Victorian architecture

I am indebted for this post to some excellent websites from the Victorian web and from Wikipedia. I have also used two books: Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem. The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (Phoenix, 2004) and Roger Dixon and Stefan Muthesius, Victorian Architecture (Thames and Hudson, 1985).

Victorian architecture is all around us. After a post-war period in which Victorian buildings were deemed 'monstrosities' and many were demolished in favour of modernism, there is now a recognition of the inventiveness, dynamism, and aesthetic appeal of so many Victorian structures. A great deal has been lost, but much has now been lovingly restored.

As well as domestic housing - some modest, some grand - the period saw an enormous expansion in public and commercial buildings: town halls,  churches, railway stations, hospitals, museums, banks and hotels.  

Architects

Many of the new building projects were open to competition and this provided an unprecedented opportunity for a young architect who wished to make his way in his profession. In 1836, for example, Charles Barry won the competition for the new houses of Parliament. Architecture was a subject of great public interest and the most esteemed architects, such as Barry, received knighthoods.

There were also many private commissions created by the patronage of wealthy individuals who worked alongside architects to produce noteworthy. Thomas Cubitt was granted commissions by the duke of Bedford and the marquess of Westminster.  In 1845 he was authorised by Prince Albert to proceed with a new residence at Osborne. 

From 1866 William Burges transformed Cardiff Castle for the 3rd Marquess of Bute and in 1875 he began work on Castle Coch.

Castle Coch, a rich man's Gothic fantasy

The career of Joseph Paxton shows both trends. He made his name by designing the glasshouse at Chatsworth for the duke of Devonshire, but won the competition for the Crystal Palace. 

The architect was now a recognised professional working alongside a quantity surveyor. In 1834 the Institute of British Architects had been founded, given a royal charter in 1837. But there were few architectural schools and the majority of architects learned their trade through apprenticeships. Architectural practice was spread through journals.

The Gothic

The favoured style of most architects was the Gothic, popularised by A. W. N. Pugin, whose idealisation of the Middle Ages was profoundly influential. 

Pugin's Contrasts (1836)
The modern workhouse compared with medieval charity.
Public domain

The Gothic revival was heavily influenced by two works by John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-3). In the second edition of The Seven Lamps, he set out his position clearly.

I have now no doubt that the only style proper for modern northern work, is the Northern Gothic of the thirteenth century, as exemplified, in England, pre-eminently by the cathedrals of Lincoln and Wells, and, in France, by those of Paris, Amiens, Chartres, Rheims, and Bourges, and by the transepts of that of Rouen.

What he loved about the Gothic was its expression of individuality, and even imperfection, compared with what he saw as the sterile formalism and uniformity of the classical style.

It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they … receive the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

This idealisation of the Gothic was not a purely British development. In France, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was also extolling the Gothic and restoring buildings in the Gothic style.

The style came to be particularly associated with Sir George Gilbert Scott. He was the son of a clergyman and he specialised in ecclesiastical buildings, though he also designed the Albert Memorial and the St Pancras Station hotel.  However he produced classical designs for the Foreign Office. 

The High-Church Gothic architect, William Butterfield, designed two Tractarian buildings All Saints Margaret Street in London and Keble College, Oxford.

Butterfield's Keble College chapel, opened 1876

The dominant architect of the mid-Victorian period was Alfred Waterhouse. He was born in Liverpool but some of his most notable work took place in Manchester, where his Gothic designs won the competitions for the assize courts and the town hall. He did not confine himself to the Gothic and constructed the Natural History Museum  along the lines of a Romanesque church.

The most advanced architect of the late Victorian period was Richard Norman Shaw. He designed Gothic buildings but he also took architecture beyond the Gothic. His concern was to evolve a style of architecture based on the English vernacular. One of his most spectacular buildings was Cragside in Northumberland.

Cragside: beyond the Gothic

New materials

Because of the nineteenth-century transport revolution builders were not confined to local materials.  The repeal of the brick tax in 1850 meant that St Pancras station and its hotel could be built in the 1860s of Nottingham red brick, brought south by the Midland Railway. Westminster Cathedral was built with brick from Peterborough. The terracotta tiles that face the Natural History Museum came from Tamworth. Polychrome brickwork became a characteristic of Victorian architecture.

Below are a few from the very many examples of the varied ways in which the Victorians applied the architectural language of previous centuries to contemporary conditions.

Station architecture

The London to Birmingham Railway, engineered by Robert Stephenson was opened in 1837.  Its London terminus was designed by Philip Hardwick and his son P. C. Hardwick. The station was approached through the 'Euston Arch', in reality a Doric propylaeum or gateway. It cost about £30,000 but the company thought it a good investment as people flocked to see it when it was built.

