NEAR the end of a short but extraordinarily prolific career, Augustus Pugin summed up his achievements in a gloomy mood. “I have passed my life thinking of fine things, studying fine things, designing fine things, and realising poor ones,” he lamented.
It’s the sentiment of many architects, who see their visions always compromised by cost problems, cutbacks, and decisions in committee. But for Pugin, there may have been clinical reasons for the gloom. A recent biographer has suggested that, like many of the 19th century’s most creative minds, this one was suffering the effects of syphilis.
In any case, Pugin was soon to sink into madness. Just before he did so, he produced his last – and probably most famous – design, for a clock tower on the new Palace of Westminster. This would later be christened “Big Ben” (after Benjamin Hall, the chief commissioner of works).
But by then, the bell had already tolled for its creator. Pugin suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown in February 1852. He spent some of his final months in a hospital that gave its name to the English language: the Bethlem Royal, better known as “Bedlam”. And he died later the same year, aged only 40.
Short as his life was, it had been long enough for him both to enjoy great success for a time and then to go out of fashion. During the first part of that trajectory, he benefited from the sense of alienation that accompanied Britain’s industrial revolution, and the mass migration into ugly cities.
This brought with it a hankering for architecture, especially church architecture, suggestive of a more innocent or romantic age. And Pugin knew exactly what was required. Fired by his own religious beliefs – he converted to Catholicism in his early 20s – he found inspiration in pre-Reformation times: before, as he saw it, the rot set in.
The Gothic Revival had predated him, but he became one of its most enthusiastic disciples: adopting and embellishing the style in an astonishing number of buildings – not just churches and cathedrals, but manor homes, schools, railway stations, and indeed the Houses of Parliament, where he did many of the interior designs for the main architect, Charles Barry.
His career also coincided with a Catholic church construction boom in Ireland, as emancipation brought the long night of the Penal Laws to a close. So Pugin’s designs found a receptive audience in this country too, starting in Wexford and spreading like a latter-day Norman invasion to Dublin, and to such outposts as Kerry, Limerick and what was not then known as Cobh, Co Cork.
Shrewdly, he didn’t just let his buildings speak for themselves. A skilled polemicist, he also made the case for his architecture in a series of books, arguing that his medieval revivalist style could be a force for moral improvement.
But even before his premature demise, he was beginning to lose the argument. In the later years, amid a backlash against the excesses of neo-Gothic, the big commissions dried up. And as if dying young wasn’t bad enough, Pugin was to have the double misfortune that his most vociferous critic, John Ruskin, enjoyed contrasting longevity.
Even while the former was still alive, in 1851, Ruskin had damned him as “not a great architect but one of the smallest possible or conceivable”.
He would have a further half century in which to elaborate.
Worse than Ruskin’s disapproval, perhaps, was another posthumous enemy of Pugin’s work, a century later: Vatican II. Not only did this lead to a plethora of new churches whose designs, as Edmund White said about something else, would go straight from looking futuristic to passé without the usual intermediate stage of ever seeming to belong in the present.
It also legitimised the vandalism of many Pugin interiors – including his Irish masterpiece Killarney Cathedral – along with those of the “Irish Pugin”, JJ McCarthy, who took over the Englishman’s unfinished works.
As his name suggests, Pugin was in fact of French ancestry, the son of draughtsman Auguste Pugin who fled his country after the Revolution.
The young man thus grew up in London, where by contrast with the piety of his later work, one of his early jobs was in that godless (except as a euphemism for the cheap seats) profession: the theatre.
He was a teenage stage-hand in Covent Garden and also designed sets.
This may have been where he acquired his taste for the dramatic. Less happily, it may have been where he acquired syphilis too. Theatre boxes of the time were a popular venue, post-show, for prostitutes. Theatre personnel were among the best customers.
Pugin was the proverbial young man in a hurry. He was married at 19, a father by 20, and would be on his third marriage (the first two ended by natural causes) when his mind went. He died at Ramsgate in Kent, home to one of his many churches, St Augustine’s. Where, later this morning, parishioners will gather for a special noon mass to mark the occasion of his birth, 200 years ago today.