Volume 18, Number 9 · May 18, 1972
The Good Life
By Noel Annan
The Victorian Country House
by Mark Girouard
Oxford, 243 pp., $38.50
The architect, practicing the most intellectual of all the arts, prides himself on his ability to relate a bewildering number of variables and assemble them into a design which when you read it convinces you by its logicality. And yet there comes a point when the more brilliant the organization of these variables the less adaptable the building becomes. It fulfills its purpose for a season; but as time passes, social conditions change, and it finally resembles a whale washed up on the shores of history, unusable, a victim of the new environment. Between 1835 and 1889 five hundred country houses of unparalleled size were built in Great Britain, and these are the subject of Mark Girouard's impressive book. Few of the houses remain untouched or are still inhabited by families. Most have been destroyed or largely pulled down or converted with varying success into schools, museums, asylums, or have suffered other indignities.
Review, 1596 words
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