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

and lengthened perspective’. 100 To bolster his opinion that ‘there are no sufficient reasons
for the intrusion of complaint’ Britton cited Gilpin’s endorsement of the ‘able hands’ of
Mr Wyatt. 101 He also noticed, without comment, the removal of the Hungerford chantry
which he believed, wrongly, to have been done by ‘the present Earl of Radnor’, who had
in fact only removed the screens. 102 Since, however, this was the very same Earl of
Radnor to whom Britton’s book was dedicated and whose ‘attention to the general
interests of literature’ had been so beneficial to Britton in particular, it was not to be
expected that his presumed architectural interventions would be censured. 103
Dependent on vergers, clergymen and wealthy patrons to allow him into buildings
and archives to gather the material for his books and then for support to get them into
print, Britton could not afford Milner’s principles. In the Beauties of 1814, however, he
changed his mind about Salisbury, attacked the organ screen as ‘a discordant piece of
patchwork’ 104 and lamented the removal of the tombs which had ‘suffered greatly … as
in re-erecting them various portions of the same, or of separate monuments, have been so
confounded, or blended with each other, that it is difficult to appropriate them to their
respective possessors’. 105 He now, like Milner, found the ‘heterogeneous mass of the
most dissimilar style’ of reassembled fragments, offensive. 106
Britton was by this time better informed and this no doubt influenced his opinion,
but he had also changed his mind about Dodsworth, who was still verger. The income
which Dodsworth derived from showing the ‘splendid and interesting Cathedral’ to
visitors, enabled him to live ‘in a genteel style’ as Britton noted somewhat sourly and in
his considerable leisure time he was working on a book which appeared in 1818, directly
‘in opposition’ to Britton’s own proposed publication. 107 This caused a predictable strain
in relations not least as Dodsworth had poached some of Britton’s artists. As late as 1850
100
Britton, Beauties of Wiltshire, (1801),1, p.58.
101
Britton, Beauties of Wiltshire, (1801),1, p.58
102
Britton, Beauties of Wiltshire, (1801),1, p.65.
103
Britton, Beauties of Wiltshire, (1801),1, dedication page
104
Britton, Beauties of England and Wales, 21, p.170.
105
Britton, Beauties of England and Wales, 21, p.171.
106
Britton, Beauties of England and Wales, 21, p.171-2.
107
Britton, Autobiography, (1850), 2, p.123.
64