The Victorians

by Jacob Rees-Mogg

  At Salisbury, Pugin set about creating his own expression of the Gothic vision in brick and stone. A few miles from the city, in Alderbury, he designed his first house, naming it St Marie’s Grange. ‘To the astonishment and often undisguised mirth of passers-by,’ remarks Rosemary Hill, ‘a turreted, fortified, red-brick house, apparently blown out of the pages of a book of hours, began to rise rapidly next to the main Southampton road.’ The Grange was and remains, though it is today much altered, a singular house, with its moat and drawbridge, its tower, its windows arranged the better to view the building’s private chapel than for any more practical reasons and its ranges of impractically interconnecting rooms. It was a strange and unusual house but is possessed of its own beauty and it was Pugin’s first essay in a craft that he would presently perfect.

  In 1834, he made another decisive change. He had long since sloughed off the Presbyterianism of his youth but now he converted to Catholicism and was received formally into the Church the following year. In his own words:

  After a most close & impartial investigation I feel perfectly convinced the roman Catholick church is the only true one – and the only one in which the grand & sublime style of church architecture can ever be restored.

  It is important to emphasise that Pugin’s journey towards Catholicism was in all likelihood not a long one. Although he had been steeped in his mother’s Presbyterian austerity, his father was probably, it is impossible to know for certain, originally a Catholic, albeit one who pragmatically converted to Anglicanism as a means of rising within British society. Pugin’s conversion involved rather less in the way of courage than would have been the case in previous years, for Catholic Emancipation was now a fact. It was nonetheless a move not without professional risk.

  Pugin might have hoped that his conversion would also open different and unexpected doors to him and this proved to be the case. He was now firmly in contact with the world of English Catholicism. He had lately met John Talbot, sixteenth Earl of Shrewsbury. He was one of England’s leading Catholic aristocrats, a de facto role with some significance as a result of English Catholicism’s centuries without Hierarchy or any form of formal leadership. Talbot himself was something of an outsider. He was not born to be Earl, having inherited the title from his childless uncle. He was the first Catholic to sit as such in the Lords since the Reformation and he had received only an uneven education. In short, he had been held to little account before he succeeded to the earldom, whereupon this kind, shy, gentle man inherited a fortune and, to everyone’s surprise, turned out to possess an ambitious vision.

  This vision was one shared with Pugin: the return of a Catholic England after centuries of suppression. Shrewsbury ‘combined, in a chivalrous manner, the public flamboyance suitable to his rank with a modest private austerity’ and now he enlisted Pugin to develop his estate at Alton Towers in Staffordshire and to rebuild and extend his residence in the Gothic style. This was a turning point for Pugin, his first great commission and the beginning of a sequence of such commissions, including his first full essays in ecclesiastical architecture.

  In 1836, Pugin followed his conversion with a publication that must be viewed as his own personal manifesto and as in itself something of a personal spiritual document, as well as a blueprint for a new world and a new and better society. Contrasts; or, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste did what its title implies it would do. It made the argument that an architecture derived from the pre-Reformation medieval world was infinitely superior to the horrors of the Renaissance or neoclassical world. It was the only fit form for a society that aspired to Godliness and the ideal of human perfection. Contrasts was above all a denunciation of urban life of the day. It attacked ‘the world of the Regency, that Vanity Fair of stucco-fronted manners, high taste and low principles’. It confronted the Britain that had by means of its industrial revolution created the modern world and squalor and misery in monstrous proportions such as the world had never previously seen. As ever for Pugin the question, and thus the answer, was moral. This was a matter of creating the right city and rejecting the wrong city. It was a study of morality, more than planning or aesthetics. It claimed to be a work of rigorous impartiality, while simultaneously asserting that no fair mind could find in favour of the work of the present century over that of the Middle Ages. Pugin’s conclusion was that true buildings were the ones which ‘emanated from men who were thoroughly embued [sic] with devotion for, and faith in, the religion for whose worship they were erected’. Contrasts never stopped being comic and readable, as well as honest, melancholic and sincere.

