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Documentary of architecture on Ghothic buildings, the makeup and the evolution to the perpendicular (British) gothic architecture that we see much of in Britain today.....
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00:04Gothic. A single word for a beast with many heads and different faces.
00:15To the Georgians, Gothic meant Gothic Revival Architecture, a medieval style of building
00:21brought back to life. But it was also the Gothic novel, a new literature of fantasy
00:28that gave voice to the real fears of an anxious age.
00:35And as the 19th century dawned, those fears deepened. Revolution in science and industry
00:43was destroying the old social order and threatening moral oblivion.
00:50The British landscape was being transformed and urbanised.
00:55And Britain became a battleground where two opposing Gothic forces contended.
01:02On the bright side, the idealistic dreams of the Gothic Revival architects.
01:09On the dark side, the Gothic of horror and of nightmares.
01:19And as the modern world began to take shape, it would be that dark side of Gothic, which fed on
01:27anxiety and alienation.
01:29All the bad stuff that really came into its own.
01:34The Victorian city was a divided place. New monuments and museums, slums and factories.
01:42And beneath it all, a honeycomb labyrinth of sewers, aptly subterranean image for the subconscious fears that haunted the Victorian
01:51mind.
01:52Was the Industrial Revolution turning people into mere cogs in a soulless machine?
01:57Was the new science putting out the light of faith?
02:01It's as if the entire British nation were going through a collective crisis of identity.
02:06But what's the best way to get to grips with all of this?
02:10I think it's by interpreting the many dreams of Gothic.
02:42We begin our story in the late 80s.
02:44The 18th century, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
02:48Science and technology were about to reshape the world.
02:52But not quite yet.
02:55Scientists were mapping and labelling the earth and everything in it.
03:00Unravelling the very nature of physical matter.
03:04So they could harness its power.
03:09Joseph Wright of Derby was an artist who chronicled this moment of profound change.
03:15He's not often associated with the Gothic imagination.
03:19But his best work is infused with a thoroughly Gothic sense of wonder and terror at the new ascendancy of
03:26science.
03:27Never more so than in his experiment on a bird in an air pump of 1768.
03:35At first sight you might say, what's Gothic about it?
03:39It's subject, after all, is science.
03:42An episode from the Enlightenment.
03:45A prosperous father of a family has invited into his home a scientist.
03:54And the scientist's job is to explain what happens to a living organism when it is deprived of oxygen.
04:03Hence, the bird in the bell jar.
04:05Hence, the air pump with its handle, which he has been turning in order to withdraw the air from the
04:13jar so that the bird slowly suffocates.
04:18It's still just fluttering, but its time is running out.
04:22The little girl looks up with fear and dismay in her eyes.
04:27Her slightly older sister can't bear to look at all, while the father comforts both of them and directs them
04:33towards knowledge, acceptance, truth.
04:37And yet, and yet, is that really the subject of this painting?
04:45Look at the way in which Rite of Derby has rather cleverly, rather subtly turned this into a haunted house.
04:56Made this the scene from a kind of modern Gothic novel.
05:01The whole scene is lit spectrally, with the sinister light.
05:12Does that really look like a man of reason?
05:15Or does that look like a magus, a charismatic, perhaps some strange form of modern priest who is aiming to
05:25bewitch us with some new fears, some new superstition?
05:30What's going on in that jar?
05:33The bird resembles the dove of the Holy Spirit in ancient altarpieces.
05:39So, God is being killed by science?
05:43Is science benevolent?
05:45Or is science the source of new fears, new terrors, a new sense of darkness?
05:51Those are the questions with which Gothic writers, painters, thinkers, architects, poets, those are the problems they would wrestle with
06:01for the next hundred years and more.
06:06The prolific Rite of Derby painted many subjects that explored the tension between old world faith and mystery and the
06:14new age of reason.
06:19First, he gives us, beneath crumbling ruins reclaimed by the forces of nature, a skeleton risen from the grave.
06:27It beckons an old man towards the fate that awaits us all.
06:34Then, in a gloomy, lamp-lit cave, a natural philosopher ponders the meaning of life and death.
06:45But Rite was also the very first artist to paint a modern factory.
06:50A sinister block-like presence in the moonlit countryside.
06:55All the more unnatural because its lights are on.
06:59Modern industry has people working day and night.
07:02That had never happened before.
07:08As the 19th century clanked into life, the frontiers of science were advancing too.
07:16Pioneers of flight successfully crossed the English Channel.
07:22British inventors built the very first working steam locomotive.
