The Victorians

by Jacob Rees-Mogg

  There was more to Pugin’s life and profession in these productive years than churches and church furniture. Although self-criticism and self-revision had been a constant throughout his life, he was boosted by occasional sense of what might be possible. In his Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843), his last, highly successful written work, Victorian architecture was there with ‘nature as a model, the return to the vernacular, the escape from mere copyism’ and a Gothic which could turn itself to anything and anything to Gothic. It is impossible to say where he might have leapt next but in his final years he had come to terms with many of his earlier self-imposed frustrations. As ever, the cause was theology and ‘development’ theory was the key. The Apology set out how he now believed that things could be designed in accordance with the principles of the past, rather than just in imitation of them. ‘Development’ held that while divine revelation was final and absolute, human understanding of it was not. This suited Pugin’s forgivable habit of letting his theories lag behind his practical discoveries. In consequence, he now felt he could build things that were new yet still true.

  One opportunity came courtesy of Balliol College, Oxford. By the early 1840s, the college authorities were sufficiently concerned about the state of the ancient Balliol buildings to propose a wholesale renewal of much of the college’s fabric in the Gothic model. George Basevi, architect of the illustrious neoclassical Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, was commissioned to draw up Gothic plans for the college but these were rejected when Pugin, asked for his opinion, damned them as ‘not bad enough to be rediculous [sic], nor good enough to be commendable’. The issue factionalised the college, so Pugin was approached by one faction to undertake the work himself.

  This was the beginning of what became known as the ‘Civil War of 1843’ at Balliol. The choice of Pugin was in itself brave, if not foolhardy. The college’s Broad Street frontage, which it was proposed Pugin tear down and rebuild, occupies one of the most prominent positions in Oxford. Moreover, it faced the new Martyrs’ Memorial, the form of which Pugin had loudly opposed in print, this despite the fact that the designer was George Gilbert Scott, a Pugin disciple. Balliol’s governing body divided viciously among itself and against its Master. Its members began to leak copious details of the squabble to the press, which was itself hungry for news of the savage ecclesiastical battles being waged in the highly heated Oxford of the day. Such was the temperature of the quarrel that all records of it have been removed, literally torn, from the Balliol records. In the end, nothing was done. The scheme was abandoned but nobody told Pugin, leading to humiliation and trauma for the architect.

  His domestic and private life was similarly chequered. He had sold his curious house outside Salisbury and left the district in 1841, removing temporarily to London. Louisa died in 1844 and was buried at St Chad’s. By 1848, his life and circumstances had changed again. He married his third wife, Jane Knill, at St George’s, Southwark (their child would be the architect Peter Paul Pugin), and by now he was focused on creating the building that today stands as his personal testament, The Grange, which perches on chalk soil at West Cliff, above the sea at Ramsgate. The Grange captures the domestic transformations that Pugin pioneered in the course of his career, the ideas for which he is remembered today with respect and admiration. In particular, he is loved because he emphasised the notions of truthful and honest living, with buildings to match, ideas as far removed as is possible to imagine from the mad Modernist dream of houses as machines for living.

  Pugin transformed the ideal of domesticity by moving away from the symmetry and gravity of the Georgian home, instead having the external form of the house reflect its inward purpose. Rather than living being determined by what the Georgian façade outside required, what was done was what you saw. Perhaps this concept came from the difficulties and traumas of his own home life, his loss of two wives, his eight children and his peripatetic searches for a home finally to call his own. St Marie’s Grange at Alderbury proved to be a mere essay in the craft and it was not until he settled at Ramsgate that the essay became material and set reality. The Grange adhered to the template of which Pugin and Shrewsbury were so fond. It was an organic jumble of buildings, including a chapel, all constructed on an elevated site overlooking the sea, the Goodwin Sands and distant France, with the luminous Kent sky arching overhead.

  In its essence, this house was simple, plain on the outside, with a central hall functioning as a room in its own right and with other living rooms branching off it and into each other. Here as at Salisbury family life and work were blended. Unlike in most Victorian homes, neither children nor servants were banished to the back stairs or out of sight. The briefest glimpse of The Grange reveals the truth of the matter, the interior of the building being designed first, with the exterior added later. It could almost be called a machine for living, before this ugly phrase was thought of, but a machine shaped into the warmest and most democratic form imaginable. Add the adjoining St Augustine’s, the private church designed by him and completed by his sons, and Pugin’s dream is revealed incarnate and fit for any British Victorian life.

  The Grange also exemplified the life of the private Pugin. To his children he was a loving and present father when, that is, he was in their presence. Home life would start before dawn with eldest son Ned wandering the house with a hand-bell waking everyone and throughout the day bells for offices would ring, with religion woven into the lives of the family. Delightful glimpses of this life may be caught in action. Once, when his son was fourteen and should have been asleep, Pugin was overjoyed to find him still awake in bed finishing off a drawing of the Crucifixion.

