Introduction

Horace Walpole was Member of Parliament for Callington, Cornwall, Castle Rising, Norfolk and Kings Lynne, Norfolk and member of the Society of Antiquaries from 1753. The formation of the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Dilettante played a crucial role in the Enlightenment in disseminating discourses and providing a forum for public participation and debate where factual observation, ideas, hypotheses and projects could be presented to a like-minded audience. Strawberry Hill represents, in microcosm, the philosophical and cultural context of the Enlightenment with its commemorative portraits, busts, paintings, sculptural antiquities, eclectic range of artefacts and its library. Historians traditionally dealt with tracing political events, heavily reliant on the accounts of the classical authors and writers considered to be contemporary with events. The collecting of coins and medals marked the eighteenth-century gentleman as much as collecting art, sculpture, drawings and natural history objects.