Horace Walpole’s Gothic Castles, Part 2

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of our episode on Horace Walpole, in which we will finally get to all the Gothic horror, Gothic castles, Gothic everything that we promised in part one and did not talk about at all, starting basically now.

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Speaker 1: In seventeen forty six, Horace Walpole leased a villa in Twickenham, which is today considered part of Greater London. At the time, this villa was known locally as Chopped Straw Hall and it had been built in sixteen ninety eight. The local lore around it was that its original builder had been a coachman who had made enough money for the house by selling all the good hay while feeding chopped straw to his employer's horses instead. Old paperwork gave the name of the land that it sat on as Strawberry Hill Shot, which is where Walpole got the name for the house. He called it Strawberry Hill.

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Speaker 2: When Walpole found this house, it belonged to Elizabeth Deard's Shnevis, who was the wife of toy maker Paul Daniel Shenevicks, and also the daughter of toymaker William Deard's. She was also a toy maker in her own right. Walpole described her as Missus Shenevick's, the famous toy woman. Walpole finished out a lease on the house before buying it a couple of years later.

00:01:36
Speaker 1: His plan from the start was to turn this small house on five acres of land into a Gothic castle with its own gardens. This plan doesn't seem to have come as a surprise to the people who knew him. In the words of Dorothy Margaret Stewart, quote, it was inevitable that Walpole should buy a little house somewhere and make a plaything of it, and cram it with bric a brac. That he should conceived the idea of making its roof bristle with many pinnacles, and its sealing's unfurrol much fan tracery is perhaps no matter for wonder, but it is matter for thankfulness, since this conception of his was destined to exert a singular influence upon the most salutary of all the intellectual movements that mark the second half of his century. The return to Romance.

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Speaker 2: I think this is one of the many passages in which Dorothy Margaret Stewart comes off to me as both complimentary to Walpole and also kind of backhandedly judging. Novelist Clara Reeve, whose book The Old English Baron was inspired by Walpole's The Castle of a Toronto, included a brief memoir of him in a combined edition of their two books, and in it she wrote, quote, mister Walpole's domestic occupations, as well as his studies, bore evidence of a taste for English antiquities, which was then uncommon. He loved as a satirist, has expressed it to gaze on Gothic toys through Gothic glass in The villa at Strawberry Hill, which he chose for his abode, gradually swelled into a feudal castle by the addition of turrets, towers, galleries and corridors, whose fretted roofs, carved panels, and illuminated windows were garnished with the appropriate furniture of Sutchen's armorial bearings, shields, tilting lances, and all the paniply of chivalry.

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Speaker 1: A big part of the planning and execution on Walpole's expansion of this house into a castle was his quote Committee of Taste, which was made up of Walpole, architect John Shute, and designer Richard Bentley. Walpole added a library and a refractory in seventeen fifty three, a gallery, round tower, great cloister and cabinet in seventeen sixty and seventeen sixty one, a grand bedchamber in seventeen seventy and another tower in seventeen seventy six. There were multiple guest bedrooms. Strawberry Hill also had china cabinets, a pantry, cellars for wine and beer, a kitchen, an armory, and servants quarters. He more than doubled the size of the house, adding on turrets and embellishments and a lot of stained glass windows. He eventually installed a printing press, and the works he printed included the poetry of his friend Thomas Gray.

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Speaker 2: He also traveled all over parts of rural England to buy things to fill and decorate this castle with. In the words of L. B. Seely quote as chamber. After chamber was added to the castle, it became Walpole's next care to fill them with fresh antiques. In furniture pictures bronzes, armor, painted glass, and other like articles. Over time, Walpole amassed a collection of more than four four thousand paintings, figurines, enamels, books and artifacts. Walpole thought the collection of miniatures and enamels in particular was the finest in all of England.