  Contrasts was handsomely and richly illustrated but it was a classic polemic. It focused on a series of contemporary buildings, set them against a medieval equivalent and supplied illustrations designed to magnify the beauty and harmony of the one and to diminish the beauty of the other.

  Rosemary Hill singles out Pugin’s comparison of the new King’s College London with a view of Christ Church, Oxford. The one hunches gracelessly between two larger buildings, while the other, its more contemporary Tom Tower edited out, is shown as a picture of grace. Another view showed a fine medieval monastery, complete with gardens and charity for the needy and compared it with a monstrous panopticon, where the needy were not saved but allowed to die and were despatched after death to be dissected in an anatomical laboratory. At Alton Towers, Shrewsbury had commissioned Pugin to build exactly such a medieval hospital, one which would help the needy, not merely the sick. The ideal shared by both gentlemen was that to cure the body was a good thing but to match the soul with life was the best thing.

  Pugin was being not quite fair then yet Contrasts accomplished what it set out to achieve, encapsulating in visual terms the fundamental and moral point that its author was seeking to make. Further texts would follow in the remainder of his career: in The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841) Pugin invented his work anew and showed how it could be applied to everything, from a church to a chair. This was indeed the ‘functional’ nature of his Gothic. In Pugin’s view what others called ‘symbolism’ was also functional, much as a wafer does, as understood by the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, become the Body of Christ. His churches were functional by virtue of their pointed roofs shedding rain and heralding the Resurrection. Pugin extolled the virtues of careful and skilled craft over mechanisation. This became part of his influence on the future and such words seem to anticipate the later works of William Morris. Nonetheless, it is important to note that Pugin’s essential purpose differed greatly from that of such individuals as Morris because his vision was anchored in religion itself.

  As commission followed commission and as his writings were disseminated, so his fame began to spread. He was a careful curator of his own image, for in dress and speech he appeared shabby and eccentric. He designed his own clothes, wore billowing multi-pocketed cloaks and appeared often as the fantasy of the sailor he had in his varied youth actually been. He spoke to bishops and builders as one.

  While he criss-crossed the country sketching medieval churches, his sense of theatricality served him well. His early work hanging high above theatre stages, for example, had rendered him fearless of heights. He was comfortable perched on an eyrie below the vaulted roof of Lincoln Cathedral, drawing, observing and noting and he became part of the local colour, with tour guides pointing him out, as much a cathedral point of interest as its wonderful gargoyles or the worn stone where pious pilgrims still kneel to ask for St Hugh’s intercession.

  Not that it could possibly all be plain sailing. It was all fine to champion the virtues of the medieval world, as Pugin and Shrewsbury liked to do, and to relate it to a contemporary Catholic world but the challenge came in explaining both the utility of this world and the ostensible perfection of the Catholic vision, to a country steeped for centuries in Protestant liturgy and Protestant culture. A
nation which industrialisation and mechanisation were making wealthy and powerful, the first superpower. How to explain the wonders of the Gothic in such a context? How to explain his own form of Catholicism, which was woven with an idea of England in the Middle Ages that was idealised and that never in fact had existed at all? Especially when this Catholicism bore little relation to the reality of the present Church. As Pugin’s work and career were to develop, this was to set the stage for innumerable and bitter disputes with those whom he might reasonably have hoped to be closest to him.

  There was a tremendous harmony and simplicity to Pugin’s moral vision. Gothic churches had, for him, grown out of a truly Christian world. Therefore, they ‘were not simply buildings in which, but rather with which one might worship God’. All of the church contributed to the whole. The cruciform shape was the Cross, verticality in form was the Resurrection, the spire marked out Heaven while the altar was Calvary again on Earth. The Gothic was, in its totality, not merely a style with which to decorate a church, still less a meeting house for a congregation. It was a sacred organising principle which enabled the building to be used in the way for which it was intended: the worship of God. This is religion before architecture, and it is architecture deployed to serve the needs of religion. This was the encapsulation of the man himself and the purpose, as he saw it, of his art and his gifts.

