Tales from the Penny BloodsCelebrating Horace Walpole, born on the 24th September, whose novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), marked the birth of the Gothic genre.
Walpole woke up one night from a nightmare of a ghost, and a ‘giant hand in armour’. Like his successors Mary Shelley and R.L.Stevenson, Walpole put his scary dream to literary use, and so the Castle of Otranto was born.
Happy Birthday, Horace!
Jessica Maybury