Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 the Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture, 1760–1860

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 The Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture, 1760–1860

The Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture is a history of the late Georgian phenomenon of the architect-designed cottage and the architectural discourse that articulated it. It is a study of small buildings built on country estates and not so small buildings built in picturesque rural settings, resort towns and suburban developments. At the heart of the English idea of the cottage is the Classical notion of retreat from the city to the countryside. This idea was adopted and adapted by the Augustan-infused culture of eighteenth-century England where it gained popularity with writers, artists, architects and their wealthy patrons who from the later eighteenth-century commissioned retreats, gate-lodges, estate workers’ housing and seaside villas designed to ‘appear as cottages’. The enthusiasm for cottages within polite society did not last. By the mid- nineteenth century, cottage-related building and book publishing had slowed and the idea of the cottage itself was eventually lost beneath the Tudor barge-boards and decorative chimneystacks of the Historic Revival. And yet while both designer and consumer have changed over time, the idea of the cottage as the ideal rural retreat continues to resonate through English architecture and English culture.

Daniel Maudlin is Professor of Modern History at the University of Plymouth. He has previously worked as an Inspector of Historic Buildings for Historic Scotland and held positions at Dalhousie University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Glasgow. From farmhouses

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 in Nova Scotia to aristocratic retreats on English country estates, his work focuses on the social meanings of design and the consumption of domestic architecture in the early modern British Atlantic world. He also writes about vernacular architecture, theory and the everyday. Routledge Research in Architecture

The Routledge Research in Architecture series provides the reader with the latest scholarship in the field of architecture. The series publishes research from across the globe and covers areas as diverse as architectural history and theory, technology, digital architecture, structures, materials, details, design, monographs of architects, interior design and much more. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality architectural research.

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The Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture, 1760–1860 Daniel Maudlin

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Daniel Maudlin Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Daniel Maudlin The right of Daniel Maudlin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Maudlin, Daniel. The idea of the cottage in English architecture, 1760-1860 / Daniel Maudlin. pages cm. -- (Routledge research in architecture) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Architect-designed houses--England--History--18th century. 2. Architect-designed houses--England--History--19th century. 3. Architecture, Georgian--England. 4. Cottages--England--History-- 18th century. 5. Cottages--England--History--19th century. 6. Architecture and society--England--History--18th century. 7. Architecture and society--England--History--19th century. I. Title. NA7328.M38 2015 728Ј.37094209033--dc23 2015005220

ISBN: 978-1-138-79387-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-76076-6 (ebk)

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Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby Contents

List of figures ix Preface xiii Introduction 1

1 The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life 17

2 The cottage in English architecture 31

3 The architect-designed cottage 45

4 The cottage in Arcadia 67

5 Architects, patrons and connoisseurs 85

6 Habitations of the labourer 103

7 The appreciation of cottages 121

8 Re-imagining the vernacular 137

9 The cottage ornée 161

10 The cottages of Old England 177 Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Index 193 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Figures

1.1 Thomas Gainsborough, Cottage Door with Playing Children, 1788 25 2.1 William Chambers, ‘Primitive Buildings of Conical and Cubic Form’, A Treatise on Civil Architecture in which the principles of that art are laid down, 1759 35 2.2 John Plaw, Plate 1, ‘Plan, Elevation and Sections for a Hermitage in the Garden of Green Park Lodge’, Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements, London, 1795 36 2.3 John Plaw, Plate 12, ‘Shepherd’s Huts or Cottages’, Rural Architecture or Designs from the simple cottage to the decorated villa, 1794 38 3.1 The cottage on the lake, Stourhead, Wiltshire 47 3.2 Queen Charlotte’s Cottage, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, early twentieth century 48 3.3 George Richardson, drawing of a cottage for Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, 1770 50 3.4 George Richardson, Figure 1, ‘Plans and Elevations of Cottages’, New Designs in Architecture, consisting of plans, elevations and sections for various buildings, etc, 1788 51 3.5 Estate cottage, Milton Abbas, Dorset 52 3.6 John Plaw, Plate XII, ‘circular Cottage’, Sketches for Country Houses, Villas and Rural Dwellings, 1800 53 Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 3.7 John Swete, ‘Cottage of the Honourable General Vaughan’, 1792 54 3.8 John Plaw, Plate VII, ‘Design for a Larger Cottage or Farm House’, Rural Architecture or Designs from the simple cottage to the decorated villa, 1794 54 x Figures 3.9 Richard Elsam, Plate I, ‘Elevations of the entrance and eating room fronts of a single Rustic Cottage designed for the Rev. Wm. Uvedale, proposed to be erected in the County of Suffolk’, An Essay on Rural Architecture, London, 1803 56 3.10 Estate cottage, monogrammed ‘GT’, Moggerhanger Park, Bedfordshire 58 4.1 Triumphal arch gate-lodge, Berrington Hall, Herefordshire 71 4.2 John Swete, ‘Fordland Cottage: belonging to James White Esq’, 1797 73 4.3 Estate cottage, Ridgmont, Bedfordshire 74 4.4 Estate cottage, Lidlington, Bedfordshire 74 4.5 Milton Abbas, Dorset 75 4.6 The Street, New Houghton, Houghton Hall, Norfolk 76 4.7 West Bridge Cottages, Tavistock, Devon 77 4.8 Plan of Blaise Hamlet, Bristol 78 4.9 Plan of Calverley Park, Tunbridge Wells, Kent 79 6.1 Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews, 1748–9 105 6.2 John Wood the Younger, ‘Cottages with Two Rooms’, A Series of Plans for Cottages or Habitations of the Labourer, 2nd edn, Bath, 1806 110 6.3 Nathaniel Kent, ‘Two Brick Cottages of the Smallest Size’, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property, London, 1775 112 6.4 John Claudius Loudon, Design XVII, ‘A Dwelling with Two Rooms and a Bed-Closet’, The Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, 1834 116 7.1 John Swete, ‘Cottage at Powderham’, 1799 126 7.2 John Swete, ‘Cottage on Dartmoor’, 1797 127 7.3 Willy Lott’s Cottage, Flatford Bridge, Dedham Vale, Suffolk 130 7.4 Humphry Repton, ‘‘View from My Own Cottage in Essex’, Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 1816 131 Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 8.1 James Malton, Design 5, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture, 1798 139 8.2 William Fuller Pocock, Design 7, Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, Picturesque Dwellings, Villas, with Appropriate Scenery, 1807 146 8.3 Estate cottages, Blaise Hamlet, Bristol 148 8.4 Circular Cottage, Blaise Hamlet, Bristol 149 8.5 Maison du Garde, Hameau de la Reine, Petit Trianon, Versailles 150 Figures xi 8.6 Richard Elsam, Plate X, Hints for Improving the Condition of the Peasantry, 1816 152 8.7 Estate cottage, Old Warden, Bedfordshire 153 8.8 Estate cottages, Penshurst, Kent 155 9.1 Fairlynch House, Budleigh Salterton, Devon 165 9.2 Houghton Lodge, Stockbridge, Hampshire 166 9.3 George Rowe, ‘Knowle Cottage’, Forty-eight views of cottages and scenery at Sidmouth, 1826 168 9.4 Woodland Cottage, Sidmouth, ‘drawn from nature’ by G. Eyre Brooks, c. 1830 169 9.5 Beacon Cottage, Sidmouth, Devon 170 9.6 William Alfred Delamotte, ‘Royal Cottage’, 1824 171 9.7 J. P. Neale, ‘Endsleigh Cottage, Devonshire’, c. 1850 173 10.1 John Claudius Loudon, Design 28, ‘A Cottage in the Old English manner’, Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, 1834 180 10.2 Gate lodge, Benendon School, Cranbrook, Kent 183 10.3 Peter F. Robinson, Design IV, ‘Cottage’, A New Series of Designs for Ornamental Cottages and Villas, London, 1838 184 10.4 Decimus Burton, Architectural perspective of the garden elevation, Baston Cottage, Tunbridge Wells by Decimus Burton, c.1831 185 Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Preface

Despite its architectural and cultural prominence in the late Georgian period, the design history of cottages has only featured within other broader histories, whether of picturesque and historic revival architecture, landscape gardening or agricultural improvement. The Idea of the Cottage is therefore the first book to focus specifically on the eighteenth century cultural and architectural origins of the English love affair with the country cottage. The Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture 1760–1860 remains with the same period and themes of housing design, taste, landownership and landscape explored in my previous study, The Highland House Transformed: Architecture and Identity on the Edge of Britain 1700–1850 (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), but here the focus shifts from late eighteenth- century Scotland to England and from the self-image of the tenant farmer to that of the wealthy landowner. The Idea of the Cottage is the culmination of a five-year research project based on the analysis of over one hundred eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century architectural pattern books and treatises on landscape and gardening on the subject of cottages (held at the British Library, Princeton University Library and The Winterthur Museum and Library, Delaware), periodicals, magazines and estate records alongside extensive field studies of cottages.The Idea of the Cottage is a historical study firmly located within the late Georgian period and I do not attempt to make any links between that world and our own. Nonetheless, those readers familiar with English culture will immediately recognise the idea of the cottage as set out in the eighteenth century as something familiar today. The

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 country cottage is still viewed as a highly desirable property for rural retreat, occasional or permanent, and is still considered a central component of the much-loved English countryside. So, readers may find that understanding the historic origins of the English love affair with the country cottage sheds some light on contemporary English tastes and cultural values and their profound influence upon the English legal frameworks that maintain the countryside and rural built environment, from the Town and Country Planning Act to National Parks, Conservation Areas, Listed Buildings (overseeing the appearance of old buildings) and National Planning Policy (overseeing the appearance of new buildings). xiv Preface Research for this book was supported by a fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). Personal thanks are due to various people for their support and thoughts on cottages including Andrew Ballantyne, Matthew Fletcher, Dafydd Moore, Lauri Perkins at The Winterthur Museum and Library, Gareth Rees and Marcel Vellinga. Most of all thank you to Jane Campbell. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Introduction

Humbly presented to those Noblemen and Gentlemen of taste, who build retreats for themselves, with desire to have them appear as cottages, or erect habitations for the peasantry or other tenants James Malton, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture, 17981

The Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture is a history of the architect- designed cottage between 1760 and 1860. The architect-designed cottage, predominantly expressed in new designs for small buildings on country estates and large villas by the sea, was the product of a specific discourse in English architectural writings on landscape, rural retreat and the simple life. That discussion within architecture was itself a response to a wider ‘cottage culture’: a cultural celebration of cottages and cottage life within the upper ranks of eighteenth-century English society, born of that group’s admiration and emulation of Classical culture whereby through the eighteenth century, for that group, the cottage came to represent the home of the Arcadian shepherd-king. It follows that whether in print or thatch and stone this relatively small social group was the principal consumer of architect- designed cottages. Accordingly, if a cottage culture can be identified in this period it was a highly localised phenomenon within English society that involved a handful of architects, their wealthy patrons, perhaps a few hundred connoisseurs who consumed architecture through books and magazines and a wider group of cultural consumers that at most extended to the estimated 120,000 members of late Georgian ‘polite society’.2 Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 The idea of the cottage was formulated as a reaction to the city. It does not exist without the city. The city is the physical and conceptual point of departure for retreat to the countryside. Therefore, rural retreat as understood within late Georgian polite society was not, as may be supposed, a response to industrialisation; a retreat from modernity and the modern industrial city as represented by Manchester or Sheffield. Rather, it belonged to a much older pre-industrial dichotomy of town and country, where in England at least, town was the London metropolis and country was a country estate or a villa on the south coast. In this context the cottage was perceived as the 2 Introduction embodiment of the ideal of rural retreat. However, once in the country, the term ‘cottage’ itself was used to suggest a building’s character, implying its external appearance, rather than its function as a gate lodge, garden seat, store shed or villa.3 Architect-designed cottages were intended as art objects to be observed within the landscape and are often described in architectural books as ornaments; and, while for the most part plans are included alongside elevations, the accompanying discourse is more often concerned with the appearance of a cottage in this setting than with the arrangement of internal space. Art, however, was not the only agenda in late Georgian architecture and the cottage as landscape object was not the only architect-designed cottage. Our attention should also be drawn to the working fields where architects’ skills were alternately employed to produce practical, comfortable homes for rural workers in response to the realities of rural poverty; and here the usefulness of internal plans were very much to the fore. The first architect-designed cottage intended for a landscape garden was a simple but well-proportioned thatched hut. It was a representation of both the pastoral ideal of rural retreat and the primitive hut as found in eighteenth century architectural theory. However, cottage design and its associated meaning soon changed and continued to do so well into the nineteenth century. Therefore, architect-designed cottages changed in style from thatched neoclassical boxes to the irregular forms of the Picturesque cottage, in imitation of the vernacular, to the patriotic historicism of the barge- boarded Historic Revival cottage. Each new style reflected wider changes in the location of English culture as the imagined destination of retreat shifted from Arcadia to the English countryside to the Old England of Elizabeth I. Beyond the country estate the appreciation of cottages also manifested in the sumptuous cottage ornée or seaside villa and expanded beyond individual building design to the ideal village and the design of estate villages, resort towns and suburban developments. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it also extended into the English countryside and to the appreciation of vernacular cottages, the humble dwellings of the landless labourers; although, in terms of the number of architects who specifically engaged with the vernacular through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the vernacular has less of a presence in cottage design of this period than neoclassicism, Gothic or the Old English historic revival style. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 The word ‘cottage’ is at root a legal term pertaining to property law derived from the status of its inhabitant as a landless rural labourer: the cottager. As such, it refers to a system of land tenure, or lack thereof, and does not imply any specific sort of building. However, it follows that, historically, the home of the cottager, the cottage or cot, was the smallest, humblest and least well- appointed of all rural housing types. As per Walker’s Dictionary, 1791:

COTTAGE – A hut, a mean habitation COTTAGER – one who dwells in a hut or cottage.4 Introduction 3 In the eighteenth century such cottages would have been small impermanent structures vastly more numerous than the few extant vernacular buildings that we call cottages and admire and preserve in the English countryside today. Today’s extant vernacular cottages are relatively substantial buildings of higher social status than the multitude of single-room, mud, stone and straw dwellings that much of England’s rural poor occupied historically. In the eighteenth century these dwellings and their impoverished inhabitants were both pitied and abhorred by the wealthy, educated and landowning classes who observed them on their own estates or when travelling cross- country. It was not until the late eighteenth century that they were aesthetically appreciated and considered fit subjects for artistic imitation and then, at first, only by a small aesthetic cognoscenti. Outside of property law and the physical realities of the English cot, however, from the early eighteenth century within wealthy, classically educated social circles the word ‘cottage’ came to hold a different meaning. Within this world ‘cottage’ came to represent an idea, indeed an ideal, which had much to do with the eighteenth- century English literary imagination – infused with the pastoral reveries of Augustan Rome – and little do with the dwellings of the English cottager. A notional cottage was first formulated in English literature in the late seventeenth century under the influence of Virgil’s pastoral poetry and by way of the writings of Horace and Pliny on the pleasures of rural retreat and a quiet country life. Here the cottage was first invoked as a conceptual vehicle for mental retreat to Arcadia: a simple cot for reflection, repose and reinvigoration within an imagined Elysian countryside far from the stresses of city life. Rural retreat from the city was by no means exclusive to the cottage. Pliny’s retreat was a large villa fifteen miles outside Rome. However, through the eighteenth century the Arcadian cottage as a specifically simple retreat became the subject of poets, painters and playwrights. This eighteenth-century conception of the cottage did not gain architectural form, however, until the 1760s. It was at this time that new ideas in architectural discourse for an imagined original or ‘primitive’ hut – often represented as a rudimentary thatched structure – found a practical outlet in commissions for small structures on country estates where a passion for all things ‘cottage’ met changing tastes in landscape design that, subsequent to the bald landscapes of Capability Brown, called for the reintroduction of 5

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 landscape objects. Informed by earlier aesthetic theory on vision and the imagination, as expounded by essayists such as Joseph Addison, these cottages were intended as associative objects set out in the landscape in order to trigger a specific idea in the imagination of the observer.6 A well- placed thatched cottage was intended to remind the classically educated observer of the virtues of rural retreat and the simple life. Therefore, within a designed landscape garden, seats and retreats designed to appear as cottages had a dual function as objects to be observed and as shelters from which to observe: views of cottages and views from cottages. Most importantly, ‘cottage’ could be applied to any type of building on an estate, 4 Introduction whether a retreat, a gate lodge or workers’ housing. As John Papworth described in Hints on Ornamental Gardening, 1823:

For much of the eighteenth century, estate architecture was plain but neat and regular in design as in the cottages of New Houghton Norfolk, built in 1729 for Robert Walpole, cast in the form of a classical motif such as the Roman triumphal-arch, and similarly in the case of the gate lodge at Holkham Hall, Norfolk, built by Matthew Brettingham to a design by William Kent c.1760, or the gate lodge at Berrington Hall, Herefordshire, designed by Henry Holland, 1788–91, for Thomas Harley (Figure 4.1). However, from the later eighteenth century, estate buildings increasingly took the form of thatched cottages and grid-plan estate villages such as New Houghton were joined by villages laid out on sweeping curves as per Sir William Chambers’ 1773 scheme for a village of forty thatched cottages for Lord Milton at Milton Abbas, Dorset (Figure 4.5). As demand for cottage-style estate and garden buildings increased through the 1770s and 1780s, the architectural press responded with books on cottage design and pastoral poetry infused treatises such as George Richardson’s New Designs in Architecture, 1788. Richardson explains that ‘cottages with thatched roofs may be considered of various kind. Those appropriated for the habitations of labouring people in the country are of the most simple construction…Sometimes they are employed on purpose to afford a rural prospect on some favourable spot, not far from the country residence of gentlemen of taste and fortune; and at other times they serve for a picturesque view and retreat in parks or in pleasure grounds’.8 The appearance of the utilitarian labourer’s cottage was concurrent with that of the thatched cottage-retreat of the late eighteenth century. These functional

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 neoclassical boxes were practical designs intended for the working landscape, the economic centre of a country estate that often provided the funds for building cottages within landscape gardens or parkland. Allied to an agenda of humanitarian reform, so-called ‘improved cottages’ featured in publications such as John Wood the Younger’s Habitations of the Labourer, 1780, Richard Elsam’s Hints for Improving the Condition of the Peasantry, 1816, and J.C. Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture, 1838. In the early nineteenth century, influenced by writers on the Picturesque such as William Gilpin and Sir Uvedale Price who extended the observer’s gaze beyond the landscape garden into the English countryside, architects Introduction 5 re-imagined the cottage as an irregular shaped building imitative of English vernacular cottages. The appropriation of the vernacular was concerned with the appreciation of irregular forms, colours and textures but also, thereby, with the representation of place in the tradition of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century topographic poetry. Then, through the early to mid- nineteenth century the imagined destination of rural retreat changed from Arcadia to the England of Elizabeth I and the cottage became less the pastoral shepherd’s hut and more a patriotic representation of Old England.

The history of the architect-designed cottage spans two centuries, passes through several architectural styles and engages with a range of cultural themes and social contexts. As such there is a substantial historiography of architectural studies that have discussed cottage design in the pursuit of other subjects. Architect-designed cottages feature most prominently in studies of the Picturesque where they are discussed as components of the wider rise and dominance of the Picturesque in nineteenth-century architecture, such as John Macarthur’s The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities. However, Macarthur’s overall emphasis is on spatial planning, irregularity and its significance for twentieth-century design and post-war Modernism in particular. Similarly, Andrew Ballantyne and Andrew Law’s Tudoresque: In Pursuit of the Ideal Home deftly discusses the Old English or Tudor style cottages of the nineteenth century as a prelude to twentieth-century suburban housing. The possible meaning of the eighteenth century architect-designed cottage is considered in more detail by Ballantyne in the essay ‘Joseph Gandy and the Politics of Rustic Charm’ where it is considered as an anti-revolutionary compress applied by landowners during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.9 The architectural origins of twentieth-century English domestic architecture are also considered by Gavin Stamp and Andre Goulancourt in The English House 1860–1914: The Flowering of English Domestic Architecture and with less success in Lyall Sutherland’s Dream Cottages: From Cottage Ornée to Stockbroker Tudor, Two Hundred Years of the Cult of the Vernacular. John Nash: Architect of the Picturesque, edited by Geoffrey Tyack, restores the works of John Nash to a canonical position in English architectural history. Here Nash’s cottage ornée for the Prince Regent, Royal Lodge,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Windsor, and the estate village of Blaise Hamlet are set in the contexts of Nash’s work on royal palaces and his links to other architects such as Sir John Soane and C. R. Cockerell. Earlier architectural studies of the Picturesque to include cottages are David Watkin’s The English Vision: The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design, and John Nash: The Village Picturesque with Special Reference to the Reptons and Blaise Hamlet or ‘In Search of the Cottage Picturesque’ both by Nigel Temple. The cultural context of the cottage ornée is explored in Ann Bermingham’s essay ‘The Cottage Ornée: Sense, Sensibility and the Picturesque’. The idea of comfort in cottage design is pursued by John Crowley in The Invention 6 Introduction of Comfort: sensibilities of Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America.10 Crowley also discusses comfort in terms of the improved, practical cottages of Nathaniel Kent and John Wood. Cottages, poverty and the humanitarian movement are also the subject of Sarah Lloyd’s ‘Cottage Conversations: Poverty and Manly Independence in Eighteenth-century England’. Mireille Galinou’s Cottages and Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburbs provides a micro-history of the Eyre estate in St John’s Wood, London, from its foundation around 1800 to the present day. In terms of architectural theory two important waypoints towards an understanding of the idea of the cottage are Joseph Rykwert’s celebrated work on primitivism, On Adam’s House in Paradise, and Mari Hvattum’s Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism. The Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture also draws on a range of studies from disciplines outside of architecture including garden history, art history, cultural history, social history and literary studies. Of these there are too many to mention but a debt is owed to John Barrell and Ann Bermigham on landscape, painting and the Picturesque, Nick Grindle on poetry and the imagination, John Dixon Hunt on garden design, Philip Ayres and John Brewer on eighteenth-century culture and Arthur Aughey on Englishness.11

A typology of architect-designed cottages Broadly speaking, there are four types of architect-designed cottage. The first three are buildings associated with country estates: garden seats or retreats for occasional use by the landowner and their family and friends; the labourer’s cottage built by the landowner to house estate workers; and, third, gate lodges. Gate lodges were particularly attended to as, located at principal entrances, they established the character of the estate and its owner to visitors. To these can be added any other estate building that could be reasonably dressed to appear like a cottage. As such, ‘cottage’ could be applied wherever to any building a landowner wished to visually express that idea. The table of contents to John Plaw’s Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements, 1795, suggests that designers faced a challenge finding the correct terminology when it came to clearly naming these cottage-style estate buildings, plates titles include a range from ‘Shepherd’s Hut or Cottage’ and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 ‘Cottager’s Lodge’ to ‘Lodge in the Cottage Style’, ‘Small Villa in the Cottage Style’, a ‘Lodge or Cottage’ and ‘Cottage Farm House’.12 Small lodges or day-cottages could also be found in central London’s parks, pleasure grounds and private gardens, miniature Arcadian landscape gardens within the city such as Queen Charlotte’s Cottage at Kew Gardens (Figure 3.2). The fourth type of ‘cottage’ was the gentleman’s cottage-villa, a relatively substantial building, usually with gardens but no attached estate, associated in particular with occasional or permanent retirement to the coastal resorts of southern England. Slightly lower down the social scale, the taste for cottage ornée was so pronounced within genteel society of the early nineteenth Introduction 7 century – the modestly independently wealthy rather than great landowners - that in Sense and Sensibility, 1811, Jane Austen famously has the downwardly mobile Dashwoods opine of their new home that ‘as a house Barton Cottage, though small, was comfortable and compact; but as a cottage it was defective’.13 More generally, enthused by all-things cottage, genteel folk of more modest means took to occupying vernacular cottages, including landscape designer Humphry Repton. Equally, for many genteel cottage-dwellers the outskirts of London and village-style suburban developments such as John Nash’s Park Villages East and West or Wimbledon Village in South West London were rural enough for a sense of rural retreat.14 Overall, from gate-lodge to villa, from small to surprisingly large, a wide variety of buildings associated with the countryside were discussed, designed and built through the late Georgian period to look like cottages.

The rise and fall of the architect-designed cottage A focus on cottages can first be identified in English architecture in the 1760s when architect-designed cottages were built on country estates and its decline can roughly be dated to the 1860s when both large-scale estate building programmes and the fashion for seaside and rural villa-retreats began to wane within the world of ‘Noblemen and Gentlemen of Taste’. Reaching its zenith in the early nineteenth century, architectural interest in cottages developed out of its prominence in other cultural activities such as poetry, theatre, painting, travel writing and landscape gardening. The earliest known architect-designed cottages were retreats for landowners and their invited guests placed within Arcadian landscape garden schemes such as the cottage built across the lake from Lord Burlington’s classical temple within Phillip Southcote’s Woburn Park estate, Surrey, or the thatched cottage on the lake at Henry Hoare’s Stourhead estate, Wiltshire, again juxtaposed with classical temples (Figure 3.1). Both built in the 1760s, these cottages were enclosed buildings, recognisable dwellings, which evolved out of the earlier fashion for rudimentary hermitages and thatched ‘rustic’ garden-seat structures.15 Retreats were followed from the 1770s by estate workers’ cottages designed to look like simple huts as at William Chambers’ cottages at Milton Abbas (Figure 3.5). Both retreats and estate workers’ cottages took their simple

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 geometric form and simple rustic decoration from the primitive hut, a notional original dwelling that had been speculatively discussed and sketched in neoclassical architectural theory through the eighteenth century. The trend for estate buildings dressed as cottages continued into the early nineteenth century and the design of retreats, estate cottages and estate villages continued to occupy prominent architects and their patrons, as in the case of John Nash’s village of Blaise Hamlet, near Bristol, of 1811 for John Harford; and Joseph Paxton and John Robertson of Derby’s model village of Edensor built in the 1840s at the entrance to the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth estate, Derbyshire. However, at this time the estate cottage was 8 Introduction joined by the rise to social and architectural prominence of the cottage-villa. The cottage-villa reached its fullest architectural expression and greatest popularity in the early nineteenth century with the picturesque ‘cottage ornée’. The pre-eminent collection of English cottage ornée is in and around the Regency seaside resort of Sidmouth, Devon (Figures 9.3, 9.4 and 9.5). Capitalising on its picturesque views, Sidmouth was developed as a fashionable resort by a London-based slave trader, Emmanuel Lousada. One of the most picturesque cottages at Sidmouth was Lord le Despenceur’s Knowle Cottage built c.1820 (Figure 9.3). Comfort, indeed luxury, was central to the cottage ornée as a retreat for the wealthy and leisured and reconciling the common understanding of a villa as a relatively substantial dwelling with the idea of the simple cottage was a cause for reflection for many architects. This tension is perhaps epitomised by the extensive and luxurious country seat of Endsleigh Cottage in Devon built for the 6th Duke and Duchess of Bedfordshire (Figure 9.7). Indeed, large and small, the most significant patrons of the architect- designed cottage were John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford (1766–1839) and his second wife Georgina (1781–1812, married 1803), succeeded by the continued activities of the 7th and 8th Dukes into the mid-nineteenth century. The Russells undertook a cottage building programme of unequalled scale in England across their extensive estates in Bedfordshire and Devon, ranging from multiple villages of ‘Old English’ cottages around Woburn, Bedfordshire, and Tavistock, Devon, to thatched cottage-retreats, garden seats, dairies, ice- houses and gate lodges either within the grounds of Woburn Park or their Endsleigh estate in Devon (Figures 4.3, 4.4, 4.7 and 9.7). An associated architectural discourse on cottages first emerged in the 1780s wherein expositions on the rudimentary origins of architecture were routinely fused with extensive reflections on retreat and the simple life, quotations from Classical and contemporary pastoral poetry and theories of object association and the imagination taken from landscape design. George Richardson’s New Designs in Architecture of 1788 was the first publication specifically devoted to designs for cottages (Figure 3.4). It was also at this time that the first publications on improved cottage designs appeared with Nathaniel Kent’s Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property in 1775 and John Wood the Younger’s Habitations of the Labourer, 1780 (Figures 6.3 and 6.2). Between 1790 and 1820, relative to the interests of the English architectural press

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 overall, a significant number of new architectural treatises and design books devoted to the cottage were published, including at least 40 with ‘cottage’ in the title. While the number of new titles published each year gradually declined to one or two per year, cottage-related books were published well into the mid-nineteenth century, from Peter F. Robinson’s A New Series of Designs for Ornamental Cottages, published 1838, to John White’s Rural Architecture: A Series of Plans for Ornamental Cottages and Villa, 1856. The majority of architectural books on cottages, often collectively referred to as ‘pattern books’, are collections of designs from lodge to villa intended for inspiration, imitation and the authors’ self-promotion of their Introduction 9 architectural practice. These books were often dedicated to prominent aristocratic or royal patrons but were aimed at the slightly lower social group of, as George Richardson describes, ‘gentlemen of taste and fortune’ who were keen to build but unlikely to commission a top-ranking architect such as Sir William Chambers.16 Books were also destined for the libraries of architectural connoisseurs who subscribed to architectural publications and magazines such as the Gentlemen’s Magazine and who studied architectural discourse as a learned leisure activity. Cottage titles included a wealth of material besides ‘patterns’ or plans and elevations for buildings. Most also included a preface or longer introductory essay that outlined the author’s position and it is here that often we find an exposition of the author’s idea of the cottage within a literary and artistic context. It is through these essays that a discourse can be mapped between architects and their readership from one publication to the next as each new publication sought to build on or counter the one before. Cottages were also extensively discussed in landscape texts such as Uvedale Price’s An Essay on the Picturesque, 1794, or Humphry Repton’s Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 1816. This lively debate is clear in the subtitle of Richard Elsam’s 1803 Essay on Rural Architecture… an attempt to refute by analogy the principles of Mr. James Malton’s Essay on British Cottage Architecture.17 Malton’s 1798 Essay was the first architectural treatise to suggest that architects should look to the living English vernacular as a source for cottage design (Figure 8.1). Malton’s imitation of vernacular cottages incensed Elsam who believed that the principles of symmetry and proportion were God-given and that, therefore, the irregularity of the average thatched cottage was irredeemably ungodly. Elsam versus Malton is a good illustration of the contested and changing nature of cottage-related discourse and design. By the mid-nineteenth century, the architect-designed cottage and its association with polite society appeared unchanged with, for example, the architect George Devey designing estate cottages for a familiar clientele of aristocratic landowners across Kent in the 1850s and 1860s (Figures 8.8 and 10.2). However, the social consistency of England’s cottage connoisseurs was changing. While some landowners continued to build estate cottages in the late nineteenth century, like the newly ennobled banker Lord Wantage

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 at Ardington in Oxfordshire, from the mid-century architectural patronage for English domestic architecture shifted from country estates and something that was essentially eighteenth century, landowning and upper class towards something that was more clearly nineteenth century, suburban and middle- class (and beyond the scope of this book). In the order books of architectural practices estate buildings and seaside cottage-villas were increasingly replaced by suburban cottages as retreats from the modern industrial city via new commuter rail networks. Aristocratic patrons were replaced by a middle-class clientele who commissioned a later generation of architects connected to the Vernacular Revival such as C. F. 10 Introduction A. Voysey and Edwyn Lutyens.18 Similarly, architectural publications on cottages persisted but the titles and intended audience changed. Articles in the Gentlemen’s Magazine and publications on estate architecture, sold by subscription to a list of aristocrats and gentlemen landowners, were replaced by articles in the professional Building News or the artistic Studio, such as H. M. Bailie Scott’s 1902 article in the Studio entitled ‘A Country Cottage’, followed by his Arts and Crafts handbook Houses and Gardens of 1906 (first published by George Newnes Ltd, London). Therefore, while the idea of the cottage persisted it increasingly belonged to a different type of architecture and a different social constituency.

English cottage design in context Simple rustic retreats were not an exclusively English interest. The idea of the rural retreat was born of a Roman literary heritage that was common to post-Renaissance European culture from the Russian dacha westward. It is also the case that the English architect-designed cottage as a garden retreat emerged out of the pan-European tradition of garden seats and hermitages, from France to Russia. However, the most immediate European influence on the English cottage was the neoclassical theory of the primitive hut as written on by Marc Antoine Laugier in Essai sur l’architecture (published in English translation in London in 1755 only two years after its first publication in Paris in 1753). A cultural exchange in architectural discourse between Britain and France is suggested by the dual language publication in English and French of George Robertson’s New Designs in Architecture, 1788. From the 1790s English architects influenced by picturesque theorist Uvedale Price, such as James Malton, John Nash and William Pocock, also shared a common interest with their French counterparts in the appropriation of elements from rural vernacular buildings. However, despite the strong formal similarities between individual French hameaux buildings and some English vernacular- inspired cottages, notably those designed by John Nash, no connection between the two can be convincingly established (Figures 8.4 and 8.5). Beyond France, some architects like Edmund Aikin looked to more romantic locations for their retreats, such as India or the Alps, publishing designs for ‘Hindoo’ cottages and the popular ‘Swiss Cottage’.19 John

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Papworth refers to ‘The Polish Hut’ ‘built at the beautiful grounds of White Knights by his Grace the Duke of Marlborough … first employed in garden decoration by the celebrated architect Kleber, in the picturesque and anglicised grounds of the Marquis of Floriment at Floriment in Alsace’.20 However, while thatched cottages or huts featured in European ‘English’ gardens of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, England’s own architectural cottage culture stands out due to the wide range and number of ‘cottages’ built beyond garden seats and the high number of cottage related design books published. The extent of late Georgian England’s cottage culture was singular enough to be remarked upon by nineteenth-century German Introduction 11 observers of English architecture: negatively by art historian A. Rosengarten in A Handbook of Architectural Styles, 1888; and positively by diplomat Herman Muthesius in The English House, 1904. In turn, an English visitor to Europe, Samuel H. Brookes, regretted the absence of architect-designed cottages from the Continental landscape.21 Within Great Britain cottage culture was not exclusively English. Many cottages were built in other parts of Great Britain. John Nash designed Abermydyr Cottage, 1794–6, for Major William Lewis on the Llanerchaeron estate in mid-Wales and the ‘Swiss Cottage’ of c.1817 at Cahir, County Tipperary, Ireland, for Richard Butler, Earl of Glengal, one of many picturesque estate cottage-retreats built by the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Scottish architect James Playfair’s cottage ornée, Lynedoch Cottage, Perthshire, of 1790 demonstrates the contemporary awareness of architectural trends within a Scottish context. And, it is certainly the case that although the first dedicated publication on ‘improved’ humanitarian cottages, John Wood the Younger’s Habitations of the Labourer, was addressed to English landowners, there are many more improved cottages in the Highlands of Scotland than anywhere in England.22 However, despite these examples it is nonetheless the case that England was the centre of cottage culture within Britain. The majority of architects designing cottages had offices in London, including Scottish architects like George Richardson. Furthermore, the British architectural press was predominantly based in London although some cottage design books were also published in Edinburgh, such as James Thomson’s 1827 Rural Retreats, and John White’s 1856 Rural Architecture. Moreover, while examples can be found elsewhere, the vast majority of architect-designed cottages are located within English estates or on the coast of southern England. The idea of the cottage as a simple rural retreat also crossed the Atlantic to the Anglo-American culture of the United States, where Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1787:

I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.23 Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 While in South Carolina, in 1799 plantation owner John Ball built a cottage- retreat overlooking the Cooper River for his wife Jane: ‘a nice place to have quilting parties and go marooning in the spring’.24 The simple rural retreat was then re-imagined in the nineteenth-century backwoods of Massachusetts in Henry David Thoreau’s classically referenced Walden; Or Life in the Woods, 1854. Through the transatlantic book trade, the idea of the cottage also influenced American domestic architecture with, for example John Claudius Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, Villa Architecture, published from 1834 onwards, referring directly to the North 12 Introduction American context, with later editions published in New York. From this direct English influence, American architects developed a specifically American idea of the cottage in publications such as Lewis Falley Allen’s Rural Architecture: being a complete description of Farm Houses, Cottage and Outbuildings, New York, 1852, or, Andrew Jackson Downing’s Cottage Residences, Or, A Series of Designs for Rural Cottages and Cottage Villas … Adapted to North America, New York, 1852. This exchange of ideas also flowed back from America to England as in the case of the 7th Duke of Bedford’s ‘American Log Cabin’ built at Woburn Park, Bedfordshire, c. 1850. From Poland to Massachusetts, the idea of the cottage in English architecture both drew on and influenced architecture and landscape design far beyond England, though here the focus is on the architect-designed cottage in English practice and its articulation in the English architectural press.

The idea of the cottage in English architecture This book sets out to address the idea of the cottage as manifested in English architectural design and discourse between 1760 and 1860. Chapter one, The Cottage, Rural Retreat and the Simple Life, examines the literary origins of the idea of the cottage and its various manifestations in eighteenth-century culture. Chapter two, The Cottage in English Architecture, establishes links between the cottage in eighteenth-century literature and its specific articulation in architectural discourse. Chapter three, The Architect-Designed Cottage, examines the specifics of form, space and ornament in the design of early architect-designed cottages, built and unbuilt. In chapter four, The Cottage in Arcadia, the architect-designed cottage is located within the context of landscape design and the aesthetics of observation and the imagination. It is clear that, relative to English society as a whole, the cottage ideal was only prominent within a small world of arts and letters supported and shared by wealthy, classically educated patrons. Chapter five,Architects, Patrons and Connoisseurs, therefore, looks at evidence from architectural publishers, practices and patrons to establish who, in print and brick, were the consumers of architect-designed cottages. Chapter six on the Habitations of the Labourer, examines the alternate idea of the cottage as a utilitarian neoclassical worker’s dwelling associated with humanitarian reform and the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 socio-economic project of agricultural improvement. In chapter seven, The Appreciation of Cottages, the appreciation of the English vernacular cottage is examined in travel writings, picturesque landscape theory and landscape painting. Chapter eight, Re-Imagining the Vernacular, analyses the architectural response to the vernacular in the appropriation of vernacular building features for a new grammar of ornament as symmetry gave way to irregularity in plan and elevation. Chapter nine steps aside from the stylistic evolution of the architect- designed cottage in order to consider the cottage ornée, a cottage-style villa associated with the Regency period of the early nineteenth century. It is a Introduction 13 house built for comfortable, leisurely retirement, either an aristocrat’s holiday home or the retirement property of merchants and East India Company or Royal Navy officers. The cottage ornée represents the apogee of the idea of rural retreat within the English upper class. Yet, in architectural terms, these substantial houses are often freely formed hybrids that defy the principles of cottage design as expounded in architectural treatise of the period. Chapter ten, The Cottages of Old England, moves towards the mid- nineteenth century when the cottage was re-imagined again as a retreat to Old England, in particular the half-remembered England of the Tudors and the Golden Age of Elizabeth I. This change reflected wider shifts in English culture from European neoclassicism towards the more insular nineteenth- century preoccupations with national identity, national history and the image of the nation state. As the destination of retreat changed from Arcadia to Old England, the idea of the cottage as the embodiment of rural retreat and a better, simpler life in the country was eventually lost and, consequently, the architect-designed cottage itself lost its distinction.

Notes 1 James Malton, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798), p. 2. 2 Maura A. Henry, ‘The Making of Elite Culture’ in H .T. Dickson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2002), p. 312. 3 Malton, Cottage Architecture, p. 2. 4 John Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (London, 1791). 5 John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London, 2002), p. 35. 6 Nick Grindle, ‘Virgil’s Prospects: The Gentry and the Representation of Landscape in Addison’s Theory of the Imagination’, Oxford Art Journal, 29.2 (2006), pp. 185–95. 7 John Buonarotti Papworth, Hints on Ornamental Gardening (London, 1823), p. 21. 8 George Richardson, New Designs in Architecture, consisting of plans, elevations and sections for various buildings, etc. (London, 1788), p. 7. 9 Andrew Ballantyne, ‘Joseph Gandy and the Politics of Rustic Charm’, in Barbara Arciszewska and Elizabeth McKellar (eds), Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Architecture, (London, 2004), pp. 163–85. 10 John E. Crowley, Invention of Comfort: sensibilities of Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, 2001). Also see John E. Crowley, ‘“In Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Happier Mansions, Warm, and Dry”: The Invention of the Cottage as the Comfortable Anglo-American House, Winterthur Portfolio 32; 2/3 (1997), 169–88. 11 John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge, 2011); Ann Bermigham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley, 1986); Grindle, ‘Virgil’s Prospects’; John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, Genius of the Place: English Landscape Garden, 1620–1820 (Cambridge, 1975, fifth printing 2000); John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden; Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1997); John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture 14 Introduction in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2013); Arthur Aughey, The Politics of Englishness (Manchester, 2007). 12 John Plaw, Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements (London, 1795, 1800, 1803), pp. 1–10. 13 Jane Austen (ed. James Kinsley), Sense and Sensibility (London, 1811; Oxford, 1990), p. 23. 14 English Heritage, London Suburbs (London, 1999), pp. 54–6; See Elizabeth McKellar, The Landscape of London: The Metropolitan Environs, 1660–1830 (London, 2013). 15 For hermitages see Gordon Campbell, The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome (Oxford, 2013). 16 Richardson, New Designs, p. 7. 17 Richard Elsam, An Essay on Rural Architecture being an attempt to refute by analogy the principles of Mr. James Malton’s Essay on British Cottage Architecture supported by several designs: to which are added Rural Retreats and Villas in the Gothic, Castle, Roman and Grecian Styles of Architecture (London, 1803); James Malton, Essay on British Cottage Architecture (London, 1798). 18 Alan Crawford, ‘Englishness in Arts and Crafts Architecture’, in David Crellin and Ian Dungavell (eds), Architecture and Englishness 1880–1914 (Oxford, 2006), p. 26. 19 Edmund Aikin, Designs for Villas and Other Rural Buildings. Together with an Introductory Essay, containing remarks on the prevailing defects of modern architecture and on investigating the style best adapted for the dwellings of the present times (London, 1808). 20 John Buonarotti Papworth, Rural Residences (London, 1818), p. 78. 21 Samuel H. Brookes, Designs of Villa and Cottage Architecture (London, 1839), p. iii. 22 Daniel Maudlin, ‘Modern Homes for Modern People, 1700–1850’, Vernacular Architecture, 39 (2008), 1–25. 23 Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison (20 December 1787), in Thomas Jefferson (eds Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, 1904–5), Vol. VI, p. 392. 24 William P. Baldwin, Jr., Agnes L. Baldwin and N. Jane Iseley, Plantations of the Low Country: South Carolina 1697–1865 (Greensboro, revised ed. 1987), p. 58.

Bibliography Aikin, Edmund. Designs for Villas and Other Rural Buildings. Together with an Introductory Essay, containing remarks on the prevailing defects of modern architecture and on investigating the style best adapted for the dwellings of the present times (London, 1808). Anon. A List of Books on the Various Branches of Architecture and Building

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 published by J. Taylor, at the Architectural Library, No. 59, High Holborn, London (London, 1804). Aughey, Arthur. The Politics of Englishness (Manchester, 2007). Austen, Jane (ed. James Kinsley), Sense and Sensibility (London, 1811; Oxford, 1990). Ayres, Philip. Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1997). Baldwin, William P., Jr., Baldwin, Agnes L. and Iseley, N. Jane. Plantations of the Low Country: South Carolina 1697–1865 (Greensboro, revised edn 1987). Ballantyne, Andrew. ‘Joseph Gandy and the Politics of Rustic Charm’, in Barbara Arciszewska and Elizabeth McKellar (eds), Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Architecture, (London, 2004), pp. 163–85. Introduction 15 Ballantyne, Andrew and Law, Andrew. Tudoresque: In Pursuit of the Ideal Home (London, 2011). Barrell, John. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge, 2011). Bermingham, Ann. ‘The Cottage Ornée: Sense, Sensibility, and the Picturesque’ in Lorna Clymer and Robert Mayer (eds), Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman (Newark, 2007), pp. 215–24. Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley, 1986). Brewer, John. Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2013). Brogden, William. ‘The Ferme Ornée and Changing Attitudes to Agricultural Improvement’, Eighteenth Century Life, Vol. III; 2 (1983), 39–44. Brookes, Samuel H. Designs of Villa and Cottage Architecture (London, 1839). Campbell, Gordon. The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome (Oxford, 2013). Crawford, Alan. ‘Englishness in Arts and Crafts Architecture’, in David Crellin and Ian Dungavell (eds), Architecture and Englishness 1880–1914 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 25–37. Crowley, John E. Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities of Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, 2001). Crowley, John E. ‘“In Happier Mansions, Warm, and Dry”: The Invention of the Cottage as the Comfortable Anglo-American House’, Winterthur Portfolio 32; 2/3 (1997), 169–88. Elsam, Richard. Hints for Improving the Condition of the Peasantry in All Parts of the United Kingdom, by Promoting Comfort in their Habitations (London, 1816). English Heritage, London Suburbs (London, 1999). Galinou, Mireille. Cottages and Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb (London, 2010). Grindle, Nick. ‘Virgil’s Prospects: The Gentry and the Representation of Landscape in Addison’s Theory of the Imagination’, Oxford Art Journal, 29.2 (2006), 185–95. Henry, Maura A. ‘The Making of Elite Culture’ in H .T. Dickson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2002), pp. 311–28. Hunt, John Dixon. The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London, 2002). Hunt, John Dixon and Willis, Peter. Genius of the Place: English Landscape Garden, 1620–1820 (Cambridge, 1975, fifth printing 2000). Hvattum, Mari. Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Cambridge, 2004). Jefferson, Thomas (eds Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh). The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. VI. (Washington, 1904–5). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Laugier, Marc Antoine. Essai sur l’architecture (Paris, 1753, London, 1755). Lloyd, Sarah. ‘Cottage Conversations: Poverty and Manly Independence in Eighteenth-century England’, Past and Present (2004), 69–108. Macarthur, John. The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (Oxford, 2007). Malton, James. An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798). Maudlin, Daniel. ‘Modern Homes for Modern People, 1700–1850’, Vernacular Architecture 39 (2008), 1–25. 16 Introduction McKellar, Elizabeth. The Landscape of London: The Metropolitan Environs, 1660–1830 (London, 2013). Muthesius, Herman. The English House (Berlin, 1904; London, 2007). Papworth, John Buonarotti. Hints on Ornamental Gardening (London, 1823). Papworth, John Buonarotti. Rural Residences (London, 1818). Plaw, John. Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements (London, 1795, 1800, 1803). Plaw, John. Rural Architecture or Designs from the simple cottage to the decorated villa (London, 1794). Plaw, John. Ideas for Rustic Furniture Proper for Garden Seats, Summer Houses, Hermitages, Cottages (London, 1790). Price, Uvedale. 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Temple, Nigel. John Nash: The Village Picturesque with Special Reference to the Reptons and Blaise Hamlet (Stroud, 1979). Temple, Nigel. ‘In Search of the Cottage Picturesque’, Georgian Group Journal (1988), 72–80. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden: Or Life in the Woods (Boston, 1854; reprint New York, 1995). Tyack, Geoffrey (ed.). John Nash: Architect of the Picturesque (Swindon, 2013). Walker, John. A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (London, 1791). Watkin, David. The English Vision: The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design (London, 1982). White, John. Rural Architecture, series of plans for ornamental cottages and villas (Edinburgh, 1856). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Wood the Younger, John. Habitations of the Labourer: A Series of Plans for Cottages or Habitations of the Labourer (Bath, 1780). 1 The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life

From poetry, to painting, the theatre and the decorative arts, through the course of the eighteenth century the cottage gradually gained prominence in English cultural life through its association with the Classical ideals of rural retreat and the simple life as the dwelling of the pastoral shepherd found in the works of Classical writers such as Horace, Pliny and Virgil. Through the publication and continuous circulation of these writings in Latin and English translation a canon of Roman authors emerged as the common texts for the education of wealthy children and as the core components of every gentleman and genteel lady’s library, fuelling their imagination with images of an Arcadian Nature, shepherds and cottages. Moreover, in this world familiarity with Horace or Virgil was a high-value cultural currency that, beyond literacy itself, was an important social statement of belonging to the upper ranks of society. Therefore, an appreciation of rural retreat, the countryside and the things within it was not just an intellectual pursuit but also a social strategy. The idea of the cottage in late eighteenth-century English architecture begins, therefore, in Roman writings on rural retreat and the simple rural life: two interlinked Classical ideas then translated and interpreted by English pastoral poets and depicted across the arts where they came to be embodied by the cottage. The principal Roman writers on the subject of rural retreat consumed in eighteenth-century England were Horace and Pliny, published continuously and widely across Europe from at least the sixteenth century onwards. Latin editions and English-language translations were continuously published in London throughout the eighteenth century, while many other editions

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 published across Europe in centres such as Milan, Paris or Geneva were regularly imported into England by booksellers. In terms of London editions: the Works of Horace were, for example, published in Latin in 1711 and the Odes and Epodes ‘translated into English prose, as near the original as the different idioms would allow’ in 1741 and, again, in a new translation in 1769.1 The collected Letters of Pliny the Younger and Cicero were published in London in Latin in 1701 and in English translation in 1724 under the title Epistles and Panegyrick. Translated by several hands.2 In these Classical sources rural retreat was a reaction to the city The city was the busy hub of government and business. It was understood as jostling, 18 The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life stimulating but stressful and, at times, ugly, unhealthy and/or morally degrading. In direct contrast the country was a peaceful place for physical and spiritual rejuvenation, leisure and contemplation, a place for the quiet appreciation of natural beauty and, through this, a place of personal moral improvement. A retreat was, therefore, an isolated rural dwelling used for contemplation rather than an opportunity to engage with rural folk or village life. Retreat could be alone or with friends and family and rural retreats were, therefore, often sites for out-of-town house parties. For example, in Epistle X we find Horace, ‘the country lover’, recommending the benefits of living with nature and building a country retreat to a friend, ‘Fuscus the city-lover’.3 The idea of the rural retreat, and its sequestered pleasures, is also extensively and seductively described in the Letters of Pliny the Younger. Like Horace, in Letter XIII, Pliny recommends a visit to his country villa, a ‘capital retreat’ to an urbanite friend, Gallus, clearly connecting the idea of retreat with the enjoyment of the rural landscape.4 In his summation, while endeavouring to seduce Gallus down to the country, Pliny further seduces us:

Tell me, now, have I not good reason for living in, staying in, loving, such a retreat, which, if you feel no appetite for, you must be morbidly attached to town? And I only wish you would feel inclined to come down to it, that to so many charms with which my little villa abounds, it might have the very considerable addition of your company to recommend it.5

The next passage from Pliny is of specific relevance to the conceptual genesis of the architect-designed cottage of the later eighteenth century, built as a retreat within a country estate. Pliny describes how he retreats further within the villa’s grounds to his summer-house:

When I retire to the garden summer-house, I fancy myself a hundred miles away from my villa, and take especial pleasure in it at the feast of the Saturnalia, when, by the licence of that festive season, every other part of my house resounds with my servants’ mirth: thus I neither interrupt their amusement nor they my studies.6

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Within these Roman texts the idea of rural retreat articulated was informed by Greek philosophical notions of leisure, tranquillity and reflection and their importance to the human condition. Aristotle’s notion of eudemonia advocated the importance of retreat in order to engage with intellectual exercise, while Epicurus’ notion of ataraxia recommended retreat in terms of physical and mental reinvigoration. Pliny’s retreat to his summer-house combines the Epicurean ideal of rural retreat as mental relaxation and the Aristotelian ideal of mental exercise. It was this combined idea of tranquillity and intellectual activity that characterised the gentleman’s retreat as a place of contemplation in eighteenth-century England. The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life 19 Horace and Pliny’s eulogies to rural retreat found in their letters would have resonated with the classically educated eighteenth-century English reader because they were similar figures: aristocrats, landowners or, at least, genteel (of modest private income). In eighteenth-century England retreat was an activity for gentlemen with the means to travel and divide their time between town and country not for the fixed rural population (who simply lived in the countryside rather than consciously retreated to it). In English poetry the theme of rural retreat was explored by the topographic poets of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in works such as John Gay’s Rural Sports, 1713; Alexander Pope’s Horace, 1733; Andrew Marvell’s On Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax, 1651; and Abraham Cowley’s ‘Of My Self’ published posthumously in 1668.7 For Cowley, for example, retreat was associated with retirement, sleep and the peace of death. Marvell, in contrast, extolled the pleasures of rural retreat as compensation for the end of a political career with Lord Fairfax cast in the role of Cicero. John Dryden’s 1697 The Works of Virgil, dedicated to the Earl of Chesterfield, was also presented as a recommendation to rural retreat:

Your Lordship therefore may properly be said to have chosen a Retreat … thought by a Poet to be one of the requisites to a happy life … Such only can enjoy the Country, who are capable of thinking when they are there, and have left their Passions behind them in the Town. Then they are prepar’d for Solitude; and in that Solitude is prepar’d for them.8

Outside of poetry, the architectural writer John Claudius Loudon clearly articulates the town and country dichotomy in A Treatise on Farming, 1806:

Large cities, from their very nature, are scenes of continual activity. There every individual must fill up with vigour and constancy the place which he occupies in society … In the country, however, it is otherwise: there, a gentleman may live with his family upon his own estate, free from intrusion, bustle, and discord, which prevail in public cities.9

In early modern England town and country were physically and conceptually

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 interdependent. As Peter Borsay argues, it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, when centralised industrial production gave larger urban areas self-sustaining economic identities, that the idea of a town fundamentally dissociated from the country made any sense.10 Cities were either progressive hubs of government, commerce, science and cosmopolitanism, or markets of corruption, greed and aristocratic effeminacy. Country life was parochial, backward and ignorant, or honest, independent, unaffected, manly and virtuous.11 Significantly, within this late Georgian context the idea of rural retreat and the appeal of a simple country life was not, as we might expect looking back from the twenty-first century, conceived or understood as an 20 The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life escape from industrialisation; it was a counter balance to urban life rather than a retreat from a fast-changing world and a fear of progress. Therefore retreat in the eighteenth century had little to do with the notion of ‘modernity’ as understood by the nineteenth-century sense of modernisation; a process of socio-economic development bound to industrialisation, rapid urbanisation and socio-political unrest.12 This idea of modernity is entirely absent from the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourse on retreat and the idea of the cottage where the ever-present city is the pre-industrial mercantile and political metropolis. In the mid-nineteenth century, art criticism such as John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, 1843–56, presented the countryside and the simple country life as a utopian counterpoint to the cultural vacancy of contemporary industrialisation.13 Ruskin would have a profound influence on the architects and designers of the Arts and Crafts Movement of the later nineteenth century. However, there is no reference in any cottage-related text of this period to industrialisation, to the growth of the industrial cities of northern England or to the cottage-retreat as a reaction against them. As such, late Georgian writings on the countryside and rural retreat are quite distinct from the later nineteenth-century search for a lost rural world ‘that needed to be protected and perpetuated against the forces of industrialization and urbanization’.14 As depicted in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, it is possible that the precise nature of northern industrial cities was largely unknown to metropolitan-rural, artistic-intellectual aristocratic culture (intersected with genteel provincial intellectual culture) and print culture.15 However, the inhabitants of the upper echelons of Georgian society were certainly not unaware of industrialisation as many landowners who retreated to the countryside derived part of their income from industrial activities such as the Duke of Bedford’s mining activities around Tavistock in Devon that helped with the upkeep of the Russell family’s retreat, Endsleigh Cottage. Or we can look at the Dukes of Devonshire ensconced on the Chatsworth estate in Derbyshire surrounded by the Industrial Revolution taking place in Manchester to the west and Sheffield and Leeds to the north. Either way, the most likely explanation for its absence from architectural texts of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is that industrialisation was a

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 relatively recent phenomenon that had not yet had an impact on the much older cultural dialogue on town and country.

