Reformation to Millennium: Pugin's Contrasts in the History of English ThoughtAuthor(s): Rosemary HillSource: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Mar., 1999), pp.26-41Published by: Society of Architectural HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/991435Accessed: 18/01/2010 11:58

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Reformation to Millennium Pugin's Contrasts in the History of English Thought

ROSEMARY HILL, London

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: Accompanied

by Appropriate Text. By A. Welby Pugin, Architect. was published on

4 August 1836. It marked the turning point of the Gothic

Revival. It made Pugin's reputation and remains his most

famous book.

Yet Contrasts is more widely known than read. It has re-

ceived relatively little critical attention, and it exists in no

scholarly edition. The principal studies of it are Phoebe Stan-

ton's essay "The Sources of Pugin's Contrasts" and Henry- Russell Hitchcock's introduction to the reprinted edition of

1969.1 Apart from these, S. Lang's essay "The Principles of the

Gothic Revival in England" touched on the subject briefly but

significantly.2 Since then some of the preparatory drawings have been described by Alexandra Wedgwood in her cata-

logues of Pugin's work in the collections of the RIBA and the

Victoria and Albert Museum.3 Margaret Belcher's essay

"Pugin Writing" discusses Contrasts in the context of Pugin's other books.4 Some graphic precedents have also been sug-

gested.5 This article amplifies the previous studies and differs from

them on some points, particularly the influences on Contrasts. It is divided into two main parts. The first is an account of the book's composition between 1832 and 1836, including a discus- sion of the original, previously unpublished, scheme of 1833. The second part deals with its sources and intellectual context. It suggests that Contrasts grew out of a particular tradition of

English antiquarian writing to which its relation has not been discussed. It will also show that Contrasts owes less to French

and German theory than has sometimes been thought and

more to Romanticism, to the millenarian religious climate of the 1830s, to the influence of Pugin's mother, Catherine

Welby, and to the popular culture of the day.

THE FIRST DRAWINGS

The earliest surviving intimations of the idea that was to become Contrasts are in a sketchbook that Pugin was using in

1831-1832, when he was nineteen and twenty years old.6 Here

he drew the facades of three houses over the title "Contrasted

Domestic Architecture" (Figure 1). The first, dated 1470, is a

timber-framed house with elaborate gabling. It appears in

some form in every subsequent version of the scheme. The

second house, dated 1532, is in a Flemish Renaissance style. The third, a brick end-of-terrace house with the date 1832, is

much like the one in which Pugin himself was living with his

parents, number 105 Great Russell Street, built by Thomas

Cubitt.7

The "contrast" here, already to the disadvantage of the

nineteenth century, is chiefly aesthetic. The richness of the

older buildings is set against the thinness of the new. There is a

hint of satire in the laughable awkwardness of the lamp bracket, but there is no indication of a wider moral or religious

argument. That Pugin was already beginning to develop such

a view, however, is suggested by a sequence of drawings in the

same sketchbook of designs for a "Catholic Chapel," the first

time he is known to have used the word Catholic. These are

dated 1831, four years before Pugin entered the Roman

Catholic Church. Over the next five years, the implications of

these two groups of drawings, one religious and one stylistic, were to merge.

UR-CONTRASTS

Between 1832 and 1834 Pugin made several sequences of

drawings that have come to be known as "ideal schemes."

These are neither copies of existing buildings, nor are they

designs intended to be built. They show him beginning to

deploy his knowledge of medieval art and architecture experi-

mentally to create buildings of his own invention. Of the

surviving schemes, two, both of 1833, are of particular rel-

evance.

The first is a bound volume entitled "Contrasts delineated and executed by A.W. Pugin Ad MDXXXXXXIII" (sic).8 It

comprises thirty-two drawings presented in pairs, the medieval

examples dated 1430 or 1530, the modern 1830. After the tide, the contrasted subjects are: chapels, ecclesiastical architecture

(exterior and interior), sepulchral monuments, street architec-

ture, sepulchral slabs, gatehouses, wells, castellated architec-

26 JSAH / 58:1, MARCH 1999

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FIGURE I: "Contrasted Domestic Architecture," 1832

ture, inns, town halls, prayer books, altars, domestic architec-

ture, and public conduits. There is no text except for the titles

of each pair. Like the other ideal schemes, and unlike the illustrations

for the published version of Contrasts, the drawings are all, in

varying degrees, inventions. As a result, the scheme is diffuse; the satire has yet to focus on particular targets. In the pub- lished version the buildings were all real. The choice of

subjects is also, in this early stage, somewhat random. In 1836

Pugin dropped the rural models of modern architecture and

concentrated his attack on the nineteenth-century city. The

comparisons of 1833 are also more gentle in their humor. The

points they make are aesthetic and broadly moral, but not yet Catholic or strongly polemic.

In essence, however, the graphic idea is in place. The other

important elements that would survive in the published scheme

are Pugin's preference for Late Gothic, though this would

change soon after 1836. Where Pugin was already, arguably, most prescient was in offering so many different building

types. The Gothic Revival of the early 1830s had moved be-

yond private houses and churches, but it had yet to impose itself on civic, commercial, or urban architecture. In the town

hall, the inn, and the street fronts Pugin pointed the way forward.

The Ur-Contrasts show Pugin partially mature as an artist and a satirist, still closely dependent on the experience of his

London childhood and his training as an antiquary and draftsman in the drawing school of his father, Auguste Charles

(c. 1769-1832).9 Once again the Pugin family house appears, here in situ (Figure 2). Set against it is the timber-fronted

house, this time unmistakably in France (Figure 3). The

windows of its neighbor are borrowed from the Chateau

Fontaine le Henri near Caen, which Pugin's father had in-

cluded in his Specimens of the Architectural Antiquities of Normandy in 1827. Pugin was, of course, half French and architecturally as well as verbally bilingual. Although he talks in Contrasts

principally about England, he reaches automatically for French or Flemish examples when he needs them.

