From standard book to pioneer

The obituaries were measured. The Gentleman’s Magazine found in his works “more science than taste, more judgment than ingenuity”, and wrote that his prose, “though quaint and cramped, was sometimes nervous and always earnest”.11 The Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1845, p. 321. The Builder predicted of Specifications: “It cannot fail to become a standard book.”22 The Builder, 18 January 1845, p. 29. It admitted the book’s “singularities and blemishes, perhaps the too common accompaniment of genius”.

For a generation it was. Joseph Gwilt’s Encyclopaedia of Architecture (1842) called it “one of the most valuable works to the English practical architect that has ever appeared”. A second edition followed in 1846. In 1873 Frederick Rogers took “the old standard work of Alfred Bartholomew” as his basis, dropping the savings bank and halving the specifications; his version was reissued in 1886 and 1893.33 Joseph Gwilt, An Encyclopaedia of Architecture (London: Longman, 1842), p. 923; J. Williams & Co. catalogue bound in The Assistant Engineer’s Guide in Boring (1846) (second edition, “By the late Alfred Bartholomew”); Frederick Rogers, Specifications for Practical Architecture … upon the basis of the work by Alfred Bartholomew (London: Lockwood & Co., 1873), Preface dated June 1872; HathiTrust records 006280096 (1886, “2d ed.”) and 008407100 (1893, “3d ed.”); The Builder, 29 January 1887 (“reduced in number from fifty-four to twenty-seven”), which also called Bartholomew’s book “the first attempt to reduce the art of specification writing to a system”. The 1873 text contains no savings-bank specification. Alfred Russel Wallace remembered that its introduction on Gothic “gave me ideas upon the subject of the greatest interest and value”.44 Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life (London: Chapman & Hall, 1908), pp. 98–99. By 1885, though, the Dictionary of National Biography thought his books “now of little professional value”.55 Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 3 (1885), p. 332 (“well received, though now of little professional value”).

The twentieth century read him again, as a theorist. George G. Pace’s article of 1942 called him “a pioneer of functional Gothic”.66 G. G. Pace, “Alfred Bartholomew: a pioneer of functional Gothic”, Architectural Review 92 (October 1942), pp. 99–102. Copyright; quoted briefly. For Howard Colvin, “Writing and journalism were, however, to be his real métier”.77 Colvin, Biographical Dictionary, 4th edn (2008), “Bartholomew, Alfred”. Copyright; quoted briefly. The Survey of London (2008) says that he “is best known for his advanced thinking on the rational character of Gothic structures”.88 Survey of London vol. 46 (2008), Introduction, p. 22, para [p114], https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol46/pp3-27. Pull quote: Nikolaus Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1972), ch. XI. Both copyright; quoted briefly. His one significant building still stands in Sekforde Street, and its front lettering was reinstated in 2021–22 (the building today).99 Islington planning register, P2021/0250/LBC (listed building consent granted 25 May 2021, including “reinstatement of facade lettering”); Wikimedia Commons, “No Swan So Fine”, photographs taken 31 March 2022, showing the work complete. See /history#restoration.