Abstract
Preaching at the opening of his new church at Littlemore in 1836, John Henry Newman described the church as ‘a holy book, which you may look at and read, and which will suggest to you many good thoughts of God and heaven’ (p. 33). Rather than an enclosed place to hear sermons, the building was for Newman a text to be read, its architecture and furnishings forming a coded language. In this engaging, eloquently written book, the distinguished historian William Whyte explores the symbolism and sacred space that informed the large-scale movement of church building and restoration in Victorian Britain.
As Whyte shows, the renewed emphasis in Britain on spiritual meaning in church architecture began in the 1830s and 1840s. Initially promoted by Tractarians and Ecclesiologists within the Church of England, the movement rapidly spread to other groupings within the established Church and to other denominations; it helped ensure that the thousands of new churches built or enlarged in the mid to later nineteenth century were rich in symbolic language. Victorian church exteriors became more ornate, with pointed arches, decorated altars, crosses, statues, banners, stained glass, coloured bricks, encaustic tiles, painted panels, wall hangings, choir screens. Every feature had its spiritual meaning. In church restorations, pews were removed, whitewash stripped away, medieval wall paintings uncovered.
Nearly all new churches were built in the gothic style, reflecting Victorian Romanticism and love of the medieval. During the mid-Victorian generation, Whyte maintains, the ‘auditory church’ gave way in much of Britain to the ‘visual church’ (p. 63)—intended to evoke emotive, quiet meditation on higher truths. Churches became sacred space and houses of prayer. The restoration work was extended to the surrounding environment, with churchyards properly cared for, yew trees planted, lychgates built or repaired. Church, parsonage, school and churchyard were often perceived as a unity, as ‘open-air’ havens (p. 107) and ‘sacred theatres’ (p. 120). These changes led to calls for churches to remain open, as places of week-day contemplation.
The twentieth century, as Whyte shows, would see an aesthetic reaction against Victorian church architecture. Indeed, many now view Victorian churches as museum pieces, which form obstacles to mission in a secular age. Whyte rightly challenges such views. He argues powerfully that the surviving Victorian churches, with their architectural language and emotive sense of sacred space, have much to say to us, if we would but be open to the experience they were intended to convey.