Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
A prince named Manfred wants to keep his castle and his power, no matter what it costs. On the morning of his son's wedding, a huge helmet falls out of nowhere and kills the young man. Then strange and scary things begin: a picture steps out of its frame, and a giant seems to be growing inside the castle walls. This short, wild story from long ago started a whole kind of book: the scary castle tale.
The machinery starts at once. Manfred, Prince of Otranto, holds his castle by a clouded title and fears an old prophecy: the lordship will pass when the real owner grows too large to inhabit it. His sickly son Conrad is crushed by a giant helmet on his wedding day. Manfred then tries to marry the bride, Isabella, himself. She flees through underground passages, aided by a young peasant, Theodore, while a portrait walks, a statue's nose bleeds, and a gigantic armored figure assembles itself piece by piece.
Horace Walpole, son of the great prime minister, wrote the tale in about two months after dreaming of a giant hand in armor on a staircase in his own Gothic villa, Strawberry Hill. He published it at Christmas 1764 as if it were a translation of an old Italian story by one Onuphro Muralto, and only owned it as his own invention in the preface to the second edition, once it had succeeded.
That disguise matters: Walpole knew he was breaking the rules of sensible fiction, and the book's terror, tyrant, heroine, and haunted castle became the rules instead. Every Gothic novel after it lives in its shadow.
On his son Conrad's wedding morning, a gigantic helmet falls from the sky and crushes the bridegroom in the castle courtyard. Prince Manfred, desperate to keep Otranto, turns on the bride, Isabella, while portraits sigh, statues bleed, and the past refuses to stay buried. Horace Walpole published the tale in 1764, at first pretending it was a translated old story. It invented the Gothic novel, ghosts, tyrants, trapdoors and all.
This text is the Henry Morley edition in Cassell's National Library, printed in 1901, and Morley's introduction frames the book before Walpole's own games begin. Morley tells of Strawberry Hill, Walpole's Gothic villa by the Thames, of his private press there, and of the dream from which the tale came: Walpole woke thinking himself in an ancient castle and seeing a gigantic hand in armor on the banister of a great staircase, then sat down that evening and wrote without knowing what he intended to say.
Then comes the preface to the first edition, the famous hoax. The work, it claims, was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family, printed at Naples in 1529, and translated by William Marshal from the Italian of Onuphro Muralto. Only in the second edition's preface did Walpole own up: the story was his own modern invention, and this edition preserves both layers of the deception.
Chapter One wastes no time: Manfred, his children Conrad and Matilda, the dreaded prophecy, and a wedding day that ends under a helmet large enough to crush a bridegroom.
Edition: Edited by Henry Morley. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 696.
The first chapter
The gentle maid, whose hapless tale
These melancholy pages speak;
Say, gracious lady, shall she fail
To draw the tear adown thy cheek?
No; never was thy pitying breast
Insensible to human woes;
Tender, tho’ firm, it melts distrest
For weaknesses it never knows.
Oh! guard the marvels I relate
Of fell ambition scourg’d by fate,
From reason’s peevish blame.
Blest with thy smile, my dauntless sail
I dare expand to Fancy’s gale,
For sure thy smiles are Fame.
H. W.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1764. Author died 1797. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
Starvard