07:27The mysteries of electricity, seen by some as the spark of life itself, were being revealed.
07:35Many in Britain were made deeply uneasy by the relentless probing of science.
07:41But who would give voice to their fears?
07:47A Gothic writer, of course.
07:50A young woman we remember by her married name, Mary Shelley.
08:00Mary Shelley.
08:01Mary lived in the London parish of St Pancras, at the heart of the dynamic metropolis.
08:08Yet it was in the graveyard that she found solace.
08:13And the inspiration for one of the most terrifying of all Gothic creations.
08:20Frankenstein.
08:23Mary Shelley grew up surrounded by visionary idealists who dreamed of creating a better world, but she was not one
08:30of them.
08:31Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, pioneering feminist, who died giving birth to the young Mary, and was buried here.
08:38Her father was William Godwin, a free thinker, an anarchist, who gave Mary an extraordinary education, introducing her to scientists,
08:48philosophers, writers, thinkers.
08:50It was to this churchyard that Mary came when she was young to be quiet with her thoughts, and to
08:55spend time with the mother that she'd never actually met.
08:59And it was here, too, that she and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley declared their undying love for one another,
09:07and decided to elope.
09:08She was 17, he was 22, and inconveniently married, but that didn't stop them.
09:14Shelley also was an idealist, but it was Mary's destiny to sound a great warning about what the future might
09:22hold, to write a novel about progress and the dangers that come with it, that still sends a shiver up
09:29the spine today.
09:36One famously dark and stormy night in June 1816, the teenage Mary and her lover Shelley were guests of Lord
09:45Byron at his villa on the shore of Lake Geneva.
09:49They entertained each other by telling horror stories.
09:54Mary's tale told of a scientist hell-bent on his quest, to build a creature, a man, from decaying body
10:03parts, and then to animate him.
10:10I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing
10:16that lay at my feet.
10:18I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.
10:22It breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
10:34Mary's story drew on several well-known experiments of the time.
10:39Actual attempts to revive corpses, animal and human, using powerful electrical currents.
10:49It's a very modern dilemma.
10:50Frankenstein might be a gothic novel, but its subject is a very modern dilemma.
10:55I think it's telling that people often refer to the monster as Frankenstein.
11:00But that isn't the case. Frankenstein is the monster's creator, the scientist.
11:05Although in Mary Shelley's view, perhaps he's the true monster, the real villain of the piece.
11:12Why? Because he's a scientific obsessive, a monomaniac.
11:18All he cares about is the realisation of his dream.
11:22But he doesn't think about the consequences.
11:29The moment he succeeds in bestowing the gift of life, Frankenstein rejects his creation.
11:38The unloved, deformed monster embarks on a killing spree of revenge.
11:45But he's not so much terrifying as tragic.
11:50He learns to speak and tells his maker,
11:54I should have been your Adam, but I am instead the fallen angel.
11:59Misery made me a fiend.
12:03I think the novel expresses a deep-seated 19th century terror of science that might run out of control.
12:12And I think that's why it's resonated throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century.
12:18Whether it's the human genome or the splitting of the atom,
12:21a great scientific discovery is only as great as the use that's made of it.
12:29And that use can contain as many nightmares as dreams.
12:34I think Mary Shelley's point was that the bare bones of scientific inquiry are not enough.
12:42They have to be animated by the spirit of moral responsibility.
12:49Another great fear was that modern science, for all its miraculous discoveries,
12:54was actually destroying the human capacity for wonder.
12:59Mapping God out of the equation.
13:04Powerful lenses laid bare a microscopic world.
13:10Diagrams left little space for the spiritual dimension.
13:15In the same year that Frankenstein was published,
13:18the eccentric visionary William Blake created his own monster.
13:23Painted on a tiny panel,
13:25I think it's his way of restoring to the world something he believed science had taken away.
13:34According to Blake, art was the tree of life, science was the tree of death.
13:39And yet he was perfectly capable of being fascinated by the new information and the new imagery being provided by
13:47scientific discovery.
13:49And this picture, this wonderful, strange, intense, weird picture, was actually inspired by Blake's having seen a microscopic image of
14:03a flea.
14:04Blake called this picture, a ghost of a flea.
14:09And it is itself, while inspired by science, hardly scientific.
14:14It's the depiction of a man who'd been turned into a flea as a form of punishment for having a
14:20vicious, bloodthirsty nature.
14:24He's got a sting at the back, and he's got a bowl of blood in front.
14:30What I think is going on here is deadly serious.
