Two major pieces of literature on Augustus Welby Pugin (1812–1852), the renowned Gothic Revivalist and Catholic convert who designed Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, six cathedrals, and more, state, in summary fashion, that Pugin illustrated St John Henry Newman’s Live of the English Saints. The late Professor Margaret Belcher, however, provided a great deal of detail on this subject in the second volume of her The Collected Letters of A.W.N. Pugin, published in 2003. This essay republishes, for the first time since 1914, all eleven of Pugin’s illustrations and does so for the first time ever in a single document.
For readers who are interested in using the Pusey House collections for their research, here is an overview of what we have. Only original materials have been digitized, so the digital collection is slightly smaller than the physical one, but every authentic Newman item we have should now be accessible online.
Pusey’s appraisal of Mariology—a polemic containing a mixture of historical, theological and anecdotal evidence—was, on the whole, untrue and mostly a caricature; yet as Newman would be forced to admit in his formal published reply to Pusey in 1866, the <em>Letter to Pusey</em>, there was partial veracity to his claim that at times Mariology, in some of its devotional outpourings, has obscured devotion to God, especially God’s loving mediation brought to humanity through the Incarnation.
