Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c. 1840–1870 by G. A. Bremner (review)

When a devastating earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand brought down the spire of the Gothic revival Christ Church Cathedral in 2011, it damaged not just a beloved local landmark but also one of “the most perfect symbols of the reach and ambition of the Anglican confession worldwide” (364). In Imperial Gothic—wide-ranging in scope, lavishly adorned with nearly 400 images, and challenging in its marrying of architectural, religious, political, and cultural history in a global perspective—G. A. Bremner traces the coordinated effort by the Church of England in the mid-nineteenth century to spread the gospel and attendant membership in British civilization across the Empire. Architecture, Bremner argues, was a key tool “used extensively and very deliberately by Anglican clergymen to promote the influence, authority and integrity of their confession and its distinctive values and ideals” in a strategy that was “as much political as it was spiritual” (366). That the thirty years of the Church of England’s growth abroad from 1840 to 1870 coincided with the reform efforts of the Cambridge Camden (later Ecclesiological) and Oxford Architectural Societies, which championed the Gothic revival and liturgical reforms across the British world, makes Bremner’s designation of “Imperial Gothic” an apt descriptor of this critical period in colonial Anglicanism.

Just how closely the Church of England was tied to Britain’s colonial reach is captured brilliantly in Thomas Jones Baker’s The Secret of England’s Greatness (1863), a painting of Queen Victoria, head of both church and state, presenting a bible to an African man, a representative of the non-Europeans the British Empire would encompass. While Bremner is careful to note that the Church of England was not an extension of the state, they nevertheless had shared interests. The purpose of the Church abroad, visualized in its buildings, was no less than to secure the British Empire and civilization, for if indigenous peoples and British settlers were “inculcated with the tenets of the true faith then their inclination would be to sympathise with the national character of that faith, in effect contributing to the creation of a pan-global Anglican polity” (4). That national character was “the orthodox, tempered and patriarchal brand of English civilisation represented by the Anglican faith” (226). While the Church of England was not alone in the colonies—Low Church and Roman Catholic missionaries competed with High Church Anglicanism—the creation of the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund in 1841 and the work of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts helped to systematize the spread of the Church of England around the globe and to make it a major force.

Bremner innovatively recovers the key role clergymen played in this spread of British identity and culture through architecture. He shows how the social and professional networks of these clergymen—many of whom were Oxbridge-educated and members or friends of the Cambridge Camden and Oxford Architectural Societies—brought the architectural reforms of Anglican ecclesiology to places as diverse as Calcutta, Cape Town, Ottawa, and Sydney. Anglican clergymen such as Bishops George Selwyn in New Zealand, William Broughton in Australia, and John Medley in Canada drew on architectural models—whether three-dimensional, rendered on paper, or described by word—and images published in The Ecclesiologist, which devoted more than 250 articles to colonial church architecture. Like Selwyn, many became builder-architects themselves out of necessity and even principle, and others engaged major British architects such as G. F. Bodley, William Burgess, William Butterfield, and G. G. Scott. Clergymen were the keystone of a coherent Anglican ecclesiology in the British colonies during the Victorian era.

In this book Bremner poses the methodological challenge to unify the study of British domestic architecture with that of British colonial architecture, where previously these two have been considered independently. Bremner’s claim is that architectural influence worked...