Horace Walpole’s Gothic Castles, Part 1

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. Today we are going to talk
about Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of a Toronto,
which is often cited as the first Gothic novel, although
as is the case with everything.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
There are all.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Kinds of precursors that a person could point to that
have some elements of the Gothic. In addition to writing
a novel that treated a foreboding castle almost as a
character on its own, Horace Walpole also spent a chunk
of his life turning the villa he bought in Twickenham
into a Gothic style castle of his own. So he

(00:53):
helped launch both Gothic literature as a genre and a
Gothic revival in art architecture. This was an accidental two parter. Honestly,
it was clear to me just in the bookmarking my
sources process that it was probably going to wind up
being two parts. A whole lot happened in his life.

(01:15):
I found a lot of it really interesting. Most of
the Gothic stuff is going to be in part two,
you're in a particularly halloweeny mood. Most of that is
in the next episode.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
There you Go. Horace Walpole was born on September twenty fourth,
seventeen seventeen, and his parents named him Horatio, but he
always liked the name Horace better. The family was not
part of the nobility, but they were well established, prominent,
and influential. Horace's mother, Catherine Shorter, was from a merchant
family who had made their money in Baltic timber. His

(01:50):
father has come up on the show before, in our
episode on the South Sea Bubble. He was Robert Walpole,
who would later be named First Earl of Orford. As
the title Prime Minister was not being used in the
UK at that point, Robert Walpole started carrying out what
was basically that role when Horace was about three, and
that continued for more than twenty years. Horace was the

(02:14):
last of Catherine and Robert's children, and he was eleven
years younger than his brother Edward, who was the next
oldest sibling. I think he might have had at least.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
One sibling who was born in that period who died
as a baby, but I had some trouble actually confirming
that Katherine and Robert's marriage had started out happily, but
in the years after Edward's birth it had become increasingly strained.
By the time Horace was born, Catherine was fulfilling the

(02:45):
basic persona of the wife of a high ranking member
of the British government, but it was basically an open
secret that she and Robert were living almost completely separate lives,
and that both of them were having affairs.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Meanwhile, in the words of biographer Dorothy Margaret Stewart, Horace
was a quote fragile, dark eyed elf of a child,
and he was so thin that people were constantly commenting
on it. And in that way he did not physically
resemble Robert at all. So this gap between him and
his older siblings, and the state of his parents' marriage,

(03:21):
and the fact that he did not look like his father,
led to rumors that he was really the son of Carr,
Lord Hervey, who was a member of Parliament for Bury,
Saint Edmund's. One source of this rumor was Lady Mary
Wartley Montague, whose granddaughter Lady Luisa Stuart, revived it in
memoirs that she wrote after Horace Walpole's death. Mary Whartley

(03:43):
Montague was very close to Maria Scarrett, who Robert had
a year's long affair with and who he married after
Catherine's death.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Horace, though never really expressed any questions or doubts about
his parentage, and it's not clear whether he even knew
that this rumor was floating around. Robert also didn't really
treat him as though he thought Horace might really be
somebody else's child, and Dorothy Margaret Stewart noted that while

(04:12):
Horace might not have looked like Robert, he did look
like Lady Mary Churchill, who was Robert's daughter with Maria Scarrett,
so maybe there was a family resemblance, just not the
one that people were expecting.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Sometimes jeans expressed differently in different children. As the baby
of the family, whose health was described in terms like
sickly and fragile, Horace was really doted on by his mother.
For a while, he was tutored along with some of
his cousins, and then in April of seventeen twenty seven,
at the age of nine, he left home to start

(04:47):
school at Eton College. Eaton is a prestigious school, but
like other British boarding schools of the era, its culture
was built on hazing and bullying. In other words, it
was kind of place that could be really inhospitable to
a child who was chronically ill and had spent the
first years of his life being coddled by his mother.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
Horace may have had some protection from this thanks to
the fact that his father was one of the most
powerful people in the British government, but he also formed
tight friendships with three other boys, Thomas Gray, Thomas Ashton,
and Richard West. Horace made other friends at school too,
and he was particularly close to his cousin Henry Seymour Conway,

(05:31):
who was also at Eton, But these four boys formed
a particularly close group that they called the Quadruple Alliance.
They all looked after each other, they all supported each other,
they cultivated their mutual love of reading and writing literature
and verse. Thomas Gray would go on to be one

