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Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire c. 1840–1870
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014) 145e162
an ideal means of observing nature e and one often superior to dried specimens or even on-sight observations e for the opportunity they afforded to compare the same plant over its life-cycle. Fuchs strove to make each picture ‘as complete as possible’ (absolutissima), an adjective he employed to denote completeness and perfection, which often meant in practice that pictures portrayed the entire lifestyle of a plant (roots, stems, leaves, flowers, seeds, and fruit). Another period writer, Pietro Andrea Mattioli, argued that such perfection was impossible e no one could represent all the changes of a living plant in one picture e and thus it was inconceivable to gain true and precise mastery of medicinal simples through pictures alone. Renaissance humanist textual scholarship e which involved both a recovery of ancient texts and a renewal of the reading and writing practices that produced them e has long been linked to transformations in period artistic practice. Kusukawa argues convincingly in part 2 that naturalist scholars who embraced humanist ideals of scholarship did not always share similar views regarding the role of visual representations in their work. Fuchs, Cornarius, and Mattioli were all-university educated physicians motivated by a shared humanist zeal for reviving the ancient knowledge of medicinal plants, yet they held diametrically opposed positions on the use of pictures, views which they buttressed in typically humanist fashion by turning to the opinions of ancient authors. Attention to the role of images in the production and reception of knowledge similarly adds an important element to studies of bookish practices in the period. Kusukawa demonstrates that images, too, were subject to bookish methods. Printers often left images to be colored in by readers. Authors relied on note-slips containing images as they worked, and they used images as visual commonplaces to organize their own reading. The sixteenthcentury learned physician Thomas Lorkyn, for example, littered many of the 588 books he had in his possession at his death with annotations of printed text and images. Lorkyn included pictorial details to printed images of plants, added his own images in the margins of his books, and inserted textual comments highlighting specific features of printed images. Pictures, for Kusukawa’s early modern authors, ‘played a role much more fundamental and wide-ranging’ than what we as modern readers might imagine (p. 250). Not merely illustrative, nor reflecting specific observations or observational practice, these pictures instead were mired in contemporary debate about the nature of knowledge production and its transmission. Kusukawa suggests that any thesis which draws facile conclusions regarding what pictures reveal (or not) about changes in scientific thinking requires reexamination, for pictures not only required time, skill, technical expertise and financial means to produce, but also occasioned fierce debate regarding their utility and function. Fuchs and Vesalius were chosen by Kusukawa as the foci of her study, ‘because they are the best known among the illustrated books of the period’ (p. 3), but Kusukawa has masterfully undermined our identification of these texts as canonical examples of period use of illustration by demonstrating that what is generally taken to be key and emblematic in them (namely a new attention to and the role of the visual) was in reality highly contested. Renée J. Raphael University of California, Irvine, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.02.017
153
G.A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire c. 1840e1870. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013, xiv þ 484 pages, US$95 hardcover. Global history is much in vogue these days, but few architectural historians have ventured to think globally, preferring to focus their attention within regional, national or, at best, continental or subcontinental boundaries. Now, however, Alex Bremner has chosen to examine mid nineteenth-century Anglican church-building across the whole of the worldwide imperial diaspora. The result is a triumph of ground-breaking research and acute analysis that will fascinate and enlighten anyone seeking to understand the transmission of British values and identity across the world, from Victoria, British Columbia, to the state of Victoria in Australia, and from Cape Town to Calcutta. Anglican churches were built in England’s colonies from the very first days of overseas expansion, but Bremner takes as his starting-point the establishment of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund in 1841 and the first consecration of colonial bishops in Westminster Abbey in the following year. This initiative coincided with the formation of the Cambridge Camden Society, whose aim was to encourage the design of ‘correctly’ detailed Gothic churches for the dignified performance of the Anglican liturgy according to Tractarian principles. In 1841 the first volume of The Ecclesiologist, the Society’s house journal, contained a design for a church in New Zealand, newly annexed to the empire, and within a few years churches built on Camdenian principles appeared in all the settler colonies, some of them designed or executed by the clergy themselves or even, in the case of the diocese of Cape Town, by the bishop’s wife. Many of them closely followed recent English models. So the church of St John the Baptist at Prosser Plains in Tasmania (1847e1848) is a virtual clone of the church built only two years before to the designs of R.C. Carpenter, the ‘Anglican Pugin’, at Cookham Dean in Berkshire, save only for its stone rather than flint walls. Other church builders looked directly back to the middle ages for models; Christ Church Cathedral