Reading houses and building books: Andrew Jackson Downing and the architecture of popular antebellum literature

This interdisciplinary study examines the intersection of literary and architectural taste in the three decades preceding the Civil War. The focus is the landscape gardener and domestic architect Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852). Downing, the author of three popular works on these subjects, was antebellum America's preeminent theoretician of architecture and landscaping. The study focuses on ways in which Downing's writings and designs reflected and influenced literary manifestations of domesticity. Among the writers considered are Washington Irving, Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, James Kirke Paulding, Donald Grant Mitchell, and Nathaniel Parker Willis, all of whom knew Downing or were cognizant of his work. Along with Downing, these writers exercised enormous control over the development of polite and sentimental literature, a control with both literary and architectural implications. This study identifies them as the "genteel romantics," a term intended to distinguish their truncated form of romanticism from that of Emerson, Thoreau, and other writers traditionally identified with the American Renaissance.; Genteel romanticism celebrated nature while simultaneously advocating for its control in the form of gardens and "tasteful" landscapes. The same language, imagery, and tropes were employed to radically different ends in the two varieties of romanticism. Downing and his associates also called for renewed attention to home life in the belief that sentiment, piety, and beauty could be encouraged by the construction of tasteful cottages and villas. In Downing, whose own writings are filled with references to these issues, the work of domestic and architectural reformers coalesced into a single program of genteel reform. Throughout his work one can trace the vestiges of a broad cultural dialogue involving literature, architecture, gardening, and gender issues. The popular press, eager to please an expanding middle-class readership, contributed to this discourse as well. In genteel writings, biographies, and homes, we find a multi-voiced narrative of gentility that convinced a generation of Americans to seek domestic peace in a countryside perceived as the only refuge from an increasingly complex commercial culture. Downing's designs in turn provided three-dimensional texture to these voices, proving that antebellum architecture and literature embraced identical concerns.