The Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture, 1760 - 1860

Daniel Maudlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138793873
• eBook ISBN: 9781317643142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture is a history of the late Georgian phenomenon of the architect-designed cottage and the architectural discourse that articulated it. It is a study of small buildings built on country estates, and not so small buildings built in picturesque rural settings, resort towns and suburban developments.

At the heart of the English idea of the cottage is the Classical notion of retreat from the city to the countryside. This idea was adopted and adapted by the Augustan-infused culture of eighteenth-century England where it gained popularity with writers, artists, architects and their wealthy patrons who from the later eighteenth century commissioned retreats, gate-lodges, estate workers' housing and seaside villas designed to 'appear as cottages'.

The enthusiasm for cottages within polite society did not last. By the mid-nineteenth century, cottage-related building and book publishing had slowed and the idea of the cottage itself was eventually lost beneath the Tudor barge-boards and decorative chimneystacks of the Historic Revival. And yet while both designer and consumer have changed over time, the idea of the cottage as the ideal rural retreat continues to resonate through English architecture and English culture.

1 The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life

From poetry, to painting, the theatre and the decorative arts, through the course of the eighteenth century the cottage gradually gained prominence in English cultural life through its association with the Classical ideals of rural retreat and the simple life as the dwelling of the pastoral shepherd found in the works of Classical writers such as Horace, Pliny and Virgil. Through the publication and continuous circulation of these writings in Latin and English translation a canon of Roman authors emerged as the common texts for the education of wealthy children and as the core components of every gentleman and genteel lady’s library, fuelling their imagination with images of an Arcadian Nature, shepherds and cottages. Moreover, in this world familiarity with Horace or Virgil was a high-value cultural currency that, beyond literacy itself, was an important social statement of belonging to the upper ranks of society. Therefore, an appreciation of rural retreat, the countryside and the things within it was not just an intellectual pursuit but also a social strategy. The idea of the cottage in late eighteenth-century English architecture begins, therefore, in Roman writings on rural retreat and the simple rural life: two interlinked Classical ideas then translated and interpreted by English pastoral poets and depicted across the arts where they came to be embodied by the cottage.

The principal Roman writers on the subject of rural retreat consumed in eighteenth-century England were Horace and Pliny, published continuously and widely across Europe from at least the sixteenth century onwards. Latin editions and English-language translations were continuously published in London throughout the eighteenth century, while many other editions published across Europe in centres such as Milan, Paris or Geneva were regularly imported into England by booksellers. In terms of London editions: the Works of Horace were, for example, published in Latin in 1711 and the Odes and Epodes ‘translated into English prose, as near the original as the different idioms would allow’ in 1741 and, again, in a new translation in 1769.¹ The collected Letters of Pliny the Younger and Cicero were published in London in Latin in 1701 and in English translation in 1724 under the title Epistles and Panegyrick. Translated by several hands.²

In these Classical sources rural retreat was a reaction to the city The city was the busy hub of government and business. It was understood as jostling, stimulating but stressful and, at times, ugly, unhealthy and/or morally degrading. In direct contrast the country was a peaceful place for physical and spiritual rejuvenation, leisure and contemplation, a place for the quiet appreciation of natural beauty and, through this, a place of personal moral improvement. A retreat was, therefore, an isolated rural dwelling used for contemplation rather than an opportunity to engage with rural folk or village life. Retreat could be alone or with friends and family and rural retreats were, therefore, often sites for out-of-town house parties.

For example, in Epistle X we find Horace, ‘the country lover’, recommending the benefits of living with nature and building a country retreat to a friend, ‘Fuscus the city-lover’.³ The idea of the rural retreat, and its sequestered pleasures, is also extensively and seductively described in the Letters of Pliny the Younger. Like Horace, in Letter XIII, Pliny recommends a visit to his country villa, a ‘capital retreat’ to an urbanite friend, Gallus, clearly connecting the idea of retreat with the enjoyment of the rural landscape.⁴ In his summation, while endeavouring to seduce Gallus down to the country, Pliny further seduces us:

Tell me, now, have I not good reason for living in, staying in, loving, such a retreat, which, if you feel no appetite for, you must be morbidly attached to town? And I only wish you would feel inclined to come down to it, that to so many charms with which my little villa abounds, it might have the very considerable addition of your company to recommend it.⁵

