Reading Houses and Building Books: Andrew Jackson Downing and the Architecture of Popular Antebellum Literature, 1835-1855

by Adam Sweeting

Andrew Jackson Downing's reputation as architect, landscape designer, and author spread far beyond his native Hudson River Valley during the first half of the 19th century. But as Adam Sweeting suggests in this elegantly written, illustrated account, Downing's real legacy lies in the philosophical statement he created by melding the literary and building arts with an intensely moralistic outlook.

Along with such contemporaries as William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Downing pursued what Sweeting calls genteel romanticism, an ideal that viewed the confluence of polite literature and graceful dwellings as not just an aesthetic statement, but an ethical imperative. This study of a unique coalescence of literature, architecture, and gardening illuminates "the widely held belief that efforts to reform the world began at home, that beautiful and clean houses produced morally beautiful and spiritually clean people."

242 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 1996

Reviews

[Kristi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adam Sweeting examines the cultural connections between Andrew Jackson Downing's architectural and landscape manuals and American literature, particular as manifested in author's homes and literary uses of architectural spaces. During a period when writing was transformed into an American profession, writers drew inspiration from the landscape and readers, with a popular preference for domestic fiction, relied on literary conventions to interpret the built landscape. Notions of the "Beautiful" and the "picturesque" combined to shape a cultivated domestic sphere that aesthetically represented moral and literary ideals.