In a period of less than seventy years, the Victorians transformed the look of England, especially in urban areas, by a prodigious church-building programme. Driven by a huge population increase, largely concentrated in towns and cities, and powerful religious impulses, the Church of England built or restored over 5,000 churches and chapels, and this was matched by nonconformist and Roman Catholic building programmes of equal fervour. The predominant style was Gothic, and many fine buildings were erected, designed by well-known architects such as William Butterfield, A W N Pugin, G E Street, George Gilbert Scott, Henry Woodyer and John Loughborough Pearson.

After languishing in the doldrums of taste for the first half of the twentieth century, the reputation of Victorian architecture (and particularly their churches) has been gradually rehabilitated, and many books have been written about the great Victorian architects and the religious world of the Victorians. While most of these have been written from an art historical or architectural point of view, William Whyte in his latest book seeks to offer a different perspective. He wants to uncover what the Victorians believed about their churches, how they experienced them and what ordinary people thought about them; and he does this through paying attention to the reminiscences, memoirs and sermons they left behind. Whyte claims in his introduction that his book is not a textbook retelling the familiar story of the Gothic Revival, the Oxford Movement or the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic expansion. Instead, he presents an argument about how to study church buildings and understand the ways in which our ancestors hoped to experience them. He promises his readers ‘terrible hymns, and dreadful novels, and excruciating poetry’ in the process.

He sets out his argument in four chapters. The first, ‘Seeing’, claims that the Ecclesiologists and the Tractarians were engaged in a debate not just about style, but about the very nature of church architecture. In Chapter 2, ‘Feeling’, he examines what churches were meant to do in terms of the emotional and sensory response of the worshippers. Chapter 3, ‘Visiting’, looks at the implications of these two changes, the opening up of church buildings and the re-sacralising of the landscape. In Chapter 4, ‘Analysing’, Whyte looks at how the responses of archaeologists, antiquaries, architects and others helped to shape opinion and leave us with the contemporary dilemma of whether we place a higher value on the beauty and artistic value of these buildings than we do over their religious effectiveness. Finally, Whyte explores what the book’s arguments imply for our use of these buildings in the twenty-first century.

Whyte’s book is therefore as much a social history as an architectural or religious history, focusing largely on England, and making a particular case study of the church John Henry Newman built at Littlemore, which evoked widely differing reactions from his contemporaries, both horror at its perceived Popery (the Evangelical Peter Maurice) and wonderment at its perfection and solemnity (the Tractarian Henry Wilberforce). To Newman, the building was a sermon in stone, ‘a holy book, which you may look at and read, and which will suggest to you many good thoughts of God and heaven’. And this, Whyte suggests, is how the Victorians increasingly viewed and read their church buildings – a profound break with the attitudes of previous generations. Whyte ends this attempt ‘to recapture past experience’, looking at why the Victorians built ecclesiastical structures as they did and how they used them, by giving brief accounts of eight church buildings that exhibit some of the themes he has explored.

Whyte’s account of how Victorian churches ‘became active agents in their own right, capable of conveying theological ideas, and designed to shape people’s emotions’, is an engaging read, full of interesting quotations and well researched, with copious end-notes providing a full bibliography. His final chapter is particularly important in that it attempts to engage with the controversial question of how we should use these buildings today, with a plea that, as we understand these sacred spaces better, we are given the opportunity ‘to use the churches to do what the Victorians intended them to do: to teach, to preach, to move, to convert, to lead people closer to God’.

Apart from minor typographical errors and poor-quality illustrations, my main criticism is that the book is so obviously in origin a lecture series. The voice of the lecturer can be heard on almost every page, with the attendant hyperbole, exaggeration and over-enthusiasm that keep a live audience engaged, but which do not translate well onto the printed page. In spite of this, it is a stimulating, informative and above all enjoyable read, and valuable as a contribution to the on-going argument about how we adapt these magnificent buildings to changing patterns of liturgy, church attendance and the encroachments of an increasingly secular society.