Strawberry Hill Gothick: the art of gloomth and the beauty of horror

Tags

Architecture, Castle of Otranto, Chopp'd straw hall, committee of taste, eighteenth century, English Villa, fellow goths, Georgian taste, gloomth, Gothic, Gothick, Grand tour, Horace Walpole, horror, John Chute, Lady Waldegrave, literature, Richard Bentley, stained glass, Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham

Strawberry Hill – a dream of gloomth

South View of Strawberry Hill.

Miss Jessel and I recently had the opportunity to coordinate our haunted schedules and take a trip to Twickenham to visit one of the most unusual and, to my mind, beautiful houses in England.

Strawberry Hill is a unique building in English architecture – one that fits nowhere comfortably.  It is not a castle, nor a venerable ancestral seat, nor yet is it a picaresque folly or a classic English Villa.  What is, is drama, theatricality, the promise of dark mysteries and unfolding horror….In short, Strawberry Hill is as idiosyncratic, affected and inspired as the extraordinary man who created it.  A man who, saturated as he was with the gloomth and venerable barbarism he made fashionable, let his Gothic architectural masterpiece inspire his Gothic literary masterpiece…and thereafter spawn a whole genre of Gothic literature and popular culture.

Horace Walpole (1717 -1797): connoisseur, writer, art critic and gossip

Horace Walpole by Joshua Reynolds, 1756. Image Wikimedia.

It is hard to read any history or biography concerning the eighteenth century without coming across some usually acerbically witty observations from Horace Walpole.  A voluminous correspondent, writer and art critic, he was deeply concerned with recording events around him, seeing on the spot observations as valuable tools for historians.  From the Coronation of George II to the Cock Lane Ghost, Walpole was there to offer his spiky comments to his correspondents and to posterity.

He was born in 1717 into the powerful elite of eighteenth century society. His father, Sir Robert Walpole, was, in all but name, Britain’s first Prime Minister.  This is proved extremely beneficial for Horace, as his father ensured he never had to work by granting him 3 lucrative sinecures.  His mother, Catherine Shorter, whom he is said to have taken after, was from a family of eccentrics.

Walpole’s parents, hanging in the Blue Bed Chamber (the origial frame was re-created on a 3D printer).

Like most of his contemporaries Walpole rounded off his formal education with a Grand Tour to the continent.  From 1739 -1741, accompanied by his friend, the poet Thomas Gray, he traveled to Italy.  Temperamentally very different: Gray liked to spend hours studying historical sites, while Walpole preferred living it up and partying on down, they soon fell out [1].  This tour, and its cultural influence was to have an important impact on his later ideas for Strawberry Hill as he endeavored to re-create the ‘gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals’ at home.

English tourists on the Grand Tour, 18th Century image. Source BBC.

Horace Walpole, by Rosalba Carriera. Source Wikipedia.

By 1747, Sir Robert had been in his grave for two years, leaving Horace, his youngest son the lease on a London property and enough money to begin looking about for a country retreat. Nothing as grand as Houghton Hall where he had grown up, but something more bijou and compact. A bachelor pad, but with enough space for the chi-chi little house parties that Walpole was so fond of throwing.  It had to be somewhere fashionable, after-all Walpole was a man of taste and refinement, and it had to have good transport connections to the capital with its social and political scene.

At that time Twickenham was being what we would now call gentrified.  By the time Walpole went house-hunting, Twickenham’s rustic cottages had been transformed into stylish English Villa’s (such as the classically elegant Marble Hill, home to Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk, and long-suffering mistress of George II)  and real estate was in seriously short supply. Walpole was lucky though, and snapped up the last vacant plot – Chopp’d Straw Hall – from one Mrs Chenevix, a luxury ‘toy’ woman (think uber-posh geegaws for the very rich, rather than Barbie dolls and teddy bears for the proletariat).  This image of the house as an exquisite toy seemed to tickle Walpole and he often referred to his home in those terms:

“It is a little play-thing of a house that I got out of Mrs Chenevix’s shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw.”

He was to spend the next fifty years adding and elaborating on the original house – as Maev Kennedy wrote, Walpole achieved a:

‘spectacular conjuring trick [..] [a] miniature medieval castle wrapped around a modest little country house.’ [2]

How not to build English Villa – throwing away the rule book

Plate showing ‘the five orders’ from a book by da Vignola. 16th Century. Source Wikipedia.

