British author
Born 1884 Died 1941
Hugh Seymour Walpole was born at Auckland in New Zealand on
the 13th March 1884, where his father George Henry Somerset Walpole, an
Anglican clergyman, was canon at the local St Mary's Cathedral. Hugh
spent some time in America when his father was employed at the
General Theological Seminary of New York City, but returned to
England in 1892 to be educated at a series of boarding-schools. He
began with Newham House in Truro, followed by Marlow in
Buckinghamshire, and then in 1896 went to King's School,
Canterbury, before ending up at Bede College in Durham in 1898
where his father had became principal. In 1902 he went up to
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he read history and graduated
in 1906.
His father wanted his son to follow him into the church, but a
brief period spent as a lay missioner at the Mersey Mission to
Seamen in Liverpool convinced everyone that his talents lay
elsewhere. He then became tutor to the children of the popular novelist
Elizabeth von Arnim and spent a year teaching French at Epsom
College in Surrey.
It could be said that Hugh Walpole had writing in his blood, as
he was related on his father's side to the novelist Horace Walpole
and on his mother's side to Richard Harris Barham, the author of
The Ingoldsby Legends. In his youth he edited a family
magazine which he called the Social Weekly or
Monthly as appropriate, and is said to have written a novel
at the age of twelve about Guy Fawkes for the entertainment of the
family cook.
After giving up teaching as a career he moved to London in 1909
and wrote book reviews for the Standard while working on his first
novel, The Wooden Horse which appeared in 1910. However
it was his third novel, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, an
account of two feuding schoolmasters, that established his
reputation, which was further enhanced by The Prelude to
Adventure, the story of a Cambridge undergraduate who commits
a murder, was later described by Carl Jung as "a psychological
masterpiece", and Fortitude, the most successful of his
early novels.
When World War I arrived he was rejected for military service
because of his poor eyesight and so went to Russia with his friend
Arthur Ransome where he became a Red Cross sanitar and was awarded
the George Cross for bravery after rescuing a wounded man under
fire. He ran the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau in Petrograd
for a time and experienced at first hand some of the early events of
the Russian Revolution. His Russian experiences formed the basis of
his novels The Dark Forest (1916) and The Secret
City (1919) both of which were well received, especially the
latter which was the inaugural winner of the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize for fiction.
After the war he settled at Piccadilly in London, and wrote
Jeremy, the first of what was to be a trilogy of
children's books, describing the adventures of eight-year-old Jeremy
Cole, resident of the imaginary town of Polchester in Glebeshire.
(And which were said to have been responsible for the increased
popularity of the name Jeremy afterwards.)
In 1923 he took a short holiday in the Lake District, and was
so taken by the area that he bought a home at Brackenburn Lodge
overlooking Derwentwater which he referred to as his "little
paradise on Catbells" and where he lived for the remainder of his
life. The Cumbrian landscape became the inspiration for his best-
known work, The Herries Chronicle, a family saga
comprising Rogue Herries (1930), Judith Paris
(1931), The Fortress (1932) and Vanessa (1933),
which recounted the history of the Herries family from the
eighteenth century until the mid-1930s. He also wrote a number of
macabre psychological horror novels such as Portrait of a Man
with Red Hair (1925) and The Killer and The Slain
(1942) and tried his hand at non-fiction producing critical studies
of the works of Joseph Conrad in 1916 and Anthony Trollope in
1928, two plays, and a number of autobiographical works.
In his day Walpole was a very successful writer on both sides of the Atlantic, being recognised by the award of a CBE in 1918 and a knighthood in 1937. He went on a series of five extensive and lucrative lecture tours in the United States between the years 1919 and 1936, which were said to have been the most popular since those of Charles Dickens. Walpole also spent some time Hollywood in the years 1934–1935 when he worked on the screenplays for the MGM productions of David Copperfield (1935) and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) and even played a bit part in the former.
In later life he began work on a new series of Herries novels, which would extend the saga back into the reign of Elizabeth I, the first of which was The Bright Pavilion (1940), but by this time he was suffering from diabetes and heart congestion. He was working on the next novel in the sequence, Katherine Christian, when he died of a heart attack at his home at Brackenburn on the 1st June 1941 after taking part in a parade at
nearby Keswick. He was buried at St John's church, Keswick where
his grave can be seen to this day, at the corner of the terrace on
the south side of the church, marked by a Celtic cross.
