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

Dawson Turner (1775-1858)
A banker and botanist from Great Yarmouth, the son of a banker and merchant,
Turner, like Scott, had an abbreviated university education, leaving Cambridge on the
death of his father without taking a degree. His scientific interests caused him to be
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1802 and it was only later that he took to
antiquarianism. With the help of his wife, Mary Palgrave who, like several of their eleven
children was an able artist, he documented his travels in Normandy in the years
immediately after the end of the Napoleonic wars. His vast correspondence shows Turner
to have been part of an extensive antiquarian network. Among his friends were Britton,
Gage and Langlois and he also knew the Pugins. From 1812-23 John Cotman was
drawing master to the family and travelled with them in Normandy. Turner sponsored
Cotman’s Architectural Antiquities of Normandy which appeared in 1822, two years after
his own Account of a Tour in Normandy. He published much on Suffolk and in 1848 a
Guide to the Verification of Manuscripts. My account of him is confined to his place in
the Anglo-French antiquarian network.
Robert Willis (1800-1875)
Willis, the son of an eminent doctor, became Jacksonian Professor of Natural and
Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge. He was a polymath, a public figure in his
lifetime, whom thousands (including Karl Marx) came to hear lecture. A pioneer in the
reproduction of mechanical speech, an inventive engineer and a geologist, his place here
is as the inventor of architectural history. Beginning with his Remarks on the Architecture
of the Middle Ages, chiefly of Italy, published in 1835, Willis was an extraordinarily
observant and analytic commentator on Gothic architecture, an influence on Ruskin and a
founding Vice President of the Cambridge Camden Society. He was never a fellow of the
Society of Antiquaries, becoming instead a leading member of in the Archaeological
Institute, which broke away from the British Archaeological Association two years after
its foundation in 1845, with the intention of professionalizing and gentrifying the study of
historic architecture. The only one of my subjects to take a degree and to achieve
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