Cover of Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third by Horace Walpole Ebook Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third
Ebook · Urban Romantics

Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third

Author
Horace Walpole
Series
Timeless Classics
Language
English
Length
102 pages
ISBN
9781910343845
Published
15 August 2014
Imprint
Urban Romantics
  • Richard III
  • King Richard
  • gothic
  • gothic novel
  • prophecy
  • relationship
  • family
  • marriage
  • British novel

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Description

Horace Walpole challenges the Tudor portrait of Richard III as tyrant and child-murderer, the image Shakespeare and Thomas More helped fix in English memory. He examines the sources behind the Princes in the Tower, the charge of tyranny, and the tales of deformity, and asks how far bias and propaganda built that dark legacy. Not a full exoneration of the king, but a pioneering work of revisionist history: Enlightenment skepticism that still helps readers see how received “fact” can harden from political storytelling.

Author

Horace Walpole (1717–1797), son of Sir Robert Walpole, went to Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and built Strawberry Hill as a Gothic toy that became a style. The Castle of Otranto put a giant helmet on English fiction and invented a taste: vaults, lineage, a past that will not stay buried. Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third shows the same restless elegance on history. Wit, in a haunted corridor.

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