The Englishness of Gothic: Theories and Interpretations from William Gilpin to J. H. Parker

Abstract

Why did the English Gothic Revival ignore continental architecture for so long? Horace Walpole used motifs from Rouen Cathedral at Strawberry Hill in the mid-eighteenth century, it is true, and James Wyatt drew on the Portuguese abbey of Batalha for part of Fonthill Abbey, but these were straws in a wind that did not blow with any force until around 1850. The shift towards continental Gothic at that time, associated with Ruskin and with Benjamin Webb, is well known. Yet the national monoculture that went before tends to be taken for granted, or to be overlooked in favour of the growth of Gothic archaeology or of the incipient ‘Battle of the Styles’. This Late Hanoverian concentration on home-grown Gothic is doubly surprising when compared with the increasingly plural classicism of the day, which embraced Greek, Roman, Italian Renaissance, Louis XIV, and even Egyptian variants. It will be argued here that this cordon sanitaire can be linked with two continuing beliefs, sometimes held together, sometimes separately: that Gothic was invented in England, and that it reached its purest or finest expression there.