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Speaker 1: At one point during all of this work, in seventeen sixty two, there was a labor dispute, which Walpole wrote about in one of his letters. Quote, last Saturday night my workmen took their leave, made their bow and left me up to the knees in shavings. In short, the journeyman carpenters, like the cabinet makers, have entered into an association not to work unless their wages are raised. And how can one complain the poor fellows who's all the labor is, see their masters advance their prices every day and think it reasonable to touch their share. Strawberry Hill wasn't meant just for Walpole's personal lodgings. It was also open for tours when he was not in London for the season, and it was open during that time between the hours of noon and three for prominent people. He led these tours himself, but everybody else got led through by the housekeeper after paying a guinea to do it. I love everything about this.

00:06:11
Speaker 2: I am enamored, yes.

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Speaker 1: And he wrote a guide book for all of this. It's called A Description of the Villa of mister Horace Walpole, youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, at Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, Middlesex, with an inventory of the furniture, pictures, curiosities, etc. And it begins quote, it will look I fear a little like arrogance in a private man to give a printed description of his villa and collection in which almost everything is diminutive. It is, not, however, intended for public sale, and originally was meant only to assist those who should visit the place. His description of a person's first entrance into Strawberry Hill in this guide goes like this quote. You first enter a small, gloomy hall, paved with hexagon tiles and lighted by two narrow windows of painted glass representing Saint John and Saint Francis. This hall is united with the staircase, and both are hung with Gothic paper painted by one tutor from the screen of Prince Arthur's tomb in the Cathedral of Worcester. The balustrade was designed by mister Bentley. At every corner is an antelope one of Lord Orford's supporters holding a shield. In the well of the staircase by a cord of black and yellow hangs a gothic lantern of ting Japan, designed by mister Bentley and filled with painted glass. The door of it has an old pane with the arms of their Earl of Oxford. From there, the guidebook walks through all the rooms, noting what's in each of them, along with some drawings of the castle and the features within it, like the details of the fireplaces. This includes a list of all the china in the china room. It also includes descriptions of the chapel and the cottage and the flower garden that were part of the grounds, and a list of material printed at Strawberry Hill. I should recall he had a printing press. There are also floor plans and appendices and editions of things that had been added to the house after the guide was originally printed. As I was reading this, I was like, Okay, I'm at the end. Why are there still so many more pages than it was? Multiple additional adenda of lists of things that had been added to the house. In terms of like the collections, not the physical structure.

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Speaker 2: This house is described as almost the opposite of his father's neoclassical estate of Houghton Hall. Dorothy Margaret Stewart put it this way. Quote anything less Gothic than Houghton it would be impossible to conceive. And Strawberry Hill sparked a revival in Gothic architecture, which mostly took place in the UK, but also inspired some buildings in the US and elsewhere as well. Some of these elements were also part of Georgian architecture more broadly, that period, of course, being named for the time in British history spanning the reins from King George the First through the fourth, but Gothic architecture, sometimes spelled with a K at the end, included a lot of decorative motifs that harkened back to the medieval period, lots and lots of turrets and spires and stained glass. This trend continued into the nineteenth century and eventually became known as Victorian Gothic. Walpole eventually started calling Strawberry Hill his a Toronto, and his most famous novel was interconnected with his personal castle, and we'll get into all of that after a sponsor break. Although The Castle of a Toronto is Horace Walpole's most famous work today, it was not his first work to be published, or the only one at all. He had written various poems and essays, some of which criticized the British government and were published anonymously. In seventeen fifty seven he published a pamphlet called A Letter from Choho, a Chinese philosopher at London, to his friend Lan Chi at picking So. Walpole had developed an interest in Chinese history and culture while studying at Cambridge, and this was written from the perspective of one Chinese man writing to another, but it was really a commentary on what Walpole saw as the cruelty of the English government. This followed the execution of Admiral John Bing during the Seven Years' War. Bing's squadron had been ordered to keep the French from capturing Minorca and had failed to do so. Bing was court martialed and found guilty under the twelfth Article of War, which placed a penalty of death on anyone who did not quote do his utmost to take or destroy every ship which it shall be his duty to engage. Walpole strongly opposed a decision to execute being, and when he failed to save the admiral wrote this letter in response, appropriating a Chinese persona to criticize both the English as a people and the execution specifically. In seventeen sixty two, Walpole started publishing Anecdotes of painting in England, with some account of the principal artists and incidental notes on other arts, collected by the late mister George Virtue and now digested and published from his original manuscripts by mister Horace Walpole. This was a work on British art history that would come out in multiple volumes over the subsequent decades. As its name suggests, it was expanded from unpublished notebooks that had been kept by engraver and antiquary George Virtue, and Walpole had purchased those notebooks. This was a really ambitition work. It was one that was meant to provide a thorough account of British art history, and it is still cited as a useful history of British art.

