Victorian Art and Architecture

The Gothic Revival.

In reaction to the classical style of the previous century, the Victorian age saw a return to traditional British styles in building, Tudor and mock-Gothic being the most popular. The Gothic Revival, as it was termed, was part spiritual movement, part recoil from the mass produced monotony of the Industrial Revolution. It was a romantic yearning for the traditional, comforting past. The Gothic Revival was led by John Ruskin, who, though not himself an architect, had huge influence as a successful writer and philosopher.

Extravagant...

Most popular architectural styles were throwbacks; Tudor, medieval, Italianate. Houses were often large, and terribly inconvenient to live in. The early Victorians had a predilection for overly elaborate details and decoration. Some examples of large Victorian houses are Highclere Castle (Hampshire) and Kelham Hall (Nottinghamshire).

... and simple.

In late Victorian times the pendulum, predictably, swung to the other extreme and the style was simpler, using traditional vernacular (folk) models such as the English farmhouse. This period is typified by the work of Norman Shaw at 'Wispers' Midhurst, (Sussex).

Not just styles changed. The Industrial Revolution made possible the use of new materials such as iron and glass. The best example of the use of these new materials was the Crystal Palace built by Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The Arts and Crafts movement.

Another name that has to be mentioned in the context of Victorian art and architecture is that of William Morris. Neither artist nor architect, he nevertheless had enormous influence in both arenas. Morris and his artist friends Rossetti and Burne-Jones were at the forefront of the movement known as 'Arts and Crafts'. Part political manifesto, part social movement, with a large dollop of nostalgia thrown in, the Arts and Crafters wanted a return to high quality materials and hand-made excellence in all fields of art and decoration.

The cheap, mass-produced (and artistically inferior 131o141b ) building and decorating materials then available horrified them. Morris himself, through his Morris and Co., designed furniture, textiles, wallpaper, decorative glass, and murals. Many of Morris' designs are still popular today.

John Nash

Technically John Nash does not belong to the Victorian period, but to the earlier Georgian era. However, I have chosen to place him in the Victorian era as his major works were very much in the style of the 19th century, and his influence was felt much more heavily in that period.

John Nash (1752-1835) was the son of a millwright, but he cast aside his father's profession and apprenticed with architect Sir Robert Taylor.

He soon wearied of apprenticeship, however, and In a typical act of impatience he set up his own practice.

Nash's first major venture was a speculative effort building London houses of brick which were faced with stucco painted to emulate stone. The venture fell flat, and Nash retired to the country. There he began to build a successful practice, partnering with landscape architect Humphrey Repton on several projects - Nash built the houses, Repton the grounds.

In 1802 the two split up and Nash returned to London. There Nash's natural ebullience found its scope tackling visionary (read extravagant) schemes for his sponsor the Prince Regent.

In 1811 the Prince Regent asked three architects, including Nash, for ideas on developing the farmland called Marylebone Park and the surrounding areas. Nash's ambitious plans included a "garden city", with villas, terraced houses, crescents, a canal, and lakes.

The prime focus of the developement was a proposed avenue from Prince Regent's Park to "Prinnie's" home at Carlton House in the Mall.The area covered by Nash's scheme covered the present Regent's Park, Trafalgar Square, St. Jame's Park, and Regent Street.

The enthusiastic Prince Regent threw his support (and more importantly, his money), behind Nash's scheme, and for the next 23 years until his death, Nash laboured to create his vision.

Several elements of Nash's sweeping scheme had to be abandonned, including a summer palace in Regent's Park, and the present day Regent's Street has been much altered.

As the work in London continued, Nash took on other projects for the Prince Regent, including the remodeling of Brighton Pavillion.

There was already a villa at Brighton, designed by Henry Holland, and the Prince Regent asked Nash to make it into a palace. This Nash did, beginning in the Indian fashion then popular, and as work progressed, incorporating further Eastern design elements. The result has been called "Indian Gothic with a flavour of Chinese" (Encyclopedia of Architecture, Doreen Yarwood, 1993).

Back in London, Nash remodeled Carlton House as Carlton House Terrace (1827-1833) and built Cumberland Terrace (1827), The Royal Mews (1825), Haymarket Theatre (1820), All Soul's church in Langham Place (1822-25). He also created what is now Trafalgar Square. The buildings that surround the latter were all added by later architects however.

