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Paperback – 150 × 115 mm – 64 pages

ISBN 9781873429839

By a mile, this is the most brilliant and most influential essay ever written on English garden history. For two centuries it mapped the whole landscape of the subject. However, the author was partial in the highest degree. As the son of England’s first Whig prime minister (Sir Robert Walpole) it would be surprising if he were otherwise. The essay’s title gives the first clue: Horace Walpole believed in progress, in modernization and the superiority of everything English to almost everything that had gone before. He had a special dislike of Baroque gardens, as exemplified by Versailles, which for him symbolized absolutism, tyranny and the oppression of nature. He celebrated such quintessential English innovations as the ha-ha and the triumph of the English style under Kent and Capability Brown.
Tom Turner, Professor of Garden History, University of Greenwich.

Walpole’s achievement has to be saluted all the more when it is realized that single-handedly he determined (or distorted) the writing of landscape architecture history to this day.
John Dixon Hunt in ‘Greater Perfection: the practice of garden theory’

Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717-1797), MP, collector and writer, was the fourth son of Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister. His most famous work is The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first Gothic novel. At Strawberry Hill, just south of London, he built a ‘little Gothic castle’, which he filled with antiquarian treasures. There he also established a printing press, and published works of history, art history and poetry. Some of these were by Walpole himself, who also wrote fiction, including the first surrealist stories in English (Hieroglyphic Tales, also available from Pallas Athene), and a vast correspondence.