The pastoral poems of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics and Horace’s Odes differ from the letters of Pliny and Horace on rural retreat as they are narratives on the beauty of Nature and the pleasures of a simple country life. Eighteenth-century editions of Virgil include: the poet John Dryden’s famous translation of The Works of Virgil containing his Pastorals, Georgics and AEneis first published in London in 1697 with a second edition in 1716, a Latin edition of Pastorals and Georgics published in 1741 and a New The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life 21 Translation of Virgil’s Eclogue, on a more liberal plan than ever yet attempted, published in 1783.16 As the literary critic and essayist Joseph Addison wrote of Virgil’s Eclogues (or pastorals) and Georgics in 1712: ‘This kind of Poetry … is altogether conversant among the fields and woods, and has the most delightful part of Nature for its province’.17 However, more than a delight in nature, these poems offered eighteenth- century readers an ideal of the simple rural life as something virtuous and noble; unlike life at Pliny’s luxurious villa, in this poetry material poverty was to be envied by the unfortunately wealthy. In the Georgics, Virgil also presents the countryside, country activities and country folk, notably shepherds, as noble and fortunate in their simplicity, ‘though they feed no gaze on doors inlaid with lovely tortoise-shell’.18 While in Odes III, for example, Horace expounded the virtue of a simple life and the imagined moral benefits of poverty:

Abandon wearisome plenty, the pile … the money, the din of wealthy Rome. … A change is usually pleasant: A wholesome meal in a poor man’s modest home with no fine purple fabrics can smooth the rich man’s troubled brow.19

The figure of the shepherd that features prominently in much eighteenth- century pastoral poetry orginates in these Classical writings. To the educated early modern mind steeped in Augustan poetic works, the simple country life as embodied by the shepherd was deeply seductive; he was an enviable figure of simple wants given to peaceful reflection. In the face of actual rural poverty Dryden explains the appeal of the pastoral shepherd to his aristocratic patron, the Earl of Chesterfield, by distinguishing between the shepherds of Virgil he holds up for emulation and the not-so-impressive country folk of late seventeenth-century England:

We figure the Ancient Country-men like our own, leading a painful life in Poverty and Contempt, without Wit, or Courage, or Education: But Men had quite different notions of these things, for the first thousand

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 years of the World … It is commonly known, that the Founders of the most renown’d Monarchies in the World, were Shepherds.20

Outside of published works, in private letters the same juxtaposition is found in Dorothy Osborne’s letters to Sir William Temple. In a letter written in early May 1653 she writes to Temple describing a typical day where she encounters some shepherdesses and is given cause to reflect:

The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, 22 The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads. I go to them and compare their voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so.21

Therefore the shepherd is an abstract, notional figure. For Pope, John Barrell argues that ‘the shepherds, so far from pre-occupying themselves with rural business, show an easy disregard of it preferring lying on grassy hill-sides while engaged with contemplation’.22 Barrell also argues that ‘the attitude to work which Arcadian shepherds display … does seem to be an attitude which only an aristocracy can afford to indulge’.23 Certainly the leisurely and reflective simple shepherd was a seductive image for the classically educated English aristocrat or gentleman landowner with extensive landscaped grounds and time to spare.

In eighteenth-century pastoral poetry the simple shepherd lived in a simple cottage. Like the shepherd, the cottage was presented as something to be envied by the wealthy urbanite. Poets such as James Thomson and John Dyer presented poetic tours through Arcadian landscapes of woods, groves and pastures punctuated by edifying encounters with simple shepherds.24 In these poems there are numerous references to cottages. For example, in Spring from Thomson’s The Seasons, 1730, we find the ‘lone cot’ where, as the embodiment of virtuous simplicity, the shepherd is ‘Sustained alone by providential Heaven’.25 In Summer, the cottage appears again as the idealised simple dwelling of the shepherd, ‘His mossy cottage, where with Peace he dwells’.26 While in a later verse in Summer the swain, or young shepherd, returns to his ‘cheerful cottage ‘not mean, tho’ simple’ at the end of an edifying morning tending his flock.27 In similar vein John Dyer’s The Fleece, 1757, makes several references to ‘The little smiling cottage warm embower’d’.28 For eighteenth-century poets such as Thomson and Dyer, the cottage was a device employed to represent a synthesis of the two overlapping but distinct Roman concepts of aristocratic retreat from the city and the virtue

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 of the simple life. However, if Virgil and Horace are the source material, locating the cottage within Latin texts is not straightforward. The English word ‘cottage’ has no direct Latin equivalent and its use by early modern poets was neither a direct nor an obvious translation of the Latin used by Virgil or Horace. The cottage as the home of the pastoral shepherd-king was, therefore, an English invention. More specifically, this idea, if not invented, was established in English culture by the poet and translator John Dryden. Abraham Cowley employed the term in the poem ‘Of My Self’, published in 1668, where he refers to ‘my house a cottage, more than palace, and should fitting be for all my use, no luxury’.29 However, it is the repeated The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life 23 use of the word ‘cottage’ in Dryden’s widely circulated and much reprinted 1697 translation of Virgil’s Pastorals and Georgics that gave the word its currency in the eighteenth century. For instance, in Dryden’s translation of Georgics, II, a cottage is presented as the ideal location of retreat, ‘To lead a soft, secure, inglorious Life, A Country Cottage near a Crystal Flood’.30 Or, in the second Pastoral, the virtue of the simple country cottage or cott is contrasted with the busy city:

O leave the noisie Town, O come and See our Country Cotts, and live content with me.31

However, if we look to the Latin, and to other English-language translations of Virgil by later scholars, we find that other words would have been as, or more, suitable. In the Georgics Dryden chose to translate the Latin habitura as ‘cottage’ where habitura can be more vaguely translated as dwelling or habitation and, in the Pastorals, translates villarum as both ‘cottages’ and ‘cotts’, where villarum would have a more ready translation as pertaining to much larger buildings such as a small villa or farm. Indeed, in twentieth- century translations of the Georgics we find the term ‘farms’ used instead.32 In Dryden’s world of aristocratic patronage, ‘villa’ already had a specific connotation as a substantial mansion house and ‘farm’ was associated with a relatively larger and higher-status dwelling than would befit the lonely shepherd. ‘Cottage’, therefore, replaces these terms to present a building with specifically early modern English implications of size, simplicity and location. The specific, deliberate and frequent use of ‘cottage’ by Dryden suggests that the poet searched for a word that implied a simple rural dwelling in the context of seventeenth-century England but, as with his distinction made between Arcadian shepherds and English shepherds, in doing so needed to disassociate the cottage from its association with rural poverty and its common usage as a legal term pertaining to land tenure, or lack of. Dryden imbued the cottage with a new, desirable, meaning that resonated through the eighteenth century.

By the later eighteenth century, the image of the shepherd and his cottage

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 had migrated from poetry to visual representations across the fine and decorative arts. Roman writers such as Virgil and Pliny were widely venerated in the eighteenth century as Augustan Rome was itself venerated as a golden age of liberty and democracy and held up for imitation in the arts and public life. As eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon described in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776–89, it was viewed by Georgian England as ‘the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous’.33 This reverence for Augustan Rome had a tremendous impact on cultural activities such as poetry, theatre, painting, sculpture or 24 The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life architecture and material culture in general from cups to coats but, more fundamentally, it informed how a portion of English society saw the world that surrounded them and how they saw themselves. They were the new Augustans and crafted themselves a mental and material world that supported that self-image. As Catherine Belsey has said of eighteenth- century English culture, ‘the collective construction of the “obvious”, could be said to take for granted the pre-eminence of classical values in art, architecture and, indeed, literature’.34 In this Augustan-infused culture of eighteenth-century England – after Dryden’s Virgil, Thomson and Dyer – images of shepherds and cottages appeared frequently across the arts and manufactures. Cottages appeared on porcelain dinner services, on textile prints and nestled in the curves of gilt mirror frames. The Royal Collection, Windsor, for example, houses a late eighteenth-century oval tortoiseshell box decorated on the lid with a pastoral scene of a ‘seated shepherd playing pipe with sheep, church, cottage, trees, bird and butterfly’ while fashionable women of the 1770s wore shepherdess costumes accessorised with the popular broad-brimmed shepherdess’ hat.35 On the stage, Richard Rolt’s 1765 opera The Royal Shepherd centred on a king who laments the misfortunes of power and muses on how fortunate he would be if he could swap his throne for the simple virtue of ‘a lovely cottage’.36 Two decades later, the Ladies Memoranda reported on ‘The Most Esteemed New Songs, Sung at the THEATRES ROYAL, VAUXHALL, RANELAGH, and POLITE CONCERTS, in the Year 1788’ including a pastoral song advocating retreat and the simple life in a cottage, ‘Sung by Mr. Incledon’, where ‘not plenty, but health bless’d the scene’.37 In fine art, society women were depicted as shepherdesses in portraits and cottages were the subject of rustic genre painting – where the shepherd was portrayed either before his cottage as a figure of leisurely contemplation or, in contrast, as a figure of virtuous rural industry. For example, Thomas Gainsborough’s series of rustic genre paintings from the 1780s depict cottages such as A Pool in the Woods with Cottage and Figures, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782, or Cottage Door with Playing Children, 1788 (Figure 1.1). These so-called ‘Cottage Door’ paintings fit within a pattern of pastoral imaginings within the eighteenth-century English arts. In the wider European context, Gainsborough’s cottagers set before a murky

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 cottage may reject the pastoral landscapes of Claude Lorrain but they do look back to seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting such as Adriaen van de Velde’s The Hut, 1671. In these ‘fancy pictures’ Gainsborough augmented ‘his landscape repertory with seascapes, Claudian pastorals, sublime mountain scenery and Cottage Door scenes’.38 In his study of English rustic painting, The Dark Side of the Landscape, John Barrell puts the case that the artist and his customers saw these rural idylls as aspirational images, a projection of a better life ‘away from the oppressive world of court and city’.39 However, Ann Bermingham argues that Gainsborough did not offer a specific antidote to urban life but a suggestion of ‘naturalness’ as a universal The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life 25

Figure 1.1 Thomas Gainsborough, Cottage Door with Playing Children, 1788. Source: Cincinnati Art Museum/Bridgeman Images

truth’: that is, less Pliny and more Virgil. Moreover, setting Gainsborough’s paintings in the social context of late eighteenth-century England, Barrell further argues that they do not simply depict repose but repose as the reward of labour in a ‘world of social and economic relations that are anything but idyllic’; a humanitarian progression from Dryden’s abstraction of the pastoral shepherd from seventeenth-century realities.40 From poetry to painting, under the influence of the Augustan poets and their Roman models, through the course of the eighteenth century the cottage was established in the English arts as the principal conceptual

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 vehicle for retreat as, unlike a palace or villa, it was a rural dwelling that embodied the pastoral ideal of virtuous simplicity. The cottage can be identified in a range of literary and artistic works from the early topographic poetry of Abraham Cowley through a century of English pastoral poetry from Pope to Thomson to Dyer, to the theatre, rustic genre painting, dresses and plates. Central to this trajectory to cultural prominence is Dryden’s Virgil as the translator’s choice of words provided the authority for a century of cottage culture: including its manifestation in the architect- designed cottage. 26 The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life Notes 1 For example, editions of Horace available in the eighteenth century include: Horace, Q. Horatii Flacci opera. Interpretatione & notis illustravit Ludovicus Desprez ... In usum serenissimi Delphini, ... Huic editioni accessêre Vita Horatii cum Dacerii notis, ejusdem chronologia Horatiana, & praefatio de satyra Romana (London, 1711); Horace, The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace, translated into English prose, as near the original as the different idioms ... would allow. With the Latin text in the opposite page, and ... notes in English; from the best commentators both antient and modern, especially M. Dacier and P. Sanadon. And a preface to each ode ... Also a method of scanning the several sorts of verse ... Together with the Latin text put into order of construction. For the use of schools as well as of private gentlemen (London, 1741). 2 For example, editions of Pliny available in the eighteenth century include: Pliny the Younger, Pliny’s Epistles and Panegyrick. Translated by several hands. With the Life of Pliny. By Mr. Henley (London, 1724); Pliny the Younger, Letters, in M. T. Ciceronis epistolæ selectæ, et aliquot C. Plinii Cæcilii Secundi. In usum scholæ Westmonasteriensis (London, 1702); Pliny the Younger, in Jean-Henri-Samuel Formey, Le philosophe payen, ou pensées de Pline; avec un commentaire littéraire et moral (Leide, 1759). 3 Horace, The Odes, Epistle X, ‘The Delights of Nature’. 4 Pliny (trans. W. Melmoth; ed. F.C.T. Bosanquet) Letters of Pliny (Middlesex 2006), Letter XIII Gallus. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Abraham Cowley, The Works of Mr Abraham Cowley (London, 1678). 8 John Dryden, The works of Virgil containing his Pastorals, Georgics and AEneis. Translated into English verse; by Mr. Dryden (London, 1697, 2nd edn 1716), pp. 193–7. 9 John Claudius Loudon, A Treatise on Farming, Improving, and Managing Country Residences (London, 1806), p. 5. 10 Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), p. 315. 11 See John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2013), pp. 487–521. 12 Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 9–11. 13 John Ruskin, ‘Modern Painters, 1856’. In E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds), The Works of John Ruskin (London, 1903). 14 Robert Brown and Daniel Maudlin, ‘Concepts of Vernacular Architecture’, in C. Grieg Crystler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory (London, 2012), p. 348. 15 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (London, 1855). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 16 Dryden, The works of Virgil, pp. 193–7. Virgil, Publii Virgilii Maronis Bucolica, Georgica, et Æneis, nunc primum edita ad hoc exemplar, interpretatione et notis illustrata, opera et studio Thomæ Cooke (London, 1741); Virgil A new translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, on a more liberal plan than ever yet attempted (London, 1783). 17 Joseph Addison, ‘An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics’ in Thomas Tickell (ed.), The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq; in Four Volumes, vol. 1 (London, 1721), pp. 249–50. 18 Virgil (trans. John William Mackail), Georgics of Virgil (Boston & New York, 1904), Georgics II, lines 320–1. 19 Horace, Odes, Book III, 10–16. Horace (trans. W. G. Shepherd), Horace: The Complete Odes and Epodes (London, 1983), p. 162. The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life 27 20 Dryden, Georgics, p. 80. 21 Letter 19, Undated. Assumed date Sunday, May 8, 1653, ‘LIFE AT CHICKSANDS. SPRING AND SUMMER, 1653’, in Dorothy Osborne (ed. Edward Abbot Parry), Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652–54 (London, 1903), pp. 48–174. 22 John Barrell, The Darkside of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 10. 23 Ibid., p. 11. 24 Edward Baines, Country and Town, with fragments of ancient and modern morality [partly based on Horace]. In rhyme (Leeds, 1808). 25 James Thomson, The Seasons: By James Thomson; with His Life, an Index, and Glossary (London, 1793) Spring, pp. 27, 680–1. 26 Ibid., Summer, pp. 52, 59–66. 27 Ibid., Summer, pp. 56, 220–5. 28 John Dyer, The Fleece: A Poem. In Four Books (London, 1757), pp. 10, 120–3. 29 Cowley, The Works, p. 144. 30 Dryden, Georgics, p. 266. 31 Ibid., p. 35. 32 See Mackail translation of Georgics of Virgil. 33 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1: With Maps (New York, 1841), p. 47. 34 Catherine Belsey, ‘Afterword: Classicism and Cultural Dissonance’, in Lucy Gent (ed.) Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660 (Studies in British Art) (London, 1996), p. 433. 35 An example of an eighteenth-century lady’s shepherdess’ hat is on display at the Royal Albert Museum, Exeter. Trinket box, Royal Collection, Royal Collection, Windsor: 22241. 36 Richard Rolt, The Royal Shepherd, an English opera; … the music composed by Mr. Rush. The second edition. (Andover, 1765; 2010). 37 Anon, The Ladies’ own memorandum-book [electronic resource] : Or, Daily pocket journal, for the year 1789. Designed as a methodical register of all the transactions of business, as well as amusement. Containing I. An introductory address. II. New and full moons. III. Table of moveable feasts from Oct. 1787 to Oct. 1788. IV. Useful market tables. V. Common notes for 1789. VI. Birth- days and years of the Royal family. VII. Birth-days of the sovereigns in Europe. VIII. Rules for finding the moveable feasts, &c. IX. Fourteen country dances for the year 1789. X. Table of precedency among ladies. XI. Table of the roads from London to Edinburgh. XII. A perpetual diary. XIII. Poetical answers to last year’s enigmas. XIV. Nine new enigmas. XV. Charades, &c. XVI. Answers to the rebuses of last year. XVII. Twenty-one rebuses. XVIII. Several original poetical pieces. XIX. New songs, sung at Vauxhall, &c. in 1788 (London, 1788), p. 129.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 38 Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 50–2. See also Ann Bermingham (ed.), Sense and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s ‘Cottage Door’ (New Haven, 2005). 39 Barrell, The Darkside of the Landscape, p. 71. 40 Ibid.

Bibliography Addison, Joseph. ‘An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics’, in Thomas Tickell (ed.), The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq; in Four Volumes, vol. 1 (London, 1721), pp.248–58. 28 The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life Anon. The Ladies’ own memorandum-book: Or, Daily pocket journal, for the year 1789. Designed as a methodical register of all the transactions of business, as well as amusement. Containing I. An introductory address. II. New and full moons. III. Table of moveable feasts from Oct. 1787 to Oct. 1788. IV. Useful market tables. V. Common notes for 1789. VI. Birth-days and years of the Royal family. VII. Birth-days of the sovereigns in Europe. VIII. Rules for finding the moveable feasts, &c. IX. Fourteen country dances for the year 1789. X. Table of precedency among ladies. XI. Table of the roads from London to Edinburgh. XII. A perpetual diary. XIII. Poetical answers to last year’s enigmas. XIV. Nine new enigmas. XV. Charades, &c. XVI. Answers to the rebuses of last year. XVII. Twenty-one rebuses. XVIII. Several original poetical pieces. XIX. New songs, sung at Vauxhall, &c. in 1788 (London, 1788). Baines, Edward. Country and Town, with fragments of ancient and modern morality [partly based on Horace]. In rhyme (Leeds, 1808). Barrell, John. The Darkside of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge, 1980). Belsey, Catherine. ‘Afterword: Classicism and Cultural Dissonance’, in Lucy Gent (ed.), Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660 (Studies in British Art) (London, 1996), pp. 427–42. Bermingham, Ann. Sense and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s ‘Cottage Door’ (New Haven, 2005). Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley, 1986). Borsay, Peter. The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989). Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2013). Brown, Robert and Daniel Maudlin. ‘Concepts of Vernacular Architecture’, in C. Grieg Crystler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory (London, 2012), pp. 340–56. Cowley, Abraham. The Works of Mr Abraham Cowley (London, 1678). Dryden, John. The works of Virgil containing his Pastorals, Georgics and AEneis. Translated into English verse by Mr. Dryden (London, 1697, 2nd edn 1716). Dyer, John. The Fleece: A Poem. In Four Books (London, 1757). Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South (London, 1855). Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1: With Maps (New York, 1841). Heynen, Hilde. Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, MA, 1999). Horace. Horace: The Complete Odes and Epodes, trans. W. G. Shepherd (London, Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 1983). Horace. The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace, translated into English prose, as near the original as the different idioms ... would allow. With the Latin text in the opposite page, and ... notes in English from the best commentators both antient and modern, especially M. Dacier and P. Sanadon. And a preface to each ode ... Also a method of scanning the several sorts of verse ... Together with the Latin text put into order of construction. For the use of schools as well as of private gentlemen (London, 1741). Horace. Q. Horatii Flacci opera. Interpretatione & notis illustravit Ludovicus Desprez ... In usum serenissimi Delphini ... Huic editioni accessêre Vita Horatii The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life 29 cum Dacerii notis, ejusdem chronologia Horatiana, & praefatio de satyra Romana (London, 1711). Loudon, John Claudius. A Treatise on Farming, Improving, and Managing Country Residences (London, 1806). Osborne, Dorothy (ed. Edward Abbot Parry). Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652–54 (London, 1903). Pliny. (trans. W. Melmoth; ed. F.C.T. Bosanquet). Letters of Pliny (Middlesex, 2006). Pliny the Younger, in Jean-Henri-Samuel Formey. Le philosophe payen, ou pensées de Pline; avec un commentaire littéraire et moral (Leide, 1759). Pliny the Younger. Pliny’s Epistles and Panegyrick. Translated by several hands. With the Life of Pliny. By Mr. Henley (London, 1724). Pliny the Younger. Letters, in M. T. Ciceronis epistolæ selectæ, et aliquot C. Plinii Cæcilii Secundi. In usum scholæ Westmonasteriensis (London, 1702). Rolt, R. The Royal Shepherd, an English opera; … the music composed by Mr. Rush. The second edition (Andover, 2010). Ruskin, John. ‘Modern Painters, 1856’. In E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds), The Works of John Ruskin (London, 1903). Thomson, James. The Seasons: By James Thomson; with His Life, an Index, and Glossary (London, 1793). Virgil (trans. John William Mackail). Georgics of Virgil (Boston & New York, 1904). Virgil. A new translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, on a more liberal plan than ever yet attempted (London, 1783). Virgil. Publii Virgilii Maronis Bucolica, Georgica, et Æneis, nunc primum edita ad hoc exemplar, interpretatione et notis illustrata, opera et studio Thomæ Cooke (London, 1741). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 2 The cottage in English architecture

Through the language and allusions employed in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century architectural writings, a meaningful relationship can be established between poetry, art and architecture. In their treatises on cottages and cottage design, architectural writers cite pastoral poetry and frame their discussions in terms of rural retreat and the simple life. However, in the search for a suitable architectural model for the cottage, architecture turned to its own discourse on the primitive hut and produced cottage designs that were pure, white geometric forms topped with thatch. In the mid-eighteenth century the cottage first emerges, and comes to prominence, from a range of architectural publications devoted to rural retreat in the form of designs for small garden structures such as seats, hermitages and summer-houses. Looking at the language of these architectural titles we find that ‘retreat’, often combined with ‘rural’, first features in William and John Halfpenny’s 1752 Rural Architecture … consisting of designs for huts, retreats, summer and winter hermitages and rustic seats. The Halfpennys’ next publication on retreats was The Country Gentleman’s Pocket Companion for Rural Decorative Architecture, 1753. In identifying the use of specific words care must be taken to distinguish those publications dedicated to retreat from those pertaining to the practical business of farming such as Robert Morris’ Rural Architecture: consisting of regular designs of and elevations for Buildings in the Countryside, 1750. Specifically on rural retreats, the Halfpenny titles were followed over a decade later by Thomas Rawlins’ 1768 Familiar Architecture: consisting of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 original designs of Houses for Gentlemen and Tradesmen, Parsonages and Summer-Retreats. ‘Cottage’ does not appear in the title of an architectural book on rural retreat until John Plaw’s 1790 Ideas for Rustic Furniture Proper for Garden Seats, Summer Houses, Hermitages, Cottages, followed by his 1794 Rural Architecture or Designs from the simple cottage to the decorated villa. Plaw’s Rural Architecture was soon followed by John Soane’s 1793 Sketches in Architecture: containing Plans and Elevations of Cottages, Villas and Other Useful Buildings which was itself soon after joined by James Malton’s An Essay on British Cottage Architecture, 1798. Thereafter architectural 32 The cottage in English architecture books devoted to cottages appeared in volume. In 1804, 23 of the 33 titles on architectural publisher and bookseller J. Taylor of Holburn’s List of Books on the Various Branches of Architecture and Building include ‘cottage’ in the title.1 Some caution should be taken when attempting to demonstrate that influences and meanings were drawn from one medium to another as different disciplines and practitioners operated in different social worlds and at different times. As Morris Eaves warns ‘“Literature” … and the “visual arts” are unstable entities that slip and slide this way and that under the complex pressures of history’.2 However, in the case of cottage design publications there is consistent use of and reference to eighteenth-century pastoral poetic discourse on rural retreat and cottages. Richard Elsam’s 1803 An Essay on Rural Architecture quotes Thomson’s The Seasons on the ‘pure pleasures of the rural life’ and a pastoral poem, The Wish, on building a retreat by the poet Pomfret before outlining his own ideas on the matter:

Beyond doubt, there is considerable satisfaction in a comfortable convenient retreat, near a town, where a gentleman has an opportunity of participating in the sports of the field, in agriculture, or in gardening; and at other intervals, when the mind is so disposed, to intermix in the company, and gay amusements, of his neighbourhood. These are the great pleasures of such a retreat, situated near the city or town, which if elevated upon a rising ground, near to the public road, well sheltered by trees, and on a pleasant spot, cannot fail to render it both cheerful and retired.3

Fitting with these ideas, on cottages Elsam writes:

The greatest recommendation to the Cottage itself should be, its making a lively appearance, for to those persons who are desirous of partaking in a country life, as a relaxation from business, are not apt to be prepossessed in favour of a gloomy habitation.4

Retreat and the pastoral ideal also permeates the language used in plate captions for cottage designs, as in the captions for John Plaw’s Sketches for Country Houses, Villas and Rural Dwellings, 1800: Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Plate VIII: This sketch may be considered as a Cottage or Rural Dwelling, making a very comfortable residence for a family with a small independent fortune, or a retreat occasionally to relax from the bustle of business.

Plate XIII: Is another Cottage: the exterior enclosure may be of pise, mud, rubble-stone, or brick, and covered with thatch; the inside partitions are quartering … the conveniences within would render it a more comfortable retreat from the bustle of town, for the man of business or science.5 The cottage in English architecture 33 However, while quoting Horace or Thomson was readily done, as a discipline predominantly concerned with the design and production of buildings, architecture was faced with a singular problem when responding to the rise of cottage culture. The problem for architects was that the idea of the cottage was just that, a loosely sketched notion that existed only in abstract cultural space. Where poets and artists could remain in the abstract in their allusions, architects had to find practical answers to some specific design questions. What should a shepherd-king’s cottage look like? What sort of walls? What sort of roof? Detailed structural descriptions of cottages are notably absent in pastoral poetry while their depiction in rustic genre painting offer only gestures: something small, something low, something thatched. The cottage in these literary and painterly representations does not have true physical form: this challenge had to be taken up by the Sister Art of Architecture. For possible answers architects turned to a separate and largely unrelated theme within their own theoretical discourse on the origins of Architecture and the notion of the primitive hut. Here, the cottage was discussed as a neoclassical archetype. However, more practically, speculative discussions and representations of the appearance of the primitive hut provided possible forms and a grammar of ornament that could be applied to cottage design. Therefore, in Architecture, the cottage was first interpreted as a primitive hut: a neoclassical architectural ideal fused to the poetic ideal of the simple rural retreat. The rustic or ‘primitive hut’ – a term first used by William Chambers – is an architectural fable on the origins of architecture formulated in order to position classicism as the one true universal architecture, an ‘externally valid paradigm’.6 Following Marc Antoine Laugier’s seminal treatise on the ‘little rustic hut’, Essai sur l’architecture, and subsequent English interpretations such as Sir William Chambers’ A Treatise on Civil Architecture, 1759, the ‘hut’ gained a particular prominence in English architectural discourse of the mid-to-late eighteenth century with many architects including Chambers, Henry Holland and Sir John Soane producing sketch designs. Eighteenth-century discourse on the primitive or rustic hut has been extensively analysed elsewhere, not least by Joseph Rykwert in On Adam’s House in Paradise.7 The aim here is only to demonstrate the hut’s transition from architectural theory to pattern books on cottages; as Antoine Laugier wrote in Essai sur l’architecture, ‘Let us never lose sight of our little hut’.8

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 As discussed by Rykwert and others, Laugier’s essai was part of a pan- European Enlightenment discourse on Nature, huts and architectural origins from Jacques-Francois Blondell and Milizia to Quatremere de Quincy.9 In England, Laugier was preceded and followed by a series of mid-eighteenth- century English texts and drawings on the origins of Architecture, the best known of which is William Chambers’ A Treatise on Civil Architecture: in which the principles of that art are laid down, 1759. Following the theory that mimesis and adaptation were fundamental to the evolution of the first buildings, as argued by Vitruvius and Laugier, Chambers, taught in France by Blondel, revisits the fable with a familiar account: 34 The cottage in English architecture Rude and unseemly, no doubt, were his first attempts; without experience or tools, the builder collected a few boughs of trees, spread them in conic shape, and covering them with rushes, or leaves and clay, formed his hut; sufficient to shelter its hardy inhabitant at night or in seasons of bad weather. But in the course of time, men naturally grew more expert; they invented tools to shorten and improve labour; they fell upon neater, more durable modes of construction, and forms better adapted than the cone to the purposes for which their huts were intended … but as soon as the inhabitants discovered the inconvenience of the inclining sides, and the want of upright space in the cone, they changed it for a cube …10

However, as Rykwert notes, Chambers gives a particular emphasis to the importance of geometry in the form of the original hut, not made so explicit in other treatises, that becomes a fundamental principle of the early architect- designed cottage.11 Chambers illustrates his Treatise with sketches of ‘Primitive Buildings of Conical and Cubic Form’ similar to the illustrations of the Phrygian and Chalkian huts in Jean Martin’s and Claude Perrault’s editions of Vitruvius (Figure 2.1).12 These illustrations depict three variations of the primitive hut: a cone of crude branch construction covered with what appears to be an animal skin described as ‘The First Sort of Huts’; a symmetrical, cubic hut made of a superior timber post-and-beam or trabeated construction with mud in-fill walls and a thatched flat-roof structure described as ‘The Second Sort of Huts’; and ‘The Third Sort of Huts’, similar to the second hut but with a pitched roof, a logical adaptation to throw off water, where the front gable forms the ‘first’ architectural pediment. These theoretical sketches are similar in their simple geometric form and crude construction to designs for garden seats and small rustic structures such as hermitages found in William and John Halfpenny’s 1752 Rural Architecture and John Plaw’s 1795 Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements (Figure 2.2). Chambers himself produced a design similar to ‘The Third Sort of Huts’ for a cubic ‘Primitive Hut’ intended as a gardener’s hut for Kew Gardens that features a pedimented portico supported on rough log columns, a timber entablature, pitched thatched roof and crude timber door to centre.13 In the Treatise, Chambers does not use the word ‘cottage’. In form and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 construction the primitive hut may have provided an architectural model for the architect-designed cottage but the connection between the hut and the Arcadian shepherd’s cot is not made by Chambers. Although, predating both Laugier and Chambers, John Wood uses the word ‘cottage’ rather than ‘hut’ in On the Origin of Building, 1741, where he distinguishes between ‘the antient and universal cottage’ and an eighteenth-century reality where ‘every country produces cottages without proportion and regularity’.14 Wood uses the term exclusively as a reference to the primitive hut and like his contemporaries Robert Morris and Halfpenny makes no reference to the cottage-retreat. Similarly, in Habitations of the Labourer, 1780, John Wood The cottage in English architecture 35 Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 2.1 William Chambers, ‘Primitive Buildings of Conical and Cubic Form’, A Treatise on Civil Architecture in which the principles of that art are laid down, 1759. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection 36 The cottage in English architecture

Figure 2.2 John Plaw, Plate 1, ‘Plan, Elevation and Sections for a Hermitage in the Garden of Green Park Lodge’, Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements, London, 1795. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection

the Younger also calls upon the ‘simple hut’ to support his argument that classical architecture is founded upon formal principles that are applicable to any type of building irrespective of size or social station. It is a theoretical justification to ‘turn his thoughts towards … the plans for cottages … Considering the regular gradation between the plan of the most simple hut and that of the most superb palace; that a palace is nothing more than a cottage IMPROVED’.15 For Wood and Wood the Younger, Morris and Halfpenny the cottage is invoked as the essence of neoclassical design, a pure reduction of simplicity, symmetry and proportion. For Morris, writing in Rural Architecture, 1750, ‘cottage’ denotes a small, plain building within a sliding scale of classically- designed buildings. Morris’s wider neoclassical agenda is clear as per the book’s subtitle: ‘Consisting of Plans and Elevations for Buildings in the Country. In

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 which the Purity and Simplicity of the Art of Designing are variously exemplified’.16 In the preface Morris writes ‘most who have wrote on this Subject [Architecture], have raised nothing but Palaces, glaring in Decoration and Dress; while the cottage, or plain little Villa, are passed by unregarded’.17 Similarly, in Useful Architecture, 1755, William Halfpenny writes about cottages for the same neoclassical ends, ‘the Truth will ever stand uncontested, that more real Beauty and Elegance appears in the due Symmetry and Harmony of a well-constructed Cottage, than can be found in the most exalted Palace’. These texts are not concerned with pastoralism or rural retreat. Yet, they are significant because they establish the cottage as an architectural The cottage in English architecture 37 archetype, ultimately connected to the primitive hut, which would provide a suitable paradigm for the cottage-as-retreat. The direct connection between the neoclassical architectural ideal and the poetic pastoral ideal is first made by Thomas Rawlins. In Familiar Architecture Rawlins, 1768 writes:

How sooth’d and mollify’d must be the Passion When we descend to the pleasing rural Cot. Where simple Elegance, Proportion and Convenience Unite!18

After Rawlins, designs for symmetrical and classically-proportioned cottages regularly appear in pattern books alongside texts full of passages on the significance of the cottage as the embodiment of rural retreat and the pleasures of the simple life. Informed by these English articulations of the primitive hut, early pattern books on cottage-retreats by architects such as Rawlins, Plaw, George Richardson and Sir John Soane are characterised by a strict adherence to geometry and thatch. Chambers’ drawings of imagined huts, conical and cubic, appear as homage in Plate 12, ‘Shepherd’s Huts or Cottages’, in John Plaw’s 1794 Rural Architecture where the images serve as authoritative visual references for Plaw’s subsequent cottage designs (Figure 2.3). The plate is divided into two cells. The lower image depicts the front elevation of a cubic hut or cottage very similar in form, pediment and rough-log post- and-beam construction to Chambers’ ‘Third Sort of Huts’; however, the posts flanking the entrance rise to form a ‘natural’ arch within the pediment that also delineates a gothic arch (possibly to support Plaw’s use of gothic windows in many of his cottage designs). The upper image depicts an Arcadian pastoral landscape of hills and rolling grasslands complete with sheep and a distant shepherd. In the foreground is a shepherd’s hut or cottage. It is a circular dwelling of what appears to be plank construction or cladding with tapering walls suggestive of a cone and an overhanging conical thatch with central chimneystack-cum-finial. Like Chambers’ huts it is windowless with a single, simple doorway to the centre. In the middle distance is a second hut or cottage. This dwelling is cylindrical with straight white plastered walls and a similar overhanging conical thatched roof and single door to centre. This image is significant because it places the notional

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 original primitive hut in the specific context of shepherding and a pastoral landscape. Moreover, the juxtaposition of the tapered plank-clad walls in the first hut or cottage with the straight, white walls of the cylindrical second hut or cottage represents the conceptual architectural link between sketches of primitive huts and the first white-walled, geometric architect- designed cottages. The profound influence of the ‘little hut’ on cottage design is evident in its continued discussion in later publications that in style have rejected classicism in favour of the irregularity of the Picturesque. The new aesthetic theory, irregular forms, polychrome walls and textured surfaces of the 38 The cottage in English architecture Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 2.3 John Plaw, Plate 12, ‘Shepherd’s Huts or Cottages’, Rural Architecture or Designs from the simple cottage to the decorated villa, 1794. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection The cottage in English architecture 39 Picturesque successfully challenged the fundamental principles of neoclassicism but did not dislodge the idea of the primitive hut. For example, we find the myth retold in Edmund Bartell’sHints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamental Cottages, 1804:

Man in his most savage state has no wants but those of appetite, which he supplies by hunting. This, in the earliest stages of barbarism, was his sole employment; shady thickets, trunks of trees, and cavities of rock, his only shelter from the inclemency of brutes, littler inferior to himself in sagacity, and scarcely superior in the savage terror of their lives … Building, one of the most necessary improvement, became the earliest object of attention, Thus, says Vitruvius.19

Indeed, in Rural Residences, John Papworth, writing in 1818, explicitly recognises the influence of the hut on contemporary cottage design before moving to his present day and own picturesque cottage designs, stating:

The architects of the present day, attempting to combine fitness and beauty in rural buildings revert the practices in the infancy of art, and, forming their designs upon these simple modes, gain some advantage by the association of ideas produced in the mind of the spectator.20

Architects of the Picturesque also continued to present their designs in terms of pastoral poetry and the Classical idea of simple rural retreat. This is apparent in James Malton’s pioneering picturesque treatise, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture, 1798, which begins with a short poem and the lines: ‘Close in the dingle of a wood, Obscur’d with boughs, a cottage stood’.21 This poem sets the tone for Malton’s subsequent essay on cottages and rural retreat with its familiar references to the nobility of country life and the envy of the wealthy and powerful for the life of the simple shepherd. Malton writes ‘often has the aching brow of royalty resigned its crown, to be decked with the soothing chaplet of the shepherd swain’.22 In another passage Malton introduces another pastoral poem ‘so replete with Cottage imagery, according to my idea of a Cottage, that I have often perused and pondered on it with exceeding delight’.23 Similarly, in Hints for Picturesque

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Improvements in Ornamented Cottages, 1804, Edmund Bartell begins Essay 1 with Richard Payne Knight’s poem Landscape and, with support from a Horace quote, presents a familiar argument in the preface that:

The love of a country life seems to be innate in the human breast: man seeks the large and populous city from necessity; but when he is fortunately enabled to pursue his own inclinations, he generally dedicates some part of the year to a rural retreat … Perhaps of all situations, the romantic retirement of a rural cottage is likely to produce the highest and most refined relish for social happiness.24 40 The cottage in English architecture Moreover, Bartell stresses the importance of the simple cottage as the best possible vehicle for rural retreat:

As a retreat from the hurry of a town life, the ornamental cottage is rational and elegant; and it is only to be condemned when carried beyond the bounds of that simplicity which should be its characteristic distinction … the characteristic mark of a cottage is humility, as if, conscious of its inferiority, it should appear to retire.25

Later in the nineteenth century John Claudius Loudon paraphrases Bartell when he writes in the Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, 1838:

Such is the superiority of rural occupations and pleasures, that commerce, large societies, or crowded cities, may be justly reckoned unnatural. Indeed, the very purpose for which we engage in commerce is that we may one day be enabled to retire to the country, where alone we picture ourselves days of solid satisfaction and undisturbed happiness.26

To conclude, as architects absorbed and responded to the rise of the cottage in English cultural life the terms ‘rural retreat’ and ‘cottage’ began to appear in architectural publications of the mid-to-late eighteenth century. But, it was in their own discourse on the original primitive hut that they found a design model for the poetic cottage ideal. Therefore, in architectural writings the cottage usefully represented two ideas: pastoral retreat and the primitive hut. These two meanings were not incompatible as they stem from the same Classical world but they are nonetheless distinct and would not have necessarily equally engaged architect and patron. From the later eighteenth century the cottage became the subject of an increasing number of publications well into the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, a later generation of architects devoted to the Picturesque recognised the primitive hut as central to the genesis of the architect-designed cottage and continued to quote and reference eighteenth-century pastoral poetry and Roman writings on retreat into the 1860s.