The "Catholic Chapel" of the earlier sketchbook also reap- pears in simplified form, based in part, like its predecessor, on

the mid-fourteenth-century Slipper Chapel at Houghton Saint

Giles, Norfolk, which Pugin had drawn in 1831 for his father's

Examples of Gothic Architecture (Figure 4). Its modern counter-

part, the "Zion Chapel," is surely intended to be generic, with

HILL: PUGIN'S CONTRASTS 27

_ ** - *-f -0 140o ____

FIGURE 2: "Contrasted Street Architecture 1830," 1833

its inappropriately sited "wine vaults" and "counting house"

in the cellars (Figure 5).

A major source for the drawings of 1833 was the tour of the

West Country that Pugin made with his parents in the previous

autumn of 1832, during which the idea for Contrasts was

developed. It was to be the last of the annual drawing trips that

A. C. Pugin took with his pupils before his death that Decem-

ber. The medieval buildings of Wells in Somerset, especially

the cathedral and the Vicars' Close, a whole planned street of

the fourteenth century, drove Pugin "mad" with excitement;

as he told his friend William Osmond in a letter on the top of

which are drawn a memorial tablet and a canopied tomb,

labeled "1832" and "1532," respectively.10?

At Glastonbury "The George" was the basis of Pugin's

medieval inn (Figure 6). In his own version Pugin made the

late-fifteenth-century building grander. He also made it sym-

metrical, something he would not have done five years later.

The modern inn, perhaps another generic composition, was a

target that Pugin found hard to hit (Figure 7). There was

nothing impractical about it. A coach office on the premises

was highly appropriate. The success of the early scheme is variable. The caricature

of a commissioner's church is probably meant particularly for

Edward Lapidge's Saint Peter's, Hammersmith (Figure 8).

Unfortunately, Pugin's medieval alternative is not much better

digested. His "Ecclesia Parochialis MCCCCXXX" (Figure 9) is

an anthology that includes the west end of Saint Mary, Bever-

ley, and the tower of Saint Mary Magdalen, Taunton. He does

not manage, however, to make them into a plausible unity.

In the "medieval" altar, with its anachronistic Renaissance

retable (Figure 10), there is another example of Pugin's

fast-developing but still imperfect grasp of medieval forms. His

fantastic Gothic town hall is a wild extrapolation from Flemish

buildings he had probably not yet seen for himself (Figure 11).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A POLEMIC

Pugin's other scheme of 1833, "The Deanery in 1830," is a

fragment, five illustrations made up into a booklet (Figure

12).11 Here, for the first time, the moral and historical argu-

ments are brought fully into play. The drawings are humorous,

and the brief text brings the satire home. The fictional dean-

ery is a medieval building that has suffered first at the hands of

the Cromwellian forces in the Civil War and then from mod-

ern improvers who have smartened it up with sash windows

and gas lamps. At the same time,

... the Gatehouse having been destroyed cannot here be represented

but this light and appropriate design was erected by the late munificent

dean at the expence of 54 pounds which was defrayed by the sale of the

28 JSAH / 58:1, MARCH 1999

FIGURE 3: Street architecture, 1 530," 1833

materials of the old gatehouse which were sold to a Builder in the town

for ?170 including the lead.12

The eighteenth-century dean, "a staunch supporter of the

union of church and state," appears as one of a pair of con-

trasting clergymen (Figure 13). "The Deanery in 1830" takes

a political position with its ironic reference to the "freedom of

the people" under the Commonwealth and its anti-Erastianism.

In the style of its drawings, "The Deanery," like Contrasts,

may, as Phoebe Stanton suggests, owe something to George Cruikshank's cartoons. It is hard to discern a predominating influence. Pugin had found his own voice in the manner of the

day. He had known Rudolph Ackermann's print shop and art

emporium in the Strand, The Repository of the Arts, all his

life, and he was thoroughly familiar with modern prints, as his

discussion of them in An Apology for Contrasts makes clear.13

The text of "The Deanery" is a parody of contemporary art

journalism in general and perhaps in particular of Acker-

mann's Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, which described

Pugin's father's designs in 1827 as being in the Gothic style but

with "those improved forms and elegant contrivances which

the superiority of modern art and ingenuity have intro-

duced."14

After 1833 the scheme for Contrasts lay dormant but it was

not forgotten. The direction of his thoughts is evident from his

sketchbooks for that year and the next, which contain occa-

sional notes such as: "182 lay and clerical persons executed in

Queen Elizabeth's reign." On the other side of the same page is a drawing of iconoclasts.15

With the controversy over the rebuilding of the Palace of

Westminster, destroyed by fire in 1834, the battle of the styles between Gothic and classical architects erupted into the pub- lic arena. Pugin felt he could contain himself "no longer"and went "boldly to the attack."16 His pamphlet A Letter to Hakewill, a reply to William Hakewill's suggestion that the Houses of

Parliament be rebuilt in the classical style, appeared on 18

August 1835.17 At the beginning of the Letter to Hakewill, Pugin described himself for the first time in print as "Architect" for

he had now built his house, Saint Marie's Grange, outside

Salisbury, Wiltshire. Now, also for the first time, he put into

words his views on modern architecture. The targets of "The

Deanery in 1830" had been the clergy and modern taste in

general. Here he launched an attack on the architectural

profession and its "foolish" training, as well as a defense of the

craftsman builder that anticipates Ruskin. Students of architec-

ture, he complained,

after idling a few years on the classic soils of Greece and Italy, having

... restored a whole amphitheatre from a few feet of stone seat, return

to their countries and venture to attempt the styles which the master-

mind of a Steinback or a Wykeham carried to such perfection.18

While, by contrast,

The chisels of many a humble mason, whose only school has been

the cathedral of the city in which he dwells, have lately produced

stonework scarcely inferior to the finest specimens of the olden time.19

Pugin had been a Roman Catholic forjust over two months

when he published the Letter to Hakewill, but the religious

itso

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FIGURE 4: Chapel," 1430," 1833 FIGURE 5: "Contrasted Chapels 1830," 1833

HILL: PUGIN'S CONTRASTS 29

I

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FIGURE 6: Inn, "1530," 1833 FIGURE 7: "Contrasted Inns 1830," 1833

argument was still only implicit in the stylistic one. On the back of the pamphlet, however, was an advertisement for Contrasts, Or A parallel between the noble edifices of the middle ages, and the state

of architecture in the 19th century, described as "In progress and will be published as soon as completed."

