Richard Gough: scholar, antiquary and man of violence

The British Antiquities are now in the Artist’s hands; all his visionary contemplations, relating to his own country and its ancient glory, when it was as it again shall be, the source of learning and inspiration.—WILLIAM BLAKE(1)

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, interest in antiquities developed into the common pursuit of the educated man: Bishop Thomas Percy was collecting his Reliques; Thomas Warton collecting materials for histories of Winchester and of Kidlington, writing a history of English poetry, and exposing the forgeries attributed to Thomas Rowley; John Sherwen collecting materials to establish the authenticity of the Rowley poems; Horace Walpole assembling a catalogue of the works of royal and noble authors; John Nichols preparing his monumental history of Leicestershire; Joseph Ritson contributing to the creation of a real scholarly study of folk song and the ballad tradition; Francis Douce reviving interest in village traditions such as games and mummers' plays; and all of these men, along with almost everyone who was doing any writing at all, were looking up information for each other, copying inscriptions, collecting anecdotes, and writing innumerable letters.(2)

Blake scholars have long been engaged in an illuminating discussion of the way Blake and the other Romantics used in their works the often wonderfully perverse conclusions of contemporary antiquaries and mythologists such as Stukeley, Bryant, and the rest.(3) My concern here is with the intersection of Blake’s life and work with that of a more sober figure, Richard Gough. Gough’s life is exceptionally well-documented. And some details of Gough’s life can illumine that of the obscurer William Blake.

An antiquary, in the late eighteenth-century application of the term, was basically a writer of local histories of towns, counties, parishes, abbeys, or even of individual churches, houses, or monuments; he was an antiquary because he was dedicated to the preservation of antiquities. The antiquaries were, then, a group with wide and diverse interests: a cross section of the educated class. They were historians, novelists, medievalists, and letter writers. They were bishops and parish priests, nobles and commoners of any business or profession. The uniting force, the effort to preserve the past, threw them into communication with each other.

Unknown artist, Richard Gough, portrait. Engraving by R. Sawyer (1786).

Richard Gough was the most eminent antiquary of the eighteenth century; without his forceful personality, English antiquarian studies would have developed a lot less than they did. A brief modern biography, by Philip Whittemore and Chris Byrom, and currently unobtainable, is all there is.(4)  His friend and publisher, John Nichols, printed a lengthy obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, which he extended slightly in his Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth-Century. Every subsequent writer has done little more than borrow from Nichols. It’s not as though there is no material available. I estimate there are a couple of thousand surviving letters, scattered in record offices throughout Britain; the Bodleian Library in Oxford contains diaries, notebooks, manuscripts of unpublished works, and annotated copies of his books; and there’s another sequence of private papers in the British Library.

Gough was a man who devoted his life to topographical study, and a major contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine. He avidly collected books, papers, and prints, obliged to assemble for himself the materials which he needed for his work. When he died in 1809, his topographical collections enormously enriched the Bodleian Library.

●

Richard Gough was a Londoner, born in 1735. His mother was a brewer’s heiress; his father had travelled in China and commanded an East Indiaman before becoming a member of Parliament. Harry Gough, by then a director of the East India Company, died in 1751, leaving his son Richard the prospect of considerable wealth.

Gough Park. Wood-engraving. From W. Robinson, The History and Antiquities of Enfield. London, 1823. The family home was demolished some time after 1900, and a planned replacement building never built. Today, the area known as Gough Park still survives as allotments. 

