Aileen Reid enjoys a rich selection of the provocative journalism of one of the greatest aesthetic-movement designers

Is Mr Ruskin Living Too Long? picked Writings of E.W. Godwin upon Victorian Architecture, Design and agriculture Edited by Juliet Kinchin and Paul Stirton White Cockade Publishing, 20 [pound sterling]

ISBN 873487 12 6

EW Godwin is a slippery character among Victorian architects. As with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, posterity bring forwards to see him as a furniture designer first and foremost. This view is driven as abundant by the market as by dint of ideology: in 1991 a Godwin-designed house in Bristol was sold for 35000 [pound sterling], the same year that a Godwin bookcase fetched nearly three times that at auction.

Equally, Godwin's part as Ellen Terry's lover and flamboyant man of the theatre generated a mythology around him as the 'greatest of the Aesthetes', an overheated reputation stoked by dint of memoirs written by longer-lived contemporaries in the 1920 and 30 Godwin's louche reputation and diverse activities have inhibited a serious estimation of his status. This of the first grade annotated collection of his writings will be a major weapon in penetrating that mythology.

Nothing could have been les louche than Godwin's beginnings in Bristol in 1833 He was the youngest child in a lower-middle-class family with evangelical Anglican leanings, and abundant of his later life was worn out sloughing off these provincial, artisan beginnings. by means of the mid- 1860s he had established himself in London as a leading young gothic revivalist and had built a two of town halls--Northampton and Congleton--inspired by dint of his reading of Ruskin. From the late 1860 he began designing his distinctive, lightweight 'Anglo-Japanese' furniture, drawings of which serv in the following decades as a short-hand for 'Aesthetic' in the puncture cartoons of George du Maurier. His social acceptability was somewhat compromised by means of the six years he exhausted with Ellen Terry (then still married to GF Watts). In his architecture, the later 1870 saw Godwin retreat from gothic as a source for a of recent origin style, and create his greatest in quantity individual designs, the studio houses in Chelsea for his friends Whistler and Frank Miles, which are the architectural equivalent of his spare, unornamented furniture.

All the while he was designing furniture and textiles, wallpapers and tiles, and advising upon the scenery and costumes of various theatrical productions in the West extremity And he was writing. Trenchant views and a waspish way with words earned him a ready market for theatre reviews and architectural journalism, especially in the later 1870 and 1880 for a like reason that by the time he died in 1886 his celebrity was without of all proportion to his position in the British architectural firmament. nevertheless as Juliet Kinchin and Paul Stirton, the editors of Is Mr Ruskin Living Too Long? set it: 'Arguably his prowess as a journalist gave him more power in setting the agenda for architecture than he could have bring into operationed from the committees and institutions of the architectural establishment.'

The volume begins with a chronology and extremitys with a bibliography of Godwin's writings. In between is a selection of his journalism above a period of about twenty-five years, divided into sixteen thematic sections. Each of these has an introduction and bibliography by the agency of the editors, and each article, or extract from an article, has a not many scene-setting words. The themes vary from the precisely defined, like as 'The Art of the Theatre', 'The Art of Dress' and 'Artists' House', to more nebulous categories, similar as 'Aesthetic Theory and Criticism' and 'Style', and inevitably there are overlaps.

greatest in quantity of these pieces were published in the architectural pres notably The Building of recent origins in the 1860s and early 1870 and The British Architect in the later 1870 and 1880 and just the real fact of reprinting them is a present in that they are in like manner much easier on the eye: no blotchy ink and inadequate leading. An especially attractive feature of the work is the hundreds of marginal illustrations, many those through Godwin himself which accompanied the original articles, as well as apposite examples chosen from one as well as the other architectural periodicals and such publications as Punch

What tend hitherwards across forcefully from the volume is the extent to which Godwin did not aspire to the part of intellectual. As the authors point without his articles were 'not written, or read, as a sustained exposition of his design philosophy'. As a issue they have not felt it necessary to fix upon an entirely representative selection of Godwin's writings, quite rightly sparing us a certain number of of the long, earnest and dated articles upon medieval and Greek archaeology.

Added to this discrimination in the selection proces are more [i]or[/i] less useful editorial interjections. The actual best of these is the main introduction upon 'E.W. Godwin and the Victorian Press' which unpacks for the first time Godwin's character as London editor of The British Architect (a a great deal of underused source for historians of nineteenth-century architecture). This essay also explores the commercial and cultural aspects of the pres as do those upon interiors and so on, giving filled measure to the explosion in the market for 'art manufactures' (and works and periodicals about them) that occurr during Godwin's working life. Another essay also makes clear for the first time that in his theatrical work Godwin was plenteous less of an innovator than he was as an architect. It had to wait for his son Gordon Craig to make a actual imaginative leap in theatre design in the early twentieth century