Although the body of this church was all but completely destroyed by bombs, the tower and spire still dominate the Hamburg skyline (Plate [52B]). It is interesting to compare this grand scenic accent with the tower and spire of the Petrikirche, almost equally prominent, built in 1843-9 by de Chateauneuf and Fersenfeld (Plate [57A]). Although built, with a curious echo of London’s characteristic stock brick, of an unpleasantly yellowish brick, while the Petrikirche is of a handsome deep-red brick like de Chateauneuf’s Alte Post, the silhouette is so enriched with elaborate fourteenth-century stonework—part English, part German in derivation—that it almost rivals in richness of effect Kemp’s Walter Scott Monument in Edinburgh. Yet the scale is grand, the parts well related, and in every way it represents a more advanced, almost mid-century taste, in contrast to the simplicity and the geometrical clarity of de Chateauneuf’s square brick tower with its plain triangular gables and its very tall and svelte metal-clad spire.
From 1845 down to 1855, when Henry Clutton (1819-93) and William Burges (1827-81) won the competition for Lille Cathedral in France and G. E. Street (1824-81) received the second prize, the pre-eminence of English architects at plausible revived Gothic was generally recognized abroad. Though few of the innumerable churches built by Scott and his rivals at home in the forties are in any way really memorable, by the middle of that decade the characteristics of English church edifices had been completely revised, largely thanks to the propaganda of the Cambridge Camden Society. There is no more typical nineteenth-century product than a Victorian Gothic church of this period built to the Camdenian canon; yet the real achievement of the most original architect who designed such churches, Butterfield, belongs to the next, or High Victorian, phase (see Chapter [10]). The more Puginian Carpenter, the other favourite architect of the Society, who died in 1855, is hardly as interesting a designer—however ‘correct’ he may be—in such prominent works as St Paul’s in West Street, Brighton, of 1846-8 and St Mary Magdalen’s, Munster Square, in London of 1849-51, as in what he built for Lancing College in 1851-3. There the plain high-roofed ranges with their fine smooth walls of knapped flint and very flat and simple cut-stone dressings have a quality of precision quite lacking in most contemporary churches. Almost finer is St John’s College, Hurstpierpoint, although largely posthumous in execution.
Scott, Carpenter, and Butterfield all supplied designs for churches in various parts of the British Empire; other English architects emigrated to the Dominions and to the United States, carrying with them the doctrine of the Gothic Revival, just as French architects half a century earlier had carried a rather different sort of doctrine all over the western world. As a symbol of Britain’s major world position, moreover, English churches now rose in many Continental cities, from German watering-places and French Riviera towns to remote capitals such as Athens and Istanbul. Remarkably alien in their foreign contexts, these express the vigour and the assurance, if rarely the real creative possibilities, of the Victorian Gothic.
The Established Church in England was the great patron of the revived Gothic, although other denominations were not far behind. But the use of Gothic was by no means confined to churches, nor indeed to country houses as it had largely been in the late eighteenth century. No other Gothic public buildings rivalled the Houses of Parliament; but in 1843-5 Philip Hardwick, designer of the most Grecian of railway stations, with his son (P. C., 1822-92) built the Hall and Library of Lincoln’s Inn in London of Tudor red brick with black brick diaperings and cream stone trim. This offered a foretaste of the external polychromy which would be the sign-manual of the next period of revived Gothic in England. An earlier, more severe, sort of Tudor, carried out in stone, served Moffatt, Scott’s former partner, for a mansion at No. 19 Park Lane. But this house was most exceptional; in the forties London architects and builders generally eschewed Gothic of any sort except for churches. Generically medieval, if not specifically Gothic, inspiration would eventually play a major part in forming the advanced commercial mode of the late fifties and sixties however (see Chapter [15]).
The success that Victorian Gothic, initiated by a Romanist and supported by the Catholicizing wing of the Church of England, had with non-Anglicans in England and throughout the English-speaking world is surprising. Ritualistic planning, almost the essence of the Revival to Pugin and his Camdenian followers, was naturally avoided; but the Gothic work of the best Nonconformist architects, such as the Independent Church of 1852 in Glasgow by J. T. Emmett, is by no means unworthy of comparison with Scott’s, if not the more puristic Carpenter’s. Samuel Hemming of Bristol even employed a few touches of Gothic detail on the prefabricated cast-iron churches that he exported all over the world from Bristol in the early fifties.
The mature Gothic Revival, as has been said, is more anti-Picturesque than Picturesque, at least in the realm of theory; as a writer in The Ecclesiologist expressed the matter succinctly, ‘The true picturesque derives from the sternest utility.’ Yet the revived Gothic could only be expected to appeal widely to architects and to a public who had long fully accepted the Picturesque point of view. All its irregularity and variety of silhouette, its plastically complex organization and its colouristic decoration, its textural exploitation of various traditional and even near-rustic materials is profoundly opposed to the clear and cool ideals of Romantic Classicism, but fully consonant with the Picturesque.
The significance of the English Gothic Revival of the thirties and forties is manifold, and no two critics will agree how to assess it. Certainly the functional doctrines of the Revival and its renewed devotion to honest expression of real construction remain of great importance, even though much of this runs parallel to—if, indeed, it does not follow from—the more rationalistic aspects of Romantic Classical theory. In this way the Revival made a positive historical contribution, if not perhaps as new and original a one as has sometimes been maintained in recent years.
Negatively, the English Gothic Revival was clearly of very great effectiveness as a solvent, not only of the rigidities and conventionalities of Romantic Classicism, but also of the older and deeper Classical traditions that had been revived by the Renaissance and maintained for several centuries. The lack of an equally effective solvent on the Continent helps to explain why the revolutionary developments of the next period, particularly in the domestic and in the commercial fields, were so largely Anglo-American.
Even in the twentieth century it may be said that part of the profound difference between a Wright and a Perret lay in the fact that one had the tradition of the English Gothic Revival in his blood—largely through reading Ruskin—while the other had not (see Chapters [18] and [19]). Still later, the California ‘Bay Region School’ of the 1930s and 1940s implies a Gothic Revival background, however little its leaders may be aware of the fact; the coeval ‘Carioca School’ of Brazil manifestly has no such background (see Chapter [25]). It is therefore of more consequence to see how the ideals of the Picturesque, and concurrently the anti-Picturesque doctrines of the Gothic Revival, were accepted in the United States, than to give comparable attention to Europe, where neither the Picturesque nor the Gothic Revival were very productive of buildings of distinction. For that matter, most of the American buildings that fall under these rubrics are but feeble parodies of English originals. The Greek Revival architects of America were no unworthy rivals of the Europeans of their day; the exponents of the Picturesque and the followers of Pugin—sometimes the same men—produced little of lasting value. But when seen in relation to the later development of the American house, the contribution of the Picturesque period, lasting in America down to the Civil War and even beyond, is of real significance (see Chapter [15]).
There was not much eighteenth- or very early nineteenth-century Gothick of consequence in America. Latrobe’s Sedgeley of 1798, Strickland’s Masonic Hall in Philadelphia of 1809-11, and Bulfinch’s contemporary Federal Street Church in Boston were none of them of much intrinsic interest, and all are now destroyed. Other early manifestations of the Picturesque were even rarer, and it was not until the thirties that a concerted Gothic movement got under way. Haviland’s Eastern Penitentiary of 1821-9 was very modestly Castellated; Strickland’s St Stephen’s in Philadelphia, a rather gaunt two-towered red-brick structure of 1822-3, more or less Perpendicular, represents but a slight advance in plausibility over his Masonic Hall.