Nash's other major building project in London, Buckingham Palace, did not fare so well, however. When Nash began work on the Palace in 1825 it was still Buckingham House. The Prince Regent had decided that Carlton House was "antiquated, rundown, and decrepit", and decided to create a palace on the site of the Duke of Buckingham's former villa.

Nash was dillatory in his work however (and erected and pulled down several wings of the building according to his moods), that the Prince Regent died before work was finished. Nash was finally dismissed from the project, and all that remains of his work at the palace is the west wing.

Nash had designed a triumphal gateway to stand at the end of the Mall. However, it was discovered that the state coach was too wide to fit through the opening! The gate was then moved to Hyde Park corner, where it became known as Marble Arch.

Summing Up.

John Nash helped define the style of an era. Through his friendship with the Prince Regent, his influence on Regency art and architecture cannot be overstated. He worked in many architectural styles, from Gothic to Italianate, Palladian, Greek, and picturesque. He was enthusiastic and impatient, yet a man blessed with great talent and creative vision.

William Morris (1834-1896)

William Morris was one of the most influential voices in Victorian art and architecture, and his influence spread far into the 20th century in the form of the Arts and Crafts Movement that he helped spawn.

Morris was born at Walthamstow, Essex, in 1834. and attended Marlborough School, and later, Exeter College at Oxford University. He had planned to enter the church, but reading the social commentaries of Ruskin and Caryle (among others) led him to the arts instead. While at Exeter he met the artist Edward Burne-Jones, who was to prove a life-long friend.

After graduating from Oxford Morris worked in the architectural offices of George Street, who specialised in the Gothic Revival style, but he soon left to pursue painting under the tutelage of Dante Gabriel Rosetti.

In 1859 Morris commissioned Philip Webb, a friend from Street's office, to design him a new home, Red House in Bexley Heath. The house was to be built in simple vernacular style using traditional materials.

Morris was annoyed that he could find no good textiles and furniture to decorate his new home, so he decided to design them himself. It was a momentous decision. With friends Burne-Jones, Rosetti, and Webb he formed a small firm, later called Morris and Company, to sell the products they designed.

There was a profound social philosophy behind Morris' designing. He was a committed socialist and medievalist who was horrified by increasing mechanization and mass-production in the arts, and he dreamed of reestablishing the values of traditional craftsmanship and simplicity of design. His slogan was that art should be "by the people, for the people".

Under Morris' leadership the company soon made a name for itself as a high quality producer of such diverse items as stained glass, wallpaper, textiles, and furniture, often with a floral or foliage motif. Unfortunately, the cost of producing these quality items by hand meant that they were too pricey for ordinary people. Only the rich could afford the products of Morris and Company, a fact which caused him great distress.

Morris was also a poet, his The Earthly Paradise (1868-70) meeting with wide success. He translated classical and Icelandic works, and wrote romances such as The Well at the World's End.

He was active in radical politics, notably the Democratic Federation and the Socialist League. In 1890 Morris founded the Kelmscott Press near his last home of Kelmscott House in Hammersmith. He died at Kelmscott House in 1896.

The ideals generated by Morris' efforts went far beyond the success of his company, however. They gave rise to a whole new interest in the medieval period, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and even such later 20th century ideals as Art Nouveau. Morris was enormously influential in the late Victorian period as a social reformer and his ideas on the value of simplicity and the importance of the individual craftsperson are still with us today.

Victorian London

The Victorian city of London was a city of startling contrasts. New building and affluent development went hand in hand with horribly overcrowded slums where people lived in the worst conditions imaginable. The population surged during the 19th century, from about 1 million in 1800 to over 6 million a century later. This growth far exceeded London's ability to look after the basic needs of its citizens.

A combination of coal-fired stoves and poor sanitation made the air heavy and foul-smelling. Immense amounts of raw sewage was dumped straight into the Thames River. Even royals were not immune from the stench of London - when Queen Victoria occupied Buckingham Palace her apartments were ventilated through the common sewers, a fact that was not disclosed until some 40 years later.

