A Brill Calendar: September 24

Few contributions to learning and scholarship are as hard to assess as what ‘lay scientists’ donate to academic traditions of the world.

The growth of insight and knowledge is replete with initiatives and activities from individuals who lack any affinity with the practices and usages of matriculation, graduation and tenure. A superb example of the precious breed is Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (24 September 1717 – 2 March 1797, both in London).

Of course, he is famous for creating the largest correspondence in the language (something that has become a book to generations of literary editing), but there is much, much more than that. The private press he had installed in his villa ‘Strawberry Hill’ near Twickenham, (a pseudo-Gothic intimate ‘extravaganza’) opened up a new era in typographical style. And of course his quaint and curious taste for gruesome stories launched in his story, ‘The Castle of Otranto’, free invention and fantasy in fiction.

It is seldom that cultural life in the decades before the French revolution is not seen as a vital part of the storm gathering for the first outburst on July 14, 1789. When Horace Walpole invented in a letter to his friend Horace (Walt) Mann in Florence a new word, ‘serendipity’ ‘accidental sagacity’ (January 28, 1754) he had the good and elegant fortune to discover an important concept in epistemology in a word of his own private self; unencumbered by grave concerned by notions foreign to the innocent and harmless universe he maintained in great style his entire life.