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

face amidst solemn azure and fleecy vapours, then the effect is still more awful and impressive; the
enthusiastic spectator is riveted to the scene; his mind wanders in reveries of delight; and his enraptured
imagination ‘darts from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven’, in rapid and daring flights.. Should the
deep-toned organ sound at such a moment, and reiterate its solemn music through the ailes [sic], the effect
would be infinitely augmented. 98
In his text for The Cathedral Antiquities Britton went to greater length and into
more detail than had been possible with the Beauties, backing his account with an
academic apparatus that included footnotes, an index and a bibliography. The result was a
synthesis of existing material. There was, however, no speculation on the questions of
origin and nomenclature of the Gothic such as preoccupied Milner, Willson and many
others at the time. Britton was rigorous about the information he presented but made no
claims to original scholarship. It was the quality of the plates, for which Britton was
responsible in the sense of recruiting and in some cases training, the most talented artists
he could find as well as the engravers John and Henry Le Keux, the accessibility of the
text, with its anecdotes of the famous people buried in the cathedral and the presentation
of the work as a serial publication, covering all the cathedrals, that ensured its value and
its success, from which ‘the proprietors ultimately derived a considerable profit’. 99 It was
aimed at that polite public, who would be as bored as Britton by too many technicalities
or speculative antiquarian debate on the origins of the pointed arch, but who now
required more than a generalised perspective view to satisfy their taste and curiosity.
If it was polite, however, Britton’s writing was not bland. It was always personal
and markedly so on the subject that first brought Salisbury to contemporary antiquarian
notice, the notorious ‘improvements’. Britton’s vacillating attitude to these may show a
real change of mind, it certainly shows a developing aesthetic, but it no doubt also reveals
the practical constraints on the professional antiquary. In his first description of Salisbury
in 1801, in a book confusing entitled The Beauties of Wiltshire, but not part of the series
of Beauties, Britton heartily endorsed the alterations, claiming, as Shute Barrington and
Dodsworth had, that the removal of the screens enhanced the sublime effect of ‘space,
98 Britton, The Cathedral Antiquities, 2, p.68.
99 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), 2, p.127.
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