(05:52):
of the most well known and important British poets of
the eighteenth century. Folks may know him from elegy written
in a country churchyard, which was foreshore, an English class
staple when I was in high school. That's the one
that starts, the curfew tolls, the knell of parting day,
the lowing herd winds slowly, or the lee the plowman

(06:16):
homeward plods his weary way and leaves the world to
darkness and to me.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
Walpole's father intended for him to study law and entered
him into Lincoln's Inn, one of the four inns of Court,
but Horace did not care for law, so he never
actually went. In seventeen thirty four, after finishing at Eton,
he went on to King's College, Cambridge. Thomas Gray and
Thomas Ashton both went to Cambridge as well, and they

(06:44):
all maintained their friendships with each other and with West
as he went to christ Church, Oxford. Walpole didn't really
enjoy his time in Cambridge, though he mostly tolerated it
thanks to the presence of his friends and some of
his cousins who were also studying there. He also left
Cambridge without finishing his coursework. He didn't specifically.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
Say why, but a lot of people connected it to
the death of his mother, Catherine on August twentieth, seventeen
thirty seven. It is possible that this was a factor,
and he did take some long breaks from Cambridge, but
he didn't formally withdraw until more than a year and
a half after she'd died. Horace was truly devastated by

(07:28):
his mother's death, which isn't surprising considering how close they were.
Some of the people who knew him described him as
never quite the same again. Another layer to this was
that Horace's father really didn't seem to be affected by
Catherine's death at all. Within about six months, Robert had
married Maria Scaret in a lavish ceremony. As we said earlier,

(07:51):
he and Maria had been having an affair for years,
and they had already had two daughters together, one of
whom died in childhood. But Maria also died in June
of seventeen thirty eight following a pregnancy loss. Later on,
Robert secured a patent of precedence for their one surviving
daughter so that she could be recognized as the daughter

(08:11):
of an earl. From that point she was known as
Lady Maria Walpole and then Lady Maria Churchill after getting married,
and that was the person people thought Horace looked like.
Seventeen thirty eight was also the year Horace Walpole attained
his majority, and his father arranged some sinecures for him,
that is, jobs that he got a financial benefit from,

(08:35):
but did not require him to actually do much work.
He was named Usher of the Exchequer, Controller of the Pipe,
and Clerk of the Streets, which were transcripts of records
as an example of what kind of work these appointments involved.
As Usher of the Exchequer, Horace Walpole was responsible for
shutting the gates of the Exchequer building and making sure

(08:58):
that the clerks who actually worked they had enough paper
and sand and ink and scissors and stuff like that.
Basically what we would consider a really low level, entry
level kind of job, except it paid grown up wages. Yeah,
you didn't even have to go to work every day necessarily.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
Walpole seems to have had at least some self awareness
about the inequity involved in this whole setup. Later in
his life there was an investigation into this system, and
he wrote at length about these positions and the people
who held them. He wrote, in part quote, patent places
for life have existed from time immemorial, by law and

(09:37):
under all changes of government. He who holds an ancient
patent place enjoys it as much by law as any
gentleman holds his estate, and by more ancient tenure than
most gentlemen hold theirs. And from the same fountain only
of ancient or date, than many of the nobility and
gentry hold their estates, who possess them only by grants

(09:57):
from the Crown, as I possess my places, which were
not wrung from the Church and in violation of the
intention of the donors, as a vast number of estates were.
Nor can I think myself as a patent placement, a
more useless or a less legal engrosser of part of
the wealth of the nation than deans and prebendaries, who
fatten on Christianity like any less holy incumbent of a fee.

