CHAPTER FOUR: COPYISM
Every object has its roots in central nature, and may of
course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Essay on Art."
Introduction
Like grammar,
metaphysics structures and divides experience. Theory uses that grammar to formulate
a purpose and a direction within the resultant ordered landscape. One could
define theory as the promise of direction enveloped within a compelling view of
the world.
A theory of architecture to some extent reflects a
personal understanding of the world and its processes and Garbett's theory is
no exception. The Treatise
assimilates the laws which Garbett understood to govern the natural creation to
those physiological and psychological processes he identified as responsible
for artistic creativity. Somehow, nature's purpose was seen as equivalent to
artistic intention. The same analogy but then inverted stood at the basis of
contemporary natural theology. William Paley's watch, made by human hands for a
specific purpose, demonstrated design, that is, purpose. A logical extension of
that way of reasoning could be applied to the human eye, the bird's wing, etc.,
which ipso facto became indicative of a
divine design, that is, the analogy implied a conscious maker of the universe and a consequent universal purpose.
An investigation of the basic assumptions on which
Garbett's logic is constructed and the manner in which that logic is related to
explanatory and procedural traditions in nineteenth century thought is the main
theme of this chapter. Each of the three separate sections take as their
starting point a particular issue discussed in the preface to the Treatise. It is here that Garbett
formulated the rules of his understanding,
setting in place the axioms which determine the metaphysical landscape
on which he intended to build his theory. These axioms are concerned with
establishing how artistic creativity is ordered through the smooth mechanics of
genius, principles and taste.
A significant role in that process is played by language.
Language is not only the medium to communicate among ourselves. It is a medium
between us and experience. It serves as a monitor regulating a proper
interpretation of nature. In this way language becomes the ultimate factor in
the resolution of every conflict. The following two chapters are both concerned
with a particular aspect of Garbett's theory of language. This chapter starts
off with one end of the spectrum, namely intellectual sloth. The next is
concerned with the concept of genius. It is appropriate that both extremes of
the creativity, that is slavish copyism and pioneering genius, are represented
as being mute.
Echo and Narcissus: Copyism
Garbett opens his book
by launching a crisis:
Two widely different arts at present bear the name
ARCHITECTURE... The
more common of them may be defined as the art of clothing or masking buildings,
of whatever class, with scenic representations of the features of a superior
class, erected in some past age. The merit of these works is of course to be
estimated by the fidelity with which they adhere to the peculiar marks of the
period chosen, and avoid those belonging to any other period or country. This
art has now arrived at great perfection, in consequence of the many fine
archaeological works in which specimens of the building styles of various ages
and nations are delineated. Indeed, few things can be easier than this is now
rendered by such engravings; in the absence of which, of course, verbal
directions on this art would be useless, and whose presence renders them needless.
With this art, therefore, the present little work has no concern.[1]
Semantic bifurcation
forces the reader to make a clear choice between, to use an appropriate
biblical metaphor, the narrow, steep and difficult road to good architecture
and the broad and easy road to complete dissolution. In fact, the last sentence
is no more than a rhetorical ploy; the theme of copyism constitutes the woof of
the book's fabric, it runs through every chapter and justifies every harangue against the perpetrators of contemporary
copy-book architecture. The copy-books themselves, the books of examples, or fine
archaeological works and the printing industry which supports them become
icons of the mindlessness which pervades contemporary architecture; their only
effect being to reduce the process of design to a form of asexual reproduction,
tracing features regardless of their appropriateness to contemporary desires
and concerns. Garbett accuses the writers of such books of encouraging a mute
architecture, helping to reduce artistic activity to the sounding of a
continuous echo and severely limiting the scope for communication, expression
and signification. What scope there is for communication, he considers to
be negative, derivative and
parasitical. An architecture that is merely concerned with surfaces and formal
resemblances cannot be fully rational, cannot erupt as a self-consistent system
from reason, cannot be deduced. It is
for this reason that there are so few illustrations in his book, they would
discourage reasoning and allow copyism. An architecture that can only be copied
from previous architecture becomes inbred, narcissistic and stale:
Nothing is
beautiful which is without motive.[2]
With this Garbett means
to say that antiquity or the mere quest for novelty cannot be admissible as
sound motives for the adoption of a particular form. The adoption of antique
forms merely because they are old, without also adopting the conditions under
which those forms were necessary, is wrong. Copyism is wrong because it refuses
to inquire into the structural or optical causes of forms.
