Gothic Tourism

Emma McEvoy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137391292
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From Strawberry Hill to The Dungeons, Alnwick Castle to Barnageddon, Gothic tourism is a fascinating, and sometimes controversial, area. This lively study considers Gothic tourism's aesthetics and origins, as well as its relationship with literature, film, folklore, heritage management, arts programming and the 'edutainment' business.

1

Strawberry Hill: Performed Architecture, Houses of Fiction and the Gothic Aesthetic

The duc de Nivernais visits Strawberry Hill

In the April of 1763, Louis-Jules-Barbon Mancini-Mazarini, duc de Nivernais, visited Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s home in Twickenham. Nivernais and Walpole, who were almost exact contemporaries, had much in common. For a start, they were both politicians. Nivernais, an experienced diplomat, was acting in England as ambassador extraordinary, and earlier in the year had been involved in the negotiations for the Peace of Paris, one of the two treaties that concluded the Seven Years War.¹ Walpole was the son of the eminent eighteenth-century first minister, Robert Walpole, and an MP in his own right, with what he called (using an Old English term to refer to parliament) a ‘Gothic passion … for squabbles in the Wittenagemot.’² Besides politics, Walpole and Nivernais had many other mutual interests. Walpole was a francophile and Nivernais an anglophile. Both were connoisseurs of art, devotees of the landscape garden, and, above all, men of letters.³ The two were to remain in contact for many years afterwards (the last surviving letter that passed between them dates from 1792, by which time both men were in their mid-seventies). Nivernais’ visit to Twickenham in 1763, however, was not primarily social. His reason for calling was as much to see Strawberry Hill as to see Walpole.

Receiving tourists into one’s home, in this period, was certainly not unknown. One has only to think of Elizabeth Bennet touring Darcy’s Pemberley with her aunt in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). But travellers who made visits to Pemberley, or, in the real world, Chatsworth or Hampton Court (where Nivernais was heading for), did so for reasons different from those of visitors to Strawberry Hill. Not only did the former want to see impressive collections of paintings and rare and beautiful objects (which Strawberry Hill had in plenty), but they also wanted to see houses that were either brilliant examples of new building or hallowed by age and historic associations. Chatsworth, for example, had been rebuilt in the baroque style at the turn of the century. Hampton Court was famed for its association with the monarchy: Henry VIII had taken the palace from Cardinal Wolsey; Edward VI had been born there; Elizabeth I had been imprisoned there as a young woman by her half-sister Mary I. Strawberry Hill, although it had some exquisite objets d’art and historical relics, was neither a celebrated historic house nor a stunning new build. It was not even large. Strawberry Hill was a converted dairy, which had been substantially extended and mocked-up.

Nivernais had a great deal of respect for Walpole’s taste in the fields of literature and design. An anecdote of Walpole’s shows Nivernais, the following month, at a party given by a mutual friend at Esher, ‘absorbed all day and lagging behind, translating [Walpole’s] verses’.⁴ In 1785, Nivernais was to translate Walpole’s ‘Essay on Modern Gardening’ into French. Despite these promising indications, Nivernais was doomed not to ‘get’ Strawberry Hill. In a letter to Horace Mann, Walpole notes: ‘I cannot say he flattered me much, or was much struck by Strawberry.’⁵ The crisis came when the duke walked into the room Walpole called the Tribune, which held many of Walpole’s greatest treasures (see Figure 1.1).