Gough commented on his younger self:

One of the most prominent features in his character was, an insatiable thirst for Literature; and particularly … the study of our National Antiquities. Young as he was at the time of his Father’s death … not having then attained his 16th year; an only son, with the certainty of inheriting a plentiful fortune; his attention was principally turned to the improvement of his mind, and the foundation of a noble Library. Hence the pleasurable diversions of the age to him had little charms. The … auction-rooms of the two Sams, Baker and Paterson, had beauties far transcending the alluring scenes of fashionable dissipation.(5)

Gough makes his first appearance in the bibliographic record in 1741, when the six-year-old Richard Gough was a subscriber to Thomas Boreman’s Gigantick Histories:

Between 1740 and 1743, the bookseller Thomas Boreman published a series of miniature books from his bookstall, “near the two Giants” in the Guildhall. The series now known as The Gigantick Histories were among the first books claiming to “join instruction with delight”. The charm of the books for us now lies in their size and the lists of child subscribers at the beginning of each volume.

The subscribers to the History of St. Paul’s included one “Master Richard Gough”: a rather solemn little boy, a very serious-minded six-year-old, already it seems collecting books and subscribing to topographical volumes. He was too, a little boy who looked after his books, since, sixty years later he was able to give his set of the Gigantick Histories to his godson, John Gough Nichols.

Gough also began early as a published author, or at least as translator. At a young age he began a work which was printed under the title of The History of the Bible, translated from the French, by R. G., Junior, 1746. Twenty-five copies were privately printed at his mother’s expense for distribution to family and friends; and the colophon proudly declares that the translation, made from a work by David Martin (Amsterdam, 1700), was “done at twelve years and a half old”.(6)

To the 612 folio pages of his translation, Gough adds his own original contribution: “A Short Chronology of the Holy Scripture”, of 12 pages. This is to become the hallmark of Gough’s work as an antiquary, bringing order to historical studies through the compilation of chronologies, bibliographies, lists of all kinds.

Gough had been brought up a Presbyterian, and the master of his Cambridge college was particularly enjoined by his mother “not to suffer him to be matriculated, by which he avoided taking the oaths, and not to let him receive the sacrament, otherwise he was to go to the college chapel as others”.(6) In the end, he left university without taking his degree (since that would have required him to assent to the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles). In adulthood, Gough appears to have become a practising Anglican.

Leaving Cambridge in July 1756, he made an excursion to Peterborough, Croyland, and Stamford. In his history of Croyland, published long after, he calls it 

... a spot whence my career of antiquarian pursuits literally began 1756, and which I reviewed with equal if not greater pleasure last summer, having directed my pilgrimage thither once during the intervening 26 years.(7)

Similar excursions were made regularly through the different parts of England, Wales, and Scotland, from 1759 to 1771, collecting materials, noting observations, and examining with historical and critical precision all the remarkable sites of national antiquities; and until within two years of his death, he repeated his visits to spots of particular interest and curiosity. During this period, he formed an extensive acquaintance with the antiquaries of his time, which produced an equally extensive correspondence.

Gough always stresses the dependence of his antiquarian studies on his network of informants. He wrote, and assisted in the production of numerous topographical and antiquarian works, and contributed many articles to the Archæologia and the Vetusta Monumenta of the Society of Antiquaries. His friendships and network of correspondents give us the fullest evidence of how intellectual life operated in his day. His friend and Enfield neighbour, John Sherwen, recalled Gough’s generosity:

… his noble library was open to the wants and wishes of literary men. Often I have found a book in my own house long before the fatigues of the day would permit me to open it.(8)

and this despite the fact that they held firmly opposing views on the authenticity of the “Rowley” poems.

Gough’s friendships and network of correspondents give us the fullest evidence of how intellectual life operated in Blake’s day. Richard Gough, not unassisted, because he had lots of helpers, but without his forceful personality, English antiquarian studies would have developed a lot less than they did. The eighteenth-century Pevsner, Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, and National Bibliography, all rolled into one.

