Hugh Walpole

Summary

Introduction

Given his illustrious literary forebears – the novelist and art historian Horace Walpole, and the novelist and chronicler Richard Harris Barham (usually known by his pseudonym Thomas Ingoldsby) – it appears quite fitting today that Hugh Walpole should have decided at an early age to become a man of letters. It was not, however, what his family had intended, for they marked him out for the clergy, following in the wake of his father, the Reverend Somerset Walpole, who was to become Bishop of Edinburgh in 1910. Somerset Walpole was the incumbent of the cathedral in Auckland, New Zealand, in the late nineteenth century, the coincidental result of which being that his eldest son, Hugh, shared with KM their country of birth. Only the very first years of Walpole’s life, however, were spent in New Zealand; when his father then moved on to his new incumbency in New York, his mother preferred to return to Britain, having long suffered from homesickness. Walpole thus grew up in Truro, in Cornwall, before going up to Cambridge to study history. He quickly evolved towards Cambridge’s more literary circles, however, especially under the influence of his long-term mentor and father-figure, the novelist A. C. Benson, who fostered Walpole’s lasting passion for the later nineteenth-century writers – Henry James, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad and Arnold Bennett. After an uninspired appointment as a lay teacher, he was encouraged by a former Cambridge friend, E. M. Forster, to take up a position as a tutor to a ‘British’ author based in Germany – it was thus, by coincidence, that he came to live for some months in the family of KM’s cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, who would become a life-long friend. Walpole soon took up novel-writing himself, publishing six between 1909 and the outbreak of the war – thereby initiating a rhythm of output that was maintained almost throughout his life.

Walpole took up journalism during the war, after being disqualified from military enrolment by very poor eyesight. This choice took him straight to Russia and the Eastern Front as the Daily Mail correspondent, which allowed him not only to report back in great depth on conditions in the trenches and field hospitals, but also to make extensive stays in Petrograd and Moscow, where he instinctively explored the world of arts and letters – especially among the entourage of Maxim Gorky.