Upon this scene entered an unlikely hero, an engineer named Joseph Bazalgette. Bazalgette was responsible for the building of over 2100 km of tunnels and pipes to divert sewage outside the city. This made a drastic impact on the death rate, and outbreaks of cholera dropped dramatically after Bazlgette's work was finished. For an encore, Bazalgette also was responsible for the design of the Embankment, and the Battersea, Hammersmith, and Albert Bridges.

Before the engineering triumphs of Bazalgette came the architectural triumphs of George IV's favorite designer, John Nash. Nash designed the broad avenues of Regent Street<, Piccadilly Circus, Carlton House Terrace, and Oxford Circus, as well as the ongoing creation of Buckingham transformation of Buckingham House into a palace worthy of a monarch.

In 1829 Sir Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police to handle law and order in areas outside the City proper. These police became known as "Bobbies" after their founder.

Just behind Buckingham Palace the Grosvenor family developed the aristocratic Belgrave Square. In 1830 land just east of the palace was cleared of the royal stables to create Trafalgar Square, and the new National Gallery sprang up there just two years later.

The early part of the 19th century was the golden age of steam. The first railway in London was built from London Bridge to Greenwich in 1836, and a great railway boom followed. Major stations were built at Euston (1837), Paddington (1838), Fenchurch Street (1841), Waterloo (1848), and King's Cross (1850).

In 1834 the Houses of Parliament at Westminster Palace burned down. They were gradually replaced by the triumphant mock-Gothic Houses of Parliament designed by Charles Barry and A.W. Pugin.

The clock tower of the Houses of Parliament, known erroneously as Big Ben, was built in 1859. The origin of the name Big Ben is in some dispute, but there is no argument that the moniker refers to the bells of the tower, NOT to the large clock itself.

In 1848 the great Potato Famine struck Ireland. What has this to do with the history of London? Plenty. Over 100,000 impoverished Irish fled their native land and settled in London, making at one time up to 20% of the total population of the city.

Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria was largely responsible for one of the defining moments of the era that bears his wife's name; the Great Exhibition of 1851. This was the first great world's fair, a showcase of technology and manufacturing from countries all over the world. The Exhibition was held in Hyde Park, and the centerpiece was Joseph Paxton's revolutionary iron and glass hall, dubbed the "Crystal Palace".

The exhibition was an immense success, with over 200,000 attendees. After the event, the Crystal Palace was moved to Sydenham, in South London, where it stayed until it burned to the ground in 1936. The proceeds from the Great Exhibition went towards the founding of two new permanent displays, which became the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The year 1863 saw the completion of the very first underground railway in London, from Paddington to Farringdon Road. The project was so successful that other lines soon followed.

But the expansion of transport was not limited to dry land. As the hub of the British Empire, the Thames was clogged with ships from all over the world, and London had more shipyards than anyplace on the globe.

For all the economic expansion of the Industrial Revolution, living conditions among London's poor were appalling. Children as young as 5 were often set to work begging or sweeping chimneys. Campaigners like Charles Dickens did much to make the plight of the poor in London known to the literate classes with his novels, notably Oliver Twist. In 1870 those efforts bore some fruit with the passage of laws providing compulsory education for children between the ages of 5 and 12.

Gothic Revival Architecture

The term "Gothic Revival" (sometimes called Victorian Gothic) usually refers to the period of mock-Gothic architecture practiced in the second half of the 19th century. That time frame can be a little deceiving, however, for the Gothic style never really died in England after the end of the medieval period. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, when classical themes ruled the fashion-conscious world of architecture, Gothic style can be seen, if intermittently. This is because many architects were asked to remodel medieval buildings in a way that blended in with the older styles.

Christopher Wren, the master of classical style, for example, added Gothic elements to several of his London churches (St. Michael, Cornhill, and St. Dunstan-in-the-East). William Kent's gatehouse at Hampton Court Palace (1723) fit in flawlessly with Cardinal Wolsey's original Tudor Gothic. When Nicholas Hawksmoor remodeled the west towers at Westminster Abbey (from 1723) he did so in a sympathetic Gothic style.

