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This chapter surveys the background to ritualism in the religious and cultural ferment of the early 19th century. It explains how Tractarianism and Ecclesiology both led to an impetus amongst a minority of Anglican clergy for the development of elaborate liturgical forms based on those of the late medieval English Church which quickly became known as ritualism. This process can be considered as part of the wider phenomenon known as the Gothic Revival in art and architecture. In essence, a romanticised view of the Middle Ages which was itself a reaction against Enlightenment notions of progress and of escape for the supposedly primitive ways of the European past. Perhaps best conceptualised by Pugin, gothic styles were meant to be provide a model for the re-sacralisation of England, particularly its blighted urban areas. It is made clear, however, that Pugin’s vision, like that of most contemporary ritualists, was not based primarily upon contemporary Roman Catholic reality but upon an imaginary and idealised English Catholicism. Therefore, the ensuing battles over ritualism in the Church of England were in fact evidence of a fight over the nature of England and English identity.

While many religious writers praised Paxton's innovative design, often likening it to a temple or the modern equivalent of a medieval cathedral, High Churchmen and Roman Catholics abhorred the design, comparing it most unfavourably to the neo‐Gothic style then in vogue for ecclesiastical and public buildings. Certain exhibits also proved controversial, none more so than Pugin's contributions to the Medieval Court, which were often seen as importing Catholic devices into the very heart of the Exhibition. This chapter centres on the religious controversies surrounding the Crystal Palace and its contents in order to show that it was a highly contested space and that protagonists across the religious spectrum endowed it with different spiritual meanings.

The concluding chapter to the book seeks to account for the changes that the architectural imagination underwent in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Guided by the concept of ‘purification’, it shows how the construct of the Gothic ‘Dark Ages’ was revised in contemporary historiography and replaced with the less injurious notion of the ‘medieval’; how first- and second-generation romanticism curtailed the excesses of the Gothic architectural imagination; and how nineteenth-century Gothic Revivalists such as A. C. Pugin, A. W. N. Pugin, and John Ruskin reacted against the amateur Gothic experiments of Horace Walpole and William Beckford. What emerges in the discussion is an architectural imagination that is very different from the one of the previous century, that rich, associative aesthetic that drove the production of Gothic literature and revivalist architecture from the start. In a brief coda, the discussion briefly charts the professionalization of architectural practice that took effect from 1834 onwards.

This chapter examines the so-called contrast narrative, an unusual but influential historical genre in the early nineteenth century. It discusses the idea that historical thought involves a dialogue between two distinct moments but finds no acknowledgment in history's formal structure and the contradiction between history's conceptual underpinnings and its formal arrangements. The chapter also provides examples of contrasting narrative including Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present and Augustus Pugin's Contrasts which used doubled or ironic narratives for purposes of ideological critique.

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.

This chapter describes the form of ecumenism stemming from a number of Roman Catholics under the influence of a group of converts led by Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle who began to re-imagine their newly adopted church as the historical embodiment of the great undivided western church of medieval Christendom. Their profound influence on religious aesthetics and taste, which was dominated by the vision of the great pioneer of the Gothic Revival, the architect and designer, A. W N. Pugin, quickly spread beyond their own church, with some members of the Church of England, including F. G. Lee, reconceiving their own church in similar terms, often accompanied by a revival of medieval ritual. It describes the history of the first major ecumenical organisation with significant support from the two churches, the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom.