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

When St Mary’s Wreay was consecrated in December 1842 it was just as well,
perhaps, that ‘Bishop Percy and his episcopate supporters’, ‘hardly comprehended’ the
building they came to open. 195 Just three years later, after John Henry Newman’s
defection to Rome, as factions within the established church fought out their theology
over the erection of rood screens, the position of altars and the use, or not, of candles, it
would have been much more difficult to get such an unorthodox piece of architecture past
the church authorities. As it was Losh created a work of art that could not perhaps have
been produced at any other moment in which the sensibility of the early Victorian age, its
profound faith and equally profound doubts were filtered through one woman’s
engagement with history.
Robert Willis and the birth of Architectural History
If Losh represents one end of the spectrum of architectural antiquarianism in the
fusion of subjective and objective, Willis represents the other. He was the antithesis and,
in the event, the nemesis of the romantic antiquary. He had a scientific background, a
conventional if distinguished university education at Cambridge and no interest in
illusion of any sort. In 1821, having inspected Wolfgang von Kempelen’s automaton
which, it was claimed, could play chess, he published an exposé of the fraud, an account
later passed off by Edgar Allan Poe as his own. 196 In 1837 Willis became Jacksonian
professor of natural and experimental science at Cambridge. It would be wrong to depict
him as dry, or an unimaginative pedant. He was a talented musician and a compelling
lecturer who appealed to general as well as university audiences, but he was not, by any
definition, a romantic.
195
Londsdale, The Worthies of Cumbria, p.230.
196
Ben Marsden, ‘Willis, Robert (1800–1875)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford
University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2009.
[http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.londonlibrary.co.uk/view/article/29584, accessed 2 March 2011].
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