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

exhortations to accuracy and appeals to the ‘excitement of imagination’ as well as
references to Payne Knight. 139
In the Examples, however, Willson took a different tack. The highly coloured
evocations of the past in relation to specific buildings disappeared. The individual
Examples are not summoned up as Hampton Court is in the Specimens, with that ‘train of
affecting incidents, which crowded almost two centuries of history’ and so on. 140 These
flourishes, in Britton’s style, were surely among his revisions for the press. Left to his
own devices Willson developed quite a different line of imagery, one he had put forward
at the end of his first essay, where he compared Gothic to a dead language, which could
only be learned by working from ‘original examples’. 141 This need not, he added, mean
mere imitation for just as a scholar might put forward an original argument in Greek so
an architect, once steeped in medieval sources, might make an original modern building.
It was a subtle variant on the image of the building as text, put forward by Thomas
Kerrich and later much elaborated by Victor Hugo in Notre Dame de Paris. 142 In 1831
Willson pursued the analogy, comparing the Examples to the rest of the antiquary’s stock
in trade: ‘personal memoirs, original letters, wills, or other documents of genuine
history’. 143 Modern books of Gothic designs were, on the other hand, he wrote, ‘fictitious
narratives’ and while Willson was careful to say that he wanted no ‘invidious
competition’ between the two, the clear implication is that he prefers the genuine to the
fictitious. 144 What this meant in his case was not a diminution of sensibility, the triumph
of archaeology over romanticism, but the complete fusion of the two, for as an architect
Willson could speak and compose in the language, he could write the books as well as
read them.
139
Pugin and Willson, Specimens of Gothic Architecture, 2, p. xviii.
140
Pugin and Willson, Specimens of Gothic Architecture, 2, p.1.
141
Pugin and Willson, Specimens of Gothic Architecture, 1, p. xx.
142
See Buchanan, ‘Robert Willis and the Rise of Architectural History’, p.185 for the origins of the image
which later became current among antiquaries.
143
Pugin and Willson, Examples of Gothic Architecture, 1, p.vii.
144
Pugin and Willson, Examples of Gothic Architecture, 1, p.vii.
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