14:33I think this is Blake using his Gothic imagination to take revenge on the scientific attitude.
14:38He's taken an image drawn from science, and he's re-enchanted it, made it mysterious, made it weird, made it
14:46Gothic.
14:47In fact, the image is just the sort of thing that you might see carved into the choir stall of
14:53a medieval church,
14:54or carved into the front of a church, perhaps as a gargoyle.
14:59So Blake has taken an image that's all about explanation, all about discourse, science, discovery.
15:08And he's made it mysterious and strange.
15:16As science scrutinised the world around us, it inevitably turned its unflinching gaze on the most intriguing subject of all.
15:25Ourselves.
15:28Scientists began to question the very nature of identity.
15:31Who are we?
15:33Is consciousness evidence of a soul?
15:36Or simply the product of chemical reactions in the brain?
15:44Mesmerism seemed to offer clues to the nature of the mind.
15:48We recognise it now as an early form of hypnotism.
15:50But in the early 19th century, such powers of mind control, independent of the body, seemed much more sinister, more
15:59Gothic.
16:01They suggested invisible realms.
16:04Some claimed mesmerism allowed them to gaze into the future or contact the dead.
16:09But nothing was proven.
16:14As science broadened the horizons of knowledge, so art followed.
16:20Romantic poets explored the nature of the mind in their work.
16:25Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner took Gothic horror to the high seas and to the depths of
16:34the human psyche.
16:35In the poem, the haunted journey of a doomed sailor becomes a metaphor for the searchings of a troubled mind.
16:46When the sailor recklessly kills an albatross, nature condemns him.
16:51He must roam the earth and suffer the psychological torments of guilt and alienation.
17:00But poets and scientists alike made a troubling discovery.
17:04The more they tried to pin down the essential nature of who we are, the more it seemed to evaporate,
17:12like mist at sea.
17:15We appear in a constant state of change.
17:18Are we the product of our emotions?
17:21Our memories?
17:23Our will?
17:24How do we even know our reality is not simply an illusion?
17:31At least you knew where you were with the old Gothic.
17:34Ruined castles, haunted abbeys.
17:37But now the realisation suddenly dawned that perhaps the most terrifying Gothic haunted house of all might be the human
17:46mind.
17:47And the greatest terror was that of not knowing yourself.
17:54Many writers of the time found inspiration through the products of science, namely drugs.
18:02Opiate-based medicines provoked chemical reactions in the brain that allowed the user to explore the darkest recesses of the
18:10mind.
18:13Poets like Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth and Byron all experimented with opium.
18:20Even the fictional Dr Frankenstein took laudanum to drown out his guilt.
18:26But one writer went further.
18:28He revealed to the world exactly what happens when drugs open the door to the subconscious.
18:37Thomas de Quincy was 36 when he wrote The Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
18:43It's almost a stream of consciousness account of his experiences with opium.
18:48The book is presented as a warning against the dangers of excess.
18:53Yet throughout it runs a darkly Gothic fascination with the interior world it opens up.
19:03De Quincy was a deeply troubled man, traumatised, as you wrote in Confessions of an Opium Eater, by the loss
19:11of many of those closest to him.
19:13And it seems to me that he used the drug as a way of fuelling his own escapist fantasies.
19:21As he describes it in the book, it's as if he took opium in order to turn his own mind
19:28into a kind of Gothic fantasy producing machine.
19:32He would take the drug, close his eyes and go on a trip.
19:36And it's extraordinary when you read his book.
19:39How many of his trips are as if scripted by the Gothic novelists of the past.
19:45They are visions of debauchery and excess.
19:48Trips to hell and back.
19:50And yet, for all its outlandishness, its weirdness and its novelty, I think De Quincy's book was important.
19:59Because in it, he identified and confessed to being part of a new social phenomenon.
20:07Namely, escaping your unhappiness by turning to drugs.
20:19Whatever may be visually represented I did think of in the darkness, shaped into phantoms of the eye.
20:27I seemed to descend into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths from which it seemed hopeless that I could
20:34ever re-ascend.
20:37Buildings and landscapes in proportions so vast as the eye is not fit to receive.
20:44I sometimes seem to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night.
20:51Sometimes a millennium.
20:52Or a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.
21:02De Quincy's trips into inner space were both exploration and escape.
21:08Escape from a world that was moving at an ever more terrifying speed.
21:14Nothing epitomised the pace of change more than the locomotive.
21:21On its maiden journey, the first passenger train mowed down and killed a man.
21:27It was soon achieving speeds previously undreamt of.
