Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space by William Whyte (review)

Nineteenth-century England witnessed an “extraordinary efflorescence of ecclesiastical architecture,” observes social historian of architecture William Whyte, Professor and Vice President, St. John’s, University of Oxford. Tens of thousands of new churches, not to mention rebuilt older structures, cropped up across the global British imperial landscape during the period. Between 1800 and 1900, a new Anglican church was built at an average of one every four days, and Nonconformist chapels proliferated even more rapidly. These, in addition to the many more Protestant houses of worship built in international English-speaking territories flung as far and wide as Sydney and Kanpur, constituted an astonishing transformation of the English religious landscape (1–2). Whyte describes this as an “unfinished revolution” begun by the Victorians, one that “largely succeeded in turning churches from preaching boxes into something almost sacramental” (187). Yet, scholarly understanding of this dramatic shift remains muddled by historiographical assumptions that merit significant reconsideration.

Building, as Whyte notes, on the work of a range of scholars such as Sarah Foot, who emphasizes the need to understand religious buildings religiously, and on the ideas of medievalist Mary Carruthers, who points out that church buildings are always and everywhere not just buildings but “engines” of prayer, the author convincingly presents his case. Far greater scholarly attention to the theological and liturgical dimensions of Victorian Anglican debates over art, architecture, and sacred furnishings, and a reassessment of the motivations of some of the era’s most important figures, like Newman, is called for. Whyte points out that the two most influential voices in the aesthetic transformation of Anglican churches in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, as is well documented in the existing literature, are, of course, well known to students of the subject, the Tractarians and Ecclesiologists. However, far from being a “residual” effect of Reformation-era debates or a simple indulgence in nostalgia on the part of high-churchmen for a romanticized English medieval Catholic past, questions of belief and how they implicated church architecture “developed a significance” that these issues “had not possessed for centuries” (21). A renewed focus on the sacraments, Whyte argues, drove both the High Church and Evangelical camps within the Church of England to rethink the significance of liturgical space. This shift within the Anglican world, and which played out rather uniquely—according to the author—in that Anglican world, “proved so compelling that it reshaped ideas about architecture in almost every other denomination” (21). Understanding this process, according to Whyte, is at the heart of his book.

Unlocking the Church is composed of five chapters, as well as a chapter-length introduction and an afterword, “Seeing for Yourself,” which provides brief and helpful thumbnail sketches of several representative churches examined in the book for those who are able to visit them in person. The historiographical commentary and other material frontloaded in the lengthy introduction could perhaps be woven into the subsequent chapters in a later edition. The chapters are entitled “Seeing,” “Feeling,” “Visiting,” “Analysing,” and “Revisiting,” seeing the buildings described through the eyes of those that built, experienced, and reacted to them. A rich scope of primary and secondary materials are used throughout, as well as period and contemporary illustrations in conversation with the text.

John Henry Newman, not surprisingly, figures prominently throughout the book, particularly in the introduction, where Whyte introduces the theme of Newman’s Anglican-era Littlemore Church before returning to his analysis of its aesthetics in the chapter entitled “Seeing.” Whyte offers a deep read of Littlemore, described in 1875 by Alexander Beresford Hope as “the undoubtedly visible gem of the revived worship of the English Church” (3). Littlemore, where Newman memorialized his own mother, Jemima, upon her death in 1836, was a building with which Newman invested great emotional significance (8), and which in fact, Whyte explains, quite concretely stood in for and “metaphorically” represented Newman himself as well as his developing liturgical ideas...