In August 1835, Pugin was in London. It was almost cer-

tainly then that he made the first drawings for the book.20

They were all modern, "bad" contrasts. The London of the 1830s would provide him with no good examples. He decided to concentrate on urban building types. He worked on an- other version of "castellated architecture" but dropped it, as he dropped the villa and the gatehouses. Contrasts now be- came part of the nineteenth-century debate about the city.

Pugin drew the entrance to King's College in the Strand,

newly completed by Sir Robert Smirke, whose career, Pugin felt, had "gone on too long" (Figure 14).21 Focusing the attack on the architectural profession, he now substituted for his

parents' house as an example of a modern house front that of Sir John Soane, Professor of Architecture at the Royal Acad-

emy (Figure 15). Stephen Geary's King's Cross, an unsatisfac-

tory and much lampooned building that combined memorial cross and police station, made an irresistible target, as did the Inwoods' feeble commissioner's church, Saint Mary's, in Ever- sholt Street nearby.

Pugin went on to sketch John Nash's All Souls, Langham Place, the epitome of Regency chic that would appear as the modern parish church in the published version. He also

drew the pump at Saint Anne's, Soho, a mean little structure with its handle chained up, which symbolized the parsimony of the modern age as compared to the generous medieval conduit from which water flowed free and abundant (see Figure 17).

After that, Pugin sketched Ely House, Dover Street, home of the Bishop of Ely. This modern family house (1775) had

replaced the medieval Bishop's Palace, a building referred to

by Shakespeare. The old and new buildings appeared in Contrasts as the pair of Episcopal Residences. It was a compari- son that had struck others before Pugin. As David Watkin has

noticed, Sir John Soane had made the same point in his lectures.22 Pugin, however, would not knowingly have bor- rowed an idea from the despised "Professor." He took his view of the old palace and part of his text, with due acknowledge- ment, from Brayley's Londiniana.23

Then the project lapsed again. Pugin was preparing draw-

ings for Charles Barry's and Gillespie Graham's entries in the

competition for the Palace of Westminster. He returned to Contrasts the next year and began drawing on 23 February.24 In March he was in Brighton and London, after which he made a

ten-day tour of the north and west of England. He drew the late-fifteenth-century facade of the Angel Inn

at Grantham, Lincolnshire, and the early-fifteenth-century chapel at Skirlaw, Yorkshire, on the later part of his tour. In both cases he "improved" the buildings. For the Angel he reconstructed the mullions and restored the sculpture, the

30 JSAH / 58:1, MARCH 1999

kind of topographical license that was common practice in his father's drawing school. Pugin went further, however. The

plates as published were idealized. At the Angel he moved the

gateway to the dead center, making, as in the earlier scheme for an inn, a symmetrical composition (Figure 16).

At Skirlaw, where the only criticism Nikolaus Pevsner could later make of this "perfect" Perpendicular chapel was that "the South porch sits against the building awkwardly" and that "the West tower is a little short," Pugin altered just these

points.25 He chose an angle that heightened the tower, and he left the porch off altogether.

On 26 March Pugin began "etching contrasts." A volume of preliminary and finished drawings and plates survives in the Victoria and Albert Museum.26 To the sketches of that month and the previous summer he added the "regular roman altar screen" at Hereford, which he had deplored three years earlier, and the Gothic screen at Durham.27 The parish church was Saint Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, which he had also visited in 1833. He disguised its incomplete spire in the engraving by making it appear to soar out of the picture frame.

Sir John Soane's house, placed in a suitably caricature Soanian frame, was paired with the rue de l'Horloge, Rouen. The only other un-English plate, and the only invention in the

published version, was the medieval H6tel de Ville. Pugin had now visited the Low Countries and grown out of the extrava-

gance of his first idea. Here he composed a building from Flemish sources, principally the thirteenth-century cloth hall in Ypres.28

The most significant addition to the preparatory sketches was Pugin's inclusion of figures as well as carriages, animals, and other animate scenery. He used them, not according to

topographical convention, merely for scale, but as they were used in his father's most popular work, The Microcosm of London, to add a narrative, sometimes comic element. This

technique was Pugin's parents' invention, although the figures in the Microcosm were drawn by Rowlandson.29

Pugin deployed it in the same way. The disorderly crowd

bursting out of Saint Pancras Chapel and the bobbing bonnets at Brighton spoke for the secularity of the modern age. The devout and orderly procession at Saint Mary Redcliffe in Bristol contained a contrast within itself, for there had been violent anticlerical riots in the city in 1831. The godly citizens, like the gracious residents of the rue de l'Horloge, spoke for a

better, more civil age. In "Contrasted Public Conduits," as The Gentleman's Magazine pointed out, the message is carried al- most entirely by the figures (Figure 17).30 A policeman shoo-

ing away a child from the chained pump while an indifferent

spectator lounges against a doorway in the background says more about modern morals than does the architecture. It is a

plate that reminds us that Contrasts was published a year before Oliver Twist.

Pugin now gave the book a title page, the successive drafts of which varied mostly in the spelling of "Parallel" (a question that he never settled). The endpiece of the book, a scale with the nineteenth century weighed against the fourteenth, was more importantly transformed in these drawings from an

elegant piece of metalwork, much like his designs for fashion- able iron and brassware, to a great balance pivoted on the eye of Truth (Figure 18). The frontispiece has been fully de- scribed byJohn Summerson.31

Of the plate "dedicated without permission to the trade," there is a first version in a drawing divided vertically between a medieval scene and a modern "temple of taste" (Figure 19). The published version is more successful and funnier in its satire on late-Georgian architecture, epitomized by the glazing bar in the sash window running impudently through John Nash's nose (Figure 20). With the help of his friend Talbot

Bury, who "understands my style," Pugin finished etching

'

I

FIGURE 8: "Parish church 1830, Contrasted Ecclesiastical Architecture No. I," 1833 FIGURE 9: "Ecclesia Parochialis MCCCCXXX," 1833

HILL: PUGIN'S CONTRASTS 31

Contrasts on 2 May 1836.32 On 30 May he completed the

letterpress that is the subject of the second part of this article. Two months later Contrasts was published.

