In 2003 Horace Walpole's ‘villa’ at Strawberry Hill was listed as one of the world's hundred most endangered sites by the World Monuments Fund. The years following the listing witnessed one of the most significant modern restorations of a historic building to take place in England, during which the house and grounds were carefully studied and restored to allow them to be accessible once again to tourists, as Horace Walpole intended when he built them in the eighteenth century. Sustained attention to the house culminated in the recent exhibition at the British Art Centre at Yale and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, to which Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill is the catalogue.

Characteristic of the format of recent catalogues, the book is arranged into a series of chapters with shorter ‘breakaway’ chapters interspersed between and within them. Sixteen major chapters cover the life of Walpole and his social milieu (particularly the so-called ‘Committee of Taste’), the experience of visiting the house, his collection, Walpole's own historiography (or what might better be called Walpole's ‘historiographical imagination’), Walpole's place in European art-historical discourse, the library and the 1842 sale of the house and its contents. An exceptionally valuable catalogue of the exhibition follows, occupying some sixty-five pages.

Typical of Yale's publications, the book is lavishly illustrated and beautifully produced. The illustrations alone are worthy of comment: illustrated here is undoubtedly the most extensive collection of Walpoliana ever assembled in a single volume, much of which derives from the remarkable Lewis Walpole Library at Yale (Farmington, Connecticut). These include the well-known drawings of the house by John Chute, John Carter and Johann Heinrich Müntz, a visual survey of Walpole's collection of art and objects (including the armour from the so-called ‘armory’), the publications from the Strawberry Hill Press, as well as the lesser-known drawings by Thomas Rowlandson, which satirize the house and the tourist culture that surrounded it.

It is impossible in a brief review to do justice to the wealth of information that this volume contains, so I will draw attention to some major highlights. The editor's essay, ‘Going to Strawberry Hill’, usefully explores a range of evidence for the experience of the house (something that has been recently studied by Anna Charlcraft and others). This essay not only covers much well-trodden but essential territory, but it also publishes some new evidence for the house, such as Walpole's theory of the kinesthetic effects of moving through differently lit and differently ornamented spaces at Strawberry Hill described in Cambridge, Fitzwilliam College ms 13-1947, fol 1 (a text long known to scholars of the house through a reproduction at the Lewis Walpole Library but never previously published).

Kevin Rogers's essay on Walpole's conception of Gothic, informed by the recent restorations, considers the anachronistic (or anichronic) potential of Gothic to propose ‘an elaborate fictive history, not a house built over fifty years, but an ancient seat’ (p 63). There can be no doubt that this was one part of Walpole's project, as David Duane McKinney and others have argued (McKinney 1992, a text notably absent from the footnotes), but the observation requires much nuancing (how serious was this creation of ancestry, or was it done with tongue in cheek?), which is only achieved in other papers exploring Walpole's associationist aesthetics. For the present reviewer, the two most impactful papers are Stephen Bann's account of Walpole's antiquarianism, which considers Strawberry Hill to function as ‘a theatre for “self fashioning” and as a repository of “cultural memory”’ (p 132), and Nigel Llewellyn's essay ‘The Anecdotes of Painting and continental European art history’, which usefully, and all too rarely, positions Walpole's aesthetics amidst current theoretical debates on art and architecture.

The intention of the catalogue is to be ‘the standard work on Walpole and his collection, and [to propose] a set of debates that will enable scholarship to move forward, both specifically in relation to Strawberry Hill, and more broadly in the history of collecting and display’ (p ix). In this, the book is very successful. While this study does much to contextualize Walpole, Strawberry Hill and its collections, the approach to Walpole as a historical personality is cautious, and suitably so, perhaps, given the book's status as an exhibition catalogue. And yet, notably absent from all but one essay (by George Haggerty) is consideration of Walpole's sexuality and the bonds that existed between him and his ‘Committee of Taste’. Despite the publication of a number of significant theoretical studies which explore the historiographical and aesthetic consequences of Walpole's sexuality, many of which start with Timothy Mowl's controversial 1996 biography, Horace Walpole: the great outsider (which is also absent from the footnotes), the homosocial groups that formed the Gothic mansion at Twickenham are almost completely erased, and the queer coteries that were partially responsible for the revival of the Gothic are not considered. Given the centrality of sexuality to current considerations of Walpole and the Gothic (whether a literary or architectural idiom), this is surely a curious oversight. So, too, was a truly inter-disciplinary account of what ‘Gothic’ meant to Walpole, since it was manifestly not only as an architectural idiom, but as a broadly historiographical one that also embraces a form of literature he invigorated in his The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic story (1764).

Horace Walpole, and Strawberry Hill, once again a tourist destination, now more than ever fall into that specific category of the English historical imagination: the national treasure. As such, Walpole is ‘known’ by a handful of quotable passages from his voluminous correspondence that are readily recycled and frequently taken out of context. Similarly, Strawberry Hill is ‘known’ as an eccentric ‘paper house’, a whimsical mansion that somehow mirrors the whimsical and flippant character of its owner. Understood in these terms, patron and house have been subsumed within Pevsnerian clichés of the ‘Englishness of English art’ which tend to foster, rather than to interrogate, nationalist paradigms. It is not altogether surprising that aspects of Walpole's alterity, and particularly his sexuality, are now being explored by scholars outside England, and in North America in particular. Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill reminds us most forcefully that Walpole and his house constitute malleable interpretative terrain, subject to re-examination and reinvention from multiple perspectives at different periods in time. It reminds us, too, that we are only beginning to understand Walpole as a historical personality and that much work remains to be done.

McKinney, D D 1992. ‘History and revivalism: Horace Walpole's promotion of the Gothic style in architecture’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Virginia

Mowl, T 1996. Horace Walpole: the great outsider, London: John Murray