page_title: Penshaw Monument
section_title: 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Penshaw Monument / Reception and impact / 19th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Engraving of Penshaw Monument, made between 1844 and 1848
context_page_description: Penshaw Monument is a memorial in the style of an ancient Greek temple on Penshaw Hill in the City of Sunderland, North East England. It is near the village of Penshaw, between the towns of Washington and Houghton-le-Spring in the historic County Durham. The monument was built between 1844 and 1845 to commemorate John Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, Governor-General of British North America and author of the Durham report. Owned by the National Trust since 1939, it is a Grade I listed building under the name of the Earl of Durham's Monument.
  John and Benjamin Green designed Penshaw Monument. It was built by Thomas Pratt of Bishopwearmouth using local gritstone at a cost of around £6000; the money was raised by subscription. On 28 August 1844, while it was partially complete, its foundation stone was laid by Thomas Dundas, 2nd Earl of Zetland in a Masonic ceremony which drew tens of thousands of spectators. Based on the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, it is a tetrastyle temple of the Doric order, with eighteen columns—seven along its longer sides and four along its shorter ones—and no roof or cella.
context_section_description: Before its completion, the Carlisle Journal said Penshaw Monument would be "one of England's proudest architectural wonders, and a fitting memorial of one of its wisest statesmen". However, its design initially met with a hostile response in architectural circles: in 1844 The Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal called it "as arrant a piece of 'nonsense architecture' as can well be imagined" and derisively compared it to a cattle pound. The Art Union was similarly scathing: it was critical of the idea of a Greek temple, which it said "does not bespeak much of either invention or judgement". It concluded: "To us it appears to be one of the most absurd, ill-imagined, and ill-contrived things ever devised, utterly devoid of significancy, purpose, or meaning."
  The Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal termed the presence of pediments despite the absence of a roof a "gross and palpable violation of meaning and common sense". The Athenaeum was similarly critical of the roofless pediments—"the building will look as if there had originally been a roof to it, which had fallen in!"—and expressed disapproval of the lack of cella and inner walls, writing that the architects had "cut the Gordian knot" by omitting them. The decision to make the walls and columns hollow was condemned by The Athenaeum, which called the structure "nearly as much a sham, as if it were composed of cast iron coloured in imitation of stone" and said it "may be intended as characteristic ... of an age which estimates plausible appearances above solid worth". The Art Union agreed: the hollowness of the columns, it said, "partakes too much of sham construction, with little if any thing to recommend it on the score of economy".
  The Athenaeum wrote that climbing the monument's stairs could be dangerous, and The Art Union condemned the staircase as "dreadfully narrow and inconvenient". The Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal believed that those who ascended the monument would "have to promenade somewhat after the fashion of crows in a gutter", and suggested that the architects ought to have provided a terrace on the roof of the monument, accessible by a wider staircase. The Athenaeum expressed confusion at the absence of a statue or commemoration of the Earl of Durham, believing that "although it may not yet be definitely settled what it is to be, something must surely be intended".
  In 1850 The Times was more complimentary: "The position and architecture of this structure are both extremely fine, and viewed from the railway it produces the best effect." At the Great Exhibition, which took place in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London in 1851, a model of the monument made of cannel coal was exhibited as part of the event's Mining and Metallurgy section. In 1857 William Fordyce wrote: "The temple is remarkable for its grandeur, simplicity and imposing effect, nothing in the shape of ornament or meretricious decoration being introduced". In his graphic novel Alice in Sunderland, which explores Lewis Carroll's connections to Sunderland, Bryan Talbot suggests that Carroll may have been inspired by the monument, comparing the door leading to the monument's stairs to a scene omitted from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which Alice knocks on a door in a tree. In his 1887 story "The Flower of Weardale", author William Delisle Hay described the monument:
  Upon the crest of a bare and ugly eminence that towers above the Wear, there stands a mighty experiment in stone: a Grecian temple, splendid and solemn, with its columns and entablatures, yet blackened and stained by the sooty atmosphere, and looming grandly through the rolling smoke-clouds rising from the collieries down below, over which it lords, and with which it has no fellowship.
  Queer art, curious taste, surely, which has raised this majestic memorial of an aesthetic age and clime, and planted it, severe and solid, here in the centre of the now most prosaic county of practical, toiling, prosaic England! A monstrous monument, set up a few decades ago in honour of some notability, dead and in spite
caption: An engraving of the monument made shortly after its erection, which shows it out of proportion with the hill[129]
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