Walpole was the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, the first real prime minister of England. Horror fiction, as well as certain strains of romance and thriller writing, all trace their roots to this era. While Gothic fiction’s popularity has ebbed and flowed over the years, it has never receded completely. Gothic fiction is defined in the Encyclopedia Britannica as “European Romantic pseudomedieval fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror.” The deliberate admixture of realistic and fantastic elements in Otranto was a huge success.
The romances of the Middle Ages and Renaissance had been largely supplanted by more realistic tales, but with the advent of Gothic literature, romantic fiction rose again in popularity, proceeding directly from Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto. Suffice it to say, by the middle of the 18th century the novel was a popular form of entertainment no longer confined to aristocratic readers. The history of the novel in the West is long, complex, and complicated.
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