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

published works have largely been subsumed in a marsupial relationship to those of his
collaborators, the over-powering John Britton and the more famous A C Pugin. 128
As the son of a master builder who became a craftsman and architect without
serving formal articles (something which was far from uncommon at the time), Willson
arrived at the same position as Britton and Milner but from the opposite direction, that is
he came to antiquarianism via architecture rather than the other way around during a
period when the borders between the two occupations were fluid. A chance meeting some
time between about 1800 and 1807 with Britton in Lincoln cathedral, where Willson was
‘occupied in carving some of the fine stall work’ led to a friendship. 129 Willson was
already steeped in the history of the cathedral and the neighbouring antiquities and
Britton, with characteristic condescension took him under his wing. ‘The young
topographer and his younger pupil’ remained in touch and Britton encouraged Willson to
try his ‘inexperienced pen’, thereby securing some scholarly material for the Beauties
which Britton ‘revised for the press.’ 130
Willson’s writings, as Pevsner recognised, made a genuine contribution to the
debates on origins and terminology of the Gothic. His account of medieval architecture is
quietly authoritative, revealing a wide knowledge of current theories and a clear,
unpolemical but critical intelligence. Writing in the 1820s and ’30s as the ‘battle of the
styles’ between Greek and Gothic architecture got under way Willson was notably
unpartisan, wishing not that modern Gothic should triumph, simply that it should be
good. Beyond the factual discussion of dates and architectural details Willson’s writings
reveal a thoughtful, religious and intellectually subtle character. The notion of him as
simply one of a kind, ‘spawned’ as Pevsner puts it by this phase of the Gothic Revival,
does him less than justice.
Willson wrote the text and introductory essays for the two volumes of Specimens
of Gothic Architecture which appeared in 1821 and 1823. The illustrations comprised
128
Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, p.25.
129
Britton, ‘Edward James Willson’.
130
Britton, ‘Edward James Willson’.
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