Somewhat more appropriately, prisons were likely to be Castellated in the forties and fifties, thus echoing the design as well as the planning of Haviland’s Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia. The Reading Gaol of 1842-4 by Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-78) and his partner W. B. Moffatt (1812-87) and the Holloway Gaol in London of 1851-2 by J. B. Bunning (1802-63) are the most striking examples. Both are essentially Picturesque essays; but by the time the latter was built the accepted standards of fake-castle building had entirely changed. The reconstruction of Alton Castle in Staffordshire, about 1840, by A. W. N. Pugin (1812-52) was archaeological in intention; even more archaeological is Peckforton Castle in Shropshire, newly erected by Anthony Salvin (1799-1881) in 1846-50, and his extensive ‘restoration’ of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland carried out in the next decade. Thanks to its magnificent hill-top site and its present state of disrepair, Peckforton is in fact notably Picturesque; but the fine, hard, structurally expressive detailing of the beautiful pink sandstone may almost be considered anti-Picturesque—contemporaries praised it for its ‘realism’.
The welter of alternative Picturesque modes is most entertainingly epitomized in the model village of Edensor,[[115]] built by Joseph Paxton in 1839-42 at Chatsworth. He was probably assisted by John Robertson, a draughtsman for that encyclopaedist of the Picturesque, J. C. Loudon.[[116]] One particular mode, however, had begun to take the lead even before this ‘point of view’ came closest to dominance in the early decades of the new century. The use of Gothic[[117]] for new churches was common enough from the mid eighteenth century. Down to about 1820, however, this was usually done without much archaeological pretension. The mood of the protagonists of what was then called ‘Gothick’, whether architects or clients, was not very serious. Architects lacked accurate illustrations of old work such as the volumes of Stuart and Revett and other similar treatises were providing for the Grecian. In the first two decades of the new century the more thorough and general study of ancient Gothic monuments in England and the handsome publications of John Britton (1771-1857)[[118]] and of Nash’s Gothic specialist, the elder Pugin,[[119]] were gradually changing the situation. Thomas Rickman (1776-1841), a pharmacist turned medievalist, began to put his knowledge[[120]] of old churches to practical use; his St George’s, Birmingham, built 1819-21, is a not unsuccessful essay in revived Perpendicular. Several others had built or were building by this time churches whose relationship to monuments of the medieval past was about as close as that of most of the contemporary Grecian work to its ancient models. St Mary’s, Bathwick, in Bath, of 1814-20 is at once very early and exceptionally well-scaled. The local architect John Pinch (1770-1827) even vaulted it throughout in Bath stone.
The ultimate purging away of the frivolity of Georgian Gothick detail and the effective substitution of archaeological for Picturesque ideals in over-all composition was by no means always a gain. In two later Birmingham churches, St Peter’s, Dale End, of 1825-7, and Bishop Ryder’s of 1837-8, Rickman did not improve on St George’s, while St Luke’s, Chelsea, built in London by James Savage (1779-1852) in 1819-25, despite its great size and its stone vaulting, is as cold and dry as the Grecian churches of the day and quite inferior to Pinch’s.
Edward Garbett’s Holy Trinity, Theale, of 1820-5—with tower added after the architect’s death by John Buckler (1770-1851) in 1827-8—is rather more interesting and also premonitory of what was coming. Here the detail, imitated from Salisbury Cathedral, is thirteenth-century in character, not fifteenth-sixteenth-century, as in the churches of Pinch, Rickman, and Savage. Moreover, Theale is more boldly scaled and more plastically handled altogether than are theirs. The placing of the tower, far to the rear on the south side, while more Picturesque in its asymmetry than the standard position at the centre of the west front, is also an archaeological echo of the free-standing tower which still existed then beside Salisbury Cathedral.
