The Author’s House: Abbotsford and Wayside

Abstract

Architectural historians have traditionally criticised nineteenth-century architecture for its ‘literary’ quality, arguing that its significance results from an abject subordination to historical and literary association rather than, as it supposedly should, from pure form. In The Architecture of Humanism (1914), for example, Geoffrey Scott identified a ‘literary fallacy’ in romantic architecture, which he claimed ‘neglects the fact that in literature, meaning, or fixed association, is the universal term; while in architecture the universal term is the sensuous experience of substance and form.’ 1 Or, as Robert Furneaux Jordan puts it: ‘Mere form or structure — the first of which has been dominant in the eighteenth century and the second of which was to be dominant in the twentieth century — were altogether subordinate to this passionate embracement of the Imagination.’ 2 The practice of literary tourism, which emerges at precisely the same time that literature supposedly killed architecture, suggests that objects’ and buildings’ associative qualities might enhance, rather than subordinate, their material qualities. 3 Association can open up the very thing Geoffrey Scott suggests it destroys, ‘the sensuous experience of substance and form.’ I will explore this claim through considering two building projects: Sir Walter Scott’s building of his house Abbotsford in the Borders, and the renovations to The Wayside in Concord, Massachusetts carried out by its owner, the American author (and visitor to Abbotsford) Nathaniel Hawthorne. These two house building projects demonstrate two very different reactions to the practice of literary tourism, a revelling in its architectural possibilities in Scott’s case and a retreat from them in Hawthorne’s, but both reveal a commitment to association’s possibility to awaken architectural and material form.

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