Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, intended for a career in the church but drawn instead to writing. Among those who encouraged him were the authors Henry James and Arnold Bennett. His skill at scene-setting and vivid plots, as well as his high profile as a lecturer, brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s but has been largely neglected since his death.
After his debut novel, The Wooden Horse, was published in 1909, Walpole wrote prolifically, producing at least one book every year. He was a spontaneous story-teller, writing quickly to get all his ideas on paper, seldom revising. His first novel to achieve major success was his third, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, a tragicomic story of a fatal clash between two schoolmasters. During the First World War he served in the Red Cross on the Russian-Austrian front, and worked in British propaganda in Petrograd and London. In the 1920s and 1930s Walpole was much in demand not only as a novelist but also as a lecturer on literature, making four exceptionally well-paid tours of North America.
As a gay man at a time when sex between men was illegal in Britain, Walpole conducted a succession of intense but discreet relationships with other men, and was for much of his life in search of what he saw as "the perfect friend". He eventually found one, a married policeman, with whom he settled in the English Lake District. Having as a young man eagerly sought the support of established authors, he was in his later years a generous sponsor of many younger writers. He was a patron of the visual arts and bequeathed a substantial legacy of paintings to the Tate Gallery and other British institutions.
Walpole's output was large and varied. Between 1909 and 1941 he wrote thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two original plays and three volumes of memoirs. His range included disturbing studies of the macabre, children's stories and historical fiction, most notably his Herries Chronicle series, set in the Lake District. He worked in Hollywood writing scenarios for two Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films in the 1930s, and had a cameo in the 1935 film adaptation of David Copperfield.
Walpole was born in Auckland, New Zealand, the eldest of three children of the Rev Somerset Walpole and his wife, Mildred Helen (née Barham). Somerset had been an assistant to the Bishop of Truro, Edward White Benson, from 1877 until 1882, when he was offered the incumbency of St Mary's Cathedral, Auckland; on Benson's advice he accepted.
Mildred Walpole found it hard to settle in New Zealand, and something of her restlessness and insecurity affected the character of her eldest child. In 1889, two years after the birth of the couple's daughter, Dorothea ("Dorothy"), Somerset Walpole accepted a prominent and well-paid academic post at the General Theological Seminary, New York. Robert ("Robin"), the third of the couple's children, was born in New York in 1892. Hugh and Dorothy were taught by a governess until the middle of 1893, when the parents decided that he needed an English education.
Walpole was sent to England, where according to his biographer Rupert Hart-Davis the next ten years were the unhappiest time of Walpole's life. He first attended a preparatory school in Truro. Though he missed his family and felt lonely he was reasonably happy, but he moved to Sir William Borlase's Grammar School in Marlow in 1895, where he was bullied, frightened and miserable. He later said, "The food was inadequate, the morality was 'twisted', and Terror – sheer, stark unblinking Terror – stared down every one of its passages ... The excessive desire to be loved that has always played so enormous a part in my life was bred largely, I think, from the neglect I suffered there".
In 1896 Somerset Walpole discovered his son's horror of the Marlow school and he moved him to the King's School, Canterbury. For two years he was a fairly content, though undistinguished, pupil there. In 1897 Walpole senior was appointed principal of Bede College, Durham, and Hugh was moved again, to be a day boy for four years at Durham School. He found that day boys were looked down on by boarders, and that Bede College was the subject of snobbery within the university. His sense of isolation increased. He continually took refuge in the local library, where he read all the novels of Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, and many of the works of Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins and Henry Kingsley. Walpole wrote in 1924:
I grew up ... discontented, ugly, abnormally sensitive, and excessively conceited. No one liked me – not masters, boys, friends of the family, nor relations who came to stay; and I do not in the least wonder at it. I was untidy, uncleanly, excessively gauche. I believed that I was profoundly misunderstood, that people took my pale and pimpled countenance for the mirror of my soul, that I had marvellous things of interest in me that would one day be discovered.
Though Walpole was no admirer of the schools he had attended there, the cathedral cities of Truro, Canterbury and Durham made a strong impression on him. He drew on aspects of them for his fictional cathedral city of Polchester in Glebeshire, the setting of many of his later books. Walpole's memories of his time at the King's School, Canterbury grew mellower over the years; it was the only school he mentioned in his Who's Who entry.
Cambridge, Liverpool and teaching
From 1903 to 1906 Walpole studied history at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. While there he had his first work published, the critical essay "Two Meredithian Heroes", which was printed in the college magazine in autumn 1905. As an undergraduate he met and fell under the spell of A. C. Benson, formerly a greatly loved master at Eton, and by this time a don at Magdalene College. Walpole's religious beliefs, hitherto an unquestioned part of his life, were fading, and Benson helped him through that personal crisis. Walpole was also attempting to cope with his homosexual feelings, which for a while focused on Benson, who recorded in his diary in 1906 an unexpected outburst by his young admirer: "[H]e broke out rather eagerly into protestations – He cared for me more than anyone in the world. I could not believe it ... It is extraordinarily touching. ... It is quite right that he should believe all this passionately; it is quite right that I should know that it will not last ... I tried to say this as tenderly as I could ..."
Benson gently declined Walpole's advances. They remained friends, but Walpole, rebuffed in his "excessive desire to be loved", turned the full force of his enthusiasms elsewhere, and the relationship with Benson became less important to him. Less than two years later Benson's diary entry on Walpole's subsequent social career reveals his thoughts on his protégé's progress:
He seems to have conquered Gosse completely. He spends his Sundays in long walks with H. G. Wells. He dines every week with Max Beerbohm and R Ross ... and this has befallen a not very clever young man of 23. Am I a little jealous? – no, I don't think so. But I am a little bewildered ... I do not see any sign of intellectual power or perception or grasp or subtlety in his work or himself. ... I should call him curiously unperceptive. He does not, for instance, see what may vex or hurt or annoy people. I think he is rather tactless – though he is himself very sensitive. The strong points about him are his curiosity, his vitality, his eagerness, and the emotional fervour of his affections. But he seems to me in no way likely to be great as an artist.
With Benson's help, Walpole had come to terms with the loss of his faith. Somerset Walpole, himself the son of an Anglican priest, hoped that his eldest son would follow him into the ministry. Walpole was too concerned for his father's feelings to tell him he was no longer a believer, and on graduation from Cambridge in 1906 he took a post as a lay missioner at the Mersey Mission to Seamen in Liverpool. He described that as one of the "greatest failures of my life ... The Mission to Seamen was, and is, a splendid institution ... but it needs men of a certain type to carry it through and I was not of that type." The head of the mission reprimanded him for lack of commitment to his work, and Walpole resigned after six months.