Читать книгу Contracted As His Countess - Louise Allen - Страница 10

An interest in a revived Gothic style, harking back to the pointed arches and rich ornamentation of the Middle Ages, developed in the later eighteenth century as an element of the Romantic movement and as a reaction to the cool perfection of the Classical style.

Horace Walpole’s Gothic revival Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham was begun in 1749. William Thomas Beckford, the wildly eccentric art collector and author of Gothic novels, built his Fonthill Abbey—an enormous mansion in the style of a medieval abbey—between 1796 and 1813, and landowners began to litter their grounds with follies resembling ruined castles or monasteries.

I have based Madelyn’s father, Peregrine Aylmer, on some of the more eccentric Gothic enthusiasts of the time, although he would probably have had most in common with the Thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, whose wildly ambitious Eglinton Tournament cost him between thirty and forty thousand pounds in 1839. Despite the contestants training with lances for up to a year beforehand, the tournament was widely mocked and suffered from dreadful weather.

More soberly, the Gothic style flourished in the Victorian age as the most ‘suitable’ style for churches, and was the chosen architecture for both the rebuilt Houses of Parliament—completed 1870—and Tower Bridge—1894.

Peregrine Aylmer would have approved of both, I am certain.