In the late 18th century, running in parallel, as it were, with raging classicism, was a school of romanticized Gothic architecture, popularized by Batty Langley's pattern books of medieval details. This medieval style was most common in domestic building, where the classical style overwhelmingly prevailed in public buildings.

One of the prime movers of a new interest in Gothic style was Horace Walpole. Walpole's country house at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham (1750), was a fancifully romantic Gothic cottage. The style adopted by Walpole (termed, not surprisingly, "Strawberry Hill Gothic"), took many of the decorative elements of exterior medieval Gothic and moved them to the interior of the house. Thus, Walpole's rooms are adorned - some might say over-adorned - with touches like cusped ceilings and crocketed arches.

Little of Walpole's style is what you could call "authentic"; he merely took decorative touches and strewed them about with abandon. The controversial result is very much open to criticism; you either love it or hate it, but few people are ambivalent about it.

Other architects tried their hand at Gothic style. Even Robert Adam, the master of neo-classical country house architecture, used Gothic elements, for example at Culzean Castle, where the exterior crenellation recalls a medieval fortress.

James Wyatt was the most prominent 18th century architect employing Gothic style in many of his buildings. His Ashridge Park (Hertfordshire), begun in 1806, is the best surviving example of his work. At Ashridge, Wyatt employed a huge central hall, open to the roof, in conscious imitation of a medieval great hall.

Into the early years of the 19th century many architects dabbled in Gothic style, but as with Walpole, it was more the decorative touches that appealed to them; little bits of carving here, a dab of pointed arch there. Most paid scant heed to authentic proportion, which is one of the most powerful moving forces of "real" Gothic style. Even when the shapes used by builders were Gothic, the structure was not. Columns and piers were made with iron cores covered over with plaster.

In the early 19th century Gothic was considered more suitable for church and university buildings, where classical style was thought more appropriate for public and commercial buildings. Good examples of university Gothic can be seen at Cambridge, for example, the Bridge of Sighs at St. John's College (1826) and the gateway at King's College (1822-24).

It is really only after 1840 the the Gothic Revival began to gather steam, and when it did the prime movers were not architects at all, but philosophers and social critics. This is the really curious aspect of the Victorian Gothic revival; it intertwined with deep moral and philosophical ideals in a way that may seem hard to comprehend in today's world. Men like A.W. Pugin and writer John Ruskin (The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849) sincerely believed that the Middle Ages was a watershed in human achievement and that Gothic architecture represented the perfect marriage of spiritual and artistic values.

Ruskin allied himself with the Pre-Raphaelites and vocally advocated a return to the values of craftsmanship, artistic, and spiritual beauty in architecture and the arts in general. Ruskin and his brethren declared that only those materials which had been available for use in the Middle Ages should be employed in Gothic Revival buildings.

Even more narrow-minded than Ruskin were followers of the "ecclesiological movement", which began in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Adherents of the ecclesiological movement believed that only the Gothic style was suitable for church architecture, but not just any Gothic style! To them, the "Middle Pointed" or Decorated style prevalent in the late 13th to mid 14th century was the only true Gothic. The bible of the movement was the monthly publication, The Ecclesiologist, which was published from 1841-1868. The publication was in essence a style-guide to proper Gothic architecture and design.

But all this theory needed some practical buildings to illustrate the ideals. The greatest example of authentic Gothic Revival is the Palace of Westminster (The Houses of Parliament). The Palace of Westminster was rebuilt by Sir Charles Barry and A.W. Pugin after a disastrous fire destroyed the old buildings in 1834. While Barry oversaw the construction, much of the design is Pugin's, a design he carried out in exacting Perpendicular Gothic style inside and out.

The period from 1855-1885 is known as High Victorian Gothic. In this period architects like William Butterfield (Keble College Chapel, Oxford) and Sir George Gilbert Scott (The Albert Memorial, London) created a profusion of buildings in varying degrees of adherence to strict Gothic style. High Victorian Gothic was applied to a dizzying variety of architectural projects, from hotels to railroad stations, schools to civic centres. Despite the strident voice of the Ecclesiological Society, buildings were not limited to the Decorated period style, but embraced Early English, Perpendicular, and even Romanesque styles.

