Dickie Bateman and the Gothicization of Old Windsor: Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole

Abstract

Mr Dicky Bateman was a typical eccentric, who resembled his friend Horace Walpole in his Gothic affectation, and [John] Wilkes in his impious buffoonery.In one of the witty characterizations for which he is justifiably famous, Horace Walpole described the subject of this article — the transformation of the villa at Old Windsor owned by his friend, Richard (Dickie) Bateman — as a bout of one-upmanship between two men of taste: ‘[I] converted Dicky Bateman from a Chinese to a Goth […] I preached so effectively that every pagoda took the veil’. He later described the change of the style of Bateman’s house in terms of spiritual affiliation: Bateman’s house had ‘changed its religion […] I converted it from Chinese to Gothic’. Here as elsewhere in the early years of the Gothic Revival, Walpole serves as principal interlocutor, providing keen, if sharply biased, insights on many significant building projects in England. Walpole positions himself as a teacher and Bateman as a disciple whom he convinced to change his tastes from Chinoiserie (‘the fashion of the instant’) to the Gothic, the style ‘of the elect’. Walpole’s clever allegory of stylistic change as national and religious conversion was based in part on the fact that he provided the conduit for Richard Bentley and Johann Heinrich Müntz, two of his closest designers in the ‘Committee of Taste’, to design Gothic additions for Bateman between 1758-61. Rebuilt and expanded in the fashionable mode of Walpole’s own Strawberry Hill and by its designers, from Walpole’s perspective at least, Old Windsor as remodelled for Bateman served to reinforce his role as arbiter of the Gothic taste and Strawberry Hill as its paradigm.

Serious Gothic and ‘doing the Ancient Buildings’: Batty Langley's Ancient Architecture and ‘Principal Geometric Elevations’

“…As Reeve observes, 'Fribbles and men of the third sex [homosexuals] were characterized as intersexual hybrids, and were frequently called "hermaphrodites", articulating the third sex as composite of "male" and "female".' 18 Gothic's rejection as an approved taste throughout the early-and mid-eighteenth century was based upon its unfavourable contrast with Classical architecture, particularly in form, ornament, and mathematical and proportional relationships. John Evelyn (1620-1706) identified Gothic's 'licentious' characteristics, and in 1706 he set them against the 'solemn greatness' of Classicism: a certain Fantastical and Licencious manner of Building, which we have since call' The entry on Gothic in Isaac Ware's A Complete Body of Architecture (1756) similarly attacks Gothic as a 'wild and irregular manner of building', and is representative of pro-Classical thought in mid-eighteenth-century Britain.…”

A Fake or Genuine Artefact? The Parian Chronicle and Perceptions of Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain

“… Walpole 1955, 295-96. 37 Hazen and Lewis 1969, vols 1-3.38 Walpole signalled his intention to resign from the Society in a letter to William Cole from 28 July 1772: Walpole 1937, 270-71.39 Reeve 2013, and Colvin 2009. …”

HERALDRY AND THE ARCHITECTURAL IMAGINATION: JOHN CARTER’S VISUALISATION OFTHE CASTLE OF OTRANTO

“…For a more substantial genealogy of Strawberry Hill’s architectural ‘offspring’, see McCarthy 1987, 92–117, 171–9. See also Reeve 2013.…”