Victorian Medievalism and Secular Design

This chapter traces how the arguments used to promote ecclesiastical gothic became diffused in the context of a wider discourse about taste. Pugin’s arguments for gothic had been designed to persuade a narrow group of ecclesiastical patrons but this approach became problematic when addressing Victorian consumer culture. Attempts to influence the judgement of the consumer run through the work of other apologists for medievalism such as John Ruskin, G. G. Scott and Charles Eastlake. Owen Jones appropriated the discourse of medievalism and some of its principles but applied them to a much wider historiography of architecture and ornament, thus dissolving the more partisan hermeneutics promoted by the medievalists. The principles underlying the Gothic Revival were perpetuated through movements such as Aestheticism but these principles no longer pointed to the superiority of the gothic style.