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

Figure 16 Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, by John Constable, 1831
Reviewing Britton’s Cathedral Antiquities in the Quarterly Review Robert
Southey now poet laureate saw the new interest in the past as in itself an endorsement of
the present. The word ‘improvement’ occurs often in his essay though not in connection
with the Wyatt style of intervention. Alterations of that sort were undertaken, Southey
wrote, ‘in the spirit of those times when alterations of Shakespeare were perpetrated, not
merely with impunity, but with applause, by Shadwell, Nahum Tate and Colley
Cibber’. 115 Wyatt was now dead and just months before Southey’s review appeared, in
December 1825, the tower of his fantastic house for William Beckford, Fonthill, in
Wiltshire had collapsed, taking with it, not entirely justly, the last of Wyatt’s reputation.
It was an incident Southey did not forbear to mention. He was willing only to concede
that something had been learned from the ‘injury’ done to Salisbury, admiring by contrast
the ‘beautiful’ and more sensitive restoration work now taking place at Winchester,
directed by William Garbett. 116 Renewed pride in the architecture of the Middle Ages
was for Southey ‘one proof of national improvement in feeling as well as in taste and
knowledge’. 117
As far as Britton’s publications were concerned it was in the illustrations that
Southey found the most ‘surprizing improvement’, ‘as much more faithful as they are
115
‘Britton’s Cathedral Antiquities’, Quarterly Review, 34, (1826), pp. 305-49, p.306. The article is
unsigned but Britton attributes it to Southey in his Autobiography (1850), [1, p.247] and there is no reason
to doubt him. Southey was a principal contributor to the Quarterly at the time.
116
Southey, ‘Britton’s Cathedral Antiquities’, p.348.
117
Southey, ‘Britton’s Cathedral Antiquities’, p.305.
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