at Fredericton, New Brunswick, begun in 1845, is a convincing re-creation of the fourteenth-century cruciform church at Snettisham in Norfolk, and the same model was used in the cathedral at Montreal (1857ec.1860). Sometimes local conditions forced clergy and their architects to experiment with new materials and new modes of design. New Zealand, for instance, suffers from earthquakes, as seen in the recent sad collapse of Sir Gilbert Scott’s cathedral at Christchurch. So at Otaki (1848e1852) the church was built of timber, using the techniques developed over the centuries by Maori people. The cathedral at Wellington (1865e1866) is also timber-built, its complex roof structure recalling the churches of E.B. Lamb in and around London and anticipating the work of arts and crafts architects such as Bernard Maybeck in California. In tropical countries churches needed to be cool and shady, leading to the development of what contemporaries called ‘speluncar’ (cave-like) buildings with thick walls and small windows, such as the church of All Saints at Point-de-Galle in Sri Lanka (1861e1862) and the cathedral at Allahabad in India, designed in 1870 by William Emerson, one of the many able but little-known architects whose work is highlighted by Bremner. One of the most poignant buildings in the book is the church of St Barnabas in Norfolk Island, built in 1875e1880 to a design by the Oxford architect T.G. Jackson as a memorial to the recently murdered Bishop of Melonesia, but incorporating shellwork motifs by indigenous craftsmen. Here, as in the colonial churches designed by such famous high Victorian architects as William Butterfield and William Burges, copyism was abandoned in favour of the principle of ‘development’: the idea that Gothic
154
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014) 145e162
should be a progressive style, adapting and changing according to the needs of a changing world. What did all this spate of church-building mean? Any British person visiting the countries of the commonwealth cannot fail to be struck by the uncanny sense of déjà vu that comes from finding a familiar street name, or perhaps a cricket ground, in a totally unexpected setting thousands of miles from home; the same almost surreal feelings are evoked by the sight of what looks like a fourteenth-century village church in an Australian or a Canadian suburb. Yet such buildings are not exotic anomalies; they are expressions of culture and belief first transmitted by the bishops and clergy, who are the real heroes of this volume, and they helped shape the character of large parts of today’s world. Bremner’s superbly illustrated and beautifully produced book has been awarded the Society of Architectural Historians’ prize for the best book of the year e something it richly deserves. It will not only open the eyes of readers to the architectural riches of the former empire; it will deepen their understanding of the imperial legacy itself. Geoffrey Tyack University of Oxford, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.02.007
Shanti Sumartojo, Trafalgar Square and the Narration of Britishness, 1900e2012: Imagining the Nation. Oxford, Peter Lang, 2013, x þ 216 pages, £40 paperback. Since its completion in the mid nineteenth century, Trafalgar Square has arguably become one of the most well-known public spaces in the world. In this well-written and engaging book, Shanti Sumartojo examines the square’s relationship to British national identity through a series of detailed case studies from the past century. Building on work by scholars such as Benedict Anderson and Michael Billig on the everyday construction of national identities, Sumartojo’s book explores how various groups have used Trafalgar Square as part of attempts to alter narratives of ‘Britishness’, and how the multiple uses of the square have reframed national meanings implied by its built form. The book addresses a period of dramatic change in Britain, and the world more generally, which had inevitable implications for Britain’s notion and constitution of national identity. Beginning with the British Empire at its height, the book traces the history, interpretations, and uses of Trafalgar Square through both world wars, the decline of the empire and the Cold War, and the rise of modern, multicultural London. Drawing upon Jeffrey Olick’s notion ‘that the relationship between the national past and its present is best understood as how the past is reconstructed for the purposes of the present’ (p. 3e4), Sumartojo argues that interpretations of history are a key element of national identity. The multiple uses of Trafalgar Square and its varied meanings make it an ideal site for exploring national identity as a discursive process rather than a fixed object. Sumartojo argues that Trafalgar Square is Britain’s national stage, and that groups seeking visibility are able to deploy the square’s familiarity for that purpose. This practice results, of course, in the square being used as a space of dissent by groups lacking in official power, and examples of this are comprehensively covered in Sumartojo’s discussion. This is, to some extent, ground that has been covered before, most notably in Rodney Mace’s Trafalgar Square: Emblem of Empire (2005). Unlike Mace, however, Sumartojo addresses more official attempts to construct particular ideas of Britishness using Trafalgar Square, such as royal weddings,