Most Gothic churches built in the twenties and thirties under the Act of 1818—Commissioners’ Churches as they are called—were neither very satisfyingly Picturesque nor at all archaeological. The usual reason for preferring Gothic to Grecian, indeed, was to save money by avoiding the need for expensive stone porticoes! Barry’s Commissioners’ Churches around Manchester and in north-eastern London are among the better examples; but only his St Peter’s, Brighton, of 1824-6 (not financed by the parsimonious Commissioners) is at all elaborate. Among the most successful contemporary examples are several by one of Soane’s pupils, R. D. Chantrell, at Leeds. His Christ Church there of 1823-6 has considerable spatial grandeur in its tall nave and aisles, while the Perpendicular detailing is rich and even fairly plausible.
Generally preferable to the ecclesiastical Gothic of this decade is the collegiate work; of this more exists both at Oxford and at Cambridge than is generally realized. At King’s College, Cambridge, Wilkins’s Gothic screen fronting the quadrangle and the hall range at right angles to it are not altogether unworthy of the magnificent Perpendicular chapel and Gibbs’s Fellows Building that form the other two sides. Wilkins won the competition for this work in 1823, and it was all completed by 1827. Still more appealing, because an effectively independent entity, is Rickman’s New Court at St John’s College, also at Cambridge,[[121]] built by him with the aid of his pupil Henry Hutchinson (1800-31) in 1825-31 (Plate [50B]). This is not very plausibly Gothic perhaps, but the papery planes of the light-coloured ashlar walls of the U-shaped quadrangle, now richly hung with creeper, form an eligibly Picturesque composition above and behind the open gallery across the south side despite their total symmetry.
By the thirties standards of Gothic design were generally rising, both in the greater degree of plausibility attained by the leading practitioners and in their more positive command of various borrowed idioms. Thus Barry’s King Edward’s Grammar School in Birmingham, designed in 1833 and built 1834-7, seems to have been a rather satisfactory Neo-Tudor design, notably Barryesque in the breadth of the composition and in the use of strong terminal features. This building was unusually literate in detail owing to the assistance of the younger Pugin, who was just about to make a tremendous personal reputation as a Gothic expert thanks to his books.[[122]]
Pugin’s Contrasts, published 1836, marks a turning point even more than does the acceptance in that year of Barry’s Gothic design for the Houses of Parliament. Newly converted to Catholicism, Pugin believed the building of Gothic churches to be a religious necessity. His programme of Gothic Revival was far more stringent than any existing programme of Greek Revival or, a fortiori, of Renaissance Revival. If the Gothic were really to be revived, Pugin saw that its basic principles must be understood and accepted. Merely to copy Gothic forms was as futile, and to him as immoral, as merely to copy Grecian or cinquecento ones. The methods of building of the Middle Ages must be revived; architecture must again derive its character, in what he considered to have been the true medieval way, from the direct expression of structure; and at the same time it must serve the complicated ritual-functional needs of revived medieval church practices.
In some ways Pugin’s ideas are closely parallel to those of the most rationalistic Romantic Classical theorists in France; doubtless they could be traced back, through his father, to French eighteenth-century sources (see Introduction). However, Pugin’s primary motivation was devotional and sacramental. Approaching all matters of building with passion, he could not but reject the frivolous emphasis on visual qualities that had always been characteristic of the Picturesque point of view.
The mature Gothic Revival that began with Pugin, essentially an English manifestation despite its presumptive French background and carried eventually wherever English culture extended—as far as the West Coast of the United States and to the remotest Antipodes—grew out of the Picturesque yet is itself basically anti-Picturesque. One must build in a certain way because it is right to do so, not because the results are agreeable to the eye. The Gothic Revival thus came to be, for about a decade, as absolute as the most doctrinaire sort of Grecian Classicism. When the Anglicans of the Established Church just after 1840 took over and began to apply rigidly the principles of the Catholic Pugin, a new church-architecture came into being. This is quite as characteristic of the nineteenth century as is Romantic Classicism, even though the mode was—nominally at least—entirely dependent on English medieval Gothic of the fourteenth century. Within a decade, however, Puginian Gothic, after being accepted and codified by the Cambridge Camden Society,[[123]] developed into a much more original mode, the High Victorian Gothic, very remote indeed from the models which Pugin had recommended as providing the only proper precedents for the Revival (see Chapter [10]).