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By the middle of the 19th century, the manufacturing breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution had for the first time placed ornament within reach of the middle class, yielding the mania for decoration that characterized the Victorian era. Beginning with the relatively restrained Italianate style of the 1860s, Victorian architecture progressed through the increasingly florid Mansard and Stick-Eastlake modes, culminating in the monumentally bombastic Queen Anne style. In this relatively restrained example, the projecting bays, panels of shallow ornament, and a round corner tower with a candle-snuffer roof are typical of the period. By the early 1880s, ornament had become an end in itself, rather than a means of evoking an earlier historic style. Within the next decade architectural critics and the public alike would rebel against such unbridled eclecticism, ushering in the chaste and puritanical aesthetic of the Mission Revival.
Douglas Keister