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Speaker 1: In seventeen sixty three as the biggest additions to Strawberry Hill were nearing completion, Walpole wrote The Castle of a Toronto. Here's how he described this work in a letter to the Reverend William Cole quote. I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream of which all I could recover was that I had thought myself in an ancient castle, a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story, and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armor. In the evening, I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it, ad that I was very glad to think of anything rather than politics. In short, I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea about six o'clock till half an hour after one in the morning, when my hand and fingers were so weary that I could not hold the pen to finish the sentence.

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Speaker 2: This book was published on Christmas Eve, seventeen sixty four, initially without Walpole's name on it, and also not at the press at Strawberry Hill. The premise was that this was a translation of a found manuscript, that manuscript originally written in Italian and dating back to fifteen twenty nine, and also containing an even earlier work, and in that first edition not published at Strawberry Hill, not with Walpole's name. There were definitely readers who thought this framing device was the real story of where this manuscript had come from.

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Speaker 1: The novel itself was set in medieval Naples during the Crusades, and it blended elements of mystery, horror, and the supernatural. It told the story of a family that inhabited the castle, and this family was the subject of an ancient prophecy that the castle quote should pass from the present family whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it. At the beginning of this story, an enormous helmet falls from the sky and crushes Conrad. I read this in college, and this is the one thing I remember about it was the giant helmet. Conrad was about to be married to a princess, and that it was also his father's only male heir, So Conrad's father tries to marry this princess himself, but a series of events get in the way of that, some of those events involving ghosts and other supernatural occurrences. There's a giant sword, and another prophecy, and a big family secret, and the castle itself just looms over the whole thing. An eighteen eleven edition of The Castle of a Toronto includes an introduction attributed to Scottish author, poet and historians Sir Walter Scott. Scott said of the novel quote, the Castle of a Toronto is remarkable not only for the wild interest of the story, but as the first modern attempt to found a tale of amusing fiction upon the basis of the ancient romances of chivalry. Scott went on to say that it had been quote justly considered not only as the original and model of a peculiar species of composition, but as one of the standard works of our lighter literature.

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Speaker 2: Scott also described how Walpole wove together the mundane and the spectacular.

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Speaker 1: Quote.

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Speaker 2: It was his object to draw such a picture of domestic life and manners during the feudal times as might actually have existed, and to paint it checkered and agitated by the action of supernatural machinery, such as the superstition of the period received as a matter of devout credulity. The natural parts of the narrative are so contrived that they so ssociate themselves with the marvelous occurrences, and by the force of that association, render those speciosa miraculous, striking, and impressive, though our cooler reason admits their impossibility, and he ticked off a number of the things that would become some of the hallmarks of Gothic literature. Quote his feudal tyrant, his distressed damsel, He's resigned yet dignified churchmen, the castle itself, with its feudal arrangement of dungeons, trapdoors, oratories and galleries, the incidents of the trial, the chivalrous procession, and the combat. In short, the scene, the performers, and action, so far as it is natural, form the accompaniments of his specters and his miracles, and have the same effect on the mind of the reader that the appearance and drapery of such a chamber as we have described may produce upon that of a temporary inmate. The whole point in Scott's words was quote not merely to site surprise and terror by the introduction of supernatural agency, but to wind up the feelings of his reader till they become, for a moment identified with those of a ruder age, which held each strange tale devoutly true.