Notes Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 1 Anon, A List of Books on the Various Branches of Architecture and Building published by J. Taylor, at the Architectural Library, No. 59, High Holborn, London (London, 1804). 2 Morris Eaves, ‘The Sister Arts in British Romanticism’ in Stuart Curran (ed.), British Romanticism (Cambridge, 1993, reprint 2007), p. 243. 3 Quoted on title page of Richard Elsam, An essay on rural architecture: illustrated with original and oeconomical designs; to which are added rural retreats and villas in the Gothic, Castle, Roman, and Grecian styles of architecture, with ideas for park-entrances, a mausoleum, and a design for the Naval Pillar, to immortalize British naval heroism: the whole comprising thirty plates, in aquatinta …an attempt to refute James Malton (London, 1803); Elsam, Rural architecture, p.8. The cottage in English architecture 41 4 Ibid., p.17. 5 John Plaw, Sketches for Country Houses, villas and rural dwellings also some designs for Cottages (London, 1800, 1823), pp. 11–12. 6 Adrian Forty, ‘Primitive: The Word and Concept’ in Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr (eds), Primitive: Original Matters in Architecture (Oxford, 2006), p. 5. Adrian Forty points out that while we discuss this idea in terms of primitivism, primitive architecture, the primitive hut, the term ‘primitive’ does not appear in architectural texts until the third edition of William Chambers’s Treatise on Civil Architecture in 1791. Marc Antoine Laugier in Essai sur l’architecture (Paris, 1753, London, 1755) refers only to a ‘rustic hut’ and this phrase can be found in many architectural texts including those related to cottage, such as Plaw. Forty further makes clear that when it did appear ‘primitive’ had a specific eighteenth-century meaning as ‘original’ not, as understood today, as inferring backward, savage or barbarous. Indeed, in eighteenth-century architectural theory ‘primitive’ is understood as a positive notion of purity. Mari Hvattum, ‘Origins redefined: a tale of pigs and primitive huts’ in Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr (eds), Primitive: Original Matters in Architecture (Oxford, 2006), p. 34. 7 Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise (Cambridge, MA, 1981); see also Odgers et al., Primitive. 8 Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture, p. 2. 9 Ibid., chapters 2–4. 10 William Chambers, A Treatise on Civil Architecture in which the principles of that art are laid down and illustrated by a great number of plates accurately designed and elegantly engraved by the best hands (London, 1759, 1791, 1825), p. 103. 11 Rykwert, Adam’s House, p. 71. 12 Vitruve (trans. Jean Martin and Jean Goujon), Architecture, ou art de bien bastir (Paris, 1547) ; Vitruve (trans. Claude Perrault), Les dix livres d’architecture de Vitruve (Paris, 1673); Robin Middleton, ‘Chambers, W. ‘Chambers, W. “A Treatise on Civil Architecture” London 1759’ in J. Harris and M. Snodin (eds), Sir William Chambers: Architect to George III (Yale, London, 1996), p. 70. 13 Middleton, ‘Treatise’, p.71 14 John Wood, The Origin of Building (Bath, 1741), p. 13. 15 John Wood the Younger, Habitations of the Labourer: A Series of Plans for Cottages or Habitations of the Labourer (London, 1806), p. i. 16 Morris, Rural Architecture, title page. 17 Ibid. 18 Thomas Rawlins, Familiar Architecture: Consisting of Original Designs of Houses for Gentlemen and Tradesmen, Parsonages and Summer-Retreats (London, 1768), pp. ii–iii. 19 Edmund Bartell, Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 (London, 1804), p. 32. 20 John Buonarotti Papworth, Rural Residences (London, 1818), p. 18. 21 Malton, Cottage Architecture, frontispiece. 22 Ibid., p.6. 23 Ibid., p.5. 24 Edmund Bartell, Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages (London, 1804), p. v. 25 Ibid., pp. 5, 15. 26 John Claudius Loudon, A Treatise on Farming, Improving, and Managing Country Residences (London, 1806), pp. 5–6. 42 The cottage in English architecture Bibliography Anon. A List of Books on the Various Branches of Architecture and Building published by J. Taylor, at the Architectural Library, No. 59, High Holborn, London (London, 1804). Bartell, Edmund. Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages (London, 1804). Chambers, William. A Treatise on Civil Architecture in which the principles of that art are laid down and illustrated by a great number of plates accurately designed and elegantly engraved by the best hands (London, 1759, 1791, 1825). Crowley, John E. ‘“In Happier Mansions, Warm, and Dry”: The Invention of the Cottage as the Comfortable Anglo-American House’, Winterthur Portfolio, 32; 2/3 (1997), 169–88. Eaves, Morris. ‘The Sister Arts in British Romanticism’ in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism (Cambridge, 1992, reprint 2007), pp. 236–69. Elsam, Richard. An essay on rural architecture: illustrated with original and oeconomical designs; to which are added rural retreats and villas in the Gothic, Castle, Roman, and Grecian styles of architecture, with ideas for park-entrances, a mausoleum, and a design for the Naval Pillar, to immortalize British naval heroism: the whole comprising thirty plates, in aquatinta … an attempt to refute James Malton (London, 1803). Forty, Adrian. ‘Primitive: The Word and Concept’ in Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr (eds), Primitive: Original Matters in Architecture (Oxford, 2006), pp. 3–14. Halfpenny, William and John. The country gentleman’s pocket companion, and builder’s assistant, for rural decorative architecture: containing, thirty-two new designs, plans and elevations of alcoves, floats, temples, summer-houses, lodges, huts, grottos, &c. in the Augustine, Gothick and Chinese taste, with proper directions annexed : also the exact estimate of their several amounts, which are from twenty-five to one hundred pounds, and most of them portable : correctly engraved on twenty-five copper plates 2nd Edn (London, 1753). Halfpenny, William and John. Rural Architecture in the Gothic Taste … huts, retreats, summer and winter hermitages … rustic seats (London, 1752). Hvattum, Mari. ‘Origins Redefined: A Tale of Pigs and Primitive Huts’ in Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr (eds.), Primitive: Original Matters in Architecture (Oxford, 2006), pp. 33–42. Laugier, Marc Antoine. Essai sur l’architecture (Paris, 1753, London, 1755). Loudon, John Claudius. A Treatise on Farming, Improving, and Managing Country Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Residences (London, 1806). Malton, James. Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798). Middleton, Robin. ‘Chambers, W. “A Treatise on Civil Architecture” London 1759’ in J. Harris and M. Snodin (eds), Sir William Chambers: Architect to George III (Yale, London, 1996), pp. 68–76. Morris, Robert. Rural Architecture: Consisting of regular designs of plans and elevations for Buildings in the Countryside (London, 1750). Odgers, Jo, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr (eds), Primitive: Original Matters in Architecture (Oxford, 2006). The cottage in English architecture 43 Papworth, John Buonarotti. Rural Residences (London, 1818). Plaw, John. Sketches for Country Houses, villas and rural dwellings also some designs for Cottages (London, 1800, 1823). Plaw, John. Rural Architecture or Designs from the simple cottage to the decorated villa (London, 1794). Plaw, John. Ideas for Rustic Furniture Proper for Garden Seats, Summer Houses, Hermitages, Cottages (London, 1790). Rawlins, Thomas. Familiar Architecture: Consisting of Original Designs of Houses for Gentlemen and Tradesmen, Parsonages and Summer-Retreats (London, 1768). Rykwert, Joseph. On Adam’s House in Paradise (Cambridge, MA, 1981). Soane, John. Sketches in Architecture: Containing Plans and Elevations of Cottages, Villas and Other Useful Buildings (London, 1793 & 1798). Thomson, James. Rural Retreats, A Series of Designs Consisting of Plans and Elevations for Cottages, Villas and Ornamental Buildings (Edinburgh, 1835). Vitruve (trans. Claude Perrault). Les dix livres d’architecture de Vitruve (Paris, 1673). Vitruve (trans. Jean Martin and Jean Goujon). Architecture, ou art de bien bastir (Paris, 1547). Vitruvius (trans. Morris Hicky Morgan) The Ten Books of Architecture (New York, 1960). Wood, John. Habitations of the Labourer: A Series of Plans for Cottages or Habitations of the Labourer (Bath, 1780; London, 1806). Wood, John. The Origin of Building (Bath, 1741). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 3 The architect-designed cottage

To my numerous Friends and Subscribers I beg leave to observe, the designs here given possess advantages beyond mere fancy sketches; many of them having been carried into execution in various parts of the kingdom, and of most of them I have small models which completely show their effect in execution; these I shall be happy to explain to any gentleman who may wish to inspect them. John Plaw, Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements, 17961

The first architect-designed cottages built in the 1760s and 1770s were small purpose-built gentlemen’s retreats within country estates or estate workers’ housing. With these new buildings landowners could repair to their cottages to spend a day or two living a simple rural life. En route they may have observed other newly built ‘cottages’ that added to the experience of immersion in a pastoral landscape. To meet the expectations set by Dryden’s Virgil or Thomson’s Seasons designed cottages of the later eighteenth century had, above all, to be small in scale and simple in design. However, while the earliest cottages were indeed small and simple structures, when we look to the 1790s these defining principles were challenged as ‘cottage’ was applied to quite substantial buildings. Thus, the principle was modified from: a cottage had to be small to a cottage had to appear to be small; and from simple to conveying the idea of simplicity. As such ‘cottage’ became less a defined form and more a style. In the design of a cottage, therefore, whether labourer’s cottage or gentleman’s retreat, what became important Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 was not the physical size or simplicity of a building nor its function but that it should communicate the idea ‘cottage’. Some architects found this shift towards an applied style, a grammar of cottage ornament, difficult to reconcile with their architectural principles and found the large and luxurious ‘cottage-villa’ of the early nineteenth century, the cottage ornée, a conceptual over-reach. As the temporary dwelling of the upper strata of society, the eighteenth- century architect-designed cottage fits within a longer history of rural retreats in English domestic architecture from medieval hunting lodges and royal retreats such as Leeds Castle in Kent used by the family of Edward I in 46 The architect-designed cottage the thirteenth century. Henry VIII had Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, 1538–41, while in the early nineteenth century the Prince Regent retreated to John Nash’s Brighton Pavilion and, later, Queen Victoria spent extended periods at her palatial retreats of Osborne House, built in the Italianate style on the Isle of Wight and the Scots Baronial Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands. The aristocracy and their social circle also built suburban villa- retreats along the upper reaches of the Thames around Richmond and Twickenham – relatively large, opulent and close to town – as semirural retreats from city life and Westminster politics: some well-known examples include Hampton Court, 1514–25, appropriated by Henry VIII from Cardinal Wolsey; the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale’s Ham House, built in 1615; Lord Burlington’s Chiswick Villa, 1729; and Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, from 1747. On the banks of the Thames eighteenth-century poets transplanted Arcadia from an imagined Classical Italy to Albion. Pope transformed the retreat of Laelius described by Horace into Lord Bolingbrook at Chiswick Villa and in Rural Sports John Gay recommends rural Windsor over urban London.2 Retreat could also be more generally applied to the annual summer retreat from London by the ruling class to their country estates. Accordingly, in The Seasons, James Thomson transfers the activities and actors of Arcadia to Lord Lyttleton’s estate of Hagley Park, ‘The British Tempe’, which he imagines as an Epicurean retreat ‘thrown graceful round by Nature’s careless hand’ where Lyttleton could ‘wander thro’ the philosophic world’.3 Alternatively retreat to one’s country estate could mean a permanent withdrawal or retirement from politics and public life, perhaps in disgrace, as in the case of Lord Fairfax the subject of Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth- century poem On Appleton House. As recommended by Pliny, small structures within the grounds offered further retreat from the bustle of the main house, the demands of the county social circuit, the business of estate management and local government duties. It is here that the architect- designed cottage of the later eighteenth-century finds its place within the English architectural history of retreat.

The origin myth of the primitive hut gave authority to a set of neoclassical architectural design principles centred on symmetry, proportion and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 restrained simple ornament. Small and thatched, it also looked like a good design for an ideal cottage. Therefore, it is no surprise to find that symmetry and proportion of elevation and plan characterise the early designs for architect-designed cottages and that simplicity, plainness and rustic, primitive hut-like gestures constitute their ornament. From one country estate to the next, we find that estate buildings from the mid-century onwards – by neoclassical architects such as George Richardson, Sir William Chambers, John Plaw, Sir John Soane and Richard Elsam – shared a cottage aesthetic of simple geometric forms, white-washed or stuccoed walls and thatch, whether gate lodges, labourers’ cottages or gentlemen’s retreats. The architect-designed cottage 47 However, the three earliest identified ‘cottages’ built in the 1760s do not completely follow this formula, differing as much from each other in materials and ornament as they do from the white-walled cottages that followed in the 1770s to early 1800s; this variety in external ‘dressing’ over regular forms suggests an early experimentation with possible ‘cottage’ styles before plain white became the standard finish. First is the cottage at Henry Hoare’s Stourhead estate, Wiltshire, which sits on the lakeside adjacent to the Temple of Flora. It is a small single-room thatched building intended as a garden seat within the wider architectural perambulation around the lake (Figure 3.1). Today the original simplicity of the exposed random rubble stone-walling is somewhat lost behind a substantial gothic window seat added to the cottage’s lake-front elevation in the early nineteenth century. Second is the ‘Gothick Cottage’ at Philip Southcote’s Woburn Farm estate, Surrey. This structure sat on the riverbank, opposite a temple by Lord Burlington. As the name suggests this now-lost early cottage, only known from a 1770 sketch of ‘Woburn Farm’ by Samuel Ireland, featured gothic, pointed-arch windows and a gothic ornamented door surround.4 However, these gothic details were applied to an otherwise plain two-storey, three-bay neoclassical box with hipped roof typical of the mid- eighteenth century. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 3.1 The cottage on the lake, Stourhead, Wiltshire. Source: author 48 The architect-designed cottage The architects of the cottages at Stourhead and Woburn Park are not known. However, the third, Queen Charlotte’s Cottage at Kew, London, built slightly later in the early 1770s, is reputed to have been designed by the Queen herself with the assistance of Sir William Chambers as described in the London Magazine, 1774, ‘the Queen’s cottage in the shade of the garden is a pretty retreat … The design is said to be Her Majesty’s’ (Figure 3.2).5 Queen Charlotte’s cottage was intended as a day-retreat for picnics and tea parties in conjunction with visits to the royal menagerie. The cottage is built of rough red brick-work under thatch. The use of ‘rustic’ materials in the exterior dressing of the cottages at Kew suggests the possible influence of the hameau at Chantilly, France, built from 1773 under J. D. le Roy.6 However, like the Gothick Cottage at Woburn Farm but unlike the buildings at Chantilly, it is neat and regular in plan and elevation, consisting of a simple rectangular plan and symmetrical garden-front elevation with a tripartite projecting-bay to the centre. The earliest-known attributable architectural drawing for a ‘cottage’, dated 1770, is the first design to depict the whiteness that characterises the cottages of the later eighteenth century. This is not a gentleman’s retreat but a proposed gate-lodge by the Scottish architect George Richardson intended Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 3.2 Queen Charlotte’s Cottage, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, early twentieth century. Copyright: The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew The architect-designed cottage 49 for the grounds of Lord Curzon’s Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire (Figure 3.3). Richardson’s drawing shows a front elevation and plan for a small and simple symmetrical dwelling of one-and-a-half storeys with a thatched, hipped roof. The central doorway is flanked by two ground floor windows and has a small upper storey window directly above. The otherwise plain, white-washed, front elevation is articulated by the inscribed outline of a simple neoclassical plinth and pilasters framing the outside edges. Intended as the dwelling-house for a gate-keeper, the simple interior plan consists only of a single-room living space with hearth, an office/kitchen and stairs to a single bedroom upstairs. Richardson later published similar designs in New Designs in Architecture, consisting of plans, elevations and sections for various buildings, etc, 1788. Figure 1 of ‘Plans and Elevations of Cottages’ is a typical cottage design in New Designs (Figure 3.4). It shows a two-storey cottage ‘the extent of the front is 33 feet; the highest from the ground to top of the roof is 24 feet 6 inches; and the side walls are 7 feet high’.7 It is simple and symmetrical, white-washed and thatched with steeply-pitched roof and a front-facing gable that forms the outline of a primitive pediment with a central upper- storey window located within the apex. Richardson’s description stresses that ‘compositions of small buildings, in the style of Cottages, will not admit of elegance; but they may be so contrived and constructed as to produce a pleasing effect with respect to simplicity and uniformity, both in the Plan and Elevation’.8 This rigorous adherence to white-wash, thatch, symmetry and proportion is also evident in the well-known forms of Sir William Chambers’ thatched cottages at Milton Abbas, Dorset, built for Lord Milton from 1773 (Figure 3.5). As originally designed and built, though many have since been altered, Chambers’ forty cottages, flanking the length of the main street of the estate village of Milton Abbas, were of uniform appearance: two-storey, three-bay white-washed cubes with a doorway to centre and a symmetrical arrangement of carefully-proportioned windows. The Milton Abbas cottages are similar to Richardson’s designs featuring the same strict symmetry of form, plain white walls, hipped thatched-roofs and ‘lozenge’ pattern glazed windows as specified inNew Designs. The importance Chambers placed on the external appearance of symmetry is suggested by the single central-doorways to the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 cottage fronts. Intended as accommodation for Lord Milton’s estate workers, the cottages appear to be rather generous two-storey buildings. However, the single central doorway originally concealed a further two entrances accessed from a small lobby as these apparently single cottages were internally subdivided into two dwellings. As a group the visual impact of Milton Abbas lies not just in the symmetry of the individual cottages but in the repetition of a single form. The simple geometry of the neoclassical cottage is exemplified by John Plaw’s ‘circular Cottage’ published in Sketches for Country Houses, Villas and Rural Dwellings, 1800: a cylindrical form capped by a conical thatched 50 The architect-designed cottage Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 3.3 George Richardson, drawing of a cottage for Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, 1770. Copyright: National Trust/Andrew Patterson The architect-designed cottage 51

Figure 3.4 George Richardson, Figure 1, ‘Plans and Elevations of Cottages’, New Designs in Architecture, consisting of plans, elevations and sections for various buildings, etc, 1788. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection

roof and central finial-chimney with internal rooms arranged around a central hearth that sees his earlier, 1794, sketch for ‘Shepherd’s Huts or Cottages’, discussed in the previous chapter, developed into an habitable building (Figure 3.6). Plaw describes the cottage as ‘built with quartering, or stud-work, lath and plastered … it will admit of four bedrooms in the roof and would be a pretty object in a Gentleman’s Park’.9 Across his various cottage related titles published through the 1790s, Plaw consistently emphasises the importance of neatness, regularity and uniformity, as per the caption for Plate 16 from Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements, 1796: ‘This

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 design for Double Cottages has the advantage of two regular elevations, of course their appearance is uniform, which is a pleasant thing on a Gentleman’s estate, where neatness and regularity are proposed’.10 In the early nineteenth century, influenced by the French neoclassical architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Joseph M. Gandy further experimented with simple geometric forms in a series of striking and fantastical designs for small cottages and shepherd’s cots published in Designs for Cottages, Cottages Farms and other rural buildings, 1805, and The Rural Architect, 1806. While at the other end of the process of architectural production, whiteness and symmetry were also appreciated by the informed consumer 52 The architect-designed cottage

Figure 3.5 Estate cottage, Milton Abbas, Dorset. Source: author

of rural retreats such as the gentleman traveller the Rev. John Swete who found it ‘impossible not to admire the simple Elegance of the plan, the double bow, the straw-clad roof, and the uninterrupted neatness’ of the Honourable General Vaughan’s cottage-retreat at Mamhead, Devon.11 Swete’s watercolour of Vaughan’s cottage depicts a two-storey building with double-bow front and what appears to be a rustic rough-log porch to the centre (Figure 3.7). On the larger scale of the small country-house or villa designed as a ‘cottage’, we find the same adherence to symmetry and proportion in designs of the 1790s across a range of titles from Sir John Soane’s 1793 Sketches in Architecture: Containing Plans and Elevations for Cottages and Villa, to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Charles Middleton’s Views for Cottages, Farm Houses and Villa, and, Richard Elsam’s An Essay on Rural Architecture, 1803. The cottage-villas presented in these turn-of-the-century books offer only gestures of ‘cottage’ in otherwise conventional neoclassical villa designs. Indeed, some of the designs for larger houses offered by Soane and Plaw are little more than standard mid- eighteenth-century neoclassical boxes, after Isaac Ware or Robert Morris, with the addition of a thatched roof: such as Plate VII, ‘Design for a Larger Cottage or Farm House’, from Plaw’s Rural Architecture (Figure 3.8).12 The plans of these early cottage-villas show a similarly conventional division and arrangement of rooms, that is: entrance hall to centre flanked The architect-designed cottage 53 Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 3.6 John Plaw, Plate XII, ‘circular Cottage’, Sketches for Country Houses, Villas and Rural Dwellings, 1800. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection 54 The architect-designed cottage

Figure 3.7 John Swete, ‘Cottage of the Honourable General Vaughan’, 1792. Source: Devon Heritage Services Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 3.8 John Plaw, Plate VII, ‘Design for a Larger Cottage or Farm House’, Rural Architecture or Designs from the simple cottage to the decorated villa, 1794. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection The architect-designed cottage 55 by dining room and/or parlour(s) with kitchen and offices or library/study to rear. For example, the villa depicted in Plate I of Elsam’s Essay on Rural Architecture is described as: ‘Elevations of the entrance and eating room fronts of a single Rustic Cottage designed for the Rev. Wm. Uvedale, proposed to be erected in the County of Suffolk’ (Figure 3.9). However, what is presented is a sophisticated late eighteenth-century neoclassical villa with an amphiprostyle portico to the side elevations juxtaposed with recessed central bays to the front and rear elevations: the front featuring an engaged column and entablature screen and the rear a single-storey semicircular projecting bay with balcony over. Nonetheless, from small to large, throughout the later eighteenth-century from the simple white-washed and thatched boxes of Richardson and Chambers, the geometric forms of Plaw to the thatched villas of Soane and Elsam, the early architect-designed cottage was conceived as ‘the pleasing rural Cot. Where simple Elegance, Proportion and Convenience Unite!’.13

It follows that the same principle of simplicity that dictated plan and elevation prevailed in the materials and external finishes of the architect-designed cottage, what is referred to in many texts of the period as the ‘dressing’. Accordingly Plaw states in Sketches for Country Houses, 1800, that ‘To me, it appears, that the most simple forms and finishings … are best … dressed in the artless and unaffected attire: such in my ideas, approach nearest to the true Cottage’.14 Edmund Bartell, writing a little later in 1804, concurred that:

The characteristic mark of a cottage is humility, as if, conscious of its inferiority, it should appear to retire beneath the shelter of its friendly woods; which it would not do, were it fabricated of glowing colours and costly materials … frippery, thus employed about the cottage, destroys its simplicity, and gives it a tricked-out appearance of many of the small houses in the suburbs of the metropolis.15

The views of Plaw and Bartell on what is the appropriate ‘appearance’ for a cottage reflect an essentialist, boiled-down interpretation of classicism typical of the ascetic strain within eighteenth-century neoclassical architecture, as practised by Robert Mylne or later Sir John Soane. These

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 architects followed Robert Morris’ belief that:

…preferring Plainess and Utility … I think a Building, well proportioned, without Dress, will ever please; as a plain coat may fit as gracefully and easy, on a well-proportioned Man … But if you will be lavish in Ornament, your structure will look rather like a Fop, with a superfluity of gaudy Tinsel.16

As the embodiment of that principle simplicity was not only applicable but fundamental to cottage design. In New Designs in Architecture, 1778, 56 The architect-designed cottage

Figure 3.9 Richard Elsam, Plate I, ‘Elevations of the entrance and eating room fronts Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 of a single Rustic Cottage designed for the Rev. Wm. Uvedale, proposed to be erected in the County of Suffolk’, An Essay on Rural Architecture, London, 1803. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection The architect-designed cottage 57 Richardson had proposed a very simple cottage dressing of plain white walls and thatch with little or no ornament; ‘The roof is intended to be covered with thatch; the front and side walls may be rough-cast and white- washed’.17 This preference for white-wash, thatch and little else also characterises Chambers’ cottages at Milton Abbas. However, later architects such as Plaw, publishing in the 1790s, added additional ornament that consisted of primitivist gestures such as rough-log columns, porches and pediments, and more ‘pretty’ adornments such as arcades and trelliswork. 18 In Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements, Plaw stipulates the dressing for a series of cottages:

Plate 18 Hunting or Shooting Lodge in the Cottage Style. This building is calculated for a small family; the front is intended to be rough cast, or peretto work.

Plate 19 A Small Villa in the Cottage Style … It is proposed the roof should be thatched, and the front stuccoed, with an arcade or portico of trillage work, fronting the South: the general appearance ancient.

Plate 23 Cottage or Farm House. Plans, elevation, and section calculated for a dwelling-house, on a small farm, or for a keeper’s lodge: the construction is cheap, the character simple and interesting. The front should be white and the roof thatched.19

In this manner and similar to the smaller cottages illustrated in Sir John Soane’s 1793 Sketches in Architecture, a white-washed, two-storey symmetrical thatched cottage with demi-lune upper-storey windows and a small overhanging canopy can be found among the estate cottages at Moggerhanger, Bedfordshire (Figure 3.10). The cottage is monogrammed ‘GT’ above the front door for landowner Godfry Thornton and dated 1800. This cottage was possibly designed by Soane while engaged on the design and construction of Moggerhanger House, 1790–9.20 However, writing in Ornamented Cottages, 1804, Edmund Bartell warned of the inappropriateness of additions such as porches:

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 …unless the porch is managed with great simplicity … it is undoubtedly the worst kind of entrance that can be adapted in cottage architecture … I allude to the mistaken idea of attaching an entrance porch for a mansion to a mere cottage covered with reeds.21

The same concern was raised by Soane himself, who worried in his eighth Royal Academy lecture, in part on cottages, that ‘instead of being distinguished by uniform simplicity or even rusticity, [cottages] are frequently plastered to resemble the most delicate stone, with a portico in the centre to protect a fine mahogany door and sash window’.22 58 The architect-designed cottage

Figure 3.10 Estate cottage, monogrammed ‘GT’, Moggerhanger Park, Bedfordshire. Source: author

Looking back in 1818, John Papworth reflected on this early cottage aesthetic:

The styles that have been introduced in small dwellings and rural retreats have not been numerous … sometimes it is formed from the simple mode of frugality … with a rigid adherence to its perfect simplicity; at another, more ornament is introduced, but of a very rustic character … In other instances extended license has been taken, and the model entirely neglected …23

As Papworth suggests, while symmetry and simplicity were the neoclassical

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 ideal in practice other forms of ornament were not uncommon, notably ‘Gothic’ details such as mullioned or trefoiled windows. Philip Southcote’s cottage-retreat at Woburn Farm and the Rev John Swete’s at Oxton, Devon, featured gothic ornament in otherwise classically-proportioned buildings and were both referred to as a ‘Gothic Cottage’. The cottages presented in Plaw’s Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvement, 1795, and Sketches for Country Houses, 1800, are all white-washed symmetrical buildings, however, many also feature mullioned and pointed- arch windows alongside thatch and rough-log columns or pilasters. Plate 18 for a ‘Hunting or Shooting Lodge in the Cottage Style’ even features a The architect-designed cottage 59 quatrefoil window in the apex of a pediment. Neoclassicism, while predominant, is not, therefore, the only narrative at play in the early architect-designed cottage. This apparent contradiction in ‘dressing’ and associated meaning highlights a frequent double-coding of cottage exteriors to communicate two seemingly conflicting sets of cultural references. The presence of both neoclassical and gothic cottage dressing reflects a wider eclecticism of structures within a typical eighteenth-century garden ranging from Classical temples, to Chinese pagodas and antiquarian fragments of historic buildings. However, it goes against our expectations of stylistic consistency within a single design. But, it appears to be the case that as long as the building was symmetrical in form, a mixture of ‘dressings’ does not appear to have given any cause for concern to ardent neoclassicists like Plaw or Elsam (the meaning of these gothic elements is discussed in the final chapter). Although, not all architects could tolerate this mixing of styles; Sir John Soane, for example, made his disapproval clear to the Royal Academy in 1815, wondering:

How these deviations from correct feeling can be tolerated, nay approved … I trust it is not necessary for me to caution the students further from being led astray by authorities, however great, to the adoption of false taste. Such ineffectual attempts at contrast and variety must be fatal to every sound principle of architecture.24

Gothic ornament notwithstanding, the consensus in the later eighteenth century was that the fundamental principles of cottage design were: ‘the character simple and interesting. The front should be white and the roof thatched’.25 However, these principles largely collapse when we turn to interior design. While floor plans mostly emphasised internal symmetry, simplicity did not always extend to decoration and furnishings.26 As explored in the next chapter, the cottage was primarily conceived as a monument, a designed-object to be first appreciated from the outside. The decoration and furnishing of its interior was not observed from the outside, and did not impact on its visual role within the landscape, therefore, it was considered by many architects and their clients to be a quite separate concern. As such, an appropriate cottage dressing did not necessarily extend

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 indoors where the late Georgian cottage interior was instead dictated by the neoclassical principle of ‘decorum’. As defined by the 1778 Builder’s Dictionary, decorum was the ‘keeping of a due respect between the inhabitant and the habitation’.27 Accordingly, hidden from the outside, on the inside ‘cottage’ gave way to furnishings appropriate to the wealth and social standing of the occupant. A small, single-room estate ‘cottage’ might have been primarily built and used only to store tools or garden furniture and not be ‘finished’ at all, that is left with exposed unplastered wall. A labourer’s cottage may have received the simplest finish of white-wash or plaster to the walls and a sealed floor, while 60 The architect-designed cottage a gentleman’s cottage-retreat could be internally decorated and furnished with some luxury and equipped to serve leisured cultural pursuits and social activities such as art collecting and appreciation, drawing, painting, reading, writing and entertaining. Yet, externally all three shared the appearance of a cottage. The plan of John Plaw’s design for a ‘circular Cottage’ includes niches for a display cabinet and bookcase suggesting he considered it a gentleman’s retreat (Figure 3.6). Similarly, the interior of the Rev. John Swete’s cottage-retreat on his Oxton estate in Devon was furnished with fine dining furniture to host dinner parties and was described in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1793 as ‘adorned on the inside with the productions of Mr Swete’s elegant pencil’. 28 Like the landed gentry, the aristocracy and royal family also furnished their cottage-retreats in a manner appropriate to their social rank and interests. William White’s History, gazetteer, and directory of Devonshire, 1850, reports on the Duke and Duchess of Bedfordshire’s Endsleigh Cottage, Devon, that:

The internal decorations of this ducal residence combine usefulness with taste. The dining room, with its emblazoned window; the library, with its choice selection of books; and the other principal apartments, are elegantly and tastefully furnished, and contain many fine paintings and other works of art.29

Queen Charlotte used the ground floor of her cottage at Kew to display her collection of Hogarth prints while the upstairs tea or pic-nic room was decorated with floral trelliswork painted by Princess Elizabeth, third daughter of the Queen and George III, and furnished with chairs and benches in a fashionable Chinese-style. If Queen Charlotte’s decoration was not dissimilar in content and character to John Swete’s, the principal bedroom of John Nash’s Royal Lodge, 1813–16, or ‘His Majesty’s Cottage’ at Windsor was very much more regal in character, featuring a ‘Graeco-Egyptian’ marble fireplace and gilded dolphins taken from the Royal yacht ‘Royal George’.30 These royal interior-extravagances, contrasted with a simple cottage exterior, echo the sumptuous interiors of the French hameaux buildings at Chantilly, 1773,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 and Petit Trianon, 1785 to 1792, although it is marked that no references to the French hameaux have been identified in any English architectural writing on cottages of the period.31 We get a glimpse of the social activities royal cottages housed from early photographs in the Royal Collection which show royals entertaining guests in fashionably decorated and furnished rooms. Photographs taken at Cambridge Cottage at Kew, London, by the society artist Ella Taylor in the mid-nineteenth century show scenes of dinner parties, art appreciation with the Prince of Wales and a whist party made up of ‘The Duke of Cambridge, Gen. Forster, Princess Mary, the Duchess, Lord Clyde’.32 The architect-designed cottage 61 This distinction, indeed disjuncture, between the external and interior design of a cottage did not please Sir John Soane who argued in his 1815 Royal Academy lecture that ‘the same feeling that is produced by the first sight of a building should be preserved … nay the furniture itself should partake of the decorative character of the building’.33 However, from the gentry to the royal family, most wealthy cottage-dwellers were pleased to ignore Soane. An extreme example of this can be found in the interiors of Knowle Cottage described in great detail in J. Harvey’s A Guide to Illustrations and Views of KNOWLE COTTAGE, Sidmouth, 1834. Knowle Cottage was a picturesque cottage ornée built in 1810 for Lord le Despenceur (Figure 9.3). Harvey appears overwhelmed by the elegant furnishings and extensive art collection assembled at Knowle Cottage by its next owner, Mr Thomas Fish. Some highlights from Harvey’s exhaustive room-by-room descriptions are worth quoting as the scale of the costly display at Knowle Cottage is staggering, demonstrating how far the fashionable cottage interior had travelled by the 1830s from the idea of the cottage articulated in the eighteenth century; even if art and art appreciation, or connoisseurship, were in themselves most suitable contemplative activities when on retreat:

THE GRAND SUITE OF ROOMS: In this window are four fine paintings upon glass, copies after Teniers … also three other celebrated pieces of Italian scenery from Patel, usualy [sic] termed ‘The French Claude’ … Over the chimney piece in the eastern room, is a fine portrait by Stewartson, a correct likeness of T. L. FISH ESQ … We are enabled to judge by three very good water colour drawings, that Mr. Fish is himself an artist of no inconsiderable talent; Tintern Abbey opposite the centre window is a very fine picture; and aMoonlight View, and a Sun set after Rain, are in no way inferior. We next enter the usual Apartment occupied by Mr. Fish, which is denominated THE MORNING ROOM: Herein, is a large window, and one also of smaller dimensions with a southern aspect: both of them, are embellished by paintings upon glass, of the most delicate touch. The Eddystone Lighthouse by moon-light is a chef d’oeuvre. Also two views on the Rhine, are richly coloured. Upon ten Tables in this room, are displayed the most costly, and magnificent productions, of nature,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 and art! The rare specimens of stones, amethysts, lapis lazuli, malekite, [sic] topaz, &c. are truly superb … A Chandelier of Dresden China hangs in the middle of the room, which, with the frame of a glass composed of the same material, is superb beyond the power of description … This collection, particularly in the article of Dresden China, outvies all we have before seen; a magnificent clock and bracket to correspond, is perfectly unique. The Mineralogist, and the Connoisseur, will we are assured regret the short space of time allotted for admiring the contents of this splendid room … all of which, have been collected at a vast expense.34 62 The architect-designed cottage The nineteenth-century interior of Mr. Fish’s seaside cottage-villa and its collection of paintings on landscape, religious and historical themes, statuary, curios, fine porcelain, silverware and geological samples was exceptional for a cottage-retreat but not unique in its use of the cottage interior as a high-status space to display art, to house books or fishing gear and to entertain guests.

The architect-designed cottages of the later eighteenth century were products of neoclassicism: plain, simple and well-proportioned. As, in part, an architectural model of the primitive hut, these early cottages not only followed these neoclassical principles but embodied neoclassical architectural theory. The external dressing of these cottages was white-wash, thatch and rough-log columns; although, without apparent contradiction, adherence to the principles of neoclassicism did not for some architects preclude the use of gothic ornament. However, simplicity did not necessarily extend to the cottage interior where interior decoration was determined by the intended function of a ‘cottage’ structure and the social rank of the intended occupant whether garden-store, labourer’s dwelling or gentleman’s retreat.

Notes 1 John Plaw, Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements: A Series of Domestic and Ornamental Designs, Suited to Parks, Plantations, Rides, Walks, Rivers, Farms, &c; Consisting of Fences, Paddock Houses, a Bath, a Dog-kennel, Pavillons ... ; Engraved on Thirty Eight Plates (London, 1796), p. A (advertisement). 2 Frank Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation (Cambridge, 1985), p. 54; John Gay, Rural Sports, cited in John Barrell, The Darkside of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730 –1840 (Cambridge, 1980), pp.37-9. 3 Thomson, James. The Seasons: By James Thomson; with His Life, an Index, and Glossary (London, 1793), Spring, pp. 35, 911–20. 4 John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London, 2002), p.48. 5 Historic Royal Palaces, ‘Queen Charlotte’s Cottage’, Historic Royal Palaces website www.hrp.org.uk/KewPalace/sightsandstories/buildinghistory/queencharlotte (last accessed 14 December 2014). From S. Groom and L. Prosser, Kew Palace, The Official Illustrated History (London, 2006). They state that the cottage was on the site by 1771. 6 Hunt, Picturesque, p. 111. 7 George Richardson, New Designs in Architecture, consisting of plans, elevations and sections for various buildings, etc. (London, 1788), p. 7. 8 Richardson, New Designs in Architecture, p. 7. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 9 John Plaw, Sketches for Country Houses, villas and rural dwellings also some designs for Cottages (London, 1800, 1823), p. 12. 10 Plaw, Ferme Ornee, p. 7. 11 John Swete (ed. Todd Gray), Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of the Reverend John Swete, 1789-1800, I (Exeter, 1997), p. 65. 12 John Plaw, Rural Architecture; or Designs, from the Simple Cottage to the Decorated Villa; including some which have been executed (London, 1794), plate VII. 13 Thomas Rawlins, Familiar Architecture: Consisting of Original Designs of Houses for Gentlemen and Tradesmen, Parsonages and Summer-Retreats (London, 1768), pp. ii–iii. The architect-designed cottage 63 14 Plaw, Sketches, p. 3. 15 Edmund Bartell, Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages (London, 1804), p. 11. 16 Morris, Rural Architecture, p. i. 17 Richardson, New Designs, p. 7. 18 Plaw, Sketches for Country Houses, p. 12. 19 Plaw, Ferme Ornee, pp. 8–9. 20 J. Boutwood, ‘Mogerhanger Park’, Bedfordshire Magazine (1956), 5; 38; D. Stroud, The Architecture of Sir John Soane (London 1961); P. Inskip and P. Jenkins, Mogerhanger House, Bedfordshire, A Historical Summary with Illustrations (London, 1994). 21 Bartell, Ornamented Cottages, p.20. 22 Lecture VIII, 1804–21. Lectures 1–6 written 04-7, presented 09, 2nd part written 12-14, presented 1815, represented in much same form 1815–19. Lecture VIII, in John Soane (ed. David Watkin), Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 599–600. 23 John Papworth, Rural Residences (London, 1818), p. 18. 24 Soane, Royal Academy Lectures, p. 601. 25 Plaw, Ferme Ornee, p. 9. Plate 23 Cottage or Farm House. Plans, elevation, and section calculated for a dwelling-house, on a small farm, or for a keeper’s lodge: the construction is cheap, the character simple and interesting. The front should be white and the roof thatched. 26 John E. Crowley, ‘“In Happier Mansions, Warm, and Dry”: The Invention of the Cottage as the Comfortable Anglo-American House’, Winterthur Portfolio, 32; 2/3 (1997), 169–88. 27 Anon, ‘The Builder’s Dictionary’ in The rudiments of architecture; or the young workman’s instructor. In two parts ... with twenty-three elegant designs of building, the most of which have been actually executed in North Britain. To which is added. The Builder’s Dictionary. Intended for those whose time will not allow them to attend teachers. (Edinburgh, 2nd edn 1778; reprint 1992). 28 Richard Polwhele, The History of Devonshire Vol. III, (London, 1806), pp. 162–3. ‘Adorned on the inside with the productions of Mr Swete’s elegant pencil’ from Anon., ‘Gazebo at Oxton’, Gentleman’s Magazine (1793), II, 593. 29 William White’s History, gazetteer, and directory of Devonshire (Sheffield, 1850), p. 622. 30 English Heritage Listing NGR: SU9798876512: Adelaide Cottage, Home Park, Windsor, Images of England website: www.imagesofengland.org.uk (last accessed 23 December 2014). 31 Hunt, Picturesque, p. 111. 32 Ella Taylor, Dinner Party at Cambridge Cottage: the Prince of Wales looking at Ella Taylor’s sketches, 29 Oct 1858 (Royal Collection: DM 5272, RL 18795); Ella Taylor, Whist Party at Cambridge Cottage, 1862 (Royal

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Collection: RL 18840 DM 5318). 33 Soane, Royal Academy Lectures, pp. 599–600. 34 J. Harvey, Guide to Illustrations and Views of KNOWLE COTTAGE, Sidmouth; The elegant Marine Villa Ornee of THOs FISH, Esq (Sidmouth, 1834), pp. 5–11.

Bibliography Anon. ‘Gazebo at Oxton’, Gentleman’s Magazine (1793), II, 593. Anon. ‘The Builder’s Dictionary’ in The rudiments of architecture; or the young workman’s instructor. In two parts ... with twenty-three elegant designs of building, the most of which have been actually executed in North Britain. To 64 The architect-designed cottage which is added. The Builder’s Dictionary. Intended for those whose time will not allow them to attend teachers. 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1778; reprint 1992). Barrell, John. The Darkside of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge, 1980). Boutwood, J. ‘Mogerhanger Park’, Bedfordshire Magazine (1956), 5; 38. Crowley, John E. ‘“In Happier Mansions, Warm, and Dry”: The Invention of the Cottage as the Comfortable Anglo-American House’, Winterthur Portfolio, 32; 2/3 (1997), 169–88. Elsam, Richard. An essay on rural architecture: illustrated with original and oeconomical designs; to which are added rural retreats and villas in the Gothic, Castle, Roman, and Grecian styles of architecture, with ideas for park-entrances, a mausoleum, and a design for the Naval Pillar, to immortalize British naval heroism: the whole comprising thirty plates, in aquatinta … an attempt to refute James Malton (London, 1803). Gandy, Joseph Michael. Designs for Cottage, Cottage Farms, and Other Rural Buildings including Entrance Gates and Lodges (London, 1805). Groom, S. and Prosser, L. Kew Palace, The Official Illustrated History (London, 2006). Harvey, J. Guide to Illustrations and Views of KNOWLE COTTAGE, Sidmouth; The elegant Marine Villa Ornee of THOs FISH, Esq (Sidmouth, 1834). Historic Royal Palaces, ‘Queen Charlotte’s Cottage’, Historic Royal Palaces website www.hrp.org.uk/KewPalace/sightsandstories/buildinghistory/queencharlotte (last accessed 14 December 2014). Hunt, John Dixon. The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London, 2002). Inskip, P. and Jenkins, P. Mogerhanger House, Bedfordshire, A Historical Summary with Illustrations (London, 1994). Middleton, Charles. Picturesque and Architecture Views for Cottages, Farm Houses and Country Villas (London, 1793). Morris, Robert. Rural Architecture: consisting of regular designs of plans and elevations for Buildings in the Countryside (London, 1750). Papworth, John Buonarotti. Rural Residences (London, 1818). Plaw, John. Sketches for Country Houses, villas and rural dwellings also some designs for Cottages (London, 1800, 1823). Plaw, John. Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements. A series of Domestic and Ornamental Designs, suited to Parks, Plantations, Rides, Walks, Rivers and Farms … calculated for landscape and picturesque effects. Consisting of Fences Paddock Houses A Bath A Dog-Kennel Pavilions Farm-Yards Fishing-House Sporting-Boxes Shooting-Lodges Double Cottages. By John Plaw, Architect, author of Rural Architecture. (London, 1796). Plaw, John. Rural Architecture or Designs from the simple cottage to the decorated Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 villa (London, 1794). Rawlins, Thomas. Familiar Architecture: Consisting of Original Designs of Houses for Gentlemen and Tradesmen, Parsonages and Summer-Retreats (London, 1768). Richardson, George. New Designs in Architecture, consisting of plans, elevations and sections for various buildings, etc. (London, 1788). Soane, John. (ed. David Watkin). Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge, 1996). Soane, John. Sketches in Architecture: containing Plans and Elevations of Cottages, Villas and Other Useful Buildings (London, 1793 & 1798). Stack, Frank. Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation (Cambridge, 1985). The architect-designed cottage 65 Stroud, D. The Architecture of Sir John Soane (London, 1961). Swete, John (ed. Todd Gray). Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of the Reverend John Swete, 1789–1800, I–V (Exeter, 1997). Thomson, James. The Seasons: By James Thomson; with His Life, an Index, and Glossary (London, 1793). Ware, Isaac. A Complete Body of Architecture (London, 1758). White, William. History, gazetteer, and directory of Devonshire (Sheffield, 1850). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 4 The cottage in Arcadia

While the idea of the cottage gained currency across the arts in the eighteenth century, the specific catalyst for the construction of cottages, or buildings that represented the idea ‘cottage’, was changing tastes in gardening that saw a return to fashion of associative objects. The first architect-designed cottages of the 1760s and 1770s were built on country estates where they were conceived as elements within wider landscape design compositions. Cottage design was therefore articulated in treatises through constant reference to scenery and landscape, as per the captions for cottage designs in John Papworth’s Rural Residences, such as:

3. A Cottage, adapted to Garden Scenery or on an Entrance Lodge 4. A Steward’s Cottage, adapted to Park or Garden Scenery 5. A Bailiff’s Cottage, designed as an ornamental building in Park Scenery.1

In the history of landscape gardening the later eighteenth century saw a reaction against the mid-century fashion for the bald, empty landscape gardens of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Garden designers and their patrons returned to seats, summer-houses and retreats that had been popular earlier in the century. These small structures were carefully selected and placed within a landscape so that their observation would stir the imagination of the garden wanderer with a specific idea or association; an idea that would have been familiar to and appreciated by the intended audience such as

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Antiquity (Classical temples), Ancient Briton (King Alfred’s Tower at Stourhead), the making of Modern Britain (Temple of British Worthies at Stowe), the exoticism of China or India (the pagoda at Kew or Hindu seat at Mount Edgcumbe, Cornwall), or, perhaps, the idea of the cottage.2 Also popular, though much derided by some architects and critics such as John Ruskin, were Swiss Cottages and Alpine Lodges erected to conjure memories of the Grand Tour and the Alps in the grounds of, for instance, the Shuttleworth estate in Bedfordshire, Endsleigh Cottage in Devon or Osborne House, Isle of Wight. Amongst the range of exciting remembered or imagined worlds offered by these associative objects, a well-placed cottage was 68 The cottage in Arcadia intended to bring to mind thoughts of Arcadian pastoral retreat and the nobility of the simple life.