CONTRASTS AND THE ANTIQUARIAN TRADITION

The text of Contrasts comprises a preface, five chapters, a

conclusion, and twenty-one appendices. In summary, Pugin's intention is to show "how intimately the fall of architectural art in this country, is connected with the rise of the established

religion," by which he means the Church of England.33 He

begins by praising the "wonderful superiority" of Gothic

buildings, explaining that architecture flourished until the

Reformation, when the dissolution of the monasteries de-

stroyed the fabric of medieval society, after which artistic and social integrity were lost. The plates are intended as examples of this thesis.34

Contrasts is, as Henry-Russell Hitchcock said, "primarily" a

picture book.35 It is so literally, in the sense that Pugin first conceived it visually and worked on the plates of the published version before the text. More than that, however, without its

illustrations, which have a wit and clarity absent from the

letterpress, it would have had little impact either in 1836 or since.

Yet it is important, in considering Contrasts critically, to consider it whole. The text that Pugin felt was "appropriate" to his book is revealing of the author and his age. Long in

FIGURE I I: Town Hall, 1833

contemplation, rapid in execution, it bears the marks of haste.

Nevertheless, it contains the essence of Pugin's convictions

and much that would be fundamental to his thinking for the rest of his life, beliefs that would inform his work and to some

extent the course of the Gothic Revival.

Contrasts was shaped as much by Pugin's ignorance as by his

knowledge. Both were remarkable. He was educated almost

entirely at home by his intellectually adventurous mother and in his father's drawing school. He knew almost as much as

anyone alive about Gothic architecture, but his grasp of his-

tory was vague. He could not spell "parallel" or "marriage." His first serious book, like his first building, Saint Marie's

Grange, bears the marks of autodidacticism; it has the original-

ity, at times the naivete, of a mind working not against but

apart from academic convention.

In considering the influences on Contrasts, it would seem

reasonable to begin with those that Pugin himself acknowl- FIGURE 10: Altar, 1833

32 JSAH / 58:1, MARCH 1999

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the Dissolution,39 thereby, as one reviewer pointed out, setting his golden age in the midst of the Wars of the Roses.40 Later, when he knew more, he attributed the change of style to the

Renaissance and made drastic alterations to the second edi-

tion of Contrasts, shifting the aesthetic high point back in time

accordingly.

Pugin's picture of the Middle Ages owed most to the

greatest of the Stuart antiquaries, William Dugdale

(1605-1686). The engravings of Wenzel Hollar and others

populated Dugdale's works with grave monks and sweet-faced

nuns in a landscape of castles and monasteries. They created a

world of beauty and harmony such as Pugin envisaged restor-

ing in England. He later owned a first edition of the Monasticon

Anglicanum and used the map of Thanet from it in the glass of

his house at Ramsgate.41 Dugdale, who was at the Battle of Edgehill and went with

Charles I's exiled court to Oxford, wrote about the Reforma-

tion under the shadow of what he saw as another, similar

catastrophe, the Commonwealth. The Monasticon is a lament

for the lost treasures of the English church. Its lists of jewels,

"pillars of silver," and "clusters of pearls" lie behind Pugin's own evocative notes of "oaken presses now empty and decayed [once] filled . .. with .. . vestments of richest materials."42 On

the title page of the Monasticon, drawn by Hollar but designed

by Dugdale, is a pair of contrasting images (Figure 21). In one

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FIGURE 14: King's College,

College Gateways," 1835

London. Preparatory pencil sketch for "Contrasted

FIGURE 15: SirJohn Soane's house. Preparatory pencil sketch for "Contrasted House

Fronts," 1835

a medieval king makes an act of donation to an abbey. It is a

scene of order and piety, with Art, Church, and State at peace.

Against it stands Henry VIII brandishing a sword. At his "Sic

volo" the abbey he has seized is brought to ruin.

34 JSAH / 58:1, MARCH 1999

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The title page is not suggested here as a source for Contrasts

but rather as a precedent in the same intellectual tradition and

an image that Pugin certainly knew. It is, like Spelman's illustration of primitive Christian architecture, "The first

Church of the Christians in Britaine" at Glastonbury (Figure

22), more relevant to Pugin's ideas in 1836 than, for example, the frontispiece to Milizia-Laugier's primitive hut set against a Corinthian portico.43 Pugin could have known Milizia's

Memorie degli architetti antichi e moderni when he wrote the first

edition of Contrasts, but nothing in the book depends on it.44

The tradition to which Contrasts belongs was still current in

the antiquarian circles in which Pugin grew up. His immediate

intellectual predecessor is John Milner (1752-1826), the

builder of the Gothic chapel at Winchester and Catholic Vicar

Apostolic of the Western District. Milner was attacked, when

his Historie of Winchester appeared in 1798-1801, for writing a

work of Catholic propaganda dressed up as antiquarian his-

tory. Pugin was reading Milner while he worked on his own

book and admired him greatly.

Indeed, in speaking of the dissolution of the monasteries, it

was almost a commonplace of antiquarianism to say, as E. J. Willson did in 1821 in the introductory remarks to A. C.

Pugin's Specimens of Gothic Architecture, that the loss of those

"grand establishments, where Architecture, Sculpture, and

Painting had always been warmly cherished, .. . gave a terrible

blow to those arts 'that adorn and soften life.' "45 Willson was a

Catholic; John Carter was thought to be one, and the vein of

Catholicism still ran deep. When the Society of Antiquaries declined to elect James Wyatt in 1797, for reasons that had

nothing to do with religion, George III denounced them as a

"Popish Cabal."46

Thus the intellectual milieu that, long before he wrote

Contrasts, formed the cast of Pugin's mind had prepared the

ground for a view of the pre-Reformation world as a golden

age of faith and art. Itwas perhaps what he meant when he said

in 1840 that he had prayed "from a child for the long lost glory of Catholic England" and wept over its ruins.47 This line of

thought came to him most directly through Willson

(1787-1854), who had known the Pugin family since 1818, when Pugin was six. A competent architect and a sophisticated restorer, as his work at Saint Mary's, Hainton, Lincolnshire,

shows, Willson lived in Lincoln, and Pugin visited him regu-

larly from childhood. It was almost certainly Willson who was

responsible for Pugin's first making the explicit connection

between Gothic and "Catholic" architecture.