From Palladio to Inigo Jones and Lord Burlington, by the eighteenth century the prevailing architectural fashion was Classical: symmetrical, ordered, regulated by the ‘noble rules’ and harking back to the roman country villa [3].

When Walpole chose to buck the trend and go Gothick, he was not the first. Vanbrugh and William Kent had been earlier trailblazers.  Where he was different was in using actual architectural examples to create a new Gothic building.  He was not adding a sympathetic extension, or restoring an existing Gothic building like Vanbrugh and Kent had done.  He was taking research and turning it into a reality, twisting the invariably Classical  English Villa into something more organic, more irregular, dramatic, more English.  And it was completely at odds with the dominant Classicism of the day.  As Michael Snoddin, curator at the V&A commented:

“The most striking external feature of Strawberry Hill was its irregular plan and broken picturesque silhouette.” [4]

It must have seemed shocking to his neighbors!

Yet, despite its oddity, it also fitted with the sensibility of the eighteenth century perfectly, the Picaresque movement was popular at the time, and the very nature of eighteenth century style was very feminine – think Rococo curves.  It also tapped into the growing interest of Antiquarians in the Medieval past of Britain, whilst not omitting modern conveniences, as Walpole was at pains to point out:

The Tribune, where Walpole displayed his most valued treasures.

“In truth, I did not mean to make my house so Gothic as to exclude convenience, and modern refinement in luxury.  The designs of the inside and outside are strictly ancient, but the decorations are modern.”

There was almost a national pride in the resurgence of the style – something that would become more pronounced in the 19th Century when the Victorian’s enthusiastically embraced the Gothic style of architecture.  Walpole certainly appreciated that England’s Medieval heritage needed to be preserved, and this is typified in his method of using actual examples of medieval decoration and interior design.  His preferred period was the Perpendicular period of 1330 – 1550, and this is evident at Strawberry Hill [5].

According to Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi:

“Horace Walpole used new materials, had amazing ideas, but utilized these to reinvest the past with excitement.  Both Georgian and Victorian Gothic architecture grew from a style which recalled the past but which was also the epitome of modernity.” [6]

Hence the term Strawberry Hill Gothic, or Gothick with a ‘k’ was coined,  to distinguish this modern Gothic from true Gothic style.

Detail of the Entrance hall wallpaper, a design taken from Prince Arthur’s tomb at Worcester cathedral.

My Fellow Goths

The Stunning Long Gallery

Although Walpole was the driving force behind Strawberry Hill, he also deferred to and acted upon the decor and design suggested by his Committee of Taste, his ‘fellow Goths’.  Membership varied over the years but the two most prominent members were John Chute, who specialized in early buildings, antiquarianism, and heraldry; with Richard Bentley influencing interiors, furniture and decoration.

Together Walpole and his Committee created a theatrical experience using a range of techniques: use of light (the windows are slightly larger than might be expected), the absence of light (blue glass and stained glass give a wonderful Gloomth to many of the rooms), use of vivid colour and rich gilding (one can only imagine how gorgeous the Long Gallery must have looked by candle-light – with its gilded fan vaults ablaze and casting eerie shadows on the walls).

Many of the rooms are vivid hues – the Blue Bed Chamber, the Rich Red of the Long Gallery, the purple of the Holbein Room. – while some rooms are muted – the entrance hall and staircase, the trunk-ceiled passage setting a more sombre scene.  Whereas today, the sheer peacockery of the place removes any sense of dark mystery or foreboding, in the eighteenth century the impression would have been quite different.

The Glorious Gloomth of the Library.

As Chalcraft and Viscardi note, Walpole used illusion to create a mood for each room – nothing is quite what it seems. Plaster, wood and paint imitate stone carvings, giving, as Sally Jeffrey observed, an almost illustrated delicacy to the building reminiscent of its academic sources [7]. Throughout the building, the vistas are carefully planned, the visitor moves through the house in a particular way,  the design and layout is immersive, intended to alter the mood of the viewer, or focus their attention on a particular object or scene.  Today, the house is sparsely furnished, but in Walpole’s day it was crammed with the six thousand objects he had collected, each placed for maximum impact and each with its own story to tell.

From darkness into the light. Planned vistas in Strawberry Hill.

No surprise then that the house has always attracted visitors, Walpole was even occasionally run out of his own home by the massed hordes of upper crust sight-seers, and he would retreat to a cottage nearby.  However, oh the whole he seemed to have rather enjoyed the attention, even going so far as to create rules for visitors and issuing the very first country house guide in 1774, for their edification.

Walpole’s rules for visitors to Strawberry Hill.

