J. B. BULLEN
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128885
- eISBN:
- 9780191671722
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128885.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Augustus Welby Pugin’s book Contrasts was one of the most famous and controversial contributions to the English Gothic Revival. It was a highly combative work because it viewed architecture and ...
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Augustus Welby Pugin’s book Contrasts was one of the most famous and controversial contributions to the English Gothic Revival. It was a highly combative work because it viewed architecture and architectural history from a Catholic viewpoint at a time when Catholicism, in England, was felt to be a growing threat to the Protestant establishment. It made unwelcome assumptions about the connection between Catholicism and social values. Contrasts appeared in two editions, one in 1836, the other in 1842; perhaps the most interesting difference between them is Pugin’s ‘discovery’ of the Renaissance. The first edition of Contrasts places the responsibility for the depraved state of nineteenth-century English society and English architecture firmly at the door of Protestantism, and it dates that decay from the English Reformation. Pugin’s denunciation of the Reformation in England drew on an established tradition which combined nostalgia for the Middle Ages with contemporary reforming zeal. For Pugin, ‘the renaissance’ is associated with modernism, and by implication with egotism. It suggests not only the rebirth of paganism, but the rebirth of the self and contrasts with the conformity of ‘faith’ and ‘devotion’.Less
Augustus Welby Pugin’s book Contrasts was one of the most famous and controversial contributions to the English Gothic Revival. It was a highly combative work because it viewed architecture and architectural history from a Catholic viewpoint at a time when Catholicism, in England, was felt to be a growing threat to the Protestant establishment. It made unwelcome assumptions about the connection between Catholicism and social values. Contrasts appeared in two editions, one in 1836, the other in 1842; perhaps the most interesting difference between them is Pugin’s ‘discovery’ of the Renaissance. The first edition of Contrasts places the responsibility for the depraved state of nineteenth-century English society and English architecture firmly at the door of Protestantism, and it dates that decay from the English Reformation. Pugin’s denunciation of the Reformation in England drew on an established tradition which combined nostalgia for the Middle Ages with contemporary reforming zeal. For Pugin, ‘the renaissance’ is associated with modernism, and by implication with egotism. It suggests not only the rebirth of paganism, but the rebirth of the self and contrasts with the conformity of ‘faith’ and ‘devotion’.
Clare Pettitt
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198830429
- eISBN:
- 9780191894688
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198830429.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Chapter 5, ‘Scalar: Pugin, Carlyle, Dickens’, is about scale. It looks in detail at three writers in London who produced very different versions of the ‘modern’ in the late 1830s and early 1840s, but ...
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Chapter 5, ‘Scalar: Pugin, Carlyle, Dickens’, is about scale. It looks in detail at three writers in London who produced very different versions of the ‘modern’ in the late 1830s and early 1840s, but all of whom realized that something very big indeed was happening around them. Across different genres, Augustus Welby Pugin, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens all chose to represent democracy and reform specifically as a problem of scale. This chapter investigates their understanding of the seriality and scalability of market capitalism and the anxieties and opportunities that this revealed to them. Each took a different view, from Carlyle’s apocalyptic denunciation of a massification which soars vertiginously between the gigantic and the tiny; to Pugin’s insistence on a built and material ethics of the human scale; and Dickens’s cautious optimism about this moment of scalar derangement and the redistribution of the sensible.Less
Chapter 5, ‘Scalar: Pugin, Carlyle, Dickens’, is about scale. It looks in detail at three writers in London who produced very different versions of the ‘modern’ in the late 1830s and early 1840s, but all of whom realized that something very big indeed was happening around them. Across different genres, Augustus Welby Pugin, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens all chose to represent democracy and reform specifically as a problem of scale. This chapter investigates their understanding of the seriality and scalability of market capitalism and the anxieties and opportunities that this revealed to them. Each took a different view, from Carlyle’s apocalyptic denunciation of a massification which soars vertiginously between the gigantic and the tiny; to Pugin’s insistence on a built and material ethics of the human scale; and Dickens’s cautious optimism about this moment of scalar derangement and the redistribution of the sensible.