  Such a home, a relatively modest, detached dwelling fit for the new middle classes, was an aspect, a by-product, of the world as it had become and it is in such insights that the irony in Pugin’s life and work can be seen. In particular, lives such as the one lived by the Pugin family overlooking the Channel at Ramsgate were made possible by technology and by one form of technology above all. This was the railway. The monstrous machine of steam and heat that brought Pugin’s seaside life within range of London and professional engagements, that opened up such prospects to Britain’s rising bourgeoisie and that brought cheery, sunny Ramsgate and other such locales within the reach of an even greater swathe of the population. Pugin’s life of transformation was, in other words, made possible by the modern transformations of the Victorians.

  Pugin’s contemporary William Powell Frith demonstrated this transformation with his painting Life at the Seaside (Ramsgate Sands), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1854. The painting shows a cheery and almost shockingly mixed group of Britons intent on enjoying a day at the seaside. The scene is crowded with a Victorian paraphernalia of bathing machines, a Punch and Judy show, a boy with his mouth organ, performing animals and, there in the background, Pugin’s house on West Cliff. Here was an expanding democracy and an expanding world captured on canvas. Pugin was both an intrinsic aspect of Frith’s dizzying painting and of the world it portrayed. He made this modernity work for him. Whether it was in pressing Birmingham foundries and workshops into his service or installing plate-glass windows instead of leaded panes or enjoying the comfort of water closets or ‘any modern invention which conduces to comfort, cleanliness or durability’, Pugin was pleased to apply the contemporary world to his cherished Gothic. Nor would he be the last architect to eschew ideological purity in favour of every mod con to be had and surely because of this he is the more popular. Turning from the domestic to the public it is time to look at the schemes which placed Augustus Pugin at the centre of national life.

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  On 16 October 1834, a fire began in the basements of the Palace of Westminster, the ancient home of Parliament. The fire spread rapidly through what was a decrepit medieval building, parts of which dated back to the eleventh century, and before long the greater part of the Palace was ablaze, in what proved to be the greatest conflagration London had witn
essed since the Great Fire of 1666. Elements of the sprawling complex survived, most notably Westminster Hall and the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft, but the remainder of the building was burned to the ground, together with centuries of historic treasures in the form of tapestries, furniture and paintings. The sheer scale of the fire was captured by Turner in his two paintings entitled The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons. He, together with others, including Constable and Pugin, had walked to the south bank of the Thames and watched as the conflagration grew and spread.

  It was a calamity but also an opportunity and almost at once recognised as such. In some quarters there were calls for Parliament to rebuild elsewhere – William IV offered Buckingham Palace, hoping in the process to dispose of a cordially disliked London residence – but in the end a decision was made to rebuild on the existing and historic riverside site. As to how to rebuild, it is significant that when proposals were floated to embrace the neoclassical it was decided that such notions were alarming. After all, Washington DC had been built along such lines and any idea that the British Parliament might cleave to republican ideals must be rejected.

  Instead, it was decided from the outset that the new building must hark back to an earlier English age. It must be Elizabethan or Gothic in its form and it must incorporate those original buildings that had survived the fire. When the Royal Commission chosen for the task reported back in 1836, it chose a design submitted by the English architect Charles Barry.fn1 The new building would be explicitly Gothic, although its design was underpinned by neoclassical conceptions of symmetry, with a great tower at its centre, another tower, a clock tower, at its eastern end and a dazzling river frontage created partly on land reclaimed from the Thames. Barry had chosen his prospective design well and, significantly, he had chosen his collaborator well too. He had asked Augustus Pugin, at this point still resident at Salisbury but at the age of twenty-three already gaining a reputation for the clarity of his vision, to contribute ideas for the internal design and form of the new building. Pugin did not let him down, adding his own distinctive touches in the form of a cornucopia of vanes, spires and other Gothic motifs. Construction began in 1839.

  Pugin had been instrumental in the choice of building but until 1846 he played no further part in its construction. It was not until the scheme threatened to spin entirely out of Barry’s control that Pugin was summonsed back to work. At every stage, the vast project had attracted controversy and even malice. Barry was taxed almost to defeat by his struggle over the vast contrivance responsible for blowing hot air through the Palace and which threatened the new building once more with incineration. The Commons and Lords clashed on the matter. In the midst of this crisis and faced with understandable press ridicule, Barry lost his prime government supporter when Peel was felled in the aftermath of the repeal of the Corn Laws. At this nadir in his fortunes, Barry implored the return of Pugin. Formally he became ‘Superintendent of Wood Carving’ but this title, for which he was paid a pittance, utterly fails to capture the centrality of his role.

  When his association with the developing building was at length renewed, Pugin set to work to fill the vast building with his own vision of carvings and gilt, panelling and a range of furniture. His attention to detail knew no bounds. Even the door knobs were bespoke by Pugin and those with an eye for such things understood that the real architect in this gargantuan project was not Barry, but Pugin himself. Charles Voysey remarked it was considered ‘an acknowledged fact that Mr Pugin was the real Architect of the Houses of Parliament’. Pugin himself felt obliged to issue a refutal:

  A misconception prevails as to the nature of my employment in the works of the new palace of Westminster … In fulfilling the duties of my office, I do not do anything whatever on my own responsibility; all models and working drawings being prepared from Mr Barry’s designs and submitted to him for his approval or alterations prior to their being carried into effect. In fine, my occupation is simply to assist in carrying out practically Mr Barry’s own designs and views in all respects.

