A Victorian Architectural Controversy

Who was the bona fide architect of the New Houses of Parliament? Charles Barry (1795-1860), the winner of the Parliamentary competition, or Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52), the ‘ghost’ designer, a scarcely known young Catholic architect and Gothic specialist?

After both men died, the controversy over the actual architect of the Houses of Parliament was to become a matter of public dispute, largely stimulated by the directly-opposed claims published by the two men’s sons—the architect Edward Welby Pugin (1834-1875) and Rev. Alfred Barry (1826-1910), an Anglican clergyman who later became the Bishop of Sydney.

The writings of both sons, compiled here in a single volume, reveal to us the whole picture of the controversy over the real authorship of the grandest architectural monument of Victorian Britain and the feverish reactions to it of the nineteenth-century British public, which evince the Victorian democratization of artistic appreciation.