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Court superseded Pugin’s stall as the event’s showstopper. Ironically, it was
the Mediaevalist designers that were most in awe.
Says Anna Jackson, “the Japanese Court made the greatest impact on
Gothic Revivalists such as the architect and designer William Burges… who
believed that in contemporary, feudal Japan could be found the ideal society
of the Middle Ages”. 17 Burges is to have said that:
If the visitor wishes to realise the real Middle Ages he must visit the Japanese Court
for at the present day the arts of the Middle Ages have deserted Europe and are
only to be found in the East…. Truly the Japanese Court is the real Mediaeval
Court of the Exhibition…. [For] the student of our reviving arts of the thirteenth
century… an hour… spent in the Japanese department will by no means be lost
time, for these hitherto [so-called] unknown barbarians appear not only to know all
that the Middle Ages knew but in some respects are beyond them and us as well….
In fact… [they] are… much in advance of us…. 18
For the Gothic Revivalists, who reflected, in their motivation towards all
things medieval, their idealisation of an imagined utopian, pre-industrial
past, Japan represented and satisfied that craving for a long-lost, long-
sought-after idyll.
There were varying reasons why Neo-Gothicists yearned to return to
the Middle Ages – many demonstrated their resistance to industrialisation
and reaction against the Industrial Revolution’s effects on society and the
environment, while some British designers just wanted to revive all that had
been lost from their once rich Gothic heritage during the iconoclastic
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