In 1872 Charles Eastlake published a detailed, generously illustrated

in which he traced the movement from its first stirrings in the work of sixteenth-century antiquaries through the eighteenth-century taste for garden ornaments in the “Gothick” style, and finally to its triumph in the churches, universities, museums, law courts and town halls of the Victorian age. He could not have known, in 1872, that the revival had reached its apogee. Although the ideas and innovations of the Gothic Revival remained immensely influential in English architecture, the stylistic unity its advocates had sought was already being lost.

With the Renaissance, taste had turned away from medieval styles and toward a renewed classicism. When taste turned toward Gothic once

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Citation: Brooks, Michael. "Gothic Revival". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 March 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=481, accessed 22 November 2024.]