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

Royal Charter in 1837 and two years later the Cambridge Camden Society (CCS) and the
Oxford Architectural Society (OAS) came into being. These Britton hailed with
‘exultation’ as well as welcoming the various other, more modest, provincial societies
that were springing up across the country. 161
The year after Toddington appeared, 1841, was later hailed by Pevsner as the
‘annus mirabilis of the story of the Gothic Revival in England’. 162 For him this was
signalled by the publication of A W N Pugin’s True Principles of Pointed or Christian
Architecture, the first volume of the CCS journal The Ecclesiologist and by the moment
when Robert Willis ‘turned to the English cathedrals’ where, Pevsner noted, ‘he was to
achieve his greatest glory’. 163 From the point of view of architectural antiquarianism per
se, the early 1840s marked the point at which those traditions of study and practice,
passive and active involvement with the buildings of the Middle Ages, that had been
converging since 1789, met and fused into the broader movement that was the Victorian
Gothic Revival. The resulting compound had its own particular constitution. It was more
organised, as Britton noted, better established in the universities, where the CCS and to a
lesser extent the OAS wielded influence far beyond their numerical weight, in the public
mind with the New Palace of Westminster and institutionally in the Institute of British
Architects of which Britton was a fellow.
A great enthusiast for institutions, a member of many, the founder of the Wiltshire
Topographical Society which was another product of 1841, and an advocate for greater
official recognition for the ‘Literary Profession’, Britton’s hope was that these and other
professional bodies would provide the sort of structure and respectability for lack of
which he had struggled in the early years of his own career. 164 He was to be in some
degree disappointed, however, by the developments he hailed so enthusiastically. The
architectural antiquarianism of the mid-century, which marked the start of a movement
161
Britton, Graphic Illustrations with Historical and Descriptive Accounts of Toddington, p. xiv.
162
Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, p.54.
163
Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, p.56.
164
Britton, Graphic Illustrations with Historical and Descriptive Accounts of Toddington , p. ix.
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