The next passage from Pliny is of specific relevance to the conceptual genesis of the architect-designed cottage of the later eighteenth century, built as a retreat within a country estate. Pliny describes how he retreats further within the villa’s grounds to his summer-house:

When I retire to the garden summer-house, I fancy myself a hundred miles away from my villa, and take especial pleasure in it at the feast of the Saturnalia, when, by the licence of that festive season, every other part of my house resounds with my servants’ mirth: thus I neither interrupt their amusement nor they my studies.⁶

Within these Roman texts the idea of rural retreat articulated was informed by Greek philosophical notions of leisure, tranquillity and reflection and their importance to the human condition. Aristotle’s notion of eudemonia advocated the importance of retreat in order to engage with intellectual exercise, while Epicurus’ notion of ataraxia recommended retreat in terms of physical and mental reinvigoration. Pliny’s retreat to his summer-house combines the Epicurean ideal of rural retreat as mental relaxation and the Aristotelian ideal of mental exercise. It was this combined idea of tranquillity and intellectual activity that characterised the gentleman’s retreat as a place of contemplation in eighteenth-century England.

Horace and Pliny’s eulogies to rural retreat found in their letters would have resonated with the classically educated eighteenth-century English reader because they were similar figures: aristocrats, landowners or, at least, genteel (of modest private income). In eighteenth-century England retreat was an activity for gentlemen with the means to travel and divide their time between town and country not for the fixed rural population (who simply lived in the countryside rather than consciously retreated to it). In English poetry the theme of rural retreat was explored by the topographic poets of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in works such as John Gay’s Rural Sports, 1713; Alexander Pope’s Horace, 1733; Andrew Marvell’s On Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax, 1651; and Abraham Cowley’s ‘Of My Self’ published posthumously in 1668.⁷ For Cowley, for example, retreat was associated with retirement, sleep and the peace of death. Marvell, in contrast, extolled the pleasures of rural retreat as compensation for the end of a political career with Lord Fairfax cast in the role of Cicero. John Dryden’s 1697 The Works of Virgil, dedicated to the Earl of Chesterfield, was also presented as a recommendation to rural retreat:

Your Lordship therefore may properly be said to have chosen a Retreat … thought by a Poet to be one of the requisites to a happy life … Such only can enjoy the Country, who are capable of thinking when they are there, and have left their Passions behind them in the Town. Then they are prepar’d for Solitude; and in that Solitude is prepar’d for them.⁸

Outside of poetry, the architectural writer John Claudius Loudon clearly articulates the town and country dichotomy in A Treatise on Farming, 1806:

Large cities, from their very nature, are scenes of continual activity. There every individual must fill up with vigour and constancy the place which he occupies in society … In the country, however, it is otherwise: there, a gentleman may live with his family upon his own estate, free from intrusion, bustle, and discord, which prevail in public cities.⁹

In early modern England town and country were physically and conceptually interdependent. As Peter Borsay argues, it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, when centralised industrial production gave larger urban areas self-sustaining economic identities, that the idea of a town fundamentally dissociated from the country made any sense.¹⁰ Cities were either progressive hubs of government, commerce, science and cosmopolitanism, or markets of corruption, greed and aristocratic effeminacy. Country life was parochial, backward and ignorant, or honest, independent, unaffected, manly and virtuous.¹¹ Significantly, within this late Georgian context the idea of rural retreat and the appeal of a simple country life was not, as we might expect looking back from the twenty-first century, conceived or understood as an escape from industrialisation; it was a counter balance to urban life rather than a retreat from a fast-changing world and a fear of progress. Therefore retreat in the eighteenth century had little to do with the notion of ‘modernity’ as understood by the nineteenth-century sense of modernisation; a process of socio-economic development bound to industrialisation, rapid urbanisation and socio-political unrest.¹² This idea of modernity is entirely absent from the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourse on retreat and the idea of the cottage where the ever-present city is the pre-industrial mercantile and political metropolis.

In the mid-nineteenth century, art criticism such as John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, 1843–56, presented the countryside and the simple country life as a utopian counterpoint to the cultural vacancy of contemporary indust...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction
• 1 The cottage, rural retreat and the simple life
• 2 The cottage in English architecture
• 3 The architect-designed cottage
• 4 The cottage in Arcadia
• 5 Architects, patrons and connoisseurs
• 6 Habitations of the labourer
• 7 The appreciation of cottages
• 8 Re-imagining the vernacular
• 9 The cottage ornée
• 10 The cottages of Old England
• Index