Page 22 - History 2020

Culture wars
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The interpretation of 19 century Britain that I’m advancing here is that right from
the beginning, dislike of the Industrial Revolution was so intense that it provoked a
desire for a cultural escape, initially into the fantasy past of Merrie England, as
conceived by Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Pugin’s Gothic Revival. But as the
Victorian age gathered pace, alongside this medievalist escapism, another equally
powerful cultural movement emerged, a second escape, this time into the rural idyll
of the countryside, the village and the garden. Obviously the two are linked; Merrie
England was rural. But “ruralism” developed a strong life of its own. These Victorian

culture wars, industrialism versus medievalism and ruralism, are the inner history of
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19 century Britain.

John Ruskin: the thunderer
Whose names are associated with “England as a garden”? The phrase itself was used
by William Morris, a disciple of John Ruskin, who we need to look at first. Ruskin was
one of the most influential thinkers of the Victorian age, though it’s fair to say that

few of us engage with his ideas today. Perhaps this is because his thinking was so
uncompromisingly resistant to the modern age. Ruskin was more than the nation’s
leading art critic. He integrated his ideas about art into a profound political, economic
and historical critique of the industrial revolution. His books were best sellers, his
articles major events, and his wildly popular lectures were described as “secular
sermons”. He was a leading warrior in the Victorian culture wars.

He was born into a well-off. His parents indulged him mentally (father showed him

the business, took him travelling) and spiritually (mother was a devout evangelical
Christian, much Bible reading) but deprived emotionally (starved of contact with his
own age-group). He grew to see their limitations but remained close to them. He
married disastrously (it was annulled) then loved another equally disastrously (she
eventually rejected him and went mad, as did he).

His twin passions were writing and art. Both evolved. He made his reputation as an
influential art critic writing in long, florid long sentences; his later writing became
simpler and more direct. His multi-volume works about the great painters, Gothic
architecture and Venice shaped public tastes. He championed Turner and the Pre-
Raphaelites for their honesty and truth. A stay in visit to Venice converted him to the
Italianate Gothic style (today we’d call it early Renaissance). This influenced the
Gothic revival, adding campanile-style towers* to our Victorian towns alongside
Pugin’s heavier Germanic Gothic.

*A town I once lived in, Liskeard, had one; I never knew why.