The industrial revolution began in England 1775. Within 75 years severe criticism about its impacts on people and cities had developed. Also, the middle and upper classes expected that culture, and architecture as a specific aspect of culture with authority over the material environment, would respond to the degradations created irrevocably by this revolution.
They expected culture (and specifically architecture) to respond by upholding what they defined as a moral imperative – an aspect of the civilization they claimed to have created. The Victorian age that defined Britain at the time contained elements of both an imperial sensibility (a noblesse oblige if you will) based in the construction of the world’s largest empire that was so vast that people bragged that the sun never set on it, and a paternalism based in this sensibility that equated the extent of empire with a moral superiority requiring Britain to instruct the rest of the world as to how to live. Any evidence that contradicted the assumptions of superiority – such as the slums that General William Booth compared to “darkest Africa,” was an affront that the middle and upper classes could not tolerate easily.
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