Horatio Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford (1717-1797), known as Horace Walpole, was an English art historian, antiquarian, and Whig politician, best known for his first Gothic Novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764). His works inspired great Gothic author such as Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and perhaps even Edgar Allan Poe. Because of Walpole's superstitious elements, combining history with fiction, intellectuals of the Englightenment were offended by its "fake" facts. We like the folks at Cambridge's reaction: the book "made some of them cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights."