The Italianate Newcastle station was opened in 1850 by the Queen. The train shed used curved wrought-iron ribs to support an arched roof, the first of its kind in the world.

After 1851 stations drew on the experience of building the Crystal Palace. King's Cross station was built in 1851-2 to a design by Lewis Cubitt. The train sheds copy the techniques of the transepts of the Crystal Palace. The façade consists of a screen of yellow stock brick pierced by two arched windows, with an Italianate clock tower in between.

King's Cross station at its opening in 1852.

St Pancras station, opened in 1868 was the London terminus of the Midland Railway. It was intended as a structure that would eclipse in size all the previous London stations. 

Museum architecture

The British Museum was designed by Sir Robert Smirke in the style of the Greek revival. But in the Victorian period a second wave of construction took place under the Italian librarian Anthony Panizzi. By the early 1850s he conceived the idea of constructing a round room in the empty central courtyard of the Museum building. With a design by Smirke work on the reading room began in 1854 and was completed three years later. With a diameter of 140 feet, the room was inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. It was constructed by segments on a cast iron framework. The papier mâché ceiling is suspended on cast iron struts hanging down from the frame. The room was opened on 2 May 1857. It was opened for public viewing between 8 and 16 May and over 62,000 visitors came to see it.

The British Museum reading room
Wikimedia Creative Commons

The British Museum was stylistically conservative - classical rather than Gothic - as were the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. However, the Natural History Museum in South Kensington was stylistically much more innovative innovative.

It was the brainchild of the palaeontologist Richard Owen, who was appointed superintendent of the British Museum Natural History departments in 1856. He saw that the collections needed more space and because the British Museum site was limited, he planned a new site in South Kensington. In 1866 the commission was granted to Alfred Waterhouse. Work began in 1873 and the museum was finally completed in 1881 at a cost of £395,000.

The Natural History Museum, designed by
Waterhouse as a temple of science modelled on a
Romanesque cathedral

Waterhouse's design was influenced by his frequent visits to the Continent. The style is an idiosyncratic version of Romanesque. The façade to the Cromwell Road is 675 feet long and is punctuated by central towers which rise to 192 feet. It is faced with terracotta tiles manufactured by the Tamworth-based company of Gibbs and Canning Ltd. The tiles and bricks feature relief sculptures of flora and fauna, with living and extinct species in different wings, the living in the west and the extinct in the east. This may have been Owen's rebuke to Darwin. Between the central towers is a great arched portico, which leads to a hall giving access to the galleries.

Manchester: flagship city

In keeping with its self-confidence as 'Cottonopolis', Manchester saw the building of grand warehouses based on the style of the Italian Renaissance. The J. Brown and Son Warehouse (1851) was one of the most impressive

Possibly the largest is the sandstone Watt's Warehouse, a six-storey palazzo (now the Britannia Hotel), built in 1856 by Travis and Magnell at a cost of £100,000.  It is designed in the form of a Venetian palazzo, and has five floors each built in a different architectural style. The four roof towers break up the horizontal cornice at regular intervals.

In the 1860s a campaign was underway to build a magnificent town hall that would celebrate Manchester's cultural and economic dominance.  The competition was won by Alfred Waterhouse. His problem was how to create an impressive building on an awkward site in Albert Square and he created a Gothic style that owed much to Venetian architecture. The Town Hall opened in 1878.

Manchester Town Hall - a palace for King Cotton
Public domain

The Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall

Conclusion

1. The Victorian period, a time of rapid population growth, increased prosperity, and technological innovation, saw an unprecedented demand for new buildings, both public and private.
2. Architects tended to favour the Gothic, though some looked back to the classical period, while others merged the Gothic with Italianate or English vernacular styles. 
3. The new buildings were a reflection of opulence, self-confidence and stylistic and technical innovation.

An age of faith? An age of doubt?

'The Doubt: Can These Dry Bones Live"'
Henry Alexander Bowler (1855)
Tate Britain. Image released under Creative Commons
CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

‘Contemporaries agonized over those who did not float upon the flood of faith. We marvel at the number who did.’ Theodore Hoppen, The Mid Victorian Generation (Oxford, 1998), p. 425.

See here for a very comprehensive site.

A crisis of faith?

The Victorian period saw some well-publicised crises of faith, often caused by the new scientific discoveries. Two of the most prominent intellectuals to lose their Christian faith were Charles Darwin and George Eliot. In 1869 Thomas Henry Huxley coined the term 'agnostic'. 

