The visualisation of Strawberry Hill: a collusion of history and imagination

Horace Walpole is renowned for his creation of the celebrated Gothic villa Strawberry Hill and author of The Castle of Otranto. Both are fabrications of his imagination originating in “a head filled like mine with Gothic story”. This paper explores how visual and textual sources, authored or solicited by Walpole, express a nuanced reading of how the castle and collection are linked as unified forms of display. It demonstrates how Walpole constructed a visual narrative that led the observer through periods in history to stimulate a dynamic dialogue with the past through significant historical figures and events in English history.