Behind the Scenes Minis: Literature and Kooky Houses

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We spent the whole week talking about Horace Walpole. We sure did I have had I've had him on the list for a long time for a possible October episode, And it was one of those things that where I had kind of written him on the list but not really looked much into what it would actually involve, because, as I said in the episode, I read the Castle of a Toronto in college in a class that I took that was called Discourses in Terror. That was it was an elective literature class specifically about Gothic novels. So we read Castle of Toronto, Mister Duvi, Dolfo, Frankensteinula. We kept getting each It was in a chronological thing, so we kept getting like later and later re envisionings of Gothic literature. We ended on A Clockwork Orange. We were supposed to watch the film A Clockwork Orange, with our professor saying, if you're not comfortable watching this movie, you do not have to. You will not be penalized. But something happened and we weren't able to watch it, and I don't remember what that was. I'm laughing as you say this, not laughing at what you're saying, but just to the fact that, like, you remember so much more vividly your college experience than I do. I could not tell you the name of a single course I took. Yeah, wait, one maybe, Okay, So I would say I remember more specifics of this one elective class than almost anything else that I took as a course in literature, largely because it was a lot of them were novels that would not necessarily have been taken as seriously as literature. At the same time, my professor, who I have learned in doing the research for this, his name was doctor ed Katz. He passed away a couple of years ago. He did have strong opinions about what counted as literature and what didn't. From my memory, but like, I don't remember being all that interested by The Castle of a Toronto. I thought about giving it a reread while working on this, and I didn't because I just did not have time to do that, and so I had not really I had been like, okay, first gothic novel, cool thing to talk about in our you know, October episodes around Halloween, but I had did not really know anything about Horace Walpole. We didn't talk much about him as a person at all. And this year when I was like, let's go check out Horace Walpole again, I immediately was captivated and was like absolutely, I'm not only am I going to do an episode on this, I'm ninety percent sure it's going to be two parts. I found a lot of stuff about his life really delightful. Not everything, but a lot of stuff. I mentioned in the show that I had wanted to talk more about the gardening booklet but could not for reasons that I would talk about today, and that reason is that as I was working on these episodes, the website archive dot org was hit with a DDoS attack. YEP, I had the same problem. And I'm going to talk about archive dot org for a minute. And if you're having very strong feelings right now, and the feelings are not in support of archive dot org, I want you to just hang in there for a second, because I think a lot of people have an idea in their head of archive dot org that does not actually align with what is happening. So archive dot org is home to a ton of public domain work that is a big part of my research on this show a lot of the time. It is also home to the Wayback Machine, which is like a chronicle of what websites used to look like at points in the past, and sometimes that is part of the research too, because there will be something that used to be on a website that's not there anymore and I can only find it at the Wayback Machine. There are also books that are still protected by copyright, and the way this works is that either archive dot org or one of its other physical library partners has a physical copy of the book. They have made a scan of that book, and people can check out the scan of the book, with the number of people who can check it out at the same time lining up with how many physical copies of the book Archive dot org actually has access to. At the beginning of the COVID nineteen pandemic, they temporarily waived that limit because it was an international emergency where people were suddenly forced to stay home locked out of their research materials. They were like, Okay, this is a crisis. Everybody can get whatever books they need. And some people absolutely freaked out about it, and there was a big dog piling of people who sort of took the idea of archive dot org is pirrating the entire planet and made it a talking point, and people kind of glommed onto that talking point without actually looking deeper into it. It fed into a lawsuit by publishers who were angry that archive dot org had like scanned their work that period of releasing all of the limits on how many people could have a book at the same time. That only lasted for like twelve weeks. Archive dot org rolled that back and for a year more like years. Since then, it has been if archive dot org has one copy of a book, one person can look at the digital out of time. There is for sure a whole legal argument to be made about whether that is acceptable in terms of copyright law. But there's a perception that archive dot org is just like freely scanning and the throwing people's books into a giant website that anybody can access freely at all times with their restrictions, and that's like, that's really not what's happening. So yeah, doos attack on archive dot org. While I was working on this, I fortunately had already done most of the research and the reading on things that involved public domain biographies of Horace Walpole, a lot of his written work also at archive dot org. I had already gotten a lot of that. Something I had not gotten yet that I had bookmarked was the Gardening Essay, and I had not had a chance to look at it yet. It's possible that some other digital resource also has the Gardening Essay, but