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Speaker 1: A second edition of The Castle of a Toronto came out in seventeen sixty five, and that one revealed that Horace Walpole had written it. He had named the Castle for a place that he had seen on a map of Italy but had not visited during his travels there. As we sat up at the top of the show. There are other earlier works that contain some elements of mystery or horror or the supernatural, like The Castle of a Toronto did, but this novel is credited with launching Gothic literature as a genre. It inspired works like Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, as well as Jane Austen's Northinger Abbey, which satirized this genre and was published posthumously. Elements of Gothic fiction also inspired authors and poets during the Romantic period that included Mary Shelley with her novel Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Walpole continued to write and publish other work after this. There was an account of the Giants Lately Discovered in a Letter to a Friend in the Country, which was published in seventeen sixty six, in which Dorothy Margaret Stewart said he quote satirized everything and almost everybody that he disliked methodism and pedantry, slavery and the Stamp Act, Whitefield and the Grenvilles. Walpole also wrote histories, including Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third, which was published in seventeen sixty eight that was a more sympathetic treatment of the king and raised doubts about whether he had killed the Princes in the Tower. We covered the Princes in the Tower in November of twenty twenty one year. He also published a blank verse drama called The Mysterious Mother a Tragedy, which was a story of family betrayal that included a lot of accidental incest. He also published memoirs of King's George the Second and George the Third, which were essentially political histories of those kings reigns. There was even a long essay on modern gardening, which started out as part of a collection of essays but was eventually printed as its own standalone booklet. I wanted to talk more about this essay, but could not for reasons. We will talk about on Friday. We're going to take a quick sponsor break, and then we will talk about some things that happened in the later half of Walpole's life. Aside from all the Gothic We're going to spend the last part of this episode on some of the bigger moments from.

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Speaker 2: The later part of Horace walpole life. In seventeen fifty one, Horace Walpole's brother, Robert Walpole, second Earl of Orford, died and the title then passed to his son, George. Horace tried to help find a wife for his nephew, and this led to a huge dispute between him and his uncle Horace about who George should marry. This was just a whole additional drama that we're not going to get into the details of. But George was just one of the family connections that Horace really tried to help after his father's death. That also included financially providing for at least two of his father's natural daughters.

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Speaker 1: In the seventeen fifties, Walpole also developed gout, which is a form of arthritis. Gout is caused by a complex process related to how the body breaks down purines into uric acid. In some people, uric acid builds up and causes crystals to accumulate in the joints, often affecting the big toe, and it can be very painful. Sugary beverages, alcohol, and some types of meat and seafood are high in purines. So for a long time, gout was primarily associated with people's diets and their weight. Diet and weight are still considered to be risk factors, but gout can happen to anyone regardless of what they eat or what their body looks like. All of this is connected to Horace Walpole's experience with gout. We've talked about his being a really slender person, something that people just commented on his whole life, But beyond that, he was also known for having a pretty meager diet, including in what he served to guests at his home. So he just did not fit the stereotype of somebody with gout. He referenced this in a letter to John Shoot, Earl of Stafford, in seventeen sixty quote, I have got the gout, Yes, the gout in earnest. I was seized on Monday morning, suffered dismally all night, and am now wrapped in fur like the picture of a Morocco ambassador, and am carried to bed by two servants. You see, virtue and leanness are no preservatives. He also wrote about how he would have found it easier to bear if there had been a family history of gout. Quote, if either my father or mother had had it, I should not dislike it so much. I am herald enough to approve it if descended genealogically. But it is an absolute upstart in me. And what is more provoking, I had trusted in my great abstinence for keeping me from it. But thus it is. If I had any gentleman like virtue, as patriotism or loyalty, I might have got something by them. I had nothing but that beggarly virtue temperance, and she had not enough interest to keep me from a fit of the gout.

