Horace Walpole's letters : masculinity and friendship in the eighteenth century / George E. Haggerty.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Horace Walpole's epistolary relations -- Horace Walpole's epistolary friendships -- Horace Walpole on the grand tour -- Strawberry Hill: architecture, friendship, and the erotics of collecting -- Illness and intimacy in the letters between Horace Walpole and William Cole -- Art, politics, and friendship in the letters between Horace Walpole and Horace Mann -- Walpole and women: the Countess of Upper Ossory and Mary Berry.

Print version record.

Over the course of his life, which spanned the eighteenth century from 1717 to 1797, Horace Walpole wrote thousands of letters to his closest friends and acquaintances. In this study, George E. Haggerty writes about the letters themselves, which span forty-eight volumes of correspondence. In addition to looking at the letters in terms of one of the great literary accomplishments of the century, at least on a par with Boswell's Life of Johnson and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, these letters taken in aggregate offer an astonishingly vivid account of the vagaries of eighteenth-century masculinity. Walpole talks about himself obsessively: his wants, his needs, his desires; hies physical and mental pain; his artistic appreciation and his critical responses. It is impossible to read these letters and not come away with a vivid impression of a complex personality from another age.

English.

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