Victorians found the resulting houses and streets monotonous and the dimensional restraints tyrannical, and christened the Act "The Black Act of 1774", although it was more likely the increasingly efficient capitalisation of building, not legislation, that was the main cause of this. Benjamin Disraeli blamed the Act for "all those flat, dull spiritless streets all resembling each other, like a large family of plain children." He also observed in his novel Tancred; or, the New Crusade (1847) that:
