We have encountered the original Goths sporadically already, but thus far we have not owned up to a dirty secret. In medieval Europe, no architecture exists that would have been called Gothic at the time of its construction. To clarify, no person in the Middle Ages would have understood the application of the adjective to the architecture of any medieval century. Goths were an East Germanic people of ancient times. Among their different subgroupings, the Visigoths were long understood to mean “West Goths,”
while the Ostrogoths were interpreted as “East Goths.” Both are associated with the barbarian invasions that led to the fall of Rome. The Visigoths famously sacked Rome
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in 410, while the Ostrogoths set up a kingdom that menaced at times both the Western Roman and Eastern Roman empires. The progenitors of both groups are remembered thanks to numerous histories, late antique as well as modern, and a multitude of place names in Scandinavia and elsewhere: Gotha, Gothenburg, Gotland, Jutland, and so forth. The Goths and the tribes that pullulated as descendants from them had distinctive languages and cultures. Still, their buildings did not have pointed arches, lancet windows, flying buttresses, spires, piers, ribs, stained glass, or any of the other features conventionally associated with what has been called Gothic architecture. In fact, the Goths lacked a masonry system in which structural elements are stabilized in thrust and counterthrust. At many times and in many places, these tribe members probably had little stonework of any sort.
Strictly speaking, therefore, the application of the adjective Gothic to literature and architecture, including the decorative arts, is always an anachronism and a mislabeling.
The misfiling is now hallowed by nearly four centuries of currency, but that fact does not make it any less off-key. Yet there is no getting rid of the usage—and who on earth would want to, anyway? Words often carry many connotations. All we can do is to be as explicit as our own capacities allow in defining the denotations most germane to our needs.
Gothic was first employed in reference to architecture in the mid-seventeenth century. In that period it developed political associations, sometimes positive, in English. As an architectural and aesthetic term, it arrived from French with a penumbra of mainly pejorative overtones. Gothic was a vital part of the Dark Ages, to mark off what was medieval and romantic from what was classical. More generally it signified barbarity, rudeness, and uncouthness. These slurs are still leveled against the Middle Ages. Sometimes the offenders are experts who should know better than to bandy about such old inanities.
This Gothic was Gothick, to resort to the archaic spelling with a terminal k that can help to distinguish it from its multifarious namesakes, such as either the medieval Gothic or the sundry Gothics from the nineteenth century to the present day. Far later, a fascination with the medieval period manifested itself in Britain during the Victorian and Edwardian eras in the decorative arts. Gothic settees and chairs, tables and sideboards, lamps and candelabra, table settings and all manner of household items, and even andirons were all designed and manufactured in overabundance.
Yet the style may well have achieved its most lasting, if not its most lustrous, impact architecturally. Many fine examples of domestic architecture have been destroyed by acts of God or by the malice or incompetence of human beings, but enough still exist for us to imagine how the Gothic revival in full operation would have made urban landscapes look. Beyond the buildings, texts survive aplenty that deepen our viewpoint through their descriptions and discussions of Gothic design.
The expression “Gothic revival” is attested by 1869—the formulation can throw us off the scent, since it encompasses a nearly boundless spectrum of different
expressions—but the physical reality of nouveau Gothic began far before the wording was devised. Already in 1865, the phrase “Gothic mania” was in circulation. One major impetus for the British Gothic revival came from the Church Building Acts, which granted first one million pounds in 1818 and then an additional 500,000 in 1824 for raising up Anglican churches. These houses of worship are known as Commissioners’
churches, after the officials who were appointed to oversee them. Many such buildings were erected in Gothicizing styles. The legislation made for a heady brew, by propelling a spree of construction at precisely the moment when the romantics issued vociferous glorifications of the fashion for its sublimity. As is often the case later too, Gothic literature and architecture began to develop alongside each other. Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto functioned as a hinge for the romantic swing to the sublime.
Later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked on the sublime actualities of Gothic art. The pronouncement of the English poet, literary critic, and philosopher was hardly to be unrepeated.
Gothic has been extraordinary in provoking its leading adherents to compose manifestoes. These templates have both created partisans for the fashion and forged collective identities among them. In effect, revivalism in this manner has often become a creed. Sometimes it has even tottered on the cusp of becoming a religion. Romanticism spliced the early nineteenth-century stage of the revival with picturesqueness and passion, particularly love. Should we be surprised that in due course Our Lady’s Tumbler became embedded again and again in a Gothic framework? The medieval poem too was associated with all the same numinous qualities and emotions. In short order, the sublimity of the style became interlaced with broader moral aspirations and civic virtues.
