Good morning.

Today, a mildly interesting coat of arms… and the letter it accidentally produced, which gave English one of its most useful words.

Let’s begin.

The Word Invented to Describe Not Trying

Horace Walpole—“Serendipity”

Horace Walpole (1717–1797), son of Britain’s first prime minister, was one of the most prolific letter writers of his century, exchanging correspondence with the diplomat Horace Mann for forty-five years. On this particular morning, he had just noticed a coincidental link between two families’ coats of arms, a small, private discovery, mildly interesting and nothing more.

Rather than just describe it, Walpole reached for a word he had invented on the spot, borrowed from a Persian fairy tale he had once read called “The Three Princes of Serendip.” In the tale, the princes constantly stumbled onto discoveries while actually searching for something else entirely.

This is Walpole himself, painted two years later, seated at a desk much like the one where he wrote that letter.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, “Portrait of Horace Walpole,” 1756. National Portrait Gallery, London.

Walpole explained his new coinage with a small example from the fairy tale itself: one of the princes deduces that a mule blind in its right eye had recently walked the same road, purely because the grass had only been eaten on the left side, where it happened to be worse. Accident, sharpened by attentiveness. That was the whole idea.

Ten years after writing this letter, Walpole built himself a very different kind of monument to his own imagination.

Johann Heinrich Müntz, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, 1755–1759.

Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s self-designed Gothic villa outside London, became the template for an entire architectural revival. In 1765, he published The Castle of Otranto, widely credited as the first Gothic novel, a genre he essentially invented the way he’d invented his word: by chasing his own curiosity somewhere nobody had specifically asked him to go.

I used to think of “serendipity” as meaning pure random luck. Walpole’s own definition insists on something sharper: the princes weren’t just lucky. They were paying close enough attention to notice what their luck was actually showing them.

The word barely circulated for over a century. It took until the 1870s for a scholar to even ask, in print, where it had come from, and until the twentieth century for it to become genuinely common. It now sits comfortably beside penicillin, Post-it Notes, and the microwave oven, all famously unplanned discoveries made while their inventors were technically looking for something else.

A man wrote a letter about nothing much, and invented, almost as an afterthought, the exact word he needed to describe writing it.

Three Things Worth Knowing

Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Seeing This Week

Strawberry Hill House, the villa from today’s issue, has been restored and is open to the public in Twickenham, on the outskirts of London.

Where: 268 Waldegrave Road, Twickenham TW1 4ST.  Tickets: standard adult admission runs around £16–20; check the house’s site for current pricing and seasonal hours.  Insider tip: the house closes for winter most years; check ahead before planning a visit outside the main spring-to-autumn season.  Plan a visit at strawberryhillhouse.org.uk →

Worth Reading

Explore Further

Read: the Paris Review’s short blog post on the original 1754 letter, quoting Walpole’s own explanation of the word in full, at theparisreview.org.

Browse: the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale holds digitized volumes of Walpole’s full correspondence, including the original serendipity letter, free to search online.

Test Your Knowledge

If the links above don’t respond in your email app, just reply with your answers—I’ll write back.

That’s all for today.

Tomorrow, one more word… and the philosopher who used it to describe an entire age at once.

In good taste,

Charles T. Mayfair

Editor, Connoisseur Daily