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

Within architectural history there were in the twentieth century broadly two views
of architectural antiquarianism. The first was largely dismissive. John Summerson’s
attitude to John Britton in his Architecture in Britain 1530-1830, is typical in being both
intellectually and socially condescending, though it reflects a view of himself that Britton
encountered frequently in his lifetime:
The Cathedral Antiquities of Great Britain (1814-35), [Britton’s] most important work and one which, as
an architectural survey of the British cathedrals, has still not been superseded…attains a very fair level of
accuracy and some of the engravings… are admirable. Britton published many more works, his last being
an autobiography in which we see him as something of a vulgarian with a vast opinion of his achievements
and a singular flair for a marketable line in architectural literature. 4
Britton’s lack of formal education, his tendency to self-promotion and the fact
that he was a populariser who earned a living from his work all clearly made Summerson
uneasy. The antiquary, journalist, draughtsman to the Society of Antiquaries and
occasional architect John Carter (1748-1817), author of Ancient Architecture of England
(1795) is also disparaged, despite having ‘a mind capable of analysis’, for representing, ‘a
type which becomes familiar as the century advances –the introverted creature who, in
boyhood, has his imagination set on fire by the mystery of time past’. 5 Imagination and
‘romanticism’ trouble the architectural historians. The entire antiquarian enterprise,
especially when it began to affect architecture directly, was distasteful to Summerson.
Concluding his survey he summed up:
The story of English architecture comes, in 1830, to a natural halting-place; scarcely, however, a place
where one would wish to halt long, for at no moment, perhaps, in the whole period we have traversed was
English architecture so feeble, so deficient in genius, so poor in promise. Why was this? The answer lies in
the whole drift and texture of English society…in the rapid expansion of the class to which, rather than to
the state or to the elder aristocracy, architecture had come to look for patronage… the next generation…
found standards of its own… standards confused and debilitated by the literary antiquarianism which, in
Regency England, marched in step with the sentiment of patriotism on the one hand and the bourgeois
4
Summerson , Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830, p. 523.
5
Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830, p. 522.
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