Welcome to the Lewis Walpole Library’s blog HORACE WALPOLE AT 300.

In this year 2017-2018, the Lewis Walpole Library, a department of Yale University Library, is celebrating the life, works, and collections of Horace Walpole through a variety of programming including lectures, seminars, an exhibition, conference, dramatic reading, and more.

This year-long blog will feature items from the Lewis Walpole Library’s collection associated with Walpole. Each week, a new blog post will look at something that Walpole either owned, wrote, had printed at his house in Twickenham called Strawberry Hill, or in some way was closely connected with him. Alternating with entries by current Lewis Walpole Library staff and former Fellows will be chapters from W.S. Lewis’s Rescuing Horace Walpole, reproduced here with permission of the Yale University Press.

As noted in the dustjacket blurb of Rescuing Horace Walpole, “Leslie Stephen wrote, ‘The very large segment of the eighteenth century is simply a synonym for the works of Horace Walpole.’ In the early 1920’s Wilmarth S. Lewis began to collect not only Walpole’s own writings, but the publications of his private press at Strawberry Hill, books from his library, and pictures, prints, and drawings he owned. Today the Lewis Walpole Library, in Farmington, Connecticut, is one of the most extraordinary collections of eighteenth-century books, papers, and works of art to be found anywhere in the world.”

W.S. (“Lefty”) Lewis, Yale ’18, in his autobiography One Man’s Education, described the beginnings of his collecting of Horace Walpole, “…in London Walpoliana were everywhere, lying about unwanted, the books that Walpole wrote and printed, and unique items, which Lefty later called ‘Bits of the True Cross’: presentation copies of the Strawberry Hill Press and books from Walpole’s library. The harvest was ready and Lefty reaped and gathered it in.”

As Lewis wrote about the 250th anniversary of Walpole’s birth, “There will be celebrations throughout Walpoleshire–bonfires and dancing on the green….Walpole would be pleased, embarrassed, and not at all surprised by these tributes to his memory.” We hope Walpole would feel the same about this current tribute to Walpole at 300.

–Susan Walker, Head of Public Services, the Lewis Walpole Library