Gothic and Architecture: Morris, Ruskin, Carlyle, and the Gothic Legacies of the Lake Poets

'Tom Duggett’s [chapter] advances an argument that places the Gothic at the heart of the aesthetics of the nineteenth century. Far from being a kind of excrescence or addition to the body cultural, Gothic lies at the very root of how architectural and aesthetic theory developed during these years, ensuring a clear transition from the thought and imagination of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey to the manifestos and practices of later cultural thinkers. Gothic provides, we might say here as elsewhere, a different account of how history moves. Behind this there lies a hugely significant argument about the relation between ideas of the Gothic and ideas of ‘English’ nationalism, centred on the notion of the unwritten constitution' - David Punter.