 The Castle of Otranto

Of course, the fame of Strawberry Hill also lies in it being the inspiration for the tale cited as the first ever Gothic Horror story – The Castle of Otranto.

On 9th March 1765 Horace Walpole wrote to the Rev William Cole:

” I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.  In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate…” [8]

Staircase, designed by Richard Bentley and inspired by Rouen cathedral, and the supposed setting of Walpole’s dream.

And so the Gothic Horror Genre was born. The story is rather like the house itself, which is not quite what it purports to be.  in 1764 Otranto was launched onto the reading public as an ancient Italian Tale, discovered in a remote library and translated by the antiquarian William Marshall.  Once its warm reception had been assured, subsequent editions named Walpole as the author.

Unfortunately, rather like the house itself, the tale has lost some of its sense of dread and mystery over the years, leaving a theatrical, slightly breathless melodrama in its stead: death by gigantic helmet, portraits coming to life, a rotting corpse hermit with a message from beyond the grave and swooning maidens aside, the tale does lay out the standard tropes enthusiastically adopted in later Gothic tales.  There is a cursed noble family, a long-lost heir, a doomed highborn beauty.  Earthly moral peril and otherworldly threat create dynamic tension and heighten the drama.

Mario Praz, in his excellent introduction to the Penguin edition, despite acknowledging The Castle of Otranto  to be the first of its genre, sees it as a rather weak example of  Gothic horror, noting somewhat dismissively that like Strawberry Hill itself, Otranto was merely – ‘Rococo in Gothic disguise’.  [9]

Walpole’s source of inspiration? Carceri series, by Piranesi. Image public domain, via Wikimedia.

Despite the modern criticisms, in the Eighteenth century the tale was a ‘best seller’. The popularity of the Castle of Otranto may seem to be a paradox in the Enlightened eighteenth century.  However, the century that prided itself on the rational and scientific progress was also a century that saw more and more people becoming urbanized and losing their connection to the countryside in the wake of ‘progress’.  Almost as a counterbalance to things becoming to rational and to classical, there was a growing interest in the picturesque and in Britain’s medieval past as people yearned to rediscover and reconnect with the chaos of nature.

In literature De Sade and in art Piranesi tapped into and exploited this desire for primordial chaos and destruction.  As Praz explains, a sensibility grew up where horror became a source of delight – charm and repulsion were combined and “the ‘beautiful horrid’ passed by insensible degrees into the ‘horribly beautiful'” [10]

Walpole can be seen in his creation of Strawberry Hill  and his writing of The Castle of Otranto successfully tapping into the zeitgeist of the mid-eighteenth century and in doing so became both a fore-runner of the Gothic  literature so popular later in the century and of the Gothic architectural style so beloved of the Victorians.

The armoury from the staircase.  A great plumed helmet, reminiscent of Otranto, can be seen in the middle arch.

So, despite Walpole’s fears that ‘My buildings are paper…and will all be blown away in ten years after I am dead’ both of his great works, Strawberry Hill and The Castle of Otranto, have survived the centuries to become culturally significant landmarks.

Strawberry Hill today

After Walpole’s death in 1797, Strawberry Hill suffered a checkered fate with some sympathetic and some not so sympathetic custodians.  Sadly, the famed collection was broken up and sold in the 1840’s.

The 19th Century Waldegrave Wing.

Restoration in progress – hand-woven sheets are laid out on the table.

By 2004 Strawberry Hill was listed as endangered by the World Monument Fund.    But, thanks to the Strawberry Hill Trust the house was saved.  The Trust are restoring the house to the state it was when Horace Walpole lived in it, so the colours are vivid and the textiles fresh.  The visitor may sometimes have difficulty telling what is ‘real’ and what is a reconstruction, but the overall effect is glorious and I feel sure Walpole would have approved.

It is the 300th anniversary of Horace Walpole’s birth next year, and as part of the celebrations the Trust planned to try to reunite Horace Walpole’s lost collection with Strawberry Hill.  Bringing together hundreds of items from all over the world is a huge undertaking, and now it looks like this won’t happen until 2018.  However, it should be well worth the wait.