The relationship between the observed cottage and the observer needs to be understood in terms of eighteenth-century notions of observation, association and the imagination. In terms of garden design and landscape, a complex relationship was constructed between emblematic garden objects, individual experience and the imagination whereby ‘habits of association in paintings and poetry were readily transferred to gardens’.3 What you had read in books and seen in paintings would come back to you when walking in the garden on being given the right visual trigger, thus enhancing your experience. As such, whatever the building’s internal use, the external appearance of a ‘cottage’ was as important as its setting; whether used as a retreat or gate-lodge. The theory of observation was formulated in early eighteenth-century literary criticism such as Joseph Addison’s essay on Virgil’s Georgics, ‘The Pleasures of the Fancy and Imagination’, first published in 1712. Addison wrote, ‘This kind of Poetry I am now speaking of, addresses itself wholly to the imagination … It raises in our minds a pleasing variety of scenes and landscapes’.4 Addison’s judgement was underpinned by the belief in an intimate link between the ‘imagination and the exterior world of real objects and things’.5 Addison divided ‘pleasure’ into primary pleasures ‘which entirely proceed from such Objects as are before our Eyes’, and secondary pleasures, ‘which flow from the Ideas of visible Objects, when the Objects are not actually before the Eye, but are called up into our Memories, or formed into agreeable Visions of Things, that are either Absent or Fictitious’.6 In the wider context of eighteenth-century culture, this visual relationship between the individual and the landscape can be equated with the growth in ‘private’ reading whereby the individuality of the imagination is mediated by the idea of community, so although appreciation is a private act of cultural consumption it is done in order to experience the ideals of society as a whole.7 The importance of this intimate connection between the observer and the observed object was well understood by architects such as James Malton who refers directly to the imagination in Essay on British Cottage

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Architecture, 1798, when he writes ‘when mention is made of the kind of dwelling called a Cottage, I figure in my imagination a small house in the country’.8 More explicitly, Edmund Bartell writes in Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamental Cottages, 1804, ‘in the review of all objects, we are apt to associate certain ideas, and to make them our standard of judgement’.9 Similarly, William Pocock writes in Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, 1807:

Of Rustic Cottages … In many situations on a large estate these rustic buildings will form pleasing and characteristic objects in the landscape. The cottage in Arcadia 69 When the mind is filled with beautiful and sublime ideas from the contemplation of an extensive prospect. As the circle of vision gradually contracts, the eye dwells with peculiar delight on the clay built Cottage covered with thatch.10

In similar vein John Papworth argues in Rural Residences, 1818, that ‘to apply the pictures of his fancy … the imagination readily converts the scene…by the association of ideas produced in the mind of the spectator’.11 While J.C. Loudon notes in the Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture, 1846, that on the matter of choosing an architectural style appropriate to a building’s setting:

…the style adopted ought to exercise some influence on the imagination; and, therefore, whichever style may be selected, it ought always to be accompanied, as far as practicable, by such circumstances as may serve to heighten its effect on the mind.12

The cottage was intended to sit within a landscape garden setting that was the product of the same Classical literature. The Arcadian landscapes described in Roman texts provided a template for an idealised rural landscape to be admired, desired and replicated. These gardens reflected the same Arcadian imagery appreciated in the seventeenth-century pastoral landscapes of painters such as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin that were consumed by aristocrats and other wealthy collectors (often in conjunction with the Grand Tour to Italy). Such paintings depicted pastoral scenes of grasslands peppered with gods, heroes, shepherds, woods, rocks, streams, temples, farms, castles and distant hill-towns. On the ground, many eighteenth-century English landowners had the resources to reject what architect and landscape designer John Papworth described as ‘the practice of clipping evergreens with grotesque and artificial forms so long the disgrace of modern times, [as practised by] the Italians, the French, and the Germans’ and to instead create this imaginary Classical world within the grounds of their country estates.13 To cite a well-known example, in the 1730s at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, the landscape painter-cum-architect William Kent, architect James Gibbs,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 garden designer Charles Bridgeman and sculptor Giacomo Leoni were variously employed by Lord Cobham to transform John Vanburgh and Bridgeman’s baroque park of the early 1700s into an Arcadian landscape complete with lawns, stands of trees, lakes, bridges and other garden structures such as Kent’s Temple of Ancient Virtue (appropriately located in the ‘Elysian Fields’). In a virtuous circle of cultural production and consumption, Stowe was celebrated in poetry by Alexander Pope in Epistle IV to Lord Burlington, 1736: an exhortation on the importance of deferring to place – what we term site – in garden design.14 Like Pope’s Epistle, early eighteenth-century aristocratic gardening activities were supported and informed by this wider (if socially 70 The cottage in Arcadia closed) cultural dialogue that admired Classical descriptions of landscapes and advocated their imitation; as per Joseph Addison’s quoting and paraphrasing of Virgil’s Georgics in the Spectator, 1712, to give authority to his vision of an ideal landscape ‘in anything that hath such a variety or regularity as may seem the effect of design in what we call the works of chance’.15 In the mid-eighteenth century Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown introduced a new landscape aesthetic informed by Edmund Burke’s notion of the beautiful and the sublime that advocated a topographic composition free of objects: a house set within an empty landscape of rolling lawns. However, ‘being at once useful and pleasing’, landscape objects such as seats and retreats came back into fashion in the later eighteenth century and remained so through the nineteenth century.16 As part of the revived fashion for small garden structures, architects and their landowning patrons of the later eighteenth century experimented with communicating the idea ‘cottage’ through the outward appearance of a range of estate buildings. Whether the cottage on the lake at Stourhead or the cottages of Milton Abbas, early architect- designed cottages were meant to be observed within the wider landscape alongside other structures that conveyed similar or different meanings to the observer, be these temples, pagodas or rudimentary garden structures as promoted by John Plaw in Ideas for Rustic Seats including Garden Seats, Summer Houses, Hermitages, Cottages, 1790,17 for example, gate lodges in the form of a Roman triumphal-arch were built at Holkham Hall, Norfolk in 1760 (designed by Matthew Brettingham after William Kent) and at Berrington Hall, Herefordshire, 1788–91, by Henry Holland (Figure 4.1). However, as John Papworth stresses in Rural Residences, 1818, it was of the utmost importance that all new estate buildings fitted within the overall scheme and for this ‘cottages’ were a good choice:

Perhaps no sort of building is more decorative to the rural scenery than that which is designed in the ‘cottage style’ … Few embellishments of an estate are more interesting than those small buildings which compose the farm-offices and residences for the active, the superannuated, or other servants of the domain, particularly if they are designed in a manner comfortable to the surrounding scenery, and distributed about the property with judgement.18 Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Here, the hermitage has an interesting parallel history to the cottage as an eighteenth-century landscape feature. Hermitages were also popular with landowners as a temporary retreat or garden seat though in design these tended to appear as rudimentary structures offering limited shelter. In The Hermit in the Garden, Gordon Campbell describes how some landowners employed ‘hermits’ to live in these structures and accost visitors.19 Indeed, in terms of construction, the architect-designed cottage can be seen as an architectural progression from these expressively crude, open structures towards a more substantial, enclosed dwelling. The cottage in Arcadia 71

Figure 4.1 Triumphal arch gate-lodge, Berrington Hall, Herefordshire. Source: author

By the early nineteenth century landscape gardens could boast a plethora of features and landscape objects ‘in varied spots in the course of the walks, ornamental seats, alcoves, temples, bridges and aviaries’ within a coherent ‘great whole’.20 However, good aesthetic judgement was required. As a cautionary tale against over-packing your landscape garden with such objects J. C. Loudon recounts a visit to the Earl of Shrewsbury’s gardens at Alton Towers in 1826 where amidst a staggering array of landscape features he sees a ‘cottage’ made from a chimney and dormer windows fixed to a large rock:

…the valley, to the bottom, and, on the opposite side, displays such a

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 labyrinth of terraces, curious architectural walls, trelliswork arbours, vases, statues, stone stairs, wooden stairs, turf stairs, pavements, gravel and grass walks, ornamental buildings, bridges, porticoes, temples, pagodas, gates, iron railings, parterres, jets, ponds, streams, seats, fountains, caves, flower-baskets, water-falls, rocks, cottages, trees, shrubs, beds of flowers, ivied walls, rockwork, shellwork, rootwork, moss-houses, old trunks of trees, entire dead trees etc, that it is utterly impossible for words to give any idea of the effect. There is one stair of 100 steps; a cottage for a blind harper, as large as a farm house; and an imitation cottage, formed by sticking windows, and two chimneys, 72 The cottage in Arcadia accompanied by patches of heath to imitate thatch, on the sloping surface of a large grey rock. This, seen at a distance, protruding from a steep bank of wood, bore naturally some resemblance to the roof of a cottage grey with lichens; and the chimney-tops and windows were added, to complete the idea.21

Site was a key consideration when planning a cottage or group of cottages within a landscape. Cottages had to be placed where they would enhance a view. As Edmund Bartell writes in Ornamental Cottages, the retreat must ‘if possible, be so placed as to make a pleasing object in the landscape and at the same time be a comfortable retreat to its inhabitant’.22 Bartell would have approved of the Rev. John Swete’s cottage-retreat at Oxton, Devon, as described by the poet Robert Polwhele on the occasion of his visit in 1792 as, ‘rising, on one of the highest eminences above the woods, a pleasure house called the Cottage, may well be deemed sacred to Friendship and the Muses’.23 As George Richardson summarises in New Designs in Architecture, 1788:

Cottages with thatched roofs may be considered of various kind… Sometimes they are employed on purpose to afford a rural prospect on some favourable spot, not far from the country residence of gentlemen of taste and fortune; and at other times they serve for a picturesque view and retreat in parks or in pleasure grounds.24

Queen Charlotte’s Cottage at Kew is perhaps the principal example of the urban or suburban-park cottage but we can also consider the more public setting of the ‘reading-room’ thatched cottage among the various pavilions and entertainments at Beulah Spa pleasure garden, Norwood, Surrey.25

The gentleman’s cottage-retreat was also an important position from which to observe a view. Cottage-retreats in particular, were, therefore, intended both as objects to be observed and the point of observation (in contrast to the gate lodge or estate worker’s cottage where the inhabitant’s view from the cottage was not a consideration). For example, John Swete favourably describes and illustrates the site and sight-lines of ‘Fordland Cottage’ a retreat built on his Devon estate by James White, Esq (Figure 4.2): Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Two miles of Lane on which I was now riding … brought me to a small grove of trees, contiguous to which, was Fordland, a Cottage belonging to Counsellor White of Exeter … The House, detach’d a little from that of the Farm, was a shell of two rooms, one over the other, having the Windows at the Western end, in a segment of a Circle – from these, there was a command of a small lawn with a peep into two Vallies.26

Beyond the country estate, cottage-villas – relatively substantial rural or semirural houses with gardens but no attached estate – were also carefully The cottage in Arcadia 73

Figure 4.2 John Swete, ‘Fordland Cottage: belonging to James White Esq’, 1797. Source: Devon Heritage Services

sited to engage with the wider landscape and views from windows in principal rooms were aligned with a specific view. For example, the views from Knowle Cottage, Sidmouth, were described in A Guide to Illustrations and Views of KNOWLE COTTAGE, 1834.27 Significantly, the framed views from windows where you can ‘cast your eye down the beautiful sloping avenue’ are described as part of the total visual experience of each room alongside paintings and other objects to ‘produce an effect which cannot be surpassed’.28

In terms of other estate buildings, the site of a ‘cottage’ was determined by who was most likely to observe its external appearance; that is, those estate buildings close to roads and walks within an estate that were frequented or

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 observed by the landowner and invited guests were more likely to be dressed as cottages. For example, examining the ‘cottage’ dressing applied to the exteriors of workers’ cottages across the Duke of Bedford’s estate villages in Bedfordshire it is striking how the amount of decoration increases sharply as the visitor approaches the entrances to the Woburn Abbey Home Park, culminating in the heavily ornamented cottages surrounding the entrance gate lodge at Ridgmont, designed by Edward Blore in the 1830s.29 This chimes with John Papworth’s advice on the decoration of gate lodges and how they require particular attention specifically because they are the first buildings viewed by visitors: 74 The cottage in Arcadia When the house is situated a considerable distance within its boundary, a lodge or residence for some servant to the proprietor is needful for convenience of himself [the proprietor], and visitors … it is by no means necessary that this building should assume an ostentatious display … but being the introductory medium to the dwelling, where the visitor receives his first impression of the place, it is important that it should exhibit propriety and fitness – have fair pretension to suitableness of character with the estate to which it belongs … in general it may be said of lodges that they should be considered a higher class of cottage.30

In contrast, while the cottages of outlying villages such as Lidlington follow similar plan and elevation as those in Ridgmont, there is a complete lack of decoration (Figures 4.3 and 4.4). These villages and their cottages would only have been seen by their inhabitants and the Duke’s estate managers. Therefore, in architectural texts the observer is assumed to be the landowners’ social peer. This is important to our understanding of the estate cottage. The message communicated by these buildings was in a specific visual language that required a specific education in order to understand it. They were only intended to be ‘read’, to be seen and correctly interpreted, by specific observers (a much smaller number than the totality of people who would have regularly seen those buildings). While architect-designed cottages were intended to represent simple rural buildings that message was not intended for the consumption of country folk – culturally and often literally illiterate estate workers – but for the informed-gaze of the educated observer: the owners of an estate or villa and their invited guests. Significantly, therefore, because of the requirement for visual literacy we can dismiss the possibility that the ‘cottage’ message was intended for the instruction of agricultural labourers who were, for the most part, not educationally equipped to understand it. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 4.3 Estate cottage, Ridgmont, Figure 4.4 Estate cottage, Lidlington, Bedfordshire. Bedfordshire. Source: author Source: author The cottage in Arcadia 75 In many of the garden schemes of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries planned estate villages or groups of cottages were designed to fit within the wider landscape. Garden design followed the topographic tradition established in the first half of the eighteenth century that emphasised the natural features and contours of a site as per Alexander Pope’s famous exhortation to ‘Consult the genius of the place in all; That tells the water or to rise, or fall; or helps th’ ambitious hill the heavens to scale’.31 Therefore, like the juxtaposition of neoclassical temples with curving hills and lakes, the symmetry and regularity of individual cottages was juxtaposed with an irregular, curving street-plan. The foremost example of this juxtaposition is Sir William Chambers’ scheme for Milton Abbas, Dorset, 1773, where forty neat and regular cottages line a single street laid out in a gentle, serpentine S-curve that follows the natural contour of a shallow valley opening out to a lake at the bottom of the hill (Figure 4.5). At the same time as Milton Abbas Robert Adam laid out the elegant semicircular terrace and green for Sir James Lowther’s Lowther Village, Cumbria, 1766–73. In the Analysis of Beauty, 1753, the S-curve was famously championed by William Hogarth as the most beautiful of lines, where he writes ‘the serpentine line, as the human form, which line hath the power of super-adding grace to beauty. Note, forms of most grace have least of the straight line in them’.32 Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 4.5 Milton Abbas, Dorset. Source: author 76 The cottage in Arcadia By the late eighteenth century curves in planning were advocated by architects such as Richard Elsam, who otherwise deplored irregularity in building design as:

…an irregularity striking to every eye, have in my estimation the pre- eminence, in point of beauty, over the regular formal built squares and spacious streets; which, however uniform, well built or well proportioned, are not calculated to gratify the sight or captivate understanding.33

However, the serpentine curve of Milton Abbas followed almost a century of grid-planned estate villages from New Houghton, Houghton Hall, Norfolk, laid out in 1729, to the identical brick-built rows of Nuneham Courtenay, Oxforshire, in the 1760s (Figure 4.6). Yet, the curve did not entirely replace the straight main street as many estates continued to line cottages along straight main streets; to take two examples from Bedfordshire: the thatched picturesque cottages of Old Warden, built in the 1820s, and the Tudor or Old English cottages of nearby Campton, built in the 1850s, are both laid out in a straight approach to the main gates as at New Houghton. The Bedford Estates’ numerous villages in Bedfordshire were also uniformly laid out in straight terraces by Edward Blore in the 1830s while the Bedford Estate cottages in Tavistock, Devon, are arranged in geometric blocks designed in the 1840s and 1850s by architect-surveyor to the Bedford Estates, Theophilus Jones (Figure 4.7). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 4.6 The Street, New Houghton, Houghton Hall, Norfolk. Source: author The cottage in Arcadia 77

Figure 4.7 West Bridge Cottages, Tavistock, Devon. Source: author

Influenced by a generation of picturesque landscape and architectural design, J. C. Loudon, writing in 1846, outlined his ideal village where he goes beyond the S-curve and suggests the ideal is a scattered settlement of irregularly clustered cottages:

The effect of an irregular street … is often highly picturesque; but I should prefer a scattered village, in which the houses are arranged in groups, as being more convenient, and generally more pleasing. Cottages together in a continued row have too much of the appearance … of a dirty back street in a country town … a more cheerful effect produced, where the houses are scattered in irregular groups, and at irregular

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 distances, on each side of the road, and around the village green.34

Loudon’s ideal of the ‘scattered village’ is exemplified at Edensor, the picturesque estate village built at the gates of the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth estate in Derbyshire in the 1840s to designs by Joseph Paxton and John Robertson of Derby. Edensor is a mixture of buildings in Old English and Italianate styles. The village is laid out along a serpentine main street terminating in a gated green facing the main driveway to Chatsworth house. Unlike Milton Abbas the cottages are arranged in single houses, clusters and terraces. The ‘scattered village’ is perhaps most famously represented by John 78 The cottage in Arcadia Nash’s estate village of Blaise Hamlet near Bristol designed for John Harford in 1812 (Figure 4.8). The cottages at Blaise Hamlet are arranged in clusters of two or three around a meandering, circular pathway. The planning of Blaise Hamlet is particular interesting as it creates a self-contained imaginary world. The village is at some distance from the main house and garden and is enclosed by a high boundary-wall with no views in and no views out towards what was the surrounding working agricultural landscape. All the cottages look inwards towards the central green and pathway and the whole is only accessed by a small gated entrance-way. The composition is signed by John Nash (on the base of the village pump in the centre of the green) and was exhibited by him as a model at the Royal Academy. Richard Elsam recalled ‘a most admirable design for a village was publicly exhibited in the Royal Academy, a few years since by that ingenious architect Mr Nash’.35 Suburban villa schemes such as Nash’s Regent’s Park developments of Park Villages East and West, 1823, and the speculative developments of St John’s Wood and Maida Vale in the 1840s translated the scattered village ideal into urban planning. Unlike conventional city expansion schemes that looked inwards towards the city these were intended to look outwards to the countryside and thus engage with the rural ideal.36 As at Edensor or Blaise Hamlet, the streets of these schemes follow irregular, looping lines. Outside of London, further suburban developments of the period were planned at resort/retirement towns such as Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Tunbridge Wells had been a spa resort for aristocrats and the gentry to take Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 4.8 Plan of Blaise Hamlet, Bristol. Source: author The cottage in Arcadia 79 the waters since the seventeenth century. The town grew as a fashionable resort through the eighteenth century culminating in the 56-acre Calverley Park housing development, 1826–40. Calverley Park was designed by Decimus Burton centred on ‘an arc of villas overlooking a landscaped valley’ inspired by Nash’s Regent’s Park developments (Figure 4.9).37 Like Nash’s developments these villas are mostly in an Italianate or Old English style interspersed with examples in a more overtly cottage-style such as nos 5–11 ‘steep red brick cottage ornee villas, of c 1853–9’, probably by William Widdicombe, Keston Lodge, Farnborough Lodge and Burton’s own house, Baston Cottage (Figure 10.4).38 The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century also saw the growth of coastal resorts and the building of seaside villas. Seaside resorts were the maritime playgrounds of England’s aristocracy and gentry who were drawn by the picturesque coastal landscape, lack of urban development and, prior to the arrival of the trains and popular tourism, the promise of social exclusivity.39 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Sidmouth in Devon was one of the most socially exclusive seaside resorts, founded and developed by a London merchant and property speculator, Emmanuel Lousada. As in the case of Knowle Cottage discussed above, many of the Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 4.9 Plan of Calverley Park, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Source: author 80 The cottage in Arcadia aristocratic cottage-retreats that characterise Sidmouth stand alone, discretely sited along the Sidmouth coastline where they capture exceptional views of the natural harbour and sea. However, this highly exclusive, scattered development pattern is complimented by the Elysium Fields. The Elysium Fields is an enclosed development of cottage ornée discretely plotted along a single serpentine lane that winds uphill along a small valley away from the coast.

Rustic cottages developed from rustic seats that first appeared in the earlier eighteenth century as part of the range of structures positioned around the circulation routes of designed landscape gardens with the intention of evoking particular literary or historical associations. By the late eighteenth century the architect-designed cottage was a familiar feature of the designed landscape alongside an expanding repertoire of themed estate buildings. Yet, as the cottage-style spilled over from the estate into the wider countryside, parks, pleasure grounds, the city suburbs and resorts towns, the association with pastoral poetry, retreat and landscape remained the central appeal of the cottage.

Notes 1 John Papworth, Rural Residences (London, 1818), p. 21. 2 John E. Crowley, ‘“In Happier Mansions, Warm, and Dry”: The Invention of the Cottage as the Comfortable Anglo-American House’, Winterthur Portfolio, 32; 2/3 (1997), 179. 3 John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London, 2002), p. 35. 4 Joseph Addison, ‘An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics’ in Thomas Tickell (ed.), The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq; in Four Volumes, vol. 1 (London, 1721), pp. 249–50. 5 Joseph Addison, Spectator no. 416 in Nick Grindle, ‘Virgil’s Prospects: The Gentry and the Representation of Landscape in Addison’s Theory of the Imagination’, Oxford Art Journal, 29.2 (2006), 188–191. 6 Ibid. 7 Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (London, 1999), p. 6. 8 James Malton, Essay on British Cottage Architecture being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798), p. 2.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 9 Edmund Bartell, Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages (London, 1804), p. 20. 10 William Fuller Pocock, Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages (London, 1807), p. 5. 11 Papworth, Rural Residences, pp. 16–18. 12 J. C. Loudon, Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture, Vol. 2, (London, 1846; reprint Chippenham, 2000), p. 773. 13 John Papworth, Hints on Ornamental Gardening (London, 1823). 14 Alexander Pope, Epistle IV, To Lord Burlington (London, 1736). 15 Joseph Addison, ‘Wednesday, June 25, 1712’ and ‘Wednesday, June 25’, The Spectator, 414 (1712). 16 Papworth, Hints on Gardening, pp. 15, 29. The cottage in Arcadia 81 17 See also: William and John Halfpenny, Rural Architecture in the Gothic Taste … huts, retreats, summer and winter hermitages … rustic seats (London, 1752); John Plaw, Ideas for Rustic Furniture Proper for Garden Seats, Summer Houses, Hermitages, Cottages (London, 1790). 18 Papworth, Rural Residences, p. 21 19 Gordon Campbell, The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome (Oxford, 2013). 20 Papworth, Hints on Gardening, pp. 15, 29. 21 Loudon, Encyclopaedia, pp. 787–9. 22 Bartell, Ornamented Cottages, p. 7. 23 Richard Polwhele, The History of Devonshire Vol. III, (London, 1806), pp. 162–3. 24 George Richardson, New Designs in Architecture, consisting of plans, elevations and sections for various buildings, etc. (London, 1788), p. 7. 25 James Stevens Curl, Georgian Architecture (Newton Abbot, 1993), pp.162–3. For further examination of the architecture of pleasure gardens see also James Stevens Curl, Spas, Wells, and Pleasure Gardens of London (Whitstable, 2010). 26 John Swete (ed. Todd Gray), Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of the Reverend John Swete, 1789–1800, Vol. IV (Tiverton, 1997), pp. 25–6. 27 Anon., Guide to Illustrations and Views of KNOWLE COTTAGE, Sidmouth; The elegant Marine Villa Ornee of THOs FISH, Esq (Sidmouth, 1834), pp. 5–11. 28 Ibid. The views from Knowle Cottage were illustrated in various other publications including A New Guide to Knowle Cottage, the Villa of T. L. Fish, Esq, 1840, which features an 1826 lithograph of ‘the drawing room window of Knowle Cottage … drawn from nature …’ by George Rowe which depicts the same view framed by the window casement: a lawn receding into the middle distance flanked by trees and parrots. These guides were preceded by the Rev. Edmund Butcher’s The beauties of Sidmouth displayed 3rd edn (Sidmouth, 1820), which includes a ‘View of Sidmouth from Knowle Cottage’, p. 44, by H. Haseler that places the garden lawns in the foreground of an expansive south coast seascape. 29 J. M. Robinson, ‘Farming on a Princely Scale: Estate Buildings of the 5th and 6th Dukes of Bedford at Woburn, 1787–1839’, Architectural Review, Nov (1976), 280–1. 30 Papworth, Rural Residences, p. 33. 31 Pope, Epistle IV. 32 William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753; Menston, 1971), p. 38. 33 Richard Elsam, An essay on rural architecture: illustrated with original and oeconomical designs; to which are added rural retreats and villas in the Gothic, Castle, Roman, and Grecian styles of architecture, with ideas for park-entrances, a mausoleum, and a design for the Naval Pillar, to immortalize British naval heroism: the whole comprising thirty plates, in aquatinta … an attempt to refute James Malton (London, 1803), p. 3.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 34 Loudon, Encyclopaedia, p. 811. 35 Elsam, Rural Architecture, p. 3. 36 See Mireille Galinou, Cottages and Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb (London, 2010). 37 John Newman, The Buildings of England: Kent: West and the Weald (Yale, 1969, revised 2012), pp. 608–20. 38 Ibid., pp.622–3. 39 John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London, 2011), p. 33. 82 The cottage in Arcadia Bibliography Addison, Joseph. ‘An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics’, in Thomas Tickell (ed.), The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq; in Four Volumes, vol. 1 (London, 1721), pp. 248–58. Addison, Joseph. ‘Wednesday, June 25, 1712’ and ‘Wednesday, June 25’, The Spectator, 414 (1712). Bartell, Edmund. Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages (London, 1804). Butcher, Edmund. The beauties of Sidmouth displayed. 3rd edn (Sidmouth, 1820). Campbell, Gordon. The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome (Oxford, 2013). Crowley, John E. ‘“In Happier Mansions, Warm, and Dry”: The Invention of the Cottage as the Comfortable Anglo-American House’, Winterthur Portfolio, 32; 2/3 (1997), 169–88. Defoe, Daniel. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (London, 1724–6; New Haven, 1992). Dixon Hunt, John. The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London, 2002). Elsam, Richard. An essay on rural architecture: illustrated with original and oeconomical designs; to which are added rural retreats and villas in the Gothic, Castle, Roman, and Grecian styles of architecture, with ideas for park-entrances, a mausoleum, and a design for the Naval Pillar, to immortalize British naval heroism: the whole comprising thirty plates, in aquatinta … an attempt to refute James Malton (London, 1803). Gandy, Joseph Michael. Designs for Cottage, Cottage Farms, and Other Rural Buildings including Entrance Gates and Lodges (London, 1805). Galinou, Mireille. Cottages and Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb (London, 2010). Grindle, Nick. ‘Virgil’s Prospects: The Gentry and the Representation of Landscape in Addison’s Theory of the Imagination’, Oxford Art Journal, 29.2 (2006), 185–95. Halfpenny, William and John. Rural Architecture in the Gothic Taste … huts, retreats, summer and winter hermitages … rustic seats (London, 1752). Harvey, J. Guide to Illustrations and Views of KNOWLE COTTAGE, Sidmouth; The elegant Marine Villa Ornee of THOs FISH, Esq (Sidmouth, 1834). Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty (1753; Menston, 1971). Loudon, J. C. Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture, Vol. 2, (London, 1846; reprint Chippenham, 2000). Malton, James. Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 McCann, Andrew. Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (London, 1999). Newman, John. The Buildings of England: Kent: West and the Weald (Yale, 1969; revised 2012). Papworth, John Buonarotti. Hints on Ornamental Gardening (London, 1823). Papworth, John Buonarotti. Rural Residences (London, 1818). Plaw, John. Ideas for Rustic Furniture Proper for Garden Seats, Summer Houses, Hermitages, Cottages (London, 1790). Pocock, William Fuller. Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages (London, 1807). Polwhele, Richard. The History of Devonshire Vol. III, (London, 1806). The cottage in Arcadia 83 Pope, Alexander. Epistle IV, To Lord Burlington (London, 1736). Richardson, George. New Designs in Architecture, consisting of plans, elevations and sections for various buildings, etc. (London, 1788). Robinson, J. M. ‘Farming on a Princely Scale: Estate Buildings of the 5th and 6th Dukes of Bedford at Woburn, 1787–1839’, Architectural Review, Nov (1976), 276–81. Stevens Curl, James. Spas, Wells, and Pleasure Gardens of London (Whitstable, 2010). Stevens Curl, James. Georgian Architecture (Newton Abbot, 1993). Swete, John (ed. Todd Gray). Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of the Reverend John Swete, 1789–1800, I–V (Tiverton, 1997). Urry, John and Jonas Larsen. The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London, 2011). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 5 Architects, patrons and connoisseurs

The architect-designed cottage was an eighteenth-century cultural phenomenon. It was an artistic event within the high culture of the English arts, ‘the best that has been thought and said’, but it was also an event within the English social subculture of polite society: the patrons and consumers of high culture. And, in terms of cultural capital, it was this group that owned the idea of the cottage.1 Tables of social classification by eighteenth-century commentators such as Daniel Defoe and Joseph Massie suggest up to seven classifications within English society, of which the top two are ‘Noblemen’ and ‘Gentlemen’.2 The population of Britain in 1700 has been estimated at 5.5 million and in 1810 at 10 million at either point only 1.2 per cent fell into these categories (about 66,000 in 1700 growing to 120,000 in 1810).3 Membership of this exclusive social group, often termed ‘polite society’, was determined not simply by wealth but through a subtle matrix of social indicators including independent wealth (i.e. not earned through regular employment), family background, family and social connections, and education. Social stratification was determined by the hereditary notion of rank rather than the more direct socio-economic idea of class. Polite society, therefore, extended from the royal family and aristocracy – the great landowners who had the wealth to indulge in building cottages on their estates – to the regional landed gentry and genteel families of good education and modest private income that were on the lower social boundary of polite society. This chapter considers the consumption of the cottage within that group.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Inclusion and exclusion from polite society was self-policed through the mutual recognition, or not, of shared beliefs, values, manners and taste in art, literature and material culture (determined by the correct – Classical – education). Historians have discussed the nature of polite society, its values and rules. Lawrence Klein, for example, tells us that ‘politeness stood for a constellation of meanings, which have offered modern interpreters numerous handles on the period’. ‘Politeness’ can perhaps be interpreted as the desire to outline and codify the beliefs, values and tastes that denoted membership of society’s exclusive upper ranks.4 Taste in the arts and material culture in eighteenth-century Britain was not simply emulative but socially determined. 86 Architects, patrons and connoisseurs Members of polite society did not passively consume the arts; they were implicated in its production through their patronage of writers, artists and architects willing to reflect their values, tastes and self-image. As Viccy Coltman argues, the consumption of high-culture supported ‘an elite British agenda of social emulation, aristocratic competition, and ... self- representation’.5 Moreover, the income of this social group rose consistently through the eighteenth-century so they could afford to do so.6 For polite society, familiarity with the idea of the cottage was not simply a niche interest, though across society as a whole it certainly was that, but a significant demonstration of taste that marked membership of the smallest and most exclusive subcultural group within society. In terms of pastoralism, as Christine Berberich has observed:

…the upper class played an important role in the dissemination of the rural ideal through their patronage of the arts and literature. Their ideal version of the countryside – gentrified and serving their country pursuits – became established as the norm in both writing and painting of the time.7

For the socially anxious at the lower boundary of polite society articulation of this ideal could be seen as a key distinction from the middling sorts.

The dichotomy between town and country life reflected the practicalities of everyday life for the wealthy and landed who divided their time between town and country not just because it was pleasant to get out of town but because that was the social and economic pattern of their lives. Regular travel to the city was necessary to attend to business, politics, social and public life. Regular travel to the country was essential in order to manage estates, often a primary source of income, and to attend to county business, law and politics. While the regional landed gentry lived permanently in the country they still had to travel to the city for appointments with bankers, lawyers, booksellers, tailors, etc. Moreover, county or provincial gentlemen of ‘taste and fortune’ may not have maintained London residences but they were connected to new ideas and the cultural life of the metropolis via the postal service and subscriptions to magazines or booksellers’ lists. Therefore, as nobles and gentlemen divided their time between town and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 country, polite society was at once both an urban culture that extended its interests and activities into the countryside and a rural culture that continued its activities and interests in the city. Amanda Vickery suggests that ‘a national society was created in eighteenth-century England by provincial elites who aped London taste’.8 While Elizabeth McKellar proposes that ‘the reception and spread of classicism in the eighteenth century suggests not a top-down model but rather overlapping spheres of influence between the national and the provincial, the classical and the non-classical, the elite and the everyday’.9 However, these are models of cultural consumption concerned with the geographically fixed provincial middle-classes. The Architects, patrons and connoisseurs 87 social world of the eighteenth-century English aristocracy and landowning class was, in contrast, highly mobile and belonged to both the metropolis and the provincial countryside with money and ideas moving constantly between the two, informing and enriching both. The idea of the cottage belongs to this world. Cottage-building, and probably much reading about cottages, took place in the countryside; however, ‘cottage culture’ was mostly produced in London. London was the location for most architectural practices and publishers, the part-time residence of many landowners and the centre of cultural activities including Royal Academy exhibitions where John Nash exhibited the model for Blaise Hamlet village.10 London was the centre of English cultural life where ideas emerged out of the overlapping ‘conversable worlds’ of artists, writers, coffee-house intellectuals, clubs and societies, the theatre, business and politics.11 For example, the poet John Dryden who first introduced the word ‘cottage’ into Virgil’s Pastorals lived and worked in London in order to be at the centre of English cultural life. As John Ruskin noted in The Poetry of Architecture, ‘the romantic rhymer takes a plastered inhabitation, with one back window looking into Green Park’.12 Similarly, most architectural books on cottages were written and published in London. The majority of architects connected to cottage design had offices in London, as did the architectural press. For example, John Papworth’s office was at 10 Caroline St, Bedford Square; Sir John Soane’s at Lincolns Inn Fields; and Edmund Aikin’s practice was housed in the Bartlett Building, Holborn. A notable exception was John Plaw whose office was in Southampton. London was the centre of English publishing and book culture: Richard Elsam’s publisher, E. Lawrence, was located on the Strand; Carpenter and Son were located on Old Bond St; and Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, who published John Claudius Loudon, were on Paternoster Row. However, from Soane to Plaw and James Malton, the dominant publisher and seller of architectural books in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was Josiah Taylor’s Architectural Library, 59 High Holburn. Taylor’s offered a mail order service, sending out lists to their subscribers and selling three or four architectural titles as a single bound collection through which the gentleman scholar could compare works and follow the exchange of ideas from one architectural essay to the next. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 In terms of the actual construction of cottage-style buildings, the royal family built a considerable number across their English estates. Perhaps the most well-known and earliest royal cottage is Queen Charlotte’s cottage at Kew of the 1770s but others include ‘Cambridge Cottage’, purchased from Lord Bute by George III in 1806 (though stylistically it is a plain London town house).13 Queen Charlotte had a second cottage, Frogmore Cottage, within the grounds of Frogmore House, leased in 1790, that was a retreat for her and her unmarried daughters within Windsor Home Park. In the nineteenth century the Prince Regent commissioned John Nash to design the 88 Architects, patrons and connoisseurs cottage-style Royal Lodge at Windsor Castle, 1813–16, which also served as an occasional retreat for the family within Windsor Home Park. There are numerous watercolours and prints of the Royal Lodge at Windsor held by the Royal Collection where it is referred to as the ‘Royal Cottage’ and ‘His Majesty’s Cottage’, suggesting the building was viewed as a ‘cottage’.14 Moreover, the existence of these depictions of His Majesty’s Cottage in the Royal Collection suggests a wider engagement by the royal family with cottage imagery. The Royal Collection also includes several books on cottages such as Soane’s 1793 Sketches in Architecture, William Fuller Pocock’s Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, 1807, and David Laing’s 1804 Hints for dwellings, consisting of original designs for cottages, farm houses, villas etc., though it is not known whether these were gifts from friends and ambitious architects or personal royal purchases.15 The royal family continued cottage building on their country estates into the nineteenth century, including the Swiss Cottage at Osborne House, Isle of Wight, and York Cottage, Sandringham, Norfolk, gifted by Queen Victoria to Prince Edward, later Edward VII, on the occasion of his wedding in 1862. In a familiar dichotomy, Victoria intended that Sandringham would provide Edward with a retreat from the London social circuit and encourage him to find pleasure in the rural life. Victoria herself built Osborne House as a rural retreat when the search for solitude at Brighton Pavilion, George IV’s retreat, had become impossible due to the crowds of (lower class) holiday-makers. Cottage culture was also widespread among the great aristocratic landowners such as the Dukes of Devonshire who employed Sir Jeffry Wyattville and Joseph Paxton to design estate cottages at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, through the early-to-mid nineteenth century including gate- lodges and the picturesque estate village of Edensor. The Duke and Duchess of Bedford also employed Wyattville in this period to design their retreat Endsleigh Cottage in Devon as well as several thatched cottages on the Endsleigh estate. There are many other examples, for instance: as discussed, Chambers designed the estate village of Milton Abbas, Dorset for Lord Milton in 1770; George Richardson was commissioned by Lord Curzon to design a cottage for the grounds of Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, 1770; John Papworth for Lord Ongley at Shuttleworth, Bedfordshire, in the 1820s; and,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 George Devey for Lord De L’Isle and Dudley at Penshurst, Kent in the 1850s. Outside of the country estate, the aristocracy and their social circle also built a staggering array of cottage-villas, or cottage ornée, at Sidmouth in Devon including the Duke of Buckingham’s Sidholme Cottage, Lord le Despenceur’s Knowle Cottage, Lord Gwydyr’s Woodland Cottage and Woolbrook Cottage (leased in 1819 by Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, fourth son of George III, with the infant Princess Victoria). Resort to the seaside typically involved a retreat of several months for the summer season, which was as necessary as it was desirable since travel to and from the remote south-west coast by coach was time-consuming. Therefore, before the Architects, patrons and connoisseurs 89 railway, coastal resorts like Sidmouth had the advantage over Tunbridge Wells or Brighton in that they excluded those who had to work, although Sidmouth was actually founded by a London-based businessman Emmanuel Lousada. Lousada was an outsider from this social group. He was a Jew and a merchant but he nonetheless managed to attract polite society to build and dwell in Sidmouth. Art critic John Ruskin took a passing swipe at these cottage-dwelling aristocrats when he wrote in the Poetry of Architecture, 1838; ‘The polished courtier brings his refinement and duplicity with him to ape the Arcadian rustic in Devonshire … the soft votary of luxury endeavours to rise at seven, in some Ultima Thule of forests and storms’.16 Architectural ideas and architects were traded within polite society through a network of shared family connections, education, clubs, social activities, visits and letters. For instance, the Royal Collection holds an illustration of Endsleigh Cottage gifted by the Duke and Duchess of Bedford.17 The Collection also includes an 1840 watercolour of Cambridge Cottage, Kew, by Joshua Edward Adolphus Dolby, commissioned by the Duchess of Gloucester.18 At a slightly lower social-strata, John Nash designed Houghton Lodge in Hampshire’s Test Valley, c.1800, for the Pitt- Rivers family as well as the picturesque estate village of Blaise Hamlet, Bristol, for John Harford in the early nineteenth-century. The picturesque theorist and poet Richard Payne Knight – whose pastoral verse was quoted by Edmund Bartell in Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages – wrote in a cottage-retreat within the grounds of his Downton estate, Herefordshire. Partly in imitation of aristocratic tastes but also through their own distinct regional ex urbis identity as country-dwellers, the minor landed gentry and ‘gentlemen of modest fortune’ focussed their architectural patronage on retreats and small houses in the cottage style. References to individual commissions can be found in architectural texts, such as Selfdon House, a cottage-style design for Thomas Lore of Croydon, Surrey, noted in John Plaw’s Rural Architecture, 1794, or ‘a single Rustic Cottage designed for the Rev. Wm. Uvedale, proposed to be erected in the County of Suffolk’ illustrated in Richard Elsam’s Essay on Rural Architecture, 1803, while Peter F. Robinson’s A New Series of Designs for ornamental cottages and villas, 1838, includes a cottage designed for ‘Mr Prestwood near Stourbridge, 19

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Wiltshire’. At Sidmouth, Theodore Mogridge lists a number of smaller cottages and their genteel owners in A Descriptive Sketch of Sidmouth, 1836:

Lower down, and adjoining the grounds of Powis, is Belle-Vue, situated on an eminence, occupied by J. Harrison, esq.; next to it is Ivy Cottage, the residence of Mrs. Kennet Dawson, and opposite, Rose Cottage, the property of the above gentleman, occupied by the Rev. Mark Henry Mogridge, having from its southern front, a view of the sea, with the church, and church fields, in which is May Cottage, a neat and comfortable lodging house.20 90 Architects, patrons and connoisseurs A slightly earlier source, the Rev. Edmund Butcher’s The Beauties of Sidmouth Displayed, 1820, further informs us that Rose Cottage was ‘a very neat house, built by Mr. Wm. Stocker, now the residence of Mrs. Cawne’.21 These sources suggest a lot of cottage building and a high turnover of owners and occupants. ‘Gentlemen of taste’ were also the main consumers and target readership of architectural books on cottages and related periodicals.22 James Malton’s 1798 Essay on British Cottage Architecture opens with a general appeal: ‘To nobles and gentleman, and persons of cultivated taste, I address this essay’.23 Similarly, in New Designs in Architecture, 1788, George Richardson addresses his work to ‘gentlemen of taste and fortune’.24 Some books are dedicated to specific wealthy patrons such as William Fuller Pocock’s Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, 1807, dedicated to ‘Sir John Courtenay Honeywood, calculated to further the views you entertain for promoting the comforts and happiness of those rustic dependents necessary to an extensive Estate’.25 Edmund Aikin’s Designs for Villas and Other Rural Buildings, 1808, is dedicated to ‘Thomas Hope Esq, as a tribute for his enlightened taste and liberal patronage of the fine arts’. While, with greater social ambition, Richard Elsam dedicated An Essay on Rural Architecture, 1803, ‘To Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth’.26 The cottage must, therefore, be understood in a social context where architectural discourse and design was supported by a small world of wealthy and educated cognoscenti either through the direct patronage of buildings or through the consumption of published essays and designs. However, there were distinctions and stratifications even within this small world. Architects worked on commissions for actual buildings and wrote essays and published designs – but these two activities were not always undertaken by the same architects. Equally, patrons commissioned architects to build cottages and connoisseurs took an intellectual interest in cottages through subscriptions to architectural books and periodicals such as The Gentleman or Landscape Magazine. Yet, the patrons of cottage architecture were not necessarily the same people as the consumers of architectural books on cottages. These distinctions were for the most part based on relative status and wealth. The wealthiest consumers, princes and dukes, worked directly with prestigious architects and engaged with the idea of the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 cottage through building. Although Chambers, Soane and Nash all published books on cottages, the majority of architectural publications were mostly produced by less well-supported architects such as John Plaw or James Malton as a source of income as well as to engage with intellectual discourse, and the purchasers of these books were mostly the landed gentry. Architects hoped some readers would then go on to commission a small retreat, estate cottage or gate-lodge.

Lists of subscribers to these books indicate that the circulation of such books was more genteel than aristocratic (alongside a high number of sales to Architects, patrons and connoisseurs 91 professionals related to the building trade). The great landowners tended to deal directly with prestigious architects whereas pattern books, while providing a forum for architectural discourse, were intended to solicit commissions from those of ‘modest fortune’: good if they buy the book for intellectual interest, better still if they commission a cottage. For example, despite the dedication to ‘Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth’, the ‘List of Subscribers’ to Elsam’s Essay on Rural Architecture includes only one aristocrat, the Earl of Breadalbane. The majority of subscribers are ‘gentlemen’ (hereditary private income generally connected to landownership and franchised to vote such as Baronets, Sirs, Right Hons., or Esquires and professions suitable for gentlemen such as Revs. and Captains). Those listed include Lieut. General De Lancey, ‘His Majesty’s Barrack Master General’, Sir Walter Stirling of Pall Mall and Sir William Uvedale, patron of the cottage by Elsam in Suffolk. Elsam’s subscribers also include 11 architects (including John Soane and John Foulston), 18 surveyors, 14 builders (including Thomas Pritchard, ‘Bricklayer to His Majesty of Richmond’), 13 carpenters, 2 plasterers and 2 painters (Mr Pym, ‘portrait painter’ and Robert Kerr Porter, ‘historical painter’). It is, however, perhaps most indicative of a circumscribed social world that Elsam’s list includes only 17 ‘Mr’ or ordinary disenfranchised men not associated with a building trade. Similarly, the ‘List of Subscribers’ to John Plaw’s Rural Architecture, 1794, reveals a circulation of seven nobles (including the Earl of Guildford, Lord William Gordon and the Duke of Harcleugh); 78 gentlemen; 29 ‘Mr’ not associated with a building trade; 15 architects, 31 surveyors, 21 builders, 8 carpenters and 3 painters.27 The social status of the subscribers to Elsam and Plaw’s books fits in a wider context of subscriptions to magazines such as The Gentleman – in which title the editor went by the nom de plume ‘Sylvanus Urban, Gent.’ – that distributed current affairs and original essays alongside ‘fold-out maps and wood cuts, illustrating recent inventions, architecture and mathematical puzzles’; Special interest titles were also popular such as Country Magazine Calculated for Gentlemen, Poetical Magazine and Landscape Magazine.28 The nationwide distribution of these publications through the postal service and new coach roads enabled a geographically diffused social network that connected London-based publishers with architectural patrons and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 connoisseurs located throughout the counties of England. For the socially anxious, investing in the idea of the cottage was a way to distinguish oneself from those outside of ‘polite society’. Famously, in Sense and Sensibility, 1811, Jane Austen has the downwardly mobile Mrs Dashwood opine of her new home that ‘as a house Barton Cottage, though small, was comfortable and compact; but as a cottage it was defective’.29 This is a subtle statement in which Austen is deploying her characters’ views on cottages to present her understanding of the nuances of taste and social rank. That she did so in a novel with the expectation that the allusion would be readily understood by her readership suggests the currency of cottage 92 Architects, patrons and connoisseurs culture in the early nineteenth century. At the start of the novel the Dashwoods are forced to leave their home, Norland Park, Sussex, described as a large country estate. They relocate to the relatively small Barton Cottage in distant Devon. However, the principal problem with Barton Cottage is not its location nor its size as ‘with the size and furniture of the house Mrs. Dashwood was on the whole well satisfied’ (two ‘sitting rooms … on each side of the entrance’ to the front and offices – kitchens – to the rear, four bedrooms and two garret rooms).30 The problem with Barton Cottage was that it did not meet the Dashwoods’ fashionable idea of a cottage.31 Austen describes the house as recently built; a classical stone-built house with tiled roof typical of mid-eighteenth century designs for modest villas and farmhouses: neat, white boxes of the sort that could be found in Robert Morris’ Rural Architecture, 1750, or Thomas Lightoler’s The Gentleman and Farmer’s Architect, 1762. This ‘modern’ house disappointed because ‘the building was regular, the roof was tiled, the window shutters were not painted green, nor were the walls covered with honeysuckle’; for Austen this judgement of taste associates the Dashwoods, by their own reckoning at least, with polite society.32 Mrs Dashwood’s social anxiety focused on the need to demonstrate good taste in the face of her reduced circumstances. To have good taste meant to have the capacity to make discerning judgements on beauty. This implied that one had the time and resources to acquire a suitable education in the arts. An artistic eye was therefore an indicator of social status that economic changes in circumstance could not confiscate.33 Decorum was the key to this code of social inclusion and exclusion. Decorum was the ‘keeping of a due respect between the inhabitant and the habitation’.34 Therefore, when building or purchasing and furnishing a house everything had to be socially appropriate. For Mrs Dashwood, Barton Cottage was appropriate as the home of a tenant farmer but not as the home of a family of former landowners with aristocratic connections. Austen’s articulation of Mrs Dashwood’s taste offers a rare insight into a female engagement with the idea of the cottage. More generally, women are mostly absent from the evidence related to cottage culture such as lists of subscribers. However, the publication of a pastoral song about cottages, as sung at the Theatre Royal Vauxhall in 1788, in The Ladies Memoranda

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 suggests it was considered relevant to the magazine’s intended female readership.35 The few instances where female engagement has been documented suggest that aristocratic and genteel women were closely involved in the design and build of cottages. For instance, we know that Queen Charlotte played a role in the design of her cottage-retreat at Kew and that her daughter Elizabeth painted the interior (Elizabeth is the subject of Richard Elsam’s dedication in An Essay on Rural Architecture, 1804, where the architect praises her ‘zeal to promote the arts’).36 It is also noteworthy that the foundation stone at Endsleigh Cottage, Devon, names Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire and her sons, not the Duke. William White’s History, Architects, patrons and connoisseurs 93 Gazetteer, and Directory of Devonshire, 1850, further reports that Endsleigh Cottage is located on a ‘sweetly sequestered site selected by the late Duchess’.37 Further down the social scale, female-led building activity can be identified on the south coast where the cottage-retreat A la Ronde, Exmouth, Devon, was commissioned in the 1790s by the Parminter sisters who hand-decorated the interiors with shell-work. Theodore Mogridge’s A descriptive sketch of Sidmouth, 1836, also details a number of genteel ladies as owners of cottage ornée in Sidmouth such as Mrs. Cawne of Rose Cottage and her neighbour Mrs. Kennet Dawson of Ivy Cottage described above.38 Moreover, while lists of subscribers to architectural books on cottages list only men this only denotes the person in whose name a book was ordered not its actual readership within a household. Equally, while most ‘gentleman’s’ cottage- retreats are associated with the (male) name of the landowner in texts such as architectural books, magazines and tourist guides, it is not clear by whom these cottages were actually used. And, while Dove Cottage in the Lake District is best-known for its association with William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal suggests that she was fully engaged with the cottage ideal while in residence there, where she described a pastoral shepherd-like existence of ‘plain living, but high thinking’.39 At the lower end of polite society, those persons, male or female, who were educated and socially aspiring but of relatively modest means, could read pastoral poetry and subscribe to architectural publications but they did not have the means to commission architects to build cottages. A solution was to occupy vernacular cottages built and previously occupied by actual country people. Too small and inconvenient for occupation by the truly wealthy, these cottages were then often extensively modified to enhance their ‘cottage’ appearance. Landscape designer Humphry Repton lived in a rented cottage in the village of Hare Street near Romford in Essex. Here, at ‘My Cottage in Essex’, he wrote his most influential works such asAn Enquiry into the Changes of Taste in Landscape Gardening, 1806.40 Hare Street was on a main coach-road to London nonetheless Repton described ‘the humble cottage to which for more than thirty years I have anxiously retreated from the pomp of palaces, the elegancies of fashion and the allurements of dissipation’.41 William and Dorothy Wordsworth lived in similar literary penury at Dove Cottage near Grasmere in the Lake District

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 between 1799 and 1808 where many of William’s most famous poems such as ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ were written. When the Wordsworths left Dove Cottage in 1808, the lease was taken on by the poet and opium- eater Thomas de Quincey who lived there until 1820, and then, after moving to a larger house kept the building on as a writing retreat until 1835. However, the building itself was not a thatched cottage but a seventeenth- century coaching inn on the main road between Ambleside and Keswick known as the ‘Dove and Olive Branch’ that had closed in 1793. What is significant about Dove Cottage and the Wordsworths, therefore, is that they gave it the name ‘Dove Cottage’ when they took on the lease of the empty 94 Architects, patrons and connoisseurs building in 1798, thus imbuing a rather plain and functional place with the idea of the cottage. With improved finances and William’s position as poet laureate, the Wordsworths later built themselves their own more substantial ‘fancy cottage’, Rydal Mount, near Ambleside in the Lakes, where they lived from 1813 to William’s death in 1850.42

Adherence to the idea of the cottage denoted membership to a broad social group at the top of English society which stretched from the royal family down to the struggling Wordsworths. Membership of that group and the adoption of its ideal were aspired to by those outside of it. For instance, professionals tied to daily business in the City made do with the outskirts of London as the location for their dream-home rural retreats. Thus, from its genesis in the late eighteenth century, the production of the cottage-villa was as suburban and aspirational as it was rural and aristocratic. The cottage- villa featured alongside Italianate villas in London-fringe suburban developments of the early nineteenth century, such as John Nash’s Park Villages East and West, 1823, the speculative developments of St. John’s Wood and Maida Vale in the 1840s and Wimbledon Village in south-west London from the 1860s.43 Cottages also proliferated across the English Home Counties surrounding London of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Essex, Kent, Surrey and Sussex which, as transport improved, increasingly operated as an extended suburb of London. Cottage architects, associating themselves with polite society, passed their own judgement on these suburbanites and suburban cottage architecture. Sir John Soane criticised the inappropriate setting of cottages in the suburbs in his Royal Academy lectures, noting that ‘From a want of attention to character and this feeling of propriety, the ferme Ornée, the cottage, the hermitage, instead of being confined to retired situations, are sometimes placed contiguous to the approaches to great cities’.44 In Rural Retreats, 1827, James Thomson divided cottages into a socially hierarchy of ‘“COTTAGE RESIDENCES”, or “RETIREMENTS” of a limited description, adapted more particularly to the environs of the metropolis; the second class containing villas, or “RETREATS”, of the higher order’.45 John Papworth, in Rural Residences, stresses the importance of a rural setting for a cottage and contrasts this with the suburban villa: ‘[The cottage] should combine properly with surround objects, and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 appear to be native to the spot, and not of those crude rule-and-square excrescences of the environs of London; the illegitimate family of town and country’.46 While, in similar mode, Edmund Bartell warns that a cottage should not resemble the houses of the London suburbs, ‘frippery, thus employed about the cottage, destroys simplicity, and gives it a tricked-out appearance of many of the small houses in the suburbs of the metropolis’.47 The tacit implication in these passages is that true rural retreat and rural architecture is beyond the social reach of those tied to London through work, however lucrative. In this snobbish vein, Ruskin singles out the ‘rich stock-jobber [who] calculates his percentages among the soft dingles and woody shores of Architects, patrons and connoisseurs 95 Westmoreland’, while James Malton writing in An Essay on British Cottage Architecture, 1798, saves his ire for the luxurious coastal cottage-villa built by the newly moneyed, often retired officers of the East India Company:

The returned Nabob, heated in his pursuit of wealth, imagines he imports the chaleur of the East with its riches; and we behold the stretched awning to form the cool shade, in the moist clime of Britain … A nation deriving the chief of its affluence from commerce and bold enterprise, is certainly not likely to be actuated by a general and pure taste in the elegance of art. The good sense and nice discernment that directs individuals to a just appropriation of objects, will not affect the many who are continually, and, I may say, momentarily, rising to independence by the possession of immense wealth.48

However, not everyone with money in English society aspired to belong to ‘polite society’ and made their architectural choices according to the tastes of their own social group. Indeed, the scarcity of ‘cottages’ occupied by members of other (lower) social groups – including the relatively wealthy – reinforces the argument that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the idea of the cottage belonged exclusively to polite society. Outside of this privileged social group, the architectural tastes of the middling sorts such as the urban artisan and tenant farmer tended towards a straightforward plain neoclassicism as promoted in print by architects such as Robert Morris and Isaac Ware in the mid-eighteenth century. Indeed, by the later eighteenth century the spatial and decorative architectural rules of classicism had become the common language of builders and carpenters building ordinary, everyday houses throughout Britain – in town and country – as regional vernacular forms that were commonplace in the seventeenth century were gradually straightened out, given symmetry and codified.49 Newly built, modest modern homes from farmhouses in Scotland to townhouses in London or Manchester were all built according to these design rules producing an unprecedented uniformity in Britain’s housing stock.50 Art and Crafts enthusiast Herman Muthesius observed this architectural sameness in The English House, 1904:

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 The architecture, especially, the domestic architecture, of the time stood in as great a need of reorganisation as the artistic crafts … the house was still in the cold grip of Classicism, especially the ordinary small house. It was built to an axial and symmetrical plan, like a box…The form had spread across England with the trend in taste introduced by John Nash, replacing the old Puritan guild tradition. These houses were as cheerless inside as out.51

Here, Elizabeth McKellar’s regionalist model of taste and building production as ‘overlapping spheres’ applies.52 What this tells us about the everyday 96 Architects, patrons and connoisseurs architectural consumer is that ‘in building uniform houses … which conformed to architectural norms ... members of eighteenth-century [society] expressed their standing and their sense of community’.53 In the nascent industrial cities that surrounded the Peak District in the north of England few ‘cottages’ were built by mill-owners, lawyers, doctors and clerks (although good examples were close to hand on the Chatsworth estate and elsewhere). Mill owners and cotton merchants built neoclassical boxes in the outlying countryside, encircling cities such as Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds such as Longford Park, Stretford, a two-storey, five-bay box with Italianate details built in 1856 for cotton merchant John Rylands. No doubt John Papworth would have viewed Longford’s Italianate box with the same disdain he held for the ‘crude rule-and-square excrescences of the environs of London’.54 In Greater Manchester, many of these country estates in miniature are now engulfed by the city but can be identified by the numerous public parks and golf courses. In the city itself, as in central London, Manchester’s middle-class professionals dwelled in plain eighteenth- century terraces such as Byram Street, Quay Street and St. John Street close to St Ann Square laid out in the 1720s. However, more significantly, if we turn to the Broadhall suburb of Sheffield, we find streets of neat two-storey, three-bay neoclassical villas mostly built in the 1840s for the city’s office-working commuters. The uniform, plain neoclassical style of the houses in Broadhall can be contrasted with the cottages of similar size built in the same period in the London suburbs and genteel resort towns such as Sidmouth or Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent. While some mill-owners may have had the same pretensions as the returning nabob, the social rules of decorum appear to have been observed among the middle- income rank of urban professionals who sought to observe the taste of their immediate social peers. Of course, another group outside of polite society did live in architect-designed cottages. Estate workers dwelt in cottages provided for them by the landowner. These cottage-dwellers lived out their lives in someone else’s idea of the cottage. Therefore, it can be argued that between 1760 and 1860, whether consumed through building or print, the idea of the cottage belonged more or less exclusively to English polite society, a social group bound not necessarily by wealth but by birth, education, interests, activities and tastes. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Notes 1 M. Arnold (ed. Robert H. Super), The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold in eleven volumes (Ann Arbor, 1960–77), Volume V: Culture and Anarchy with Friendship’s Garland and Some Literary Essays (1965). 2 Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in P. J. Corfield (ed.),Language, History and Class (Blackwell, Oxford, 1991), p. 113. 3 Maura A. Henry, ‘The Making of Elite Culture’ in H .T. Dickson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2002), p. 312. Architects, patrons and connoisseurs 97 4 Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, The Historical Journal, 4 5, 4 (2002), 870. 5 Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicim in Britain, 1760–1800 (Chicago, 2006), p. 163 6 Henry, ‘The Making of Elite Culture’, p. 313. 7 Christine Berberich, ‘This Green and Pleasant Land: Cultural Constructions of Englishness’, in Robert Burden and Stephan Kohl (eds), Landscape and Englishness (Rodopi, 2006), p. 209. 8 Amanda Vickery and John Styles (eds), Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (Yale, 2007), p. 18. 9 Elizabeth McKellar, ‘Preface’, in Elizabeth McKellar and Barbara Arciszwekas (eds), Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Culture (Reinterpreting Classicism: Culture, Reaction and Appropriation (Aldershot, 2004), pp. ix–xxv. 10 See Ann Bermingham, ‘Urbanity and the Spectacle of Art Romantic Metropolis’ in James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (eds), The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 151–77. 11 See John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997); Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830 (Oxford, 2011). 12 John Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture (London, 1837; reprint 1905), p. 233. 13 Cambridge Cottage, Kew Royal Botanical Gardens website: www.kew.org/ visit-kew-gardens/explore/attractions/cambridge-cottage (last accessed 18 December 2014). 14 Royal Cottage also referred to as His Majesty’s Cottage (RCIN700921) Royal Collection Trust: www.royalcollection.org.uk (last accessed 18 December 2014); Anon. A small wood engraving of the above (i.e. Royal Lodge); a gardener watering f/g left. From The Mirror, Saturday 6 December 1823. (RCIN 700923), Royal Collection Trust: www.royalcollection.org.uk (last accessed 18 December 2014). 15 Sir John Soane, Sketches in Architecture, containing plans and elevations of cottages, villas and other useful buildings, with characteristic scenery (London, 1793), (RCIN 1150994); William Fuller Pocock’s Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages (1807), (RCIN 1079041); David Laing, Hints for dwellings, consisting of original designs for cottages, farm houses, villas, etc....by David Laing (London, 1804), (RCIN 1150883). Royal Collection Trust website: www.royalcollection.org.uk (last accessed 18 December 2014). 16 John Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture, p. 233. 17 John Preston, Endsleigh Cottage, Devonshire, 1818. View of the house (designed by Sir G. Wyattville, 1810), which has a picturesque irregularity. (RCIN 701316) Royal Collection Trust website: www.royalcollection.org.uk (last accessed 18 December 2014).