●

In 1768 Gough published the first edition of his Anecdotes of British Topography; a work which he had begun as an undergraduate and which he expanded to two volumes in the second edition of 1780. Gough’s British Topography contains a minute and exhaustive description of all the public records, chronicles, heralds’ visitations, printed books, manuscript collections, maps, charts, engravings, articles in periodicals, and every sort of material detailing the antiquities and topography of Great Britain and Ireland from the earliest times. He wrote in the preface:

Our enlightened age laughs at the rudeness of our ancestors, and overlooks the manners of that rank of men whose simplicity is the best guardian of antiquity. Innumerable lights may be drawn from local customs and usages, which are generally founded on some antient fact, and serve to guide us back to truth. (9)

And in the preface to the first publication of Archæologia, the journal of the Society of Antiquaries, in 1770, Gough noted that the Society was concerned with “British antiquities” and that it was interested above all in an accurate record of the past. “The arrangement and proper use of facts is HISTORY—not a mere narrative taken up at random and embellished with poetic diction, but a regular and elaborate inquiry into every ancient record and proof, that can elucidate or establish them.”

The Society’s attitude to the past was rigidly antiquarian; Gough was taking sides in the battle between Learning and Taste. His leading opponent was Horace Walpole who responded:

The antiquaries will be as ridiculous as they used to be; and since it is impossible to infuse taste into them, they will be as dry and dull as their predecessors. … Their Saxon and Danish discoveries are not worth more than monuments of the Hottentots; and for Roman remains in Britain, they are upon a foot with what ideas we should get of Inigo Jones, if somebody was to publish views of huts and houses that our officers run up at Senegal and Goree. Bishop Lyttelton used to torment me with barrows and Roman camps, and I would as soon have attended to the turf graves in our Churchyards. I have no curiosity to know how awkward and clumsy men have been in the dawn of arts or in their decay.(10)

In February 1767 Gough had been elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and not long after, in 1771, nominated Director of the Society. He remained its Director for nearly 30 years. Gough’s friends loved him for his kindness and wit; only the Walpole faction found rudeness in his quickness of mind.

Joan Evans in her History of the Society of Antiquaries writes of “ … friendly Gough … with his disinterested rage”.(11) By that she means his rage against the destroyers of ancient monuments, and, just as bad, the improvers. Gough, when Director of the London Society of Antiquaries, had used his position to object strenuously to the “improvements” that James Wyatt (1746-1813) and his nephew Jeffrey Wyattville were making in their restoration of cathedral buildings (or what the architectural historian Howard Colvin calls their “irresponsible meddling”). Gough fought hard for twenty years to keep Wyatt out of the Society and when in 1798 he was forced to admit him, he promptly resigned from the Antiquaries and maintained his stern criticism of Wyatt from outside.

But the “preservers” were defeated. Wyatt demolished Salisbury’s 14th-century bell-tower. The concern of Gough and others to “preserve” the Gothic cathedrals, and their intellectual justification of this concern, confronted the neo-classicists’ assumption to evaluate sublimity, beauty and the picturesque within their own essentially secular aesthetics.

●

William Blake was apprenticed to James Basire in 1772, and was sent to study and engrave the sculptured monuments in Westminster Abbey and other medieval churches. In his account of Blake’s time as apprentice Gilchrist mentions an incident that took place early in 1774: 

During the progress of Blake’s lonely labours in the Abbey, on a bright day in May, 1774, the Society for which, through Basire, he was working, perpetrated, by royal permission, on the very scene of those rapt studies, a highly interesting bit of antiquarian sacrilege: on a more reasonable pretext, and with greater decency, than sometimes distinguish such questionable proceedings. A select company formally, and in strict privacy opened the tomb of Edward the First, and found the embalmed body ‘in perfect preservation and sumptuously attired,’ in ‘robes of royalty, his crown on his head, and two sceptres in his hands.’ The antiquaries saw face to face the ‘dead conqueror of Scotland’; had even a fleeting glimpse—for it was straightway re-enclosed in its cere-cloths—of his very visage: a recognisable likeness of what it must have been in life. I cannot help hoping that Blake may (unseen) have assisted at the ceremony.(12)

[attributed to William Blake], Edward I in his tomb. Society of Antiquaries.