To find out more about visiting Strawberry Hill, you can find their website at:

http://www.strawberryhillhouse.org.uk/

To find out more about the Walpole Collection, visit the Lewis Walpole Library:

http://www.library.yale.edu/walpole/

 Sources and notes

Images:  By Lenora unless otherwise stated.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Horace-Walpole-4th-earl-of-Orford [1]

Chalcraft, Anna and Viscardi, Judith, 2011, ‘Strawberry Hill Horace Walpole’s Gothic Castle’ Francis Lincoln Ltd [5] [6] [7] [and most quotes from Horace Walpole]

Fairclough, Peter, ed. and Praz, Mario, 1986, ‘Three Gothic Novels’, Penguin [8] [9]

Jeffery Sally, ‘Architecture’ in Ford, Boris, Ed, 1995, ‘The Cambridge Cultural History of Britain Vol 5 Eighteenth Century Britain’, Cambridge University Press [3] [7]

Kennedy, Maev, 25 Feb 2015, ‘Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole’s fantasy castle, to open its doors again’ , The Guardian.  https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/feb/25/strawberry-hill-horace-walpole-gothic-castle-otranto-open-again [2]

Walpole, Horace, republished 2016, ‘A Description of Strawberry Hill’ The Strawberry Hill Trust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Walpole [4]

 

 

 

Advertisements

George Selwyn – The Gentleman Sadist

Tags

blasphemy, Eccentrics, eighteenth century history, Engish History, Friars, George Selwyn, hangings, Hellfire club, Horace Walpole, Maria Fagiani, Mie Mie, Monks of Medmenham, necrophilia, tyburn

George Selwyn by Joshua Reynolds

“It is actually possible to become amateurs in suffering. I have heard of men who have travelled into countries where horrible executions were to be daily witnessed, for the sake of that excitement which the sight of suffering never fails to give, from the spectacle of a tragedy, or an auto-da-fe, down to the writhings of the meanest reptile on whom you can inflict torture, and feel that torture is the result of your own power. It is a species of feeling of which we never can divest ourselves.” (1)

So wrote Charles Maturin in his 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer – and the inspiration for this insight into the darker side of human nature?  George Selwyn (1719 -1791), heir to a fortune, kicked out of Oxford for Blasphemy, MP to a rotten borough (or two), rake, wit and notorious necrophile.

Drunken japes or bloody blasphemy?

George Selwyn, second son of a Gloucestershire gentleman farmer, was sent to Eton and Oxford as befitted his rank in society.  Here he met his lifelong friend the renowned wit and inveterate letter-writer Horace Walpole.  Although Horace Walpole would eventually become famous for his novel ‘The Castle of Otranto’ a novel that was the fore-runner of many a famous Gothic novel, at this early stage Selwyn seems to have had the edge on the darker-side of human nature.

In fact George’s Oxford career was cut rather short one drunken evening in July 1745.  Having somehow successfully blagged a local silversmith into to handing over a sacred chalice that was being repaired for a church, George set out to parody the Christian Holy Communion.  Gathering together his chums he filled the chalice with red wine and then “made signs as though he was blooding at one of his arms, did apply the neck of the bottle of wine into the said arm…”(2) Following this he uttered the blasphemous words “Drink this in remembrance of me.”(3)

In 1745 that was enough to have you drummed out of Oxford however drunk you claimed to be.  Even pandering to the anti-Catholic feelings of the day – by claiming to have been mocking transubstantiation – did not save Selwyn’s university career.  Not that he seemed to mind very much.

A Clubbable Man

White’s Club London, sited here since 1778. Image by Paul Farmer 2009 [via Wikimedia]

In the eighteenth century it was important for a man to be ‘clubbable’.  To be able to socialise amongst his peers with poise, elegance and wit.  Despite, or perhaps because of, the somewhat sleepily affable persona that Selwyn exuded he was a hit.  He soon became a well-known figure at clubs such as Brookes’ and White’s (White’s was so notorious for gambling that Hogarth satirised it as a club where if a man collapsed outside, his body would be dragged into the club so bets could be laid on whether he was dead or not). Like most of his peers he was a keen gambler (and the aforementioned wager would no doubt have appealed to Selwyn’s macabre side) and he also had a ready wit.  His Bon Mots were the talk of the town, and many a time ‘Selwyn’s last‘ was recorded for posterity by Horace Walpole.  One of my favourites is the following slightly saucy retort:

Princess Amellia, by Jean Baptiste Van Loo

“Asked if Princess Amelia would have a guard, he replied with some indelicacy ‘now and then one, I suppose'”  (4)

Wraxall described his style as: “eyes turned up, his mouth set primly, a look almost of melancholy on his whole fact.” (5) One can just imagine this lugubrious delivery just adding to its comedic effect.