21:31No human being had ever travelled this fast before.
21:35And the sense of awe that it induced was captured on canvas by England's greatest painter, Turner.
21:43Rain, steam and speed. It's such an astonishing picture.
21:47Such an explosive essay in a new form of perception.
21:53It's so predictive of Impressionism.
21:55Painted in 1844, 30 years before Monet even dreamed of creating Impression sunrise.
22:04And yet, precisely for those reasons, I think this explosion of a canvas has been, in a sense, misunderstood.
22:13Or rather its subject, its true subject, has been forgotten.
22:17What's it actually about?
22:18It's about a locomotive.
22:20It's about a steam train hurtling towards us, out of the void, into a void.
22:26It's about this dark, clanking automaton, this creation of science that is running out of control.
22:34There's terror.
22:36And it lives at the heart of Victorian England.
22:40That's Gothic.
22:42That's Gothic right there.
22:49The train mercilessly ploughed its tracks deep into the British countryside.
22:56Factories and cities soon followed.
23:04In the March of Bricks and Mortar, satirist George Cruikshank depicted the relentless forces of urbanisation as a demonic war
23:13waged by city on country.
23:19It's almost impossible now to appreciate what it must have felt like to live through such profound changes.
23:36Britain's transformation from a rural to an industrial economy was a real shock to the system.
23:43It happened very quickly. Within just a few decades, more people in Britain were living in cities than in the
23:51countryside.
23:52This was the first place on earth where that had ever happened.
23:55The environment was changed.
23:57Huge clouds of smoke covered much of the landscape.
24:01The phrase industrial revolution doesn't really do justice to it.
24:05It was more of an industrial trauma.
24:11The traditional extended family network was undermined as people flocked to the cities in search of jobs.
24:21In northern factory towns like Bradford, nearly half the population came from somewhere else.
24:29The landscape of the future was urban and its territory, a whole range of new anxieties.
24:42For many Victorians, the source of their worst fears was the city, associated with crime, grime, violence, poverty, and a
24:52new form of popular literature sprang into being which fed those fears and fed on those fears.
24:59It was aimed at a mass audience. It sensationalised urban horror, fictionalised it, and added all kinds of weird supernatural
25:08elements.
25:09Characters like Varney the Vampire or Spring-Heeled Jack.
25:12It was all done with a flourish and using the language and the imagery of, what else? Gothic.
25:22They began with the true crime stories of Newgate prisoners.
25:27Then came urban myths.
25:29Reports of a cloaked man who attacked women, then flew off over the rooftops.
25:35He was given a name and a storyline.
25:38The dastardly Spring-Heeled Jack.
25:40But Jack began using his superhuman powers to solve crimes and turned into a Batman-style hero.
25:49The murderous barber Sweeney Todd was the most enduring creation of the Gothic comics.
25:55They were nicknamed Penny Dreadfuls.
25:58And they were popular because they tapped into working-class fears about the modern city.
26:06It was a place where people, mixed in their millions, no longer really knew each other.
26:14Where anyone could do anything and just disappear back into the city's maze of streets.
26:23One anxious critic of the Penny Dreadfuls wrote.
26:27Boys and girls reared in the cellars and garrets of large cities are reading a literature of animal passion and
26:33defiant lawlessness.
26:36Lives of bad people, crime, madness and suicide are powerful in preparing the young for convict life.
26:47In fact, the evidence suggests that Penny Dreadfuls worked like a pressure valve, easing urban anxieties.
26:55They also boosted adult literacy.
27:00Charles Dickens, the most popular writer of the age, would reinvent urban Gothic for the middle classes.
27:09There's more than a smattering of the supernatural in Dickens.
27:14Think of the ghosts haunting Scrooge in The Christmas Carol.
27:17But his Gothic isn't really about ghouls from beyond the grave.
27:23It's about the gloom of the industrial here and now.
27:29Dickens painted his most vivid picture of modern urban Gothic in Bleak House.
27:34It's an epic tale of aristocrats and paupers, country mansions and city squalor.
27:47Where is the dark Gothic heart of Dickens' novel?
27:51Well, it's certainly not the bleak house of the title, which is actually quite a nice place.
27:57It's only gradually, as you read the book, that you realise that Dickens' great Gothic castle, full of terrors and
28:09nightmares, is actually London itself.
28:12He describes it as if it were a huge, labyrinthine, single, multi-celled structure.
28:21Instead of being twined with ivy like a Gothic ruin, it has fog creeping across every surface.
28:29It's a place full of darkness where you can barely see your hand in front of your face.