In May 1831 Willson wrote the introduction to the first

volume of A. C. Pugin's Examples of Gothic Architecture. In it he

took up the knotty business of nomenclature, a question that

much preoccupied antiquaries of his generation. His friend

John Britton had recently offered the term "Christian" as an

alternative to Gothic, with its still pejorative connotations.48

Willson suggested that this would "imply too much," for

Christianity predated the pointed arch. If, he continued, "a

term were to be borrowed from religion, it might be more

properly denominated 'Catholic Architecture.' "49 It was in

1831 that Pugin made the drawing discussed above for the

"Catholic Chapel," apparently the first time he had used the

word.

The question was certainly debated by A. C. Pugin and his

pupils in the Great Russell Street school. Another of them, Thomas Larkins Walker, who had been introduced by his

"master and friend" to the Architectural Society, read his

"Essay on the Study of Gothic Architecture" to the members

on 31 December 1833.50 He began by citing Willson's use of

the term Catholic, which he preferred to Britton's Christian.

After this, Walker, a Scots Protestant, proceeded to make a

confused case arguing both for the Gothic and for the forward

"march of good taste." On the conduct of Henry VIII, like

many better historians, he was unable to make up his mind.

Three years later, Walker was offended by Contrasts. This was

probably because, as Pugin said, he took its criticisms person-

ally.51 He may also have felt that the subject was to some extent

his own.

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FIGURE 16: Angel Inn, Grantham. Preparatory sketch for "Contrasted Public Inns,"

1836

HILL: PUGIN'S CONTRASTS 35

St ANNES SOHO COHTRn STea

IlYBRLIC COnahYtTS

FIGURE 17: "Contrasted Public Conduits," as published in Contrasts, 1836

In the context of English antiquarianism, the argument made in Contrasts for the moral connotations of Gothic archi-

tecture can be seen to arise naturally out of that tradition.

There were other influences on the book, however, which

Pugin did not acknowledge. They were too close for him to

see. They were aspects of the spirit of the age.

ROMANTIC MILLENARIANISM

Contrasts is imbued with Romanticism and the sensibility of the

Picturesque. "Soften perspective," Pugin noted to himself as

he prepared the medieval drawings.52 Much as he mocked the

Regency Picturesque, he was an inheritor of its philosophy. His

text sets out the case for Gothic architecture entirely in terms

of association, of the devout "feelings" that certain visual

effects will inevitably produce. In a Gothic church "the eye is

carried up and lost in the height of the vaulting ... the intri-

cacy of the ailes; the rich and varied hues of the stained

windows."53

Pugin laughed at "cloisters by moonlight," but he had

WEST CH*FXP CO}HYIT THOMAS IbtA 1+79

grown up with the Picturesque.54 His father had worked for

Nash when he was closely associated with Payne Knight and

Uvedale Price. David Watkin complains that Pugin offers the

theories of Knight and Price "as though he had discovered

them himself."55 He probably thought he had; that is often the

way with ideas absorbed in childhood. Pugin's churches would

always conform-when he could get a rood screen-to Knight's

description of the effect of Gothic "dim and discoloured light diffused through unequal varieties of space, divided but not

separated."56

Pugin's religion was steeped, like that of the Tractarians, with Romantic longing and similarly was charged with the

millenarianism of the late 1820s and 1830s.57 Yet Pugin re-

mained unaware before 1836 of developments at Oxford. The

only child of older parents, with whom he lived until their

deaths in 1832 and 1833, he was in some ways sheltered. His

chief contact with intellectual life was through his mother, Catherine Welby Pugin (c. 1769-1833). In considering the

original conception of the book, it is remarkable that no one

36 JSAH / 58:1, MARCH 1999

FIGURE 18: "They are weighed in the balance and are found wanting," preliminary

design for endpiece in pen with red and black ink, 1836

has taken up Benjamin Ferrey's unambiguous attribution of

the plan to the "suggestive imagination" of Catherine Pugin.58

Ferrey disliked Mrs. Pugin and would not have given her

credit unless it was due. His statement is given weight by the

evidence of her surviving papers.59 It was Catherine Pugin who

worked out the idea for her husband's most popular book, The

Microcosm of London.60 Moreover, the Microcosm was unique

among A. C. Pugin's works, as Contrasts was to be in his son's, in

having a conceptual rather than an exegetical basis. This, it

seems likely, was the reflection of Catherine Pugin's more

analytic mind.

She was of Coleridge's generation and intellectually typical of it. A reader of Thomas Paine and Rousseau in her youth,

optimism had been turned, by disillusionment with the ideals

of the French Revolution, to pessimistic conservatism. Her son

shared, or he inherited, her conservatism. She was not, as has

sometimes been said, a Calvinist, and Pugin was certainly not

brought up as a Puritan.61 She was an Anglican but, like many of her contemporaries, a troubled and critical one.

Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and the Reform Act of 1832

challenged the authority of the established church. The apa-

thy of many of the clergy and the neglect of church buildings seemed all of a piece, and not only to the Pugins. In the

autumn of 1832, while the family was in the West Country and

the plan of Contrasts was being formed, it seemed to so

temperate a man as Dr. Arnold of Rugby that "the church

of England as it now stands no power on earth can save."62

That is the premise on which Contrasts is based. It is a mani-

festo for action "whenever" the present establishment should

fail.63

From Wells, while Pugin wrote of his excitement about the

buildings and drew contrasting memorials on the letter, his

mother told her sister, "Many a cathedral I have seen but none

so lovely as this," adding that "tears of admiration rushed into

the eyes" of her son at the sight of the lady chapel. Yet they feared it was threatened with ruin. The greater part of the

townspeople were "rank Methodists." The clergy therefore,

"having no-one to jog them," either did nothing to repair the

fabric or, if they did, they employed "ignorant blockheads"

who bodged. Therefore, Mrs. Pugin concluded: ". . . when in

the confession they chant forth we have done what we ought not to have done & left undone what we ought to have done

we can scarcely forbear casting our eyes around and respond-

ing you have indeed."64 Mother and son had much in com-

mon.

