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

publications such as Storer’s there were also the works of Walter Scott. His Border
Antiquities, ‘that lumbering Essay’ as he later decried it, appeared in 1814, the same year
as the first Cathedral Antiquities. 111 Scott’s second venture into documentary
antiquarianism, the Provincial Antiquities, was published in 1826. Between the two,
however, had come the novels. Ivanhoe, The Abbot, Woodstock and The Monastery had
all appeared and it was these (with The Fair Maid of Perth, published in 1828) that
Eastlake later thought Scott’s most important contribution to stimulating interest in
Gothic architecture, bringing to it in fictional form exactly that combination of ‘reality’
and ‘romance’, authenticity and illusion that Britton offered:
[Gothic architecture] forms the background to some of the most stirring scenes which the author depicts. It
invests with a substantial reality the romances which he weaves. It is often intimately associated with the
very incidents of the plot. 112
By 1826 John Constable had already embarked on the series of paintings of
Salisbury Cathedral that would culminate in the view exhibited at the Royal Academy in
1832, showing it under a stormy sky with a rainbow, a symbol of the Church of England
menaced by Reform [fig: 16]. 113 The cathedral had now become much more than a focus
for antiquarian argument, it had come to symbolise something of England itself. That
same year William Cobbett on his rural rides reflected the now frequently heard view that
the Age of Improvement was not all it might be that, as Milner had suggested, the past
held lessons for the present and that these could be read in its architecture:
For my part, I could not look up at the spire and the whole of the church at Salisbury without feeling that I
lived in degenerate times. Such a thing never could be made now. We feel that, as we look at the building.
It really does appear that if our forefathers had not made these buildings we should have forgotten, before
now, what the Christian religion was! 114
111
Scott, Journal, p.362.
112
Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival, p.112 .
113
The significance of the image to contemporaries is discussed in Vaughan, John Constable, pp.63-70.
114
Cobbett, Rural Rides, p.397.
66