As the son of Britain’s first Prime Minister and the cousin of Lord Nelson, it is fair to say Horace Walpole enjoyed certain advantages in life. His father’s cronyism led to the young Horace being granted a series of lucrative and undemanding positions. At 20 he was earning £3,900 a year (the equivalent of £750,000 a year today) as Usher of the Exchequer, a role which involved the occasional opening and closing of office doors. At 22 he took a two year holiday around Europe and on his return at 24 he was elected MP for Callington, a town in Cornwall that he would represent for 13 years but never visit.
It is no great surprise that a man with this background coined the word serendipity, the fortunate discovery of things we may not have been actively seeking. The idea came to him when reading the English version of a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, with Serendip deriving from the Arabic name for Sri Lanka. The plot was driven by the Princes making chance discoveries, and so in 1754 Walpole describes such luck as “of that kind which I call serendipity”.
To give Walpole credit he had by this time distinguished himself as one of England’s great letter writers, and his legacy of quotable and enduring lines includes “this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel”. He also wrote a well-received Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, which would influence writers including Bram Stoker and Edgar Allen Poe. Walpole’s interest in the Gothic also extended to architecture, and Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham with which he introduced the Neo-Gothic style to England is still standing today. His life is a good example of serendipity in action.
It would take over two centuries for the word serendipity to make its own impact. A 1955 reference in the Scientific American reflected that “discovery often depends on chance” and usage of the word serendipity became more common as the 20th century drew to a close. In 2001, it received the Hollywood seal of approval as the title of a romantic comedy in which two lovers are reunited by chance. Horace Walpole, who never married, might have envied their good luck.
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