He didn’t just restrict his membership to the more usual gaming and drinking clubs.  Selwyn was, according to Geoffrey Ashe, one of the fully paid up members of Sir Francis Dashwood’s Monks of Medmenham – otherwise know as the Hellfire Club.  (Of which more in future posts).

Selwyn didn’t let his political career get in the way of pursuing his favourite pass-times – in fact in 40 years as an MP he is not credited with a single political speech and his main contribution seems to have been in amusing his fellow MPs by ‘Snoring in unison with Lord North’(6)

However witty his Bon Mots were, and however uneventful his political career was, George Selwyn has come down through posterity as a necrophile and the model (along with Algernon Swinburne) for Edmond De Goncourt’s ‘Gentleman Sadist’ in his novel La Faustin – why was this?

A connoisseur of the macabre

The idle prentice hanged at Tyburn by Hogarth.

It was an age when it was not unusual for people to look forward to attending public hangings (even children were hanged).  So popular was this gruesome spectator sport that you could even buy premium ‘grandstand’ seats at Tyburn in  the so-called ‘Mother Proctor’s Pews’ – Roy Porter notes that for the hanging of the infamous Lord Ferrers (no relation to Katherine Ferrers of Wicked Lady fame) the pews raked in £500 in profit.  Yet despite this, George Selwyn’s well-known predilection for executions and death was considered somewhat extreme even in his own day – Walpole relates the following tale that illustrates Selwyn’s pre-eminence in the subject:

“[Selwyn] told him, as a most important communication, that Arthur Moore had had his coffin chained to that of his mistress. ‘Lord! how do you know?’ asked Horace. ‘Why, I saw them the other day in a vault at St. Giles’s.’ ‘Oh! Your servant, Mr. Selwyn,’ cried the man who showed the tombs at Westminster Abbey, ‘I expected to see you here the other day when the old Duke of Richmond’s body was taken up.'” 

The Wharton’s, in their book ‘The Wits and Beaux of Society’, point out that Selwyn was in some ways a man of contradictions – one minute the toast of polite society with his bon mots, the next rooting about in coffins and extorting confessions from criminals remarking of him that: “George Augustus Selwyn famous for his wit, and notorious for his love of horrors”

Lord Lovat, image Wikimedia

This mixture of wit and gloom came to the fore following the execution of Lord Lovat the captured Jacobite rebel.  Some ladies objected to his having witnessed the execution to which he replied:

“‘I made full amends, for I went to see it sewn on again.’ He had indeed done so, and given the company at the undertaker’s a touch of his favourite blasphemy, for when the man of coffins had done his work and laid the body in its box, Selwyn, imitating the voice of the Lord Chancellor at the trial, muttered, ‘My Lord Lovat, you may rise.'” (7)

Selwyn hated to miss an execution and often got friends to give him full reports of any that he was unable to attend – however he did have some scruples.  On being asked why he did not attend the hanging of a criminal named Charles Fox (the same name as his friend the Whig statesman Charles James Fox) he is reported to have said:

“I make it a point never to attend rehearsals.” (OUCH!)

The most famous and likely apocryphal story attached to George Selwyn is that he was mistaken for an executioner on a busman’s holiday when he was spotted at the execution of Damiens in 1757.  Damiens made a pretty feeble attempt on the life of King Louise XV of France and was sentenced to a gruesome death:  torture with red-hot pincers before being slowly ripped limb from limb by horses.  The whole process took hours (with the unfortunate Damiens being alive for a considerable part of it).  A sentimental lady is reported to have objected to the barbarity of the proceedings – because the horses were whipped. Who said only the British are animal lovers!

Selwyn was spotted pushing his way to the front of the crowd to get a ringside view of the torture when a gentleman spotted him.  He asked Selwyn if he was himself an executioner come to observe proceedings.  Selwyn made the unforgettable reply:

“No Monsieur, I have not that honour: I am but an amateur”

Damiens before the judges. 18C via Wikimedia

For all of his charm, wit and affable nature, there is something chilling in his love of watching the suffering of others and in his fondness for watching corpses exhumed.  It is likely that this particular story has simply attached itself to his legend (it is also told of others) and he was often the butt of fanciful tales spread about by his friends (and rivals) in wit.  Lord Chesterfield and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams have been cited by the Wharton’s as possible sources of this tale, and of the rumour that Selwyn sometimes dressed as a woman in order to attend executions incognito. Nevertheless it does not seem too far out of character for Selwyn that – given the chance – his connoisseurs palate would not have relished such a scene of horror as presented by Damien.

