Filed under: Littlefield
Ruskin created a Gothic architecture checklist in “The Nature of Gothic”:
(Littlefield House)
Littlefield shows all of these elements: imperfect workmanship, diverse art style, jutting, and bizarre. But how does this connect to Victorian literature? Jerry Taylor describes authors such as Shelley, Stoker, and Poe demonstrating influence from Gothic architecture, but these are not Victorian novels, “In essence, these stories were romances, largely due to their love of the imaginary over the logical, and were told from many different points of view. This literature gave birth to many other forms, such as suspense, ghost stories, horror, mystery, and also Poe’s detective stories” (523).
When I think of Victorian literature, I think of authors like Bronte, Dickens, Tennyson, and Eliot. I have a hard time imagining these grotesque buildings as anything Victorian. “For much of this century the term Victorian, which literally describes things and events in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), conveyed connotations of ‘prudish,’ ‘repressed,’ and ‘old fashioned,’” (Landow).
But Landow goes on to explain that Victorians are not “single, simple, or unified,” they are much more complex than that. The Victorian era was not simple and old fashioned, “it was an age of paradox and power.”
There is evidence of Gothic architecture in Jude the Obscure:
From his window he could perceive the spire of the cathedral, and the ogee dome under which resounded the great bell of the city. The tall tower, tall belfry windows, and tall pinnacles of the college by the bridge he could also get a glimpse of by going to the staircase. These objects he used as stimulants when his faith in the future was dim. (#)
(Oxford)
Jude the Obscure shows the tension between realism and fantasy through the Gothic architecture. Scholarship and prestige are Victorian elements, but they must be obtained in a “romantic” setting, as Taylor described the architecture. Landow explains, “The Catholicism of the Oxford Movement, the Evangelical movement, the spread of the Broad Church, and the rise of Utilitarianism, socialism, Darwinism, and scientific Agnosticism, were all in their own ways characteristically Victorian,” these ideas, by no means, are “prudish, repressed, or old-fashioned.” These are the external virtues of Victorian society, where the abstract ideas of that time are seen in the architecture.
George P. Landow, www.victorianweb.org.
