Benjamin Webb (1819-85) and Victorian Ecclesiology

Abstract

We begin in Trinity College, Cambridge, in May 1839. It is 10 o’clock at night and three undergraduates named Neale, Webb, and Boyce are trying to persuade one of their dons, Archdeacon Thorp, to become senior member of a new society. They refuse to leave until he agrees. The Cambridge Camden Society is born. J. M. Neale becomes President, Benjamin Webb Secretary, and E.J. Boyce Treasurer. Within a year they are joined by another Trinity man with influence in a much wider sphere, Beresford Hope. By 1843 the membership list includes two archbishops, sixteen bishops, thirty-one peers and M.P.s, seven deans or chancellors of dioceses, twenty-one archdeacons or rural deans, sixteen architects, and seven hundred ordinary members. In 1845 the society goes national, moves to London, and becomes the Ecclesiological Society.

In Search of the Byzantine: George Gilbert Scott's Diary of an Architectural Tour in France in 1862

“…They reveal much about the High Victorian sensibility, especially as they were written only three years after Benjamin Webb's admiring review of All Saints', Margaret Street, in which he observed 'the same dread of beauty, not to say the same deliberate preference for ugliness' evident in the contemporary paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites. 6 T think there is no escaping the general conclusion that during the middle decades of the nineteenth century there was a singular attraction on the part of some painters, architects and writers towards ugliness,' John Summerson wrote in his essay 'William Butterfield, or the Glory of Ugliness' first published in 1945. 7 Since then, there has been a reaction against this interpretation which regarded ugliness as being as legitimate as beauty, and a consequent concern by scholars to emphasise the considered aesthetic quality of the High Victorian Gothic Revival.…”

'A Portentous Mass of Bastard Romanesque Frippery': An Early Ecclesiological Export

“…One of the concerns of The Ecclesiologist from its very first edition, and one that was subsequently to reappear regularly in its pages, was the provision of church designs that would be appropriate for erection in the colonies. 1 While subsequently the Cambridge Camden Society had much success in this direction, 2 the outstanding artistic exports of the middle years of the nineteenth century were to sites rather closer to home: the designs -both executed and unexecuted -for great churches and cathedrals on the Continent of Europe by, among others, G. G. Scott senior, William Burges, E. W . Pugin and G. E. Street.…”