Fiction · 1764
The Castle of Otranto
Manfred, Prince of Otranto, loses his only son on his wedding day when the boy is crushed beneath a giant helmet that falls from nowhere, and Manfred's desperate attempt to secure his line by marrying his son's intended bride himself sets off a chain of supernatural omens that will end his family's hold on the castle for good.
Horace Walpole published the novel anonymously in 1764, claiming it was a translation of a medieval Italian manuscript, before admitting authorship in a second edition; it is widely credited as the first Gothic novel.
Bibliomancer restores the 1764 text exactly as Walpole wrote it.
Contents
New editions
Never lose your place.
This book is free to read in full, and stays that way. Leave an address: one click confirms it and opens a free account, so your progress and bookmarks sync across every device. You'll also hear when the next restored edition enters the archive. Terminate at any time.
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source mind
About the author
1717–1797 · Enlightenment
Horace Walpole (1717–1797), youngest son of Britain's first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, sat as a Member of Parliament for over two decades while building Strawberry Hill, his Twickenham villa remodeled in an invented Gothic style that helped launch the Gothic Revival in English architecture. The Castle of Otranto (1764), published first as a purported translation of a medieval Italian tale and acknowledged as his own only in its second edition, subtitled "A Gothic Story," is generally credited as the first Gothic novel. He also wrote extensively on art and anecdote and left, at his death, one of the largest surviving bodies of correspondence — some four thousand letters — of any eighteenth-century figure; he inherited the earldom of Orford from a nephew in 1791, four years before his death in London.
Adjacent records
