...he explained in a letter to a friend that the inspiration for his fiction was given him in a dream: I waked one morning in the beginning of last June...an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head like mine filled with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase 1 saw...

...by its creators to be related to a prison? "I waked one morning," wrote Walpole in a letter in 1783, "from a dream of which all I could recover was, that...an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head like mine filled with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw...