What did the Victorians do for us? Apart from town planning, metalled roads, mains water and gas supplies, efficient sewerage, and the canals and railways, no one should be unaware of their legacy of church buildings. They built a vast number of churches; in the 1860s a new church was consecrated every four or five days by the Anglicans alone, not to mention those of the non-Conformists and Catholics. But that was not all, for by the 1870s the Victorians had also thoroughly restored and refurbished a third of all pre-Victorian churches, thereby preventing a significant number of them from being lost to posterity altogether.
But this is not a book about architectural styles. Professor Whyte has analysed in great detail the mindsets of those who built churches; not just the architects, but the clergy and the wealthy patrons who paid for them. Proposing to ‘see things, to feel things, to understand things just as the Victorians did’, he thereby arrives at a new way of understanding both Victorian architecture and Victorian faith. Architecture and theories of the sacred are mutually influential. Whyte demonstrates how the Victorians’ principles and aims still deeply affect the way that we see, feel, understand and even use their buildings today. Thus he argues that the Victorians bequeathed a great deal more than bricks, stones, glass, furnishings and vestments to us; they shaped the very way in which we still apprehend and use all these things in the twenty-first century, whether we approve of them or not.
Whyte begins with that peculiarly Victorian idea in architecture: the Gothic Revival. He rightly observes that this movement is not a reactionary one, for all that architects like Pugin passionately espoused Gothic as the only true Christian architectural style, whose revived majestic beauty should inspire a popular return to the religion which had created it centuries before. Indeed, even Pugin was often remarkably practical and innovative in his use of Gothic forms. Secondly, Whyte shows that the reappearance of Gothic is not simply to be ascribed to the aesthetic influence of the romantic movement, but instead can arguably be traced to a source hardly associated with aestheticism at all. J. H. Newman's austerely simple little church in Littlemore, built in 1836, would barely merit attention today on architectural grounds. Yet Whyte is surely correct in stating that Littlemore church is important for more reasons than its historical association with the greatest theologian of the age. Its significance lies in what Newman himself aimed to achieve by it, which he explained to his parishioners in the course of several detailed and important sermons.
Newman's typological interpretation of the architectural forms as symbols of religious truths, such as the triple lancet window as representing the Holy Trinity, was quite unusual for its time, even revolutionary, since it quietly overturned the centuries’ old Protestant emphasis on the predominantly ‘auditory’ purpose of churches, as buildings in which hearing the spoken word was paramount over everything visible. Yet Newman's use of metaphor and symbolism in explaining architectural forms and details would become the lingua franca of many church buildings for at the least the following century, and not only among Anglicans and Catholics, but even by those non-conformists who later came to build Gothic churches instead of chapels.
Whyte shows that to oppose the Tractarians’ concentration on theological principles to the Ecclesiologists’ attention to architectural externals is a distortion of the truth. Newman's interest in architectural imagery at Littlemore quite closely resembles what the Ecclesiologists like J. M. Neale would argue for in building and restoring churches along mediaeval lines. Both men saw places of worship as parables of the Church's faith.
‘Seeing’ is the first key to Whyte's interpretation of the revolution in which the Victorians unlocked their churches. It is thus through the sense of sight that he identifies the primary effect that those who built churches fully intended to elicit in worshippers and visitors alike. For the Victorians were far from utilitarian in their approach to church buildings, and sought to make them eloquent even when not in use, as seen from inside or outside alike, and whether in use or simply as places to visit. As the century progressed, churches not only accommodated a greater number of services than had been general in earlier times, but came to be seen in a yet more holistic way, as shaping the emotions of those who experienced them by touching all their senses. So, for instance, as acoustics became more resonant in large Victorian church buildings, their sound register altered to enhance the effect of music and singing over that of the spoken word.
In the final chapter, Whyte draws lessons from the fact that so many of these buildings no longer serve their original purpose. Even those that are still in religious use may no longer be interpreted in the same way, as liturgical revolutions have come and gone and left their mark. Yet, Whyte argues, there is still a continuity between all that the Victorians achieved in their conception of these churches and the way we view them now, even if, paradoxically, we now try to make them do many different things, some of which seem to be plain contrary to their original purpose. So, for instance, he details the many diverse religious and secular uses to which churches are now often put. He also contrasts the conversion of disused churches to various public and private secular uses, with the starkly secular, utilitarian styles adopted by many modern churches, whose stated intention is to appear more amenable to secularised mindsets. At the beginning of a second century since the one in which these buildings were created, we are faced with the urgent need to decide how to conserve them, and to what purpose. The greatest contemporary enemies of the Victorian church include not just secularists, but those believers who reject the architectural language of vertical transcendence in favour of one of horizontal social relevance. Yet must we therefore see the buildings bequeathed by our ancestors as stifling authentic developments in the expression of faith and worship? Or can we not apprehend in their aesthetic and architectural language an eloquence not unlike that of the creeds and theology transmitted to us from past centuries, which, though requiring exegesis and interpretation, can still form and enrich us?