  At the heart of Pugin’s vision, however, there was an essential contradiction which could not for ever be ignored or set aside. At first, as we have seen, Romantic Catholics stood undivided with other British Romantics. When the Anglo-Irish writer and Catholic convert Kenelm Digby wrote about what might have happened had the Reformation never occurred and England remained a Catholic country, he was fully in the mainstream of a critique of a century. ‘It is possible’, Digby suggested, ‘that Birmingham and Manchester might not have attained their present character, for merciless inhuman industry would not have been tolerated.’ It is important to emphasise that this is not a discussion about the merit of some counterfactual speculation, nor the rights and wrongs of ‘Manchesterism’. Rather it is the common criticism and concern for the physically and spiritually poor, which stretched from liberated Catholics to so many other quarters in Victorian Britain.

  British Catholics such as Pugin, however, diverged from these mainstream preoccupations in certain critical ways. Their glorification of the medieval caused them to see the sermons and boards listing the Ten Commandments of the Established Church as being inescapably and inextricably linked with the wider socio-spiritual malaise. Pugin and his patron Shrewsbury were tormented by the knowledge that their suggested antidote to this problem was a Gothic vision which relied upon an antediluvian world. It was one in which a powerful laity played a critical role in the Church and by means of the Church, in the wider world. The problem with this vision was, in short, that this Church and this world no longer existed. Pugin wished to build churches that Catholics themselves no longer used as once they did.

  This painful truth was manifest in Rome itself, where the Renaissance and the return to the earliest classical forms stood as the city’s visible heritage. The very Senate House of ancient Rome, the Curia Julia, had survived the ravages of time essentially intact but for more than 1,200 years it was not a place of pagan government at all but the Christian church of Sant’Adriano al Foro. Catholicism itself, in its mainstream and necessarily practically minded form, had altered. The great mass of Catholics appreciated that the Tridentine rite, which had reordered continental churches to accommodate it, was by now centuries old and was serving the flock well. In other words, certain recusant English Catholics and certain converts such as Pugin were firmly in the minority and were regarded as dwelling in the past. They were emerging into the post-Emancipation world only to find that this world had changed and that Catholicism had too.

  For Cardinal Wiseman, the Irish cleric who would become the first Archbishop of Westminster upon the re-establishment of the Catholic Church in England and Wales in 1850, the Pugins of the world were intent not on glorifying the Church in England but on establishing an English Catholic Church, a crucial and potentially dangerous difference:

  [They] thought that no more authority should be allowed [the Pope] than what was barely necessary for keeping up communion … Such opinions if acted upon would lead directly to schism … I would rather see all the splendid cathedrals on earth levelled to the ground, than a jot or tittle of Catholic truth allowed to pass away & I would rather hear the pure doctrines of the Church preached in barns than dangerous theories or principles that would weaken unity preached under richly fretted and gilded vaults.

  No wonder, perhaps, that Contrasts entirely justified the little ditties which were sung about its author:

  But now it’s clear to one and all,

  Since he published his lecture,

  No church is Catholic at all,

  Without Gothic architecture.

  This dilemma, this spiritual and liturgical conundrum, was far more tragedy than comedy and one that would unfold through the bitter legacy of his work, as he attempted to put English Gothic to the service of a restored Church which no longer, by its own universal lights, had any call for it. Indeed, the keenest usage of Pugin’s Gothic eventually ended up being certain Anglo-Catholic parishes of the Established Church. A Church whose existence he bewailed but the form of which to this day Pugin has done as much as anyone to settle. How did Pugin set his course through these disturbed and difficult waters?