  Pugin was clearly constrained by the needs of diplomacy, because it is very evident that he was no mere dogsbody in the process. The respective roles of Pugin and Barry would later become an unseemly feud. A generation later, a new wave of Pugins and Barrys would publicly squabble over what recognition was deserved by whom for the Palace.

  In any case, in 1847 Pugin received no invitation to the inauguration of the House of Lords, the first phase of the building to be completed. Not that Pugin sought much in the way of adulation from the project. He went to Italy at the time so he deliberately avoided the event. It is impossible to know for certain the facts in this case. What is clear, however, is the lack of attention his work received at the time. This almost certainly had something to do with his very visible Catholicism. The renewal of the Catholic Hierarchy in England and Wales had, after all, occasioned the last strong outburst of anti-Catholic prejudice in the country. Thus it makes sad sense that Britain’s most famous Catholic should be barred from receiving plaudits that were his due for designing the nation’s Parliament. In any case, Pugin certainly has had the last laugh. For while the exterior of Parliament, Barry’s testament, may not quite deserve Pugin’s famous quip of ‘All Grecian, sir; Tudor details on a classic body’, anyone who steps inside the building can see the wonders that have been achieved.

  Indeed, Barry freely admitted, not least by beseeching his draughtsman from the distant days of competition success to return to the fray, that ‘only Pugin could have done what Pugin did’. Pugin’s work received a Royal imprimatur too. Prince Albert himself chaired the Royal Commission on Fine Art which oversaw the interior decoration of Parliament. Shrewsbury was another member and neither the Prince nor the Earl had any doubt that only one man in the country could manage the vast work in wood, glass, metal, furniture, upholstery, lighting, wallpaper, tiling and decorative schemes which the new Palace needed before it could be finished. That man was Pugin.

  Latent anti-Catholic feeling continued to linger in the country and it appeared once more in Augustine Pugin’s career, this time amid the glittering surroundings of the Crystal Palace. Prince Albert’s awareness of Pugin meant that his presence at the Great Exhibition of 1851fn2 could be no real surprise.

  Yet in Protestant England suspicion of Rome could erupt, geyser-like, at any hour and in any place, even within the Crystal Palace. One such eruption occurred over Pugin’s conception of a ‘Medieval Court’, planned as a star exhibit at the Great Exhibition and consisting of a deeply atmospheric display of ecclesiastical furnishings, Marian statues, metalwork, textiles and sculpture. In truth, he was not enthusiastic about the Crystal Palace, which he dismissed as a ‘glass bubble’. He dismissively told its designer Joseph Paxton, ‘You had better keep to building greenhouses and I will keep to my churches and cathedrals.’ It was not only the glassy surroundings that ought, by rights, to have repelled Pugin and prevented him from going near Hyde Park that summer. The Great Exhibition was in its essence a thrusting display of technological wonders and the power of modernity, neither of them ideas which pleased such a man as Pugin.

  Most of all, the scheme of organisation for exhibits at the Crystal Palace was the antithesis of everything Pugin believed. That in itself should have prevented him from taking part. It was all divided into categories and in the applied arts all was subdivided by material. Instead of Pugin’s transcendent idea of the unified, Christian whole, there was a form of ghastly material division, the opposite of everything he stood for when it was housed in a building of which he despaired. Where for others the Crystal Palace represented a staggering achievement of British ingenuity and engineering, to Pugin this glazed cathedral of man erected in months had all the demerits of something which had manifestly not taken centuries to build and did not serve God.

  Perhaps the lure was simply too much. To assemble a showcase of medievalism, its beauty and sacred meaning set off by the false and profane sparkle of its surroundings, was
too glorious a chance to pass up. Thus, in that inevitable, truly Victorian way, Pugin broke the rules. He pitched his idea, he was accepted and he triumphed. No artist at the Great Exhibition was supposed by rights to be individually named and certainly none was supposed to do what his Medieval Court did. Certainly none was supposed to insert Catholicism, of all faiths, into this pagan milieu. No wonder some critics and viewers were scandalised, some claiming that this shameless Catholic architect was brazenly attempting to insert a Papist chapel into the heart of the Crystal Palace, complete with a statue of the Virgin and Child. How much more outraged they would be when Pugin’s exhibit was among the greatest successes of the hugely successful Exhibition. The claims of craftsmanship, care, devotion, all triumphed in the age of the machine and it was for this that Pugin received full laud and honour. It was his crowning glory.

  Unfortunately the story of Pugin does not end with his note of glory, for the details of how his life ended are miserable. In February 1852, while on a train bound for London, Pugin suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown. He arrived in the capital unable to speak and seemingly unable to recognise his friends and family. By June he had entered Bedlam, the Royal Bethlem lunatic asylum adjacent to his own Catholic cathedral of St George’s, Southwark. By September he seemed to have recovered sufficiently to be removed to The Grange at Ramsgate but recovery was impossible. He died at Ramsgate on 14 September and is buried at St Augustine’s.