The analysis of antiquity for the deduction of
architectural principles is heartily approved of by Garbett. Age is a
vindication of the thing aged, it demonstrates stamina:
Though
age affords no reason whatever for the adoption of any thing, it gives every
reason for its examination and study.[3]
Garbett's promise was
to deduce the principles of architecture from nature and show how the best
architects in history caused their architecture to erupt spontaneously from the
laws of nature. This necessitated the attitude that form and content are
intimately related and completely dependent on one another, that in fact they
cannot be separated.
The rational of copyism, on the other hand, is confined to
the systematic tracing of outlines and tries to separate content from form..
Copyism negates the causal principles of form and by doing so generates a
surrogate and false content which feeds on the success of others. If that
success is expressed in terms of age, copyism tries to make new buildings look
old. One side-effect of this way of reasoning where everything in a building
should be intimately or organically interrelated, is that architectural
ornament is not allowed to be appreciated independently. To be distinguished
from sculpture, Garbett argues that ornament must be causally related to the
building as a whole.
All this is not to say that Garbett is against
eclecticism, or indeed against historicism as such. It means that he wants to
promote an architecture where each formal element has not been severed from its
structural or distributive raison d'être.
It is with this in mind that he wants to contrast two forms of architecture.
One of these, we already know, was copyism, the other is its ideological
opposite:
There is another art, however, of the same name, more
ancient, yet less known and practised at present, because more difficult and
troublesome. This is the art of building Well, -well as regards every purpose
intended in building or its parts to their several purposes, but also the
fitness of their appearance thereto... [4]
A detailed analysis of
Garbett's definition of architecture has to be reserved for a more appropriate
moment. It is possible to anticipate that discussion by noting the functionalist
course which his contrasted definition of good
architecture would appear to be taking. Good architecture links purpose with
appearance. The main function of the preface, however, is to set the negative,
or reformist theme of the book. The preface should be seen as a call to arms in
the fight against copyism. That call becomes increasingly and nauseatingly
emphatic as the Treatise runs its
course. In the end Garbett convinces himself that mindless copyism, as
encouraged by the enormous strides in printing techniques and the industry of
dissemination, is somehow symptomatic of the threat to the English nation as a
whole. Mindlessness may be the most common characteristic of every nation, he
argues, but it is only in England where that characteristic now constitutes the
nation's identity by being encapsulated in its most prominent buildings.
Copyism and the Gothicity of the English Parish Church
Copyism versus its
various opposites such as originality, proper imitation and systematisation had
been a favourite subject of discussion since the beginning of the
century.
[5]
That discussion must be seen as a necessary by-product of the philosophical
concern with imitation. That concern goes all the way back via Quatremère de
Quincy, Lessing, Laugier and Winckelmann to the theorists of the Renaissance
and ultimately to its classical roots in Plato's Republic. This is not the place to discuss imitation and its exact
relation to copyism. The aim here is to investigate the rhetorical role of
copyism in Garbett's Treatise.
During the nineteenth
century Copyism constituted a general, somewhat elusive evil. That elusiveness
caused each theorist to redefine the enemy in his own terms. On the basis of a
philosophical re-assessment, partly referring to a previous polemical tradition
on copyism and partly based on the theorist's own experience, the theorist was
able to decide on a strategy and choose his weapons. Garbett, as we have seen,
chose the current popularity of antiquarian pursuits and the industry producing
countless books of architectural examples as his enemy. Gothic archaeology was
dominated by wolves in sheep's clothing:
Since our fancied revival of Gothic architecture,
Garbett writes, ignorance of its principles,
and the consequent necessity for amassing voluminous collections of examples
and precedents, have led to the egregious error of supposing that our 9,000
parish churches contain an exhaustless fund of such `precedents,' on whose
genuineness and consequent infallibility we may rely, and rest from the weary
search after truth; for, to save ourselves the labour of thought, is the
real object of all this industrious measurement and delineation, and bustle of
endless research.[6]
This sarcasm was very
probably directed at the Ecclesiologists.
[7]
They had, after all, compiled the famous questionnaire to help the amateur
enthusiast draw up an inventory of the peculiar features of his or her local
parish church. The Ecclesiologists had also advised the architect to take
specific parish churches as universally applicable models.
[8]
They had promoted an historicism which, as far as Garbett was concerned, simply
did not allow the nineteenth century enough room to develop its own identity.
