Unlike Victorian novelists and painters, architects needed very large sums of money in order to realize their ideas. In their case patrons combined the roles which publishers and readers together occupied in the field of literature. But like the novelists and painters, Victorian architects also inhabited a specific time and place. New building techniques and materials, a transition from craftsmen to contractors, the growth of middle-class demand, the need to design building types for an industrializing and urbanizing population, all pressed hard upon them and added to the complexities created by their own often bewildering discoveries in the field of architectural history. Coherence of style gave way under such pressures. And the rapid expansion of an as-yet scarcely organized architectural profession encouraged the appearance of imposters of all kinds, so that Victorian architects 'had bitter personal experience of unrestrained competition, and their stylistic individualism was a necessary part of the struggle of each for survival'. In a general sense, therefore, the unbridled private enterprise of the age actually helped to create the acute contrasts of High Victorian styles (with their strident personal mannerisms and lack of aesthetic direction). However, at the level of the individual architect it is easier to identify influences emanating from a contemporary crisis of artistic belief than from any directly economic imperatives, though a mingling of the two certainly helped to generate--in architecture as elsewhere--a characteristically Victorian conjunction of material optimism and spiritual disquiet. Thus an architect like the idiosyncratic and opulent Gothicist, William Burges, represented an optimistic strain, as can be seen in his castle building at Cardiff and Castell Coch ( 1868-81) for the wealthy Marquess of Bute and in the brilliantly realized St Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork ( 1865-79). Equally, William Butterfield represented-like the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, with whom he corresponded-those Victorians for whom a state of persistent unease was only kept in check by religious faith, as his savage masterpiece, All Saints, Margaret Street , London ( 1850-9), so powerfully reveals.

Unlike all other art producers, architects began in the nineteenth century to see themselves and to be seen by others as belonging to a recognized profession. This artistic singularity occurred largely because money lay so central to their activities, even though only a small part of it remained in their hands. The number of architects rose substantially: in 1850 there may have been as few as 500 'proper' architects in the whole country, just under half of whom--the members of the Institute of British Architects founded in 1834--constituted an elite. The explosion in the number and complexity of the building types required by an increasingly mature industrial society (hotels, factories, libraries, railway stations, hospitals, schools, offices, banks, town halls, markets, department stores) increased the demand for architectural skills and made specialization possible well beyond churches and country houses. H. and A. Saxon Snell, for example, concentrated on hospitals, C. J. Phipps and Frank Matcham on theatres, Rowland Plumbe on artisan housing. At the same time, the growth of official building regulations helped to establish the architect as a natural intermediary between client and builder, while the development of largescale contracting demanded a continuous supply of detailed drawings and plans.

By the last quarter of the century numbers had increased substantially, perhaps by as much as 400 in each decade (mainly on the breadand-butter side). Indeed, as early as 1861 it is possible to identify 638 'architects' in London directories, a third of them fellows or associates of the Institute. Those at the top designed churches, great houses, and public buildings; the next rank obtained good commercial and medium domestic work; then came the old-style 'surveyors and architects' with highly varied practices; and at the bottom a long tail of fringe practitioners drawing elevations for speculative builders or preparing drainage plans for local authorities. Dickens Seth Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) occupied the more dubious reaches. . .

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