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 18 Former property of Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester; bought at auction on behalf of HM The Queen. Anon., Drawing of a view of Cambridge Cottage behind a lawn, circular flower bed and shrubs. The spire of St Anne’s church is visible in the background on the right. Pencil and watercolour c.1840 (RCIN 933975) Royal Collection Trust website www.royalcollection.org.uk (last accessed 18.12.14). 19 John Plaw, Rural Architecture or Designs from the simple cottage to the decorated villa (London, 1794); Richard Elsam, An essay on rural architecture: illustrated with original and oeconomical designs; to which are added rural retreats and villas in the Gothic, Castle, Roman, and Grecian styles of architecture, with ideas for park-entrances, a mausoleum, and a design for the Naval Pillar, to immortalize British naval heroism: the whole comprising thirty plates, in aquatinta … an 98 Architects, patrons and connoisseurs attempt to refute James Malton (London, 1803), plate 1; Peter F. Robinson, A New Series of Designs for ornamental cottages and villas (London, 1838). 20 Theodore Mogridge lists a number of these cottages and their owners in A descriptive sketch of Sidmouth (Sidmouth, 1836), pp. 47–8. 21 A different source, Rev. Edmund Butcher’s The beauties of Sidmouth displayed, being a descriptive sketch of its situation, salubrity and picturesque scenery. Third Edition. (Sidmouth, 1820), p. 43. 22 James Malton, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798), p. 2. 23 Malton, British Cottage Architecture, p. 11. 24 George Richardson, New Designs in Architecture, consisting of plans, elevations and sections for various buildings, etc. (London, 1788), p. 7. 25 William Fuller Pocock, Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, Picturesque Dwellings, Villas, Etc: With Appropriate Scenery, Plans and Descriptions. To which are Prefixed, Some Critical Observations on Their Style and Character; and Also of Castles, Abbies, and Ancient English Houses, Concluding with Practical Remarks on Building, and the Causes of Dry Rot (London, 1807); Edmund Aikin, Designs for Villas and other Rural Buildings (London, 1808), p. 1. 26 Elsam, Rural Architecture, frontispiece. 27 Plaw, Rural Architecture, List of Subscribers. 28 James Tierney, ‘Periodicals and the Trade, 1695–1780’in Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol V, 1695–1830 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 489–90. 29 Jane Austen (ed. James Kinsley), Sense and Sensibility (London, 1811; Oxford, 1990), p. 23. 30 Ibid. 31 Ann Bermingham, ‘The Cottage Ornee: Sense, Sensibility, and the Picturesque’ in Lorna Clymer and Robert Mayer (eds), Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman (Newark, 2007), pp. 215–24. 32 Austen, Sense and Sensibility, p. 23. 33 Vickery and Styles, Material Culture, p. 14. 34 Anon. ‘The Builder’s Dictionary’ in The rudiments of architecture; or the young workman’s instructor. In two parts ... with twenty-three elegant designs of building, the most of which have been actually executed in North Britain. To which is added. The Builder’s Dictionary. Intended for those whose time will not allow them to attend teachers, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1778; reprint 1992). 35 Anon. The Ladies’ own memorandum-book [electronic resource]: Or, Daily pocket journal, for the year 1789. Designed as a methodical register of all the transactions of business, as well as amusement. Containing I. An introductory address. II. New and full moons. III. Table of moveable feasts from Oct. 1787

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 to Oct. 1788 IV. Useful market tables. V. Common notes for 1789 VI. Birth- days and years of the Royal family. VII. Birth-days of the sovereigns in Europe. VIII. Rules for finding the moveable feasts, &c. IX. Fourteen country dances for the year 1789. X. Table of precedency among ladies. XI. Table of the roads from London to Edinburgh. XII. A perpetual diary. XIII. Poetical answers to last year’s enigmas. XIV. Nine new enigmas. XV. Charades, &c. XVI. Answers to the rebuses of last year. XVII. Twenty-one rebuses. XVIII. Several original poetical pieces. XIX. New songs, sung at Vauxhall, &c. in 1788 (London, 1788), p. 129. 36 Elsam, Rural Architecture, Frontispiece. 37 William White, History, gazetteer, and directory of Devonshire (Sheffield, 1850), p. 622. Architects, patrons and connoisseurs 99 38 Mogridge, Sidmouth, pp. 47–8; Butcher, The beauties of Sidmouth, p. 43. 39 Dorothy Wordsworth (ed. William Knight), Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Vol. I (of 2) (London, 1897), p. viii. 40 Humphry Repton, Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (London, 1794); Humphry Repton, Observations on the theory and practice of Landscape Gardening; including some remarks on Grecian and Gothic Architecture (London, 1803); Humphry Repton, An Enquiry into the changes of taste in Landscape Gardening (London, 1806); Humphry Repton, Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (London, 1816). 41 George Carter, ‘Humphry Repton at Hare Street, Essex’, Garden History 12; 2 (1984), 120–31. 42 William Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes, 5th edn (London, 1822), p. 125. 43 Andrew Saint (ed.), London Suburbs (London, 1999), pp. 54–6; also see Elizabeth McKellar, The Landscape of London: The Metropolitan Environs, 1660–1830 (London, 2013). 44 John Soane, Lecture VIII, in Soane (ed. D. Watkin), Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 599–600. 45 James Thomson, Rural Retreats, A Series of Designs Consisting of Plans and Elevations for Cottages, Villas and Ornamental Buildings (Edinburgh, 1827), p. iv. 46 John Buonarotti Papworth, Rural Residences (London, 1818), p. 32. 47 Edmund Bartell, Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages (London, 1804), p. 11. 48 Ruskin, Poetry, p. 233; Malton, Cottage Architecture, p. 10. 49 See Daniel Maudlin, ‘Crossing Boundaries: Revisiting Some Thresholds of the Vernacular’, Vernacular Architecture, 41 (2010), 10–14. 50 See Peter Guillery, The Small House in Eighteenth Century London (Yale, 2004). 51 Herman Muthesius, The English House (Berlin, 1904; reprinted London, 2007), p. 99. 52 McKellar and Arciszwekas, British Classicism, pp. ix–xxv. 53 Nicholas Cooper, ‘Display, Status and the Vernacular Tradition’, Vernacular Architecture 33 (2002), 31. 54 Papworth, Rural Residences, p. 32.

Bibliography Aikin, Edmund. Designs for Villas and other Rural Buildings (London, 1808). Anon. The Ladies’ own memorandum-book: Or, Daily pocket journal, for the year 1789 (London, 1788). Anon. ‘The Builder’s Dictionary’ in The rudiments of architecture; or the young workman’s instructor, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1778; reprint 1992). Anon. The Complete English Farmer or A Practical System of Husbandry, founded

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 upon Natural, certain, and obvious Principles: In which is comprised, A General View of the whole Art of Agriculture (London, 1761). Arnold, Matthew (ed. Robert H. Super). The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold in eleven volumes (Ann Arbor, 1960–77), Volume V: Culture and Anarchy with Friendship’s Garland and Some Literary Essays (1965). Austen, Jane (ed. James Kinsley). Sense and Sensibility (London, 1811; Oxford, 1990). Bartell, Edmund. Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages (London, 1804). Berberich, Christine. ‘This Green and Pleasant Land: Cultural Constructions of Englishness’, in Robert Burden and Stephan Kohl (eds), Landscape and Englishness (Rodopi, 2006), pp. 207–24. 100 Architects, patrons and connoisseurs Bermingham, Ann. ‘The Cottage Ornée: Sense, Sensibility, and the Picturesque’ in Lorna Clymer and Robert Mayer (eds), Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman (Newark, 2007), pp. 215–24. Bermingham, Ann. ‘Urbanity and the Spectacle of Srt Romantic Metropolis’ in James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (eds), The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780– 1840 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 151–77. Brewer, John. Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997). Brookes, Samuel H. Designs of Villa and Cottage Architecture (London, 1839). Butcher, Edmund. The beauties of Sidmouth displayed, being a descriptive sketch of its situation, salubrity and picturesque scenery, 3rd edn. (Sidmouth, 1820). Carter, George. ‘Humphry Repton at Hare Street, Essex’, Garden History 12; 2 (1984), 120–31. Coltman, Viccy. Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Chicago, 2006). Cooper, Nicholas. ‘Display, Status and the Vernacular Tradition’, Vernacular Architecture 33 (2002), 28–33. Corfield, Penelope J. ‘Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in P. J. Corfield (ed.),Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), pp. 101–30. Elsam, Richard. An essay on rural architecture: illustrated with original and oeconomical designs: to which are added rural retreats and villas in the Gothic, Castle, Roman, and Grecian styles of architecture, with ideas for park-entrances, a mausoleum, and a design for the Naval Pillar, to immortalize British naval heroism: the whole comprising thirty plates, in aquatinta … an attempt to refute James Malton (London, 1803). Guillery, Peter. The Small House in Eighteenth Century London (Yale, 2004). Henry, Maura A. ‘The Making of Elite Culture’ in H. T. Dickson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2002), pp. 311–29. Klein, Lawrence E. ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, The Historical Journal, 4 5, 4 (2002), 869–98. Laing, David. Hints for dwellings, consisting of original designs for cottages, farm houses, villas, etc. ... (London, 1804). Lightoler, Thomas. The Gentleman and Farmer’s Architect (London, 1762). Malton, James. Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798). Maudlin, Daniel. ‘Crossing Boundaries: Revisiting Some Thresholds of the Vernacular’, Vernacular Architecture, No. 41 (2010), 10–14. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 McKellar, Elizabeth. The Landscape of London: The Metropolitan Environs, 1660–1830 (London, 2013). McKellar, Elizabeth and Arciszwekas, Barbara (eds), Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Culture (Reinterpreting Classicism: Culture, Reaction and Appropriation (Farnham, 2004). Mee, Jon. Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830 (Oxford, 2011). Mogridge, Theodore. A descriptive sketch of Sidmouth (Sidmouth, 1836). Morris, Robert. Rural Architecture: consisting of regular designs of plans and elevations for Buildings in the Countryside (London, 1750). Architects, patrons and connoisseurs 101 Muthesius, Herman. The English House (Berlin, 1904; reprinted London, 2007). Papworth, John Buonarotti. Rural Residences (London, 1818). Plaw, John. Rural Architecture or Designs from the simple cottage to the decorated villa (London, 1794). Pocock, William Fuller. Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, Picturesque Dwellings, Villas, Etc: With Appropriate Scenery, Plans and Descriptions. To which are Prefixed, Some Critical Observations on Their Style and Character; and Also of Castles, Abbies, and Ancient English Houses, Concluding with Practical Remarks on Building, and the Causes of Dry Rot (London, 1807). Repton, Humphry. Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (London, 1816). Repton, Humphry. An Enquiry into the changes of taste in Landscape Gardening (London, 1806). Repton, Humphry. Observations on the theory and practice of Landscape Gardening; including some remarks on Grecian and Gothic Architecture (London, 1803). Repton, Humphry. Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (London, 1794). Richardson, George. New Designs in Architecture, consisting of plans, elevations and sections for various buildings, etc. (London, 1788). Robinson, Peter F. A New Series of Designs for ornamental cottages and villas (London, 1838). Ruskin, John. The Poetry of Architecture (London, 1838, reprint 1904). Saint, Andrew (ed.). London Suburbs (London, 1999). Soane, John. Sketches in Architecture, containing plans and elevations of cottages, villas and other useful buildings, with characteristic scenery (London, 1793). Soane, John (ed. David Watkin) Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures, (Cambridge, 1996). Tierney, James. ‘Periodicals and the Trade, 1695–1780’, in Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol V, 1695–1830 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 479–97. Vickery, Amanda and Styles, John (eds). Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (Yale, 2007). White, William. History, gazetteer, and directory of Devonshire (Sheffield, 1850). Wordsworth, Dorothy (ed. William Knight) Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Vol. I (of 2) (London, 1897). Wordsworth, William. Guide to the Lakes, 5th edn (London, 1822). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 6 Habitations of the labourer

In the imagination of the eighteenth-century English landowner, the land that entailed their estate was divided into two distinct worlds: the landscape garden that was the site of aesthetic or intellectual investigation and expression; and the working agricultural landscape that was the site of industry and economic activity.1 The two were interdependent as the activities of the working landscape largely funded the activities of the artistic landscape, but they were physically and conceptually separated, as explained by Thomas Whately in Observations on Modern Farming, 1770:

Though a farm and a garden agree in many particulars connected with extent, yet in style they are the two extremes. Both indeed are subjects of cultivation; but cultivation in the one is husbandry, and in the other decoration: the former is appropriated for profit, the latter for pleasure.2

The cottages discussed so far were conceived and built within the world of the landscape garden or walled acres of the Home Park. However, concurrent to the idea of the cottage as a simple rural-retreat, a very different cottage – the improved cottage – was conceived and built in the working fields beyond the Home Park. Like the rural retreat, the improved cottage was a simple dwelling; however, its simple form and accommodation was not a product of the literary imagination but of a different set of eighteenth- century ideals: the humanitarian reform movement and the socio-economic project of agricultural improvement. Accordingly, the improved cottage was

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 a rational, functional building intended for a rationalised, well-ordered working landscape. Its purpose was to improve the living conditions of the rural labourer through good design. The terrible condition of the typical rural labourer’s cottage was both a historic norm within the English countryside and a contemporary phenomenon. The form and materials of the dwellings of England’s rural poor observed in the eighteenth century had evolved under the constant shadow of poverty since the medieval period. However, the eighteenth century was also a distinct period of rapid change in the English rural landscape: the Agricultural Revolution – the rural counterpoint to the urban 104 Habitations of the labourer growth associated with the Industrial Revolution. The rapid rise in urban populations through industrialisation demanded massive increases in food production. The solution was agricultural improvement: the rationalisation and modernisation of agricultural production processes to increase yields. Agricultural improvement involved the development of new crops, the introduction of crop rotation cycles, and intensive selective breeding programmes in animal husbandry. In the moral and philosophical terms of the Enlightenment, ‘improvement’ was a belief in progress and a conviction that man possessed ‘a wonderful capacity for improvement’.3 Societal improvement marked ‘a historical transition from rudeness to refinement or from barbarism to civilization’.4 However, in practice the principal impact upon the rural landscape and human settlement was enclosure. Enclosure was a process by which lands were literally enclosed by landowners with hedges and walls. Through enclosure landowners appropriated the commons – communal lands which had historically sustained large populations of commoners. The process of land reform through enclosure began in the seventeenth century and 70 per cent of commons were enclosed by 1700.5 Landowners created large and efficient farms by enclosing numerous traditional smallholdings, evicting the smallholders and re-letting the land to a single modernising tenant farmer. Agricultural improvement increased food production, and the wealth of landowners, but it also exacerbated the poverty of the peasantry. The number of labourers required to work the land was reduced through new efficiencies in farming and a significant part of the rural population was necessarily displaced through the amalgamation of smallholdings into large single tenant farms.6 A landowner’s pride in a well-ordered and prosperous improved landscape is the theme of Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews, 1748–9 (Figure 6.1). Robert Andrews and his wife Frances, of Ballingdon House near Sudbury, Suffolk, stand before a very modern depiction of the English landscape composed of boundary hedges, enclosed fields, straight rows of drilled crops and, significantly, no dwellings. The portrait directly associates the Andrews with modern land management practices. As a representation of landscape, Mr and Mrs Andrews’ neat fields can be compared to the pastoral landscapes depicted in the paintings of Claude

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin that contributed to the conception of the Arcadian landscape garden. In the foreground Mr and Mrs Andrews sit in a corn field marked by recent labour and the middle distance is occupied by sheep within enclosed and gated fields. By contrast, for example, in Claude’s Landscape with Apollo Guarding the Herds of Admetus and Mercury stealing them, 1645, the figure of Apollo-as-shepherd reposes leisurely and plays the fiddle in an open ‘natural’ landscape of grassland, trees, river and hills before a hill-fort. Similary, the goat-herd in Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm, 1650, tends his herd within a pastoral landscape; although more typically in Poussin’s landscapes the foreground is occupied with characters Habitations of the labourer 105

Figure 6.1 Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews, 1748–9. Copyright: National Gallery, London

from Classical literature or allegorical figures set against largely empty pasture lands. Where the landscapes depicted in these paintings were informed by Virgil, Mr and Mrs Andrews is informed by The Complete English Farmer.7

Across Britain, improvements proceeded at different rates: widespread enclosures were common in East Anglia and the Scottish Highlands whereas in Devon and Cornwall, the remote south-west peninsula of England, traditional farming and settlement patterns were largely unaffected.8 Overall, in the first half of the eighteenth century 74,000 acres of land were enclosed in England and Wales, not accounting for similar activities in Scotland, and in the later eighteenth century this figure swelled to 750,000 acres.9 Through the nineteenth century the rural population surplus that emerged as a by-product of this process would be offset by the migration of the rural population to urban industrial centres; however, in the late eighteenth century migration was a trickle rather than a flood and the more immediate Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 effect was an increase in the rural poor and dispossessed. The situation was described in An Account of the Work-Houses in Great Britain, 1786:

There is a cruelty practiced in many Lordships, particularly in new Inclosures, both to the injury of the Poor, and decrease of Population, viz. That the Proprietors destroy the cottage-houses in order to remove the inhabitants. Without an Act of Inclosure, the right of Common could not be taken from the Poor; but, even with this, to dispossess them of their settlement seems to border on inhumanity.10 106 Habitations of the labourer The ‘Work-Houses’ referred to in the title of this account were containment centres introduced following the Workhouse Test Act (1723) in an attempt to cope with the increasing numbers of rural indigents. Under the Act, any person who wished to claim parish poor relief had to leave the land and enter a parish workhouse. Since the medieval period, the church and some landowners had provided almshouses – essentially a type of small cottage – for the poor and elderly.11 However, as enclosures increased, between 1723 and 1760 over 600 parish workhouses were built across England’s rural parishes. The initial societal effects of the Act were considered positive.12 Workhouses were part of each parish’s poor relief tax known as the ‘Parish Burden’, which was paid to the parish by the principle landowners within a parish. Therefore, despite profiting from enclosures, many landowners considered workhouses an unwanted expense and were prone to begrudge their share of the Parish Burden and workhouse law was modified under the Relief of the Poor Act, 1782. The principal amendment was that while the young, infirm and elderly were to be put out in poorhouses, the able bodied were to be provided with relief in their homes. Relief in the home was supposed to reduce taxation by reducing the size and growth of workhouses. Significantly, the Relief Act placed rural housing and landowners’ responsibility for its improvement at the centre of the public poor relief debate. From the 1780s onwards, through treatises, reports and building design, landowners were publicly urged to carry out their paternalistic and patriotic duty to improve their part of England not only for themselves but also for their tenantry (and the country). After all, improvement was supposed to be a national project; an ideological and practical partnership between landlords and government, private and public life, the individual and the state.13 Of course, the social, economic and political dominance of the wealthy landowner over the landless labourers who continued to live on their estates is implicit but to eighteenth-century notions of a civic society landowner paternalism was a force for good (and, not least, a demonstration by the individual landowner of the ‘polite’ quality of moral virtue).14

Addressed to ‘gentlemen of property’, Habitations of the Labourer, published in 1781 by John Wood the Younger, was the first architectural

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 treatise and pattern book to address the dwelling of the rural labourer. John Wood the Younger (1728–81) was the son of John Wood, architect of Queen’s Square and the Circus, Bath, and was himself the architect of the New Assembly Rooms, 1769–71, and the Royal Crescent, 1767–75, Bath. At the end of a career dominated by works in Bath and a handful of country house and church commissions in the English West Country, John Wood the Younger devoted his last architectural project to the West Country’s rural poor. Habitations of the Labourer was intended to encourage landowners to build for others, urging them to improve the terrible state of the rural dwellings Wood had observed in the West Country: Habitations of the labourer 107 shattered, dirty, inconvenient, miserable hovels scarcely affording shelter for beasts of the forest much less for the human species; nay it is impossible to describe the miserable condition of the poor cottager, of which I was too often the melancholy spectator … wet and damp from the floors of them being sunk… That they were cold and cheerless from the awkwardness of the situation of the door, windows, and chimney … That they were inconvenient from their want of room … That they were unhealthy … from the lowness and closeness of the rooms.15

‘Prompted by humanity to make my talent useful to the poorest of my fellow citizens’, as he describes it, Wood’s rational, humanitarian approach to cottage design distinguishes Habitations of the Labourer from the multitude of books on architect-designed cottages intended for the landscape garden:

Some time back when in conversation with several gentlemen of landed property; the conversation turned on the ruinous state of the cottages of this kingdom; it was observed that these habitations of that useful and necessary rank of men, the LABOURERS, were become for the most part offensive both to decency and humanity; that the state of them and how far they might be rendered more comfortable to the poor inhabitants, was a matter worthy of the attention of every man.16

Wood’s appeal to landowners in the English West Country to build better housing for estate labourers was written in the knowledge that the imminent 1782 Relief of the Poor Act would place landowners’ individual responsibilities for their poor cottagers, and the standard of estate cottages, at the centre of the public poor relief debate. Wood, however, does not address the causes of rural poverty; rather, he regrets the effects and offers an architect’s solution.17 Habitations of the Labourer is a humanitarian treatise which carefully presents the improvement of rural labourers’ housing not as a political polemic but, addressed to a readership of landowners, as a facet of well-managed agricultural improvement. Nonetheless in writing Habitations of the Labourer Wood entered the public debate on poor relief on the side of the humanitarian reform movement. Wood’s treatise was written with specific reference to the West Country.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 The West Country observed and described by Wood broadly incorporates the mid-west English counties of Somerset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. This is a temperate area of low lying, gently rolling hills which has historically maintained pastoral and, to a lesser extent, arable farming. Enclosures in the West Country were patchy and took place at the level of individual estates, owned by ‘gentlemen of landed property’, not great landowners, whose lands extended to two or three parishes. As such, the West Country did not see the vast depopulated landscapes and agricultural monocultures that were created in northern Scotland and eastern England.18 The ‘miserable hovels’ Wood describes in the West Country would have therefore included 108 Habitations of the labourer a range of dwellings from the ‘batter’d and decay’d’ traditional homes of petty tenants on unimproved estates to the recently built temporary dwellings of landless day labourers.19 Born in 1728, John Wood the Younger was a highly accomplished neoclassical architect whose life mapped the ‘Augustan age’ in British culture. He was, therefore, an archetypal figure of mid-eighteenth-century Britain combining in his work neoclassical culture with progressive European Enlightenment thought. Thus, while neoclassical art and design could lead to the imaginary world of the cottage-retreat and the Arcadian landscape garden, it also provided the aesthetic counterpart to the Enlightenment tenets of rational enquiry and progress which saw practical application in the ‘improvement’ of Britain’s agriculture, manufactories and civic infrastructure (roads, canals, harbours). Habitations of the Labourer applied these cultural dialogues to the practicalities of economic agricultural reform or ‘improvement’ and its social consequences. In response to the conditions he witnessed, Wood produced a collection of cottage designs that combined the order and regularity of neoclassical design with a programme of humanitarian reform, centred upon establishing material and structural standards. He intended that through improved design cottage life would be ‘rendered more comfortable to the poor inhabitants’.20 The term ‘comfort’ is of particular significance in the context of the eighteenth century as opposed to its specifically medical meaning in the seventeenth century and earlier. As John E. Crowley argues:

…the word comfort was beginning to have the modern connotation of self-conscious satisfaction between one’s body and its immediate physical environment … humanitarian reformers were giving new attention to concerns about lighting, heating, ventilation, privacy, ease, and hygiene in the design of the domestic environment.21

Accordingly, Wood’s idea of ‘comfort’ relates to the improvement of building performance, materials, construction, and spatial organisation, for the benefit of human health. However, Wood was also concerned with the neoclassical concept of beauty which he believed was immutably connected to virtue and morality. Therefore, designing cottages that were not just

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 practical but beautiful was to Wood a moral act. Writing shortly before his death in 1782, neoclassicism was unquestioningly equated with beauty, ‘I would by no means have these cottages fine, yet I recommend regularity, which is beauty; regularity will render them ornaments to the country’.22 A small but significant neoclassical detail in his cottage designs is the addition of a blind window to the centre of his design for paired cottages in order to avoid a void on the central axis. In Habitations of the Labourer Wood presents ‘SEVEN principles upon which all cottages should be built’ formulated from his observation of West Country cottages’. Cottages should be: dry and healthy; warm, cheerful and Habitations of the labourer 109 comfortable; convenient; at least 12 foot in width; always built in pairs or close to each other so ‘that the inhabitants may be of assistance to each other’; ‘built strong, and with the best materials’; and, finally, they should be provided with a vegetable garden.23 These principles responded to structural and site problems in vernacular cottages Wood had observed in the West Country such as sunk floors, spreading walls and poor ventilation from small openings and poor flues. Wood does not stipulate roofing or walling materials nor whether the roof should be open to the rafters or enclosed with a ceiling. He does not recommend interior finishes such as plaster, lime wash or rough exposed walls, although the phrase ‘by no means have these cottages fine’ would suggest a simple lime-wash finish.24 As he is primarily concerned with the well-being of the intended occupants, Wood is more devoted to interior plans than the authors of cottage related architectural titles previously discussed who were, for the most part, primarily concerned with their appearance within the landscape. Wood’s cottages are presented as a series of graduated plans: Cottages with One Room; Cottages with Two Rooms; Cottages with three Rooms; Cottages with Four Rooms. The number of rooms equate to family size, from one or two children up to families of eight or more. Cottages with Two Rooms establish Wood’s cottage model: plain but well-proportioned three-bay symmetrical buildings of rectangular-plan (Figure 6.2). The front elevation of each cottage is composed of a central doorway flanked by two large windows. The interior space is divided into three parts: two well-lit living spaces flanking a central space which includes a child’s sleeping recess behind a front entrance area. Gable end fireplaces with flues and large windows would have provided good ventilation and light within a cottage. However, the circulation of air would certainly have reduced the warmth and cheer of the cottage in comparison to the dark and dirty but centrally- heated and airtight traditional cottage. The individual rooms are not multi-functional spaces as would be found in a vernacular dwelling of similar size; each room is assigned a specific function (principally sleeping and cooking), separating public and private space and removing less hygienic functions such as sheltering livestock and human waste. Historians have commented on the social significance of Wood’s interior spaces: John Crowley stresses the importance Wood placed upon comfort in

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 the overall specifications; while Michael McKeon emphasises Wood’s careful ordering and subdivision of internal spaces.25 Significantly, work is also excluded from the domestic interior. Wood’s universal cottage designs were intended for the improved landscape of a new rural economy which was in part responsible for the decline of the cottager and the cottage industry.26 The imagined occupant was, therefore, an unskilled labourer who had to leave the home to work. However, Wood’s seventh principle stipulated that each cottage should have a garden plot. This can be linked to recommendations in the Board of Agriculture’s Annals of Agriculture that landless labourers should be provided with a small parcel of land sufficient 110 Habitations of the labourer Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 6.2 John Wood the Younger, ‘Cottages with Two Rooms’, A Series of Plans for Cottages or Habitations of the Labourer, 2nd edn, Bath, 1806. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection Habitations of the labourer 111 to grow some crops but too small to allow self-sufficiency. The intention was to keep poor relief, an unwanted tax burden, and cost of labour low without threatening the supply of labour or necessitating the payment of a living wage.27

The neoclassical cottages in Habitations of the Labourer were designed to sit within a rationalised landscape of agricultural improvement. Wood’s cottages are a universal architecture of the ‘common fields’: an artificial, geometric landscape of regular fields, neatly laid hedges and planned villages.28 The physical and moral location of the neoclassical cottage within the improved landscape of the 1780s was mirrored in the ‘industrial’ genre of contemporary landscape paintings, such as Francis Wheatley’s Industrious Cottager, 1786, depicting the contented worker rather than the proud landowner of Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews: a positive conception of art and industry that would be rejected by picturesque theorists of the later eighteenth century as ‘a mechanical process that resulted in uniformity and duplication’.29 Beyond the agricultural landscape, Wood’s combination of design and humanitarian reform also had contemporary counterparts in the utopian schemes of ‘social mechanics’ such as Robert Owen and Jeremy Bentham.30 Rational design was at the centre of utopian projects, such as David Dale and Robert Owen’s workers’ village and cotton mills complex of New Lanark, Lanarkshire, founded in 1786, and Jeremy Bentham’s well- known radial ‘inspection house’ design for the Panopticon, 1812.31 Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rationalised prisons and hospitals were built across Britain, such as the radially planned Cork and Dartmoor prisons and the hierarchically planned Edinburgh Bridewell prison, Glasgow Lunatic Asylum and Quaker-run York Retreat hospital. French physician Jean-Baptiste Leroy believed that hospitals could be designed as ‘machines for curing’.32 This is the same concern for health, the same observation-based design process and the same rational organisation of space that John Wood applied to the Habitations of the Labourer.

Wood wrote ‘no architect had, as yet, thought it worth his while to offer to the publick any well-constructed plans for cottages’.33 Yet, Wood’s cottage designs were by no means original and the classification of who was

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 considered an ‘architect’ in the late eighteenth century underpins this statement. Plans for cottages, similar to Wood’s paired cottages, were published six years earlier in Nathaniel Kent’s Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property, 1775 (Figure 6.3). However, Kent was not an architect but a land surveyor and his plans and elevations are notably cruder than Wood’s, the composition is not so delicate and the draughtsmanship is poor. Moreover, the single-storey, rectangular-plan, three-bay ‘improved cottage’ was a common feature of eighteenth-century agricultural improvement schemes throughout Britain. Simple neoclassical cottages were widely built by improving landowners or tenant farmers to provide suitable housing 112 Habitations of the labourer

Figure 6.3 Nathaniel Kent, ‘Two Brick Cottages of the Smallest Size’, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property, London, 1775. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection

wherever permanent labour forces were required as part of wider improvements. It was also the case that, although unpublished as folios of plans, British architects routinely designed labourers’ cottages as part of planned model villages related to wider agricultural improvements. However, the most prolific designers of cottages were probably professional land surveyors. The land surveyor was a vital aspect of any eighteenth- century improvement scheme. The mathematical and drawing skills required for drawing up estate maps and field enclosure schemes were readily translated into the design of simple symmetrical and regular cottages, such as those by Nathaniel Kent. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 By the late eighteenth century, the single storey, three-bay symmetrical cottage and its counterpart the two-storey, three bay farmhouse were familiar features of the improved landscape and familiar to house builders throughout eighteenth-century Britain.34 For example, in 1786 the Scottish surveyor David Aitken drew up a series of ‘neat and regular’ cottage designs for the planned village of Ullapool, Wester Ross, that are very similar in plan and elevation to Wood’s designs, while in 1786 Samuel Wyatt designed model farmhouses for the Holkham estate in Norfolk.35 Common building types and design principles were disseminated and established throughout eighteenth-century Britain and the British Atlantic world, following the Habitations of the labourer 113 routes of migrant labour and the distribution of architectural publications throughout Britain and North America. For example, Abbott Lowell Cummings has demonstrated that the most popular architectural titles available in eighteenth-century New England were both English publications: William Salmon’s Palladio Londinensis, London, 1737, and Batty Langley’s The Builder’s Jewel, London, 1741.36 As such, while building materials varied according to local availability and relative cost, Wood’s Cottages with Two Rooms are comparable to both a shepherd’s cottage in the Scottish Highlands or an English settler’s farmhouse in Nova Scotia, Canada.37 As discussed in the context of everyday urban classicism in the previous chapter, the eighteenth century saw unprecedented uniformity in the production of British domestic architecture. Habitations of the Labourer was the first British architectural treatise on cottage design and the first architectural writing to link estate improvement to humanitarian reform, but, despite Wood’s claim to an observation-based design process, the designs were a late codification of a commonplace building type.

Wood’s campaign for humanitarian cottage design was continued into the nineteenth century by architects such as Richard Elsam who followed his volume on gentleman’s cottage-retreats and villas, An Essay on Rural Architecture 1803, with the more socially-minded Hints for Improving the Condition of the Peasantry in All Parts of the United Kingdom, by Promoting Comfort in their Habitations, 1816. Like Wood, Elsam prefaced his designs with an account of the ‘miserable huts’ he observed in the countryside:

…in many parts of the united kingdom these habitations are the most miserable huts…as the friend of mankind, anxious for the welfare of his fellow-creatures, he cannot but lament the fate of many thousands who, in these hospitable isles, are destined to live under hovels fit only to shelter the inhabitants of the forest from the inclemencies of the weather.38

However, in contrast to Wood’s plain neoclassicism, Elsam’s cottages are dressed like ornamental estate cottages, featuring thatched-roofs, tall chimneystacks and mullioned windows common to the emergent picturesque- cottage style (Figure 8.6). Whereas Wood set out a clear utilitarian aesthetic

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 for his worker’s cottages, distinct from the thatched architect-designed cottages of his contemporaries Chambers, Richardson or Plaw, Elsam’s cottages are in outward appearance the same as any other estate building dressed as a cottage. Yet, Elsam’s labourer’s cottages are significantly larger than the typical published designs for ornamental gate-lodges and gardener’s cottages, comprising three bedrooms, a large kitchen-living space 17 by 18 feet and several smaller rooms or offices. As such, in these designs Elsam addresses both the artistic sensibilities and the social conscience of the landowner, offering cottages that would enhance the landscape as well as provide a comfortable life for their inhabitants.39 114 Habitations of the labourer The campaign against rural poverty, living conditions and the need to improve labourers’ cottages continued well into the nineteenth century where, according to the governmental Sanitary Report of the Poor Law Commissions, 1842, conditions had not significantly improved across much of rural England despite the efforts of architects such as Wood and Elsam. As William Cobbett observed in his Rural Rides of the 1820s:

The desolation and damnable system of paper-money, by sweeping away small home-steads, and laying ten farms into one, has literally stripped of all shelter for the labourer … The labourers seem miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds, and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig. Their wretched hovels are struck upon little bits of ground on the roadside, where the space has been wider than the road demanded. In many places they have not two rods to a hovel. It seems as if they had been swept off the fields by a hurricane, and had dropped and found shelter under the banks of the roadside!40

Architects and architectural commentators continued this public engagement; P. F. Robinson stressed in Designs for Farm Buildings, 1830, that the cottage of the improved agricultural landscape should be characterised by its practical simplicity and utility rather than the pastoral poetry-infused notion of a ‘simple life’.41 J. C. Loudon entered the debate in 1846 in response to the 1842 Sanitary Report with a new supplement on labourers’ cottages added to the Encyclopaedia of Cottage Farm and Villa Architecture that included extensive social commentary as well as new designs.42 Indeed, for the humanitarian social reformer the conditions described in the Sanitary Report were disturbing. For example, the account for Northumberland reported:

The general character of the best of the old-fashioned hinds’ cottages in this neighbourhood [Norham, on the banks of the Tweed, not far from Berwick] is bad at the best … mere sheds … The average size of these sheds is about twenty-four feet by sixteen-feet. They are dark and unwholesome. The windows do not open, and many of them are not larger than twenty inches by sixteen inches. And into this space are

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 crowded, eight, ten, and even twelve persons. How they lie down to rest, how they sleep, how they can preserve common decency, how unutterable horrors are avoided is beyond all comprehension.43

The Sanitary Report account for Bedfordshire described conditions that were

not much better … and expose the family to every vicissitude of the weather: the liability of the children so situated to contagious maladies frequently plunges the family into greatest misery … The girls become the mothers of bastards, and return home a burden to their parents or Habitations of the labourer 115 to the parish, and fill the workhouse. The boys … become the worst of labourers, resort to poaching, commit petty thefts, and add to the county rates by commitments and prosecutions.44

The report goes on to contrast these scenes of social degeneracy with the happy, respectable life within an improved cottage where the labourer who:

…sees his wife and family more comfortable than formerly; rises in respectability of station, and becomes aware that he has a character to lose. Having acquired these important advantages, he is anxious to retain and improve them.45

Loudon provides numerous cottage designs that were presented as, ‘the beau ideal of what we think every married couple, having children of both sexes, and living in the country, should possess’, where, ‘The necessities, and even comforts of life, are contained in a small compass’.46 These range from utilitarian model cottages intended to improve living conditions to highly decorative cottages intended to improve landscapes. For example, in Design XVII, ‘A Dwelling with Two Rooms and Bed-closet’, Loudon offers a stripped-back functional cottage in the simple neoclassical tradition established by Kent and Wood (Figure 6.4): ‘It must be confessed that this, though a substantial looking dwelling, which promises not be without comfort within, has nothing elegant in its appearance. If it has any character of style, it is that of the Scotch stone cottage’.47 Although, unable to resist some picturesque detail, he adds that ‘What can be done to render such a cottage elegant? A veranda might be added…The chimney top might also be enriched by ornamental chimney pots…’.48 John Papworth wrote of the new improved labourers’ cottages that ‘such buildings, neat, clean, and in good repair, become testimonies of that liberality and care of his dependents that have always been distinguishing features of the character of a British gentlemen’.49 However, despite the exhortations of social commentators and architects from Wood to Loudon, the accounts provided in the Sanitary Report suggest that by the mid-nineteenth century reformers had met with only limited success in convincing England’s landowners to tend to the dwellings of their labourers as well as the stables and dressed cottages in

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 their gardens. Indeed, in terms of the demographic of social-housing reformers, it is interesting that Donaldson observes in passing in A Treatise on Manures, 1842, that in his experience industrialists in the north of England were much more active in providing improved cottage accommodation than the region’s traditional landowning class.50 In light of this, it is worth observing that the great development of Bedford Estates villages by Francis Russell, 7th Duke of Bedford, in the 1840s and 1850s, much feted in the later nineteenth century, and the designs of which were submitted to the Royal Agricultural Society and later published in 1850, followed soon after the Sanitary Report and its public reception and commentary by figures such as Loudon.51 116 Habitations of the labourer Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 6.4 John Claudius Loudon, Design XVII, ‘‘A Dwelling with Two Rooms and a Bed-closet’, The Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, Villa Architecture. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection Habitations of the labourer 117 John Wood’s neoclassical labourers’ cottages were a late codification of a ‘neat and regular’ everyday building type which had evolved in relation to agricultural improvement schemes throughout eighteenth-century Britain. Although Habitations of the Labourer ran to three editions (1781, 1806, 1837), tastes changed; with the advent of the Picturesque in the late eighteenth century Wood’s conviction that ‘regularity is beauty’ was no longer an absolute of cultural taste and a new generation of humanitarian cottage pattern books by authors such as Elsam emphasised irregularity and variety based upon vernacular cottage forms. However, it is not the designs but Wood’s progressive humanitarian text, developed by Loudon in the nineteenth century, that fully distinguishes Habitations of the Labourer from the scenographic poverty depicted in the majority of the Picturesque cottage-style pattern books that followed.

Notes 1 William Brogden, ‘The Ferme Ornée and Changing Attitudes to Agricultural Improvement’, Eighteenth Century Life 8 (1983), 39–44. 2 Thomas Whately cited in Brogden, ‘Ferme Ornée’, 42. 3 Henry Home, Lord Kames, cited in David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain (New Haven, 1990), p. 302. 4 Ibid., p. 253. 5 Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain, 1470–1750 (London, 2000), p. 327. 6 Tom Williamson, The Transformation of Rural England: Farming and the Landscape, 1700–1870 (Exeter, 2002), pp. 45–9; J. V. Beckett, ‘The Disappearance of the Cottager and the Squatter from the English Countryside’ in Jim Holdness and Michael Turner (eds), Land, Labour and Agriculture, 1700–1920 (London, 1991), pp. 49–68. 7 Anon., The Complete English Farmer … In which is comprised, A General View of the whole Art of Agriculture (London, 1761). 8 Susanna Wade Martins, Farmers, Landlords and Landscapes: Rural Britain, 1720 to 1870 (Macclesfield, 2004), pp. 72–96. 9 Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley, 1986), p. 10. 10 Anon., An Account of the Work-Houses in Great Britain, in the year MDCCXXXII. 3rd edn (London, 1786), pp.iv–v. 11 Ronald W. Brunskill, Houses and Cottages of Britain: Origins and Development of Traditional Buildings (London, 1997), p. 104.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 12 Anon., An Account of Several Work-houses for Employing and Maintaining the Poor; setting forth the rules by which they are governed (London, 1725), p. iv. 13 Andrew Mackillop, More Fruitful Than the Soil: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715–1815 (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 190–5. 14 See W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago, 2002); Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (Oxford, 1999). 15 John Wood, A Series of Plans for Cottages or Habitations of the Labourer: A Series of Plans for Cottages or Habitations of the Labourer (Bath, 1781, second edition, London, 1806; third edition, London, 1837), pp. i–iii. 16 Ibid. 118 Habitations of the labourer 17 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event, in a Letter Intended to have been sent to a Gentleman in Paris (London, 1790); John Sinclair (ed.), Submissions to the Board of Agriculture, vol. 1 (London, 1793). 18 Williamson, Transformation, pp. 155–160. 19 ‘The souls dark cottages, batter’d and decay’d/Lets in new light thro’ chinks that time has made’ from ‘Death and Judgement’ in Joseph Addison, The Evidences of the Christian Religion (1763; Oxford 1827), p. 346. 20 Wood, Habitations of the Labourer, p. ii. 21 John E. Crowley, Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities of Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, 2001), pp. 216–19. 22 Wood, Habitations of the Labourer, p. iv. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Crowley, Comfort; M. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge, (Baltimore, 2005), pp. 259–67. 26 John Barrell, The Darkside of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 3. 27 Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, p. 76. 28 Ibid., p. 13. 29 Ibid., p. 67. 30 John McArthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (London, 2007), p. 9. 31 Jeremy Bentham, Pauper Management Improved: Particularly by Means of an Application of the Panopticon Principle of Construction (London, 1812). 32 Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture, 1750–1890 (Oxford, 2000), p. 95. 33 Wood, Habitations of the Labourer, p. i. 34 Daniel Maudlin, ‘Modern Homes for Modern People: Identifying and Interpreting the Highland Building Boom, 1700–1850’, Vernacular Architecture, 39 (2008), 1-25; Daniel Maudlin, ‘Tradition and Change in the Age of Improvement’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 133 (2003), 359–75; Daniel Maudlin, ‘Architecture and Identity on the Edge of Empire: Domestic Architecture in Nova Scotia, Canada, 1800–1850’, Architectural History, 50, (2007), 95–123. 35 See Daniel Maudlin, The Highland House Transformed: Architecture and Identity on the Edge of Britain, 1700–1850 (Dundee, 2009). 36 Abbot Lowell Cummings, ‘The Availability of Architectural Books in Eighteenth- century New England’ in K. Hafertepe and J. F. O’Gorman (eds), American Architects and their Books to 1848 (Amherst, 2001), pp. 1–16. 37 See Maudlin, The Highland House Transformed. 38 Richard Elsam, Hints for Improving the Condition of the Peasantry in All Parts of the United Kingdom, by Promoting Comfort in their Habitations (London, 1816), p. 2.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 39 Sarah Lloyd, ‘Cottage Conversations: Poverty and Manly Independence in Eighteenth-century England’, Past and Present (2004), 69–108. 40 William Cobbett, Rural Rides in England 1820–1836 (London, 1909), pp. 45–6; 27. 41 Peter F. Robinson, Designs for Farm Buildings (London, 1830), Design 1. 42 John Claudius Loudon, The Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture (London, 1834; 2nd edn 1846), p. 1125. 43 Loudon, The Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, Villa Architecture (London, 1846), p. 1126 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Loudon, Encyclopaedia (1846), p. 8. 47 Loudon, p.72. Habitations of the labourer 119 48 Ibid. 49 Papworth, Rural Residences, p. 21 50 Loudon, Encyclopaedia, p. 1127. 51 See Francis Russell, (7th) Duke of Bedford, Plans and Elevations of Cottages for Agricultural Labourers (London 1850).

