Improvement, Repair, and the Uses of the Gothic Past

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.

From ‘Castles in the Air’ to the Topographical Gothic

This chapter charts the genesis, development, and eventual modification of Ann Radcliffe’s architectural imagination over the most active years of her career. Having provided a reading of the politics of Radcliffe’s fictional castles, and situating her representations within the tradition of eighteenth-century landscape painting, the argument explores the transition from imaginary Gothic architectural forms—those proverbial ‘castles in the sky’—to the ‘real-life’ Gothic castles described in contemporary antiquarian topographies. Broadening the focus out beyond the particular case of Radcliffe, the chapter explores a more general sense of cultural transition in the period, one that resulted in a marked turning away from fake ruins, follies, and fictional ‘castles in the air’ and a movement into the more ‘authentic’, grounded, and antiquarian impulses of the ‘topographical Gothic’.

Antiquarian Gothic Romance

Consolidating the themes explored in previous chapters, Chapter 6 turns to consider the ‘antiquarian Gothic romance’, an oxymoronic strain of Gothic writing that, even as it peddled its hyperbolic, highly fanciful tales, self-consciously aspired towards the rigour and facticity of the antiquarian topographical method. Having discussed these impulses in a selection of lesser-known Gothic romancers, as well as the curious antiquarian romances of writers such as Thomas Pownall and Joseph Strutt, the chapter focuses on two literary responses to the ruins of Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire: Ann Radcliffe’s posthumously published Gaston De Blondeville (1826), and Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821). As in previous chapters, Gothic ruins are shown to call up vastly competing imaginative constructions of the Gothic past, each of which is politically inflected: the Tory ‘white Gothic’ of Scott, and the radicalism of Radcliffe.

‘Venerable Ruin’ or ‘Nurseries of Superstition’

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.

Associationist Aesthetics and the Foundations of the 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.

Introduction

This introductory chapter explores the primary concerns of the book. Having provided an account of how the long eighteenth century conceptualized ‘Gothic antiquity’, it explores the perceived links between the antique past, its architectural remains, imaginative response, and eighteenth-century political discourses. Through a reading of Horace Walpole’s confounding of the differences between historiography and romance, it situates the rise of Gothic literature in a liminal space between these two practices. Analysing two competing visual representations of scenes from Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the discussion introduces a concern that runs throughout the remainder of the book: far from being a monolith, ‘Gothic antiquity’ for the eighteenth century was a divided and politically disputed construct. While conservatives tended to celebrate the Gothic past as a vanished golden age of political stability and great cultural achievement (the ‘white Gothic’), radical writers invoked it as a ‘Dark Age’ of tyranny, violence, and oppression.

Conclusion: From the Gothic to the Medieval

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.

Horace Walpole’s Enchanted Castles

Extending the discussion of Walpole’s architectural imagination in Chapter 1, this chapter pays sustained attention to the assumption that the eponymous castle in his The Castle of Otranto (1764) is based on, or inspired by, the author’s architectural work at Strawberry Hill. Having outlined the history of the Otranto/Strawberry Hill relationship, the chapter subjects these presumed correspondences between text and house to careful scrutiny, eventually arguing that if the two are related at all, it is primarily through the language of romance that is common to both. Both the Castle at Otranto and Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, the argument shows, are versions of the ‘enchanted castles’ that Walpole discovered deep in the annals of ‘Gothic story’. The chapter ends with an account of the extent to which Walpole arrogated to himself the ability to call up so many ‘enchanted castles’ in a number of contemporary literary and architectural experiments.