Hugh Walpole never married for the simple reason that he was
homosexual. When he lived in London he joined in with the 'fast
set' around Noel Coward, but after moving to the Lake District he
settled down, and from 1926 onwards his companion was a former
policeman Harold Cheevers who doubled up as his chauffeur.
Despite being amongst the well-regarded novelists of his day;
Rogue Herries was described by one critic as "the best novel
published in English since 'Jude the Obscure', and attracting the
praise of both J.B. Priestley and Arnold Bennett, Walpole is not
that well known today. This is partly because he was lampooned by
W. Somerset Maugham in his Cakes and Ale (1930) as a
literary opportunist named 'Alroy Kear', a portrait which coloured
later views of his work (Walpole was subjected to a "particularly venomous attack" in his obituary in The Times) but mainly because he "lost credit with critics especially as modernism flourished" according to Elizabeth Steele.
Although Hugh Walpole's work remains in copyright in the United Kingdom (at least until 2011) the law on copyright varies and Project Guttenberg does contain copies of some of his earlier works; see
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Walp
ole%2C%20Hugh%2C%20Sir%2C%201884-1941
Bibliography
Fiction
The Herries Chronicle
Other Herries Novels
The Jeremy triology
Other Novels
- The Wooden Horse (Elder, 1909)
- Marradick at Forty (Elder, 1910)
- Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (Boon, 1911)
- The Prelude to Adventure (Boon, 1912)
- Fortitude: Being a true and Faithful Account of the
Education of an Adventurer (Secker, 1913)
- The Duchess of Wrexe: Her Decline And Death, A Romantic
Commentary (Secker, 1914)
- The Dark Forest (Secker, 1918)
- The Green Mirror (Macmillan, 1918)
- The Secret City (Macmillan, 1919)
- The Captives (Macmillan, 1920)
- The Young Enchanted (Macmillan, 1921)
- The Cathedral (Macmillan, 1922)
- The Old Ladies (Macmillan, 1924)
- Portrait of a Man with Red Hair (Macmillan,
1925)
- Harmer John: An unwordly Story (Macmillan, 1926)
- Wintersmoon: Passages in the Lives of Two Sisters, Janet
and Rosalind Grandison (Macmillan, 1928)
- Farthing Hall (Macmillan, 1929)
with JB Priestly
- Hans Frost (Macmillan, 1929)
- Above the Dark Circus: An Adventure (Macmillan,
1931)
- Captain Nicholas (Macmillan, 1943)
- The Inquisitor (Macmillan, 1935)
- A Prayer for My Son (Macmillan, 1936)
- John Cornelius (Macmillan, 1937)
- The Joyful Delaneys (Macmillan, 1938)
- The Sea Tower (Macmillan, 1939)
- The Blind Man's House: A Quiet Story (Macmillan,
1941)
- The Killer and the Slain: A Strange Story (Macmillan,
1942)
Short Story Collections
Plays
Non-fiction
- Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study (Nisbet, 1916)
- The English Novel (CUP , 1925)
- Reading: An Essay (Jarrolds, 1928)
- Anthony Trollope: A Study (Macmillan, 1928)
- My Religious Experience (Benn, 1928)
- A Letter to a Modern Novelist (Hogarth, 1932)
- The Waverley Pageant (Eyre, 1932)
- The Apple Trees (Cockerel, 1932)
- Extracts from a Diary( Private, 1934)
- Roman Fountain (Macmillan, 1940)
- Open Letter of an Optimist (Macmillan, 1941)
REFERENCES
'Sir Hugh Walpole' www.visitcumbria.com/walpole.htm
Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Hugh Walpole's Weird Tales
http://www.violetbooks.com/walpole-bib.html
Hugh Walpole
www.kruse.demon.co.uk/walpole.htm
Time Magazine Monday, Jun. 11, 1923 He Wrote His First Novel for
the Family Cook
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,736119,00.html
Elizabeth Steele, ‘Walpole, Sir Hugh Seymour (1884–1941)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004