What was the Tribune like? Fortunately for scholars of Strawberry Hill, Walpole left a very detailed description of the room and its many contents in a catalogue A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-Hill, Near Twickenham: With an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, &c (1774). In this work, we learn that the Tribune (or ‘the Cabinet’ as it was also known) featured windows from the ‘great church at saint Alban’s’,⁶ that its roof was taken from the chapter house at York and was ‘terminated by a star of yellow glass that throws a golden gloom all over the room’,⁷ and that the room contained an ‘altar of black and gold, with a marble slab of the same colours’.⁸ Not all the objects in the Tribune had religious associations. The Tribune was a ‘cabinet’ in the eighteenth-century sense in that it contained many and varied objects. There were secular portraits and statues, many of them of historical figures, including kings and queens of England and of France, and some of the Walpole family past and present. There were various objets d’art (‘a fine old enamelled watch-case, after Raphael and Dominichino’,⁹ for example); a substantial number of objects from the classical world (examples include a ‘small bust in bronze of Caligula, with silver eyes’¹⁰ found at Herculaneum; an antique cameo of a ‘sleeping hermaphrodite with two satyrs’;¹¹ ‘Two phalli … two sacrificing instruments’¹²); and treasures from as far away as China.

As he entered the Tribune, the duke removed his hat. He did this because he thought he was entering a chapel. A number of factors had wrong-footed him, not just the number of religious objects in the room, but the fact that the Tribune was, as Walpole admits, ‘formed upon the idea of a Catholic chapel’¹³ and had been intended to have ‘all the air of a Catholic chapel – bar consecration!’¹⁴ In removing his hat, Nivernais (an aristocratic Frenchman who would not have been surprised to find a richly endowed Catholic chapel in a private house) had reacted automatically. He had, however, failed to take into account Walpole’s Protestant upbringing, and the fact that Walpole liked to call himself an ‘infidel’.¹⁵ He quickly collected himself. A glance at the sleeping hermaphrodite, the ‘naked Venus’ or the antique phallus charms would have been enough to dispel his illusion. Although Nivernais could hardly be faulted for his mistake, he was evidently annoyed at his faux pas. He commented ‘Ce n’est pas une chapelle pourtant’ (‘It’s not a chapel, though’ italics in the original), and Walpole remarked that he ‘seemed a little displeased’.¹⁶

Figure 1.1 Carter, John c. 1789 ‘The tribune at Strawberry Hill’. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

The anecdote is, for me, exemplary. It shows a new kind of tourism – and an old style of tourist. It recounts a faulty response, which is in itself illuminating, and hints at a new aesthetic for which a new set of sensibilities is required. It conveys both Walpole’s amusement and the fact that Strawberry Hill in 1763 was a singular phenomenon that involved a new type of visitor experience.

In this chapter, I will be looking at Strawberry Hill as a piece of proto-Gothic tourism. In the first section, I will be thinking about Strawberry predominantly through the lens of visitor experience, considering the reactions of visitors – or at least their imputed reactions – and the kinds of responses Strawberry elicited. Most of the anecdotes I’ll be looking at are drawn from Walpole’s letters and come accompanied by his comments. Walpole’s comments give us a sense of how Strawberry wasn’t to be approached, what was not to be expected of it, and what it wasn’t, as well as suggest the skills and sensibilities he considered necessary for a proper appreciation of it. In the following section, taking as my cue Walpole’s phrase ‘liberty of taste’, I will be thinking about some of Walpole’s pronouncements on ‘Gothic’, and some of the contemporary connotations of the style. My focus throughout the chapter is on the question of what made Strawberry such a new phenomenon. I will be thinking about its experimental aesthetics, and its indebtedness to the landscape garden, as well as considering it as a piece of performed architecture. I will be discussing some of the parties that took place at Strawberry, and comparing them with a more fully Gothic party at William Beckford’s work of literary architecture, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.

The aesthetic at work at Strawberry was in a constant state of development. From the mid-1760s, Strawberry Hill started to become a different phenomenon. Not just a piece of performed architecture, but one that was intimately related to a literary text that was, like Strawberry itself, sui generis. Strawberry became a different house by means of, and because of its relationship to, Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764). I consider the relation between Strawberry and Otranto by means of an account of a visit made by the novelist, Frances Burney, later in the century.