(10:21):
While there are distinctions of ranks and unequal divisions of
property not acquired by personal merit, but by birth or favors,
some will be more fortunate than others. The poor are
most entitled to complain. But an archdeacon or a country
gentleman has very little grace in complaining that any other
unprofitable class is indulged by the laws in the enjoyment

(10:45):
of more than an equal share of property with the
meanest laborer or lowest mechanic. He went on to say, quote,
having said this with the confidence that does not misbecome
a legal possessor. I am far from protect any other plea,
much less to any merit in myself. A tender parent

(11:06):
lavished riches on me greatly beyond my dessert, of which
I am so little conscious in myself that if the
distress of the public require a revocation of gifts bestowed
by the Crown in its splendor, I know no man
who can plead fewer services to his country or less
merit in himself than I can. He also seems to

(11:30):
have tried to avoid the various ways these positions could
be involved in corruption, like if some politician was suggesting
he might get paid a little extra, or tried to
withhold his pay to get him to do something, he
generally just ignored it and went on with his very
minimal work.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
While Paul's appointments to these positions also did not prevent
him from spending a couple of years traveling around Western
Europe while still being paid starting in seventeen thirty nine.
Have more on that after a sponsor break. It's possible

(12:12):
that Horace Walpole was motivated to get away from England
in seventeen thirty nine because he had just been through
some kind of a breakup Thomas Gray wrote him a
letter the year before in which he expressed surprise about
Walpole's news. He doesn't say specifically what the news was,
but it's really clear from the language that it was

(12:34):
a relationship with a woman. Gray frames all of this
as quote of all likely things the last I should
have believed would come to pass, and in the letter
he also wishes his friend joy. It is not clear
who this relationship might have been with. There's some speculation
that it was one of his cousins on the Conway side.

(12:58):
When Horace set out for his grand tour of the
continent in seventeen thirty nine, Thomas Gray went with him.
While these two men had been friends for years, there
was a huge disparity between them in terms of their
family's wealth and position. Horace's father was essentially the Prime Minister,
and Horace had been given positions that were providing him

(13:18):
with an income of about nine hundred pounds a year,
which was enough for him to live on and to
travel on his own money. These kinds of comparisons are
always really messy and inexact, but this would be an
equivalent to very approximately one hundred and six thousand pounds
or one hundred and forty thousand dollars today. Meanwhile, Thomas's

(13:41):
father was a scrivener and his mother and aunt owned
a millinery business together. They weren't poor by any stretch,
but Thomas was one of twelve children and they had
to be frugal. Thomas was able to go to Eton
because two of his mother's brothers worked there, and his
education at Cambridge was paid for with scholarship and his
mother's earnings from the millinery shop. Before leaving, Walpole secretly

(14:05):
wrote out a will that would leave everything to Gray
if he died during their journey. This disparity in their
financial positions caused some tension during their travels. There was
no way not to notice that Walpole was the one
who was paying for everything, and that started to bother
Gray after a while. They also just had very different temperaments.

(14:30):
Walpole was enjoying himself, he was going to dinners and parties,
but over and over, Gray's letters say that he's writing
to whoever he's corresponding with from their rooms alone while
Walpole was out, and that Gray had not gone out
with him even though he had been invited to. Gray

(14:50):
was also a lot more interested in taking in all
of the artwork and the cultural sites of the continent
than Walpole really was.

Speaker 1 (14:58):
Walpole and Gray spent two w months in Paris and
then traveled around Reims de Jean Leon and into the
French Alps. From there, they decided to spend the winter
in Italy. Pope Clement the twelfth died on February sixth,
seventeen forty, and the two men made their way toward
Rome with the thought that they might be there when
the new pope was elected. That didn't wind up happening, though,

(15:22):
Clement's successor, Benedict the fourteenth, wasn't elected until July, and
by that point they had decided to move on. They
had some discussions about this which were like, well, what
if we leave and then the new pope is elected
like tomorrow. For Walpole's part, the idea of seeing the
new pope elected really was not about religion. It was

(15:45):
about the spectacle that would be involved with that. Walpole
had a number of pretty anti Catholic views. Some of
that came through in his writing on patent places that
we read before the break. Of course, France and Italy
were both dominantly Catholic countries, but since Rome is also
home to the Vatican, Catholicism was seemingly inescapable there.

