Keat's Fancy Mantel

The Anglo-American fireplace is tightly intertwined with literature. It locates the act of reading while dislocating the domestic belonging. A collegiate fireplace at the University of Pennsylvania inscribes that tension in stone. Two youngsters William C. Hays and Milton Medary designed the oldest American student union with their professor Frank Miles Day. Houston Hall is a Tudor Revival building (modeled on the 17th-century Peacock Inn, Rowley). Its main hall is flanked by two large fireplaces carved in limestone. A band runs over the eastern fireplace that contains a running stanza from Keats 1820 poem Fancy.

"Sit thee by the ingle, when
The sear faggot blazes bright,
Spirit of a winter's night"

The heavy mantel becomes a didactic device for escaping the home through fancy. "Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home" is the poem's central message. Stuffy as this collegiate gesture may seem today, it contains an element of dislocation. The meaning of faggot has greatly changed over the last century from its original medieval French import into the English language. A bundle of sticks burns below a bundle of ripples. The blazing reality around which the readers bundle generates a conversation or an exit strategy.

The inglenook (literary "a corner of fire") became an obsession in British domestic architecture. Is it possible that the British hearth imaginaire could be transported to Greece? This blog, remember, explores the vernacular associations of Greek villages. If not directly, British domestic ideals would have passed to Greece through Germany, specifically through Hermann Multhesius. Published by Wasmuth press in Berlin in 1904, Multhesius's monograph The English House put British vernacular at the center of modernism. Just five years later, Wasmuth would publish Frank Lloyd Wright's famous folio that made him an instant celebrity among modernists (while still hated by Americans). While admiring the English house immensely, Multhesius cannot help himself but make fun of the British for insisting on fireplaces even as they all understand how totally inefficient they are.

I could not resist making a quick sketch of this literary marriage in stone at Houston Hall, a space that I have passed a thousand times. For more information on the building, see George Thomas and David Brownlee, Building America's First University (Philadelphia, 2000), p. 171.