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

workings of this little commonweal of medieval archaeologists’ to be ‘gratifying’ not
least in their internationalism. 12 Arcisse de Caumont (1801-1873), and Henry Gally
Knight (1786-1846), were among the antiquaries he took seriously and his account of
Willis, whose paper on vaults Pevsner believed ‘established a standard of insight and
meticulous accuracy which has never since –in England or anywhere else- been
surpassed’ 13 was a direct stimulus to later research on antiquarianism. 14 Yet Frankl and
Pevsner were concerned to establish hierarchies of their own, albeit intellectual rather
than social.
For Frankl, who saw in the antiquaries’ aesthetic response to medieval
architecture something more than an infatuation with ‘the mystery of time past’, their
writings were nonetheless valuable chiefly as signposts or ‘piles driven into the morass,
so that on them could be raised the structure of modern aesthetics and stylistic theory’. 15
Britton was to Pevsner ‘a populariser rather than a scholar’ 16 while Willson, as an
untrained architect, was merely ‘One of that breed …spawned by the historicist writings
of Walpole and Essex’. 17 Pevsner was committed to a teleological view of the Gothic
Revival, seeing it as moving towards an ever greater degree of ‘correctness’ and
assessing antiquaries and antiquarian architects on the ‘maturity’ or otherwise of their
work for its date. 18 Thus Willson’s church of St Mary Louth, in Lincolnshire of 1833 ‘is
in rather enervated pre-Pugin Gothic’, while ‘at the Anglican St Mary Hainton ,
Lincolnshire (1847-8) he is already using an archaeologically correct style’. 19 Pevsner’s
view also remains influential.
Nevertheless, more recent studies, though few in number, have been concerned to
see the architectural antiquarianism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
12
Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, p.44.
13
Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, p.54.
14
Ex inf. Alexandrina Buchanan who cites Pevsner’s remarks as the starting point for her own work.
15
Frankl, The Gothic, p.446.
16
Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, p.27.
17
Pevsner, The Buildings of England, Lincolnshire, p. 69.
18
Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, p.23, referring to Georg Moller.
19 nd
The Buildings of England, Lincolnshire, Nikolaus Pevsner and John Harris, 2 edition revised by
Nicholas Antram, Harmondsworth, 1989, p. 69.
39