The Many Lives of Horace Walpole

George E. Haggerty, Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of California, Riverside

In his charming biography of Horace Walpole, R. W. Ketton Cremer makes the point that “one of the difficulties which confront a biographer of Walpole is his remarkable versatility. He was active in many fields—in politics, social life, literature, architecture, antiquarianism, printing, virtú; and it is not easy to include them all in the compass of a single volume.” George Haggerty, who is currently writing a new biography of Horace Walpole, takes up this challenge in his lecture with and through Walpole’s letters. Haggerty asserts that Walpole writes himself into his experience by means of his epistolary imagination.