Unlike Johnson, who praises this development for making literature morally relevant to its audience and raising it above mere entertainment, Walpole laments the loss of “fancy” that characterized prose fiction-romance-from late antiquity to the 17th century. 4: the movement of fiction toward realism, a mode that aspires to tell invented stories about common people in a style that emphasizes social and psychological verisimilitude. Walpole here observes the same trend noted by Dr.
Invention has not been wanting but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. In the former, all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In his preface to the second edition, to which Walpole appended his own name, he writes: It not only set off a craze for novels about haunted castles and abbeys, about predatory dukes and scheming monks and fainting maidens, all necessary popular accompaniments to Romanticism’s more philosophical critique of Enlightenment rationality, it also changed the novel form. Published pseudonymously in 1764 by an English politician, The Castle of Otranto is usually praised as the first Gothic novel.
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