When Keynes visited the Society of Antiquaries to see the preliminary drawings supposedly by  Blake, he found two careful water colours of King Edward, first as he appeared, wrapped in his cerements, and secondly when he had been exposed by turning them aside.(13) The drawings are not signed or dated and were not engraved, but they have the same general characters as many of the other sepia water colours attributed to Blake.

Gough described the opening of the tomb in a letter sent to his long-term correspondent, the eminent Scottish antiquary and bibliographer George Paton, on 12 May 1774:

12 May 1774, Richard Gough (from Winchester Street) to George Paton. Edinburgh. National Library of Scotland: Adv. MS. 29.5.6.i, fol. 51.

A very curious discovery has lately been made here of wch an imperfect account has got into the Newspapers: but a more particular one may soon be expected from ð Society of Antiquaries. The mention in Rymer’s Fœdera of writs issued t.E.3 & H.5 & we know not yet how much later to ð abbot & convent of Westminster de cera renovanda circa corpus regis Edwardi 1 prompted Mr Barrington to see the actual state of ð royal corps at present. Having obtaind leave of ð Dean some members of ð Antiquarian Society (of whom myself was one) assisted at opening the large marble chest in wch lay a yellow stone coffin whose lid was kept down only by its own weight. On lifting this up, ð royal body was found in perfect preservation, wrapt in 3 or 4 coverings. The outermost was a coarse cloth, ð next, cloth of gold strongly waxed & as fresh as if lately done (wch seems to have been what ð order particularly intended). The corps was clothed in a rich crimson silk mantle, paned with white, having at ð intersection of ð panings gilt ornaments of this form [drawing] of chased work studded with red & blue stones & pearls: two of them larger & somewhat different lay on yt part wch fell over the hands. The mantle was fastened on ð right shoulders with a superb fibula of the same metal, chasd & adorned with 22 red & blue stones besides many pearls, & fastend by an acus headed with a fine Sapphire & screwd into 3 joints: ð whole of this form. [drawing] The face was covered with fine linnen reducd to lint, forming a mask exactly exhibiting ð features wch were like tanned leather: ð eyes moveable in ð sockets: ð nose short & small, ð upper lip prominent, ð chin firm: under ð jaws a quantity of black dust, (either flesh or spices). The hands only skin & bones (without nails) held, ð right a gilt metal sceptre surmounted by a cross fleuri, ð left, another surmounted by 3 clusters of leaves & a dove: ð head was girt with a crown fleuri of ð same metal, above wch we felt the scull: The feet were wrapt up in ð cloths but ð toes might be distinctly felt, & ð soles & heels were prominent & fleshy. The length of ð whole corps was six feet two inches. After a particular & minute view & observation ye whole was carefully reinstated & closd down more firmly than before.(14)

Blake’s patron, Benjamin Heath Malkin (whose informant was Blake himself), emphasized that Blake’s lasting enthusiasm for Gothic art was first aroused in Westminster Abbey. He writes that among “those neglected works of art, called Gothic monuments,” Blake “found a treasure, which he knew how to value. He saw the simple and plain road to the style of art at which he aimed, unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice.”(15)

Malkin and Gilchrist were certainly right to insist on the importance of this early work in Westminster Abbey and elsewhere. It determined Blake’s high valuation of Gothic art, gave him the deep historical sense so often evident in his writings, and provided ample memories for use in his paintings throughout his life, and, forty years after his visits to the Abbey, for the “visions” of historical and imaginary persons drawn for John Varley’s benefit. The apprentice was necessarily at a very impressionable age, and his mind registered his visual experiences in “sharp and wiry detail”. (16)

●

St Andrew's Parish Church, Enfield. From W. Robinson, The History and Antiquities of Enfield. London, 1823.

In Gough’s home parish of St. Andrew’s, Enfield, 1777 had seen some of the kind of alteration and “improvement” of medieval buildings which so angered Gough. Old hatchments were removed from the church, the interior whitewashed, the arch which separates the chancel from the nave enlarged, and a medieval painting of the Last Judgement over the arch thrown out. Gough never attended a service at Enfield again, but rode over every Sunday to the church at Wormley.

