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

Appendix
John Britton (1771-1857)
Topographer, author and publisher, Britton began working life as a cellarman in
Clerkenwell. He became a solicitor’s clerk and worked at night providing the
commentary –and songs- for de Loutherbourg’s light show, the Eidophusikon. In the
meantime he educated himself, reading widely in history and topography. In 1789 he met
Edward Brayley and their professional partnership lasted for the rest of Brayley’s life.
Britton was the organising force, Brayley the quieter presence, who did more of the
writing. Britton assembled an unbeatable team of artists, including the leading
watercolourists of the day to illustrate their publications. With E J Willson and A C
Pugin he produced the first books from which architects could copy Gothic architecture
exactly and he wrote the first attempt at a chronological history of English Gothic.
Britton’s career, its triumphs liberally larded with financial crises and violent quarrels
with publishers and authors runs like a spine through the antiquarian activities of the
period.
Francis Douce (1757-1834)
Douce, the son of an attorney and briefly an attorney himself, gave up the law to
pursue antiquarian interests when his father’s death gave him a sufficient income to do
so. He never went to university but had a brief flirtation with the professional world as
Assistant and then Keeper in the manuscripts department of the British Museum from
1807-11. He resigned out of impatience with the ‘fiddle faddle’ of administrative life.
The purpose of his own collections was to illustrate the manners and customs of the past
from coins, prints and medals. He was a pioneer of social history in many fields of which
this thesis considers only three; Shakespeare, Anglo-French antiquarianism and the
medieval Dance of Death. Douce also assisted Walter Scott with his Sir Tristrem and
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