The chapter concludes by looking at an example of fully commercialized Gothic tourism in the late 1790s: Robertson’s Parisian phantasmagoria. The Fantasmagorie was a popular attraction that ran for four years, and spawned many rivals and tributes. Immersive, mocked-up, using a perambulating audience and scare actors, it is demonstrably akin to the scare attractions of today. It was, I argue, indebted to the aesthetic experiments essayed by Walpole earlier in the century.

I make no apologies for my concentration on Walpole in this chapter. Although I take a brief look at one of Strawberry Hill’s successors, Fonthill Abbey, regarding it too as a piece of performed architecture, and finish with Robertson’s Paris Fantasmagorie, my main focus has been on Strawberry Hill. My reason for this is twofold. First, it was an extraordinary aesthetic experiment in its own right, with lasting effects on both architecture and tourism. Second, through its relation with Otranto, it gave birth to the Gothic aesthetic, to which all later Gothic – touristic or otherwise – is indebted.

Strawberry Hill: ‘puppet-show of the times’

Walpole had acquired the lease of Strawberry Hill in 1747 from a Mrs Chenevix who had a toyshop and china shops at Charing Cross. His recorded comments about the house play upon the idea of toys, knick-knacks and treasures. Walpole joked in a letter to his cousin Conway that it is ‘a little play-thing-house that I got out of Mrs Chenevix’s shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw.’¹⁷ To his friend Horace Mann, in June 1747, Walpole wrote: ‘This little rural bijou was Mrs Chenevix’s, the toy woman à la mode’.¹⁸ As these words suggest, his house was in an area that was both rural and fashionable. The patch of five acres that Walpole acquired was, as Michael Snodin notes, ‘the last piece of undeveloped Thames-side land’¹⁹ in the fashionable area of Twickenham. Twickenham was full of wealthy titled widows (‘Dowagers as plenty as flounders’²⁰ Walpole commented) and noblemen with fantastical design ideas. One of his neighbours, Lord Radnor, had a Chinese pagoda in his grounds, which were to become known to Walpole and his friends as ‘Mabland’.

Strawberry was not called Strawberry Hill when Walpole acquired it. Walpole ‘rescued’ this romantic name from history. He tells us that its previous name was Chopped-Straw-Hall, supposedly because local people believed that its owner, the Earl of Bradford’s coachman, had been able to afford to build it by feeding his master’s horses chopped straw rather than hay.²¹ As Walpole noted in 1764, after having had to spend substantial amounts of money entertaining some tourists from the top end of the social scale (‘representative majesties of France and Spain’), Strawberry Hill ‘was no royal foundation’.²² It was a building of humble origins, history and associations. When Walpole showed Strawberry to his friend Etheldreda, Lady Townshend, she ‘cried out “Lord God! Jesus! what a house! It is just such a house as a parson’s, where the children lie at the feet of the bed!”’²³

Walpole, a man of means, had more than one home. During the season, he could be generally found at his London address, in Arlington Street, in the district of St. James, conveniently near to the House of Commons, but from 1748 he was increasingly to be found at Strawberry Hill. His first references to Strawberry, show that he conceived it in classical terms. He describes it to Horace Mann in 1748 as a ‘villa’ and refers to the Thames as the Brenta.²⁴ By 1750 though, he is declaring ‘I am going to build a little Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill.’²⁵ In 1763, Walpole had just completed a second phase of work on the house. Strawberry now had battlements, ogee windows, a round tower, a new hall and stairs and an armoury (in ‘an open vestibule of three gothic arches, lighted by a window entirely...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Strawberry Hill: Performed Architecture, Houses of Fiction and the Gothic Aesthetic
• 2 Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors: Wounded Spectators, Perverse Appetites and Gothic History
• 3 London’s Gothic Tourism: West End Ghosts, Southwark Horrors and an Unheimlich Home
• 4 Ghost Walking
• 5 Becoming a Haunted Castle: Literature, Tourism and Folklore at Berry Pomeroy
• 6 A Tale of Three Castles: Gothic and Heritage Management
• 7 ‘“Boo” to Taboo’: Cultural Tourism and the Gothic
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index