These notes are set down in the hope that the case for the maintenance forever of the nobler works of Wren will not be vitiated, confused, and, in the minds of plain men, made ridiculous by hysterical praise of his meanest buildings from which such small quality as they once possessed has been removed by modern vandalisms.
ST DUNSTAN’S
The achievement of Sir Christopher Wren was vast, and for that very reason there must be discrimination between those buildings on which he lavished his utmost personal care and those which, in the press of a huge practice, were designed mainly by assistants and carried out probably with the slenderest supervision by the master.
A glance at the Chronology I print in an appendix will show the sort of pressure at which Wren worked during the ten years following the Fire. Examination of the Accounts of the City Churches reveals that payments began to be made in 1670 to the builders of seventeen churches, and six years later the number had grown to twenty-eight.
Actual work on practically the whole of the fifty-three had been completed by 1690. None was begun after 1686 and payments were made on eight only between 1690 and 1695.
Wren did comparatively little after 1700 except the completion of St. Paul’s and Greenwich. This means that the great majority of his vast bulk of achievement was done within about thirty years.
Is it any wonder that some of his churches show signs of haste and want of thought? Can we suppose anything but that some of them were left largely to assistants?
The year of his first marriage was his annus mirabilis, for during 1669 he must have been working on the plans for the seventeen churches which began to be built in 1670, and he was developing the design of St. Paul’s at the same time.
Evelyn’s word prodigious seems to meet the case.