Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

French precedence in Gothic. 89 Rickman meanwhile, appealed to his readers for more
information on French fonts. The efforts of Turner and Britton, whose Architectural Antiquities
of Normandy appeared in parts from 1826-28, were among the most scholarly and between them
spanned the range from the purely architectural to the broadly topographical. Turner’s Tour was
based on his visit of 1815 and subsequent trips in 1818 and 1819. He conjured up for a genteel
but unspecialised readership as much as he could of every aspect of the experience, choosing,
like Scott, the more gentlemanly literary form of the letter, writing to an unidentified friend at
home in Norfolk, over the workmanlike essays on individual buildings that made up Britton’s
volume.
Turner’s book followed his own interests, ranging beyond architecture into costume,
customs and naturally the Bayeux Tapestry. By this date antiquarian literature was so much part
of polite culture that antiquaries were well-enough known among Turner’s readership for him to
drop their names. Much of the Tour is written as a dialogue not so much with his supposed
correspondent as with other authors including Andrew Ducarel, (‘the doctor’) whose Anglo-
Norman Antiquities he was finding increasingly unsatisfactory. ‘It is our fate to be continually at
variance with the doctor, till I am half inclined to fear you may be led to suspect that jealousy has
something to do with the matter.’ 90 He was better pleased with the work of Millin, whom he had
met in 1815, while Douce had ‘furnished us with some curious remarks’ on the Feast of Fools
and its representation on misericords. 91 Turner never left or arrived at a town without informing
his readers of its situation in the landscape, the picturesqueness or otherwise of the approach and
the receding view.
His observations on architecture combined as much factual information as he could
ascertain with a desire, sometimes frustrated, to revive the spirit of the past in buildings that had
been stripped in many cases not only of their contents but also of their function. At Caen the
Conqueror’s palace was in use as a grain store and even Scott’s poetry could not re-animate it.
89
Whewell, Architectural Notes on German Churches, p.144 .
90
Turner, Tour in Normandy, 2, p.67.
91
Turner, Tour in Normandy,1, p.196.
128