Education: The Walpologist

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With a twinkle in his eye and mock solemnity in his voice, handsome, white-haired Wilmarth S. Lewis gazed at his New Haven audience and declared: "The year 1933 is memorable for three events: Hitler's accession to full power, the first Inaugural of Franklin Roosevelt, and the start of the Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence. Ladies and gentlemen, which of these events is, so to say, still going strong?"

Horace Walpole's correspondence, of course. No one knows it better than Lewis, a remarkably dedicated scholar who has kept the extraordinary project going since its start. As Yale and Lewis celebrated the undertaking's 40th anniversary last week, the edition stood at 37 three-inch-thick dark blue volumes. When the 50th and last volume is published (probably some time in 1978), the edition will contain, with meticulous annotation and indexing, 7,000 letters written or received by Walpole, the witty dilettante and social chronicler of 18th century England.

As the son of Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole and a Member of Parliament himself for 26 years, Horace was in a position to observe the haul monde of his time. Though he also wrote political diaries, art books and fiction (his The Castle of Otranto is the prototype of the gothic novel), Walpole wielded his pen effectively and entertainingly in writing letters to such friends as Poet Thomas Gray and Diplomat Sir Horace Mann. Sensing his correspondence's value to posterity, the bachelor author once said: "Nothing gives so just an idea of an age as genuine letters. History waits for its last seal from them."

Lewis emphatically agrees. While some 40,000 volumes of the Yale edition have been sold (at $20 each), Lewis does not expect many scholars to read the complete set. "But," he adds, "no serious student of this period can afford to overlook this work. It has become the encyclopedia of the 18th century." It has also become, for Lewis, the culmination of a lifetime devoted to collecting.

Now 77, Lewis started collecting things as a youngster. "My first attempt was with houseflies," he recalls. "I kept them in a cigar box until somebody threw them out without my knowledge." Undaunted, he moved on to sea shells, stamps, coins, butterflies and finally books. By 1923, Lewis had acquired 1,000 books of English literature. "I really didn't care about them," he says. "Yet I knew if I could get interested in one person, I could have a direction for life." Through pure serendipity*—a chance remark of a friend at a dinner party—Lewis came upon the writings of Walpole and found a direction.

Delicious Dust. In a consuming search for Walpoliana, Lewis alerted bookmen, placed ads in newspapers and spent endless hours in libraries and bookstores. "I have had my share of dust," he says, "and it has been delicious. I saw all the unwanted Walpoliana lying about and felt like Sinbad in the Cave of Diamonds." He gleefully made off with prints once owned by Walpole that he saw hanging unrecognized in friends' houses. Once he tracked down 400 letters Walpole had written to a lady friend; they had languished in a London attic wrapped in old corset strings.