coronations and funerals, and the celebration in 2005 of London winning its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. Sumartojo’s more comprehensive approach highlights the contentious and multiple uses and interpretations of the square, as well as emphasising the argument that there is no single interpretation of Britishness. This idea contributes to recent research on national identity; the book providing another example which supports the argument that national communities are flexible and multiple entities, constantly being negotiated and renegotiated by a range of actors. Sumartojo’s case studies draw upon research in multiple archives and includes a diverse range of events, from fundraising and recruitment during both world wars, through protests by the Suffragettes and many other groups, to the more recent celebration of religious festivals such as Diwali and Hanukkah. These examplesdarranged in chronological order and divided into chapters according to different interpretations of Britishness that were being portrayed in the square at different stages during the twentieth and early twenty first centuriesdare used to illustrate Sumartojo’s arguments to considerable effect. The context of each case study is explained before the event is discussed, so the arguments of the book are accessible even if the reader is not familiar with the history of London or of Britain. The in-depth discussion of each of the case studies means this text is also useful for those studying the use of public space, as well as the everyday construction of nationality. One arguably key factor this is not addressed, however, is the relative levels of power that different groups using Trafalgar Square have enjoyed in promoting their understanding of Britishness. Whilst government control of the square and regulations over demonstrations that take place there are mentioned, the implications of these factors on the ability of different groups to successfully promote their understanding of Britishness using the square is not discussed. It is much easier for the Mayor of London, for example, to hold an event in the square than it is for the Occupy movement, and precisely these power relations are overlooked in Sumartojo’s otherwise comprehensive study. A further minor criticism relates to the photographs in the middle of the book which, although interesting, are not directly referred to at any point in the text, making it somewhat tricky to relate each photograph with its relevant discussion in the book. Thoughtful, thorough, and engaging, this book is a valuable addition to the field. A sociologist by trade, Sumartojo nevertheless makes clear and instructive use of geographical concepts, so the book is a valuable addition to the reading list of any geographer working on themes such as national identity, public space, or protest and dissent. Hannah Awcock Royal Holloway, University of London, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.02.008
John K. Walton and Jason Wood (Eds), The Making of a Cultural Landscape: The English Lake District as Tourist Destination, 1750e2010. Farnham, Ashgate, 2013, xv þ 276 pages, £70 hardcover. There can be no doubting the significance of the English Lake District as a cultural landscape nor its particular significance as a tourism landscape. Not only does the Lake District epitomise the wider transformation of the countryside over the last two centuries into a place of touristic consumption, nowhere else, at least in Britain, is the interplay between nature, human intervention, artistic and literary interpretation, and the consequential
an ideal means of observing nature e and one often superior to dried specimens or even on-sight observations e for the opportunity they afforded to compare the same plant over its life-cycle. Fuchs strove to make each picture ‘as complete as possible’ (absolutissima), an adjective he employed to denote completeness and perfection, which often meant in practice that pictures portrayed the entire lifestyle of a plant (roots, stems, leaves, flowers, seeds, and fruit). Another period writer, Pietro Andrea Mattioli, argued that such perfection was impossible e no one could represent all the changes of a living plant in one picture e and thus it was inconceivable to gain true and precise mastery of medicinal simples through pictures alone. Renaissance humanist textual scholarship e which involved both a recovery of ancient texts and a renewal of the reading and writing practices that produced them e has long been linked to transformations in period artistic practice. Kusukawa argues convincingly in part 2 that naturalist scholars who embraced humanist ideals of scholarship did not always share similar views regarding the role of visual representations in their work. Fuchs, Cornarius, and Mattioli were all-university educated physicians motivated by a shared humanist zeal for reviving the ancient knowledge of medicinal plants, yet they held diametrically opposed positions on the use of pictures, views which they buttressed in typically humanist fashion by turning to the opinions of ancient authors. Attention to the role of images in the production and reception of knowledge similarly adds an important element to studies of bookish practices in the period. Kusukawa demonstrates that images, too, were subject to bookish methods. Printers often left images to be colored in by readers. Authors relied on note-slips containing images as they worked, and they used images as visual commonplaces to organize their own reading. The sixteenthcentury learned physician Thomas Lorkyn, for example, littered many of the 588 books he had in his possession at his death with annotations of printed text and images. Lorkyn included pictorial details to printed images of plants, added his own images in the margins of his books, and inserted textual comments highlighting specific features of printed images. Pictures, for Kusukawa’s early modern authors, ‘played a role much more fundamental and wide-ranging’ than what we as modern readers might imagine (p. 250). Not merely illustrative, nor reflecting specific observations or observational practice, these pictures instead were mired in contemporary debate about the nature of knowledge production and its transmission. Kusukawa suggests that any thesis which draws facile conclusions regarding what pictures reveal (or not) about changes in scientific thinking requires reexamination, for pictures not only required time, skill, technical expertise and financial means to produce, but also occasioned fierce debate regarding their utility and function. Fuchs and Vesalius were chosen by Kusukawa as the foci of her study, ‘because they are the best known among the illustrated books of the period’ (p. 3), but Kusukawa has masterfully undermined our identification of these texts as canonical examples of period use of illustration by demonstrating that what is generally taken to be key and emblematic in them (namely a new attention to and the role of the visual) was in reality highly contested. Renée J. Raphael University of California, Irvine, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.02.017