Speaker 2 (16:09):
Walpole did not really like that.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
Aside from that, Pope Clement had given James Francis Edward Stewart,
also known as the Old Pretender, a place to live
in Rome, and the Jacobite court in exile was a
popular stop on tours of the continent, regardless of a
person's religion, So as a quick recap, James Edward was
the son of deposed King of England, James the Second

(16:34):
of the House of Stuart, and the Jacobites wanted to
restore the Stewarts to the throne of England. Not long
after this, James Edward's son, Charles Edward Stewart, known as
Bonnie Prince Charlie, would lead an uprising in an effort
to overthrow King George the Second and put his father
on the throne. We covered this on the show on
July fourth of twenty sixteen. Of course, Walpole's father was

(16:58):
King George's Prime minister. While Walpole had some sympathies for
the plight of James supporters, especially as they faced political oppression,
he did not agree with the Jacobites goals, and he
did not like how many Jacobites there were in Rome.
Walpole was definitely at some of the same social events
as James Edward and his sons, but it isn't clear

(17:19):
whether he actually spoke to any of them.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
Later on, in Tuscany, Walpole met thirty four year old
British diplomat Sir Horace Mann, and they would be close
for the rest of Man's life. They maintained this friendship
for more than forty years, entirely through letter writing, because
while Walpole made several trips to France later on, he
never went back to Florence in Italy. When Walpole and

(17:45):
Gray left Florence, Mann wrote Walpole a letter in which
he said, quote, I am more miserable than I wish
you to conceive, and therefore will not attempt to describe
it to you. Neither would I willingly give you a
moment's uneasiness. One thing alone makes me really happy, which
is that I am sure you love me and are

(18:07):
convinced of my most sincere and tender affection for you.
This is all I can say on this subject, though
it employs every moment of my thoughts. Italy had a
reputation for being more sexually liberated and unrestrained than England,
and it was common for upper class English visitors to
take advantage of that. Walpole had various flirtations while he

(18:29):
was there, including with Elizabeta Capponi, the wife of Marquees Graffoni.
Their speculation about whether any of these relationships were physical,
with different historians coming to different conclusions they could be
emotionally very intense, though Elizabetha Capponi is described as weeping
over Horace Walpole long after he left her behind. Walpole

(18:53):
and Gray stops traveling together in May of seventeen forty one.
It might have been that the diffrences and their finances
and their temperament and interest just gradually led to a
breach in their relationship, or there could have been some
kind of incident that led to a falling out that
neither of them explicitly documented. We don't really know at

(19:15):
the time, though Gray's letters made it sound like he
was just kinda tired of this whole experience, including all
of the socializing and the travel.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
Walpole, on the other hand, took responsibility for it, writing
quote it arose from Gray being too serious a companion.
Gray was for antiquities. I was for perpetual balls and plays.
The fault was mine. But later on Walpole wrote a
letter to his friend George Montague that was pretty harsh
toward Gray. Quote, he is the worst company in the world,

(19:47):
from a melancholy turn, from living reclusely, and from a
little too much dignity. He never converses easily. All his
words are measured and chosen and formed into sentences. His
writings are admirable. He himself is not agreeable. Whatever his
feelings were.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
Walpole made arrangements for all of Gray's expenses to be covered,
once again doing this in secret. I have various questions
about how whether Gray would have just thought this was
obvious that somebody was paying all of his bills. But regardless,
Gray left for Venice, Walpole stayed behind in Reggio. It

(20:26):
is possible that Walpole thought this was just kind of
a temporary disagreement and he'd be able to go to
Venice and catch up with Gray. But he got sick
and that became impossible. It started out with an attack
of tom solitis, and from there Walpole became very ill
and nearly died. He had gone without medical care for
some time. This was probably a combination of underestimating how

(20:49):
sick he really was and also not trusting the local doctors. Eventually,
Henry Pelham Clinton, the Earl of Lincoln, and his tutor
Joseph Spence got help for Walpole, including sending for a
doctor they personally knew and could vouch for.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
Once he had recovered, Walpole started making his way back
to England. He arrived in London on September fourteenth, seventeen
forty one, and we'll talk more about that after we
pause for a sponsor break.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
When he got back to England, Horace Walpole lived with
his father, Robert, including at Robert's neoclassical estate of Houghton
Hall in Norfolk. Horace had already been elected to serve
as MP for Callington in Cornwall, which was a borough
that his family had connections to but which he had
personally never visited. Then he was elected to represent Castle

(21:51):
Rising in seventeen fifty four. This, like Callington, was known
as a rotten borough. Basically, these were boroughs that still
had to MP's in the House of Commons, but they
had almost no voters actually living there, both to vote
for these MPs, and for the MPs to represent MPs