I could not find it in time to like get this episode done. I don't want to get into the details of like what prompted this attack on archive dot org, like what prompted somebody to carry out this DDoS attack, because honestly, I have heard multiple contradictory explanations about it, and I don't know which one is correct. And also, uh, we are recording this on the eleventh, the eleventh of October, and this episode of the show is not going to come out until the twenty fifth, which is in two weeks, and so who knows what we will know about this DDoS attack by that point. Whatever we would be saying now will probably be very old news. Anyway, archive dot org has been so important to my work on this show. Yeah, ninety percent of what I get there is scans of public domain stuff, the other ten percent overwhelmingly is some incredibly obscure still protected by copyright, but also out of print book which I cannot find at any other library, with those including two different public library systems, the Boston Athenaeum, which I am a member of and is a private library, and Harvard, which I have access to, and I'm like, sometimes archive dot org is a place that has a book that's not in any of those collections. Anyway, I have very strong feelings about archive dot org. I think it is a critical and important service, and I wish that one thing that was done in a time of international crisis of the early pandemic had not then become a weird talking point of misinformation. Yeah, do you want to talk more about Horace Walpole? Let's do talk more about Horace Walpole. He fascinates me. I yeah, yeah, because he is not specifically his travels with Thomas Gray, Because Horace Walpole is not the person, based on everything we know up to that point, that I would think would be a party boy. But he was like, he was like, Yeah, let's go to balls, let's go dance and hang out all the time, which sounds super fun to me. But noney does not sound like your jam. It would be like I would there would be an amount of it that would be fun to me. But we were having an off off Mike conversation in which we talked about how like if you and I were traveling together for an extended period of time, you would be the walpole and I would be the gray. Yeah, for sure. And to be clear, we've traveled together plenty and it's been fine, but it has not been like just the two of us, not just the two of us for two years and right in France and Italy, Right, sounds great, Let's go on towo year time tour of France in Italy. That would be very fun. But yeah, like when we do travel together, there are also for sure times that like I go out to the hotel room and you're you're at a SEEKI bar for however many hours. When we do our trips to the show our international trips that we've done, there is typically a separation that happens at the end of the night, like after dinner, where half of the group is like, let's go find every speakeasy I'm in that group, and the other half is like, let's go find cozy bedtime, and I'm like, cozy bedtime, I will lead the procession back to the hotel. Yes, yeah, which happens, which made me chuckle a little bit because just because Walpole was not the one I would have expected to be late. Right woo, I'm going to another ball, let's go party. Yeah. It makes me laugh a little bit, especially given his later discussions of how he has always practiced like temperance and it didn't help with his gout and I'm like, you are a can an outgoing person. I do get the vibe that he got kind of older and crankier and in the later years of his life, was like I just kind of want to be at my castle. Yeah, all that castle. Yeah, it's been so I meant to put this in the episode and I forgot. I actually deleted it, and then as we were recording, I was like, I should say that thing, and then I forgot to do it. So after he had died and he had left the he had left Strawberry Hill in his will, it sort of got passed through families. It I don't there's a middle part wheun like what happened there I don't remember. But now it is a place that you can tour as a member of the public. It is Strawberry Hill House and Garden. It is Strawberry Hill House and Gardens. The contents of it were eventually sold off, so it has gone through a restoration, and there have also been efforts to like get some of the original items that were there, but also replicas and reproductions and stuff like that, so that at some point in the future a visitor might be able to get a sense of like just how packed it was with Horace Wallpole's many collections of art and other stuff. Yeah, there is a thing that happens at Strawberry Hill House and Garden that I have never been able to line up with my schedule that I am aching to do. Do you know they do a Halloween event there. It does not surprise me. I'd be into that, and then to go to bed at respectable hour. They close all of the shutters and they do this sort of like gloomy presentation, and I really want to go there, and I never managed to make it work timing wise. That sounds very fun. If I had been smart this year, I would have scheduled London right before we go to Iceland. Oh yeah, but I wasn't smart and now it is too late to make this all work. Well it's fine, but yeah they do. They do a lot of fun stuff and I ache to do it one day. Yeah, there was also a thing that came up. I will spoiler alert people a little. The Walpoles are coming up again in our Halloween contents as one of part of another thing and not horror specifically, But there is an early thing where we were talking about children numbers of children, and they're possibly being like another child that may have passed in, you know, as a very young young child, and like, this is a problem with this family, is what I can tell you, because they're in this this piece that comes up a little later this month, there is a discussion of one person who marries a Wallpole and him having had X number of children with his first wife and then a y number