Catherine Pugin died in 1833, the year the first schemes were drawn. "The Deanery in 1830" probably expressed her anti-Erastian Anglicanism as much as her son's. Over the next

three years, however, he lost patience with the Church of

England, finding the resolution of his religious and architec-

tural beliefs in a return to the true, pre-Reformation, Catholic

faith. Like Ambrose Phillips, soon to be his friend, and some of

FIGURE 19: Preliminary design for frontispiece and title page in pencil, 1836

HILL: PUGIN'S CONTRASTS 37

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the Tractarians for whom he would be ready "to write CREDO

with our blood," Pugin's religious belief was imbued with a millenarian sense of urgency.65 England seemed to him re- served for some great destiny, and the reunion with Rome

imminent.

For thinking men and women of every religious persuasion and none, the England of the 1830s seemed on the verge of crisis. Criticism of the Church was combined with a wider fear

of social disintegration in the wake of the July Revolution in France. Fear of a loss of moral center, of "private judgement," which Pugin attacks in architecture and in religion equally,

running mad led people of widely different opinions to recon- sider the Reformation critically. John Stuart Mill saw in Chris-

tendom in the Middle Ages the greatest example of a "progres-

FIGURE 20: The plate "Dedicated to the Trade,"

as published in 1836

sive" society, while for conservatives like Cobbett, Southey, and

Pugin, it offered a model of stability.66 The works of the early

antiquaries began to be reprinted, and those who pondered the position of the church looked to the early Anglican di-

vines. Keble's edition of that foundation stone of the Church

of England, Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, appeared in

the same year as Contrasts.

In England in the first third of the nineteenh century, as W.

H. Oliver has said, prophecy was "an ordinary intellectual

activity."67 More than two dozen books and pamphlets called

Signs of the Times were published between Thomas Carlyle's in

1829 and the second edition of Contrasts in 1841. The authors

included the Rev. Patrick Bronte, Robert Owen, and the

millenarian preacher Edward Irving. Pugin had been taken by

38 JSAH / 58:1, MARCH 1999

FIGURE 21: Title page of Monosticon Anglicanum, Wenzel Hollar, 1655

his mother to hear Irving. He found the experience pro-

foundly boring. Yet he, too, shared with that "son of thunder"

the vocabulary of apocalypse.68 The text that concludes Contrasts is the writing on the wall

from Daniel 5.27: "They are weighed in the balance and are

found wanting." In his Apology, Pugin cited Romans 13.12: "the night of sorrow is far spent, the brightness of returning

glory is seen."69 Carlyle suggested that prophecy was now a

form of history, and if such a genre ever existed, Contrasts

would be an example of it.

PANTOMIMES AND PUBLIC OPINION

It has been said that Pugin must have read Carlyle and agreed with him, or that he studied Schlegel, Saint-Simon, and Cha-

teaubriand.70 This seems unlikely. He was never much given to

academic pursuits. His outline for an autobiography reveals-

apart from a particular enthusiasm for the theater-the inter-

ests of the popular press: royal deaths and marriages, bankrupt- cies, fires, and elopements.71 All his life he read novels and

newspapers but not philosophy. The ideas that run through the book were more prevalent

than has perhaps been thought. Pugin's antiutilitarian vocabu-

lary, his characterization of the modern age as "mechanical," or the use of a phrase like "the age of improvement" tells us

nothing more than that he read the newspapers and the

developing architectural press. He certainly readJohn Carter, from whom he seems to have adapted the phrase "dozing

pens" for pews.72 Indeed, as J. Mordaunt Crook points out, much that Carter says about the structural and conceptual flimsiness of Regency architecture anticipates Pugin. Yet Carter

was writing in The Gentleman's Magazine before Pugin was born.

By 1836 these criticisms of modern architecture were general, as the reviews of Contrasts make clear.

Perhaps Pugin read Cobbett, as Phoebe Stanton suggests. Whether he knew Rural Rides, however, hardly matters, for

what Cobbett, that "very honest man with a total want of

principle," tells us is not so much what he thought as what

thousands of other people thought at any given time.73 At

Salisbury, where Pugin was living when he wrote Contrasts, Cobbett had written in 1826: "I could not look up at the spire and the whole of the church ... without feeling that I lived in

degenerate times. Such a thing never could be made now."74

In an age preoccupied, as Mill said, with comparing itself

with the past, such ideas were the journalistic commonplaces of Pugin's childhood. The growing interest in the Gothic past was to be found in many currents and crosscurrents of thought and taste. It was expressed in the popular enthusiasm for the

"olden times" that created a market for Scott's novels and

hundreds of modestly priced prints. It animated the public debate about the state of the established church, and, aided by books of measured drawings of medieval buildings like A. C.

Pugin's, it offered an alternative model at a time when discon-

tent with contemporary architecture was becoming general. Much of what Pugin knew of popular taste came to him

through the theater, where he worked in the late 1820s and

early 1830s. He assisted on productions of Kenilworth and

Henry VIII (the revival of which was another manifestation of

public interest in the Reformation). If, as is perfectly likely,

FIGURE 22: "The first Church of the Christians In Britaine," from Henry Spelman's

Concilia, 1639

HILL: PUGIN'S CONTRASTS 39

Pugin was taken in 1822 to Gog Magogat Drury Lane, he could

have seen the essence of his argument in pantomime form.75

The Harlequinade was cast as a battle between modern archi-

tects and the Society of Antiquaries. In the transformation

scene, the buildings of modern London were turned into their

medieval equivalents.