In the first of his lectures on European literature delivered in 1818, Coleridge urged his audience to contemplate the style, capping his exhortation with “a Gothic cathedral is the petrifaction of our religion.” The Englishman here plays on “stone-making” or
“making into stone,” the etymological meaning of the elements in this Latinate term for the fossilization of organic matter. The sentence also alludes to the old pun in Greek and Latin, going back to Jesus as reported in the Gospel of Matthew, that the apostle Peter was the rock (petra) on which he founded his church. Being calcified could conjure up death and rigidity, but such a fate and fatality did not lie in store for Gothic as a mode in architecture, literature, and much else. On the contrary, by parsing the Latinate verbiage, people anticipated positively Bob Dylan’s later lyric,
“Everybody must get stoned.” Not long after, on the continent, Victor Hugo discerned in the architecture a capacity for endlessly pliable recombination. The bones of Gothic may have been old, but they were anything but rigid and ossified.
In Britain, Gothic (or, once again, Gothick with a final k) prevailed within a few decades of Coleridge. A movement, named initially the Camden Society after the sixteenth-century historian William Camden, was founded in Cambridge in 1838. In 1845, rechristened the Ecclesiological Society, it was relocated to London. As the core of
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its mission it undertook to publish texts of interest to antiquarians. Yet the members of the group had a larger philo-Gothic ambition, declared in 1844, of promoting the revival of Gothic parish churches. They also sought to coordinate the design of ecclesiastic buildings with sacramentalism. The last concept was bound up in the necessities of the worship, with attention to both liturgy and symbolism. A fundamental tenet of the Ecclesiologists posited “Gothick is the only Christian architecture.” They also made the Coleridgean dictum on petrifaction one of their own mottoes. Their work forms a complement, and sometimes a contrast, to the architecture and polemics of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. In the New World or, to be more precise, in the United States of America, Gothic went through multiple stages before the final decade of the nineteenth century. In general, the revival must be set within the context of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalism in general. As the United States affirmed its self-awareness as a nation, it looped through a succession of revivals. In a kind of architectural and stylistic dress-up that befitted a nation in its adolescence, it tried on for size a few major phases through which European culture had passed long before.
The Gothic revival in the architecture of America may be split into subsections, from the late eighteenth century down to the present. Here four will be mentioned.
First, the Federal period from 1776 to 1840, which saw classicizing revivals, especially Greek, alongside of which emerged the first chapter of Gothicism. This early American Gothic, as it has been dubbed, relates more to romanticism than classicism. In fact, it could be regarded with only a scintilla of overstatement as anticlassicism—that is, it expresses a reaction against the Enlightenment as well as against the unbending canons of Greek and Roman revivals. The appetite for Gothic swelled a little at a time into the second half of the nineteenth century, and a second phase, christened the mature Gothic revival, extended from 1840 to the Civil War.
The third episode of Gothic took the world (Old, New, and beyond) by storm for more than two decades. High Victorian Gothic, with its characteristic ebullience of turrets and pinnacles, preponderated from the postbellum period into the early 1890s.
By its very nature, the style was at least in aspiration historicizing and medievalizing.
At the same time, it was radically and self-consciously innovative, even deliberately modern. During the 1870s and early 1880s, this brand of the fashion overlapped with another distinct form of medievalism in architecture, namely, Romanesque revival.
Both fell into dismal desuetude as rapidly as they had achieved bragging rights.
The effervescence for Gothic endured considerably longer in the United States than elsewhere around the globe. In America, it had a fourth phase, the most successful of all. Influenced by the much-admired rectilinearity of Saint Paul’s School chapel in Concord, New Hampshire (see Fig. 3.14), the vogue that acquired the name of collegiate Gothic became deep-seated in many colleges from the late 1890s through the 1930s. In some of them it persisted far beyond that terminus. Indeed, even down to the present day it has maintained a stony stranglehold within select American university campuses.
The architecture of the Gothic revival—in truth, multiple revivals—forms part of the backdrop to the tale of the juggler. The destiny of the story would have been altogether different in the twentieth century without its reception in the United States, and the treatment of the narrative in America would have been something else entirely had the continent not been mantled in Gothic architecture. Somewhat circularly, the architectonics that is encoded within the tale enhanced its appeal as it was received and retouched during this time. The interplay between the story and an architectural setting stands to reason. As we will notice again and again, in precious few cultural movements have literature and architecture interacted to mutual benefit as has been the case in the repeated recrudescences of Gothicism.
Fig. 3.14 Postcard depicting the chapel of St. Paul’s School, Concord, NH (Portland, ME: Hugh C. Leighton Co., ca. 1904–1907).