153
G.A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire c. 1840e1870. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013, xiv þ 484 pages, US$95 hardcover. Global history is much in vogue these days, but few architectural historians have ventured to think globally, preferring to focus their attention within regional, national or, at best, continental or subcontinental boundaries. Now, however, Alex Bremner has chosen to examine mid nineteenth-century Anglican church-building across the whole of the worldwide imperial diaspora. The result is a triumph of ground-breaking research and acute analysis that will fascinate and enlighten anyone seeking to understand the transmission of British values and identity across the world, from Victoria, British Columbia, to the state of Victoria in Australia, and from Cape Town to Calcutta. Anglican churches were built in England’s colonies from the very first days of overseas expansion, but Bremner takes as his starting-point the establishment of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund in 1841 and the first consecration of colonial bishops in Westminster Abbey in the following year. This initiative coincided with the formation of the Cambridge Camden Society, whose aim was to encourage the design of ‘correctly’ detailed Gothic churches for the dignified performance of the Anglican liturgy according to Tractarian principles. In 1841 the first volume of The Ecclesiologist, the Society’s house journal, contained a design for a church in New Zealand, newly annexed to the empire, and within a few years churches built on Camdenian principles appeared in all the settler colonies, some of them designed or executed by the clergy themselves or even, in the case of the diocese of Cape Town, by the bishop’s wife. Many of them closely followed recent English models. So the church of St John the Baptist at Prosser Plains in Tasmania (1847e1848) is a virtual clone of the church built only two years before to the designs of R.C. Carpenter, the ‘Anglican Pugin’, at Cookham Dean in Berkshire, save only for its stone rather than flint walls. Other church builders looked directly back to the middle ages for models; Christ Church Cathedral at Fredericton, New Brunswick, begun in 1845, is a convincing re-creation of the fourteenth-century cruciform church at Snettisham in Norfolk, and the same model was used in the cathedral at Montreal (1857ec.1860). Sometimes local conditions forced clergy and their architects to experiment with new materials and new modes of design. New Zealand, for instance, suffers from earthquakes, as seen in the recent sad collapse of Sir Gilbert Scott’s cathedral at Christchurch. So at Otaki (1848e1852) the church was built of timber, using the techniques developed over the centuries by Maori people. The cathedral at Wellington (1865e1866) is also timber-built, its complex roof structure recalling the churches of E.B. Lamb in and around London and anticipating the work of arts and crafts architects such as Bernard Maybeck in California. In tropical countries churches needed to be cool and shady, leading to the development of what contemporaries called ‘speluncar’ (cave-like) buildings with thick walls and small windows, such as the church of All Saints at Point-de-Galle in Sri Lanka (1861e1862) and the cathedral at Allahabad in India, designed in 1870 by William Emerson, one of the many able but little-known architects whose work is highlighted by Bremner. One of the most poignant buildings in the book is the church of St Barnabas in Norfolk Island, built in 1875e1880 to a design by the Oxford architect T.G. Jackson as a memorial to the recently murdered Bishop of Melonesia, but incorporating shellwork motifs by indigenous craftsmen. Here, as in the colonial churches designed by such famous high Victorian architects as William Butterfield and William Burges, copyism was abandoned in favour of the principle of ‘development’: the idea that Gothic
154
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014) 145e162
should be a progressive style, adapting and changing according to the needs of a changing world. What did all this spate of church-building mean? Any British person visiting the countries of the commonwealth cannot fail to be struck by the uncanny sense of déjà vu that comes from finding a familiar street name, or perhaps a cricket ground, in a totally unexpected setting thousands of miles from home; the same almost surreal feelings are evoked by the sight of what looks like a fourteenth-century village church in an Australian or a Canadian suburb. Yet such buildings are not exotic anomalies; they are expressions of culture and belief first transmitted by the bishops and clergy, who are the real heroes of this volume, and they helped shape the character of large parts of today’s world. Bremner’s superbly illustrated and beautifully produced book has been awarded the Society of Architectural Historians’ prize for the best book of the year e something it richly deserves. It will not only open the eyes of readers to the architectural riches of the former empire; it will deepen their understanding of the imperial legacy itself. Geoffrey Tyack University of Oxford, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.02.007
