ABSTRACT
The architectural historian Mark Girouard saw the accumulation of ornaments as a national psychosis because there was more money in more pockets – the surfeit was being spent on what were, strictly speaking, non-essentials. With industrial progress and an expanding Empire during the 19th century there was a partial but still distinct shift of power and influence from the upper classes to the middle classes. The old rich, the aristocracy, were put out by the entrepreneurial middle class who bought the houses and land they could no longer afford. A few idealists, like William Wordsworth, pursued the chimera of liberty, equality and fraternity and visited the new French utopia, only to retreat before the brutalities of the revolutionaries’ reign of terror. While the importance of specialised education was recognised, training was centred on drawing – not drawing as a means of exploring and testing radical ideas but as a way of copying precedents and respectfully adapting them to contemporary needs.
