ABSTRACT

Romantic Adaptations', originating from the formal re-opening of Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill in March 2011, it is appropriate to reassess its famous owner's life-long engagement with, and mediation and remediation of, the culture of the world's most populous empire of the eighteenth century and beyond. Walpole, his contemporaries, and his romantic successors lived in a global context that involved them with consuming, reading, copying, adapting and mediating the products both intellectual and physical of the Qing Empire. In many ways, their influential precursor Walpole serves as an ideal focalizer for studies of what we now know of as the 'Global Eighteenth Century' which situates the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century within the context of the relationship of Western European industrial, technological, scientific and colonial progress to that of non-European societies. Both Walpole and Murphy were responding, in different ways, to the remarkable explosion of interest in Chinese things in the decade of the 1750s and beyond.