A slightly more amusing anecdote has Lord Holland, on his death-bed, advising a servant that:

“If Mr. Selwyn calls, let him in: if I am alive I shall be very glad to see him, and if I am dead he will be very glad to see me.”

Sometimes his friends were able to use his love of the death-bed and corpses to their own ends – one story associated with Selwyn’s time at Whites Club relates to the election of Sheridan as a member.  Selwyn did not want Sheridan, a mere theatrical, elected to a gentleman’s club.  The only way to stop him repeatedly black-balling Sheridan was for Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, in cahoots with Charles Fox, to trick him out of the club with the promise of a juicy death-bed to attend!

The twilight years

Mie Mie by George Romney

Although friends such as Walpole, the Duke of Queensberry and Lord Carlisle seemed to have esteemed Selwyn and thought him of good heart despite his foibles, one of his passions might seem a little off-putting to the modern reader.  Selwyn never married and claimed to have only slept with women seven times in his entire life, the last being when he was 29.  Instead he transferred his affections to children.

Two little girls were the focus of his attention:  Anne Coventry daughter of one of the beautiful Gunning sisters, and more lastingly Maria ‘Mie Mie’ Fagniani daughter of the high living Marchese Fagniani and the Duke of Queensberry.   Despite there being no question that he was not the father, he was so obsessed with Mie Mie (right from her infancy) that he succeeded in persuading the Marchese to leave her child with him when she returned to the continent.  By the late 1770’s she and Selwyn were embroiled in a bitter dispute over custody.  Eventually Selwyn seems to have won and spent the rest of his life fussing over Mie Mie, despite her eventual disdain for him.  In his will he left the girl £33,000 (which along with the £150,000 left to her by Queensberry made her a very eligible heiress).

George Selwyn was a feature in society long after it had come to view him as a bit of a relic.  His good friend the Duke of Queensberry provides this description of him at a society dinner:

“George Selwyn, (who lived for society and continued in it till he looked  really like the waxwork figure of a corpse)”

It seems a fitting epitaph for a man who loved death so much.  Selwyn finally succumbed of that most upper class of diseases: Gout, in 1791.

George Selwyn, (standing), and friends by Henry Graves

George Selwyn’s legacy

George Selwyn was a wit and a necrophile.  He didn’t participate in any major events, he was hardly a mover and a shaker.  Nevertheless he did leave a legacy.  A somewhat unenviable one, based on his love of the macabre and his membership of the notorious Hellfire Club.  It is in literature that he is still remembered:  from Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, to Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal, Or the Adventures of a Guinea; to Edmond de Goncort’s La Faustin where he is fused with that other reputed sadist Algernon Swinburne. Although it is worth noting that despite selwyn’s love of  torture and executions this seems to have been a voyeuristic pleasure, and though this does seem to qualify him as a sadist there is at least no evidence to suggest he was a sexual sadist.  (Small mercies perhaps…?)

Whatever the modern take on George Selwyn, it is apparent that his willing embrace of the darker side of human nature holds an enduring fascination – whether we like to admit to ourselves or not.

I will leave the final words to a contemporary of Selwyn, a poet who thought that Selwyn would be a suitable successor for the Devil should Old Nick ever need a day off….

“The murmurs hush’d – the Herald straight proclaimed
S-l-n the witty next in order name’d
But he was gone to hear the dismal yells
Of tortur’d ghost and suffering criminals.
Tho’ summoned thrice, he chose not to return,
Charmed to behold the crackling culprits burn
With George all know ambition must give place
When there’s an execution in place” (8)

Finis Gloria Mundi by Juan de Valdes Leal c1670 via Wikimedia

Notes

1.  Maturin, Charles, Melmoth the Wanderer, 1820
2. White, T.H., The Age of Scandal, 1950
3. Ibid
4. Ibid
5. Wharton, G and P, The Wits and Beaux of Society Vol2
6. ibid
7. ibid
8. Combe, William, The Diaboliad, 1777

Sources

Ashe, Geoffrey, The Hellfire Clubs, Sutton, 2005
http://www.bartleby.com/344/357.html
Gothic Labyrinth http://omni.sytes.net/selwyn.htm
Porter, Roy, Engish Society in the Eighteenth Century, Penguin, 1982
Wharton Grace and Philip, Ed Justin Huntley Mccarthy MP, The Wits and Beaux of Society Vol2, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10797 2004 ed
White, T.H, The Age of Scandal, Folio Society, 1993 ed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Augustus_Selwyn_%28politician%29