Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword by Barry Orford
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Note on Illustrations
- 1 An Introduction to Denominations and Victorian Churches
- 2 Architecture, Antiquarianism, and Styles
- 3 The Religious Atmosphere in the 1830s and 1840s
- 4 Recusants, Goths, Converts, Ultramontanes, and Controversies
- 5 The Anglican Revival
- 6 The Search for an Ideal
- 7 Church Architecture of the 1850s, 1860s, and Early 1870s
- 8 The Late Victorian Anglican Church in Several Manifestations
- 9 Non-Anglican Buildings for Religious Observance
- 10 Epilogue
- Select Glossary
- Select Bibliography
- Index
7 - Church Architecture of the 1850s, 1860s, and Early 1870s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword by Barry Orford
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Note on Illustrations
- 1 An Introduction to Denominations and Victorian Churches
- 2 Architecture, Antiquarianism, and Styles
- 3 The Religious Atmosphere in the 1830s and 1840s
- 4 Recusants, Goths, Converts, Ultramontanes, and Controversies
- 5 The Anglican Revival
- 6 The Search for an Ideal
- 7 Church Architecture of the 1850s, 1860s, and Early 1870s
- 8 The Late Victorian Anglican Church in Several Manifestations
- 9 Non-Anglican Buildings for Religious Observance
- 10 Epilogue
- Select Glossary
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
We want a style … which will be pleasing …, yet be susceptible of every gradation of beauty, till it reach the noblest and most exalted objects to which art can aspire. If we can devise such a style … let us endeavour to develope [sic] it out of that of some former period … and happily we find such a nucleus to work upon in the native architecture of our own country.
George Gilbert Scott (1811–78): Remarks on Secular & Domestic Architecture, Present & Future(London: John Murray, 1857), 8–9.The church of St John, in Tue Brook, a suburb of Liverpool, … recently completed from the design of Mr G.F. Bodley, … has returned to that type of Middle Pointed art which reached its highest grace towards the middle of the fourteenth century.
Charles Locke Eastlake (1836–1906): A History of the Gothic Revival(London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1872), 369.Ruskin
‘Great’ Scott recognised Pugin and John Ruskin as influences on English architecture. Both, it has to be said, were bigots: Pugin was anti-Protestant; Ruskin was anti-‘papist’; each equated architecture with moral worth; and both argued polemically, omitting anything inconvenient to their causes.
In The Stones of Venice (1851–53), Ruskin made an extraordinary attempt to dissociate Gothic architecture from ‘popery’, trumpeting against its ensnaring attractions: ‘Romanism’, he wrote, ‘instead of being a promoter of the arts, has never shown itself capable of a single great conception since the separation of Protestantism from its side’.
One of the effects of such writing was to remove anti-Gothic prejudices among Evangelicals and Nonconformists alike: Ruskin’s polemics painted Gothic as fit to ‘frame a temple for the prayer of nations’, despite the undoubted fact that all mediæval Pointed ecclesiastical architecture was pre-Reformation, and therefore, in the past, the architectural style of R.C. churches throughout Europe. Ruskin’s advocacies for a Christian social order draped a mantle of romantic democracy over the Gothic Revival.
‘Ruskinian Gothic’ is a term connected with colour in the materials used in a building (rather than applied to surfaces), naturalistic sculpture, and Italian mediæval architecture. In his Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) Ruskin celebrated Continental Gothic, contrasting it with that of mediæval England, which he opined was thin and insubstantial, even in 13th-century examples.
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- English Victorian ChurchesArchitecture, Faith, and Revival, pp. 111 - 138Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022