But Garbett's concern is at the same time more general.
Copyism releases independent thought from any involvement
with its own processes and denies purposive movement. It is intellectually
impotent and as such copyism comes to stand for a more universal vice, like it
did in Plato's Republic. Copyism
stands for intellectual sloth, breeding a mindless society of which a mindless
architecture is but one of the symptoms. With reference to Cartesian ontology
of which the slogan cogito ergo sum
still enjoyed considerable popular validity in the nineteenth century,
mindlessness (and therefore copyism) stands for the moral and physical negation
of identity. In contradistinction to the Ecclesiologists, Garbett wanted to
promote an energetic and radical individualism in architecture. This policy is
even echoed in the title when he speaks of the Greek and Gothic architects rather than of Greek and
Gothic styles, architecture or whatever. The Ecclesiologists had a far less
Protestant view of things, placing their emphasis on obedience to edicts from a
central authority: their own institution. Garbett -in the Treatise at least- demanded a personal interpretation of
experience, a personal struggle with truth, which would achieve a valid and
increasing level of intersubjectivity as soon as the only arbitrary element in
the process was sufficiently standardised: language.
The motto for the whole book, therefore, is that there is no substitute for thought:
All the ponderous tomes
of examples, specimens, &c., from Adams and Stuart downwards, have been
intended, or received, for this purpose; and, as such, are not only totally
worthless, but extremely prejudicial; though invaluable as materials for
analysis, free criticism, and search into principles.
[9]
The moral or procedural
code Garbett advocates for architectural development is related to a personal
ethic which prescribes an interpretation of experience where truth is held to be
self-evident and will reveal itself automatically to those who look for it
earnestly.
[10] In
Garbett's eyes the Ecclesiologists had become all too successful in establishing
a central authority with the power to pre-digest the division between good and
bad for others. Basing themselves solely on the authority of past models, the
Ecclesiologists instituted a process of design which Garbett felt to be
stifling and mindless. He envisioned the consequence of this approach to be a
parasitical society, completely and destructively dependent on its history or
that of other countries.
To avoid such a reliance on a central and catholic
authority, to point out the dangers of a blind and thoughtless following,
Garbett wrote something which caused a lot of bad feeling among his public.
Ultimately this assertion may even be identified as the main reason for his
sporadic and uncertain influence on English architectural theory. He was never
forgiven for appearing to attack just that aspect of English pastoral culture
of which the nation was perhaps most proud: the parish church. The parish
church, more than anything else, gives the English countryside its tremendous
sense of comfort:
Now, the fact is, that
our old "Gothic" parish churches are, for the most part, Gothic indeed;-the work
of illiterate rural masons, totally ignorant of the principles of that or any
other architecture; repeating as well as they could the mere details, empty
forms, or clothing, of the only architecture they saw,-that of the scientific
fraternity of Gothicists,-without the remotest conception of its meaning,
motive, or principles. They admired the cathedrals and abbeys, as all admire
that which is consistent, united, and true, though they cannot see what
constitutes the consistency, cannot discern the one motive that gives unity,
cannot state the truth.
[11]
This sentence caused
Garbett's critics, always eager to find the most negative interpretation of
anything ambiguous, to accuse him of being a traitor to his country! Eventually
Garbett's ideas about the proper role of the parish church were even echoed by
such prominent architects as G.E. Street.
[12]
At the time, however, many felt that the most glorious part of the English
heritage was being slandered.
If one re-reads the passage carefully, one can see that
this was not the case at all. Garbett was only concerned with the delineation
of pure Gothicity.
Because the Ecclesiologists recommended the parish church as a universal model
for architects, Garbett accused them of doing nothing less succumbing to the
Platonic nightmare, making copies of copies.
[13]
Most builders, Garbett argued in a fashionably
deterministic fashion, lack the knowledge of what ideas constitute the principles of true architecture. Were they to know what that meant, they would
not be content to copy the mere visual details of a particular style. Instead
they would want to follow out the process of design, which starts with a
problem or need and ends with an appropriate solution. They would want to use
the underlying principles, the axioms of
architecture, which, by necessity,
give rise to the visual details they desire. Visual forms which are worked out
in that way, exhibit the stylistic and conceptual unity which is the immediate
effect of the consistent application of principles. Architects should copy the
principles rather than the resultant image. They should examine the cathedral,
its material, its construction, the conditions under which the building was
erected, rather than copy the diluted forms of the cathedral's illegitimate
offspring, the English parish church.
