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The term was first defined by Rickman (1817) as a style in which ‘the mullions of the windows, and the ornamental panelling, run in perpendicular lines’. In the Lamp of Obedience Ruskin is concerned that architects should choose a style which should be ‘well-fenced from chance of again stiffening into the perpendicular’ (Works, 8.48).
In Stones of Venice I ‘its main idea or decimal fraction of an idea, being to cover its walls with dull, successive, eternity of reticulation’ (Works, 9.303) - a precursor of the Crystal Palace perhaps. This is illustrated at figure 46 at Works, 9.230, and discussed at Works, 9.229 and following.
A prime example is the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. In the first edition of the Lamp of Truth, the chapel is a ‘piece of architectural juggling’. In a letter of April 6 1861 Ruskin says that it was ‘even uglier than my remembrance of it’. However the condemnation of the chapel is excised from the 1880 edition of Seven Lamps of Architecture on the grounds that the passage ‘took no account of the many charming qualities possessed through its faults, nor its superiority to everything else in its style’. On all this see the footnotes at Works, 8.63.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]