Associationist Aesthetics and the Foundations of the Architectural Imagination

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-88
Author(s):  
Dale Townshend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Thomas Gray ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Architectural Association ◽  
Architectural Imagination

This chapter seeks to provide an account of how aestheticians and practising architects in the long eighteenth century variously accounted for the imaginative potential of Gothic architecture. Showing how architectural debates in the period were structured according to the classical/Gothic divide, it explores the empiricist discourse of architectural association as it runs from John Locke, through Joseph Addison, Mark Akenside, William Chambers, Alexander Gerard, Thomas Gray, William Gilpin, and others, into the work of John Soane. Situating the architectural writings of Horace Walpole within this tradition, it discusses Walpole’s engagement with the architectural theories of his day. Through a reading of the work of William Beckford, the chapter charts the shift from empiricism to idealism in the architectural imagination of the early nineteenth century.

Gothic Antiquity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale Townshend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Selection Of

This book seeks to provide the first sustained scholarly account of the relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature (fiction, poetry, drama) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the literature/architecture relation is a topic that has long preoccupied scholars of the literary Gothic, there remains no monograph-length study of the intriguing interactions between these two aesthetic forms. Equally, Gothic literature has received only cursory treatment in art-historical accounts of the early Gothic Revival in architecture, interiors, and design. Addressing this gap in scholarship, Gothic Antiquity seeks to situate Gothic writing in relation to the Gothic architectural theories, aesthetics, and practices with which it was contemporary, providing closely historicized readings of a wide selection of texts. In turn, it shows how these architectural debates responded to, and were shaped by, what we have since come to identify as the literary Gothic mode. In both its ‘survivalist’ and ‘revivalist’ forms, the architecture of the Middle Ages in the long eighteenth century was much more than a matter of style. Incarnating the memory of a vanished ‘Gothic’ age in the enlightened present, Gothic architecture, whether ruined or complete, prompted imaginative reconstructions of the nation’s past—a notable ‘visionary’ turn in which Gothic writers, architects, and antiquaries enthusiastically participated. Through initiating a series of dialogues between Gothic literature, architectural history, and the antiquarian interest in the material remains of the Gothic past, the book argues that these discrete yet intimately related approaches to vernacular antiquity are most fruitfully read in relation to one another.

Coda

2019 ◽  
pp. 224-240
Author(s):  
Angus Vine
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Considerable Distance ◽  
Inns Of Court ◽  
Thomas Gray ◽  
Textual Culture ◽  
Scholarly Production ◽  
Geographical Scope

This concluding chapter explores the geographical scope and extent of the textual culture described in previous chapters. Revisiting a number of the individuals discussed earlier in the book (including Hill, Oxinden, and Owen of Henllys), it shows that miscellany culture flourished in the provinces and regions as well as in the more familiar sites of literary and scholarly production. In fact, it is shown that it emerged in some of its most striking and innovative ways in places that were a considerable distance geographically (as well as often intellectually) from more typical literary locations such as Oxford, Cambridge, and the Inns of Court in London. In parallel, the chapter also shows that this kind of textual culture had an unexpected longevity, extending well into the eighteenth century, as examples including John Locke and Thomas Gray show.

Improvement, Repair, and the Uses of the Gothic Past

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-220
Author(s):  
Dale Townshend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Radicalism ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter confronts the question of the politics of Gothic architecture in the long eighteenth century. Exploring manifestations of its Whiggish appeal, the argument also points to a number of notable Tory appropriations of the revived Gothic style. If the political significance of the Gothic was thus open to dispute, notions of improvement and repair were almost uniformly inflected with intimations of political radicalism, particularly after the French Revolution of 1789. Exploring the political meanings of improvement, repair, and ruination in the work of John Carter, the discussion extends this into a reading of political discourse of the 1790s, tracing political writers’ extensive appropriations of architectural metaphor. The chapter concludes with a reading of 1790s political Gothic fiction, showing how radical writers of the decade engaged with the politics of Gothic architecture while questioning the extent to which chivalry, romance, and other aesthetic ‘remains’ of the Gothic past could serve the needs of the present.

‘Venerable Ruin’ or ‘Nurseries of Superstition’

2019 ◽  
pp. 221-266
Author(s):  
Dale Townshend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

Ranging across antiquarian studies, executed architectural projects, romances, letters, essays, and topographical writing, this chapter seeks to show how the Gothic fictional aesthetic, in both its pro-Catholic and anti-Catholic extremes, was merely one manifestation of the broader discourse on ecclesiastical Gothic architecture and architectural ruin in the long eighteenth century. While, for many antiquaries, ecclesiastical ruins were ‘venerable’ and deserving of respect, for other, more popular writers they were ‘nurseries of superstition’, painful remainders (and reminders) of England’s Catholic past. Having explored the ceaseless vacillation between the poles of ‘venerable ruin’ and ‘nurseries of superstition’ across a range of architectural theorists, essayists, and Gothic writers of the period, the argument shows how Gothic architecture, particularly the architecture of ecclesiastical ruin, prompted imaginative reconstructions of the nation’s Gothic past, an age not only characterized by Catholic ‘darkness’ and ‘superstition’, but one also felicitously inhabited by ‘enlightened’ English Catholics.

Conclusion: From the Gothic to the Medieval

2019 ◽  
pp. 311-356
Author(s):  
Dale Townshend
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
Dark Ages ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
The One ◽  
First And Second Generation ◽  
Architectural Imagination

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.

Liberty, Property and Popular Politics

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
The University

Few scholars can claim to have shaped the historical study of the long eighteenth century more profoundly than Professor H. T. Dickinson, who, until his retirement in 2006, held the Sir Richard Lodge Chair of British History at the University of Edinburgh. This volume, based on contributions from Dickinson's students, friends and colleagues from around the world, offers a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century Britain and provides a tribute to a remarkable scholarly career. Dickinson's work and career provides the ideal lens through which to take a detailed snapshot of current research in a number of areas. The book includes contributions from scholars working in intellectual history, political and parliamentary history, ecclesiastical and naval history; discussions of major themes such as Jacobitism, the French Revolution, popular radicalism and conservatism; and essays on prominent individuals in English and Scottish history, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Muir, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. The result is a uniquely rich and detailed collection with an impressive breadth of coverage.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

Gender, Class and a Naming Process in the English Long Eighteenth Century: Leicestershire c. 1680-1836

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-68
Author(s):  
Dave Postles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Society ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

During the 'long eighteenth century', a novel practice of naming was introduced into England which had a long precedent in some parts of continental Europe. Associated at first with aristocratic status, two 'forenames' were selectively adopted at various levels of English society. How that process occurred is illustrated here through a selective sample of Leicestershire parishes as it varied by the intersections of gender and class.

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