Were the Gothic Revivalists successful? Certainly the Victorian Gothic style is easy to pick out from the original medieval. One of the reasons for this was a lack of trained craftsmen to carry out the necessary work. Original medieval building was time-consuming and labour-intensive. Yet there was a large pool of labourer's skilled in the necessary techniques; techniques which were handed down through the generations that it might take to finish a large architectural project.

Victorian Gothic builders lacked that pool of skilled labourers to draw upon, so they were eventually forced to evolve methods of mass-producing decorative elements. These mass-produced touches, no matter how well made, were too polished, too perfect, and lacked the organic roughness of original medieval work.

Major Gothic Revival buildings to see in England:
Strawberry Hill, Twickenham
Exeter College Chapel, Oxford
Scarisbrick Hall, Lancashire
Keble College, Oxford
Palace of Westminster, London
Albert Memorial, London

Victorian Science: An Overview

During the nineteenth century the things we recognize as the sciences formed and acquired their great cultural authority. The sciences developed in contexts shaped by the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the sweeping social and cultural changes of the century. Historians of science over the past forty years have come to see sciences not as something independent and distinct from culture and social life - but as integral to other social concerns and as part of culture itself.

Some of the major transformations which occurred across the Victorian period were: the change from "natural philosophy" and "natural history" to "science," the shift from gentlemen and clerical naturalists to, for the first time, professional "scientists," the development and eventual diffusion of belief in natural laws and ongoing progress, secularization, growing interaction between science, government and industry, the formalization of science education, and a growing internationalism of science. The Victorian age also witnessed some of the most fundamental transformations of beliefs about nature and the place of humans in the universe. - John van Wyhe

Evolution, progress and natural laws

In the nineteenth century evolution, progress and natural laws were intimately related in understandings of nature. Scholars are coming to treat all of these themes as part of related and intertwined cultural processes rather than distinct and independent lineages. At the beginning of the century, the evolution of species, especially man, and the evolution of the earth were generally considered absurd and beyond the bounds of learned discussion. Because of the great interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology today, we tend to speak in terms of the history of evolutionary thought, as if many thinkers struggled in vain to come up with Darwin's theory. But this is a rather ahistorical understanding. In fact a much wider variety of concerns were proposed and debated before and after Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). For example, the possibility of geological, social, economic, technological and intellectual change or progress seemed to challenge the orthodox Genesis-inspired steady-state system created by God. Victorian evangelicals were particularly opposed to ideas of progress because they contradicted their understanding of the Bible and the Fallen state of the world.

For most of the century the question was not, do organisms evolve, but rather does nature change by itself? The crux of the question was where the agency for change lay. Was it with God or some other unseen divine creator or intelligence, or did nature simply work in the ways it did by virtue of its properties? Many believed in a complex mixture of both of these. Victorian ideas of natural and social progress were descended from French revolutionary and Enlightenment thinkers like Condorcet, Volney and Baron d'Holbach. So too the Victorians' talk of natural laws was a legacy of the French revolution.

Sciences of Man

During the Victorian age there was increasing disagreement on what Man (the traditional term for the human species) was made of. The traditional view was that Man was created in God's image as described in Genesis. Most would agree that Man consisted of a body and a mind and/or a soul. Almost without exception every account attributed to Man a special, unique, and untouchable value compared to all other living things. Some still envisioned a great chain of being stretching from simple monads to Man the crowning achievement of all nature. Man was generally held to be utterly unrelated to all other organisms until Charles Darwin (Descent of Man, 1871) began to stress the undeniable similarities between Man and other animals so that the difference might be considered one of degree rather than a difference of kind. However, we should not assume that there was an inexorable shift from traditional Christian descriptions of Man to secular scientific descriptions as the century progressed. Such an oversimplistic view is contradicted by the large evangelical and other religious movements in Victorian times. Instead there was a change from fewer to more diverse, often competing, definitions of Man during the century.

What did gradually increase were attempts to study Man in ways similar to the natural subjects. These included physiological and anatomical studies of the human body, and several sciences of mind.

