Book Review

Victorians’ English utopia

Medievalism: the Middle Ages in modern England

In a few months' time you will be able to travel from central London to Paris faster than ever before in history; departing from a restored and partly remodelled station designed in the styles of medieval Lombardy, Venice and northern France. This moment of apotheosis for Victorian high Gothic architecture comes at a significant time, for the way in which these things are written about has changed dramatically over the last few years. Not long ago the Gothic Revival was still described as a retrogressive or even a Romantic conundrum, a curiously nostalgic phenomenon that stood in contrast to the otherwise progressive nature of the world's most adventurous and industrial empire. Now - as even an excellent recent Time Team television programme on A.W.N. Pugin illustrated - the penny has dropped: Victorian Gothic architecture was very little to do with romance, monks or knights in armour - it was a rational investigation into what architecture was made of and what it could do for society.

Michael Alexander's study of medievalism is thus a welcome contribution to this renewed and much more intelligent debate on the value of Victorian culture. It is in fact three books merged into one: first, a description of how exactly Walter Scott used medieval sources to create a distinct and influential style of literature; secondly, how twentieth-century British writers and designers, mainly Catholics, used medieval formulae in their work as a form of protest; thirdly, and most interestingly, how the use of medieval literary themes in English culture is not so much to do with vague and uninformed romantic longings as it is with re-establishing a sense of Englishness against the tide of contemporary events and popular culture. This really is the principal argument of the book and it holds the rest of it together. At a central juncture Alexander quotes a passage from one of Pugin's last writings, published in 1851 following the re-establishment of the Catholic episcopal hierarchy, which could itself be the theme for his story as a whole:

All, anterior to the Reformation, is regarded and described as a sort of Utopia - pleasant meadows, happy peasants, merry England ... bread cheap and beef for nothing, all holy monks, all holy priests - holy everybody. Such charity and such hospitality, and such unity when every man was a Catholic. I once believed in Utopia myself, but when tested by stern facts and history it all melts away like a dream.

It is a critical passage in English architectural history because it suggests that Pugin - not yet 40, but close now to his final collapse, and betrayed by many of the people he had influenced - had himself recognised what it took even the most incisive professional critics another century to realise: that his architecture was something that generated itself, and not a by-product of what some writers and painters were doing. The Gothic fantasy had faded, but the buildings and the ideas behind them went on regardless. Had it been otherwise, the profound effect he had on English design would never have happened. He, as well as Walter Scott and Ruskin, reappears time and time again in this book, and that is how it should be.

Although a professor of English Literature (Honorary Professor at St Andrews University), Alexander is in fact very good on architecture; it is a shame that he seems not to know of the late Chris Brooks' excellent The Gothic Revival, which also discusses the theme of the continuing medievalism of the last two centuries. But this book focuses on something specific: the exact use of medieval writings, translations and tropes in developing Victorian literature, as opposed to the imagery of Gothic fantasy. William Morris, for example, is discussed here more as a writer than as an artist.

Once in his stride Alexander makes several valuable points, not least that in the early nineteenth century religious art was necessarily foreign; and the fact that the cult of Tristan and Isolde was an entirely Victorian phenomenon. Some may find the repetition and the jumping about in time irritating (theme parks, Braveheart, Monty Python and so on), but there are plenty of useful ideas as well as some amusing but educational aphorisms. I particularly enjoyed: "The taking of Lancelot and Guenevere as role-models was an unhappy effect of the Medieval Revival, similar to the effect which the reading of D.H. Lawrence had on university English departments in the mid-twentieth century." So true.

St Pancras Station and the Midland Grand Hotel above it - Alexander somewhat charmlessly calls them the "tomato brick mega-Schloss" - are the ne plus ultra of nineteenth-century architecture, and Mark Girouard's contribution to the 1975 BBC book Spirit of the Age began and ended with them. This chapter has never been bettered as a short history of Victorian architecture, a true piece of virtuoso writing that achieves the ideal of being entirely precise but engagingly colloquial. If you cannot find it, read Simon Bradley's St Pancras Station: it is accurate, stylish, interesting, faultlessly written, efficiently organised, appropriately illustrated, concise, fully in command of recent scholarship and sensitive to the richness of this astonishing building.

There is really nothing wrong with this book at all. Buy it to read on your first train out.

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