The Rise of Refinement: G. F. Bodley's All Saints, Cambridge, and the Return to English Models in Gothic Architecture of the 1860s

Abstract

Gothic churches of the 1880s bear little resemblance to those of the 1850s. Within less than a generation, a style based on an aesthetic of sublimity, proclaiming an ideal of ‘muscularity’ and eclectic in its sources, had been replaced by a picturesque mode which upheld ‘refinement’ as an ideal and preferred exclusively English models. This change can be traced back to the revisions G. F. Bodley made at the end of 1862 to his designs for All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge. His abrupt abandonment of the style of the 1850s now known as ‘High Victorian’ was early, decisive, and astonishingly influential. However, though All Saints is well known and well documented, the only attempt to explain its architect’s apparently surprising change of direction is the assumption of unsympathetic historians that it represents a failure of nerve. Was it no more than a retreat from the provocative stylistic innovations of the High Victorian years into the safe arms of irreproachable historicism?