28:34It has its demons, the crooks and lawyers that suck the lifeblood from the city.
28:40It has its lost souls, the poor, stuck in their terrible slums.
28:47I think Bleak House was Dickens' way of saying to his reading public,
28:52if you're looking for Gothic horror, you don't need to consult your imaginations.
28:58The sad truth is, you're actually living in it.
29:09There was no welfare safety net in Dickens' London.
29:13If you fell, you fell on your own.
29:18That's why the terrible slum in Bleak House is so aptly known as Tom All Alones.
29:29These ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and
29:36boards,
29:37and coils itself to sleep in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in and comes and goes,
29:45fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint.
29:54Later in the novel, there's a ghoulish echo of Penny Dreadful Tales,
29:58as two men who visit the rag-and-bottle merchant Crook discover he's gone up in smoke,
30:03a bizarre case of spontaneous human combustion.
30:08The cat is snarling at something on the ground before the fire.
30:12What is it? A charred log of wood, or...?
30:15Oh, horror! He is here!
30:19Or all that is left of him.
30:27At the book's climax, the tragic lady Deadlock lies down to die at the gates of a rat-infested pauper's
30:36graveyard.
30:38It was a dreadful spot, heaps of dishonored graves and stones hemmed in by filthy houses.
30:46On the step I saw, with a cry of pity and horror, a woman lying cold and dead.
31:13The Victorians looked around at the new world they were creating.
31:18Sprawling grimy cities, smoke-belching factories, and felt distinctly uneasy.
31:29Just read their literature, look at their art, and you can feel their sense that society was coming apart at
31:38the seams.
31:38But disaster loomed.
31:43The critic John Ruskin spoke of the dark storm cloud of the 19th century.
31:48A warning that unless something was done, social and environmental catastrophe lay ahead.
31:56But one man's angst is another man's opportunity.
32:00And Victorian anxieties were cannily exploited by the artist John Martin.
32:05In 1851 he painted The Great Day of His Wrath.
32:10A work very much meant for mass consumption.
32:15It was a barnstorming depiction of the end of the world.
32:22It's very much the end of the modern Victorian industrial world.
32:27It looks like a terrible incident in a smelting furnace.
32:35Inspect it more closely and you see that what he's envisioning is, in fact, a city imploding, consuming itself in
32:46a ball of flame.
32:50It's a wonderfully theatrical, in fact, perhaps almost pantomime-like depiction of the end of the world.
33:05Literally, it's a gothic painting.
33:09It returns art to that most gothic or medieval of subjects, the Last Judgment or Doom.
33:16But it's also a picture that seems to leap forward into the future.
33:21It was seen by eight million people.
33:24Martin toured it around the world.
33:27It was a smash hit sensation.
33:28A painting that predicted the Hollywood blockbusters of the future.
33:34It was a huge popular success.
33:39Why was that?
33:41Well, I think it was partly because Martin had tapped in so directly, so viscerally, to a genuine popular fear.
33:50That everything in their frighteningly modern world was indeed about to go wrong.
33:58But he also allowed them to experience the worst that could happen in the form of a work of art.
34:07They could look at it, thrilled to the terror of it all.
34:11And then reassure themselves that, well, it's only a nightmare.
34:21But if John Martin used the dark imagery of gothic to predict the end of the world,
34:27there was also another, lighter gothic.
34:31One which held out the promise of salvation from all this.
34:45Gothic's optimists were determined to ride to Britain's rescue.
34:50They had a vision.
34:52Go back to the past and we'll build a better future.
34:55And their message was popular.
34:58People longed for an earlier age when everything had seemed more certain.
35:03The whole nation began play-acting at being medieval.
35:07Costume balls and banquets became all the rage.
35:13And representing the red team is Sir Jasper Demers!
35:18Even Queen Victoria and Prince Albert donned 14th century gear for a grand plantagenet ball
35:24held at Buckingham Palace in 1842.
35:28We are the best of one England!
35:30But the new obsession with all things medieval appealed to people of every class.
35:36The Victorians loved gothic colour, pageantry, chivalry, heraldry.
35:42They loved the idea of gothic as a return to a spiritual world.
35:47A great contrast to the godlessness of their own cities and factories.
35:52The Victorian gothic dream took many forms.
35:56Architecture, literature, spectacle.
35:59But above all, it was a fantasy of escaping from the present and into an idealised past.
36:14It was a deeply conservative fantasy, fuelled by novels like Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.
36:22A book that romanticised the medieval world of the jousting tournament.