Bibliography Addison, Joseph. The Evidences of the Christian Religion (1763; Oxford 1827). Anon. An Account of the Work-Houses in Great Britain, in the year MDCCXXXII. 3rd edn (London, 1786). Anon. ‘The Builder’s Dictionary’ in The rudiments of architecture: or the young workman’s instructor. 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1778; reprint 1992). Anon. The Complete English Farmer … In which is comprised, A General View of the whole Art of Agriculture (London, 1761). Anon. An Account of Several Work-houses for Employing and Maintaining the Poor; setting forth the rules by which they are governed (London, 1725). Barrell, John. The Darkside of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge, 1980). Beckett, J. V. ‘The Disappearance of the Cottager and the Squatter from the English Countryside’ in Jim Holdness and Michael Turner (eds), Land, Labour and Agriculture, 1700–1920 (London, 1991), pp. 49–68. Bentham, Jeremy. Pauper Management Improved: Particularly by Means of an Application of the Panopticon Principle of Construction (London, 1812). Bergdoll, Barry. European Architecture, 1750–1890 (Oxford, 2000). Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley, 1986). Brogden, William. ‘The Ferme Ornée and Changing Attitudes to Agricultural Improvement’, Eighteenth Century Life 8 (1983), 39–44. Brunskill, Ronald W. Houses and Cottages of Britain: Origins and Development of Traditional Buildings (London, 1997). Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France, and the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event, in a Letter Intended to have been sent to a Gentleman in Paris (London, 1790). Cobbett, William. Rural Rides in England 1820–1836 (London, 1909). Crowley, John. E. Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities of Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, 2001). Cummings, Abbot Lowell. ‘The Availability of Architectural Books in Eighteenth– century New England’ in K. Hafertepe and J. F. O’Gorman (eds), American Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Architects and Their Books to 1848 (Amherst, 2001), pp. 1–16. Elsam, Richard. Hints for Improving the Condition of the Peasantry in All Parts of the United Kingdom, by Promoting Comfort in their Habitations (London, 1816). Kent, Nathaniel. Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property (London, 1775). Lloyd, Sarah. ‘Cottage Conversations: Poverty and Manly Independence in Eighteenth- century England’, Past and Present (2004), 69–108. Loudon, John Claudius. The Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, Villa Architecture Vol I & II. 2nd edn (London, 1834; 1846). Martins, Susanna Wade. Farmers, Landlords and Landscapes: Rural Britain, 1720 to 1870 (Macclesfield, 2004). 120 Habitations of the labourer Mackillop, Andrew. More Fruitful Than the Soil: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715–1815 (Edinburgh, 2000). Maudlin, Daniel. The Highland House Transformed: Architecture and Identity on the Edge of Britain, 1700–1850 (Dundee, 2009). Maudlin, Daniel. ‘Modern Homes for Modern People: Identifying and Interpreting the Highland Building Boom, 1700–1850’, Vernacular Architecture, 39 (2008), 1–25. Maudlin, Daniel. ‘Architecture and Identity on the Edge of Empire: Domestic Architecture in Nova Scotia, Canada, 1800–1850’, Architectural History, 50, (2007), 95–123. Maudlin, Daniel. ‘Tradition and Change in the Age of Improvement’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 133 (2003), 359–75. McArthur, John. The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (London, 2007). McCann, Andrew. Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (Oxford, 1999). McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, 2005). Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.) Landscape and Power (Chicago, 2002). Papworth, John Buonarotti. Rural Residences (London, 1818). Robinson, Peter F. Designs for Farm Buildings (London, 1830). Russell, Francis (7th) Duke of Bedford, Plans and Elevations of Cottages for Agricultural Labourers (London, 1850). Sinclair, John. (ed.) Submissions to the Board of Agriculture, vol. 1 (London, 1793). Spadafora, David. The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain (New Haven, 1990). Williamson, Tom. The Transformation of Rural England: Farming and the Landscape, 1700–1870 (Exeter, 2002). Wood, John. Habitations of the Labourer: A Series of Plans for Cottages or Habitations of the Labourer (Bath, 1780). Wrightson, Keith. Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain, 1470–1750 (London, 2000). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 7 The appreciation of cottages

In the late eighteenth century the appreciation of landscape was extended beyond the bounds of the designed landscape and the country estate to the wider English countryside. The conceptual process of appreciation remained the same in this new context: subject, object, observation and the imagination. As in the designed landscape, the ‘objects’ now observed in the wider landscape – trees, rocks, rivers, buildings – were seen and valued as elements in an overall composition. However, outside of the estate, objects not encountered through the careful scheme of the landscape gardener were viewed as ‘found’ by the appreciative observer. The rural vernacular cottage was prominent among the found ‘natural’ objects appreciated by landscape connoisseurs and instead of seeing hovels, ready for removal and replacement by the improver, they saw beauty; or rather, a new aesthetic category somewhere between the beautiful and the sublime: the Picturesque. Malcolm Andrews has described the advent of the Picturesque in the late eighteenth century as a ‘major disturbance in Augustan culture’.1 In terms of art and its appreciation this statement is not hyperbole; not only did the proponents of the Picturesque look to the English landscape they admired qualities that were anathema to neoclassical architecture: irregularity of forms and variety of textures and colours. However, this disturbance was not a rejection of the cultural space occupied by Antiquity. Picturesque theorists did not seek to establish the English landscape and its contents as outside of European neoclassical culture. They were not National Romantics in that sense. Rather, they sought to appreciate the gently rolling English landscape as a space within Classical culture.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 The term ‘picturesque’ was used throughout the eighteenth century in relation to the appreciation of irregular compositions in landscape painting and, by imitation, landscape design (i.e. like a picture). As John Papworth puts it in Hints on Ornamental Gardening, 1823:

‘The Picturesque’ rather implies that which is like to a picture, or such combination of form, light, shade, colour and effect as a painter would choose to record by his pencil … In landscape it is the same; the elegant and classic Scenery of Claude, the bolder compositions of Poussin, the romantic flight of Salvator Rosa, all come within the same pale.2 122 The appreciation of cottages In the eighteenth century an irregular landscape scheme that followed the topography of place, or site, was considered the Arcadian ideal and the appropriate ‘natural’ setting for regular, symmetrical neoclassical buildings. These landscapes and the objects within them were intended to be understood through the interaction between the imagination of the educated observer and the observed object. In 1770, travel writer, landscape connoisseur and painter William Gilpin took these principles and applied them to the wider English landscape as he encountered it on the River Wye. Famously, the resulting work was published as Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty: made in the summer of 1770. Closely following the language of garden design, in Observations on the River Wye Gilpin presents a list of ‘ornaments’ he had observed and which he considered suitable for visual appreciation, ‘the ornaments of the Wye may be ranged under four heads; ground, wood, rocks, and buildings’; on buildings he further expanded:

…the various buildings which arise everywhere on the banks of the Wye, form the last of its ornaments: abbeys, castles, villages, spires, forges, mills, and bridges. One or other of these venerable vestiges of past, or cheerful habitations of present times, characterise almost every scene.3

Following Gilpin, a theory of the Picturesque was presented in the highly influentialAn Essay on the Picturesque, 1794, written by wealthy landowner and art connoisseur Sir Uvedale Price. Primarily derived from his analysis of landscape paintings, especially the ‘wild’ landscapes of Salvator Rosa, rather than from travel like Gilpin, Price articulated the Picturesque as the quality of ‘roughness’, signifying a new category between the two extremes of the beautiful (the artificial artistic works of man) and the sublime (mountains, moors and rough seas) as defined by Edmund Burke a generation earlier in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 1757. Roughness was well suited to the appreciation of the English countryside; neither tended lawns nor mountain crags but hedge, tree, rolling hill, field and stream. Roughness implied irregular forms, textures and colours not just in the contours of the landscape but in the objects observed within it. Roughness, therefore, applied to ruins and vernacular

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 buildings such as cottages which could be appreciated for their irregular construction and varied materials or from their incompleteness through decay. Roughness specifically excluded neat and regular neoclassical buildings. Price’s text is exclusively concerned with the visual appreciation of landscape composition. In An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, 1805, another wealthy landowner and art connoisseur, Payne Knight, goes further, and like Addison, stresses the power of the imagination and the associative relationship between the observer and the observed: objects served the imagination as well as the composition.4 As with pastoralism, engagement with the Picturesque required the right reading. The Picturesque The appreciation of cottages 123 is best understood as a combination of the different contributions made by different writers: Gilpin, Price and Payne Knight. The Picturesque defined polite society’s view of the English landscape and its contents through the nineteenth century. In The Picturesque, 1927, art historian and English gentleman Christopher Hussey reflected that by the close of the nineteenth century the Picturesque had become an assumed way of seeing the countryside by his class.5 This was a proprietorial view of the English landscape that implied the cultural ownership of the countryside by the members of polite society and a redefining of its purpose as a source of visual edification for that group.6 As such, the aesthetic concerns of the Picturesque had significant social implications; as Don Mitchell argues, ‘if the desires and landscapes of a particular class can be shown … to stand for the identity of the nation as a whole … then what choice do those who live and toil in those national landscapes have but to identify with them’.7

Cottages emerged as one of the most popular ‘natural’ objects chosen for Picturesque appreciation and representation by theorists, artists and genteel rural tourists. The rural cottages under observation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century would today fall into the building typology known as ‘vernacular architecture’. The term ‘vernacular’ is derived from the Latin verna or slave and so is a category defined by low social status – not only of buildings but also of builders – and those buildings are, therefore, defined as being in opposition to what is considered high status and sometimes described as ‘polite architecture’; that is, architecture pertaining to polite society. Polite architecture, therefore, encompasses those buildings designed by professional architects according to universal principles, built by highly trained builders and consumed by wealthy patrons as expressions of their good taste. With some irony, the gentleman’s architect-designed cottage is thus the epitome of polite architecture. In contrast, the rural vernacular cottage was a dwelling built by and for poor people who acted and thought locally. The vernacular cottage was built with low-cost or free local materials (such as reeds for roofing thatch). The form and, therefore, external appearance of a cottage – the primary concern of the landscape connoisseur – was determined by a combination of the structural capabilities of those materials and the internal spatial needs of its occupants (space to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 cook, space to sleep). Both construction techniques and structure were further determined by craft traditions evolved over generations.8 Moreover, due to the relatively high-level of rural mobility amongst landless labourers induced by enclosure, many of the rural dwellings observed in the late Georgian period would have been hastily erected; temporary wayside structures, not just the well-built permanent structures we think of as cottages today. The irregular forms and mixed materials of rural vernacular cottages were an appealing scene for the Picturesque tourist of the late eighteenth century. Structural instability through poor maintenance and building decay 124 The appreciation of cottages offered further visual delight. For example, Gilpin describes the ‘view’ of a cottage and other objects in a landscape scene on the estate of Mr Jones at Hafod, Radnorshire, where ‘in one place you see a cottage pleasantly seated among the thickets of a woody hill’.9 Price was interested in the visual qualities of form, colour and texture and, in this, considered cottages to be no different from any other landscape object. Price also made clear what he was rejecting in favour of the Picturesque:

A cottage of a quiet colour, half concealed among trees … is one of the most tranquil and soothing of all rural objects, and when the sun strikes upon it, and discovers a number of lively picturesque circumstances, one of the most cheerful; but if cleared round and whitened, its modest retired character is gone, and succeeded by perpetual glare … a whitened object like the external grin of a fool.10

On aesthetic grounds, he also called for the preservation of cottages scheduled for demolition in estate improvement schemes: ‘to appropriate by demolishing many a cheerful retired cottage … is to appropriate by disquieting all whose taste is not insensible or depraved; in the same sense that an alderman appropriates a plate of turtle by sneezing over it’.11 This appeal was later echoed in the 1830s by J. C. Loudon who claimed that:

I should scarcely have courage to pull down a fine old specimen of a picturesque cottage, unless in a case of extreme necessity. Generally speaking, an old cottage may be so repaired and restored as to preserve the picturesque exterior, while the interior was made convenient and comfortable.12

In the preservation of cottages for landscape effect, both Loudon and Price were preceded by Capability Brown who retained existing vernacular cottages as eye-catchers at Roche Abbey, Yorkshire, 1774, for the 4th Earl of Scarborough, and on the banks of the lake at Bowood, Wiltshire in the 1760s for the 2nd Earl of Shelburne.13

Informed by the Picturesque, the vernacular cottage became a popular

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 subject for appreciative observation and depiction in painting by amateur landscape artists. The development of amateur landscape painting arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a popular activity for the genteel tourist. Travel was an expensive activity that required extensive leisure time.14 Ladies and gentlemen travelled to picturesque beauty spots such as the Lake District, the Peak District, the Scottish Highlands, Dartmoor and Exmoor in search of scenes to observe, appreciate and, often, represent in sketches and watercolours. The figure of the genteel traveller-cum- landscape artist was famously caricatured in William Combe’s Dr Syntax in The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, 1812. Through this The appreciation of cottages 125 process, as John Urry describes, ‘the distinction between nature and art dissolved into a circularity. Landscape became a reduplication of the picture that preceded it’.15 Gentleman-traveller-artist, the Rev. John Swete, exemplifies the character of Dr Syntax. Swete was a relatively wealthy gentleman-landowner from Devon. Educated at Eton and Oxford, president of the Exeter Literary Society, he was ‘a learned and cultured gentleman poet’ and the epitome of the educated and leisured genteel connoisseur.16 Like many, forced to abandon planned journeys to Europe due to the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars, equipped with pencil and paint brush, Swete travelled extensively across rural Devon in search of picturesque beauty between 1789 and 1792. As Todd Gray, the modern editor of Swete’s journals, notes:

…his greatest interest in the landscape lay in the picturesque: he used the word no less than 125 times in the first four surviving journals. He wrote of the sublime, the romantic and the beautiful, expressing his understanding of the current landscape debate, and in his journals cited such leading landscape figures as William Kent, William Gilpin, George Mason, and Capability Brown … [but] failed to mention Sir Udevale Price.17

The Rev. John Swete described and painted many cottages scenes in Devon, as at Dulverton:

On my approach to Dulverton, the Church, the buildings ranged on the side of a hill, and the bridge, over which I soon after past, form’d a group of objects, which was than common beautifull … almost immediately opened on my view a rich scene, abundant in rural images – a hill sloping to the river diversified with inclosures and woods amid which here and there was seen a scattered Cottage or two; and one in particular, situated on a rising knoll.18

A similar picturesque cottage scene is described and depicted as observed on the river Exe at Powderham (Figure 7.1):

In the environs there is many a Scene of Picturesque beauty … Following

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 then the course of the road … a Cottage presently offers itself to view situate on a little eminence to the right: Above the road from the opposite grounds, it, and the Scenery around it, is beheld in the greatest perfection.19

Despite the apparent ‘major disturbance in Augustan culture’ caused by the Picturesque and the increased appreciation of a ‘local’ English culture, vernacular cottages were interpreted and understood by wealthy, educated English men and women such as Swete through the common reference point of Antiquity.20 This is apparent in the case of Swete’s visit to a longhouse on Dartmoor (Figure 7.2). Swete’s description of this experience provides an 126 The appreciation of cottages

Figure 7.1 John Swete, ‘Cottage at Powderham’, 1799. Source: Devon Heritage Services

insight into the complex and contradictory cultural landscape occupied by a gentleman-landowner in the late eighteenth century as he seeks out familiar terms of reference to describe ‘Old Cator’s Cottage’, moving from Virgil to Livy to Ovid; the name Old Cator given to the occupant of the cottage is itself a Classical reference. It is also a rare description of a Devon longhouse in the eighteenth century. Swete writes:

This Story of the Old Cator, related, tho’ with some exultation, yet with the most artless simplicity, was in itself highly interesting. I admired him first, and I then turned to admire his House – I found it, in one part to come within the description given Us by Virgil ‘Pauperis et tuguir congestum cespile culmen’ – it was composed of turf and Peat, and in another (which was now the chiefest habitation), such as has been Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 handed down to Us by Livy, of the antient mode of erecting such sort of Buildings … Such was a cottage at Rome, and such is Old Cators on Dartmoor – rough and shattered as it was, it yet possessed much of the Picturesque in its appearance.21

Swete goes on to compare ‘this picture of primitive simplicity’ to Juvenal’s sixth satire.22 The story of Old Cator is embedded within Swete’s descriptions of the picturesque Devon landscape suggesting that the cultural dominance of Rome did not end abruptly but that new notions of beauty The appreciation of cottages 127

Figure 7.2 John Swete, ‘Cottage on Dartmoor’, 1797. Source: Devon Heritage Services

and landscape were assimilated into a world still seen through the lens of Classical culture. Writing a generation after Swete in the early nineteenth century, William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, 1822, is located within the same tradition of picturesque travel-writing. Like Swete, Wordsworth makes numerous appreciative references to the cottages he encounters on his tours through the vales and valleys of the Lake District, where a scene can be much ‘heightened by a single cottage’.23 Surprisingly perhaps, when contrasted with the detailed descriptions of everyday people that populate poetic works such as the Lyrical Ballads, like Gilpin and Price, Wordsworth views the Lake District cottage as a natural object ‘grown’ without human hands ‘risen, by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock’ and ‘which in their very form call to mind the processes of Nature’.24 Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 However, not all genteel travellers and travel-writers were concerned with the Picturesque. Swete’s and Wordsworth’s analysis of the visual composition of each scene encountered can be contrasted with William Cobbett’s Rural Rides of the 1820s which reflect a different set of interests. Like Swete, Cobbett was a ‘gentleman’, keen author, self-publicist and contributor to publications. However, his observations of rural England, including its cottages, reflect his interest in rural affairs and the health of the countryside rather than in art and aesthetics. Cobbett wrote on the countryside surrounding Marlborough, Wiltshire: 128 The appreciation of cottages I never before saw country people so miserable in appearance as these. There were some very pretty girls, but ragged as colts, and as pale as ashes. The day was cold too, and frost hardly off the ground: and their blue arms and lips would have made any heart ache … a little after passing by these poor things … I came to a group of shabby houses upon a hill.25

Cobbett’s interests in rural dwellings align with the humanitarian agenda of John Wood’s Habitations of the Labourer rather than with Dr Syntax.26 This exposure of the social blindness of the Picturesque and its single-minded interest in the aesthetics of the observed countryside – including scenes of poverty and hardship – was later described by John Ruskin as the ‘heartlessness of the picturesque … a facile preoccupation with visual qualities which blind the weak minded to human suffering’.27 Indeed, at points in his tour journals the Rev. Swete expressed his own unease with the ramshackle poverty he observed as art and reflected on the social causes behind it, notably the ill effects of enclosure.28

As with connoisseurs of architecture, genteel landscape painters such as Swete found advice and access to a social network of like-minded enthusiasts through subscription publications such as The Landscape Magazine, published in the late eighteenth century by J. Taylor’s of High Holburn (the principal publisher of architectural books on cottages). The magazine comprised essays on the execution of landscape paintings and reproductions of artwork submitted by its readers (suggesting a network of connoisseurship in criticism as well as execution); the editors reassured subscribers that ‘Gentlemen possessing curious Views in Britain, or its Dependencies, may depend on every Care and attention being paid to all Drawings or Pictures entrusted to the publisher’.29 The editorial to volume four of The Landscape Magazine, 1793, advises the would-be painter that, as advocated by Gilpin and Price, good landscape painting centred on the judicious composition of objects not just depictions of land.30 The magazine proposed three categories of landscape painting: the Simple Style, the Varied or Ornamental Style, and the Historical or Sublime Style.31 Cottages were assigned to the Simple Style, wherein ‘when one idea …

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 is to be represented, it is necessary that one be happily chosen, forcibly expressed, truly characterized, and exactly represented’.32 The ‘Simple Style’ alludes not to simple composition but to the theme of simplicity and rustic subject matters ‘drawn from the cottage, from rustics, from children, and their occupations’, noting ‘Many masters who have made considerable progress in seemingly more difficult undertakings, have failed in this Style.’33 Indeed the magazine gives pre-eminence to the cottage in its canon of Picturesque subjects: ‘trees of different hues’, hills, dales, rocks, roads, ravines, caverns, cities and ports.34 The magazine concludes that for a good amateur painter, ‘Genius, and Ability, render extremely interesting the simple cottage’.35 The appreciation of cottages 129 Cottages were also popular subjects for professional artists producing images for domestic consumption. Illustrated tours published for parlour tourists were widely published such as J. Skinner’s West Country Tour being the Diary of a Tour through the Counties of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall in 1797, or, William Daniell’s multi-volume A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain, 1814–25. Prints of cottages in landscape settings were also available for the smaller pocket and published in volumes such as J. T. Smith’s Remarks on Rural Scenery: with Twenty Etchings of Cottages, from Nature, published in 1797 or Francis Steven’s, Views of Cottages and Farm- Houses in England and Wales of 1815. In painting, as discussed in chapter one, cottages were represented as early as the 1770s in Thomas Gainsborough’s ‘cottage door’ scenes although the cottages are only architectural gestures, dull shapes with doorways not recognisable buildings. However, by the early nineteenth century landscape painting had turned to detailed representations of vernacular cottages. Perhaps the most famous representation of a vernacular cottage in English landscape painting of this period is John Constable’s The Hay Wain, 1821. To the left of the familiar image of the hay wain in midstream, in the brown foreground, is Willy Lott’s cottage at Flatford Bridge, Dedham Vale, Suffolk. The cottage balances the left of the composition with the trees to centre and the S-curve of the river crosses the scene from left to right. The cottage itself offers irregular form and varied colours and textures. The actual cottage shown is a two-storey building with various irregular out- shots or additions and in materials and construction is typical of Sussex craft tradition: white-rendered walls over a stone base course, steeply- gabled roof covered with red pan-tiles and a brick gable-end chimney stack (Figure 7.3). Constable paints smoke rising up from the chimney showing the cottage is occupied but also a tree growing out of its foundations and moss on the roof, showing decay. Humphry Repton’s ‘View from My Own Cottage in Essex’, illustrated in Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 1816, is an interesting image in the context of professional art and the Picturesque (Figure 7.4). The image depicts the garden of his (vernacular) cottage in the village of Hare Street, near Romford in Essex with a background of vernacular cottages, an inn and a curving lane. Repton’s cottage is not

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 shown. Like the river in the Hay Wain, the garden fence and lane form an S-curve across the picture.36 However, in terms of subject matter, as with Constable’s inclusion of Willy Lott’s cottage, what is significant is that Repton presents the surrounding cottages and other vernacular buildings to his readers as appropriate ornaments to his view. By the mid-nineteenth century, paintings of vernacular cottages and village street scenes had evolved into a substantial and popular subgenre in English painting, practised by Victorian artists such as Sir David Scott and Edward John Cobbett to lesser known figures such as John James Wilson, James Langley and George Burrell Willcock. These paintings decorated the walls of genteel 130 The appreciation of cottages

Figure 7.3 Willy Lott’s Cottage, Flatford Bridge, Dedham Vale, Suffolk. Copyright: National Trust Images/Arnhel de Serra

parlours providing an attractive image and a visual association with rustic life within the urban or suburban home.37

In nineteenth-century art criticism, the themes of landscape, observation and the appreciation of the vernacular cottage were pursued by John Ruskin in The Poetry of Architecture, 1837.38 In this early essay, first published in Loudon’s Architectural Magazine under the pseudonym Katia Phusin, Ruskin writes extensively on the appreciation of vernacular cottages and the importance of place in the connection between a cottage and its landscape context. In The End of Tradition?, 2004, architectural writer and vernacular theorist Nezar AlSayadd notes the importance given historically to place in the understanding of vernacular buildings, stating ‘for anything to be considered vernacular, it has always been assumed that it must be native or unique to a specific place’.39

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 AlSayadd goes on to contest this assumption in the face of mass-production and globalisation; however, what is meant by ‘place’ itself has also changed significantly between Ruskin in the early nineteenth century and AlSayadd in the twenty-first. Contemporary architectural thinking on place reflects the influence of Human Geography and Cultural Studies and the work of writers such as Denis Cosgrove and Doreen Massey; where place and identity are subjectively defined by individual experience.40 Thus, place is a cultural construct defined by the human experience and open to constant change. However, in the Poetry of Architecture – representative of Ruskin’s early thinking – place is a fixed geographic spot within an unchanging Nature, The appreciation of cottages 131

Figure 7.4 Humphry Repton, ‘‘View from My Own Cottage in Essex’, Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 1816. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection

closer to what we think of as ‘site’. This idea of place predates and informed both Ruskin and the Picturesque writings of Gilpin and Price, stemming from the topographical poetry of figures such as Abraham Cowley and Alexander Pope that influenced early eighteenth-century landscape design. Alexander Pope’s famous line from Epistle IV to Lord Burlington, 1736, to ‘consult the genius of place’ is a recommendation to follow the topology of the landscape when designing and laying out a garden.41 Accordingly, Ruskin appreciates vernacular cottages for two reasons. First, for their natural position or site in a specific landscape – against the side of a hill, by the bank of a river. Second, for the local materials used in their

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 construction which, he considered, connected a building to that site, to place, to Nature; thus, the sameness in landscape and building. Thus, ‘The mountain cottage … should be barely visible: it should not tell as a cottage on the eye, though it should on the mind… it is only by the closest investigation that we can ascertain it to be a human habitation’.42 Accordingly, Ruskin celebrated bricks around London, timber-framing in Cheshire and dry-stone walling in the Lake District, where:

The material is, of course, what is most easily attainable and available without much labour. The Cumberland and Westmoreland hills are, in 132 The appreciation of cottages general, composed of clay-slate and grey-wack … the material which Nature furnishes, in any given country, and the form which she suggests, will always render the building the most beautiful, because the most appropriate.43

However, Ruskin does depart from Price and the topographic tradition as he considers the builder as well as the building, and, the importance of the relationship between the two when he writes:

The uncultivated mountaineer of Cumberland has no taste, and no idea of what architecture means; he never thinks of what is right, or what is beautiful, but he builds what is most adapted to his purposes … by raising it with the nearest material, adapts it to its situation … This is all that is required, and he has no credit in fulfilling the requirement, since the moment he begins to think of effect, he commits barbarism by whitewashing the whole.44

Ruskin’s interest in people and dwelling distinguishes him from Gilpin and Price and the view of cottages as comparable to other ‘natural objects’ such as rocks, however, the Cumberland mountaineer nonetheless remains a part of Nature without agency and is largely an allegorical figure like the pastoral shepherd or the first primitive hut builders of Chambers, Laugier and Vitruvius.45 The Poetry of Architecture, subtitled The Architecture of the Nations of Europe considered in its Natural Scenery and National Character, also presents the vernacular cottage as a symbol and a symptom of national character. It is, in part, a patriotic work in which the national character of European countries such as France, Italy and Switzerland are unfavourably characterised through visual readings of those countries’ vernacular cottages, while the English cottage is held up as an emblem of the morality and strength of the English character, that is:

…it will be found as interesting as it is useful, to trace in the distinctive characters of the architecture of nations, not only its adaptation to the situation and climate in which it has arisen, but its strong similarity to,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 and connection with, the prevailing turn of mind by which the nation who first employed it is distinguished.46

This suggests Ruskin’s idea of the cottage is informed by knowledge of Montesquieu’s Laws of Spirits, 1755, developed in architectural theory by Quatremere de Quincy into ‘caractere relatif’, ‘by which he understood the particular capacity of architecture to reflect the geography and climate of its setting, as well as the beliefs of the people who created it’.47 As Mari Hvattum explains: The appreciation of cottages 133 whereas for Laugier, nature was a principle of uniformity, Montesquieu saw it as a set of relative factors. These factors, he explained, condition the customs and manners of a people, affect their judicial and political constitution, and form, ultimately, their ‘spirit’ or character.48

If rooted in older ideas, the Picturesque movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries achieved the shock of the new as Gilpin and Price redirected the art connoisseur’s gaze beyond the boundaries of familiar landscape gardens into the wider English countryside, finding a new form of beauty in the landscape and objects observed there, including ‘natural’ or vernacular cottages. These cottages were admired for their ‘roughness’, irregular forms, colours and textures; for the connection with place. They were also readily associated with the idea of the cottage as the simple rural retreat previously imagined only within the context of Arcadia. Indeed, in the imagination of Swete, Wordsworth and Ruskin, the English cottage remained an ideal like the pastoral shepherd’s hut.

Notes 1 Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque (Aldershot, 1989), p. 57. 2 John Buonarotti Papworth, Hints on Ornamental Gardening (London, 1823), p. 52. 3 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty: made in the summer of 1770 (London, 1782; reprint London, 2005), p. 26. 4 Nicola Trott, ‘The Picturesque, the Beautiful and the Sublime’ in Duncan Wu (ed.), A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford, 2001), p. 74. 5 Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London, 1927), preface. 6 John Urry and Jonas Larsen (eds), The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Thousand Oaks, 2011), pp. 100–2. 7 Don Mitchell, Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 2000), p. 117. 8 Daniel Maudlin, ‘Crossing Boundaries: Revisiting Some Thresholds of the Vernacular’, Vernacular Architecture, 41 (2010), 10–14. 9 Gilpin, Observations, p. 38. 10 Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (London, 1794), p. 136. 11 Ibid., p. 217. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 12 John Claudius Loudon, Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture. Vol. 2. (London, 1846; reprint Chippenham, 2000), p. 812. 13 John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London, 2002), p. 35. 14 Urry and Larsen, Tourist, p. 100. 15 Ibid., pp. 100–2. 16 John Swete (ed. Todd Gray), Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of the Reverend John Swete, 1789–1800, 1792, II (Tiverton, 1997), p. 34. 17 Ibid., I, pp. xii–xvi. 18 Ibid., III, p. 57. 19 Ibid., IV, p.141. 20 Andrews, Picturesque, p. 57. 134 The appreciation of cottages 21 Swete, Travels in Georgian Devon, IV, p. 64. 22 Ibid. 23 William Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes. (London, 1822; 5th edn, 1906), p. 32. 24 Ibid., pp. 62–3. 25 William Cobbett, Rural Rides in England (London, 1830; reprint London, 1909), p. 24. 26 Ibid. 27 John Macarthur, ‘The Heartlessness of the Picturesque: Sympathy and Disgust in Ruskin’s Aesthetics’, Assemblage, 32 (1997), 126–41. 28 Swete, Travels in Georgian Devon, III, p .4. 29 Anon., The Landscape Magazine, IV (1793), p. iii. 30 Ibid., p. 1. 31 Ibid., p. 16. 32 Ibid., p. 18. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 35 Ibid., p. 2. 36 John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (London, 2013), p. 81. 37 Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, 2001), p. 138. 38 John Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture (London, 1837; 1905), p. 116. 39 Nezar AlSayyad, ‘The End of Tradition, or the Tradition of Endings?’ in Nezar AlSayyad (ed.), The End of Tradition? (London, 2004), pp. 1–29. 40 For human geography see: Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison, 1998); Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices (London, 1997); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, 2007); Doreen Massey, For Place (London, 2005). 41 See John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge, 2011). 42 Ruskin, Poetry of Architecture, p. 70. 43 Ibid, p. 73. 44 Ibid., p. 5. 45 Ibid., p. vii. 46 Ibid, p. 2. 47 Mari Hvattum, Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Cambridge, 2004), p. 40. 48 Ibid., p. 38.

Bibliography AlSayyad, Nezar. ‘The End of Tradition, or the Tradition of Endings?’ in Nezar Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 AlSayyad (ed.), The End of Tradition? (London, 2004), pp. 1–29. Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque (Aldershot, 1989). Anon. The Landscape Magazine, vol. IV (1793). Anon. The Adventurer (London, 1788). Barrell, John. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge, 2011). Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757). Cobbett, William. Rural Rides in England (London, 1830; reprint London, 1909). The appreciation of cottages 135 Combe, William. The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (London, 1812). Cosgrove, Denis. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison, 1998). Daniell, William. A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain (London, 1814–25). Dixon Hunt, John. The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London, 2002). Gilpin, William. Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty: made in the summer of 1770 (London, 1782; reprint London, 2005). Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices (London, 1997). Hussey, Christopher. The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London, 1927). Hvattum, Mari. Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Cambridge, 2004). Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, 2007). Logan, Thad. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, 2001). Loudon, John Claudius. Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture. Vol. 2. (London, 1846; reprint Chippenham, 2000). Macarthur, John. ‘The Heartlessness of the Picturesque: Sympathy and Disgust in Ruskin’s Aesthetics’, Assemblage, 32 (1997), 126–41. Macarthur, John, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (London, 2013). Massey, Doreen. For Place (London, 2005). Maudlin, Daniel. ‘Crossing Boundaries: Revisiting Some Thresholds of the Vernacular’, Vernacular Architecture, 41 (2010), 10–14. Mitchell, Don. Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 2000). Papworth, John Buonarotti. Hints on Ornamental Gardening (London, 1823). Price, Uvedale. An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (London, 1794). Ruskin, John. The Poetry of Architecture (London, 1837; 1905). Skinner, J. (ed. Roger Jones). West Country Tour: Being the Diary of a Tour through the Counties of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall in 1797 (Bradford-on-Avon, 1985). Smith, J. T. Remarks on Rural Scenery: with Twenty Etchings of Cottages, from Nature (London, 1797). Steven, Francis. Views of Cottages and Farm-Houses in England and Wales (London, 1815). Swete, John (ed. Todd Gray). Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of the Reverend John Swete, 1789–1800, Vol I–IV (Tiverton, 1997). Trott, Nicola. ‘The Picturesque, the Beautiful and the Sublime’ in Duncan Wu (ed.), A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford, 2001), pp.72–90. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Urry, John and Larsen, Jonas (eds). The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Thousand Oaks, 2011). Wordsworth, William. Guide to the Lakes. 5th edn (London, 1822; reprint London, 1906). This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 8 Re-imagining the vernacular

The observation of vernacular cottages, rocks and ruins in the English countryside by the theorists and connoisseurs of the Picturesque had a profound influence on English architecture in general and on cottage design in particular. As Edmund Bartell states in the preface to Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages, 1804, ‘Few researches of late years have more occupied the attention of persons of taste, than those which relate to Picturesque Scenery’.1 From the late eighteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth century, vernacular cottages were appreciated, digested and re-interpreted as architectural design in a wave of new publications and commissions for estate cottages and cottage-villas. Architects such as James Malton, Edmund Bartell, John Nash, Sir Jeffrey Wyattville, William Fuller Pocock, John Papworth and, later, George Devey re-invented the designed cottage as an irregular structure of mixed materials and textures taken from ‘nature’ and assembled in a collage of vernacular forms and features. In his pioneering work, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture, Malton specifically cites Price, referring to ‘the judicious distinction [between the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime] made by Mr. Price in his excellent essay on the Picturesque’.2 Under the influence of Price, Malton professes his preference for the ‘simple cottage’ and its rough, rural setting over the order and geometries of neoclassical mansions:

I cannot admire the ponderous magnificence that is so often displayed in the dwellings of individuals, however high their elevation and dignity

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 … The mature eye, palled with gaudy magnificence, turns disgusted from the gorgeous structure, fair sloped lawn, well turned canal, regular fence, and formal rows of trees; and regards, with unspeakable delight, the simple cottage, the rugged common, the rude pond, wild hedge- rows, and irregular plantation.3

Malton was the first architect to propose the appropriation of the living vernacular for cottage design. He opens An Essay with the following clear and radical statement: 138 Re-imagining the vernacular In offering to the public this small essay on British Cottage Architecture, I am most forcibly influenced by a desire to perpetuate, with my share of ability, the peculiar beauty of the British, picturesque, rustic habitations; regarding them, with the country church, as the most pleasing, the most suitable ornaments that can be introduced to embellish rural nature.4

Later he outlines the features that, for him, give a cottage its picturesque appeal – the irregular forms and varied textures advocated by Price – before quoting from Richard Payne Knight’s poem Landscape with reference to the ‘exterior furniture of a Cottage’ (this poem was later also quoted by Edmund Bartell in Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages).5

Late Georgian architects did not duplicate vernacular cottages, rather, they designed buildings that were informed by the vernacular and called them cottages: they borrowed the idea of irregular forms, broken heights, asymmetrical plans; they borrowed the colours and textures of different materials and vernacular construction features; but they did not copy individual cottages. Taken from different English regions as they were observed, recorded and disseminated in various media, traditional building elements such as thatch, pan tiles, brick, cob, timber-framing, diamond- pattern leaded glass in casement window frames, stone mullions, projecting porches, etc. were appropriated and a new grammar of ornament emerged to replace the neoclassical grammar of columns, pediments, entablatures, acanthus and triglyphs. Architects also sought to lend their designs the appearance of age and decay, or poor maintenance, that characterised the cottages observed, as Ruskin exhorted in the Poetry of Architecture, ‘Now, this feeling of mixed melancholy and veneration is the one of all others which the modern cottage must not be allowed to violate. It may be fantastic … but it must not be spruce, or natty, or very bright in colour; and the older it looks the better’.6 The eighteenth-century neoclassical theory of imitation, still predominant in early nineteenth-century art and present within the Picturesque theory of Price, dictated that ‘the purpose of art was the imitation of the beauty of nature … rather than imitating nature’s concrete and individual reality, art 7

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 should imitate her general essence … imitation was a creative act’. Accordingly, elements, sourced from published tour guides and antiquarian studies as much as from the experience of travel, were reassembled in new designs, often combining details from different regional traditions with historically unrelated materials and construction methods. For example, in Design 5 from An Essay on British Cottage Architecture, Malton presents a small, single-storey cottage that combines a range of vernacular elements (Figure 8.1). The design is centred on a simple rectangular-plan made irregular through a projecting bay to centre-left, a bowed gable end contrasted with a square Re-imagining the vernacular 139

Figure 8.1 James Malton, Design 5, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture, 1798. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection

gable to the other and irregular roof profiles. The front elevation presents an articulation of leaded casement windows that defiantly challenges neoclassicism with irregular spacing and different sizes and heights with an entrance to the far right. The central axis of the elevation is a void struck through by the vertical line of the brick chimney stack and the return wall of the projecting out-shot; this directly flouts neoclassical design conventions and can be contrasted with John Wood’s cottage designs in Habitations of the Labourer that inserted blank windows to the centre bay rather than allow a void on the centre axis. In terms of materials, below the thatched roof, the walls are a mixture of mottled plaster to the main building, intended Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 to suggest age and decay, and brick-work and applied timber-framing to the out-shot. Overall, Malton’s design epitomises the principle of imitation as it is composed of authentic elements from traditional English buildings, but they are arranged in a sophisticated compositional game of design that not only exemplifies picturesque principles but also deliberately toys with the principles of neoclassicism. Imitation remained the defining principle of cottage design throughout the early to mid-nineteenth century and was still advocated by J. C. Loudon in Volume 2 of the Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture published in 1846: 140 Re-imagining the vernacular In my opinion, a cottage should present a simple picturesque exterior … and models of this kind are most common, I think, among our old- fashioned English cottages. I would build them chiefly in this style, beginning with that style of cottage in which wooden framework prevails, and imitating all the various kinds of picturesque houses which are suitable to the cottage residence.8

It would at first appear that Loudon is urging architects to directly copy cottages, but this is not the case. In his final comment on ‘imitating all the various kinds of picturesque houses’, Loudon is suggesting that the forms of features of picturesque houses should be borrowed en masse in the production of a single cottage design, not that one house should be copied to produce another. The principle of imitation as creative composition is set out by Loudon himself later in the same passage in which he warns against copying as a ‘low style of art’:

It must always be recollected, that, in imitating any style we are not limited to copying particular forms; but are required to enter into that spirit, adapted to whatever use it may be required for … It is, however, proper to observe that the object of the Architect may be, to produce such an imitation as may actually be mistaken for the thing imitated … This however, is a low style of art … Any builder may copy a style, but it requires an Architect to compose in it.9

In Designs for Farm Buildings, 1830, P. F. Robinson goes further and argues that vernacular buildings lack artistic interest in themselves and that the creativity and imagination of the educated architect is needed to provide imitations that are superior in their artistic qualities to those observed in nature.10 That the observed vernacular was considered at times too plain and in need of re-imagination is also considered by Loudon in the case of ‘Ideas for Altering the Front of an old Cottage’ submitted for inclusion in the Encyclopaedia by one of his contributors. Loudon reports that the contributor was approached by the owner of a mansion regarding an ‘unsightly cottage’ close to his entrance gates ‘as to the way in which he 11

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 might give the cottage a more agreeable appearance’. The solution offered for the improvement of this plain cottage, of which Loudon does not entirely approve, was:

…to change an ugly outside, at little trouble and expense, to one that is picturesque and pleasing … The object in the above alteration is, to break the straight horizontal lines, and thus improve the appearance of a very ugly roof. This is done by introducing a pediment, or gable, with barge boards over the centre window, and by bringing the roof lower down at the eaves.12 Re-imagining the vernacular 141 As found by Loudon’s contributor, many English vernacular cottages were (are) in fact quite plain, even neat and regular, and therefore, in a complete rejection of neoclassical standards, were, to the eye of an architect in the 1840s, ‘ugly’.

As discussed in the previous chapter, for the late eighteenth-century connoisseur of landscape one of the admired qualities of a vernacular cottage was that its form, materials, colours and textures intimately connected that building, or rather object, to place, i.e. the immediate surrounding landscape; and, that place produced character (local, regional and national). For those architects influenced by the Picturesque, the idea of place was, in principle at least, also central to cottage design – even if in practice most published designs were abstract speculations not linked to any specific location and drawn from many regional sources. John Papworth, for example, advises in the manner of Addison or Pope, that the architect must be prepared to be governed by circumstance:

A judicious architect will not fail to adopt that style of building in which to make his design, that some circumstances sufficiently important to govern it may demand, and thence supply its character: this will either arise from the nature of the country in which it is placed, the peculiarities of the spot on which it is to be built, the edifice to which it is to attend, or the rank and station of the proprietor.13

Papworth uses ‘circumstances’ to suggest a reflexive response to both the ‘genius of place’ and to decorum, or the appropriateness of a design to the rank of its intended occupant. A similar reverence for place underpins William Fuller Pocock’s Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, 1807, where he writes that ‘it is surely worthy of a great and powerful people to cultivate a style of Building formed in their own country, and peculiarly adapted to their genius and climate’.14 Accordingly, in their writings on cottage design, architects from James Malton to J. C. Loudon stress the importance of local building materials. Malton praises the ‘use of those materials which the spot whereon it is to be situated produces’ in the construction of the ‘simple British Cottage’ and compares it unfavourably with ‘the affected Cottage’ of the ‘returned East India man … having brought a principal part of the required 15

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 materials’. Loudon makes a similar appeal to:

…use the material most prevalent in the neighbourhood … Every district produces its proper building material: thus, in some counties, stone is the prevailing material; in others, brick; in other chalk and flints. A mixture of houses of all these materials would only have an appearance of propriety where all were procured in the immediate neighbourhood.16

In The Poetry of Architecture, 1837, Ruskin also argues that ‘the material which Nature furnishes, in any given country, and the form which she 142 Re-imagining the vernacular suggests, will always render the building the most beautiful, because the most appropriate’.17 Indeed, by the early nineteenth century the idea of a universal beauty, as projected by neoclassicism in the eighteenth century, had been rejected to such a degree by proponents of the Picturesque that Ruskin declared that:

All buildings are, of course, to be considered in connection with the country in which they are to be raised … There never was, and never can be, a universal beau ideal in architecture, and the arrival at all local models of beauty would be the task of ages; but we can always, in some degree, determine those of our lovely country.18

In new building design Ruskin also rejects the possibility of a single national style of architecture arguing that buildings must refer directly to their immediate location as:

Britain unites in itself so many geological formations, each giving a peculiar character to the country which it composes, that there is hardly a district five miles broad, which preserves the same features of landscape through its whole width … If, therefore, there be as many forms of edifice as there are peculiarities of situation, we can have no national style.19

However, the theoretical respect for place and local materials only applied to external surface finishes and these could be achieved through artifice and simulation. In Rural Residences, 1818, Papworth advises the use of oak paint effects to complete the exterior ‘suitable to a small lodge or as a decorative cottage in a park; and being covered with thatch and the wood- work of oak, or painted to represent it, the cottage would have a simple and pleasing effect’.20 Loudon recommends a similar approach in a cottage design for the Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, Villa Architecture, 1834:

The situation is supposed to be on a gently elevated surface, on the Surrey side of the metropolis. The walls are supposed to be of brick, either covered with cement, and coloured to imitate weather-stained stone; or of brick stained in imitation of the effects of time. All the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 exterior timberwork is supposed to be either oak, or well-seasoned deal painted in imitation of that wood.21

The Picturesque was fundamentally concerned with observation, therefore, a cottage design imitated external appearance without direct concern for the methods of craft production that produced the forms and features observed or the relation between external and internal form and construction. This is a significant distinction from the concerns of the Arts and Crafts Movement later in the nineteenth century and that group’s interest in vernacular architecture as the embodiment of craft traditions and the skills of craftsmen. Re-imagining the vernacular 143 Through the early nineteenth century irregularity of form and variety of materials and textures became the common language of cottage architecture. However, when first proposed by Malton in 1798, this new language challenged architects steeped in the design principles and associated mythologies of neoclassicism and they did not go quietly. Even if many of its principles were at root re-interpretations of eighteenth-century ideas, the Picturesque was to be resisted as it was seen to challenge an entire architectural belief system relating to beauty, nature, society, morality and God. As discussed, from Richardson and Chambers in the 1770s to Plaw in the 1790s and Elsam in the early 1800s, symmetry and proportion were fundamental principles of cottage design and the simple cottage embodied those principles. Elsam, writing in An Essay on Rural Architecture, 1803, argued that vernacular cottages were appropriate subjects for landscape painting but not architecture as:

…the peasant’s cot, and the farm-house, will therefore, for time immemorial, prove admirable subjects for the pencil of the painter, with its appropriate scenery. But they are not agreeable, to my conceptions, proper models of imitation for persons of fortune, who are desirous of building themselves rural retreats which may be erected to convey the idea of cottages.22

John Plaw presented Sketches for Country Houses of 1800 as a specific rebuttal to the emergent aesthetic of irregularity and the imitation of English vernacular cottages, appealing to ‘taste’ (the codified interrelationship between art, culture and society that eighteenth-century neoclassicism represented) when he writes:

I am aware some persons think Dwellings on an humble scale, and Cottages, ought to be irregular in their forms, and broken in their parts, taking certain structures for examples, which in my opinion should rather serve as beacons of danger, warnings of bad taste.23

Plaw’s own use of non-classical, mostly gothic, ornament in his cottage designs appears to have not offered a similar challenge as it was only used to dress otherwise symmetrical, well-proportioned buildings. Richard Elsam published An Essay on Rural Architecture explicitly as ‘an 24

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 attempt to refute James Malton’. Elsam states his case in no uncertain terms calling on the laws of Nature and ‘the great Architect of the universe’ (a Freemasonry term for God):

Uniformity in the retired cottage, situated alone, I shall endeavour to prove cannot be too studiously attended to … If we examine the works of Nature, if we only turn our minds to these reflections, the form, structure, order, and beautiful proportion of the human body, we shall discover the great Architect of the universe, in the creation of our own likeness, considered symmetry as the leading feature in the great outlines 144 Re-imagining the vernacular not only of his last work, but of the general composition of the animal creation altogether … The same parity of reasoning holds good with respect to regularity in detached pieces of architecture.25

Elsam continues at length in his criticism of Malton’s use of English vernacular cottages as suitable subjects for Architecture, making a clear distinction between what he sees as general vernacular building practices as found in eighteenth-century England and the separate, distinct and superior Art of Architecture, the two polarities of architectural purity - and finds himself incredulous that a ‘person of taste’ would wish to build and occupy such a building when faced with such a motly group of materials as brick, wood, plaster, or brick noggin, dashed to insinuate the effects of age, and the appearance of being added to at different periods.26 ‘Surely’, he argues, ‘no person of taste, who had the intention of building a small house in the cottage style, would, by preference, expend a sum of money to exhibit the aspect of an old house’.27 Then, as an adherer to the notion of the primitive hut, Elsam offers some concession to the possible value of the British cottage as ‘the primitive invention of our peasants’ but concludes he will ‘leave them to devise their own plans, satisfied they are as competent to the task, in all respects, as their forefathers’ before presenting his own cottage ideal for the benefit of ‘persons of a more refined taste and discernment’ based on geometric forms and ‘a simple uniform plan’.28 Moreover, Elsam argues that while it is wholly virtuous to dwell in a cottage inspired by the imagined pastoral cots of Arcadia, it was socially inappropriate for cottages belonging to nobles and gentlemen to be imitative of the actual cottages of the English peasantry.29 To the Classical mind-set this was an affront to the principle of decorum. Typical of eighteenth-century thinking, Elsam sees Arcadia as an ideal Ancient world abstracted from time and space and his distinction between the primitive hut and the English cottage echoes the distinction made by Dryden in the preface to his translation of Virgil’s Pastorals between the noble pastoral shepherd of Antiquity and the peasants of the English countryside discussed in the first chapter.30 However, as the Picturesque continued to challenge neoclassicism, in the early nineteenth century Edmund Aikin is more reflective and accepting of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 change when in Designs for Villas and Other Rural Buildings, 1808, he concludes that:

Architects have always considered uniformity as an essential part of beauty, and their works have shown a sedulous attention to this principle. Mr. Knight and the gentlemen of the Picturesque School, however seem to wish to banish it altogether, at least from rural buildings. After examining this subject with some attention, I should be inclined to give this opinion: That considering an edifice abstractedly as a work of art, the preservation of uniformity seems so natural and Re-imagining the vernacular 145 proper, that it may with reason be advanced as a general rule; but in practice, this, like many other general rules, must submit to frequent exceptions; and to suit particular situations, or to gain any considerable convenience in plan … In these circumstances, it is better frankly to give up uniformity, and to endeavour to convert this sacrifice into a source of beauty.31

As Aikin concedes, neoclassicists like Elsam and Plaw could not halt the rapid change in architectural tastes in the decades that followed Malton’s Essay on British Cottage Architecture. The Picturesque dominated early nineteenth- century publications on estate cottage architecture, such as Edmund Bartell’s Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages, 1804; Robert Lugar’s Architectural Sketches for Cottages, Rural Dwellings, and Villas, 1805 (2nd edn 1823); William Atkinson’s Views of Picturesque Cottages with Plans selected from a Collection of Drawings taken in Different Parts of England, 1805; Thomas Downes Wilmot Dearn’s Sketches in Architecture consisting of Designs for Cottages and Rural Dwellings, 1807; or, William Fuller Pocock’s Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, Picturesque Dwellings, Villas, with Appropriate Scenery, 1807. These publications represent a cross section of approaches to the design of Picturesque cottages from the highly expressive to the restrained. Moreover, the cottage designs of this period were rarely exclusively vernacular as, to varying degrees, architects combined vernacular forms and features with elements borrowed from other architectures with different associations from Arcadian rough-log columns to Gothic windows, Indian awnings and tall Tudor chimneystacks. In published designs, Pocock is closest to the vernacular purity advocated by Malton in his assemblage of predominantly vernacular elements within relatively simple, unexaggerated house forms. Pocock stresses the importance of ‘the picturesque effect of broken lines, unequal heights and irregular distribution’ but like Malton and Loudon is wary of more exaggerated compositions and warns that ‘this interposition of art must not be carried to too great a length, or be at all suffered to appear in such a manner as to prevent the effect from being simple and natural’.32 Design 7 from Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages depicts a two-storey double cottage that embodies Pocock’s position (Figure 8.2). It is a complex,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 intelligent composition of contrasting forms, heights and depths but the whole is not outlandish and the essence of the vernacular is retained. The plan reveals that the building is in fact a cube made irregular through chamfered edges, cutting in and adding on. At the centre is a grid of four square-rooms of equal size; however, the cottage is subdivided horizontally to form two dwellings experienced as long, narrow spaces of diminishing size leading into the principle, smaller, addition to the right of the cube. This achieves the external visual effect of appearing as a single larger building. The building is given the appearance of further external irregularity through the addition of projecting upper stories which, supported on pillars, cover 146 Re-imagining the vernacular Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 8.2 William Fuller Pocock, Design 7, Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, Picturesque Dwellings, Villas, with Appropriate Scenery, 1807. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection Re-imagining the vernacular 147 entrance porches of different size to front and back. The roof line is broken by the varying heights of these projections, half-hipped roofs and large brick chimney-stacks. The intended impression of the whole is of a comfortable cottage that has grown and evolved over time. John Nash’s deserved reputation as England’s foremost architect of the Picturesque in country house, villa and urban design has been revived and reviewed in recent years by Geoffrey Tyack’s edited collection for English Heritage and the Georgian Group, John Nash: Architect of the Picturesque. Nash was also a master of estate cottage architecture and the imitation of the vernacular. One of the earliest known cottages attributed to Nash is Abermydyr, a coachman’s house on the Llanerchaeron estate, Aberaeron, Wales for Major (later Colonel) William Lewis, 1794–6. Built while Nash was engaged on the design and construction of the main house, Abermydyr, it is a single-storey stone-and-slate cottage after traditional Welsh cottages but given an enhanced picturesque appearance by an overtly asymmetrical arrangement of the front elevation (the entrance door is to the far left and the roof gabled to one end and hipped to the other), gothic windows and a projecting veranda. Nash’s use of Gothic windows was not uncommon and predates the imitation of the vernacular as seen in the otherwise neoclassical designs of John Plaw discussed in Chapter 3. Malton, did not accept the use of gothic windows in the cottage designs, ‘which I have seen executed, and have heard called Cottage windows’.33 Like many cottage architects, Malton does, however, make extensive use of timber-framing and other elelements that could be characterised as Tudor such as stone window mullions. This is not a contradiction. While lancet windows are not commonly observed in low status traditional buildings, it is the case that many traditional building elements can be interpreted as characteristic of either the vernacular or Tudor, such as timber-framing, brick noggin or casement windows. After all, regional English craft traditions produced both high and low status buildings from a common body of construction and decorative materials and techniques. Indeed, attempts to distinguish between a cottage and Tudor style based on observed examples, then and now, is largely moot as neither is actually a style: one is a class of building defined by size and status and the other is a historic period. And so, while we can follow Malton and question the use of gothic windows, the apparent hybridity between vernacular and Tudor ‘styles’ in

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 early nineteenth century cottage design should not be a cause for concern to the historian. The vernacular-Tudor inspired picturesque estate cottage is perhaps most famously represented by John Nash’s estate village of Blaise Hamlet near Bristol, for John Harford, built from 1810–12 (Figure 8.3). Blaise Hamlet is a standard waypoint – marked Picturesque/early nineteenth century – for architectural history surveys but it was equally well known and celebrated when first built. Nash exhibited the model for the village at the Royal Academy in London, where it was visited and admired by the art-consuming public and architects such as Richard Elsam who reported: 148 Re-imagining the vernacular A most admirable design for a village was publicly exhibited in the Royal Academy, a few years since by that ingenious architect Mr Nash, who by the most happy combination of ideas proved himself a perfect master in this branch of the picturesque.34

Tourists were also a common early feature as the architect C. R. Cockerel recalled in his diary ‘he built … irregular cottages with all those little penthouses for beehives, ovens &c & irregularities which he found in peasant’s cottages & they are so beautiful that it is a sight visited from Clifton & I have always called it Sweet’.35 The nine cottages at Blaise Hamlet epitomise the principle of imitation as a creative act. Each cottage is a free-standing art object set against a green plane of grass and trees; each cottage is a singular composition of contrasting irregular forms, vernacular materials, construction elements and borrowed features such as dovecots in the apex of gables or the bee-houses admired by Cockerel (Figure 8.4). Vernacular ‘cottage’ features such as half-hipped and cat-slide roofs, thatch and irregular stone-work are combined with tall Tudor chimneystacks and mullioned casement windows to produce complex compositions of mixed textures, colours and broken, irregular elevations. The cottage forms suggest solid, squat masses with densely applied details and decoration. Many cottages Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 8.3 Estate cottages, Blaise Hamlet, Bristol. Source: author Re-imagining the vernacular 149

Figure 8.4 Circular Cottage, Blaise Hamlet, Bristol. Source: author

are also jettied with either over-hanging upper stories, or in contrast, wrap around projecting porches or veranda to the ground floor. In contrast to Malton’s simpler plain cottages, the forms are fantastical and far removed in shape and outward appearance from any vernacular cottage. The emphasis placed on external appearance in the design of these architectural objects, on the layering of masses and picturesque features, also means the interiors are very small and inconvenient in layout suggesting that Nash’s interests rest firmly with those of the educated observer not the intended occupants. In contrast, the so-called ‘Swiss Cottage’ at Kilcommon, County Tipperary, Ireland, built 1817 and attributed to Nash, is a spacious building intended only for occasional use by Richard Butler, the Earl of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Glengal. Despite the presence of upper storey veranda to the gable ends, the cottage is not particularly ‘Swiss’ in form or decoration, rather, it is an enlarged version of the English cottages at Blaise Hamlet suitable for an Anglo-Irish aristocrat’s cottage-retreat, an irregular composition of rough log posts, wrap around veranda and paint-effect timber-farming.

