First, the review. Otranto is a short book, absolutely packed to the brim with excitement, adventure, magic, good and evil, mysterious parentages revealed, love at first sight, death, ghosts, armour and pretty much everything that you could want from the origin of Gothic literature. It moves along at a rattling pace and none of the characters pause for breath before making their next exciting move. It's that kind of book. I suspect it came across as more spooky when it was written than it does today: it's more "rollicking" than "eerie" to the modern reader.
Now, on to Walpole's intentions and all those other things tantalisingly mentioned in my title.
I have written before (in passing) about what I called the Fantasy Comic, that Anglo-American strain of fantasy literature exemplified on this side of the Atlantic by E. Nesbit, on the other by Edward Eager and on both sides by Mary Poppins in her various incarnations. The conceit of this genre is that extraordinary powers come to ordinary people in ordinary places and they react as ordinary people would. Think of the children in Five Children and It who wish to become as beautiful as the day, with the result that they are not recognised by the servants and have to fend for themselves at mealtimes. I described the incongruity as being one used for comic effect and also as the kind of thing that annoys foreigners, who feel that we don't take things seriously enough.
All of which brings me back to Walpole. In the first edition of Otranto, he presented the book as a translation by "William Marshall" from a mysterious Italian original by "Onuphrio Muralto" that had been discovered in the library of an old recusant family in England. That was, in part, to add to the Gothic air of the story but also, I think, because Walpole was a little nervous about how his new genre would be received by the reading public. In the event, he soon realised that he had a hit on his hands and so in the second edition he could be entirely open about who he was and what he was doing.
So what was he doing? Here is what he says in his preface to the second edition:
In other words, he did not want to write the kind of story in which a magical thing happens and then everyone talks in elevated diction, saying things like "mayhap this presages a dire doom ere many moons are out" but instead we get something more like Ron Weasley saying "bloody hell, Harry, did you see that?" We want the Pevensies at the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (a great and very suburban magic title for a book), not the end.
One way that Walpole sets out to achieve this is by the liberal use of rather pert "domestics", i.e. servants. The role of the domestics is a big point for him and he even draws attention to it in his preface to the first edition, when he was lauding it as the work of the mysterious Muralto. In Otranto, whenever some great magical occurrence is going on and some mighty prince is trying to get to the bottom of things, the servants are stumbling over their words, using malapropisms (avant la lettre), getting confused, and generally acting like real people rather than heroic characters.
As I say, Walpole is quite deliberate about all this. Moreover, he is deliberate in copying a great English model: he points out in his preface that no less a writer than Shakespeare often puts realistic and low people in close proximity to the Great Men of High Drama, mentioning in particular the gravedigging scene in Hamlet or the various lowly Roman citizens who comment in Julius Caesar.
Walpole also consciously distinguishes his tradition from the French tradition. He spends some time in his preface taking issue with Voltaire, who, after his early admiration for Shakespeare, seems to have decided that it was all rather infra dig to have lowly characters and ordinary speech punctuating dramas that deal with Big Issues and High Affairs of State and so on. (The Tombses' book That Sweet Enemy has a lot on this too. As ever, the English and the French fall easily into contrasting stereotypes: the English are vulgar and earthly while the French are pompous and precious.)
So you can see that all of that discussion in Walpole's preface seemed to me to fit very neatly into what I had independently already said about suburban magic. I now wonder whether one might see suburban magic as a distinct sub-genre within a broader English tradition of juxtaposing the high and low even in the midst of the most extraordinary events. Suburban magic and the Fantasy Comic are examples of emphasising the comic side of the balance and subtracting most of the high drama: a kind of silliness (if you want to be rude) or lightness of touch (if you are more polite) that appeals to the English but not so much to foreigners. However, as I have suggested above, even the likes of CS Lewis and JK Rowling, who are fundamentally writers of what I called Fantasy Heroic (i.e. stories in which the stakes are high and there are big battles to fight), are keen users of the tropes of suburban magic, and both delight in scattering details of what we might call "magical ordinariness" through their books. Walpole shows us that the same effects - the amazing and the powerful butting up against the mundane and the trivial - are to be found in the Gothic novel and Shakespearean drama.
I therefore don't think it is too much a stretch to say that there is a direct line of descent from Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, through the Gothic novel, to the likes of Half Magic. (Walpole would, I think, trace the ancestry back even further, to the ancient Greeks, but I think Shakespeare is quite far enough for the moment.)
Furthermore, on thinking again about this line of descent, I am increasingly persuaded that it is a conscious one, and not only on Walpole's part. Knight's Castle, for example, has the child protagonists discussing Ivanhoe early on (the film rather than the book, but still) and it is clear that they know about magic from books (including Nesbit's). Nesbit's children are well-read too. When I originally wrote about the genre, I said "to the extent that it includes ideas, they are taken to be already in the minds of the educated reader and ripe for being played with". I stand by that. It seems to me that suburban magic or the Fantasy Comic is essentially a rather literary genre written by the well-read adult for the entertainment of the well-read child.
There is, therefore, a kind of paradox here. The wholly serious writer of Fantasy Heroic - the sort of person who tells us a grim epic about the Sword of Unpronounceability being wielded against the Tyrant of High Scrabble Scoring - might well be the naive ingénue on the literary scene, while the unserious author of a lighthearted book for children is self-consciously standing on the shoulders of literary giants from Shakespeare onwards. All the better for English literature, if you ask me. Voltaire will just have to lump it.
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