36:30A rigidly hierarchical world in which everyone knew their place and everyone knew how they ought to behave.
36:43The Victorians staged the first jousts seen in Britain for centuries.
36:54In 1839, staunch medievalist the Earl of Eglinton, a man with a quite remarkably square face, hosted a lavish tournament
37:03on his Scottish estate.
37:09A hundred thousand flocked to see grown men dress up in medieval armour and tilted each other on horseback.
37:19When the tournament actually got underway, the weather was so miserable, so wet, so appallingly Scottish, Eglinton would have killed
37:28for this sunshine,
37:29that the horses immediately sank up to their fetlocks in the mud.
37:34They soldiered on, but the journalists had a field day.
37:37This was the night with the umbrella, they jeered.
37:41But nonetheless, Eglinton's tournament did bring the Gothic Revival to the attention of a mass public, as nothing else had
37:49done before.
37:50And it set a trend for historic reenactments, which survives to this day.
38:01All the Gothic fancy dress and tales of swashbuckling chivalry were evidence of the Victorians' escapist tendencies.
38:09It made them peculiarly receptive to the ideas of a man who wanted to plunge the whole nation back in
38:16time.
38:20The youngest and most valiant knight at Gothic's new round table, or should that be drawing board, was an architect
38:28named Augustus Pugin.
38:31Aged just 24, he published what would become one of the most influential books of the age.
38:40The British Library holds the original copy of a work that would reshape the Victorian world.
38:49Contrasts, an argument for the superiority of the Gothic style, is a none too subtle rant by a distinctly angry
38:56young man.
38:59This is a very rare and precious book.
39:03It's Pugin's own copy of Contrasts.
39:06And it's even had bound into it his own drawings.
39:12Now, Pugin sought to ram his argument down the throats of those reading his book with a series of deliberately
39:21very unfair contrasts between modern architecture.
39:25Bad. Gothic architecture, good.
39:28But, although Pugin's subject in this book is nominally architecture, I think his real subject is the modern city and
39:39its ills.
39:40That's what he's really trying to get at, that's what he's really trying to understand, that's what he's really trying
39:45to cure.
39:46On the one hand, Pugin presents us with a modern city.
39:51Factories, chimneys, gas works, the workhouse, modern bridge.
40:00It's a soulless, barren, industrial, commercial, sprawling, vast, impersonal place.
40:08Against that he sets a medieval town where man goes about his daily business under the eye of God, guarded
40:21by these great towering church and cathedral spires.
40:27Everything is in order, everything is quiet, everything is tranquil.
40:33So, godlessness contrasted with spirituality.
40:38And there's something wonderfully naive about the book, of course, because in it Pugin is saying,
40:43if we build as they once did in the Middle Ages, then suddenly everyone will believe in God.
40:53Everyone will be cared for, looked after, and society will be made better.
41:00Of course, life isn't quite as simple as that.
41:06He might have been a utopian, but Pugin perfectly caught the mood of a Briton obsessed by fantasies of a
41:13glorious medieval past.
41:17This was a match made in heaven, and it would produce its greatest offspring from the flames of destruction.
41:27When the medieval Palace of Westminster burnt to the ground in 1834, it was decreed that the new Houses of
41:33Parliament should be built in the Gothic style.
41:37Not least because classical architecture was tainted by association with post-revolutionary Republican France.
41:53So the government turned to Pugin to cover its new home with medieval detail.
42:02Both outside and in.
42:07Begun in 1838, just a year after Victoria came to the throne, it's the embodiment of a very British democracy.
42:14A new Jerusalem fusing ancient heritage with modern empire.
42:22It's crammed with Pugin's spectacular designs.
42:27Ornate floor tiles.
42:29Elaborate window tracery.
42:33Graceful fan vault ceilings.
42:37But the greatest jewel in Pugin's crown is the Chamber of the House of Lords.
42:45Now, admittedly, a few things have changed in the Chamber of the House of Lords since Pugin's time.
42:51There's this rather wonderful swarm of microphones to enable the Lords to be heard.
42:56But other than that, it's remained remarkably as it was created by Pugin.
43:03And, wow, what a profusion, obsessive profusion of detail.
43:10The great gold gilt throne.
43:14These carved wooden animals, where the Lords themselves sit, are rather like choir stores.
43:21It's as if Pugin wanted to turn this space of political debate into a kind of secular church.
43:28I think he expended so much blood, sweat and tears on this place because he felt it was a really
43:35important commission for him.
43:36A chance for him to stamp the Gothic on the proceedings of political life.
