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

study of the last forty years’ offering his thoughts at the start of a new reign on the
changes those decades had brought. 154
Looking back on his early meetings with the eminent figures such as Nash,
Repton and Wyatt who first inspired his enthusiasm Britton found that ‘those times, and
those men, were exceedingly unlike any of the present age’. 155 He still admired Gilpin,
‘this once popular author and estimable man’ but found his works ‘now seldom referred
to’ 156 while Nash, dedicatee of the first volume of the Specimens but dead since 1835,
was an architect in whom there was ‘very little to praise’, having shown ‘a lamentable
want of taste [and]… an equal lack of good sense and discretion’ in his work’. 157 Britton,
a bellwether for popular opinion, was reflecting the general revulsion that the early
Victorians felt for the Regency. Now, when it came to Wyatt’s restorations, he was
prepared to damn him at least at Durham, though he was still coy about Salisbury having
perhaps at last decided that discretion might be the better part of valour on a subject so
peculiarly vexed within his own oeuvre.
In the place of the discredited Georgians, the new age offered, Britton believed,
improvements in both topography and architecture. The dull books that had so
discouraged him at the beginning of his career, works in which ‘the topographer rarely
noticed either the dates or the architectural features of ancient buildings’ concentrating
instead on ‘tomb-stone inscriptions … [and] the number of bells in parish towers’ 158 had
given way to the ‘erudite topographers of the present age’ such as himself, whose works
comprised ‘valuable and authentic materials… as well as profound reflections and
deductions’. 159 While placing himself prominently in this picture of improvement Britton
looked out more broadly and declared, with some justice, that ‘a new architectural era has
recently commenced in England’. 160 The Institute of British Architects had received its
154
Britton, Graphic Illustrations with Historical and Descriptive Accounts of Toddington, p. xi.
155
Britton, Graphic Illustrations with Historical and Descriptive Accounts of Toddington, p. xiii.
156
Britton, Graphic Illustrations with Historical and Descriptive Accounts of Toddington, p. 22.
157
Britton, Graphic Illustrations with Historical and Descriptive Accounts of Toddington, p. 21.
158
Britton, Graphic Illustrations with Historical and Descriptive Accounts of Toddington, p. 41.
159
Britton, Graphic Illustrations with Historical and Descriptive Accounts of Toddington, p. 42.
160
Britton, Graphic Illustrations with Historical and Descriptive Accounts of Toddington, p. xiv.
79