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

This was in itself significant. Scott declined to publish an account of Abbotsford, even when it
was one of the most famous houses in Europe, thinking that to do so would be in poor taste and
that ‘Horace Walpole with all his talents makes a silly figure when he gives an upholsterer’s
catalogue of his goods and chattels at Strawberry Hill’. 17 That was in 1828. Fifteen years later
Britton had no such reservations about publicising 27 Burton Street [fig: 37]. This was partly a
reflection of his character but also, as his description makes clear, a factor of the change of taste.
He too compares his home with Walpole’s but with none of Scott’s deference. To Britton that
‘ “gew-gaw” that flimsy “paste-board house,” –that “Gothic toy-castle” ’ was self-evidently
ridiculous, what an estate agent might talk up, Britton suggests, as the ‘most-to-be-admired
example of modern domestic monastic architecture in Europe’. 18 We might pause to note the fact
that the concept of ‘modern domestic monastic’ as an architectural style had now become a
plausible part of an estate agent’s vocabulary.
Figure 37 John Britton's account of his home and collection
Britton saw his house as more scholarly and more serious, morally as well as
intellectually, than Walpole’s. Accordingly and anxious always for both publicity and
respectability Britton permitted himself an antiquarian interior that expressed erudition and a
plethora of important acquaintance, but stopped well short of anything that could be regarded as
occult, eccentric, or even untidy. His Octagonal Cabinet Room, designed round the truly
17 Scott, Journal, 4 January 1828, p. 461.
18 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), 3, p.155.
170