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Pugin: A Gothic Passion, edited by Paul Atterbury and Clive Wainwright; pp. xiv + 310. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1994, $70.00, $30.00 paper, 45.00, 19.95 paper.
In 1994, the Pearson Company sponsored an exhibition of A. W. N. Pugin's work at the
Victoria and Albert Museum. This beautiful book is published in conjunction with the exhibition and bears the same title, Pugin: A Gothic Passion. The title is surely apt, for this architect's devotion to the Gothic Revival was nothing less than a passion, one strengthened by a convert's zeal for Roman Catholicism. The two-architecture and religionwere inseparable for Pugin, who customarily referred to Gothic architecture as Christian architecture, by which he meant pre-Reformation Catholic architecture. But, then, he was impassioned in all his endeavors; he was passionate about boats, and,judging by his three marriages and eight children, he was passionate in another way as well. He was not a man to do things by halves.
Passion alone accounts for the extraordinary productivity of his short life (181252). Close to the end of it he claimed to have done the work of a hundred years in forty. This book provides a record of those forty impassioned years that suggests there was little exaggeration in his self-assessment. Its division into twenty-two chapters on different aspects of his career indicates the amount, not to mention the variety, of what he achieved. Only by listing the authors and their subjects can I credit the contributors and accurately describe the contents. Clive Wainwright, one of the co-editors, contributes four essays to this volume: on Pugin's life and influence, on his collections of antiquities, on furniture, and on book design...