Pugin's use of epigraphs from Ward's Reformation suggests a

taste in poetry more robust than refined. Ward's popular

seventeenth-century burlesque is, like Contrasts, a heady mix of

high and low culture.76 Its declared sources include some of

Pugin's own (Stow and Camden), but the style is Drury Lane

doggerel. The reputation that Contrasts brought him put Pugin in

touch, after 1836, with advanced religious and architectural

thought. He made contact with the Tractarians, and having

"gained much information,"77 in 1841 he revised Contrasts,

changing the argument, such as it was, and shifting the high

point of Gothic back in time so that, as Margaret Belcher says, the reader who had been invited to admire King's College

Chapel in the first edition was now to deplore it.78

Between 1836 and 1841, Pugin worked out his "true prin-

ciples." It is with them that the influence of French rationalist

theory, which has sometimes been discussed in relation to

Contrasts, becomes significant. Whatever Pugin knew of it plays no visible part in the first edition; his remarks on "propriety" are no more than the Vitruvian conventions of the drawing school. It was perhaps soon after Contrasts appeared that he

began to consider theories of construction. The prospectus for

his Ancient Timber Houses, dated 12 January 1837, suggests a

new discovery, promising to reveal, in these "wooden edi-

fices," a "most important but unknown principle of ancient

design."79

The first edition of Contrasts caught a wave of public feeling. As the English examined their position in the light of Continen-

tal revolution and social unease, they looked back, as Dugdale and his contemporaries had looked back, to the Reformation,

trying to understand the crisis of the present in the light of

history. Pugin's familiarity with that tradition enabled him to

produce a manifesto that brought the wider issues to bear on

architecture. It was both of the moment and original. By 1841 that moment had passed; the second edition with its impor- tant new plates received little contemporary notice and lies

beyond the scope of this article.

As it appeared in 1836, however, launched on the tide of

public debate that surrounded the new Palace of Westminster and the emergence of the architectural profession, Contrasts marked a beginning and an end for Pugin as it did for

nineteenth-century architecture. It was the beginning of his career and the end of the rich, intense world of his childhood, the end of the Regency and the beginning of a new phase of

the Gothic Revival. In itself, it represented the Romantic,

millenarian flowering of a tradition whose roots ran deep in

the history of English thought.

Notes I am especially grateful to Alexandra Wedgwood, who lent me her microfilm

copy of the early Contrasts scheme, without which the first part of this study would have been impossible.

A version of the article was read to Christopher Woodward's discussion group at the Soane Museum in April 1998. I am grateful to him and to those whose comments then and since have helped me: Simon Bradley, Gillian Darley, Lindsay Duguid, Michael Hall, Roderick O'Donnell, Edwina Porter, Margaret Richardson, Andrew Saint, Andrew Sanders, Gavin Stamp, and Alexandra Wedgwood.

Dr. and Mrs. James Mackey have been generous in making unpublished material available to me.

1 Phoebe Stanton, "The Sources of Pugin's Contrasts," inJohn Summerson, ed., Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner (London, 1968), 120-139, and A.W.N. Pugin, with an introduc- tion by H.-R. Hitchcock, Contrasts (Leicester, 1969).

2 S. Lang, "The Principles of the Gothic Revival in England," JSAH 25 (1966): 240-267.

3 Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Farnborough, 1969-1977), Alexandra Wedgwood, ed., B (1977), and Alexan- dra Wedgwood, ed., Catalogues of Architectural Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, A.W.N. Pugin and the Pugin family (London, 1985).

4 Margaret Belcher, "Pugin Writing," in Paul Atterbury and Clive Wain- wright, eds., Pugin, a Gothic Passion (London, 1994):105-116.

5Ashby Bland Crowder, "Pugin's Contrasts, sources for its technique," Architectura 12 (1983): 57-63.

6 Described in Wedgwood, V&A (see n. 3), 123-127. 7 The house has since been demolished (information from Clive Wain-

wright). 8 Now in the collection of the Public Library of St. Louis, Missouri. Publica-

tion of a facsimile limited edition of the sketchbook is in progress. 9 For an account of some aspects of A. C. Pugin's career, see Rosemary Hill,

"A. C. Pugin," Burlington Magazine 1114 (1996): 11-19. 10 Letter now in Salisbury Museum, Salisbury, Wiltshire. 11 Wedgwood, V&A, 145-146. These drawings relate to but should be

distinguished from the ideal scheme "The Deanery," Wedgwood, V&A, 144-145.

12 "The Deanery in 1830," fol. iv. 13 A.W.N. Pugin, An Apology for a work entitled Contrasts (Birmingham, 1837),

42. 14 The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce 10 (1827): 245. 15 Sketchbook in private possession, fols. 2 and 2v. 16 Letter to Edward Willson dated 6 November 1834, in the Milton S.

Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. 17 A Letter to A. W Hakewill, Architect, in answer to his reflections on the style for

rebuilding the houses of parliament. By A. Welby Pugin, Architect, Salisbury, 1835. 18 Ibid., 8. 19 Ibid. 20 The sketchbook is described in Wedgwood, V&A, 162-163. 21 Letter to Willson (see n. 16). 22 David Watkin, SirJohn Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy

Lectures (Cambridge, 1996), 341. 23 Edward Brayley, Londiniana or Reminiscences of the British Metropolis, 4 vols.

(London, 1829), 1: 223-231. 24 The progress of Contrasts can be followed after 1835 from Pugin's diaries,

transcribed in Wedgwood, V&A, 32-100. 25 Nikolaus Pevsner and David Neave, eds., The Buildings of England, Yorkshire:

York and the East Riding (2nd ed., London, 1995), 689. 26 Described in Wedgwood, V&A, 164-166. 27 Letter to William Osmond dated 27 October 1833, now in private posses-

sion. 28 Contrasts (1969), 11, describes it as "the hotel de ville atYpres," but the

resemblance is not exact. 29 For an account of the Pugins' involvement in the original concept of the

40 JSAH / 58:1, MARCH 1999

Microcosm, see Rosemary Hill, "Bankers, Bawds and Beau Monde," Country Life, 3 November 1994, 64-67.