with his second wife. And the X and y are variables using algebraic variables for a reason, because they are numbered very differently depending on what even like sources that seem very official, and I think probably some of that is that many of the kids died very early on, but they're not documented quite in that way, so right, right, Yeah, I had found, you know, some biography that I had read was like two children had been born in that span, But then I couldn't find anybody else saying the same thing. And then when I would look at lists of all the children, there were not any children or infants who were like listed as having died, and I was like, I'm really not sure on this. There were a few random things that were that came up in the notes that I did not have a great place to put into the the episodes. One is that one of the things that I read was a brief biography he had written of himself, in which he said, quote, I was inoculated for the smallpox in seventeen twenty four. I like that he was both inoculated for the smallpox, and that he thought that was an important thing to put in the fact that, like his little biography that he had written up. The next was a thing that was actually written by Dorothy Margaret Stewart. As we said, I found her descriptions of him sometimes sound like she really admired him, and other times to sound very judgy. But she was talking of the trip to France and Italy and wrote, quote, it was not long before Walpole became conscious that the amount of French he had acquired at Eton was inadequate, and that caused me to laugh a lot. Horace Walpole apparently coined the word serendipity in a letter to Horace Mann and described what saren nipity meant in this letter. And then the last thing was, I don't want to throw whoever wrote this under the bus, but I've found one brief article about Walpole that it framed him as a plagiarist because in a number of his letters he makes reference to some work of literature. It is set off in the letter as though it's a quote, but he doesn't say who the author of it was. Oh, gotcha. And I was like, this is a deeply normal thing to me for an eighteenth century writer to do. Like a lot of people were throwing in quotes and literary references and whatever to their and their letters to each other and their other written work without saying specifically who the author of that piece was. There's kind of an implied assumption that the person receiving the letter h writing, they're well read enough, they're gonna know what the reference is. And so when I was like, what is this, what is this thing that was like and he was also a plagiarist. I was like, I don't think that's the definition of plagiarism that was existing in the seventeen whatevers. Yeah, when he was writing this stuff well, and also usually plagiarism is not referencing it as a quote either, right right, it would be it would be stylized in a way that was clearly meant to suggest like this is someone else's words, just to like say whose words it was. Anyway, as I said, I love him in a lot of ways. I love the idea. I mean, I know this is an interpretation of his life, but I love the idea that he was like, I'm going to put so much time and effort into making this eccentric castle that nobody's going to notice if I bring all my gay friends over and have a big gay party. Yah. I love everything about the castle concept. Obviously we've talked on the show before that I am a kooky house, so I love the idea that he just went full boar on the kookie house concept. I love the idea of his housekeeper having to give people tours like all right, here's okay, here's the hall, and in my head, it's like a very jaded I think a lot of the biggest states. You could go to the housekeeper and say I would like a tour, but like not necessarily with somebody intending for it to be a stop for tourists and writing a guide for it. In writing in my head, it's a little bit of ras from Monster sinc. Here we have the collection of Swoods, Like, I just know that wouldn't be what it was, but in the cartoon it runs in my head. The other thing that I wanted to talk about with Walpole is that initial printing of a Toronto Oh yeah, because he's kind of the original Blair Witch situation. I had that exact thought honestly, which I love. I'm like, he's actually kind of This becomes one of those questions for me of is he the influence or was he just the first to think of it? Which aren't the same thing? Right? Yeah, what if we just throw this out as though it's a real thing, see what people do? Yeah? I love that stuff. Yeah, I super have no idea if there was an earlier example of that in English language literature specifically, but yeah, yeah, and then I kind of wondered if if Chatterton was trying to do the same thing in this manuscript that he sens well, huh, And I really don't know that for sure. I intended this morning to go and actually read all of their letters to each other, and I did not get it done because I had only read sort of a summary of their correspondence. But like, it did sort of seem to me like maybe that was what he was trying to do with this. Yeah. It made me think a little bit too of when we covered Bram Stoker and his kind of very emotionally raw fan letter to Walt Whitman, and I was like, oh, is this a similar thing where yeah, where Walpole was like, ooh, you're coming in a little too hot. I'm not sure I trust your intentions here. It's very fascinating. Yeah. Anyway, I'm so glad that I finally got to Horace Walpole. Me too. I should not have put it off for as long as I did. If you would like to send us a note about this, We're at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Whatever's happening this weekend for you. I really hope that it's great. We will have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We will have a brand new episode on Monday. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcast from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.