BOOKS
Fantastic dreams
Gavin Stamp
William Burges and the High Victorian Dream J. Mordaunt Crook (John Murray pp. 423, £40) Victorian architecture has not lost its connotations of slight absurdity, fortunately. 'Antiquarian prejudice' has yet to make it as matter-of-fact as the work of the Georgians, and Victorian architects and many Victorian buildings still seem extraordinary. What is of compelling interest is the frequent contrast between the character of the architects and the extreme Romanticism of their buildings, as well as that strange, brave experiment to make the Gothic of the 13th century suitable for modern hotels, town halls and railway stations in an age which was inhibited – as Gilbert Scott sagely recognised – by knowing too much history. Sir John Summerson has always main tained, rightly, that the midVictorians were obsessed with their failure to create an architecture of their own and that it is this noble, tragic failure which appeals to a posterity which can yet admire the real originality and quality of much Victorian Gothic. Kenneth Clark's Gothic Revival was, in many ways, written as a brilliantly sustained joke; GoodhartRendel was fascinated by the eccentric among Victorian architects while John Betjeman has always combined serious appreciation of Victorian buildings with a sense of humour about their architects.
There is the frenetic dogmatism of halfmad Pugin, the naive self-confidence of Gilbert Scott, the batchelor austerity of Butterfield and the moral earnestness of Street. And then there is Burges — Billy Burges, a brilliant, lovable, absurd figure who united the high seriousness of the Gothic Revival with the Bohemianism of the Pre-Raphaelite world and who was lucky enough to design some of the most wonderful escapist and expensive buildings of the 19th century. Rossetti summed him up: There's a babyish party named Burges
Who from infancy hardly emerges: If you had not been told He's disgracefully old You'd offer a bull's eye to Barges.
As a man, Burges is possibly more appealing to modern readers than many of his contemporaries. Unlike those strict characters. Butterfield and Street, he did not work in Gothic because it was the only true Christian style: he just liked it. He was not an Anglo-Catholic; his architecture was divorced from morality. Nor was he Gothic in his private life: he moved in the more raffish Pre-Raphaelite circles, knew Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, Fanny Corn forth; attended rat-hunts and visited notorious haunts like the 'Judge and Jury Club'. He also took opium, which, combined with his extreme myopia, may well have encouraged the dreamy, fantastic side of his mediaevalism. But he was also a clubbable batchelor and very entertaining company. 'Dear Burges . . . ugly Burges who designs lovely things. Isn't he a duck,' thought Lady Bute.
Dr Crook explores Burges's world, his enthusiasms and his friendships, with great tenacity and considerable relish — he has even discovered the birth and death dates of all the architect's dogs. He also evocatively describes the winning absurdity of much of Burges's Neo-Gothicism, which, we discover, was satirised in a contemporary novel, Ambassador Extraordinary by Robert Kerr (a very bad architect): `. . ."what you call uncomfortable I call quaint. . .I want to get rid of the idea of modern cosseting, you know, and drainage and wood floors, and so on. . ." "You don't go in for beds, do you?" "No, they're later. . ." ' Burges was a considerable scholar as well as a discriminating, if obsessive, collector. His illuminated manuscripts and his suits of armour are now in museums. His imaginative designs for metalwork, furniture and jewellery show the eclectic range of his scholarship as well as his understanding of craftsmanship. Similarly, his buildings show a union of sources, materials and crafts which — like the work of other Gothicists – realise the later ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement. As for his buildings, the list is short but impressive. Most are in his characteristic heavy, sculptural Early French manner of the 13th century, whose 'boldness, breadth, strength, sternness and virility' Burges thought suitable for Victorian Britain. His accomplishment in the style was clear when he and Clutton won the competition for Lille Cathedral in 1855 (they cleverly overcame French xenophobia by putting their pseudonymous drawings in French packing cases) but of course it was not built. Nor was his fantastic design for the new Law Courts, which was like a miniature Carcassonne (Burges once cheerfully admitted that 'We all crib from Viollet-le-Duc'), but he did build several churches, a cathedral in Cork, the Speech Room at Harrow, a country house (Knightshayes, for Sir John Ileathcoat-Amory) and, best of all, two extraordinary castles for Lord Bute in Wales — Cardiff Castle and Castel Coch, either of which makes Ludwig H's creations in Bavaria seem tawdry and pedestrian by comparison.
