No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis examines science's role in the construction of Britain's new Houses of Parliament between 1834 and 1860. Architecturally the Gothic Palace embodies Victorian notions of the medieval and romanticized perceptions of English history. Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, the building not only reflected, but was involved in, the very latest scientific knowledge. This included chemistry, optics, geology, horology, and architecture as a science itself. Science was chosen, performed, trusted, displayed, contested, and debated through the physical space of government. Parliament was a place where science was done. Not only was knowledge imported to guide architectural construction, but it was actively produced within the walls of Britain's new legislature. I argue that this attention to science was not coincidental. Rather, it was a crucial demonstration of the changing relationship between science and politics. Science was increasingly asserted to be a powerful form of knowledge, and to an institution struggling to secure authority in the uncertainty of reformed British politics, it appeared a valuable resource for credibility. Contextualizing the use of science at Parliament in the political instability of the 1830s and 1840s emphasizes how the use of new knowledge was a potent practice of constructing political authority.

Furniture history is often considered a niche subject removed from the main discipline of art history, and one that has little to do with the output of painters, sculptors and architects. This thesis, however, connects the key intellectual, artistic and architectural debates surfacing in 'the arts' between 1740 and 1840 with the design of British furniture. Despite the expanding corpus of scholarly monographs and articles dealing with individual cabinet-makers, furniture making in geographic areas and periods of time, little attention has been paid to exploring Gothic furniture made between 1740 and 1840. Indeed, no body of research on 'mainstream' Gothic furniture made at this time has been published. No sustained attempt has been made to trace its stylistic evolution, establish stylistic phases, or to place this development within the context of contemporary architectural practice and historiography — except for the study of A.W.N. Pugin's 'Reformed Gothic'. Neither have furniture historians been willing to explore the aesthetic's connection with the intellectual and sentimental position of 'the Gothic' in the period. This thesis addresses these shortcomings and is the first to bridge the historiographic, cultural and architectural concerns of the time with the stylistic, constructional and material characteristics of Gothic furniture. It argues that it, like architecture, was charged with social and political meanings that included national identity in the eighteenth century — around a century before Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin designed the Palace of Westminster and prominently associated the Gothic legacy with Britishness.