00:22:49
Speaker 2: For the rest of his life, while Pole periodically dealt with intense pain that sometimes made him unable to walk. Gout was really not well understood, and Walpole also did not really trust doctors, especially after his father's death. He blamed his father's death on the medical care that he had received. So Walpole tried to treat the gout himself, using tightly wrapped foot coverings made of oiled silk and flannel, which he called bouticans, and also soaking his feet in ice water. Sometimes. He also visited bath for therapeutic treatments in the spas there.

00:23:28
Speaker 1: In seventeen sixty nine, Horace Walpole exchanged a series of letters with Thomas Chatterton. Chatterton was a poet and writer, and sent Walpole what was basically a fan letter along with what he said was a fifteenth century treatise. He was hoping that Walpole would become his mentor, and Walpole seems to have been interested in this at first, but he quickly started to suspect that this document was a forgery. For example, it was supposedly dated to fourteen sixty nine, but it used rhyming couplets in a ste from Walpole in Chatterton's own era. Walpole was also fifty two at this point, and he distanced himself from Chatterton when he realized that Chatterton was only sixteen.

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Speaker 2: So some time passed between their letters, and Chatterton eventually wrote to ask for this manuscript back. Walpole didn't send it back right away. He was getting ready for a trip to Paris, and it seems like he just forgot about it. Chatterton later sent him some pretty accusatory letters, and Walpole started writing an answer, but he did not send it because he did not want to start some kind of a big argument. Later on, Chatterton's poetry came up at a dinner that Walpole was attending at the Royal Academy, and in that conversation, Walpole was stunned to learn that Chatterton had taken his own life. A lot of people really blamed Walpole for Chatterton's suicide, and afterward Chatterton came to be viewed as a poetic prodigy.

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Speaker 1: In August of seventeen seventy one, Walpole learned that his friend Thomas Gray had died. Afterward, he wrote in a letter quote, methinks, as we grow old, our only business here is to adorn the graves of our friends, or to dig our own. In seventeen seventy five, in the early months of the Revolutionary War, he wrote a letter to Horace Mann in which he said, quote, you will not be surprised that I am what I always was, a zealot for liberty in every part of the globe, and consequently that I most heartily wish success to the Americans. In seventeen eighty, a wave of anti Catholic rioting struck London in response to the Catholic Relief Act of seventeen seventy eight. This act allowed Catholics who signed an oath of allegiance to buy land and join the army. Walpole documented this through his letters as well. We said earlier that Walpole showed some anti Catholic sentiments in his writing, but in these letters he is critical of the rioters and their leaders. His letter to the Reverend mister Cole set in part quote, I can give you little account of the origin of this shocking affair. Negligence was certainly its nurse, and religion only its godmother. The ostensible author is in the tower. Twelve or fourteen thousand men have quashed all tumults, and as no bad account is come from the country except for a moment at Bath. And as eight days have passed nay more since the commencement, I flatter myself the whole nation is shocked at the scene, and that if planned there was, it was laid only in and for the metropolis. The lowest and most villainous of the people, and to no great amount, were almost the sole actors.

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Speaker 2: I think this rioting might wind up being a episode of the show in the future, because it is not something that I was even aware had happened. By this point, Walpole was in his sixties. Dorothy Margaret Stewart described his last years this quote, So violent and so profound were the social and political changes that marked his last two decades. Walpole took refuge as in a fortress within the embattled walls of Strawberry, and felt himself beleaguered there by uncouth people and ideas even more uncouth. In December of seventeen ninety one, Walpole's nephew George died, having developed a reputation for being extravagant, eccentric, and mentally ill. After his death, Horace Walpole became fourth Earl of Orford. He described the estate and title as quote a source of lawsuits among my near relations, endless conversations with lawyers, and packets of letters to read every day and answer all. This weight of new business is too much for the rag of life that yet hangs about me. He never took his seat in the House of Lords. Horace Walpole died in London at his house there, which was at number eleven Berkeley Square, on March second, seventeen ninety seven. He was seventy nine. He had dictated an obituary to his secretary a couple of weeks before, and it read quote yesterday died at the very advanced age, but of between eighty and ninety at his house in Berkeley Square, Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Orford, after a severe fit of the gout all over him.