Burges is remembered for these Romantic castles and he has always had his admirers. In 1953 John Betjeman gave Evelyn Waugh Burges's own 'Narcissus Washstand', an exotic piece of furniture which makes an appearance in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Yet only now — on the centenary of his death are we at last given a biography, and there is a strange story behind it. The enthusiasts for Victorian architecture have often been as odd as the architects themselves, for only recently has it become an academically respectable subject. In the 1960's Burges became the special province of Charles Handley-Read, a rich dilettante collector to whom this book is dedicated. In a Prelude, Dr Crook properly pays tribute to this man, although he rather exaggerates Handley-Read's importance in the history of Victorian studies and makes the untenable claim that he 'discovered' Burges. (In the cause of honest historiography, Waugh's diary for 20 June, 1955, might have been quoted: Mark `Girouard outshone him, recognising Burges's wash-handstand as soon as he saw it, and exhibiting remarkable knowledge of English 19th century art'). In 1971, possibly tortured by his own failure to do justice to Burges, Handley-Read killed himself in peculiarly nauseating circumstances; one good thing he did was to choose Joe Crook as Burges's biographer and to leave him his copious and painstaking research material.
Now, ten years later, Dr Crook has not disappointed Burges's patient admirers. He has written a magisterial and densely researched definitive study which is yet highly readable and entertaining. A mass of information is tidied away in an intimidating number of notes, while the text is often in the new racy style of architectural history pioneered by Girouard.
But this book is more than a life of Burges. Dr Crook perceptively explores the cultural assumptions which made Burges's career possible, that central, vital tradition of Romantic utopianism, and he examines a series of Victorian 'Dreamers' — Romantic Tories (Cobbett, Sir John Manners, Kenelm Digby and Pugin), Romantic Socialists (Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris) and Romantic Artists (Rossetti and BurneJones). Equally valuable is the central section of the text: 'In Search of Style'. Here, Dr Crook endorses Summerson's claim that the mid-Victorians were riven with doubt and by a sense of failure: by the dilemma of style and by the challenge of the engineers. We are taken through Burges's own stylistic soul-searchings; he tried Continental Gothic, in which he was both faithful to precedents and yet managed to give his work that 'Vigour and Go', that originality of expression which now seems so characteristically mid-Victorian; he tried a degree of eclecticism — in Cardiff Castle, Byzantine and even Arabic elements are mixed with the Mediaeval. But he had no time for the licentious eclecticism of Norman Shaw's 'Queen Anne', which he regarded as a betrayal of the Gothic cause. In 1867, when asked by students what the style of the future is to be, Burges replied 'I cannot tell.' In the end, this highly intelligent man gave up the search and fell back into the comfortable, decorative extravagance of a Gothic fantasy world — fortunately for posterity.
At times I wonder if, in his imaginative Sympathy for the mid-Victorian Goths, Dr Crook is not almost as myopic as Burges himself. 'Like William Burges,' he tells us, returned to Gothic by way of reaction: a reaction in his case to the austerity of Neo-Classicism; in mine to the aridity of Neo-Classical scholarship' (now whose fault was that?) But he refuses to recognise that younger architects had to react them selves, against the Gothic dogmatism of Burges's generation; he is unsympathetic to the eclecticism of Shaw and wilfully blind to the talent of Bodley, who carried on the Gothic vision but gave it a refinement and an elegance of which Burges was incapable. The Romantic dream did not fade in the 1170s, as Dr Crook implies; it gave rise to good architecture for decades to come and Morris, in News from Nowhere, gave it new political vividness. The Garden City is as much a product of Victorian escapism as is Cardiff Castle.
Burges could do no wrong, it seems; but I cannot accept Dr Crook's casuistry in defence of Burges's mercifully unexecuted scheme for St Paul's, in which Wren's cold Classicism was to be obscured by a welter of mosaic and marble. And is Burges really the most representative mid-Victorian Goth? His architecture relies heavily upon sculp ture and he did not build a railway station, as did Gilbert Scott, nor a public building as sophisticated as those by Waterhouse; and he was very lucky in finding indulgent, rich clients. But I recall that Goodhart-Rendel put certain buildings by Burges above any by Street. A biography can illuminate a whole period. It is a great pity that Scott has not enjoyed the detailed, scholarly, broad treatment given here to Burges, but Dr Crook has written an indispensable book, which will be essential to the understanding of mid-Victorian architecture.
It is to Cardiff that the enthusiast for Burges must travel, or to Knightshayes in Devon, now that it is owned by the National Trust. The extraordinary house Burges created for himself in Melbury Road, Kensington, richly and reconditely deco rated and furnished, remains inaccessible to the public. But this is the tangible key to Burges's architecture and dreams; LethabY could only describe Tower House as 'massive, learned, glittering, amazing.' Even these days, £40 may seem an excessive amount to pay for a book, but, in addition to 328 pages of text, 75 of notes and 20 of appendices, there are 261 black and white illustrations and 11 in (very neces sary) colour. I only wish there were fewer plates of the Welsh castles, which have been so well illustrated in Girouard's Victorian Country House, and more of his less well known buildings. But it would be carping to find fault with either the scholarship or typography in this handsome, fat volume.
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