The exaggerated forms and creative use of rustic materials that distinguish Blaise Hamlet from the designs of Malton or Pocock suggest that Nash in particular was influenced by French design of the 1770s and 1780s. In France, groups of cottage-like rustic buildings known as hameaux were built 150 Re-imagining the vernacular as aristocratic play-farms on estates such as Chantilly, created from 1773 with advice from architect J. D. Le Roy, and, most famously, at Petit Trianon, Versailles, where Marie Antoinette played at milkmaid. Similarities can be found between individual French hameau buildings, such as the Maison du Garde at Petit Trianon, and Nash’s cottage at Blaise Hamlet in the expressive arrangement of building mass and vernacular-inspired decoration (Figure 8.5). However, while stylistic similarities can be observed, no evidence has come to light that establishes a direct influence of French design on Nash or any other English architect of the period. Indeed, there is no reference to hameaux in any known cottage related text published in England between 1760 and 1860. This is surprising given that both British and French architects of the period were interested in the imitation of the vernacular and that British and French aristocratic cottage-consumers were interested in shepherds, shepherdesses and the idea of the rustic life. However, there are subtle distinctions in their conceptualisation and intended use. The English word ‘cottage’ does not have a direct French equivalent; the closest translation is simply ‘petit maison’, or perhaps ‘chaumiere’ for thatched dwelling and these did not have the same specific cultural meanings attached as did ‘cottage’ in eighteenth-century England (after Dryden). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 8.5 Maison du Garde, Hameau de la Reine, Petit Trianon, Versailles. Source: author Re-imagining the vernacular 151 Moreover, while perhaps appearing similar to an English designed-cottage, the buildings of a hameau such as those at Petit Trianon were intended to represent a bustling dairy farm where the court could play ensemble, as further embodied by Marie Antoinette’s Sèvres porcelain milk-pails, not the lone cottage.36 A planned village such as Blaise Hamlet may have a similar collection of rustic dwellings as a hameau but they were never intended to be experienced through occupation by the English landowner, who for their own cottage always preferred the lone retreat, but experienced visually – conveying the idea of ‘village’ – as they passed through the estate. Nonetheless, the lack of evidence to establish an awareness of French hameaux among the architects and aristocratic consumers of English cottages is puzzling. Built from the 1770s and 1780s, the hameaux at Chantilly and Versaille predate the English architectural appropriation of the vernacular by a generation, which arguably began with James Malton in 1798. This generational gap of twenty years or more would have allowed ample time for reports and descriptions to reach and impact Britain. Certainly, we know that English architects continued to receive French publications through this period despite the disturbances in correspondence and travel caused by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, as indicated by John Plaw’s reference in Ferme Ornee, 1803, to Maison de Pise, a book on technical treatise on earth construction ‘by the author M. Cointeraux’, ‘a little work lately published in Paris’.37 We also know that the designs for the hameaux at Chantilly were published in Paris in 1784, although with a small circulation, under the title Album du Comte du Nord by the artist ‘known only as Chambe’.38 Yet Malton, Pocock, Papworth et al. make no mention of hameaux; the only continental influences discussed are French and Dutch landscape painting. Indeed, as John Dixon Hunt argues, English design was the greater influence on continental Europe as Anglomania inspired English Parks replete with cottages across the country estates of Europe as far as Catherine the Great’s English Park at Peterhof by a Scot, James Meader.39 However, regarding the apparent lack of a connection between the English cottage and the French hameaux, the unsatisfactory conclusion must be that either there is a connection but evidence has not yet come to light or that there is no connection and the two architectures developed independently as similar but autonomous counter reactions to the universalist impulses of the Enlightenment. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 The impress of Blaise Hamlet can be detected across early nineteenth– century cottage schemes and published designs. Sir Jeffry Wyattville’s 1812–14 gate lodge to the grounds of Endsleigh Cottage, Milton Abbot, Devon, features stone-walling, irregular thatched roof, mullioned casement windows, tall Tudor stacks and rough-log veranda or porch, all of which are taken directly from the cottages at Blaise. A similar arrangement of forms and features can also be found in Humphry Repton’s ‘Thornery’, built in the Deer Park at Woburn Abbey as a retreat for John, 6th Duke of Bedford in 1806. The Thornery predates the completion of Blaise Hamlet but not the 152 Re-imagining the vernacular exhibition of the model at the Royal Academy which according to Richard Elsam was some time before 1803. In Hints for Improving the Condition of the Peasantry, 1816, ardent neo-classicist Elsam conceded to the Picturesque in a series of designs that feature irregular plans, rough stone-walls, mullioned windows and thatched roofs (Figure 8.6). Conversely, and surprisingly given his advocacy of the Picturesque, symmetry prevails in the various cottage designs presented by John Buonarotti Papworth in Rural Residences, 1818, in conjunction with a repertoire of thatch over hipped roofs, eye-brow dormer windows, projecting porches and semi-circular gable ends with wrap-around veranda supported on rough-log columns, trellis work, decorative tall brick-chimneys and casement windows. Variations on these designs can be seen in the cottages designed by Papworth for the estate village of Old Warden, Bedfordshire, for Lord Ongley in the 1820s (Figure 8.7). At Old Warden, Papworth designed a group of variegated cottages, ranging from single and paired thatched cottages distinguished only by eye-brow dormers, tall chimney and casement windows to terraces of three cottages with a common veranda of projecting thatched eaves supported by trellis; additionally, there is an H-plan cottage with bowed-ends and a wrap-around veranda, cottages with timber-framing applied decoration, cottages with fret-work barge boarding and a gate lodge with steeply pitched thatch roof and deep overhanging Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 8.6 Richard Elsam, Plate X, Hints for Improving the Condition of the Peasantry, 1816. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection Re-imagining the vernacular 153

Figure 8.7 Estate cottage, Old Warden, Bedfordshire. Source: author

eaves supported on timber posts. Timber-framing also features in Beeley Lodge, a gate lodge to the Chatsworth estate, Derbyshire, designed by Sir Jeffry Wyatville and Joseph Paxton in the 1830s. In a prolific career working across a range of styles, Nash himself went on to design several cottage ornée using the architectural elements developed at Blaise Hamlet such as the Earl of Glengal’s Swiss Cottage and the ‘Royal Cottage’ at Windsor, 1813–17. The villas of Nash’s London suburban developments of Park Village East and West of the 1820s are mostly in a picturesque Italianate-style with some also in the Tudor or Old English style. However, an early plan for Park Village East shows the proposed serpentine road along the Regent’s Canal surrounded by vignettes of cottage-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 style houses similar to the asymmetrical gabled, rustic forms of Blaise Hamlet suggesting a vernacular cottage-style scheme was considered but not carried out.40

Like the Rev. John Swete’s interpretation of a Dartmoor longhouse as Old Cator’s Cottage, architects of the early nineteenth century saw their cottages within the Classical pastoral tradition of rural retreat. A picturesque sensibility allowed the architect to admire and borrow from the English vernacular but the intention was not necessarily to make an exceptionalist statement about national identity, nationhood and English or Britishness. 154 Re-imagining the vernacular Despite the title, in An Essay on British Cottage Architecture, published in 1798, James Malton states his admiration for ‘the peculiar beauty of the British picturesque, rustic habitations’, but at no point in the essay does he hold up cottages as symbols of nation, rather, they are ‘the most suitable ornaments that can be introduced to embellish rural nature’.41 This is a wholly aesthetic concern. However, for some architects the imitation of the vernacular also came to be additionally interpreted in terms of Englishness. In Pocock’s Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, 1807, for instance, cottages are admired as picturesque objects but they are also revered as English. Pocock follows Malton when he writes ‘on a large estate these rustic buildings will form pleasing and characteristic objects in the landscape’, however, directly referring to the Napoleonic Wars, he then adds a patriotic plea:

…that style which characterises the early Mansions and Dwellings of this country, which length of time has attached to the soil, and given a prescriptive right to form a striking feature in the natural and picturesque scenery of an English Landscape. This being the case it is surely worthy of a great and powerful people to cultivate a style of Building formed in their own country, and peculiarly adapted to their genius and climate; more particularly at this epocha in the political state of Europe.42

This fits with Ruskin’s more patriotic observations inThe Poetry of Architecture discussed in the previous chapter. Writing in the 1830s, Ruskin examines each nation in turn, comparing vernacular cottages and cottagers across Europe with those of England and finds the former wanting and the latter wholly admirable. The reimagining of the cottage as a symbol of national identity, and nationalism, is considered further in relation to the Old English style in the final chapter.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the vernacular was re-imagined again in the estate architecture of George Devey. Working mostly in Kent for a typical clientele of aristocrats and their landed neighbours, Devey’s country houses are exercises in nineteenth-century picturesque historicism. However, in his small estate buildings – gate-lodges, gardener’s cottages and workers’ village

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 housing – we find cottage designs that are more literal than the earlier imitative compositions of Nash. Devey has a reverence for the forms and materials of the local Kentish vernacular, and how they fit together, such as wall-hung clay tiles, brick, steeply gabled projecting bays and tiered timber- framing. Devey’s cottages at Kent estates such as Penshurst, Biddenden, Hawkhurst and Leigh adhere to some common characteristics of the picturesque estate cottage: they are objects in a landscape composition; they are irregular in form; and they employ vernacular materials and construction details. However, they are not just vernacular in style but specifically Kentish; to most observers indistinguishable from the vernacular cottages in Re-imagining the vernacular 155 the villages where they are located. As such, Devey’s built cottages respect local materials where earlier architectural writers advocated for it in their texts but did not, for the most part, do so in their designs. For example, at Penshurst, for Lord de L’Isle, Devey designed a group of timber-framed and tile-hung cottages that are seamlessly interlocked with historic vernacular buildings, including a fourteenth-century lych-gate to the churchyard (Figure 8.8).43 More typical of his work is Devey’s gate lodge to Benenden School, Cranbrook, where the free-standing cottage features a jettied, timber-framed upper-storey resting on a stone and brick lower-storey and red pan-tile roof (Figure 10.2). More significantly, in addition to the direct use of local materials and their related construction techniques, Devey’s reverence for regional building traditions was also observed in the replication of building forms. This is a significant departure from the eighteenth-century principle of imitation observed by the architects of the earlier nineteenth century; where the cottages of Malton and Nash are compositions, Devey’s are closer to copies. Devey’s search for what we might call authenticity chimes with the wider movement in the nineteenth century towards the accurate recording and classifying of historic buildings. Therefore, Devey’s cottage designs can be interpreted as a conceptual bridge between Malton and Nash in the early Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 8.8 Estate cottages, Penshurst, Kent. Source: author 156 Re-imagining the vernacular nineteenth century and the Vernacular Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the work of architects such as C. A. Voysey, W. R. Lethaby, Ernest Gimson, Edwyn Lutyens and M. H. Baillie Scott.44 However, the two architectural movements occupy different times and represent a different set of cultural values and interests. Equally, Devey’s extensive use of timber-framing has also to be interpreted as the beginning of the ‘English’ suburban domestic architecture of the early twentieth century.45 However, while timber-framing certainly defined one strain of English domestic architecture, after Richard Norman Shaw, in their conception Devey’s cottages should first be understood not as English but as Kentish.

In the early nineteenth century, under the influence of the Picturesque, the appreciation of cottages observed in the English countryside led to a new style of cottage architecture that rejected regularity and whiteness in favour of the irregular forms and mixed materials of the vernacular. That cottages should refer to the tones and topology of the surrounding landscape reflected an eighteenth-century understanding of place and national character. In the work of architects such as James Malton and John Nash vernacular cottages were not copied but imitated, where imitation was an act of creative composition. In different ways Malton and Nash were both radical in their use of the vernacular; other architects such as John Papworth were more cautious, combining vernacular elements with both neoclassical symmetry and gothic windows. In the mid-nineteenth century, the work of George Devey changed architecture’s relationship with the vernacular again as he rejected the eighteenth-century principle of creative imitation and free-borrowing in favour of regionalism in his respect for local forms and materials.

Notes 1 Edmund Bartell, Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages (London, 1804), Preface, p. iii. 2 James Malton, Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798), p. 1. 3 Ibid., p. 7. 4 Ibid., p. 1. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 5 Ibid., p. 6. 6 John Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture (London, 1837; reprint London, 1905), p. 118. 7 Mari Hvattum, Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Cambridge, 2004), p. 49. 8 John Claudius Loudon, Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture, Vol. 2, (London, 1846; reprint Chippenham, 2000), p. 812. 9 Ibid., p. 880. 10 Peter F. Robinson, Designs for Farm Buildings (London, 1830), p. 2. 11 Ibid., p. 181. 12 Ibid. Re-imagining the vernacular 157 13 John Buonarotti Papworth, Hints on Ornamental Gardening (London, 1823), p. 2. 14 William Fuller Pocock, Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, Picturesque Dwellings, Villas etc with Appropriate Scenery, Plans and Descriptions to which are prefixed some critical observations on their style and character; And also of Castles, Abbies and Ancient English Houses, concluding with Practical Remarks on Building and the Causes of Dry Rot (London, 1807), p. 17. 15 Malton, Cottage Architecture, p. 16. 16 Loudon, Encyclopaedia, p. 812. 17 Ruskin, Poetry of Architecture, p. 73. 18 Ibid., pp. 116, 201. 19 Ibid., p. 203. 20 John Buonarotti Papworth, Rural Residences (London, 1818), p. 18. 21 Loudon, Encyclopaedia, p. 845. 22 Richard Elsam, An essay on rural architecture: illustrated with original and oeconomical designs; to which are added rural retreats and villas in the Gothic, Castle, Roman, and Grecian styles of architecture, with ideas for park-entrances, a mausoleum, and a design for the Naval Pillar, to immortalize British naval heroism: the whole comprising thirty plates, in aquatinta … an attempt to refute James Malton (London, 1803), p. 5. 23 John Plaw, Sketches for Country Houses, villas and rural dwellings also some designs for Cottages (London, 1800, 1823), p. 3. 24 Elsam, Rural Architecture, title page. 25 Elsam, Rural Architecture, p. 4 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 6. 29 Ibid. 30 John Dryden, The works of Virgil containing his Pastorals, Georgics and AEneis. Translated into English verse; by Mr. Dryden (London, 1697, 2nd edn 1716), Introduction to Pastorals, p. 80. 31 Edmund Aikin, Designs for Villas and Other Rural Buildings, By Edmund Aikin, Architect. Together with an Introductory Essay, containing remarks on the prevailing defects of modern architecture and on investigating the style best adapted for the dwellings of the present times (London, 1808). 32 Pocock, Architectural Design, p. 8. 33 Malton, Cottage Architecture, p. 17. 34 Elsam, Rural Architecture, p. 3. 35 C. R. Cockerel [diary], cited in David Watkin, ‘Nash in Context: Links with Schinkel, Percier and Fontaine, Soane, and Cockerell’ in Geoffrey Tyack (ed.), John Nash: Architect of the Picturesque (Swindon, 2013), p. 178. 36 See Meredith S. Martin, Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 (Cambridge, MA, 2011). 37 John Plaw, Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements (London, 1795, 1800, 1803), p. 1. 38 Chambé, Album du Comte du Nord (Paris, 1784). Produced as a gift for Grand Duke Paul of Russia (later Tsar Paul II), the circulation of this portfolio was most likely very small and perhaps not readily available from booksellers. 39 John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London, 2002), p. 185. 40 Regent’s Park: ‘Plan of Ground Park Village East let to the late John Nash Esq[ui]re and by him to Mr. Lancefield’. Signed by Charles Lee, 31 May 1836 (National Archives: MR 1/1905/2). 41 Malton, Cottage Architecture, p. 1. 42 Pocock, Architectural Designs, p. 17. 158 Re-imagining the vernacular 43 John Newman, The Buildings of England: Kent: West and the Weald (London, 1969; revised 2012), p. 459. 44 Alan Crawford, ‘Englishness in Arts and Crafts Architecture’ in David Crellin and Ian Dungavell (eds), Architecture and Englishness 1880–1914 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 25–37. 45 See Gavin Stamp and Andre Goulancourt, The English House 1860–1914: The Flowering of English Domestic Architecture (London, 1986); Jill Allibone, George Devey: Architect 1820–1886 (Cambridge, 1991).

Bibliography Aikin, Edmund. Designs for Villas and Other Rural Buildings, By Edmund Aikin, Architect. Together with an Introductory Essay, containing remarks on the prevailing defects of modern architecture and on investigating the style best adapted for the dwellings of the present times (London, 1808). Allibone, Jill. George Devey: Architect 1820–1886 (Cambridge, 1991). Bartell, Edmund. Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages (London, 1804). Chambé. Album du Comte du Nord (Paris, 1784). Crawford, Alan. ‘Englishness in Arts and Crafts Architecture’ in David Crellin and Ian Dungavell (eds), Architecture and Englishness 1880–1914 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 25–37. Dixon Hunt, John. The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London, 2002). Dryden, John. The works of Virgil containing his Pastorals, Georgics and AEneis. Translated into English verse; by Mr. Dryden (London, 1697, 2nd edn 1716). Elsam, Richard. An essay on rural architecture: illustrated with original and oeconomical designs: to which are added rural retreats and villas in the Gothic, Castle, Roman, and Grecian styles of architecture, with ideas for park-entrances, a mausoleum, and a design for the Naval Pillar, to immortalize British naval heroism: the whole comprising thirty plates, in aquatinta … an attempt to refute James Malton (London, 1803). Hvattum, Mari. Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Cambridge, 2004). Loudon, John Claudius. Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture. Vol. 2. (London, 1846; reprint Chippenham, 2000). Malton, James. Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798). Martin, Meredith S. Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 2011).

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Newman, John. The Buildings of England: Kent: West and the Weald (London, 1969; revised 2012). Papworth, John Buonarotti. Hints on Ornamental Gardening (London, 1823). Papworth, John Buonarotti. Rural Residences (London, 1818). Plaw, John. Sketches for Country Houses, villas and rural dwellings also some designs for Cottages (London, 1800, 1823). Plaw, John. Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements (London, 1795, 1800, 1803). Pocock, William Fuller. Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, Picturesque Dwellings, Villas etc with Appropriate Scenery, Plans and Descriptions to which are prefixed some critical observations on their style and character: And also of Re-imagining the vernacular 159 Castles, Abbies and Ancient English Houses, concluding with Practical Remarks on Building and the Causes of Dry Rot (London, 1807). Robinson, Peter F. Designs for Farm Buildings (London, 1830). Ruskin, John. The Poetry of Architecture (London, 1837; reprint 1905). Stamp, Gavin and Goulancourt, Andre. The English House 1860–1914: The Flowering of English Domestic Architecture (London, 1986). Tyack, Geoffrey (ed.) John Nash: Architect of the Picturesque (Swindon, 2013). Watkin, David. ‘Nash in Context: Links with Schinkel, Percier and Fontaine, Soane, and Cockerell’ in Geoffrey Tyack (ed.), John Nash: Architect of the Picturesque (Swindon, 2013), pp. 169–82. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 9 The cottage ornée

The cottage ornée is a particular class of architect-designed cottage. A product of the Picturesque, like the imitative vernacular-style estate cottage, it is a free composition of irregular expressive forms and appropriated architectural features. However, for the most part, cottage ornée make little or no reference to the vernacular. The dressing or external appearance of a cottage ornée is instead characterised by an eclectic collage of neoclassical rustic, gothic, Tudor, Indian, Swiss or Italianate details. It is playful design and it is the architecture of play. Indeed, as the play-houses of the privileged, cottage ornée also elicited a negative response from many professional architects as they transgressed architectural sensibilities and standards of taste. They are, of course, retreats but to where in the imagination is unclear from their architectural language; perhaps anywhere and everywhere that is exotic, fantastical and fun. Associated with retreat as leisure, pleasure and tourism more than intellectual or artistic reflection, cottage ornée are typically located within picturesque landscapes, often by the sea, where they are sited to capture the best views, though generally without an associated estate. As William Fuller Pocock explains in Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, 1807:

The Cabane Ornee or ornamental cottage is a building that owes its origin to the taste of the present day, and though humble in its appearance affords the necessary conveniences for persons of refined manners and habits, and is, perhaps, more calculated than any other description of building for the enjoyment of true pleasures of domestic

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 life, unencumbered with the forms of state. The leading feature of this style of building is to appear in every respect a dwelling calculated for comfort and convenience, without minute attention to the rules of art.1

The term ‘cottage ornée’ is often applied to any picturesque designed cottage including small buildings such as estate cottages and gate lodges.2 However, in the architectural writings of the early nineteenth century it is specifically used to describe the substantial independent cottage-villa, as per John Papworth’s classification given inRural Residences, 1818: ‘the cottage ornée is a new species of building in the economy of domestic architecture … a mere 162 The cottage ornée cottage would be incongruous with the nature of its occupancy’.4 Edmund Bartell further explains in Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages that:

…a Cottage, to use the word in its literal sense, means a house of small dimensions, appropriated to the use of the lower classes of people; but to buildings of this description; the fashion of the present day has added on, which bears a distinct character, and is known by the appellation of the ornamented or adorned character. The expense employed, and different rank in life of its inhabitants, giving the ornamented cottage a superiority.5

The term is itself derived from ferme ornée or ornamental farm. Despite the apparent similarities between the English picturesque cottage and French hameaux buildings discussed in the previous chapter, ferme ornée does not have a French origin but was coined by Stephen Switzer in the second edition of his English gardening treatise Ichnographia Rustica, 1742, to describe the fashion for working-farm gardens in the early-to-mid eighteenth century such as Philip Southcote’s Woburn Farm, Surrey.3 These villas were substantial residences and, therefore, represented an inherent conceptual conflict between the cottage ideal as a small and simple rural retreat and the provision of elegance, luxury and size; a conflict that Ruskin was quick to criticise.6 Reconciling the common understanding of a villa as a relatively substantial and well-appointed dwelling with the idea of the cottage was a cause for reflection for many architects and the consensus was that a cottage ornée should at least appear to be small. Edmund Bartell advises that ‘whether large or small, a cottage should be rather low than loft’.7 John Papworth suggests in Rural Residences ‘perhaps it is essential that this building should be small, and certainly not exceed two stories’.8 While in Designs for Elegant Cottage and Small Villas, E. Gyfford reflects that ‘the cottage style when applied to buildings of large dimensions, and many apartments, never fails to furnish an idea nearer allied to the barn than to a cottage’.9

The main period of cottage ornée building was from the end of the eighteenth century through to the early to mid-nineteenth century. This period saw the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars in Europe restricting Grand Tours and travel to European resorts in Italy and the Alps for British aristocrats and wealthy gentlemen and women. This social group needed new locations for leisurely retreat where they could socialise and play far from the political and financial concerns of London and their principal estates. For many the city of Bath was a popular option where a town house could be rented for the season, allowing the wealthy to commune while taking walks, attending social functions at the Assembly Rooms or visiting the Roman baths. Smaller, regional versions of genteel life in Bath were available at Harrogate in Yorkshire or Royal Tunbridge Wells in Kent. The cottage ornée 163 In the season, the spa town maintained a small, self-contained and socially exclusive community.10 However, for others the preferred mode of leisured retreat was the cottage ornée. Cottage ornée were principally built in clusters along the English south coast or notable rural beauty spots where their location offered picturesque views and, significantly, the company of like-minded cottage dwellers: most cottage ornée are not lonely shepherd’s huts as found on a country estate but located within visiting distance (a few miles by horse and carriage) of other cottage ornée in dispersed but connected communities. These social networks, spread across the Isle of Wight or around the Teign and Exe estuaries in Devon, were laid over the existing rural social networks of farms, villages and towns with little engagement by cottage ornée dwellers with people outside of their group. Besides the picturesque coastal landscape, the popularity of the south coast as the primary location for cottage ornée was the curative quality of the maritime climate and the fashion for sea bathing.11 The Isle of Wight and the South West offered further appeal as they could not be quickly reached from London ensuring the exclusive company of those with months of leisure time such as the peripatetic aristocrat and the wealthy retired merchant or naval officer. The Prince Regent’s coastal enclave of Brighton soon fell from favour as a retreat amongst the social elite as it could be too easily reached from London by weekenders and day trippers, that is, the working population. Outside of southern England, in the search for picturesque landscapes, clusters of cottages were also built in the Lake District, popularised by William Wordsworth, including Wordsworth’s own Rydal Mount, built near Ambleside in 1813.12

Cottage ornée can be recognised by their large size and by a set of common architectural characteristics (if not a coherent style). As we have seen, cottage designs were subject to stylistic hybridity as neoclassical mixed with gothic or as vernacular merged with Tudor. However, in most estate cottage architecture, whether neoclassical whiteness and symmetry or picturesque colour, texture and irregularity, there is a dominant set of formal concerns linked to a specific set of notions on art, nature and retreat. In contrast the typical cottage ornée is a playful mongrel that toys with different styles and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 their cultural associations. Besides thatch, the most common feature of a cottage ornée is the whiteness of its rendered external walls. The second most common feature is gothic lancet windows. To these can be added any combination of Tudor casement-windows and decorative chimney stacks, ornate barge boarding, Indian projecting veranda and Greek Revival or Italianate classicism. While the most expressive examples are picturesque formal compositions of irregular interlocking parts many are symmetrical boxes enhanced with decorative features. Among these various elements and influences, the vernacular is probably the least evident. And there is little evidence of the appearance of traditional materials and vernacular 164 The cottage ornée construction that was central to the designs of James Malton and William Fuller Pocock or the freer compositions of John Nash. Thatched neoclassical ‘cottage’ villas are prominent in the late eighteenth- century design publications of Sir John Soane and John Plaw (Figure 3.8).13 These designs can be compared to early nineteenth-century executed cottages such as Fairlynch House, Budleigh Salterton, built in 1811: a regular two- storey, three-bay box with tall lancet windows and a thatched hipped roof enhanced by a central lantern with its own conical thatched roof (Figure 9.1). Or, Woodway Cottage, Teignmouth, built by retired royal naval captain, Capt. James Spratt R.N., in 1815; a two-storey, two-bay, square- plan house also with hipped thatch and tall lancet windows plus a trellis-work veranda projecting towards the lawn. Writing in 1794, the Rev. John Swete offers a similar description of Molt Cottage, Salcombe:

After breakfast I proceeded on to Molt (a summer villa of Mr Strode of Peamore) … Mr Strode, not being here, I dismounted at a little gate, and past through a shrubbery to the House – the front of it was singular in appearance, having about one third from its roof, a projection supported by slender pillars, assuming the form of a piazza, or (as they have frequent in the East Indies), a Veranda; intended to act as a parasole which it effectively does – not admitting the Sun to blaze upon the Windows; except when his beams are too oblique to become obstrusive, the Windows both below and above are of a gothic cast, pointed: and the frame-work with the mouldings, cornice and pillars of the Veranda, being painted green, an effect is produced uncommonly light and elegant.14

Houghton Lodge, a fishing lodge on the bank of the River Test in Hampshire built for the Pitt-Rivers family c. 1799, predating Fairlynch and Woodway, is a similar one-and-a-half storey, four-bay white box with hipped roof and gothic windows. However, it also introduces some picturesque irregularity in the addition of a circular-plan dining room that projects from the rear with a tall conical roof that rises above the roofline of the main body of the house (Figure 9.2). The circular cottage ornée was taken to a further extreme at A La Ronde, Summer Lane, Exmouth, built in 1798 for Mary and Jane Parminter. A La Ronde, originally thatched and top lit by a lantern, is a sixteen-sided cylindrical 15

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 form probably designed by John Lowder. Dating from the early nineteenth century, single-storied Umbrella Cottage, Lyme Regis, Dorset, continues this theme with an octagonal plan, white render and thatch terminating in a single central chimneystack. The cottage has a distinctive overhanging thatch supported on posts to produce a form of veranda with the thatch between the posts cut-back to form pointed arches (the whole resembling an umbrella). Similar cottages can also be found on the Isle of Wight, such as Dunnose Cottage near Shanklin, and at Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where Rock Cottage stands on a rocky promontory overlooking the town. Vernon Cottage, also at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, built for Edward Vernon Utterson The cottage ornée 165

Figure 9.1 Fairlynch House, Budleigh Salterton, Devon. Source: author

in 1817, breaks the pattern of white render as it features exposed rubble walls and half-timbering with jettied upper storey. As we have seen, James Malton was scathing of these ‘affected cottages’ with particular ire saved for the inappropriateness of gothic windows.16 Malton equally disliked the use of more exotic features such as the veranda or stretched awning, ‘the peculiars of every nation form a mongrel species in England’ which he dismissed as ‘the rude ornaments of Indostan’.17 This eclecticism was also a serious concern for Ruskin who hoped to ‘convince both the architect and his employer of the danger of giving free play to the imagination … and might persuade the designer of the necessity of looking not to his own peculiar tastes’.18

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 The pre-eminent collection of early nineteenth-century picturesque cottage ornée in England is located in and around the seaside resort of Sidmouth, on the Exe estuary in Devon; eulogised in A. G. Cooke’s A topographical and statistical description of the county of Devon, 1830:

Sidmouth, Hygeia’s chosen seat! Again receive me: let me greet Thy ruddy cliffs, thy pebbly beach, Thy broad majestic ocean reach; And streams that murmur thro’ thy green retreat.19 166 The cottage ornée Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 9.2 Houghton Lodge, Stockbridge, Hampshire. Source: Courtesy of Sophie Busk/Ed Crispin The cottage ornée 167 As Theodore H. Mogridge attests in A descriptive sketch of Sidmouth, 1836, in the early nineteenth century Sidmouth had rapidly became one of the most exclusive seaside resorts in England where ‘numerous detached villas have been erected, sheltered from the colder winds, and rendered suitable in every respect for the residence of families who seek the advantages of a mild and temperate climate’.20 Sidmouth’s cottage ornée and their aristocratic inhabitants gained fame as illustrations and descriptions were circulated in publications such as Forty-Eight Views of Cottages and Scenery at Sidmouth Devon, 1826.21 The best known of these fantastical cottages is Knowle Cottage built for Lord le Despenceur, c. 1810 (Figure 9.3). Later heavily altered and extended to become the Knowle Hotel and later Sidmouth Council Offices, period illustrations and descriptions suggest a substantial dwelling of forty rooms: one-and-a-half storeys in height; L-plan with a projecting bay to the left of the garden elevation; a hipped thatched-roof enclosing four small, gothic dormer windows; four tall chimney-stacks; and a roof-ridge that rises upwards in picturesque flourish towards the hip of the projecting bay. The ground floor is articulated by a series of pointed arch, glazed garden-doors that reduce the external wall area to a minimum, the whole covered by a veranda formed by the projecting eaves of the thatch. Knowle Cottage was a tourist attraction soon after its completion and had its own series of guide books such as A New Guide to Knowle Cottage, 1840, which describes:

…a truly romantic Marine Villa, is situated on a lovely eminence … It was built by the late Lord Le Despenser in 1810, and is a thatched building, forming nearly a quadrangle, and then contained forty rooms … A veranda which is two hundred feet above the level of the sea, and one hundred above the church tower, surrounds the principal, and eastern front of the cottage it is three hundred and fifteen feet in length, and nearly twelve in width, entirely supported at equal distances, by superb oak pollards.22

Suggesting that the successive owners of Knowle Cottages were accustomed to tourists, the guide further advises visitors that:

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 …you arrive at the head of this grand walk, where previous to entering the Cottage, servants are in attendance, who will receive, and carefully take charge of parasols, canes, &c; when we advise a contemplation of the delightful scenery to be viewed from the ring or carriage approach.23

Other notable cottage ornée at Sidmouth, featuring various combinations of thatch, white render, gothic windows and verandas include: Violet Bank Cottage, Little Courthaye, built c. 1798 for the 5th Duke of St Albans; the Earl of Buckingham’s Sidholme, Elysium Fields, built in the gothic style throughout, 1828; Cotmaton Cottage, built 1830; Peak Cottage, early 168 The cottage ornée

Figure 9.3 George Rowe, ‘Knowle Cottage’, Forty-eight views of cottages and scenery at Sidmouth, 1826. Source: Devon Heritage Services

nineteenth century, is a picturesque massing of thatched bays, projections and veranda built on the cliff-top above the town; Pauntley Cottage, Milford Road, which features a particularly decorative assemblage of oriel windows and fretwork barge-boards; and Woodbine Cottage, Milford Road is an old cob-walled cottage extended and embellished in the early nineteenth century with two front-facing gables of different heights, barge-boarding and eye- brow dormers. The 1830 catalogue for the sale of Lord Gwydr’s Woodland Cottage provides a good description of the accommodation provided by a Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Sidmouth cottage ornée:

Messrs. Brooks & Co, 28 Old Bond Street, have instruction to let, sell, or exchange, the beautifully secluded Freehold Residence formerly occupied by the late Lord Gwydyr, containing 13 Bedrooms, Servants’ Chambers over Offices, a Suit of spacious Reception Rooms, 90 Feet in length, opening to Pleasure Ground and a covered Terrace Walk of 180 Feet, extensive Offices, two productive walled Gardens, in the whole two Acres.24 The cottage ornée 169 That a legal firm in London handled the sale rather than a local, Devon, solicitor emphasises the town-and-country paradigm of the cottage-retreat where prospective buyers were expected to come from the capital. The catalogue also includes an illustration of Woodland Cottage ‘drawn from nature’ by G. Eyre Brooks which depicts the thatched cottage in its coastal landscape context with the garden and the trellis-work ‘covered Terrace Walk’ in the foreground (Figure 9.4).25 At the centre of Sidmouth’s network of aristocratic cottage-retreats is the cluster of cottages that make up Clifton Place on the beachfront at the western end of the Esplanade. In a prominent postion overlooking the town and bay, Clifton Cottage, built c. 1820, is a square-plan, single-storey thatched and rendered building consisting of four ranges enclosing a central courtyard. Clifton Cottage was built by Emmanuel Lousada, entrepreneurial founder of Regency Sidmouth, although it was rented soon after completion to the artist Henry Hasler when Lousada built a more substantial neoclassical mansion, Peak House. Hasler contributed an illustration of Clifton to the Rev. E. Butcher’s The beauties of Sidmouth, 1820, that shows the seafront elevation with a typical veranda of overhanging thatch and rough-log posts opening to a sloping lawn towards the sea.26 Next to Clifton Cottage is the seemingly picturesque Rock Cottage. However, period prints show Rock Cottage to Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 9.4 Woodland Cottage, Sidmouth, ‘drawn from nature’ by G. Eyre Brooks, c. 1830. Source: Devon Heritage Services 170 The cottage ornée have been a plain neoclassical building, later thatched and ornamented by the Arts and Crafts architect R. W. Sampson in 1908.27 Perhaps the most remarkable of surviving Sidmouth cottages is the neighbouring Beacon Cottage, c. 1840 (Figure 9.5). Beacon Cottage stands out amongst this most exuberant collection of irregularly-shaped cottages as it is four-storey in height on a relatively small square-plan, thus, flouting architectural convention that cottages should appear small. The upper- storey veranda or balcony under the projecting eaves of the thatch suggests the front-facing gable end of a Swiss Chalet. ‘Swiss Cottages’ were a popular style for garden seats in country estates in the early nineteenth century and can be found as features in aristocrats parks such as Endsleigh in Devon and Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire. However, they were derided by many architects like James Malton as inappropriate to the English countryside. Ruskin, who in The Poetry of Architecture urges architects to be ‘satisfied with national and natural forms’, is particularly critical of the Swiss Cottage and its genteel occupants, writing ‘we have old English gentleman reclining on crocodile stools and peeping out of the windows of Swiss chalets’.28 It is remarkable that to date no architect has been connected to any of Sidmouth’s cottage ornée. It is certainly the case that some architects such as James Malton were hostile to the formal and decorative Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 9.5 Beacon Cottage, Sidmouth, Devon. Source: author The cottage ornée 171 excesses of the cottage ornée but the absence of architectural provenance may simply mean an absence of records rather than that their designers were architectural outsiders.

To close a review of early nineteenth-century English cottage ornée two final buildings need to be discussed, though neither quite fit the type and in contrast to the unknown authorship of the cottage ornée at Sidmouth both are by prominent architects: John Nash and Sir Jeffry Wyattville. The first is the Royal Lodge, Windsor Great Park, Windsor, by John Nash, 1813–16, for the Prince Regent, entitled ‘Royal Cottage’ on a pencil sketch in the Royal Collection by William Alfred Delamotte (Figure 9.6).29 The building is a cottage-retreat within a country estate and therefore falls within the category of estate architecture, whereas contemporary categorisations defined the cottage ornée as an independent villa with attached gardens. Nonetheless in scale, design and use the Royal Cottage compares closely to aristocratic cottages such as Lord Gwydyr’s Woodland Cottage; indeed, Gwydyr was the Prince Regent’s Chamberlain until 1820. Formerly the Park Bailiff’s cottage, once expanded and dressed in the cottage style by Nash, Royal Lodge or Royal Cottage possessed many of the Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 9.6 William Alfred Delamotte, ‘Royal Cottage’, 1824. Source: Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014 172 The cottage ornée formal and decorative characteristics of the cottage ornée, that is: a large dwelling of irregular plan and elevations, thatch, tall chimney stacks, white rendered-walls, dormer windows, gothic windows, oriel windows and verandas formed from projecting eaves supported by posts, not to mention a cast-iron conservatory 75 feet in length. Its use as a location for temporary retreat within the Windsor Great Park may have been more typical of the gentleman’s estate cottage-retreat, in contrast to the lengthy stays at a coastal cottage ornée, but the pursuit of leisure within well-furnished, luxurious surroundings is consistent. The cost of this rustic extravagance was in excess of £28,000 and raised questions in parliament as to the Prince Regent’s spending.30 Second is Wyattville’s Endsleigh Cottage, Devon. Endsleigh was described by Christopher Hussey as ‘the outstanding and probably most nearly perfect surviving instance of a romantic cottage orne [sic], devised for an aristocratic owner under the influence of the taste for the picturesque’.31 Endsleigh was the rural retreat of John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford and Georgina, Duchess of Bedford, built on the brow of the River Tamar valley on the Devon– Cornwall border. Set within gardens by Humphry Repton, the picturesque landscape setting is described in William White’s History, gazetteer, and directory of Devonshire, 1850:

The Duke of Bedford owns the greater part of the parish, and has a beautiful occasional seat here, called ENDSLEIGH COTTAGE, delightfully situated in the picturesque valley of the Tamar, in the midst of sylvan pleasure grounds, through which the river winds in a semicircular reach, amidst some of the most romantic scenery in Devon and Cornwall … so enchantingly disposed, as to render Endsleigh one of the loveliest spots in Devonshire … Permission to view this earthly paradise may be obtained of the Duke’s steward, at his office, in Tavistock.32

In their accounts both Hussey and White describe Endsleigh as a cottage ornée and, in naming their retreat ‘Cottage’ the Russells clearly saw it as such. However, unlike the aristocratic cottages of Sidmouth, Endsleigh is not an independent villa with an associated garden of two or three acres. Equally, unlike the Royal Cottage at Windsor, it is not a retreat within a

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 country estate. Rather, it stands at the centre of its own extensive country estate of several hundred acres that included tenant farms, tin mining operations, the estate village of Milton Abbot and other civic works including the town hall, corn market and grammar school in the market town of Tavistock (effectively a large estate village). The gardens at Endsleigh include several smaller cottages such as the octagonal thatched cottage in the Dairy Dell, also by Wyattville, and a timber-framed Swiss Cottage on a wooded prominence above the main house as well other estate buildings dressed as cottages such as the gate lodge. Nonetheless, for the exceptionally wealthy Russell family Endsleigh represented a small and simple rural The cottage ornée 173 retreat from their principal seat of Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire and their London properties (the Russells owned the Bloomsbury developments of Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, Endsleigh Street, Endsleigh Place and Endsleigh Gardens). Endsleigh Cottage was designed by Sir Jeffry Wyattville and built 1810–16 (Figure 9.7).33 It is small for a country house but larger than any of the cottage ornée at Sidmouth or the Royal Cottage, Windsor: eighteen bedrooms against Lord Gwydyr’s thirteen bedrooms at Woodland Cottage. From the lawn or south elevation the building appears as a group of adjoining houses of different size, the whole resembling a street terrace in a historic market town rather than a single country cottage, though moving through the inside of the house there is no sense of crossing between different buildings.34 As William White explains ‘to produce picturesque effect, it is built in a very irregular manner, and has many ornamental gables, in one of which is a statue of the last abbot of Tavistock’.35 To the western end of the range is a two-storey pavilion dressed as a cottage with half-hipped roof, mullioned casement windows and a rough-log post porch. This is linked to the main body of the house by a single storey arcade. The main block is a composition of contrasting roof heights, gables, projections and recesses out of which emerges the facades of three apparently distinct dwellings. Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 9.7 J. P. Neale, ‘Endsleigh Cottage, Devonshire’, c. 1850. Source: Devon Heritage Services 174 The cottage ornée However, like the external decorative elements throughout, these facades are imitations of an Elizabethan house rather than a cottage: dressed stone, roof slates not thatch, barge boards, hood moulds, heavy stone mullions and oriel windows. Beneath these elements is a complex mass of interlocking blocks. While the dressing is different, Tudor as opposed to Italianate, this is a similar formal device to that employed by Wyattville in his design for the north wing extension to Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, 1818–40. Nonetheless, while stylistically the scheme is Tudor rather than vernacular cottage, Wyattville managed to make this large building appear small and as per Bartell’s advice it does not exceed two stories. Despite the external appearance of picturesque irregularity and smallness, internally the plan is quite regular: a central lobby entered from the rear or north elevation opens directly on to a central parlour with rooms extending from this to left and right and a corridor to the rear runs the length of the building’s main axis. Endsleigh Cottage is an unusual cottage ornée: it is not thatched, it is not white-walled and it does not have gothic windows. Yet, for its wealthy owners it nonetheless embodied the idea of the cottage as a simple rural retreat.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 8 Papworth, Rural Residences, p. 32. 9 E. Gyfford, Designs for Elegant Cottage and Small Villas (London, 1806), p. viii. 10 John Urry and Jonas Larsen (eds), The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Thousand Oaks, 2011), p. 32. 11 Ibid., p. 33. 12 William Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes 5th edn (London, 1906), p. 125. 13 John Soane, Sketches in Architecture: containing Plans and Elevations of Cottages, Villas and Other Useful Buildings (London, 1793 & 1798); John Plaw, Rural Architecture or Designs from the simple cottage to the decorated villa (London, 1794). 14 John Swete (ed. Todd Gray), Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of the Reverend John Swete, 1789-1800, I (Tiverton, 1997), pp. 199–200. The cottage ornée 175 15 Hugh Meller, ‘A La Ronde’, Devon Buildings Group Newsletter 11 (1992), 10. 16 James Malton, Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798), p. 16 17 Ibid., p. 10. 18 Ruskin, Poetry of Architecture, p. 232. 19 A. G. Cooke, A topographical and statistical description of the county of Devon (London, c.1830), p. 123. 20 Theodore H. Mogridge, A descriptive sketch of Sidmouth; comprising its ancient and modern history (Sidmouth, 1836), pp. 12–13. 21 George Rowe, Forty-Eight Views of Cottages and Scenery at Sidmouth Devon (London, 1826). 22 Anon., A New Guide to Knowle Cottage, the Villa of T.L.Fish, Esq. (Sidmouth, 1840), pp. 19–21. 23 Ibid., pp. 5–7. 24 ‘Woodland Cottage’, sale catalogue (1830), Devon Heritage Services (DHS): SC2615. 25 Brooks, G. Eyre, Sidmouth / drawn from nature, Lithograph (c.1830) in ‘Woodland Cottage’, sale catalogue (1830), DHS: SC2615. 26 Rev. Edmund Butcher’s The beauties of Sidmouth displayed, being a descriptive sketch of its situation, salubrity and picturesque scenery. Third Edition. (Sidmouth, 1820), pp. 38–9. 27 Information provided by Sid Vale Association, www.sidmouth.com (last accessed 13 November 2014). 28 Ruskin, Poetry of Architecture, pp. 326, 7. 29 William Alfred Delamotte, pencil drawing (1836), Royal Collection Trust: RCIN 917511, www.royalcollection.org.uk (last accessed 18.12.14). 30 Port, ‘John Nash’, p.125. 31 Christopher Hussey, Country Life, CXXX, July to September (1961), 246, 296. 32 William White’s History, gazetteer, and directory of Devonshire (Sheffield, 1850), p. 622. 33 Correspondence on design and construction of Endsleigh Cottage in Bedford Estate Papers (DHS: Devon Letters, L 1258/82). 34 Endsleigh Cottage, Devonshire / drawn by J.P.Neale ; engraved by T.Barber, DHS: SC1738. 35 White, History, p. 622.