Related to the Platonic theory of Forms this would
translate into a precept in which Garbett demands of the architect not to copy the table, but to refer back to the idea of a table. As Laugier had
already observed, however, there is no direct model for architecture in nature.
Garbett therefore desires the architect to consider those things in nature
which perform the same function as particular elements pertaining to a building
and analyse them with reference to the need that has to be resolved.
Lot in Sodom: The few against the thoughtless multitude.
By the end of Garbett's
Treatise it is evident that the book,
which appeared to start so innocently with a relatively mild rejection of
copyism, was in fact conceived as a response to what Garbett saw as a general
crisis in society. The crisis in architecture had to be related to the more
profound social and moral problems facing England at the time he was writing.
Architecture was seen by him as a symptom of society, responding directly to
shifts in society's structures and hierarchies. The predicament of English
architecture around 1850 could therefore be blamed, directly and indirectly, on
such historical factors as the rise of the middle and lower classes, the
processes of industrialisation (especially with regard to the dissemination of
opinion) and the changing morality which made these developments possible by
providing them with a justification.
The distinction between the few and the many thus acquired apocalyptic
connotations. Garbett saw a polarised society, a cultivated and refined elite up
against a thoughtless, uncritical and numbed multitude.
[14]
There is something ominous, writes Ruskin, in the light which has enabled us to look
back with disdain upon the ages among whose lovely vestiges we have been
wandering. I could smile when I hear the hopeful exultation of many, at the new
reach of worldly science, and the vigour of worldly effort; as if we were again
at the beginning of days. There is thunder on the horizon as well as dawn. The
sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.[15]
These are the
foreboding and at the same time hopeful last lines of Ruskin's Seven Lamps. Well-worn themes of
misguidance and neglect combine to plot the imminent self-destruction of a
society from which Lot was allowed to escape by virtue of his personal
integrity. The quote about the sun being risen as Lot entered into Zoar is
broken off to heighten the dramatic effect of the warning it contains. The
words immediately following were apocalyptic indeed: Then the lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire
(Genesis, 19,24).
Garbett was similarly apocalyptic in his outlook. He also
talked of a thoughtless multitude blindly pursuing their false and hollow
"progress" to inevitable self-destruction. Garbett also contrasted
the many with a small group of survivors who, by virtue of their earnest
endeavours, would have the chance of salvation. But Garbett goes even further
than Ruskin. The distinction between the few and the many is by Garbett made
axiomatic to his prescriptive theory of architecture:
Some regret that we have
(as they think) no national style. Alas! the woe is that we have a national
style,-a national shame, as all national styles ever will be,-a disgrace from
which our sole hope of escape is in other nations acquiring (quickly let us
hope) styles as national, and therefore as vile and depraved. We are perhaps the
only nation that has a national style, certainly the first in history that has
had one; for, observe, none of the styles of old were national,- they were the
styles of classes, priesthoods, and corporations: they attained their purity, I
doubt not, precisely at the times when the many, the nation, knew least, talked
least, and cared least, about architecture. This was the very essence of their
success,- that they were the exclusive production of the thinking few,
uninfluenced by the thoughtless multitude; though universally admired, yet
totally unpopular, un-national.
[16]
The concept of nation
is here reduced to no more than the sum of its inhabitants. When Garbett was
writing the Treatise it was 1849, a year after the publication of
the communist manifesto by Marx and Engels, a year after the general
revolutionary movements throughout Europe. The Reform Bill of 1832 had already
helped to consolidate the shifting of social categories which had become
unstable as a result of the economics and politics of progress. The Reform Bill
has, with its role as historical centre-piece holding an enormous symbolic
content, has come to stand for the whole age in many histories of the period,
even though its mechanical effects were limited.