Alfred Lord Tennyson
Carbon print by Julia Margaret Cameron
The Art Institute of Chicago
Public domain

Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam arose out of his grief at the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam, but also engaged with the problem of the cruelty of nature. It was inspired by Robert Chambers' Vestiges of Creation (1844) and is the first poem in English to mention the dinosaurs. Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach lamented the decline of Christianity.

Modern scholarship, however, is more inclined to stress the strength and resilience of Victorian religion. The nineteenth century was an age of doubt but it was also an age of faith, with a high level of biblical literacy. Preachers like the Baptist, Charles Haddon Spurgeon and the American evangelists, Moody and Sankey, drew large crowds. It was the age of hymn-writing, church-building and overseas missions, and the well-publicised doubts of the intellectuals were not typical of the mass of the population. 

Victorian prostitution and the fight against the Contagious Diseases Acts

'Found', by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Delaware Art Museum
Public domain

The Acts

Victorian prostitutes mainly served working-class men in squalid conditions, and their typical clients were soldiers and sailors, who tended to be single because of their conditions of service. Their middle-class clients were mainly young single men (rather than married men). At Oxford in the 1840s the proctors’ records suggest a figure of between 300 and 400 prostitutes in a city of 25,000 people of whom 1,500 were students.  

Prostitution was a widely-recognised social problem that occupied many philanthropists, such as the wealthy heiress, Angela Burdett-Coutts, who founded a home for young women, Urania Cottage. See here for Dickens's involvement with the scheme. There are interesting discussions here and here.

The three euphemistically titled Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) were an attempt by the British government to regulate prostitution in the manner of other European countries such as France in order to reduce the sexually transmitted diseases that plagued the British army and navy. The acts applied to specifically named ports and garrison towns, although the ultimate intention was to include all of Britain.   

The first Act stipulated that within a radius of eleven army camps and naval ports, a woman suspected of prostitution had to register with the police and receive a compulsory medical examination. If the examination revealed disease, she would be confined to a ‘lock’ hospital for a period of up to three months.

The Act of 1864 was replaced by a new Act in 1866, which added Chatham and Windsor to the number of subjected towns and introduced the enforcement of fortnightly examinations of prostitutes. The third Act of 1869 extended the provisions of the second Act to cover a total of eighteen towns in the British Isles. The maximum period of detention for a diseased prostitute was extended to nine months. 

The CD Acts were administered by units of plainclothes policemen seconded from the Metropolitan Police. They were given sweeping powers to determine who was a prostitute. No warrant or probable cause was needed. The victims were not merely prostitutes but working-class women in general, many of them illiterate, who were locked up without any regard for their legal rights. If a girl signed papers agreeing to an examination, her agreement was a de facto acknowledgement of prostitution. She was then required to be re-examined regularly. If she refused to sign the papers, she could be held in prison for months. 

The examinations were often brutal. Typically, the woman's legs were clamped open and her ankles tied down. Surgical instruments - sometimes not cleaned from prior inspections - were inserted so inexpertly that some women miscarried. Others passed out from the pain or from embarrassment. Some women with harmless conditions were misdiagnosed and locked in hospitals without recourse. 

Because men were not included within the provisions, the Acts embodied the double standards of sexual morality in which prostitution was seen as an unavoidable, and perhaps necessary, evil.

Victorian values: the Angel in the House and the Fallen Woman

The ideology of domesticity

As a reaction to the rackety private lives of some of their predecessors, the queen and Prince Albert set out to create a monarchy rooted in the idea of a happy marriage and domestic values that would give an example to the rest of the country. Walter Bagehot wrote ‘A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life’.

Victoria and Albert's
Christmas tree
Wikimedia Commons

The ideology of domesticity was set out in the novels and paintings of the period. Home was regarded as a place of calm happiness away from the turmoil of the world of work, and the wife was the guardian of the home. Although women were denied a say in politics, they were nevertheless thought to play a vital part in the ordering of society. It is often said that the Victorian period saw a rigid ideology of separate spheres: the man’s role was public and outward-looking, the woman’s was private and domestic. Women were denied a direct political role, but because the home was a site of national importance, their domestic role was seen as politically important. If a woman went wrong, therefore, this prefigured national disaster.

Samuel Smiles and Self-Help

This post owes a great deal to the many writings of Asa Briggs on Victorian society and ideology.

Samuel Smiles
from the frontispiece of Self-Help
Public domain

1859 was a great year for important books. It saw the publication of George Eliot's Adam Bede, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help. Mill set out the attractions of individuality - the need to create a tolerant society (although raising the possibility of the tyranny of the majority); Darwin explained evolution in terms of struggle. These were both controversial books. The third - Self-Help- was not.

Self-Help has now been digitised and can be downloaded from a number of sites. Here is one. It's probably no coincidence that it's American.

