"This study peers behind the veil of architectural styles to the underlying social microcosm of the "building world" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to examine how the fragile authority of the architect took root. Bringing to architectural history methods more familiar from studies of the social content of poetry and painting, Brian Hanson is able to establish new, and often surprising, relationships between many of the key figures of the period - including Chambers, Soane, Barry, Pugin, Scott, and Street - and to shed new light on lesser figures, and on agencies a diverse as freemasonry and magazine publishing. John Ruskin in particular emerges here in an entirely new light, as do his arguments concerning "The Nature of Gothic." Hanson concludes that in some respects Ruskin was closer to William Chambers than to William Morris."--Jacket.