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

During the decades of Britton’s visits the demand for more tourist sites associated with
Shakespeare grew. Britton expresses the need. He writes of his ‘pilgrimages’ to Stratford using
the term barely figuratively, for, after establishing his position on Popery via a brief digression
on the evils of superstition in the Dark Ages and the much improved facilities afforded to the
‘independent modern traveller’, he reverts to the term, dwelling on the stages in his own life and
development each visit marks and on the ‘excitement and association’ arising from them. 142 In
1819 with his friend the poet Henry Neele they ‘visited every place and object which at all
assimilated with the presumed haunts and habits of the Poet, whose inspired writings must have
derived much of their origin and hues from the natural and peculiar attributes of these localities’.
143
Shakespeare himself is thereby recast as a romantic, absorbing the spirit of the place and
reflecting it in his work.
Conversely, by reciprocal sympathy, familiarity with the places will bring the visitor
closer to the author. The stages of Britton’s pilgrimage included Charlecote, site of the supposed
poaching incident, Shottery, home of Anne Hathaway and more peculiarly Mr Bisset’s Museum
in Leamington where as well as collecting various antiquities Bisset had adopted a girl called
Iliff, who was thought to be a direct descendant of Shakespeare. A kind of living exhibit or relic,
she was a manifestation perhaps, like the Sobieski Stuarts, of an intense and widespread
imaginative identification with the past. In Stratford itself that past was intensely present to the
sensitive antiquary:
Crowds of reflections and associations press on the mental faculties, and give exercise and pleasure at once to
Memory and Imagination... Houses shops and everyday personages are unheeded...the whole intellect is unloosed,
and expands all its perceptive and susceptive powers. It ‘calls up spirits from the vasty deep’ of former times...What
would we not give to be enabled to realize this vision –to grasp the hand, to hear the voice, to listen to the inspired
language of the Bard...and to stroll with him to Charlecote. 144
Britton, as usual, was in step with popular feeling and taste. The need for some more
material monument at Stratford was becoming urgent. Britton’s own immensely elaborate
scheme for a theatre, library, lecture room, saloon and gallery came to nothing but the acquisition
of Anne Hathaway’s cottage, the full restoration of the parish church, a serious, but thwarted,
142 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), Appendix, p. 37.
143 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), Appendix, p. 37.
144 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), Appendix, p. 40.
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