(22:11):
from these boroughs were a lot of the times pretty
much handpicked by people in power. Then in seventeen fifty seven,
Horace Walpole followed his uncle and namesake, also named Horace Walpole,
to represent King's Lynn, and he served as MP for
kings Lynn until seventeen sixty nine.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
We're putting all of Horace Walpole's time in the House
of Commons together because there really isn't all that much
to say about it. He served in Parliament through a
series of notable historical events in England, including the Jacobite Rising,
the Seven Years' War, and rising tensions between England and
its colonies in the Americas. He left extensive documentation of

(22:53):
a lot of these events through his correspondence with other
people as they were happening. But he wasn't all that
acting or visible as an MP, and he did more
of his work kind of behind the scenes. In his words,
he was a quote person who loves to write history
better than to act in it. His first speech before

(23:13):
Parliament was on March twenty third of seventeen forty two.
His father had become increasingly unpopular and had lost a
lot of power. Younger politicians were also starting to see
Robert Walpole as too old and too out of touch
to be in the position that he was in. The
Walpoles were Whigs, and Robert eventually lost the support of

(23:36):
that party. He was forced to resign on February second,
seventeen forty two. Trus's speech the following month was in
defense of his father and critical of a proposal to
investigate Robert's last ten years in office. Meanwhile, the King
named Robert Walpole Earl of Orford and granted him an

(23:58):
annual pension of four thousands. We do have a sense
of some of Walpole's opinions based on correspondence around what
was happening in Parliament. In February of seventeen fifty, the
Royal African Company was under attack and had sought reinforcement.
The company had a monopoly on trade in West Africa

(24:18):
and was also a major part of the Transatlantic slave trade.
After these debates, Walpole wrote in a letter quote we
the British Senate that Temple of Liberty and bulwark of
Protestant Christianity have this fortnight been considering methods to make
more effectual that horrid traffic of selling negroes. It has
appeared to us that six and forty thousand of these

(24:41):
wretches are sold every year to our plantations alone. It
chills one's blood. I would not have to say I
voted for it. For the continent of America. The destruction
of the miserable inhabitants by the Spaniards was but a
momentary misfortune that followed from the discovery of the New World,
compared with the lasting havoc which it brought upon Africa.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
After returning to England, Horace Walpole spent his time either
in parliament or at home with his father or socializing,
and he also devoted more and more time to reading
and writing, and studying art and acquiring items for what
would become extensive personal collections. In the words of Leonard
Benton seely in a collection of Walpole's letters, quote Walpole

(25:29):
found in art and literature the chief employment of his
serious hours. His reading was extensive, the most solid portion
of it being in the regions of history and archaeology.
More engrossing than his love of books was his passion
for collecting and imitating antiquities and curiosities of all kinds.

(25:49):
His ample fortune furnished him with the means of indulging
these expensive pursuits. In seventeen forty three, Walpole wrote Eighties Walpole,
which was a catalog of his father's art collection, along
with his own opinions and judgments about what that collection contained,
although this wasn't published until much later. In seventeen seventy nine,

(26:12):
Walpole's nephew sold much of this art collection to Catherine
the Great, something that the British Museum tried to stop,
and many of the paintings are still part of the
collection at the Hermitage Museum. Robert Walpole died on March eighteenth,
seventeen forty five, and Horace's brother Robert inherited the title
of Earl of Orford. Horace inherited a house and some property,

(26:36):
as well as a lot of debt. Once all of
that was settled, though he had a total income of
roughly three thousand pounds a year. With all of those
same caveats as before, you can imagine this as being
roughly equivalent to three hundred and fifty thousand pounds a
year or four hundred and fifty six thousand dollars a year.

(27:00):
That amount changed at various points for various reasons, but
it was always enough for Horace Walpole to basically be
very comfortable and do whatever he wanted. In seventeen forty five,
he also reconciled with Thomas Gray. The Jacobite Rising of
seventeen forty five started later that year, something that Walpole
chronicled in his letters, although since he wasn't personally involved,

(27:22):
he was getting his information from the same sources as
everyone else, so his letters were often behind what was
actually happening and reflected whatever misinformation was floating around. A
lot of his own fears during this time were about
what would happen to him if the Jacobites were successful,
since his own position and income were tied to the

(27:42):
monarch and the government they were trying to overthrow. We
said earlier that.