  *

  The great period of Pugin’s professional life began now, in the aftermath of Contrasts, of his conversion and of the onset of his friendship with Shrewsbury. He was commissioned by the Earl to design a series of key ecclesiastical buildings in England and Wales, including St Giles at Cheadle, and aspects of St Peter and St Paul at Newport. He also designed a series of new Catholic cathedrals across Ireland, including St Mary’s at Killarney and St Aidan’s at Enniscorthy. This was his vision behind a range of new buildings at St Patrick’s seminary at Maynooth, near Dublin. In a demonstration of his range and reach, he despatched a set of designs to Australia. Pugin churches survive today in Queensland and New South Wales and the distinctive Pugin vision of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture has planted deep roots into the national psyche.

  Pugin called St Giles ‘my consolation in all afflictions’ and it remains a splendid building. Shrewsbury’s deep pockets ensured that Pugin had all the resources needed to turn a vision into material reality. This in the end was a rather larger one than the first sketch plans might have suggested, though Shrewsbury was as pleased about this as Pugin. He visited the ancient churches that stud the landscape of Norfolk, as well as those of northern France, in search of inspiration, and Shrewsbury opened a new sandstone quarry on his land to supply the stone deemed necessary. Red sandstone, white sandstone, gypsum, elm and oak were lavished on St Giles, bespoke tiling and enamelwork were commissioned for its interior and the cost of the purpose-carved rood-screen at length caused even Shrewsbury to blench. The building was consecrated on St Giles’ Day, 1 September 1846.

  Other English commissions included St Chad’s Cathedral at Birmingham, consecrated in 1841 and the first large-scale church building Pugin had had the opportunity to design. For St Chad’s, he looked to the Gothic architecture of northern and central Europe. The cathedral, with its brick fabric and its sheer height, is deliberately reminiscent of Munich’s glorious Frauenkirche and its wooden ceiling, ornamented and richly carved and decorated, glances at the lavish equivalents at Ely and Peterborough cathedrals. Much of the building’s furniture and fittings were also personally designed by Pugin, the bishop’s chair, all oak and velvet, for example, or collected from Europe and brought to England by Shrewsbury. Pugin was careful to use the finest contemporary craft, in accordance with his artistic vision. Windows, metalwork and vestments were designed by him and manufactured with loving care in Birmingham itself. St Chad’s stands as an example of why certain forms of work shou
ld be done and how they should be done and with what exalted purpose.

  Spiritually serious as these schemes were and all-consuming as Pugin invariably found them, a certain degree of pathos can from time to time be discerned. In 1839, at the consecration of St Mary’s Catholic church at Derby neither Shrewsbury, the building’s patron, nor Pugin stayed for the ceremony. It was one of Pugin’s earliest completed schemes so of considerable importance as one of the first new English Catholic places of worship in the post-Emancipation world. Regrettably the officiating priest declined to don the specially designed medieval vestments supplied for the occasion. Nor would he permit the singing of authentic plainchant to accompany the service. Instead, the London Philharmonic Society orchestra and choir performed a Beethoven Mass for the good Catholic people of Derby. Pugin and Shrewsbury did not stick around to be affronted, they simply went home. Wiseman called St Mary’s ‘without exception the most magnificent thing that Catholics have done in modern times in this country’ but sadly Pugin’s purity caused him not delight in his accomplishment, only pain and anger.

  Similarly, at his son’s christening in the non-Pugin-designed church at Margate, God’s Architect confined himself to the stairs. He would not enter the main body of the church, the better to avoid what he deemed the worst sights of the building. When asked for costs for the new St George’s Cathedral in Southwark, consecrated in 1848, the exasperated architect replied, ‘Who ever heard of a complete cathedral being built in the life of one man?’ He may have designed St Chad’s and seen it through to consecration yet in Pugin’s sure view, far better an unfinished good and true church than a completed bad one. Such purity tended to get him into trouble and such vignettes serve to underscore the ways in which his overarching vision clashed with the facts of the real world and of the real Catholic Church.