Abstract
Architect, artist, antiquary, designer, and critic A. W. N. Pugin was not always an agreeable man. In private and in public, he lashed out mercilessly, often venomously, at the “degraded” state of architecture, at contemporary culture, and at religious and political figures, past and present. “I as you know,” he stated unequivocally in one letter, “abominate the world & fashions & the emptiness of Society.”1 His personal correspondence catalogues the various religious denominations and political associations that he held responsible for the deplorable state of modern culture and society. Among them were Pagans, “hereticks,” infidels, “Mahometans,” Puritans, Calvinists, Methodists, Lutherans, Dissenters, deists, Baptists, “Westleyans,” Anglican “schismaticks,” and also rationalists, republicans, socialists, democrats, liberals, “Levellers,” and “revolutionary radicals.”2 As these competing sects “struggle for superiority,” they obliterate any semblance of cultural unity and religious concord, thus rendering the nation a house divided that must necessarily fall.3
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Notes
A. W. N. Pugin, The Collected Letters of A. W N. Pugin, vol. 2, ed. Margaret Belcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 379.
Pugin’s treatises and correspondence are littered with criticism of various sects and denominations. In just one example, he writes to register his disapproval of the practice of placing benches in churches, and comments contentiously that even “the Anglicans[,] schismaticks as they are, hereticks as they are have never dared to substitute a bench for a font. [S]uch an idea has only been put in force by the puritans & Calvinists” (Letters 1:310). The catalogue of examples I have given here are culled from A. W. N. Pugin, The Collected Letters of A.W.N. Pugin, vol. 1, ed. Margaret Belcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 169, 316, 261, 276, 336, 171, 310, and 41 and A. W. N. Pugin, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 92.
Benjamin Ferrey, Recollections of A. W N. Pugin and his Father, Augustus Pugin; With Notices of their Works (1862) (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972), 142.
A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts: or, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste, 2nd ed. (1841) (Leicester and New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 42–43.
A. W. N. Pugin, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843) (London: John Weale, 1969), 50.
“Pugin’s Christian Architecture,” Artizan 4 (April 30, 1843): 90–91; “Our Library Table,” Athenœm (January 14, 1837): 32. To gain a sense of the heated debate that Pugin inspired and for a survey of the language of these articles see Margaret Belchers invaluable A. W. N. Pugin: An Annotated Critical Bibliography (London: Mansell, 1987).
[W. H. Leeds], “A Batch of Architects,” Fraser’s Magazine 15 (March 1837): 324–339, 329.
On Pugin’s religiosity: David Watkin, Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory fom the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 3. See also Richard Davenport-Hines’s comment that Pugin was a nineteenth-century crusader who “sought salvation in gothic design” in his Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (London: 4th Estate, 1998), 223–224.
On Pugin as a romantic: Roderick O’Donnell, “Pugin as a Church Architect,” in Pugin: A Gothic Passion, ed. Paul Atterbury and Clive Wainwright (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 63–89, 64;
A. L. Drummond, “Augustus Welby Pugin: Art and Vocation,” Church Quarterly Review 153 (July 1952): 335–349, 342.
See also Megan Aldrich, “Gothic Sensibility: The Early Years of the Gothic Revival,” in A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival, ed. Paul Atterbury (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995), 13–29, esp. 13–14.
A. W N. Pugin, The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England (1843) (Frome, Somerset: Butler and Tanner, 1969), 42.
As Kenneth Clarke puts it, until Pugin began writing his architectural treatises, style was not understood as “something which springs inevitably from a way of life,” in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 137.
Patrick R. M. Conner, “Pugin and Ruskin,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978): 344–350, 349.
Jeremy Bentham, “Panopticon; or The Inspection-House” (1787) The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Bozovic (London: Verso, 1995), 29–95.
Bentham, Panopticon, 39; See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 205.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 59.
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© 2005 Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer A. Palmgren
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Wagner, C.M. (2005). Standing Proof of the Degeneracy of Modern Times”: Architecture, Society, and the Medievalism of A. W. N. Pugin. In: Holloway, L.M., Palmgren, J.A. (eds) Beyond Arthurian Romances. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981165_2
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