Shanti Sumartojo, Trafalgar Square and the Narration of Britishness, 1900e2012: Imagining the Nation. Oxford, Peter Lang, 2013, x þ 216 pages, £40 paperback. Since its completion in the mid nineteenth century, Trafalgar Square has arguably become one of the most well-known public spaces in the world. In this well-written and engaging book, Shanti Sumartojo examines the square’s relationship to British national identity through a series of detailed case studies from the past century. Building on work by scholars such as Benedict Anderson and Michael Billig on the everyday construction of national identities, Sumartojo’s book explores how various groups have used Trafalgar Square as part of attempts to alter narratives of ‘Britishness’, and how the multiple uses of the square have reframed national meanings implied by its built form. The book addresses a period of dramatic change in Britain, and the world more generally, which had inevitable implications for Britain’s notion and constitution of national identity. Beginning with the British Empire at its height, the book traces the history, interpretations, and uses of Trafalgar Square through both world wars, the decline of the empire and the Cold War, and the rise of modern, multicultural London. Drawing upon Jeffrey Olick’s notion ‘that the relationship between the national past and its present is best understood as how the past is reconstructed for the purposes of the present’ (p. 3e4), Sumartojo argues that interpretations of history are a key element of national identity. The multiple uses of Trafalgar Square and its varied meanings make it an ideal site for exploring national identity as a discursive process rather than a fixed object. Sumartojo argues that Trafalgar Square is Britain’s national stage, and that groups seeking visibility are able to deploy the square’s familiarity for that purpose. This practice results, of course, in the square being used as a space of dissent by groups lacking in official power, and examples of this are comprehensively covered in Sumartojo’s discussion. This is, to some extent, ground that has been covered before, most notably in Rodney Mace’s Trafalgar Square: Emblem of Empire (2005). Unlike Mace, however, Sumartojo addresses more official attempts to construct particular ideas of Britishness using Trafalgar Square, such as royal weddings,
coronations and funerals, and the celebration in 2005 of London winning its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. Sumartojo’s more comprehensive approach highlights the contentious and multiple uses and interpretations of the square, as well as emphasising the argument that there is no single interpretation of Britishness. This idea contributes to recent research on national identity; the book providing another example which supports the argument that national communities are flexible and multiple entities, constantly being negotiated and renegotiated by a range of actors. Sumartojo’s case studies draw upon research in multiple archives and includes a diverse range of events, from fundraising and recruitment during both world wars, through protests by the Suffragettes and many other groups, to the more recent celebration of religious festivals such as Diwali and Hanukkah. These examplesdarranged in chronological order and divided into chapters according to different interpretations of Britishness that were being portrayed in the square at different stages during the twentieth and early twenty first centuriesdare used to illustrate Sumartojo’s arguments to considerable effect. The context of each case study is explained before the event is discussed, so the arguments of the book are accessible even if the reader is not familiar with the history of London or of Britain. The in-depth discussion of each of the case studies means this text is also useful for those studying the use of public space, as well as the everyday construction of nationality. One arguably key factor this is not addressed, however, is the relative levels of power that different groups using Trafalgar Square have enjoyed in promoting their understanding of Britishness. Whilst government control of the square and regulations over demonstrations that take place there are mentioned, the implications of these factors on the ability of different groups to successfully promote their understanding of Britishness using the square is not discussed. It is much easier for the Mayor of London, for example, to hold an event in the square than it is for the Occupy movement, and precisely these power relations are overlooked in Sumartojo’s otherwise comprehensive study. A further minor criticism relates to the photographs in the middle of the book which, although interesting, are not directly referred to at any point in the text, making it somewhat tricky to relate each photograph with its relevant discussion in the book. Thoughtful, thorough, and engaging, this book is a valuable addition to the field. A sociologist by trade, Sumartojo nevertheless makes clear and instructive use of geographical concepts, so the book is a valuable addition to the reading list of any geographer working on themes such as national identity, public space, or protest and dissent. Hannah Awcock Royal Holloway, University of London, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.02.008
John K. Walton and Jason Wood (Eds), The Making of a Cultural Landscape: The English Lake District as Tourist Destination, 1750e2010. Farnham, Ashgate, 2013, xv þ 276 pages, £70 hardcover. There can be no doubting the significance of the English Lake District as a cultural landscape nor its particular significance as a tourism landscape. Not only does the Lake District epitomise the wider transformation of the countryside over the last two centuries into a place of touristic consumption, nowhere else, at least in Britain, is the interplay between nature, human intervention, artistic and literary interpretation, and the consequential