Shorter notices
The Victorian Country House, Mark Girouard (OUP £12)
"People who live in Waterhouses shouldn't throw stones:" this was, I think, the first architectural joke I heard; and certainly the notion that all Victorian architecture was bad, silly and ugly was very much part of the education I received. This important and stylish book by Dr Girouard is unlikely to "leave any reader's architectural taste quite unchanged. The subject is big. These Victorian houses are big buildings, built in a large way by men with grand ideas for patrons with great wealth. The wealth was mostly new, the prodigious consequence of the industrial revolution, of cotton, of railways, of Empire. Throughout the Victorian time domestic labour was cheap, and so was the skilled labour of stonemasons and woodworkers and plasters. These enormous, pretentious houses rose up all over England, although chiefly in the south (to which the millionaires often fled, from the muck and the brass of the north): they were efforts by the nouveaux riches to emulate, and to exceed, the style of country house living of the aristrocracy they sought, with considerable success, to buy their way into.
It is the measure of Dr Girouard's knowledge and skill that I, for one, have come as a result of this book to understand in part and thus to appreciate these monstrous Victorian piles. Nothing, I think, will ever make me like the great bulk (and bulkiness) of them: they are loutish, bullying buildings for the most part, and the exceptions seem to me to be flukes which somehow come off — like Rayons Manor by C. Tennyson D'Eyncourt and W. A. Nicholson, marvellous in its ruinous condition, Antony Salvin's Peckforton Castle in Cheshire, or the Cragside Norman Shaw built in Northumberland for the industrialist, inventor and arms king Sir William, later Lord, Armstrong. The houses Dr Girouard describes were not built to be liked, nor do they ask to be liked. Instead, they assert wealth, confidence, skill, power: they proclaim men's superiority over materials and over other men and over landscape. G.G.
Animals in Art and Thought to the end of the Middle Ages Francis Klingender (Routledge £12.00)
This large, if far from sumptuous volume, consists of part of the work Klingender was engaged on when he died in 1955 at the age of 47. Essentially it is a history of the meaning attached to animals in art through the ages and, as is usually the case much stronger on visual than on literary art. But there are many good passages, notably on the Carolingian Renaissance, the unicorn and the venerology in Tristan. It is a great pity that the pictures are all in black and white and the details chosen often trite to a degree.
Previous page
