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

adulation of ancestry on the other. A love of antiquarianism is much easier to acquire than an eye for
classical proportion, and in the 1820s it was antiquarianism which carried the day. 6
English architecture was certainly not at its best in the early 1830s and
‘antiquarianism’ in the sense of a growing interest in the Gothic did carry the day. 7 The
new patrons were not, however, generally more bourgeois than the old. 8 The influence of
antiquarianism on architecture was more complex and gradual. At the end of the period,
twenty years on from Summerson’s stopping place, the shift was not so much from
aristocratic to middle-class patron, but from antiquary to professional architect as
protagonist. Summerson’s book, however, first published in 1955, was reissued in 1993
and remains the standard text. David Watkin’s The Rise of Architectural History, gives a
brief and largely neutral account in his chapter on ‘English Antiquarians and the Gothic
Revival’. He is appreciative of Britton’s ‘thorough and beautiful’ 9 survey of cathedrals,
though his assertion that from the 1740s onwards ‘Cambridge assumed a dominant
position in the study of mediaeval architecture’ is highly questionable and again
underestimates the contribution of antiquaries who by education, religion or other
circumstances were remote from the universities. 10
Within the other predominant school of twentieth-century architectural history,
led by Nikolaus Pevsner and represented also by Paul Frankl, the antiquaries fared better.
Frankl, quoting Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival, on Britton that he ‘ “had no natural
interest in architecture” ’ and that his autobiography was ‘ “written with the egotism of a
millionaire” ’, commented that ‘I should like to say in his defense [sic] that he rose to his
task, and his later books became in many respects increasingly more scientific’. 11 Like
Frankl, Pevsner had none of Summerson’s and Clark’s social anxieties. He found ‘the
6
Summerson Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830, p. 535.
7
I have used Gothic as an elastic term to cover all pre-Reformation architecture in a period when Saxon
and Norman were not infrequently included in ‘Gothic’ and when all three categories were constantly under
revision.
8
The myth of the philistine industrialist corrupting the flow of architectural taste is dealt with conclusively
by Paul Thompson in William Butterfield, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), pp.3-6.
9
Watkin, The Rise of Architectural History, p.60.
10
Watkin, The Rise of Architectural History, p.53.
11
Frankl, The Gothic, p.496.
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