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

Chapter Two
‘To stones a moral life 1 : antiquaries and Gothic
architecture
Medieval architecture was the subject to which arguably the greatest quality and
certainly the greatest quantity of antiquarian effort was directed in the period. There were
more publications on this than on any other antiquarian subject with the possible
exception of topography and there was a considerable overlap between the two areas,
particularly in the earlier decades.
In its engagement with Gothic architecture romantic antiquarianism was both at
its most typical and its most ambitious. This chapter sets out in microcosm much that
characterised the period as a whole, particularly the relationship between antiquaries and
institutions, which should be seen as a background to the chapters that follow. One
notable shift, highlighted in the debates about architecture, was the marginalisation of the
Society of Antiquaries of London, which lost the dominance it had enjoyed in the earlier
eighteenth century. The Society’s decline was in part a reflection of the fact that, as
Samuel Foote had noticed, antiquaries were becoming more socially diverse and
individualistic. This in turn contributed to a more widespread movement within
antiquarianism from the largely passive documentation of monuments and artefacts, to an
active engagement with interpretation and conservation. The study of the Gothic saw
antiquaries branching out, becoming journalists, publishers, campaigners and, not
infrequently, turning architect themselves. By the mid-nineteenth century however, the
enterprise was losing some of its momentum. The way in which it fragmented and was
re-organised along more institutional and socially hierarchical lines was also typical of
the wider change that came over antiquarianism in the High Victorian years.
1
‘even the loose stones that cover the high-way,/I gave a moral life, I saw them feel/Or linked them to
some feeling’.William Wordsworth, The Prelude, (1805), Book 3, ll 125-7.
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