Warton, Thomas - Joan Pittock (essay date 1973)

Joan Pittock (essay date 1973)

SOURCE: Pittock, Joan. “The Taste for the Gothic: Thomas Warton and the History of English Poetry.” In The Ascendancy of Taste: The Achievement of Joseph and Thomas Warton, pp. 176-214. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.

[In the following essay, Pittock traces influences on “Gothic” poems by Warton and others and critiques his History of English Poetry.]

I

When [Samuel] Johnson's Dictionary appeared in 1755 it contained no reference to the word ‘Gothic’. Yet Horace Walpole had succumbed to the spell of Gothic architecture in building his castle at Strawberry Hill in 1750, and the vogue for Gothic as well as Chinese in design is attested by Robert Lloyd in his description of ‘The Cit's County Box’ (1757):

The traveller with amazement sees
A temple, Gothic or Chinese,
With many a bell or tawdry rag on
And crested with a sprawling dragon,
A ditch of water four foot...

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