By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The 1760s was the decade of literary forgeries. One of the most famous forgeries which that decade produced, Horace Walpole’s 1764 book The Castle of Otranto, was responsible for founding the Gothic novel genre. Walpole, who was the son of the first de facto Prime Minister of Britain, Robert Walpole, claimed the story was a genuine medieval manuscript which had recently been discovered and translated. The literary world flocked to buy this exciting new book.