43:48Pugin dreamed that this benevolent, conservative, feudal image of the past would stamp a moral vision on those who ran
43:57the country.
44:00For the politicians themselves, it represented something else, a kind of continuity, a soothing reassurance that Britain was immune to
44:09the political revolutions sweeping the continent.
44:12And perhaps that's its weakness.
44:18The problem with it as a space, I think, is that it breeds a kind of soporific indifference to the
44:29problems of the present.
44:30What he's created is a space in which it's wonderfully easy to forget about all of the problems of the
44:43present.
44:44All of the problems of the modern city, all of the problems of the poor, the problems that so engaged
44:51and enraged Pugin.
44:52And simply to lose yourself in the dream of a past.
44:58The natural response is actually just to fall asleep.
45:11The Houses of Parliament are the buildings for which Pugin is best remembered.
45:17But to see the perfect expression of the gospel according to Pugin, you have to travel 150 miles north.
45:29To St. Giles' church, Staffordshire, which he completed in 1840.
45:42Never was he given more freedom to express his belief that the soul of Britain could be saved through bricks
45:49and mortar and rich decoration.
46:08It was very important to Pugin to carry the good Gothic fight into the heartlands of the Industrial Revolution.
46:17To bring light, colour, spirituality to those whose lives were being blighted by the soot and the grime of heavy
46:30industry.
46:31I think that's why he jumped at the chance to create this church here in Cheadle,
46:36not far from Stoke-on-Trent with its potteries surrounded by mines and the slag heaps of the new mining
46:44industry.
46:45And I think there's something almost desperate about the riotous profusion of colour and design that Pugin flung at this
46:56church.
46:57It's as if he wanted to squeeze the entire tradition of ancient Christianity, at least in terms of art and
47:04design, into one building.
47:08The gilded lions seem to contain echoes of ancient Venice.
47:13Above there are these roundels of saints and prophets that echo the art of Byzantium.
47:19Stained glass windows, a baptismal font that seems to recall the objects of the ancient English Middle Ages.
47:28And the surface is everywhere, colour, pattern, design, surfaces crawling with it.
47:38But for all its beauty, for all its splendour, there's something a bit too much about Pugin's church at Cheadle.
47:48This is Gothic architecture fed on opium.
47:53There's a touch of mania about it.
48:01Pugin stood for Gothic's bright side, but he met a very dark Gothic end.
48:10With astonishing, obsessive energy, he built dozens of churches, convents, cathedrals, private houses.
48:18And he didn't just exhaust himself, he drove himself mad.
48:23By the age of 40, he was dead.
48:32Pugin's dream was a kind of mourning for a past that had gone forever.
48:39Even his most heroic buildings had a haunting melancholy about them.
48:47Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that his Gothic visions seem so conflicted, so contradictory.
48:56After all, he lived in an age of contradictions.
49:04Embodied by none other than Queen Victoria herself.
49:08Imperial figurehead and grief-stricken widow.
49:14Queen Victoria ruled Britain at its moment of greatest global influence.
49:19She symbolised the empire on which the sun never set.
49:22An empire of apparently supreme self-confidence.
49:26Yet she was, in many ways, an aptly neurotic emblem for a neurotic age.
49:32The High Priestess of High Victorian Gothic was a woman so morbidly obsessed by death,
49:38she seemed positively bewitched by it.
49:43When the Queen's beloved consort, Prince Albert, died in 1861 at the age of just 42,
49:49she plunged into a period of mourning that would last for 40 years.
49:56Dressed permanently in black, the widow of Windsor, as she became known, ritualised the memory of her dead husband to
50:03a pathological degree.
50:07She brought the royal family together to recreate group photos from happier times.
50:13Only now, Albert was replaced by a marble bust.
50:17She even had Albert's clothes laid out every day for decades, as if he were about to wear them.
50:26Most extravagant of all was the Queen's campaign to build a towering Gothic memorial to her deceased consort.
50:35Many in Britain thought it a waste of money.
50:39But after a ten-year battle, Queen Victoria finally got her way.
50:44This was the two faces of Gothic merged into one monument.
50:51If the Albert Memorial were a piece of music, you'd be hard-pressed to say whether it's a symphony or
50:57a requiem.
50:58On the one hand, it's a triumphant celebration of British progress.
51:02At its four corners are embodied the continents to which the great British Empire has spread.
51:15Above them, there are figures celebrating manufacture, commerce.
51:20Indeed, the whole structure of this monument was only made possible by advances in cast-iron technology.