[17]
But reform was accompanied by ideals which went much further in their wish to
right wrongs. The most obvious example of this is the burgeoning of socialism
as manifested in the rise of the trade union movement, the co-operative
movement of Robert Owen, and radicalism of the Chartists which reached its
crescendo at around the time Garbett was writing. England was perceived to be
involved in a slow but irrevocable process of social inversion. The natural
hierarchy of a ruling elite was being turned upside down. The mindlessness
multitude was threatening to gain hegemony. As Garbett considered the health of
a society's architecture to depend on which particular section of society was
in charge, the possible consequences of this social inversion were considered
to be catastrophic:
...suppose an intelligent person, well acquainted from
history with the comparative characters of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks,
Romans, Medieval clerics, Arabs, and Hindoos, but having never seen any of
their architecture, would he have any difficulty in identifying the productions
of each? Well our present style, being more national, is more full of character
than any of these. More distinctly than the Egyptian piles speak of tyranny,
slavery, and priestcraft;- more fully than the Greek express intellect, polish,
and refinement;- more loudly than the Roman proclaim ambition and general
energy;- more truly than the Gothic embody a religion, or rather a romantic
devotion;- more than all, does every form and feature of the modern English
style express fickleness, low cunning, hollow affectation, simulation,
servility, and thoughtflying hurry. What! are these then our national
characters? No; but they are the characters of the many, in every nation; and
we are as yet the only nation that have a style of the many. I appeal to all
who have ever returned to our shores, after a long absence, to say whether they
could shut their eyes to the hateful expression that met them in every building
whether they could at first walk our streets without being disgusted, and, if
of a sensitive temperament, almost sickened, by the intensely marked character
of the architecture.[18]
This passage starts off
from the assumption that specific sections of society can be isolated and
classified. Each has its own value-system and each performs its own rituals on
the basis of those values. That is the circle which makes them, and by
extension the products which are peculiar to that section of society, acquire a
special character. According to Garbett architecture acquires the character of
that section of society which is responsible for a building's realisation.
These are generally the owners, or, as he calls them, the style-formers. The
values and operations which characterise the dominant section of society are
indelibly impressed on its public architecture. In this way a society's social
structure is confirmed and even enforced by its architecture.
Garbett's concept of architectural character approaches
that of the concept of national character. Take for example Burke's definition
of nationhood. Burke sees a nation as the accumulation of the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and
moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people.[19]
The only modification needed to make these words into a definition of architectural
character sympathetic to Garbett's theory, would consist in exchanging the word
people used by Burke, to those whose character by whatever reason has
become attached to the building in question:
...alas! not only can no man or set of men build
unarchitecturally or without a style, -but neither can they avoid stamping
their mind thereon, and leaving the indelible impress of the characters of the
styleformers; i.e. not always the designers, but the majority or most
influential part of those who have affected the style, by example, by
infection, contagion, or mere proximity.[20]
An architectural theory
which proposes moral icons such as honesty, truth and purity as its aesthetic
ideal, is forced to relate its aesthetics to the more general moral standards
of society. Architecture's crisis, stated by Garbett in terms of the
thoughtlessness of copyism, must therefore be related by him to the moral
condition of society as a whole. Architecture thus becomes a symptom of the
health of a society generally.
Both Ruskin and Garbett believed they were witnessing an
inversion of society. Ruskin probably identified himself with Lot, abandoning
the architectural establishment as beyond salvation and turning to a fresh and
uncorrupted public (as yet innocent in matters of architecture) for support. The Seven Lamps of Architecture was
specifically directed at a broader public. A little earlier in the Lamp of
Obedience, Ruskin hints at the burgeoning of a social theory which he was
eventually to work out in The Nature of
Gothic and which was to dominate his later writings. It is no coincidence
that this social theory began with a preoccupation with architecture. The seeds
for an equation between social and architectural health were sown much earlier
in Ruskin's Poetry of Architecture
where he allowed the themes of architecture, national character and landscape
to entwine.
Garbett would also have
found comfort in the image of himself as Lot. He however uses different imagery
to explain the crisis of contemporary architecture. Garbett's Burkean despair
at the inversion of the natural pyramidal hierarchies dominating society is
represented by the image of the printing press. Dissemination is dissolution:
Pure taste in
architecture (or any other art) is a thing of much thought, owing all its value
to that thought, and therefore inaccessible and utterly unintelligible to the
hurried, the gross, or the thought-grudging. (...) Pure art, then, ever has been
(in every nation), is, and (under the present dispensation) ever will be, the
exclusive and inalienable property of the few, the thoughtful, the earnest. If
it ever became the only art, that was because these few contained only artists,
nay more, the judges, the only dilettanti. Such a state of things can never
occur again while the printing-press exists. The many now have a voice in art.
Therefore most art is, and ever will be, art for the many and of the many; and
as long as the many (in every nation) are vulgar, gross-minded, and thought
sparing, so long must every national style, by an indispensable necessity, be a
national disgrace.
