Review: Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c. 1840–1870, by G. A. Bremner

Abstract

G. A. Bremner Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c. 1840–1870 New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013, 364 pp., 80 color and 285 b/w illus. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780300187038 One of the more curious episodes in the history of the British Empire, the history of architecture, and the history of masculinity finds a large group of “Oxbridge-educated men of High Church persuasion” carrying the beauty of worship, in neo-Gothic form, to the settlers and indigenous peoples of the quarter of the world’s surface that constituted the British Empire in the late nineteenth century. Gothic churches and cathedrals of considerable ambition and architectural merit—however incongruous in relation to their localities— can be found in Christchurch, New Zealand; Adelaide, Australia; Knysna, South Africa; Zanzibar, Tanzania; Allahabad, India; Istanbul, Turkey; and Honolulu, Hawaii; as well as in other places beyond the formal reach of empire. Imperial Gothic , a formidable work of expository scholarship, examines Victorian Gothic (ca. 1840–70) as a transregional phenomenon. As G. A. Bremner notes, almost nothing has been written on these important buildings, less still on the motivation behind them, with the exception of localized studies such as Ian Lochhead’s exemplary work on Benjamin Mountfort in New Zealand. Bremner has produced a substantial, magnificently documented and illustrated work that will be a keynote for future studies of architecture and empire. With forensic precision, he lays out the transformation of the Anglican Church from its supine indolence in the 1830s. Charles Blomfield, bishop of London, issued a clarion call in 1840, insisting on the “sacred duty” of the church to make “provision for the spiritual wants of its colonies” (2). In doing so, the church blundered into one of the ideological battlegrounds of empire, in which the nonconformist denominations had long been pitted against commercial and colonial interest groups such as the East India Company and the Caribbean planters. Should the empire exist merely for financial and strategic gain, and not concern itself with saving souls (as the latter …