Gothic ‘artefictions’: fabricating history in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and The Castle of Otranto, Amy Lim

Horace Walpole’s house at Strawberry Hill and his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto are both considered landmarks in the development of the Gothic in their respective genres of architecture and literature. They also played a significant role in Walpole’s activities as a historian. Considered together, it becomes apparent that Walpole used a common approach to their creation, combining antiquarian scholarship with modern media to create ‘artefictions’, reconstructed historical artefacts, in order to invoke a sense of the Gothic past and create an emotional and sensory alternative to the rational historiography of the Enlightenment.