A "Commerce of Taste": Church Architecture in Canada, 1867-1914 by Barry Magrill (review)

The history of church-building in Canada has customarily been placed within two quite distinct narratives. At one time church historians treated the building of churches as a sign of the religious progress of the nation. In the same way the Gothic spire was coming to dominate every village and town, so would Christian moral and religious beliefs soon oversee Canadian life. The second narrative was more secular, scholarly, and aesthetic. Focusing upon the actual church buildings and their architects, it set out to explain how Canadian churches fit within the well-established narratives of style and structure that informed the history of architecture in the Western world.

Barry Magrill's fascinating study places the story of ecclesiastical architecture in Canada in a very different - and provocative - context. Here church-building is grounded in the articulation and development of a commercial economy. Raising up a new church, in his analysis, relied upon the same foundations of capital, labour, and new forms of technology that underwrote the construction of railways and the growth of a postal system. This book, then, is not about God or art, it is about the business of building churches, and as Magrill makes abundantly clear, the building of churches was very much a business.

To sustain this argument, the study relies very heavily upon the author's remarkable knowledge of pattern books. These volumes, often published by practising architects, contained drawings of churches (and other buildings) adapted to different sites and requirements. They customarily included reproductions of suitable (British) models, as well as drawings of the architects' own creation. Many also contained advertisements from the manufacturers of stained glass and church furnishings. As one would expect, during this period the images of the churches themselves generally adhered to the principles of the Gothic revival, as advocated so devoutly by A.W.N. Pugin, John Ruskin, and the members of the Cambridge Camden Society.

These pattern books served in the first instance as catalogues new communities could consult as they took up the task of building a church. They sold churches. With such books in hand, the well-to-do leaders of a congregation could compare designs, weigh costs, and enter into a dialogue with the architect/builder that would in time produce a new place of worship - one that would be not only "correct" architecturally but also reflect the social and cultural position of those who had bankrolled the entire endeavour. Magrill's book includes several "case studies" drawn from different denominations spread across the country that illustrate in some detail how this process unfolded. At the same time, however, pattern books served another important social function: they commodified church building. As physical objects they moved through a growing commercial network of printers and booksellers, defining for an ever-expanding audience proper fashion and taste. For Magrill it is the conjunction of image, capital, and print media that defined how a church should look - and it is the articulation of this "commerce of taste" that his new narrative sustains.

Telling the story in this way has a number of advantages. Decisions about building churches take on a more realistic air, and the themes the author adumbrates (capital accumulation, technological change, and class formation) as well as the social theorists he employs (Benedict Anderson and Pierre Bourdieu) draw the study much closer to many of the ongoing concerns of Canadian social and cultural historians. At the same time, however, the book raises an important cultural issue that it does not develop effectively. By highlighting the important relationship between commerce and church-building, the book throws into bold relief the anti-materialist rhetoric that characterized the way many church-builders, religious leaders, and the faithful talked about their churches. They very purposefully rejected the language of fashion and taste, asserting that the revived Gothic church actually embodied and expressed a counter world of Christian belief and practice. Building a church was part of...