God's Architect: Pugin & the Building of Romantic Britain, and: Augustus Welby Pugin, Designer of the British Houses of Parliament: The Victorian Quest for a Liturgical Architecture (review)

These publications fulfil complementary functions. Rosemary Hill's God's Architect is a long-awaited biography of Augustus Welby Pugin, whereas Christabel Powell's book examines the role of liturgy in his faith, writing, and architecture. Between them, they reveal how each generation of scholars creates its own version of Pugin. In its portrayal of a living, breathing, designing, praying, sketching, singing, loving, weeping, and fulminating Pugin, Hill's book offers the more rewarding and sprightly read. Hitherto, the most accessible monograph has been Phoebe Stanton's Pugin (1971), a desultory and disappointing book with a narrowly architectural focus. Hill makes handsome amends. That she is indebted to a generation of Pugin scholars—including Margaret Belcher, Clive Wainwright, and Alexandra Wedgwood—does nothing to diminish her achievement. Belcher's Herculean project of editing and publishing Pugin's extensive correspondence provides an invaluable foundation for Hill. Yet this new biography contains many original insights.

The first concerns Pugin's background. Hill's research establishes that his father, the architectural and topographical illustrator Augustus Charles Pugin, was not an émigré count as was long claimed but a Parisian artisan whose father was a military footman and mother a fruit and butter seller. Augustus Welby's mother, Catherine Welby, descended from solidly "county" Lincolnshire stock, supplied a modest degree of gentility. She was not always the "fervent ultra-Protestant" of Powell's description (47). Hill convincingly claims that she possessed a belligerent but intelligent mix of conservatism and independence, even undergoing a youthful feminist phase. Late in life, she observed how the Anglican churchmen of Wells Cathedral "eat drink and sleep in perfect inattention to the ruin which daily threatens to destroy this wondrous pile" (104). This nationwide "inattention"—her son would have used a stronger term—influenced his conversion to Catholicism shortly after her death.

Pugin's Catholicism has long been disputed by partisans of opposing religious positions. Hill argues that he was an English Catholic; writing in 1842 to his coreligionist the painter Clarkson Stanfield, he disavowed the "Roman" Catholic label. References to the papacy in his writings are relatively few, and his response on his one visit to Rome towards the "revived pagan" architecture of St. Peter's was predictably damning. His rich patrons and close friends (the generous, loyal, and not overly clever Earl of Shrewsbury and the monastery-building convert Ambrose Phillipps) were ideologically similar: they were Romantics, not Romans. In the 1830s and early 1840s, these lay leaders were of great importance to their precarious, recently emancipated, and impoverished church, but as Hill justly complains, they have been "virtually written out of history" (169). This is probably because the "Roman" Ultramontanism of Nicholas Wiseman and Frederick William Faber proved triumphant. In Hill's narrative, we witness Pugin's increasing disaffection with his coreligionists (particularly John Henry Newman and Faber, rather than the generous-spirited Wiseman) and conversely his sympathy, both spiritual and artistic, with the Tractarians. This tendency is apparent in the title of his last unpublished polemic, An Apology for the Separated Church of England since the reign of the eighth Henry . . . By A. Welby Pugin. Many years a Catholic minded son of the Anglican Church, and still an affectionate and loving brother and servant of the true son's of England's Church (1851). Did the tensions of Pugin's position and the psychological impossibility of reconversion to Anglicanism aggravate his final insanity?

Hill strives to be fair-minded, even critical, towards her subject. The quality of Pugin's constantly evolving architecture was initially inconsistent, even if early churches like St. Alban's, Macclesfield (1838–41) are excellent in parts. Only in the...