The Gothic Revival, rich, ambitious, occasionally eccentric, but nonetheless visually exciting, is one of Britain's greatest contributions to early modern design history, not least because for the most part it contravened approved taste: Classicism. Scholars have tended to treat Georgian Gothic as an homogenous and immature precursor to "high" Victorian Gothic, and centred their discussion around Walpole's Strawberry Hill. This book, conversely, reveals how the style was imaginatively and repeatedly revised and incorporated into prevailing eighteenth-century fashions: Palladianism, Rococo, Neoclassicism, and antiquarianism. It shows how under the control of architects, from Wren to Pugin, Walpole and Cottingham, and furniture designs, especially those of Chippendale, and Ince and Mayhew, a shared language of Gothic motifs was applied to British architecture, furniture and interiors. Georgian Britain was awash with Gothic forms, even if the arbiters of taste criticised it vehemently. Throughout, the volume reframes the Gothic Revival's expression by connecting it with Georgian understandings of the medieval past, and consequently revises our interpretation of one of the most influential, yet lampooned, forms of material culture at the time. Peter N. Lindfield is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Stirling.

• Frontcover 2
• Contents 9
• List of Illustrations 11
• Acknowledgements 17
• Introduction: the Gothic Aesthetic in Britain and British Furniture, 1730–1840 19
• 1 Understanding Gothic Architecture in Georgian Britain 25
  • The unknown: initial steps in the understanding of Gothic architecture 27
  • Subsequent steps in the understanding of Gothic architecture 41
  • Professionalised topography: the examination of medieval architecture 49
  • A transformation in the interpretation of Gothic architecture: later theorists 54
• 2 Creation of Classical Gothic Architecture, Furniture and Interiors 60
  • Classical Gothic’s antecedents: Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Sir John Vanbrugh 62
  • Reconfiguration of medieval architecture: William Kent and Batty Langley 72
  • The influence of Kent and Langley: early Georgian Gothic architecture, interiors and furniture 84
• 3 High Fashion and Fragments of the Past: the Omnipresence of Rococo Gothic 99