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Gothic Passions: The Doane Family
- Rutgers University Press
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George Hobart Doane recalled his boyhood home in New Jersey as an American center for “the dissemination of the views which took their origin in Oxford, and were first broached in the ‘Tracts for the Times,’” a reference to the Oxford Movement. This rightly credits his father, George Washington Doane, as one of the most influential forces in both the High Church wing of Episcopalianism and the Gothic Revival in America. The elder Doane was rector of Trinity Church in Boston when his first son was born in 1830. Elected the Protestant Episcopal bishop of New Jersey several years later, he moved his family to Burlington, situated on the Delaware River between Trenton and Philadelphia. As the bishop of New Jersey, George Washington Doane pushed tirelessly for the opening of new parishes and church-aªliated institutions. Widely perceived as brilliant and fantastically energetic, he published tracts, sermons, stories, and poems at a furious rate. His hymn texts (including “Thou Art the Way” and “Softly Now the Light of Day”) became interdenominational classics. The bishop knew a host of leading Anglicans: John Keble, Edward Pusey, Henry Edward Manning (later a Roman Catholic cardinal), and the poet William Wordsworth . The first American invited to preach in England since the Revolution , Doane, in the words of an admirer, “could out-preach, out-vote, and out-work the whole of his brethren in the Episcopate.”1 Bishop Doane and the American Gothic Revival By fostering the High Church movement in the Episcopal Church, Bishop Doane helped stimulate a vibrant new interest in reviving the Gothic style. 3 Gothic Passions The Doane Family 28 He zealously studied English Gothic churches, closely followed the ecclesiological movement, and joined in establishing its outpost here, the NewYork Ecclesiological Society. For his interest and e¤orts, ecclesiologists of the Cambridge Camden Society elected him a patron member, the first U.S. citizen so honored.2 The son of a builder, Bishop Doane himself irrepressibly commissioned buildings—churches, chapels, schools, residences. And he sought the best architects available. He had the Philadelphian John Notman plan an Italianate villa as a family residence and a chapel for a nearby Episcopal girls’ school.3 He hired Richard Upjohn, in many respects America’s preeminent architect, for a new church for his parish in Burlington, where Doane served as rector from the time that he became bishop of New Jersey.4 And he promoted Frank Wills, another English-born designer and the first oªcial architect of the New-York Ecclesiological Society, who returned the complement by dedicating his influential book Ancient English Ecclesiastical Architecture to the bishop. (Upjohn and Wills, born in England, and Notman, originally from Scotland, were on the short list of architects approved by the Anglican Ecclesiological Society.) The bishop’s wife, Eliza Greene Callahan Perkins Doane, from a wealthy Boston family, helped fund these building projects and other institutions.5 She was known and revered for quiet acts of charity to the needy—providing for the care of infirm neighbors (she was chronically unwell herself ), secretly dispatching gifts and holiday meals to poor families, sending support to less well-o¤ clergy working under her husband—compassion and altruism that registered permanently on Mrs. Doane’s alert sons. Mrs. Doane’s independent means also assured those sons a childhood of privileges and pleasures. Not long after the family moved to New Jersey, the artist Henry Inman painted a double portrait of George and William, capturing in oil the charmed world of their youth.6 More than that, on a distant horizon behind the Doane boys Inman also added, with a few brush strokes, the prophetic imagery of a little Gothic church. The bishop’s magnetism drew a host of Episcopal and Anglican leaders to “Riverside,” the name he gave to the stylish villa that Notman designed for him on the banks of the Delaware. In its Gothic rooms, religious and architectural matters were discussed with knowledge and enthusiasm. And as his sons, George Hobart Doane and William Croswell Doane, grew up, they joined in this High Church salon.7 In this milieu, and by watching the construction of a series of outstanding structures owing to their father’s Gothic Passions: The Doane Family 29 [3.239.96.229] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:02 GMT) initiative, they came to appreciate the role of architecture (and architects) in realizing the vision of Bishop Doane’s Christian—Gothic—utopia. Doctor, Then Deacon George Hobart Doane attended...