Bibliography Anon. A New Guide to Knowle Cottage, the Villa of T. L. Fish, Esq. (Sidmouth, 1840). Bartell, Edmund. Hints for Picturesque Improvements in Ornamented Cottages (London, 1804).

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Brogden, William. ‘The Ferme Ornée and Changing Attitudes to Agricultural Improvement’, Eighteenth Century Life, III (2) (1983), 39–44. Butcher, Edmund. The beauties of Sidmouth displayed, being a descriptive sketch of its situation, salubrity and picturesque scenery. 3rd edn (Sidmouth, 1820). Cooke, A. G. A topographical and statistical description of the county of Devon (London, c.1830). Gyfford, E. Designs for Elegant Cottage and Small Villas (London, 1806). Hussey, Christopher. Country Life. CXXX, July to September (1961), 246. Malton, James. An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798). 176 The cottage ornée Meller, Hugh. ‘A La Ronde’, Devon Buildings Group Newsletter 11 (1992), 10. Mogridge, Theodore H. A descriptive sketch of Sidmouth: comprising its ancient and modern history (Sidmouth, 1836). Papworth, John Buonarotti. Rural Residences (London, 1818). Pocock, William Fuller. Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, Picturesque Dwellings, Villas etc with Appropriate Scenery, Plans and Descriptions to which are prefixed some critical observations on their style and character: And also of Castles, Abbies and Ancient English Houses, concluding with Practical Remarks on Building and the Causes of Dry Rot (London, 1807). Plaw, John. Rural Architecture or Designs from the simple cottage to the decorated villa (London, 1794). Port, M. H. ‘John Nash and the Royal Palaces’ in Geoffrey Tyack (ed.) John Nash: Architect of the Picturesque (Swindon, 2013), pp. 125–52. Rowe, George. Forty-Eight Views of Cottages and Scenery at Sidmouth Devon (London, 1826). Ruskin, John. The Poetry of Architecture (London, 1837; reprint 1905). Soane, John. Sketches in Architecture: containing Plans and Elevations of Cottages, Villas and Other Useful Buildings (London, 1793 & 1798). Sutherland, Lyall. Dream Cottages: From Cottage Ornée to Stockbroker Tudor, Two Hundred Years of the Cult of the Vernacular (London, 1988). Swete, John (ed. Todd Gray), Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of the Reverend John Swete, 1789–1800, I–V (Tiverton, 1997). Urry, John and Larsen, Jonas (eds) The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Thousand Oaks, 2011). White, William. History, gazetteer, and directory of Devonshire (Sheffield, 1850). Wordsworth, William. Guide to the Lakes 5th edn (London, 1906). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 10 The cottages of Old England

Picturesque cottage architecture of the early nineteenth century was not exclusively focussed on the imitation of the vernacular. Cottages were also designed in part or in whole to be ‘Old English’, extensively employing the architectural motifs of an imagined Tudor Golden Age such as tall chimney stacks, window mullions and hood moulds. Like many architects of the period William Fuller Pocock, for example, argued for an English domestic architecture that represented ‘English’ values, urging ‘it is surely worthy of a great and powerful people to cultivate a style of Building formed in their own country’.1 As styles slipped and changed, Old England also replaced Arcadia as the imaginary destination of retreat. Not only was a new style adopted, the Classical world was specifically rejected by Pocock:

…something may be feared also from the desire which induces us to explore the architecture of different countries during the remote ages of the world … [it] will lead to the indulgence of every extravagance, and thereby corrupt the purity of our taste in the Arts.2

By the 1830s J. C. Loudon was able to proclaim that:

…happily … for the interest of sound taste, our country, after having given trail, for nearly three centuries, to the merits of what was called Classic Architecture, both the true and the false, has begun to discern that the native style, so long neglected, has claims to admiration which 3

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 the pretensions of foreign art can never eclipse or invalidate.

The forms and features of Tudor buildings became widespread in the design of cottages. However, in trading Arcadia for Old England the cottage lost its distinction as the simple rural retreat and became but one among many buildings designed in the Old English or Tudor style. Although cottages were always representational hybrids, within the wider arena of the nineteenth-century Historic Revival, the architect-designed cottage lost both its formal and conceptual integrity. The idea of the cottage in English architecture was, therefore, eventually buried within a bigger idea about nationalism and national history. 178 The cottages of Old England The Old English style was not the first architectural exploitation of the past, patriotic antiquarian interest in old English buildings can be traced back to the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century where loss quickly turned to nostalgia and admiration of these national monuments was born out of their appropriation and remodelling. By the eighteenth century, the medieval past was a persistent presence in patriotic plays and songs, in antiquarian interests in the remains of Ancient Briton and in the visual language of the Gothic across the decorative arts (this chapter takes its name from ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’, an eighteenth-century patriotic ballad from Henry Fielding’s 1731 The Grub-Street Opera).4 Gothick represented an interest in English history and English national mythology that was maintained alongside the century’s devotion to Ancient Rome. Gothic design was informed by antiquarianism, the recording and collecting of old objects and structures, either imitatively or through the incorporation of historic building fragments into new buildings (as exemplified by Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill). J. C. Loudon, writing about the Old English style in the 1830s, was aware of this pedigree when he refers to ‘the satisfaction that has, for some time past, been produced, in this country, by the revival of the Gothic style’.5 The historic reasons for the heightening of this long-standing mood of national nostalgia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century are considered later in the chapter. For the most part, the architectural taste for the Gothick extended only to accents, small details applied to otherwise neoclassical buildings. This is the case with the earliest architect-designed cottages where lancet windows decorated the neat and regular front elevation of Philip Southcote’s ‘Gothick Cottage’ at Woburn Farm. The Rev. John Swete records visiting ‘Captain Peppin’s Gothic Cottage, On the Barle below Dulverton’ in 1796 while the poet Richard Polwhele, writing in 1792, describes Swete’s own cottage- retreat at Oxton as ‘built in the Gothic Style’.6 The cottage was certainly unusual, comprising square, single-rooms with gothic windows over two stories capped with a thatched pyramidal roof, the upper storey reached by a raked external staircase with thatched arcading. Swete’s cottage had some celebrity in his own time being illustrated in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1793, and later in Gardener’s Magazine, 1842.7 Swete’s cottage predates the widespread use of gothic windows in the cottage ornée of the early nineteenth

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 century. As we have seen, John Plaw also routinely applied gothic windows to his otherwise classical cottage designs in titles such as Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvement, 1795.8 The appropriateness of gothic ornament in cottage architecture was a cause for some architectural debate with Plaw and Richard Elsam in favour and James Malton against.9 In the early nineteenth century, William Fuller Pocock argued that while problematic, its age and long pedigree as a native architecture gave gothic an authority in domestic architecture in that ‘Dwellings of this country, which length of time has attached to the soil …[may be] given a prescriptive right to form a striking feature in the natural and picturesque The cottages of Old England 179 scenery of an English Landscape’.10 John Papworth speculated that ‘it may be concluded that many small cottage, prior to the fifteenth century, were of the Gothic character … and by the mode of such buildings, the introduction of Gothic ornaments in cottages may be supported’.11

However, by the 1830s cottage design had been largely recast in the Old English or Tudor style. Unlike the gesture of a gothic window on a white symmetrical facade, this new style fundamentally diverted the idea of the cottage from its long established association with the Classical idea of rustic rural retreat. Not only did the conceptual destination of retreat shift from Arcadia to Old England, but the point of departure also changed from a universal, unchanging idea of the busy city to a specific point in time and space and the concerns of that moment: colonial misadventure in the 1780s, fear of revolution in 1790s and decades of war in the early nineteenth century. In order to accommodate these new meanings, the irregular formal compositions of the Picturesque remained but the grammar of cottage ornament changed. Gone is thatch. Gone are rough-log porches. Instead, as can be seen in Design 28, ‘A Cottage in the Old English manner’, from John Claudius Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Villa and Farm Architecture, 1834, we find a new grammar of Tudor hood-moulds over windows, dressed stone-work, tall ornamental chimney-stacks and, most characteristically, barge-boarding or the decorative fretwork timber boards applied to gable ends (Figure 10.1). As Loudon surmises, ‘the building is picturesque; expressive of what it pretends to be, an old English cottage’.12 Moreover, in the imitation of Tudor architectural precedents, the Old English cottage is also tall and narrow with formal elements such as jettied upper storey and high forward-facing gables. This new vertical emphasis replaces the idea that a cottage should at least appear to be low. Where Elsam or Papworth’s tall Tudor stacks adorn low, broad buildings, those illustrated by Loudon appear taller in height than they are broad in plan. Loudon’s Encyclopaedia is a good indicator of the prevalence of the Old English style in domestic architecture of the mid-nineteenth century as his role was that of editor, selecting designs for inclusion from a pool of works submitted for publication by architects in practice, including among many others: Edward Buckton Lamb, W. H. Leeds, T. J. Ricault, William Frome

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Smallwood, Esq., ‘a young Architect of great taste’, Sir Jeffry Wyattville, and ‘a Bailiff’s Cottage, in the Old English Style…at Bury Hill, hear Dorking, Surrey, the seat of Charles Barclay Esq’ by John Perry.13 The Old English grammar of ornament applied to cottages was mostly sourced from large, high-status buildings such as palaces, the more decorative houses of the gentry and wealthy merchants’ town houses, as well as churches and cathedrals. As with the contemporaneous interest in the vernacular, architects visited and recorded historic buildings, but they were also able to take advantage of published sources such as James Sargent Storer’s The Antiquarian Itinerary, Comprising Specimens of Architecture, 180 The cottages of Old England Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016

Figure 10.1 John Claudius Loudon, Design 28, ‘A Cottage in the Old English manner’, Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Villa and Farm Architecture, 1834. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection The cottages of Old England 181 Monastic, Castellated, and Domestic, with other Vestiges of Antiquity in Great Britain, 1816; Joseph Nash’s The Mansions of England in the Olden Time (1839–49); or, T. F. Hunt’s Designs for Parsonage Houses, Almshouses etc with examples of Gables and other curious remains of Old English Architecture, 1827. Hunt also provides a short history of that most characteristic of Old English features, the barge-board:

By some called verge-boards: the accepted term however is barge-board; so named from being placed immediately under the projecting course of tiles, which is called the barge course … One of the earliest dwelling- houses of this class known to have been built entirely of brick in England was the vicarage house at Hackney, erected in the reign of Henry VII by Christopher Urswick, Dean of Windsor.14

Edward Buckton Lamb’s Studies of Ancient Domestic Architecture, 1846, includes a statement on the design process that highlights the persistence of eighteenth-century aesthetics well into the nineteenth century:

We ought to look to the buildings of other times, not for patterns, but for studies. The mere copying of a former style in individual examples of it, will never produce what will deserve to be honoured by the name of style in its turn. We may allowably enough extract all that we can from the works of our predecessors, but unless something of our own be added – unless some fresh vitality be infused into it, what should be art becomes no better than manufacture – more clever perhaps than tasteful and even if tasteful, devoid of all geniality.15

The results of these studies and reflections on sixteenth-century English architectural history were highly ornate cottages such as Humphry Repton’s timber-framed Henry VII Lodge, 1810–11, Woburn Sands, Bedfordshire, for the 6th Duke of Bedford. P. F. Robinson cites the lodge as ‘a good example of a modern building in this style’ and comments favourably on Repton’s use of brick and stone for picturesque colour effect over the:

…numerous examples [that] still exist of old timber houses, the greater

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 part however rendered unpleasing by the extreme contrast of black and white which distinguishes them … The Lodge recently erected by the Duke of Bedford on the London road between Woburn and Newport Pagnel … shows the effect which may be produced by attending to colour. The Design is composed, in a degree from old buildings in Gloucester.16

In fact, the extensive and varied decorative motifs that adorn the lodge were largely sourced by Repton from Some Curious Specimens of Timber Houses communicated to the Society of Antiquaries, 1810, the lower 182 The cottages of Old England storey from Eltham Palace, the brick-nogging from a house in King’s Lynn, the barge-boarding from a house in Bury St Edmunds, the pinnacles from a house in Shrewsbury, the oriel window from Norwich and the chimneys from Wolterton Manor, Norfolk.17 What is significant, however, is that none of these sources are from Bedfordshire: the lodge is a collated image of England. Of half-timbered cottages, J. C. Loudon remarks that they are:

…very picturesque objects … as ornamental objects in parks they are very desirable, both on account of their beauty and their historical interest; carrying back as they do, the mind to the time when not only all the better kind of cottages were built in this manner, but … most of the houses of the landed proprietors.18

Loudon, however, is critical of Sir Jeffry Wyattville’s half-timbered Beeley Lodges at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, built after Wyattville’s death in 1839, finding the two cottages to have ‘no merit in an architectural point of view … Such, however, is the grandeur of the scenery where they are placed, and to which the road leads, that these lodges escape critical notice’.19 Half- timbering, jettied upper storeys and barge-boarded gables also characterise the mid-nineteenth-century estate architecture of George Devey, such as the gate lodge to Benenden School, Cranbrook, Kent (Figure 10.2). However, as discussed in Chapter 8, Devey’s work reflected the local Kent vernacular even if outside of its traditional centres of Kent, Suffolk and Cheshire, half- timbering was employed by other architects like Wyattville as a generic Old English motif. In published cottage designs the Old English style was pushed to its decorative limits in stonework by Peter F. Robinson in Design No. IV, ‘Cottage’, in A New Series of Designs for Ornamental Cottages and villas, 1838 (Figure 10.3). In the setting of the urban park, John Burge Watson’s 1840 Duck Island Cottage for the Royal Ornithological Society, St. James Park, London, is a good example of an otherwise plain building given decorative interest through the application of ornate barge boards. However, decorative barge boarding at its most elaborate, and visually dominant, can be found adorning the estate cottages of the Leighton Estate, Welshpool, by

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 the Liverpool architect W. H. Gee in the 1850s for Christopher Leyland, a Liverpool banker. Equally impressive in scale are the barge boards that adorn many of the gable ends in the estate village of Edensor, Chatsworth, Derbyshire. The cottages by Joseph Paxton and John Robertson of Derby date from the 1840s and are an eclectic mixture of styles ranging from Italianate to Old English with oriel windows and barge boards juxtaposed with the Venetian windows and towers of the villa rusticana. The Russell family’s extensive cottage building programme of the mid- nineteenth century and later was entirely executed in the Old English style. Begun by Francis Russell, the 7th Duke of Bedford, in the 1830s this The cottages of Old England 183

Figure 10.2 Gate lodge, Benendon School, Cranbrook, Kent. Source: author

programme continued into the early twentieth century with over 500 cottages built across estate villages in Bedfordshire and Devon. As discussed in Chapter 4, cottages erected on the Bedford Estates around Woburn were built in the Old English style to a pattern established by Edward Blore.20 Built in red brick with characteristic diamond leaded windows and steeply pitched roofs covered in grey slates, Bedford estate cottages from the 1850s and 1860s range from highly decorative examples in the village of Ridgmont, which also feature fretwork barge-boards and windows with deep stone- mullions and transoms, through to plain versions of the same basic form without applied decoration in Lidlington (Figure 4.3). At the same time, the Bedford Estates also built large numbers of miners’ cottages in and around

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Tavistock, Devon, in an Old English style established by Theophilus Jones in the 1840s. Of uniform stone construction with slate roofs, these cottages have characteristic gabled, wall-head dormer windows and tall ‘Tudor’ chimneystacks (Figure 4.7). In villa design, the application of the Old English style to a ‘cottage’ is exemplified by Decimus Burton’s own house or cottage ornée, Baston Cottage, which he designed as part of the Calverley Park development at Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, laid out in the 1820s and 1830s.21 Baston Cottage is a two-storey, stone-walled villa in the Tudor style replete with ornate barge-boards, high pinnacled-gables and tall decorative chimney 184 The cottages of Old England

Figure 10.3 Peter F. Robinson, Design IV, ‘Cottage’, A New Series of Designs for Ornamental Cottages and Villas, London, 1838. Source: Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection

stacks (Figure 10.4). What is significant is that Burton called this Old English villa a ‘cottage’, suggesting the idea of the cottage still had some cultural resonance even if it was not represented in the architecture’s scale, form or decoration, although Burton does make an awkward gesture to rusticity through the addition of two thatched porches supported on rough-log posts. As seen, Design 28, ‘A Cottage in the Old English manner’, from Loudon’s Encyclopaedia, typifies the Old English style. Loudon states that the building is ‘expressive of what it pretends to be, an old English cottage’.22 However, this is not the case. It is a cottage designed in the Old English style but it does Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 not look like an old English cottage of the Tudor period. Sixteenth-century cottages would have appeared recognisably similar to rural cottages observed in the early nineteenth century; formed through slowly evolved regional building traditions these were modest vernacular buildings that throughout early modern English history existed largely outside of the changing fashions that informed the architectural tastes of the professional architect and their wealthy clients. Features such as barge boards, hood moulds and decorative chimneystacks belong to this world of wealth and display and are not generally associated with vernacular cottages. Rather, they belong to the buildings used as The cottages of Old England 185

Figure 10.4 Decimus Burton, Architectural perspective of the garden elevation, Baston Cottage, Tunbridge Wells by Decimus Burton, c.1831. Source: Hastings Old Town Hall Museum and Art Gallery

sources by nineteenth-century architects such as Henry VIII’s barge-boarded hunting lodge of Eltham Palace in Kent (as illustrated by T. F. Hunt) and to relatively high-status buildings such as the wealthy merchants’ houses of England’s provincial market towns that Repton borrowed from. The result of this conflation of cottage and palace is that the Old English cottages by Loudon’s stable of mid-nineteenth-century architects, and others such as Hunt and P. F. Robinson, are awkward-looking objects as the small volume of the ‘cottage’ is overloaded and weighed down with ornament intended for much larger buildings: the visual breaks of plain wall between hood mould and barge board are compressed so that architectural rhythm is lost and features crowd each other uncomfortably. The physical burying of the cottage beneath Tudor ornament reflects the conceptual loss of the idea of Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 the cottage within the broader current of the Historic Revival. As Herman Muthesius, German champion of the English Vernacular Revival movement associated with the Arts and Crafts, observed in 1904, ‘[the architect] brought with him an architectonic ambition that made him attempt monumental architecture on these ordinary little commissions – this was the architects’ fundamental failure in the last century’.23

Whether applied to cottages or mansions, the Old English style is an architectural example of what Eric Hobsbawm describes as one of many 186 The cottages of Old England ‘invented traditions’ of the early nineteenth century, where the past was appropriated and reimagined to support the relatively new idea of the nation state ‘with its associated phenomena: nationalism … national symbols, histories and the rest’.24 The search through the past for a defined vision of England and Englishness in this period has often been accounted for by historians and literary scholars as a cultural counter-reaction to the French Revolution amongst the propertied classes, an associated fear of insurrection in England, bellicose anti-French feeling in the Napoleonic period and a sense of isolation from European culture.25 In print culture, this national mood of nostalgia can be traced in the volume of nationalistic, anti-Napoleonic propaganda in patriotic writings as public opinion was mobilised to exploit traditional English mistrust of the French.26 Even in architectural texts, such as Pocock’s Architectural Designs, we find the war with Napoleon cited as a justification for Historical Revival design.27 And, therefore, as Andrew Ballantyne argues, the message of Old English architecture was to ‘keep calm and carry on, more or less whatever happens or whatever anyone says’.28 Although, like other images of Englishness, the appeal of the Old English cottage was specific to one social group: polite society, especially landowners.29 The conservative cultural concerns and historicist creative responses of this period (including architecture) can be interpreted as the beginnings of National Romanticism and Historic Revivalism in architecture and design. However, Romanticism is a complex cultural phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a set of few guiding principles.30 Nonetheless, as Stephen Bann argues one of the few clearly identifiable features of romanticism is the ‘remarkable enhancement of the consciousness of history’.31 In uncertain times, National Romanticism sought to confirm national identity through reference to the past, a past that ‘could speak to, guide, and nurture the present’.32 In the context of National Romanticism the Old English cottage connects the imagination of the observer to the past through the visual triggers of decorative chimney stacks and barge boards. The rise of the Old English cottage fits within this wider European intellectual movement towards local cultures, nation and national history as reached through the imagination of the individual. This is distinct from what we call English ‘Romantic’ poetry, a term not used until the late nineteenth century, and poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge who were probably unknown to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 architectural writers of the early nineteenth century (who looked back to eighteenth-century poetry for their allusions and references).33 As outlined in A. Rosengarten’s A Handbook of Architectural Styles, translated from German in 1888, Historic Revivalism in architecture was not unique to England or early nineteenth-century English architecture.34 Rosengarten sets ‘that heavy Renaissance style which is peculiar to England, and called the Elizabethan, sometimes with an admixture of the Tudor style’ in the European context and finds it distinct only because of the ‘universally prevalent’ formal irregularity.35 Across Europe at the turn of the century, the interests of high culture shifted from the seemingly universal subjects and The cottages of Old England 187 forms of expression of neoclassical Enlightenment culture towards a focus on the local or regional (that is ‘national’ in the European context).36 Accordingly, in Germany, Austria and France as well as Scotland, Ireland and Wales, neoclassicism and the forms and decoration of classical architecture were gradually, to lesser or greater degrees, replaced with the forms and decoration of the historic buildings specific to those nations. National Romanticism can be tied to the chaos wrought on continental European by the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath.37 However, Goethe’s famous reflections on the German-ness of Strasbourg cathedral were first published in Germany prior to the French Revolution in 1772, which suggests deeper cultural changes. Goethe reflects on his own received notions of – neoclassical – good taste and his realisation that the gothic decoration of the cathedral is beautiful, and, more significantly, that he appreciates it because it is German – it is his, a product and emblem of his own nation’s history.38 Beyond Europe, J. C. Loudon speculated that the soothing nostalgia of Historic Revival architecture would also appeal to the British diaspora overseas:

It might raise up many associations connected with his native land … every thing connected with a man’s native land, and with the days of his youth, recalls pleasing emotions to his mind. When the Americans have increased in wealth and refinement, and have leisure, not only to build commodious and substantial houses, but edifices displaying architectural style and taste, then it is probable that they will recourse to the ancient Architecture of the parent country; and to those kinds of varieties of it which prevailed in the particular localities of their ancestors. In this point of view, the collection of published views of ancient British buildings will be of great value to future American Architects.39

American architects did borrow the decorative features of the Old English cottage style, notably high gables and decorative barge-boards, but interpreted the style through new house forms and new American meanings. This reimagining of the Old English cottage as something quintessentially American is exemplified byPalliser’s American Cottage Homes, published by the New England practice of George and Charles Palliser in 1878.40

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 The ‘Old English’ style, latterly associated with the half-timbered domestic architecture of Norman Shaw, characterised much of England’s housing in the later nineteenth century and, in its most diluted form, came to be associated with ‘Mock Tudor’, or the speculator-built mass housing of the English suburbs laid out in the 1920s and 1930s.41 In this period, the construction of buildings associated with the idea of the cottage, such as lodges and retreats on country estates and seaside villas, gradually declined as the financial and cultural interests of the English aristocracy moved away from estate improvement and the English seaside resort. Later examples of estate cottage building can be cited, such as the Rothschilds at Waddesden 188 The cottages of Old England Manor, Buckinghamshire, in the1880s, but it is significant that these tended to have been built by bankers and businessmen not hereditary landowners.42 Families such as the Rothchilds consciously acted in the traditional patriarchal role of the English landowner where the programme of cottage building itself represented an act of self-fashioning in an increasingly outmoded image of the English aristocrat; a pattern also followed by Robert Loyd-Lindsay, a member of the Coutts banking family, at Ardington, Oxfordshire and by Christopher Leyland in his barge-boarded estate building program at Welshpool.

The central aim of this book has been to understand the idea of the cottage as it was articulated in late Georgian architectural writings and expressed in the forms and surface dressings of buildings designed to appear as a cottage. The idea of the cottage as the simple rural retreat was taken from Antiquity by an elite culture enthralled to that world, its literature, art and architecture. The architect-designed cottage was a speculation, in writing, drawing and building, on the simple dwelling of the Arcadian shepherd – a heroic, kingly figure – tied to the Roman aristocratic practice of rural retreat as a temporary escape from the pressures of city life. Cottage design changed in the late eighteenth century, influenced by the Picturesque, as irregular forms replaced neoclassical symmetry and a new grammar of ornament borrowed from English vernacular cottages was introduced; yet, the central idea of the cottage as the embodiment of the Classical ideal of rural retreat was unchanged. However, while gothic windows were always a presence, in the early nineteenth century the ornate decorative features of English Tudor buildings also began to feature in designs for low, thatched cottages. By the mid- nineteenth century, this Old English style had transformed the design of small estate buildings and seaside villas alike as the wide and low cottage form was raised upwards with high gables and the exteriors of ‘cottages’ were overrun with ill-fitting Tudor ornament. The cottage style, and its meanings, as established in the mid-eighteenth century, had been lost within the wider architectural movement of the Historic Revival and the search for a national style rooted in an English past. Architectural interest in cottages and rural retreat re-emerged in the late nineteenth century, but it was focussed on different cottages and a different

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 idea of retreat, this time from the modern world to an imagined pre-industrial rural England. It was also informed by a different way of understanding architecture that was concerned with the relationship between space, form, craft and construction, not with the communication of meanings to external observers through a surface language of decoration. Later cottage-related strains within English domestic architecture also differed from the eighteenth- century idea, or ideal, as they reflected the different contemporary concerns of a different group of consumers: the middle classes. The idea of the cottage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century belonged to England’s upper classes, the higher social ranks of landowners, gentlemen and polite The cottages of Old England 189 society, and it was played out in a world of country estates and seaside villas. The cottage was a representation of the values and ideals of that group at that time: the simple sequestered cot of the Arcadian shepherd-king.

Notes 1 William Fuller Pocock, Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, Picturesque Dwellings, Villas etc with Appropriate Scenery, Plans and Descriptions to which are prefi xed some critical observations on their style and character: And also of Castles, Abbies and Ancient English Houses, concluding with Practical Remarks on Building and the Causes of Dry Rot (London, 1807), pp. 14–18. 2 Pocock, Architectural Designs, p. 14. 3 John Claudius Loudon, Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture (London, 1846), p. 922. 4 See Arthur Aughey, The Politics of Englishness (Manchester, 2007); Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003). 5 John Claudius Loudon, Encyclopaedia, p.1121. 6 Swete, John (ed. Todd Gray.), Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of the Reverend John Swete, 1789-1800, I (Tiverton, 1997), xii–xvi; Richard Polwhele, The History of Devonshire III (London, 1806), pp.162–3. 7 ‘Gazebo at Oxton’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1793, II, 593; The Gardener’s Magazine (1843), 532. 8 John Plaw, Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements (London, 1795, 1800, 1803). 9 James Malton, Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798), p. 17. 10 Pocock, Architectural Designs, p. 13. 11 John Papworth, Rural Residences (London, 1818), p. 32. 12 Loudon, Encyclopaedia, p. 103. 13 Loudon, pp. 845, 897. 14 T. F. Hunt, Designs for Parsonage Houses, Almshouses, etc etc, with examples of Gables and other curious remains of Old English Architecture. By Architect, author of Half a Dozen Hints on Picturesque Domestic Architecture, in a series of designs for gate-lodges, gamekeeper’s Cottages, and other rural residences (London, 1827), Preface, v. 15 Edward Buckton Lamb, Studies of Ancient Domestic Architecture, (London, 1846), frontispiece. 16 Peter F. Robinson, Village Architecture, Being a Series of Designs for the Inn, the schoolhouse, almshouse, markethouse, shambles, workhouse, parsonage, town hall and church, Illustrative of the observations contained in the Essay on the Picturesque by Sir Uvedale Price: And a supplement to a work on Rural

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Architecture (London,1830), p. 2. 17 Nicholas Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Bedfordshire, Huntingdon and Peterborough (London, 1968), p. 171. 18 Loudon, Encyclopaedia, p. 1145. 19 Loudon, p. 1159. 20 J. M. Robinson, ‘Farming on a Princely Scale: Estate Buildings of the 5th and 6th Dukes of Bedford at Woburn, 1787–1839’, Architectural Review, Nov (1976), 280–1.Also see Francis Russell, The (7th) Duke of Bedford, Plans and Elevations of Cottages for Agricultural Labourers (London, 1850). 21 John Newman, The Buildings of England: Kent: West and the Weald (London, 1969; revised 2012), p. 624. 22 Loudon, Encyclopaedia, p. 103. 190 The cottages of Old England 23 Herman Muthesius, The English House (Berlin, 1904, reprinted London, 2007), p. 101. 24 Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), p. 13. 25 Marilyn Butler, ‘Romanticism in England’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge, 1988), p. 51. 26 Emma Vincent MacLeod, ‘British Attitudes to the French Revolution’, The Historical Journal 50; 3 (2007), 689–709. 27 Pocock, Architectural Designs, pp. 14-18. 28 Andrew Ballantyne and Andrew Law, Tudoresque: In Pursuit of the Ideal Home (London, 2011), p. 56. See also Andrew Ballantyne, ‘Joseph Gandy and the politics of rustic charm’ in Elizabeth McKellar and Barbara Arciszwekas (eds), Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Culture (Reinterpreting Classicism: Culture, Reaction and Appropriation) (Farnham, 2004), pp. 166–71. 29 Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (London, 1999), p. 5; Aughey, The Politics of Englishness, p. 23. 30 Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York, 1995), p. 4. 31 Ibid. 32 Roy Porter, ‘Introduction’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 5–9. 33 Morris Eaves, ‘The Sister Arts in British Romanticism’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge, 1993, reprint 2007), p. 253. 34 A. Rosengarten (trans. W. Collett-Sandars), A Handbook of Architectural Styles (London, 1888), p. 493. 35 Ibid. 36 Alan Colquhoun, ‘The Concept of Regionalism’ in Vincent Canizaro (ed.), Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity and Tradition (New York, 2007), p. 151. 37 Porter, ‘Introduction’, p. 5; Butler, ‘Romanticism in England’, pp. 42–3; Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition; David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985). 38 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘On German Architecture (1772)’ in John Gage (ed. and trans.), Goethe on Art (Berkeley, 1980), p. 108. 39 Loudon, Encyclopaedia, p. 890. 40 Palliser, Palliser & Co., American Victorian Cottage Homes (New England, 1878, reprint Chatham, 1991). 41 For a full examination of the Mock Tudor house see Andrew Ballantyne and Andrew Law, Tudoresque: In Pursuit of the Ideal Home (London, 2011). 42 Ballantyne and Law, Tudoresque, p. 92.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Bibliography Anon. The Gardener’s Magazine (1843), 532. Anon. ‘Gazebo at Oxton’, Gentleman’s Magazine (1793), II, 593. Ballantyne, Andrew. ‘Joseph Gandy and the politics of rustic charm’ in Elizabeth McKellar and Barbara Arciszwekas (eds), Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Culture (Reinterpreting Classicism: Culture, Reaction and Appropriation) (Farnham, 2004), pp. 163–185. Ballantyne, Andrew and Law, Andrew. Tudoresque: In Pursuit of the Ideal Home (London, 2011). The cottages of Old England 191 Bann, Stephen. Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York, 1995). Butler, Marilyn. ‘Romanticism in England’ in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 37–67. Colquhoun, Alan. ‘The Concept of Regionalism’ in Vincent Canizaro (ed.), Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity and Tradition (New York, 2007), pp. 146–55. Eaves, Morris. ‘The Sister Arts in British Romanticism’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge, 1993, reprint 2007), pp. 229–62. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. ‘On German Architecture (1772)’ in John Gage (ed. and trans), Goethe on Art (Berkeley, 1980). Hobsbawn, Eric and Ranger, Terence. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). Hunt, T. F. Designs for Parsonage Houses, Almshouses, etc etc, with examples of Gables and other curious remains of Old English Architecture. By Architect, author of Half a Dozen Hints on Picturesque Domestic Architecture, in a series of designs for gate-lodges, gamekeeper’s Cottages, and other rural residences (London, 1827). Hvattum, Mari. Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Cambridge, 2004). Kumar, Krishan. The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003). Lamb, Edward Buckton. Studies of Ancient Domestic Architecture, (London, 1846). Loudon, John Claudius. Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture, Vol. 2 (London, 1846; reprint Chippenham, 2000). Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985). MacLeod, Emma Vincent. ‘British Attitudes to the French Revolution’, The Historical Journal 50; 3 (2007), 689–709. McCann, Andrew. Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (London, 1999). Malton, James. Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on Principle, that peculiar mode of Building, which was originally the effect of chance (London, 1798). Muthesius, Herman. The English House (Berlin, 1904, reprinted London, 2007). Nash, Joseph. The Mansions of England in the Olden Time (London, 1839–49). Newman, John. The Buildings of England: Kent: West and the Weald (London, 1969; revised 2012). Palliser, Palliser & Co., American Victorian Cottage Homes (New England, 1878, reprint Chatham, 1991). Papworth, John Buonarotti. Rural Residences (London, 1818). Pevsner, Nicholas. The Buildings of England: Bedfordshire, Huntingdon and Peterborough (London, 1968). Plaw, John. Ferme Ornee or Rural Improvements (London, 1795, 1800, 1803). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Pocock, William Fuller. Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, Picturesque Dwellings, Villas etc with Appropriate Scenery, Plans and Descriptions to which are prefixed some critical observations on their style and character; And also of Castles, Abbies and Ancient English Houses, concluding with Practical Remarks on Building and the Causes of Dry Rot (London, 1807). Polwhele, Richard. The History of Devonshire Vol. III, (London, 1806). Porter, Roy and Teich, Mikulas (eds), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge, 1988). Robinson, J. M. ‘Farming on a Princely Scale: Estate Buildings of the 5th and 6th Dukes of Bedford at Woburn, 1787–1839’, Architectural Review, Nov (1976), 276–81. 192 The cottages of Old England Robinson, Peter F. Village Architecture, Being a Series of Designs for the Inn, the schoolhouse, almshouse, markethouse, shambles, workhouse, parsonage, town hall and church, Illustrative of the observations contained in the Essay on the Picturesque by Sir Uvedale Price: And a supplement to a work on Rural Architecture (London, 1830). Rosengarten, A. (trans. W. Collett-Sandars), A Handbook of Architectural Styles (London, 1888). Russell, Francis, (7th) Duke of Bedford. Plans and Elevations of Cottages for Agricultural Labourers (London, 1850). Storer, James Sargent. The Antiquarian Itinerary, Comprising Specimens of Architecture, Monastic, Castellated, and Domestic, with other Vestiges of Antiquity in Great Britain (London, 1816). Tosh, John. The Pursuit of History 5th edn (London, 2009). Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Index

Abermydyr cottage 147 art: appreciation 121; Arcadian adaptation 33 cottages 67; architect-designed Addison, Joseph 68 cottages 2; poetry/architecture aesthetic judgement, landscape relationship 31; ‘polite society’ gardens 71 and 85–6; vernacular cottages 3, agricultural improvement schemes see also painting; visual 111–12 representations agricultural landscapes 103, 111 art criticism 20, 130 Agricultural Revolution 103–4 Arts and Crafts Movement 142 Aikin, Edmund 144–5 association and imagination 68–9 amateur landscape painting 124 associative objects 67–8 American architects 187, see also Augustan Rome 23–5 United States Austen, Jane 91–2 Andrews, Robert and Frances 104–5 barge-boards 181–2, 184–5 antiquarianism, definition 178 Bartell, Edmund 55, 57, 68, 72 Antiquity references 125 Baston Cottage 183–4 appreciation of cottages Bath 162 121–35 Beacon Cottage, Sidmouth 170 Arcadian cottages 3, 67–83, 108, beauty 108, 122, 125, 126–7, 142 122, 144, 188–9 Bedford Estates 76, 115, 183 architect-designed cottages 1–2, 5, Beeley Lodges, Derbyshire 182 11, 45–65, 80, 188; Augustan Blaise Hamlet, Bristol 78, 147–53

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 Rome influence 25; country books 87, 90–1 estates 67; culture 85; ‘polite Broadhall, Sheffield 96 society’ 123; rise and fall of Brown, Lancelot see ‘Capability’ 7–10; typology of 6–7 Brown architects 85–101; classification of Burton, Decimus 183–4, 185 111; public engagement 114 architecture: origins of 33; poetry/ ‘Capability’ Brown 70, 124 art relationship 31 Chambers, William 33–5, 57 aristocracy 22, 46, 60, 88, 89 Charlotte, Queen see Queen Aristotle 18 Charlotte’s Cottage, Kew 194 Index chimneystacks 184–5 Augustan Rome 24–5; ‘cottage’ circular cottage ornée 164 notion 33; landscapes and 121, cities 1, 3, 17–18, 19 125–7; London 87; Old English Classical influence 1, 17, 95, 105; style 186; ‘polite society’ 86; appreciation of cottages 121, rural retreat 17, 20 127; Arcadian cottages 69–70; curved cottages 75–6 Old English style 177, 179; rural retreat 153, see also neoclassicism decoration: gate lodges 73; interiors Clifton Place, Sidmouth 169 60, 62; Old English style 182, see coastal resorts 79, 89, see also also ornament seaside... decorative arts 23–4 Cobbett, William 127–8 ‘decorum’ 59, 92, 141, 144 ‘comfort’ term 108 demolition of cottages 124 ‘common fields’ 111 Devey, George 154–6, 182 communities, cottage ornée 163 Devon: cottage ornée 8, 61, 165, connoisseurs 85–101 167–74; Knowle Cottage, Constable, John 129 Sidmouth 79–80, 81n; seaside construction methods and imitation resorts 88–9; women’s 138 involvement 93 consumption, ‘polite society’ 86 Dove Cottage, Lake District 93–4 copying 140 ‘dressing’ cottages 55, 57, 59, 161, cottage: definition 2; ideal of 3 see also external design; ‘cottage culture’ 1, 11, 25, 33, 87, ornament 88 Dryden, John 22–3, 25 ‘Cottage Door’ paintings Duck Island Cottage, London (Gainsborough) 24–5, 129 182 cottage ornée 5–8, 45, 61, 153, 161–76, 183, see also eclecticism 165 cottage-villa Edensor village 77, 182 cottage-retreats 72, 80, 93, 178, see Elsam, Richard 9, 56, 91, 113, also rural retreat 143–4, 152 cottage-villas 6, 8–9, 52–3, 72–3, Elysium Fields 80 88, see also cottage ornée; villas enclosures 104–7 cottagers: decline of 109; definition Endsleigh Cottage, Devon 172–4 2 English architecture 10–13, 31–43,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 cotton merchants 96 177 country estates 6, 45, 67, see also Englishness 154, 186 estate cottages Enlightenment 104, 151 country folk: estate cottages and Epicurus 18 74; in poetry 21 estate cottages 4, 7–9; architect- country and town relationship designed 45, 57–8; cottage ornée 19–20, 86 163; Old English style 187–8; creativity and imitation 148 ‘polite society’ and 96; ‘reading’ culture: architect-designed cottages of 74, see also country estates 1, 5, 11, 59, 85; aristocracy 88; estate villages 183 Index 195 Europe, influence of 10, 186–7 Henry VII Lodge, Bedfordshire external design 61, see also 181–2 ‘dressing’ cottages hermitages 70 Historic Revivalism 186, 188 farms 23, 162 the Home Park 103 ferme ornée term 162 hood moulds 184–5 fine arts 23–4 Horace 17–20, 22, 26n Forty, Adrian 41n Houghton Lodge, Hampshire 164, France: cottage ornée 162; influence 166 of 10, 60, 149–51 humanitarianism 107–8, 111, French Revolution 186–7 113 huts see primitive hut Gainsborough, Thomas 24–5, 104–5, 129 imagination 68–9, 122 garden design 75, see also landscape imitation 138–40, 143–4, 148, gardens/designs 154–6 garden plots, labourer’s cottages improved cottages 103, 115 109 ‘improvement’ term 104–6, 111–12 garden seats 6 income, ‘polite society’ 86 garden structures 70 ‘industrial’ genre, paintings 111 gate lodges 6, 48–9, 70–1, 73–4, industrialisation 20, 96, 104 155, 183 interior design 59, 61–2, 109 ‘gentlemen’: book consumption 91; irregularity: cottage ornée 161; cottage-retreats 93; as patrons vernacular cottages 138–9, 143, 89 145–6, 156 ‘gentlemen of taste’ 90 geometry, primitive hut 34, 37 juxtaposition in cottages 75 Gilpin, William 122, 124, 132 Goethe, John Wolfgang von 187 Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire 49–50 ‘good taste’ 92 Kent, Nathaniel 111–12 ‘Gothic Cottages’ 58 Kentish vernacular 154–5, 182 gothic details 47, 58–9, 147, 163, Knowle Cottage, Sidmouth 61, 178–9 79–80, 81n, 167–8 Greek philosophy 18 labour migration 113

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 H-plan cottages 152–3 labourer’s cottages 4, 6, 59, 103–20 Habitations of the Labourer Lake District 93–4, 127 (Wood the Younger) 106–11 lancet windows 163 habitura concept 23 land surveyors 112 half-timbered cottages 182, 187 landed gentry 89 hameaux buildings, France 60, landowners: enclosures 104; 149–51 labourer’s cottages and 103; Hare Street, Essex 93 paternalism 106 Harvey, J. 61 landscape appreciation 121–3, 130, The Hay Wain (Constable) 129 141 196 Index landscape gardens/designs 103; 55, 58–9, 62; cottage ornée 161, aesthetic judgement 71; 164; labourer’s cottages 108, ‘Capability’ Brown 70, 124; 111, 117; Old English style 187; cottage setting 69; country estates principles 139; theory 10, 138; 67, see also garden design vernacular cottages 143, 145 landscape objects, cottages as 3 newly-built homes 95 landscape painting 124–8 legal issues 2–3 objects: cottages as 132; landscapes leisure time 163 121–3, 127 literature 32, see also books; poetry observation 68, 74, 121–2, 130, local materials 141–2, 155 142 lodges 164, 171–2, 181–2, see also Old English style 154, 177–92 gate lodges ornament 57, 122, 179, 185, see London 87 also cottage ornée; decoration; Loudon, J. C. 77, 115–17, 139–42, ‘dressing’ cottages 177–80, 182, 184, 187 Lousada, Emmanuel 89 painting: Arcadian images 69; Augustan Rome influence 25; McKellar, Elizabeth 95–6 cottage representations 129–30; magazines 91 ‘industrial’ genre 111; landscape Malton, James 9, 39, 68, 95, painting 104–5, 124–8, see also 137–9, 143, 145, 147, 156, 165 visual representations Manchester 96 Papworth, John 58, 69, 73–4, 94, materials and imitation 138–9, see 141, 152 also local materials ‘Parish Burden’ 106 middle classes 188 pastoral landscapes 104–5 migration: labour 113; rural pastoral poetry 20–2, 32–3, 39 population 105 pastoralism, ‘polite society’ 86 mill owners 96 paternalism 106 Milton Abbas cottages 49, 52, 57, patriotic interest 178 75–6 patrons 85–101 mimesis 33 ‘pattern books’ 8–9, 91 ‘Mock Tudor’ 187 the Picturesque 5, 37, 39–40, 89, modernisation 20 188; appreciation of cottages Muthesius, Herman 185 121–5, 127–8, 131, 133; cottage

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 ornée 161, 168; domination of Nash, John 5, 10, 60, 77–8, 87–8, 145; Elsam and 152; influence of 147, 149–50, 153, 156, 171 156; labourer’s cottages 117; National Romanticism 186–7 Nash and 147, 149; Old English nationalism 153–4, 177, 186 style 179; place and 141; resisting ‘natural’ objects/nature: cottages as 143; universal beauty and 142; 132; the Picturesque 123, 127; vernacular cottages 137–40 vernacular cottages 131 place: importance of 130–1; the neoclassicism 36–7, 96; architect- Picturesque and 141–2 designed cottages 46–7, 49, 51–2, plate captions, cottage designs 32 Index 197 Plaw, John 36–8, 51–5, 57, 60, romanticism 186–7 90–1, 143, 178 roofing 109,see also thatched pleasure 68 cottages Pliny 17–20, 23, 26n roughness 122, 133 Pocock, William 68–9, 141, 145–6, Royal Collection 89 154, 177–8 royal family 60, 87–8 poetry: Arcadian landscapes 69; art/ Royal Lodge, Windsor 171–2 architecture relationship 31; rural migration 105 primitive hut 33; romanticism rural poor 103, 107, 114 186; rural retreat 19–22, 25, 32, rural retreat 1–3, 5, 7, 10–11, 39 17–29, 31–2, 39–40, 188; ‘polite society’ 85–6, 89, 91–6, 123, Arcadian cottages 72; architect- 186 designed cottages 45–6; Classical ‘politeness’ interpretation 85 tradition 153; cottage ornée 162, Pope, Alexander 131 172–3; improved cottages and Poussin’s landscapes 104–5 103; Old English style 179, see poverty 103, 107, 114, 128 also cottage-retreats Price, Uvedale 122, 124, 132, Ruskin, John 20, 89, 94–5, 130–2, 137–8 141–2, 154 primitive hut 10, 31, 33–5, 37, Russell, Francis 115, 182–3 39–40, 41n; architect-designed Russell, John 8 cottages 46, 62; vernacular rustic hut see primitive hut cottages and 144 ‘rustic’ materials 48 print culture 20, 186 property law 2–3 S-curve cottages 75 proportion principle 49, 52 Sanitary Report of the Poor Law public engagement, architects 114 Commissions, 1842 114–15 publishing culture 87 ‘scattered villages’ 77–8 sea bathing 163 Queen Charlotte’s Cottage, Kew seaside cottages 9, 62, 79, 88–9 48, 60, 72, 87, 92 seaside resorts 167, see also coastal resorts rational design 111 Sense and Sensibility (Austen) 91–2 ‘reading room’ thatched cottages Sheffield neoclassical villas 96 72 shepherds 21–4, 37, 150, 188–9

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 regionalist model, taste 95–6 Sidmouth, Devon 8, 61, 79–80, Relief of the Poor Act, 1782 106–7 81n, 88–9, 165, 167–72 Repton, Humphry 129, 131 the simple life 17–29 retreat, cottage ornée 161, see also Simple Style cottages 128 cottage-retreats; rural retreat simplicity principle 45, 55, 58–9, Richardson, George 48–51, 57 62 Roman influence: Arcadian small cottages 45 landscapes 69–70; aristocratic Soane, John 57, 61, 94 retreat 22; rural retreat 17–18, social context: ‘comfort’ 109; see also Augustan Rome cottages 90 198 Index social groups 85–6, 94–5, 162, 186, vernacular architecture: 188–9 appreciation of 123; cottage social status, books 91 ornée and 161, 163–4; Old societal improvement 104 English style 182 Stourhead estate, Wiltshire 47 vernacular cottages 2–3, 5, 7, 9, Stowe, Buckinghamshire 69 124–5, 129, 130–2, 137–59 structural instability 123–4 vertical emphasis, Old English style sublime concept 122 179 suburban cottages 9, 46 Victoria, Queen 88 suburban villa schemes 78, 96 villages 77–8, 151, 183 Swete, John 52, 54, 60, 72–3, villarum concept 23 125–8, 178 villas 23, 78, 79, 96, 183, 184, see ‘Swiss Cottages’ 149, 170 also cottage-villas symmetry 49, 51–2, 58–9, 163 Virgil 17, 20–1, 22–3 visual representations: rural retreat taste: polite society 92; regionalist 32; shepherds 23–4, see also art; model 95–6; vernacular cottages painting 143–4 Taylor, Josiah 87 wealth of patrons 90 thatched cottages 4, 7, 9, 37; West Country 106–9 Arcadian 72; architect-designed white-washed cottages 48–9, 51–2, 49, 55, 57; cottage ornée 164, 55, 58, 163 167–8; vernacular 152 windows: cottage ornée 163; Old timber-framing 153, 156 English style 178; vernacular topographic poetry 19 cottages 147 tourism 148, 167 Woburn Farm estate, Surrey 47 town and country relationship women 24, 92–3 19–20, 86 Wood, John 34, 36 travel 124–5, 127 Wood the Younger, John 36, Tudor style cottages 147–8, 163, 106–11, 117, 139 177, 179, 183, 185, see also Old Woodland Cottage, Sidmouth English style 169 Tunbridge Wells, Kent 78–9 Wordsworth, William 93–4, 127 work-houses 105–6 Umbrella Cottage, Dorset 164 Workhouse Test Act, 1723 106

Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:35 16 August 2016 uniformity in architecture 113 working agricultural landscapes United States 11–12, see also 103, see also agricultural American architects landscapes universal beauty 142 working fields 2 universalism 151 Wyattville, Jeffry 171–3, 182