Abstract
Throughout his correspondence, Horace Walpole repeatedly framed Strawberry Hill, his architecturally and aesthetically significant Gothic Revival villa in Twickenham, as a ‘paper house’. While this has often been noted in modern scholarship, the full import of Walpole’s curious choice of metaphor has not been critically explored. This chapter examines the numerous ways in which Walpole’s pioneering experiment in the Gothic style at Strawberry Hill relied upon paper, and why he felt compelled to refer to it as a ‘paper fabric’: not only did this trope register the intellectual and aesthetic climate in which the house was designed, but also the idiosyncratic and, at times, problem-laden processes through which it came into being.
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Lindfield, P.N., Townshend, D. (2021). Metaphor and Revivalist Architecture at Strawberry Hill. In: Bloom, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_18
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