Victorian Science & Religion

During the nineteenth century, the entities we refer to as 'science' and 'religion' both underwent dramatic changes. It would consequently be naïve to expect to be able to find one simple and unchanging relationship between the two. The relationship has varied across time and geography, and from one individual to another. In addition to the historical interest of the nineteenth century debates between science and religion, there is a great historiographical significance. The way in which science and religion have been perceived in the twentieth century was heavily influenced by the writings of late nineteenth-century historians of science and religion, whose influence we have only recently begun to move beyond.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Britain, religious faith and the sciences were generally seen to be in beautiful accordance. The study of God's Word, in the Bible, and His Works, in nature, were assumed to be twin facets of the same truth. One version of this belief had been manifested in William Paley's Natural Theology (1802), which repeated the argument that natural objects show evidences of design, thus showing the existence of a designing God. Paley's work was enormously influential for its emphasis on nature as God's creation, even though, by the 1830s, few Christians saw a need to prove God's existence, preferring to take this as an act of faith. The Bridgewater Treatises (1833-36) showed how natural theology could be reconfigured in various ways to meet new discoveries. Their sales figures also showed that there was a substantial market for non-technical works of science.

This harmony between science and faith, mediated by some form of theology of nature, continued to be the mainstream position for most men of science, and most interested individuals, right up to the 1860s, at least. But it did come under threat. In the 1820s and 1830s, some working-class radicals saw a chance of using certain versions of the sciences for political ends. Some forms of the sciences, especially those emanating from France, seemed to suggest a restricted (or even non-existent) role for God in the universe, and thus to undermine the Anglican politico-religious establishment. Such materialist forms of science were as abhorred by most respectable men of science, as they were championed by working-class radicals.

The threats were not only from France, however. British men of science, particularly geologists, were also making discoveries which threatened the literal meaning of Genesis. The effect of these discoveries on faith has, however, been oft-exaggerated. Clerical geologists were quite able to find ways to reinterpret Genesis in the light of their discoveries, with no harm done to their faith. Even the majority of evangelicals were, by the 1840s, willing to accept non-literal interpretations of Genesis which could be fitted with the latest accepted discoveries in geology or astronomy. The few people who stressed the threat to faith of these discoveries tended to be the working-class radicals, while the extreme evangelicals who promoted Scriptural Geology to retain a literal reading of Genesis were an equally vocal minority. The reaction to Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859) should also be seen in this light: while some people played up its radicalism, others were quite able to fit it into their religious worldview. It depended as much on the reader's existing beliefs and agenda as on anything intrinsic to the work itself.

By the middle of the century, there were increasingly two different arenas in which science and religion might be expected to interact: one was the preserve of the expert men of science; the other was society at large, whose members were benefiting from the increasing numbers of popular science publications appearing on the market. These two arenas did overlap, but it is worth considering them separately.

In the expert arena, would-be professionalisers such as Thomas H Huxley and John Tyndall, were beginning to make their marks. Although neither of these men were opposed to faith per se, both were opposed to the authoritarianism of organised Christian religion. Both objected to the involvement of clergymen in the sciences, and argued that science should be carried out by specialist experts - clergymen should focus on being experts in their own, separate, fields of theology and pastoral care. The rhetoric of this group of professionalisers, and their growing prominence within the sciences meant that by the 1870s and 1880s, 'the sciences' and 'religion' were increasingly seen as utterly separate and distinct.

This view was exacerbated by the publication (originally in America) of two books claiming to show how theology and/or religion had repeatedly constricted the sciences throughout history: John Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1875) and Andrew White's The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1876, expanded as The History of the Warfare. in 1896). Although the myth of the conflict of science and religion was by now well established, and few clergy attempted to maintain a reputation as scientific experts, it should be noted that plenty of individuals continued to have a Christian faith and to participate in the sciences. James Clerk Maxwell is one of the most obvious examples.

Meanwhile, in the popular arena, there was far more variety in the relationship between science and religion. Although some writers and publishers did present the sciences in a secular manner, as Huxley and Tyndall would have liked, they did not have a monopoly. Publishers with explicit religious credentials continued to publish popular works on the sciences right up till the end of the century, and their works competed in the marketplace with the secular versions. Although much has been made of a mid-Victorian crisis of faith, perhaps triggered by the sciences, this seems to have been a feature of a certain class of intellectuals, and not an accurate description of the majority of society (especially middle-class society), which retained a religious faith long after most expert men of science.