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Speaker 1: Walpole never married or had children, so his earldom became extinct after his death, although it was later revived, only to become extinct again. He left his property to people he had been close to later in his life. He had built a house called Cliveden in seventeen sixty eight, named for actor Kitty Clive, who lived there for a time. He left it to sisters Mary and Agnes Barry. Their father was Walpole's literary executor, but with the understanding that Mary would be the ones selecting and arranging manuscripts. There had been some rumors that Walpole planned marriage to Mary, although at the time he was seventy and she was twenty four.

00:29:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have no idea whether that was a thing that anyone was actually talking about. Whalpole left Strawberry Hill to Lady Anne Seymour Damer another person to maybe do an episode about sometime. She was his cousin's daughter and his goddaughter. She was a sculptor and he was a big supporter of her work. He called her a female genius. While her contemporaries described her as a saphist, the word lesbian wasn't widely used during her lifetime. She did not claim the label of saphist, and to be clear, this was something other people were calling her in order to denigrate her. But it is clear that she had deep and loving relationships with other women, including with Mary Barry, which.

00:29:53
Speaker 1: Brings us to Walpole's own identity. Like a number of other people that we've talked about on the show, he's definitely someone who has a place under the umbrella of queer history. But different historians have drawn different conclusions on exactly how using today's understanding of things like gender and sexual orientation, and this can be difficult to do, both because of how people in the past express their thoughts and feelings and because as a society, our understanding of sex and gender is continually evolving. Some historians conclude that Horace Walpole had romantic and sexual relationships with men and women, others that he only had them with men, and some that he never had a sexual relationship with anyone of any gender.

00:30:41
Speaker 2: Beyond the Barry sisters and Lady Anne Seymour Damer. Walpole's social circle was full of people who just didn't follow conventions about gender and relationships. Accounts of his relationships with the men in his life can come across as very campy, and a number of essays framed Strawberry Hill as a giant closet that he built for himself so that he and his friends would have the space to be themselves. There are also literary critics who have noted that Walpole, who was living outside the bounds of what was expected for a man in masculinity, helped launch a literary genre that gave a lot of women the space to be transgressive in their writing and the relationships that they were writing about, including people like Anne Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte even more recent writers like Daphne de Maurier, who we covered on the show in June of twenty twenty one. These relationships included people like Sir Horace Mann, who also never married and who raised eyebrows for his friendship with painter Thomas Patch, who moved to Florence after being expelled from Rome after a charge related to homosexuality. Even though Man and Walpole never saw one another in person again, their letters suggest a deep connection of something unfulfilled. For example, when Robert Walpole's time in the government was coming to its tumultuous end, Man wrote a letter suggesting this might pave the way for Horace to come back to Italy. He wrote, quote, we may be quiet and happy here together, far from the insults of saucy, ungrateful people in such melancholy circumstances. What a satisfaction would it be to a heart that overflows with love and gratitude? As I assure you, my eyes at present do with tears. To have it in his power to enjoy the only satisfaction it would have left. I say no more. You must certainly understand me. You have a heart too tender yourself not to excuse the want of utterance on such an occasion. So Walpole didn't respond to this letter, though, and Man never brought this idea up again. But then Walpole did after Man's last surviving brother died in seventeen seventy five and Man inherent an estate in Kent, So Walpole's suggestion that Man might then move to England was not as emotionally charged as what Holly just read, although he did say quote, I flatter myself this thought delights you as much as it does me. I own it was the moment I always looked to. But in his response Man pointed out a number of reasons that it was just out of the question for him, at the age of seventy to try to return to England. Their letters make it seem like this was an upsetting conversation to both of them, but they eventually smoothed things over and they continued their correspondence until Man's death on November sixth of seventeen eighty six. We've referenced Walpole's letters so many times, and they really are one of his biggest legacies, not just because he wrote a lot of letters, but because he saw letter writing as an art that he tried to nurture and cultivate. He intentionally chose to write to people who lived away from London, people who would want and need to hear the news of the day, so he had a reason to document it. He was writing these letters to be preserved for later generations, and he kept copies of them. One edition of Walpole's Correspondence spans forty eight volumes and it's available online at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale. Yeah, to be clear, these are walpoles letters and a lot of their responses from other people. Obviously many quotes from his letters in these two episodes. Do you have listener mail to quote?

