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

His researches were discouraging, however, for he found all the standard works,
Camden’s Britannia, Gough’s Magna Britannia, King’s Munimenta Antiqua and the rest
‘dull and uninviting. They seemed to trifle on trifling matters, and affected much parade
of learning… I became rather bewildered than enlightened’. 83 Repelled by the dry
pedantry that he, like most people, associated with antiquarian writing, it was the popular
literature of the Picturesque that awoke his enthusiasm as it did that of so many of his
contemporaries. Starting with A Walk Through Wales, in August 1797, by the Reverend
Richard Warner, an immensely successful book that rapidly went through four editions
and generated the unimaginatively titled sequel, A Second Walk Through Wales in August
and September 1798, Britton discovered a genre unencumbered by ‘technical terms…
dull details of genealogy, manorial and parochial history, and useless lists of rectors and
vicars’. 84 Mr Warner’s ‘fluent, familiar, and pleasing style; clear and vivid in its
descriptions, entertaining in its anecdotes’ was much more to his taste. 85
He went on to read Gilpin and the works of Knight, Price and Humphrey Repton
as they appeared, indeed he became so caught up in the controversy that broke out
between the latter three that, typically, he decided to go and visit all the ‘literary
belligerents’ personally. 86 The ‘pedestrian tour’ he made in the summer of 1798 was the
first of many strenuous journeys undertaken in the production of books that combined
popular picturesque topography with architectural antiquarianism. 87 It was a project that
would occupy Britton for the rest of his life. In time, like his audience, he became more
demanding. The details came to seem less dull, but the anecdotes were still of interest and
sensibility was of the essence.
Britton’s self-propelled trajectory took him and Brayley from topography towards
an ever closer focus on medieval architecture. The series of the Beauties of England and
Wales, (1801-16) which they wrote for the publishers Vernor and Hood, soon became a
83 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), 1, p.135.
84 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), 1, p.136.
85 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), 1, p.136.
86 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), 1, p.137.
87 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), 1, p.137.
58