51:27The same technology that led to the creation of the first suspension bridges.
51:32Yet, the whole monument also speaks the language of loss, of mourning, of bereavement.
51:40At its centre, the golden image of Queen Victoria's late beloved husband.
51:46And above, in the form of this great Gothic canopy, the dream of an England that has vanished.
51:54The England of the Middle Ages.
52:01I think this memorial speaks of a nation that wants to embrace the future but can't forget the past.
52:16The Albert Memorial marks the apex of the Gothic Revival movement.
52:22The nation had so utterly embraced medieval architecture that it became the Victorian house style.
52:31Railway stations.
52:34Bridges.
52:36Museums.
52:38Schools and colleges.
52:41But even at their most expansive, such buildings couldn't conceal the anxieties of the Victorian age.
52:49In the later years of the 19th century, the triumphant, mournful and even frightening elements of Gothic increasingly came together.
52:58Nowhere more so than in this now forgotten gem of late Victorian architecture, built in 1885 on the fringes of
53:06the great sprawl of London.
53:09It was the brainchild of Thomas Holloway, philanthropist and purveyor of quack remedies, notably Holloway's ointment.
53:19It had made him millions and now he wanted to give something back to society.
53:23His appointed architect, Thomas Crossland, a devotee of Pugin's ideas.
53:29The building is every bit as large as St Pancras Railway Station and every bit as copiously decorated.
53:37But its purpose? Not transportation, but confinement.
53:43This was a lunatic asylum.
53:53The spectacular Holloway Sanatorium embodies the Victorian fascination with institutions.
54:02Whether you are sick in mind or body, criminal or poor, they believed architecture could bring stability, order, wellness.
54:16Yet something doesn't add up.
54:19This building was meant to be a cathedral dedicated to improving the lives of the mentally ill.
54:26But look closely at the decoration and it suddenly seems less optimistic.
54:32Some of these writhing creatures suggest the visions of a disturbed mind.
54:40They have the feel of involuntary confessions, of terror or the fear of failure in what was meant to be
54:48a place of hope.
55:03This is the recreation area and for me it's one of the most poignantly eccentric spaces ever dreamed up by
55:10the Victorian imagination.
55:12Imagine yourself, one of the first patients committed to this space, this place.
55:18How is it meant to improve your condition?
55:22Well, first of all, spiritual uplift.
55:25The whole room looks like a chapel and it's crowned by this enormous, tremendously impressive hammer-beam roof.
55:34Down below, everywhere you look, encouragement.
55:40On the walls, just above this coiling ornate golden decoration, are a series of moral parables, phrases designed to make
55:49those confined here feel as if they've still got a chance.
55:53Call no man happy till you know his end. You may get better yet.
55:58And everywhere you look, images of the great and good, past and present.
56:04Moral examples for the sick to aspire to, ranging from Wellington, Nelson, Oliver Cromwell, defender of the faith, all the
56:12way to Queen Victoria herself.
56:15But the question is, could Gothic actually heal the sick Victorian mind? Could it make people better?
56:28Sadly, the evidence suggests the answer was no.
56:41Instead of curing the afflicted, vast institutions often became dumping grounds for problem people.
56:49In the second half of the 19th century, the number of so-called persons of unsound mind locked away, more
56:56than quadrupled.
56:57Many of them never left.
57:02By the late 20th century, most great Victorian asylums would have closed their doors to patients.
57:08So the Gothic revival style all too often turned out to be little more than oldie-worldie set dressing for
57:16complex modern problems.
57:20As the Victorian age drew to a close, the two faces of Gothic offered two very different visions for Britain.
57:29On one side, the pessimism of Frankenstein, of Bleak House, the nightmares of the Opium Eater.
57:40On the other, the idealism of Puget and those who followed him towards the happy land of Gothic revival.
57:51Would there be a winner?
57:55Personally, I think the bad dreams of the Gothic imagination have stood the test of time better than the well
58:02-meaning fantasies of the Gothic revival architects.
58:05Now, why is that?
58:07I think it's because they simply told the modern world more of the uneasy truth about itself.
58:15But more than that, they showed more imagination, more bite.
58:26But that's for next time.
58:35For more about the programme and the British Library's Gothic exhibition, go to bbc.co.uk slash Gothic.
58:41And our season continues, uncovering hints of the Gothic in the work of medieval stonemasons.
58:46Meet the architects of the divine tomorrow at nine.
58:49And next here on BBC Four, horror's greatest double act rides again.
58:54Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in The Curse of Frankenstein.