00:34:34
Speaker 1: I do.

00:34:36
Speaker 2: We have a listener mail that is also about literature, and it is from Cheryl. Cheryl wrote, Dear Tracy and Holly, I'm nearing the end of a marathon of listening to past episodes starting from as far back as I could on my podcast app, and now that the end is in sight, literally all remaining episodes to here are on the iHeart dot com stuff you miss in history class page. I thought i'd write in there have been a number of episodes for something one of you said triggered a wish to respond, But when the episode in question is four to five years old, I just couldn't justify bringing up something so ancient. I mean, it's a history podcast, but I'm writing regarding a few episodes. I too, just read Alex Harro's Starling House, so I found the cave Wards episode interesting and timely. Tracy, I think you and I have very similar book loves, as Connie Willis is another big favorite of mine. Have you read any t Kingfisher, which's another wonderful writer. My sourdough starter is named for the carnivorous starter in her A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking. I have a possible topic for you, street painting. My husband and I paint at street painting festivals all over the country. It's an avocation, not a vocation, including one coming up next month in Marietta, Georgia. Details below in case Holly is in town and would like to come see. I know the recent history of the art forums, starting with the first street Painting festival fifty years ago near Mantua, Italy, but earlier than that, I feel I'm repeating hearsay, not anything verifiable. I would love to be able to share the real history of this art form I enjoy so much. Then Cheryl had a link to the festival and some other stuff. We don't have any pets, unless you count the alligator lizards that row our yards, so for a pet tax, I'm sharing photos of my niece's big burnt marshmallow, a dog Willow with their new puppy cricket, their farh rescue Colby aka the Cheeseman, who has happily adapted to inside cat life, where he steals willows food and insists that no, he has not been fed second dinner yet and you should get right on that this instant. I'll also include the neighbor kitty I just met this morning because he is so cute, friendly and curious. I'm also including a couple of street painting photos just for fun too. Well, there's a little addundum about if Holly goes to chok Toberfest, which is the name of the street panting festival. Best to you both and thanks for the many, many hours of enjoyment. Cheryl Cheryl, thank you so much. Personally, if somebody writes us about an episode that's four or five years old, I have no problem with that, with one caveat, which is that if someone asks me a detail about that episode from four or five years ago, I probably don't remember.

00:37:22
Speaker 1: Gods are good. It is a blur.

00:37:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm probably not gonna be able to answer questions, but I do not mind at all hearing about things that people may have liked or resonated with or whatever from episodes from a long time ago. Question number two t King Fisher. Yes, I have read A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking. I have also read, I think all of the currently available books from the Temple of the White Rat World. So those are Clockwork Boys and the Wonder Engine and Swordheart, and then all the Paladin books. If you read these books, you know what I'm talking talking about. With the Paladin books, I like them a lot. And then we have adorable animal pictures kitty cats and puppy dogs. Oh, just a great piece of street painting art that has like a three dimensional look to it. It looks like a kid in a bathtub with a cat who is stalking the rubber duck that has fallen on the floor. What's this next one? Oh? This is another very like. Imagine a child who has turned a cardboard box into an airplane, being flanked by a dog in a cardboard kit box and a cat in a different cardboard box. And we have a kitty cat in a tree.

00:38:49
Speaker 1: So cute. I love all of these. I will note this will air after the fact that I will miss choctober Fest this year. I think I only made it to like one because there is also it's one of those things where because it's fall. Oh sure, every municipality is doing fall festivals and I am. I already promised to do some stuff close to home and one of mine, so yeah, because I don't live in Marietta.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, thank you, thank you, Thank you Cheryl for this email and the pictures and all of that. If you'd like to send us a note or at history Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to our podcast on iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.