Photograph kindly provided by Rob Scarisbrick. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Front entrance of Scarisbrick Hall. A.W. N. Pugin. 1842. Near Southport, Lancashire. The porch was designed in 1841, and evidently built quite quickly. The inscription around the arch reads: "This hall was built by me, Charles Scarisbrick, MDCCCXLII. Laus Deo" (Girouard 112). However, the building would not actually be complete for some years. Complaining that only two men were working on the roof, Pugin wrote to Charles Scarisbrick on 1 March 1844: "it is really heartbreaking to have been working for years & nothing to shew anybody, not a single room finished & everything asleep. The work is twice as expensive.& it goes on so long that I positively forget my own drawings" (qtd. in Belcher 173). Note that there are many other inscriptions inside the house. Girouard points out that pious texts became "an excessive Victorian habit" (112).
Another View
Sources
Belcher, Margaret, ed. The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin. Vol. II: 1843-1845. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Girouard, Mark. The Victorian Country House. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, rev. ed. 1979.
"Scarisbrick Hall." Viewed 7 September 2008.
Last modified 7 September 2008