic Contents of Strawberry Hill (London, 1842), J. H. Anderdon’s

copy, Lewis Walpole Library (485 842 C76 I c.4), p.178.28. Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1970), p.151, 152.29. Correspondence, Vol. 31.206, 216.30. The Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke (Bath: Kingsmead Reprints, 1970), Vol. 4.103.31. Correspondence, Vol. 35.186.32. Correspondence, Vol. 2.274.33. Correspondence, Vol. 1.338.34. The Spencer copy is Lewis Walpole Library call number 49 2523.35. There are exceptions; some MS notes crossed through in red crayon are not included in

the printed ‘Appendix’ (for example, three of the five books added to the list of books in thelibrary at page 51), and the ‘Appendix’ also contains some items that do not replicate MS notes,such as the green and gold table and two high stands with the ciphers of Sir Robert Walpole andCatherine Shorter, which is the last ‘Appendix’ printed entry for the Round Drawing Room atp.136.

36. This note is reprinted in Toynbee, Journal of the Printing-Office at Strawberry Hill, p.60.



37. Lewis Walpole Library call numbers 49 2522 and 49 2522A.38. Correspondence, Vol. 16.245.39. H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale

University Press, 2001), p.232.40. I owe this observation to Timothy Wilson.41. Correspondence, Vol. 1.338, Vol. 2.274 and Vol. 2.253-4. In relation to the building of

Walpole’s Offices, Howard Colvin, in A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1540-1840,4th edn (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p.1185, follows W. S. Lewisin ‘The Genesis of Strawberry Hill’, Metropolitan Museum Studies 5:1 (1934), p.82, who in turnfollows Paget Toynbee, Strawberry Hill Accounts: A Record of Expenditure in Building Furnishing,&c. Kept by Mr. Horace Walpole from 1747 to 1795 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), p.175-6, instating that the Offices were built by James Wyatt in 1790 to the design that had been providedsixteen years earlier by James Essex. However, it appears that Wyatt may not have been involved.It is correct that Walpole wrote to him on 31 August 1789, saying ‘I have determined at last tobuild my offices next spring, and wish much to have them executed under your direction’(Correspondence, Vol. 42.261), but, as Toynbee acknowledges, Wyatt’s name does not appear inWalpole’s 1790 Strawberry Hill Accounts entry ‘1790 ... pd for the building of the new Offices£1855-0-0’, and Lewis was unable to trace any reply from Wyatt. There is, however, a pencil noteon the final blank leaf of Kirgate’s annotated proof copy of the 1784 Description (referred to inthe immediately following text), ‘The Offices at Strawberry hill, were estimated by Mr Essex, whodrew the Plan, to cost 2000£. erecting. Mr. Chapman, Builder, at Twickenham 13 yearsafterwards, contracted to build them for 1850£ though the Duties in Bricks, since Essex’sEstimate, made 200£ difference’. Given that Chapman’s estimate was within £5 of the actualbuilding cost, it seems likely that Chapman was the builder; even if Wyatt had some supervisoryrole, one would have expected his name and fee to appear in the Strawberry Hill Accounts.

42. A. T. Hazen, A Bibliography of Horace Walpole (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1948), p.80.

43. Bibliography, p.128, records that the copy of the 1784 Description that he lists as number15 has an early state of the ‘More Additions’ leaf, entitled ‘ADDED IN MDCCXC’. It lacks the lastten items of the normal version but does instead have a penultimate item, ‘miss Mary and missAgnes Berry, in water-colours, by miss Foldson, 1790’.

44. Correspondence, Vol. 25.591.45. Correspondence, Vol. 31.339; emphasis in the original.46. The first of these has in Kirgate’s hand in MS on page 93, the first page of ‘Curiosities

Added’, a new second item, being ‘A small whole length of Dryden, in oil, by Maubert’. Thesecond has that amendment incorporated in the printed text, but also has on the verso theprinted page number 94 deleted from the centre of the head of the page and the heading‘Curiosities Added’ inserted in ink, with the page number reinserted in ink on the outer margin.These amendments are incorporated into subsequent copies.

47. The other additional items in the two lists are: ‘Brown Earthen Miraculous Pitcher –Earthen Bottle, labelled, Claret; A Miniature in enamel of Lord Bute, by Spencer, bought atDalton’s Sale, 1791; A Carved Ivory Cup, with a Bacchanalian Procession, in relievo, set inSilver, with the Orford Crest on the Cover, from Houghton; Two Cocoa Nuts, carved with theArms of Orford, and mounted with Silver gilt feet, from Ditto, 1793; Two silver filigraineHampers, from Ditto, 1794; A Portrait of the Rev. William Cole, of Botesham Hall, Cambridge,on painted glass; and a Cast in Plaister of Miss Farren, from a bust in marble, executed by Mrs.Damer’. Of these items, the Dead Christ by Caracci is briefly noted, without date or provenance,as is what appears to be the carved Ivory Cup, on the final manuscript page of ‘More Additions’on the recto of the rear free end-paper of the Spencer copy; I have not been able to trace that theothers are recorded elsewhere.

48. Correspondence, Vol. 30.352.

stephen clarke is a London lawyer and has published papers on William Beckford, theantiquary John Britton, Laurence Sterne, and landscape and architecture issues in the novels ofJane Austen. His central research interest is Horace Walpole, and he has participated in theexhibition ‘Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill’ in 2009–2010 at the Victoria & Albert Museumand the Yale Center for British Art. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

380 STEPHEN CLARKE


‘lord god! jesus! what a house!’: describing and visiting strawberry hill

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