Ten of the best / Cathedrals in literature

Ten of the best

Cathedrals in literature

John Mullan
Monday 7 November 2011 

Salisbury resident Golding imagined the building of the cathedral whose spire towers over the city. Ignoring the warnings of others, the obsessive Dean Jocelin drives the work on, convinced that an angel is prompting him. As he becomes madder, the miraculous building takes shape out of the dust and chaos.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Dickens's last novel is set in the precincts of the cathedral of Cloisterham. "… a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its hoarse Cathedral bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath." Murderous passions are nursed in the shadow of the great cathedral.

Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo

The cathedral is the central character in Hugo's huge historical novel. All his characters gravitate to it. Quasimodo is the bell-ringer and swings down on a rope from the towers of the Cathedral to rescue the Gypsy girl Esmerelda from the gallows. They seek sanctuary in the great church, but violence and death pursue them there.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Housewife Emma Bovary has an assignation with student Léon Dupuis in Rouen cathedral. "In the choir a silver lamp was burning, and from the side chapels and dark places of the church sometimes rose sounds like sighs, with the clang of a closing grating …" For Léon, the religious solemnity is fitting: he is a devotee of love. Emma arrives, tries to pray, but is overwhelmed by "the tumult of her heart".

The Warden by Anthony Trollope

The clergymen of Barchester find the pursuit of God's purposes is an often ignoble business. The unworldly Septimus Harding, precentor at the great cathedral, is drawn into a furious dispute about church corruption, his only solace being the sublime sound of the cathedral choir as its songs ascend to heaven.

Old St Paul's by Harrison Ainsworth

Ainsworth's best-selling Victorian romance is set in the 1660s. During the great plague, the old cathedral becomes a hospital. At the climax, the great, dilapidated old building burns down, trapping two of the novel's villains in its vaults where they are drowned in molten lead.

The Choir by Joanna Trollope

Trollope's tale of submerged provincial passions is set in the cathedral city of Aldminster, where the cathedral itself is falling down and the costs of repairs seem likely to be met by abolishing the costly boys' choir. From the worldly dean to the idealistic choirmaster, everybody wants the best for the cathedral, the good of which becomes the justification for whatever they want to do.

"The Cathedral" by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke wrote a sequence of six poems inspired by a visit to Chartres cathedral with the sculptor Rodin. In the second, the poet muses on what the influence is of this huge tracery of stone, overwhelming rather than elevating. "And in the towers' quelled ascent, / and sudden spurn of skies, sat Death".

"A Cathedral Facade at Midnight" by Thomas Hardy

The poem recalls a night walk in the cathedral close at Salisbury, where Hardy took the movement of light across the building as a metaphor of ancient belief in the light of modern unbelief. The facade is thick with "the pious figures" of saints and clerics, holy men and women seen "Under the sure, unhasting, steady stress / Of Reason's movement, making meaningless".

The Cathedral by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Huysmans has his alter ego, Durtal, who has converted to Catholicism, explore the elaborate symbolism he discovers in stone in the great gothic edifice of Chartres cathedral. An apparent rejection of modernity, it was a bestseller.

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Victor Hugo's Notre Dame novel tops bestseller list after fire

Different editions of author’s 19th-century classic in five of top 10 slots on Amazon France

John Henley

Wed 17 Ap 2019

 

Lon Chaney as Quasimodo and Patsy Ruth Miller as Esmeralda in the 1923 film. Photograph: John Springer Collection/Corbis via Getty Images

Victor Hugo’s 19th-century literary classic Notre-Dame de Paris has soared to the top of France’s online bestseller list after the fire that ravaged the 850-year-old Paris cathedral on Monday night.

By Wednesday morning, different editions of the 1831 novel occupied the first, third, fifth, seventh and eighth slots in Amazon France’s bestseller list, with a history of the gothic architectural masterpiece taking sixth place.The book is better known in the Anglosphere as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the title given to its 1833 English translation.

The runaway success confirms a French tendency to seek solace in literature at times of national anguish: A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his time in the bars and cafés of 1920s Paris, became France’s fastest-selling book after the terror attacks of November 2015.

Hugo’s epic 11-volume novel is set in 1482 and tells the story of the beautiful Gypsy girl Esmeralda, who captures the hearts of many men – but especially the hunchback Quasimodo, the half-blind and deaf bellringer of Notre-Dame.

Many critics have argued that the cathedral itself is the real hero of the work, which the writer and campaigner began in 1829 partly to draw attention to the importance of the French capital’s gothic architecture, which at the time was being widely neglected, defaced or pulled down to make way for new buildings.

The novel went on to become a classic and is largely credited with helping to initiate a vast renovation of the crumbling cathedral – Hugo’s “majestic and sublime edifice” – in the mid-19th century, completed by the architects Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.

In one often-cited passage from the novel, Hugo rages at the state of the building: “As much beauty as it may retain in its old age, it is not easy to repress a sigh, to restrain our anger, when we mark the countless defacements and mutilations to which men and time have subjected that venerable monument.”

A second, equally prophetic passage has circulated widely on social media in France since the fire that destroyed large parts of the cathedral’s roof and sent its spire toppling into the nave.

“All eyes were turned to the top of the church,” Hugo wrote. “What they saw was most strange. Upon the top of the topmost gallery, higher than the central rose-window, a vast flame ascended between the two belfries with whirling sparks.

“A vast flame, fierce and strong, fragments of which were borne away by the wind with the smoke. Below this flame … two spouts, terminating in gargoyles, vomited sheets of fiery rain, whose silvery streams shone out distinctly against the gloom of the lower part of the cathedral front.”

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