[21]
In an earlier passage,
Garbett prepared the reader for this extraordinary assertion by dividing
history into an old and a new society with the invention of the printing press
as the point dividing the two:
Attention to the effect wrought on Fine Art, by the great
change from old (i.e. printless) to modern society, will guard us against the
dreams now indulged in by some, respecting possible new schools, and period of
pure taste. The thing is impossible. There will never again be a period of
pure taste. There
will never be another Periclean age, nor another thirteenth century. But there
may be another Pericles. Observe the difference. Though general or national
taste will always be depraved, there need not therefore be total depravity of
all taste. Though purity can never be prevalent, it need not therefore be
absent.
[22]
Far from educating the
public, the printing press fills people with more false ideas than they started
off with. The printed book dissolves the ability to discriminate, in most cases
it is nothing more than a platform for the many to indulge in their vulgarity,
expounding their thoughtlessness to all who care to hear it. The book has the
power to dislocate a natural hierarchy in society and invert it. The invention
of printing thus symbolises the point in time where that inversion began on its
irrevocable course. That point in time is just about where the Renaissance took
over from a tired, degenerate but one-time glorious Gothic.
The paradoxical nature of Garbett's own status as the
author of a book in a series which was published with the intention of
educating the public, is easily overcome by an immovable faith in his own probity:
Garbett is quite sure that he is not one of the many.
One question remains to
be asked. Is there hope? is there an architecture of the few? Garbett had
anticipated this question:
But where, it will be asked, is the architecture of the few,
the thinking, the truth-seeking? There is none; it is swallowed up, and mostly
indistinguishable from the mass; for, observe, though a majority, or an
independent body, cannot build without expressing their true character (however
they may cheat or simulate in any thing else, they can never give a false
expression,) it is otherwise with a minority. With all their efforts to
express themselves truly; inexpertness in the language, want of technical
culture, want of union, an eye deadened by long use to ugliness of the
prevalent expression, -all these causes may conspire to render their most
earnest endeavours unavailing to free themselves from the influence of the
general corruption, which will thus often overrun and falsify the expression of
their works. To obviate this is now the true office of architecture. The
general taste can never improve. Pure taste can never again prevail; but it can
fight. Ever in the minority, it nevertheless need never
be extinct. It can only exist, indeed, by fighting every inch. This is its
glorious destiny, to wage a perpetual war against falsehood; perpetual, because
it ought never to yield or relax, yet can never hope to conquer; glorious, if
maintaining its ground, from that very hopelessness.
[23]
Should this be
interpreted as a political gesture to those, like him, who consider themselves
belonging to the few? Does this passage allow these dispersed and lonely Lots
to extricate themselves from blame by pleading ignorance and urging them, so to
speak, to travel to Zoar too? If it is, it is also more than that. A more
attractive side-effect of the opposition between the few and the many is that
Garbett uses that duality to launch a self-conscious and vigorous
individualism. Garbett hinted at such an attitude earlier when he wrote that there
would never again be a Periclean age but there would be a Pericles. Garbett's
politics of radical individualism resurfaces at several points during the Treatise, even in the title. Its
significance for the argument presented here is that such a view is intimately
connected with the way Garbett visualises the mechanics of artistic progress.
7.
Enthusiasts
could, according to a specially devised questionnaire, note down all the
remarkable features of their local church. An example of this taxonomic system
was published at the end of A Few Hints
on the Practical Study of Ecclesiastical Architecture and Antiquities for the
use of The Cambridge Camden Society, 4th ed. Cambridge 1843; See also F.
White (1962) p. 231.
13.
Garbett uses the term copy of a copy in a derogatory way: Novelty-hunting, and the false use of
precedent, are the Scylla and Charybdis between which, the many, and the
architects of the many, are forever destined to be wrecked and in a note to
this passage: Thus at present (as nothing
can be real) even our novelty is only sham novelty, -a copy of a copy, -mason's
whims or blunders, raked out from the corners of Italy. In: Treatise, p. 253
14.
Raymond Williams (1984) p. 48 ff. on the distinction between the mob
and the cultivated, the public and the people.
17.
David Thomson (1985) pp. 57-58 & esp. 73-76. On the idea and
process of reform: Ian Newbould (1990). For a generalised backdrop see Eric J.
Evans (1989) And for a detailed account of the political events: Michael Brock
(1973) The classic statement on the period as seen from the idea of reform is
Llewellyn Woodward (1962). A curious account of the period is given in O.F.
Christie (1927).