Speaker 1 (27:47):
In some ways he was sympathetic to the Jacobites, and
that continued to be true as the leaders of the
uprising were tried and hanged in seventeen forty six.

Speaker 2 (27:56):
We will leave off this part of our two parter
with this inscription of the adult Horus Walpole by Letitia
Matilda Hawkins, who was a novelist who also published volumes
and volumes of biography and gossip quote. His figure was
not merely tall, but more properly long and slender to

(28:17):
excess his complexion, and particularly his hands of a most
unhealthy paleness. His eyes were remarkably bright and penetrating, very
dark and lively. His voice was not strong, but his
tones were extremely pleasant, and, if I may say so,
highly gentlemanly. I do not remember his common gait. He

(28:37):
always entered a room in that style of affected delicacy
which fashion had then made almost natural. Chapeaubride between his hands,
as if he wished to compress it, or under his arm,
knees bent, and feet on tiptoe, as if afraid of
a wet floor. His dress and visiting was most usually
in summer, when I most saw him, a lavender, the

(29:01):
waistcoat embroidered with a little silver or of white silk
worked in the timber, partridge, silk, stockings and gold buckles,
ruffles and frill, generally lace. I remember, when a child,
thinking him very much under dressed. If at any time
except in mourning, he wore hemmed cambric in summer, no powder,

(29:22):
but his wig combed straight and showing his very smooth
pale forehead and cued behind in winter powder. I love
the distinction of whether he had powder or not. So yeah,
that's where we're going to leave off on Horace Walpole today.
We will get to all of the castles next time

(29:43):
and all of the Gothic literature and all.

Speaker 1 (29:46):
Of that in the meantime. Do you have a bit
of listener mail for us? I do.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
I have listener mail from Annabelle, and I'm not going
to read the actual email because it does include a
lot of, you know, sort of personal and professional detail.

Speaker 1 (29:59):
But it is on a SME.

Speaker 2 (30:01):
That we get emails about fairly often, so I just
kind of wanted to speak more generally about it. Animal
wrote about being a freelance historian who's just graduated and
wanting to know about basically job opportunities. So, first of all,
on our show, Holly and I do not hire like

(30:24):
interns or research assistance or positions like that. We get
a lot of resumes and stuff like that from folks
who are interested in possibly researching, or writing or otherwise
working for the show. iHeart sometimes does have like production internships,
but those would not necessarily be working with our show

(30:45):
specifically in any way. They would be folks who are
doing sort of audio production, editing, stuff like that, possibly
for a lot of different shows across the network. Not
necessarily ours in terms of things a person can do
with a history degree. Annabelle wrote from the UK, and

(31:06):
I'm just going to confess, boy, do I have no
idea of how to get a job in the UK.
I think at this point I barely know how to
get a job in the United States because I have
been doing this job for so long that I have
not tried to find a job in almost twenty years.

(31:26):
But I will say that the field of history and
the study of history, in my opinion, does set people
up to do a lot of different work depending on
your interest what you're interested in, So the path to
becoming like an academic historian, my first advice would be

(31:46):
to like make connections with other people who are doing
that kind of work, to both, you know, be connected
within the field, but also to really find out whether
that is what you actually want to do. When I
was in college, I did not study history. I studied literature.
But I was absolutely convinced that what I wanted to

(32:07):
do with my life was to go to graduate school
and get a PhD and then teach at the college level.
And in hindsight twenty years later, boy am I glad
that is not what I did. I do not think
I actually would have liked that. So there are a
lot of historical sites, museums, libraries, all kinds of institutions

(32:33):
who work with history and with historians in some way,
and you know, there are sometimes these are jobs that
are really creative that involve in some way explaining history
to the general public, or explaining the institution's historical mission
to the general public, or stuff like that. So there,
I think are a lot of ways to bring the

(32:56):
study of history and the pursuit of history to a
lot of different jobs, and what it takes to get
those jobs is really going to depend on the field,
whether it's in academia or not, whether it is a
government position or not, any of that. Holly and I
both sort of fell into this show by accident. We've

