This is an important book, not because it is the first to consider Horace Walpole and sexuality but rather because it is the first to apply recent scholarship on sexuality to eighteenth-century Gothic architecture in England. Reeve, a medievalist, is interested in the phenomenon of revivalist style and clearly frustrated by earlier art historians who dismiss Walpole’s Gothic as unscientific and frivolous, a false start on the path to Pugin. In many of those earlier accounts, there is an underlying discomfort with the nature of eighteenth-century Gothic style and its proponents. Kenneth Clark observed in his Gothic Revival: an essay in the history of taste (Reference Clark1928) that ‘Bad art flourishes in every epoch, but art may be healthily or unhealthily bad, and Strawberry Hill was bad in a peculiarly ominous way’. Sir John Betjeman’s Ghastly Good Taste (Reference Betjeman1933) makes similar dark hints, without stating the obvious. Reeve turns this on its head by focusing on Walpolean Gothic as a ‘queer’ sensibility that ‘locates sexual alterity and perversity in its myriad forms within a distant medieval, foreign, and Catholic setting’.

Timothy Mowl attempted something similar in Horace Walpole: the great outsider (Reference Mowl1996), but with less nuance. Mowl projected on his subject an anachronistic twentieth-century understanding, depicting Walpole as a ‘screaming queen’ based on ‘contemporary sexual categories, terminologies, and politics …’. Reeve turns to scholarship on the history of sexuality (notably that of Randolph Trumbach, Reference Trumbach1998), suggesting that our conception of ‘homosexuality’ is not useful or apt in relation to the eighteenth century. Same-sex desire has always been a part of the human make-up, but not always in ways we would recognise. The early eighteenth century now seems to have been a turning point, witnessing a change from ‘earlier constructions of sexuality structured by age (intergenerational sexuality) or by a more fluid bisexuality between adult males and male youths or women’. What emerged was a culture in which men were expected to have sexual relations only with women, unless they formed part of what was called in the eighteenth century a ‘third sex’, which may be described as ‘homosocial’ and homoerotically inclined, if not necessarily what we would now call homosexual. The classic example is Lord Hervey, who married and fathered children while pursuing affairs with other men. Walpole and his mostly bachelor friends were placed in that category by many of their contemporaries, who saw their tastes as effeminate, foppish, superficial and unhealthy, their relations as ‘broadly homoerotic’. A ‘fribble’ in the middle of the eighteenth century was both the man who built a Gothic villa and the villa itself: flimsy, trifling, suspect. The Gothic was a domestic, private alternative to ‘masculine’, public, neo-Palladian architecture, an escape to a past supposed to have prized sensation, emotion, disorder and freedom from control. The queerness of Gothic was its appeal to ‘the new homoerotic subjectivities of the eighteenth century’.

After setting out this conceptual framework, Reeve moves on to consider Strawberry Hill itself, the site of Walpole’s ‘homosocial convivium’ and the ‘formulation of a sexual-aesthetic mode of being’ with his friends John Chute, Francis Whitehead, Richard Bentley, Thomas Gray and others. Walpole and his Strawberry Committee constructed a Gothic idiom and what Reeve calls a ‘queer family romance’. He borrows that term from Whitney Davis (Reference Davis2011), using it to describe in very effective terms the alternative genealogy these men created for themselves. In doing so they employed sometimes coded iconography, like the figure of Antinous in the Tribune at Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s deliberate association of a Roman marble eagle with the myth of Ganymede and his gallery of portraits of male friends (hung in counterpoint to a portrait of Walpole’s biological parents). The book then goes on to discuss Richard (‘Dicky’) Bateman’s Gothic improvements to his house at Old Windsor (hitherto largely overlooked by architectural historians) and similar projects at Donnington Grove, The Vyne and Lee Priory – all ‘children of Strawberry’ through their owners’ association with Walpole as aesthetic progenitor. Reeve’s final chapter returns to the place of Walpole’s Gothic in architectural history, charting its decline in the face of more ‘scientific’ revivalists like Wyatt and, of course, Pugin, but also noting the persistence of a strain of Gothicism that emphasised its sexual and other alterity (a topic worthy of consideration on its own). Reeve’s book is written in lively, witty prose and amply illustrated with 140 plates, many in colour.

As Reeve observes, Walpole’s writing has been examined through a queer lens by scholars of literature – in studies by George Haggerty (Reference Haggerty1999, Reference Haggerty2006a, Reference Haggerty2006b, Reference Haggerty2011) and others. To apply this focus to his architecture and collecting is novel, however – and welcome, as it places Walpole’s endeavour at Strawberry Hill within a coherent context. This helps us to understand Walpole’s Gothic as the product of a particular milieu at a turning point in conceptions of gender roles and sexuality. The evidence for this is sometimes thin or ambiguous, for reasons which may be obvious. We will probably never know the details of Walpole’s sex life, for example – but the absence of that information is not ultimately important and does not undermine the persuasiveness of the thesis of Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole. In some ways the book reaffirms what people have always thought about Walpole and his coterie, but from a sympathetic point of view. Walpole’s Gothic seems less peculiar, unsatisfactory and unhealthy now that we can see it as queer.