30 Gentleman's Magazine, March 1837, 285. 31 John Summerson, Georgian London (London, 1991), 286-287. 32 Undated letter to William Osmond, probably early 1835. Letter now in

private possession. 33 A.W.N. Pugin, Contrasts (1836), 15. 34 Ibid., 1. 35 Contrasts (1969), 16. 36Joan Evans, History of the Society of Antiquaries (Oxford, 1956), 2. 37 Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquaries of the Seventeenth

Century (Oxford, 1995), 217. 38 William Dugdale, The History of St Paul's Cathedral in London (London,

1656), epigraph. 39 A.W.N. Pugin, Contrasts (1836), 5. 40 British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review, April 1839, 279-298. 41 William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, 3 vols. (London, 1673), 297. 42 A.W.N. Pugin, c. 1835, notes in a sketchbook in the Victoria and Albert

Museum, Wedgwood V&A, 128. 43 Watkin, Soane, 136 (see n. 22). 44 Edward Willson owned a copy at his death in 1854. The sale catalogue of

his possessions is in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, London. 45 Specimens of Gothic Architecture ... by Augustus Pugin, the literary part by E.J.

Willson (vol. 1, London, 1821; reprint, Edinburgh, 1895), "Remarks on Gothic Architecture and on modern imitations," x.

46 Quoted in J. Mordaunt Crook, John Carter and the Mind of the Gothic Revival (London, 1995), 58.

47 Letter toJ. R. Bloxam, postmarked 25 October 1840, Magdalen College, Oxford.

48 Britton may have evolved this term with Arcisse de Caumont, who worked with him and A. C. Pugin on ArchitecturalAntiquities of Normandy. For a summary of de Caumont's views, see Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpreta- tions Through Eight Centuries (Princeton, 1960), 519-522. A.W.N. Pugin knew de Caumont, whose view of Gothic as "touching and religious" may have contrib- uted something to Pugin's developing ideas.

49 A. Pugin, Examples of Gothic Architecture, 3 vols. (London, 1831-1838), 1: xiv.

50 Manuscript in the British Architectural Library, London.

51 Letter to Edward Willson dated 5 September 1836, in the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

52 Sketchbook described in Wedgwood, V&A, 162-163. 53 A.W.N. Pugin, Contrasts (1836), 2. 54 A.W.N. Pugin, Apology (see n. 13), 11. 55 David Watkin, Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in

Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement (Oxford, 1977), 21.

56 Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste (London, 1805), 174.

57 For a discussion of Pugin and Romanticism, see Rosemary Hill, " 'To stones a moral life,' " Times Literary Supplement 4981 (1998): 21-22.

58 Benjamin Ferrey, Recollections of Pugin, with an introduction by Clive Wainwright and an index byJane Wainwright (London, 1978), 92.

59 Now in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. 60 Hill, "Bankers" (see n. 29). 61 Lang, "Principles of the Gothic Revival" (see n. 2). 62 Quoted in Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church: Part One 1829-59

(London, 1966), 47. 63 A.W.N. Pugin, Contrasts (1836), 23. 64 Letter dated 9 September 1832, in the Yale Center for British Art (Pugin

mss. no. 54). 65 Letter from Ambrose Phillips to J. R. Bloxam, 4 March 1841, Magdalen

College, Oxford. 66John Stuart Mill, The Spirit of the Age (1831; Chicago, 1942), 77. 67 W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millenialists (Oxford, 1978), 11. 68 Thomas Carlyle's obituary of Edward Irving (London, 1835). Carlyle's

reference to John Donne's description of the Anglican divines ("we are the sons of thunder") is another instance of contemporary preoccupation with the early days of the established church.

69 A.W.N. Pugin, Apology, 29-30. 70 Stanton, "Sources" (see n. 1), and Lang, "Principles of the Gothic

Revival." 71 The autobiography is published in Wedgwood, V&A, 24-31. 72 Carter's phrase is "sleeping pens," quoted in Crook,John Carter, 63 (see n.

46). 73 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age or Contemporary Portraits (1825; 4th ed.,

London, 1886), 293. 74 William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1830; London, 1985), 324. 75 Ferrey claims that Pugin never went to the theater as a child, but the

evidence of his autobiography and his mother's letters strongly suggests other- wise.

76 England's Reformation: a poem in four cantos by a Catholic soldier. 77 Letter to J. R. Bloxam, postmarked 12 January 1841, Magdalen College,

Oxford. 78 Belcher, "Pugin Writing" (see n. 4). 79 Loudon's Architectural Magazine 4 (1837): 145.

Illustration Credits

Figures 1-11. George Fox Steedman Architectural Library, St. Louis Public

Library, St. Louis, Missouri

Figures 12-20. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

HILL: PUGIN'S CONTRASTS 41

Article Contentsp. 26p. 27p. 28p. 29p. 30p. 31p. 32p. 33p. 34p. 35p. 36p. 37p. 38p. 39p. 40p. 41

Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Mar., 1999), pp. 1-105Front Matter [pp. 1 - 3]EditorialTo Save History by Design [pp. 4 - 5]

Reconciling National Narratives in Socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Baščaršija Project, 1948-1953 [pp. 6 - 25]Reformation to Millennium: Pugin's Contrasts in the History of English Thought [pp. 26 - 41]Modernism and Medicine: The Hospitals of Stevens and Lee, 1916-1932 [pp. 42 - 61]Review EssayAnanda K. Coomaraswamy and the Practice of Architectural History [pp. 62 - 67]

Exhibitionsuntitled [pp. 68 - 71]untitled [pp. 71 - 75]

BooksEnglanduntitled [pp. 76 - 77]untitled [pp. 77 - 79]untitled [pp. 79 - 82]untitled [pp. 82 - 84]

Mexicountitled [pp. 84 - 87]

Materials and Structuresuntitled [pp. 87 - 89]untitled [pp. 89 - 90]untitled [pp. 90 - 92]

Commemorationuntitled [pp. 92 - 93]untitled [pp. 93 - 96]

Modernismuntitled [pp. 96 - 97]untitled [pp. 98 - 100]untitled [pp. 100 - 103]

Abstracts [p. 104]Back Matter [pp. 105 - 105]