(33:19):
told that story before, but as a recap, we were
doing a completely different podcast together. Prior hosts of this show,
Sarah and Doblina, one had gotten another job and the
other had said it is time for me to also
step away from this. And so since Holly and I
were already working together, were already interested in history, already

(33:41):
had a little podcast experience, and this is again our job.
We got moved over onto this show, and now that
has been more than a decade ago, which is a
little hard to believe. So yeah, I feel like that
was kind of a very general discussion of jobs in

(34:01):
the field of history.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
Yeah. I mean we have had some guests on in
the past, and I always try to seek out people
who maybe are dealing with history in ways you wouldn't
have thought of before. Like we've had people that work
at like the Atlanta History Center and they literally focus
on their historical plant collection, you know, and manage their

(34:24):
trees and also their animal collection, like making sure they
have heritage breeds that make sense. There are things like that,
but I think there are a lot of interesting spaces
where people can kind of find unique jobs that relate
to history, but they are kind of tricky to suss out, right,

(34:45):
Like some places, like you know, some film studios will
have a historian who literally manages their stuff, or some
you know, like large corporations will have a corporate historian
that keeps track of the history of the company. Like
there are a lot of interesting spaces that are not
at all what you might initially think of when you
think of I want a job working in history, But

(35:07):
as Tracy said, it has to be ideally something interesting
to you. I'm a big fan of people liking their jobs.
It's not easy to do. There are lots of jobs
that are not fun that we have all taken. And
even a job you love, you know is going to
come with some moments where you're like, I do not
enjoy this. But I had a I had a great

(35:30):
boss many many years ago when I was working in
cable television, and in my interview, she said to me,
my goal is always if we can have only ten
percent of anybody's job, be the sucky part that they
don't like, I feel pretty good about it. And that
is a great way to think about it as a boss, right, Like,

(35:51):
I only want you to have I can't promise you
you're going to love every part of it, but if
I can promise ten percent or less of it will
be the stuff that you hate, then I feel like
I'm doing an okay job. And I was like, this
is a great way to look at a career. So
that has stuck with me for a long time, So
look for jobs. We're only ten percent of it looks yucky.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah, when I when what I thought I was going
to be doing was like taking a year or so
off and then try again to go to graduate school,
I was really looking for jobs that I was going
to be writing, because my you know, my degree was
in literature with a focus in creative writing. I did
the literature track and the creative writing track, and I

(36:33):
wound up finding jobs where writing was my job. But
like I was writing the instructions on how to clean
the restaurant for a company that made cleaning chemicals. And
it turned out that even though that job did involve
writing and occasionally there were things involved that were more creative, like,
I just found it to be not mentally stimulating in

(36:57):
a way that I thought it would be. And so
for a while I took a break from that entire field,
and I got a license to practice massage, and I
was a licensed massage therapist for a few years, and
then I circled back around to writing and wound up
here where I research and write about history all the
time and then say all that into a microphone. So, yeah,

(37:20):
it's tough to give like broad, concrete job advice, but
that's sort of where we are.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
It is it is.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
And then again, I definitely appreciate all the people who
write in are like I would love to work on
your show. It is very flattering to hear that from
so many people, But like Holly and I are not
hiring people to do those kinds of roles, which I'm
sure is a disappointment to folks to hear that, but
like the reality that we're living in.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
Yeah, I also always feel like I'm a bad person
to give job advice in general because I have never
had a clear vision. I'm a brass ringer. I see
an opportunity that's interesting, and I'll jump on it. But
I've never been like my next step is my five
year plan. I'm like, I'm going to do this until
I don't like doing this anymore, and then we'll see

(38:11):
what's up.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:12):
And also I think that's informed because there have been
jobs that I had that I thought were going to
be amazing, right, and I hated them. Yeah, Yeah, and
vice versa. There have been jobs I thought I'm getting
this job just to like subsist while I figure out
what my next step is and then I'm like, oh,
I actually am pretty happy in this job, and I
actually really like this stuff that I do, and maybe

(38:35):
make a life here, so you know what changes you
never know. Yeah. So yeah, that's the worst career advice
anybody could ever give a thing. I just kind of
hang out. Wait.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
Yeah, So anyway, if you'd like to send us a
note about this, if you have job advice you want
us to read on the air, maybe we will, maybe won't.
We'll see. But you can send that to us at
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else

(39:11):
you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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