The most significant thing about the arts of this time was not the usual clash between classic and romantic, but the tradition of craftsmanship which pervaded everything from the mouldings round the lintel of a door to the title page of a book.
The machine was getting into its stride, but the British tradition of thoroughness had not yet died out.The knowledge of detail inherited from a system of apprenticeship appears in the exquisite bindings of books, the high standard of engraving, the chaste layout of the typographer. No work was skimped. Even the speculative builder had a civic conscience and laid out several stuccoed estates round our larger towns which for spaciousness of planning and æsthetic beauty have yet to be improved upon in our own era of town-planning.
The classic and romantic clash must certainly be considered. The classic comes first and there is no doubt that its greatest exponent was Sir John Soane, who invented a severe style of architecture which is the envy of every European country except its own. Artists of all sorts still went on the Grand Tour and those who could not afford it made careful drawings of classical sculpture, notably the Elgin marbles. There were certain dogmatic rules laid down for art. Traditional forms and compositions pervaded everything. Art criticism was, mercifully, in its infancy and had not yet reduced many a talented craftsman to a state of gittering self-consciousness.
Literature was almost entirely in the hands of the Romantic school. Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth were established poets. Byron was a hero. Sentimental Keepsake annuals flooded the bookshops. Thomas Moore and Alaric A. Watts were drawing-room idols. Sir Walter Scott gave an impetus to reviving Gothic architecture which was far greater than that given by the whimsicalities of Walpole and Beckford. The popular style for the newest fashionable architecture was Perpendicular. In painting, this taste is expressed in the works of Cattermole and Joseph Nash and Prout. Scholars were taking to British antiquarianism.
1867
Just when it looked as though Boggleton was going to become one of those decayed market towns which would have been no credit to an age of progress and prosperity like the mid-nineteenth century, fortune saved it from oblivion.The Great Junction Railway decided that a site near Boggleton was a suitable place for its works. So in 1850 a town was built called New Boggleton. This consisted at first of several rows of workmen’s dwellings with a central green space, a church, an institute and some shops.
Enterprising Boggletonians from the old town erected an arcade of shops at the edge of the new town. A farmer sold off his land to a speculator who proceeded to erect as many houses on it as he could fit in. Then there were no town-planning laws to stop him. New Boggleton spread until it met Old Boggleton and the small houses at the London end of the High Street came down under the onward rush of the new town.
The new works were a magnificent sight: a glimpse into the engine rooms showed vista upon vista of machines with men toiling happily at them. The G.J.R. built a huge viaduct across the valley outside the town. The old naval captain in one of the genteel houses by the Abbey—he was the last survivor of the original inhabitants of the group—thought that the viaduct was magnificent, comparable to the Abbey itself, symbolising the strength and beauty of engineering in cast iron and brick against the architecture of the Middle Ages. But he was a sensible man always in touch with the times.
The new rector (High Church: instituted a weekly Communion instead of the old quarterly administration of the Sacrament) was deeply opposed to the building of the viaduct. He tried to agitate with the Mayor and Corporation. But they were all for humouring the railway since big profits were to be made out of it. Only a few landowners sympathised with the rector and agreed that the viaduct ruined the venerable and picturesque appearance of the Abbey. So the rector had to content himself with medievalising his Parish Church. The old box pews were taken down and nice sticky pitch-pine ones of a Christian shape substituted. The windows were filled with coloured glass from Hardman’s works. The screen across the chancel and north chapel was removed because it blocked the view of the new chancel. The high pulpit was destroyed and a new one made out of the remains of the screen. The hatchments were removed and the plaster stripped from the walls.
The Nonconformists were no less active. But since the Established Church liked Gothic, they preferred the Italian style. The new Independent Chapel, now called Congregational, was of white brick with red brick dressings and in an ornate but inexpensive Romanesque manner.
The Adamsbec family had long ago sold Boggleton House to a prosperous shop-owner who gutted the interior and built warehouses in the garden. Plate glass took the place of the old square-paned windows and only a few of the more old-fashioned tradesmen who were unable to keep up with the new influx and increased competition regretted the passing of old Boggleton.
The railway brought with it newer manufactories, and more chapels and churches sprung up. On the hills outside the town a smartish suburb was built for the foremen and higher clerical people connected with the factories. The richest people of all built themselves huge country houses near the town: houses in the Jacobean style and the Italian style with high walls and iron gates with lamp-posts on either
