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

Some years later in 1840, when he was commissioned to build a small Roman
Catholic church at Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire he resurrected the Slipper Chapel
in a building of substance and integrity that marked a tremendous advance, in Willson’s
own terms of historical accuracy, on Milner’s chapel of 1792. [Fig 17] It represented
also, I would argue, an intensification of the reciprocity between objective and subjective,
building and sensibility, for here the Gothic did not merely act on the beholder, it actually
came into existence out of those same impressions that it created. The architect,
inhabiting the Gothic, speaking the dead language, animated it from within. Willson,
following his own precepts, did not copy the Slipper Chapel exactly but made variations
on the theme. Having widened the west front, presumably for practical reasons, in
proportion to the height, he put in an upper window in the spherical triangle form
borrowed from Lichfield cathedral to balance the top and added a hood mould to the
lower level to avoid a blank expanse. Where, perhaps, he doubted his masons’ skills he
simplified rather than risk failure as in the mouldings around the empty niches. In the
interior the corbel heads are portraits, as medieval corbels sometimes were, and may well
represent John Exton, patron of the church, and Willson himself, physically incorporated
into that revived Gothic for which he argued.
1841: Annus Mirabilis
By the early 1830s ‘Antiquaries’, as Eastlake wrote, ‘no longer stood alone’. 146
Their interest in the Gothic and its revival was shared ‘by many professional architects of
ability and repute’, inspired by the antiquaries’ efforts. 147 Subscribers to the Specimens
and Examples now found that ‘by turning over the leaves of a convenient volume’ they
could produce a more convincing looking Gothic building than ever before. 148 The
results were not, usually, however, so happy as Willson’s efforts at Melton Mowbray and
often ‘the consequence’ as Eastlake also wrote, was that ‘an age of ignorance was
146 Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival, p.111.
147 Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival, p.111.
148 Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival, p. 89.
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