The gospel of work

Smiles did not believe he was expounding something controversial but something old and profoundly true - a gospel not a thesis.

Many people have claimed that the Victorians invented the gospel of work - but it can be found in Hogarth’s 'Industry and Idleness' and the whole eighteenth-century ethos of inculcating ‘habits of industry’ in the poor. But the work ethic was given a new vitality by a lapsed Presbyterian, Smiles’s fellow Scotsman, Thomas Carlyle, who had praised the nobility and dignity of work - and he was one of Smiles’s heroes. 

Thomas Carlyle
Public domain

The life of Smiles

Smiles was born in Haddington near Edinburgh in 1812.  Although brought up in an extreme Calvinist sect, he described his youth as ‘frolicsome’ and ‘prodigal’. He admitted in Self-Help that it was more ‘natural’ to be prodigal than thrifty, more easy to be dependent than independent.

John Stuart Mill and On Liberty

John Stuart Mill, c. 1870
London Stereoscopic Company
Public domain

This is only a brief account of Mill's life up to the publication of On Liberty. As a philosopher, colonial administrator, and politician, he was one of the dominating figures of the Victorian age and other aspects of his life and thought are discussed in further blogs. The best modern biography is Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Atlantic Books, 2007)

John Stuart Mill was born in London in 1806, the son of James Mill, a Scottish philosopher and economist. He was named after his father’s friend, Sir John Stuart. His mother, Harriet Burrow, seems to have had remarkably little influence on him – she does not merit a single mention in his autobiography. His father a follower of Utilitarianism and the prevailing economic doctrine of political economy.

The young John Stuart Mill had a precocious education, beginning with Greek at the age of three. At about the age of twenty he suffered a sort of mental breakdown and was only rescued by his discovery of poetry. This opened up a wider world of the emotions and moved him on from his father’s severe rationalism.

Because he would not subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, he was unable to matriculate at Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, he became an administrator in the East India Company.

In 1830 he met at a dinner party Harriet Taylor, the wife of a pharmacist, John Taylor. She became the great love of his life and a profound intellectual influence, and he controversially dedicated his Principles of Political Economy (1848) to her. (It was considered very improper to dedicate a book to another man's wife!) He lived in an uneasy threesome with her and her husband. Two years after  Taylor’s death in 1849 she married Mill.  After seven years of marriage, she died in Avignon in 1858. In the following year, Mill published On Liberty, still regarded as the key text on liberalism.

Here are some quotations to convey some idea of his argument:

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will is to prevent harm to others. [Chapter 1]

 If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. … Truth gains even more by the errors of one, who with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. [Ch.2]

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty or that of progress or improvement. [Ch 3] 

Conclusion

1. Mill was the supreme exemplar of mid-Victorian liberalism and he is still frequently quoted during debates on freedom.
2. He believed humans should be left free to make their own mistakes as long as these did not harm others.
3. He believed in an open market of ideas. Humans would never progress towards the truth if they were denied the freedom to express their opinions or allowed to hear only one side of an argument.

The Great Exhibition

Queen Victoria opens the Great Exhibition
at Hyde Park
Public domain

There is a great deal of interesting material online about the Great Exhibition. See here, and here for good discussions. You can also listen to Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time' discussion here.

There are also two good videos on YouTube.

Among the books I've consulted are Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Batsford, 1998) and Judith Flanders, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (HarperPerennial, 2007), especially chapter 1.

Is the opening of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ on 1 May 1851 the great symbolic Victorian event? Certainly this is how the queen seemed to see it in her letter to King Leopold. Palmerston:

‘a glorious day for England’.

The prayers uttered by the archbishop of Canterbury at the opening were the prayers of a successful people, whose God had multiplied blessings on them. His prayer was appropriately followed by the Hallelujah Chorus.

The Exhibition came at a useful time for the government of Lord John Russell, as it was in crisis over ecclesiastical policy and would have fallen if the Conservative Protectionists had been able to present a convincing alternative government. Disraeli saw the Exhibition as

‘a godsend to the Government ... diverting public attention from their blunders’.

But the very idea of the Exhibition was controversial. There was no national funding and Prince Albert had to seek private sponsorship. The Hyde Park site was fiercely attacked and there were complaints that Paxton’s structure was not only not high enough to enclose vast elm trees in full summer leaf but that it obstructed the riders in Rotten Row. Protectionists attacked its free trade ideology. The Ultra Tory MP Colonel Charles Sibthorp described it as

‘an industrial exhibition in the heart of fashionable Belgravia to enable foreigners to rob us of our honour’.

Many prophesied public indifference and financial failure.