The Enfield “Doom”. From W. Robinson, The History and Antiquities of Enfield. London, 1823.

Gough’s rages were not always “disinterested”. J. T. Smith, assistant to the sculptor Nollekens and an Enfield neighbour of Gough’s between 1788 and 1795, provides a pen portrait of the collector:

Richard Gough. Silhouette by Schnebbelie (after 1809).

Mr. Gough, the Editor of Camden’s Britannia, was the constant frequenter of … book-sales. This antiquary … wore, when I knew him, a short shining curled wig. His coat was of “formal cut,” but he had no round belly; and his waistcoat and smallclothes were from the same piece. He was mostly in boots and carried a swish-whip when he walked. His temper I know was not good, and he seldom forgave those persons who dared to bid stoutly against him for a lot at auction: his eyes, which were small and of the winky-pinky sort, fully announced the fretful being.(17)

Smith also adds:

As for his judgment in works of art, if he had any it availed him little, being … much satisfied with the dry and monotonous manner of Old Basire.

(James Basire was Gough’s favoured engraver; and through Gough, effectively official engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. Basire’s special field of antiquarian illustration required careful attention to scale, accurate delineation of outlines, and the clear rendering of every detail.)

That swish-whip re-appears in a letter addressed by Gough to his correspondent George Paton:

I had the pleasure of seeing Ld Loughboro take his seat in the Court of Com. Pleas. His figure is pleasing, his eye penetrating & his decisions founded on great discernment. I was myself concerned in the second cause he tried, having been obliged in my own defense to exert myself beyond my usual warmth against two riotous neighbours foreigners who in the last day of the last year driving furiously from London for a wager & singing & shouting in a violent manner run me down who was on horseback & endangered my life. Provokt at this insult I cd not help giving them ð discipline of ð whip. This they were pleasd to call an assault, but their own evidence was given in such an equivocal manner as set the whole court in a laugh & his Ldp refusing to certify a Battery to ð Jury I had only one shilling damage to pay & both sides sat down with their own costs.(18)

This is Gough’s embarrassing secret: the eminent antiquary revealed as a vulgar brawler. It is curious what Gough thinks appropriate to tell his old correspondent of his private life. The previous year he had not thought it relevant to tell Paton of his marriage. But the prosecution for assault forced Gough to write, presumably to forestall any more gossipy account Paton might receive from his other correspondents, Bishop Percy, or Thomas Pennant.

Fortunately for Gough, the very month of his trial, June 1780, saw London erupt into the anti Catholic Gordon riots. Gough breaks off from his bibliographical correspondence to tell Paton of his experiences (“we seem fated”, he writes, “to have an annual Mob”). 

Gough’s weekly correspondence with George Paton continued its steady bibliographical course for thirty years interrupted from time to time by public events that demanded to be related when Gough cannot restrain himself and is impelled to give Paton the latest news. (Gough’s letters constitute an important eyewitness account of the riots, though they also contain much of the unsubstantiated rumour that swept London in those sultry June days.)

Gough’s eyewitness account begins:

Little as I am in town I was unfortunate enough to be there last Friday — witness to the extravagant Zeal of the unhappy Ld George. I saw his Partizans assembling round the H of Lds & pouring down Parliamt Street like a tide in good order & for the most part in their best cloaths as he had particularly exhorted them. I heard them give three cheers & if there cd be any pleasure in such a sight it was to hear such an uniform elevation of voices without any ill intention. But as they began to fill the coffeeroom where I was stationed & the extreme heat of the day made a croud intolerable I retreated before their violence began. Many members of both houses suffered severely by it. … Strong personal Invective was not spared. It wd have [been] happy if all had ended there. The Mob in ð evening broke into & gutted four Catholic chapels of all their furniture & ornaments wch they burnt in the streets.(19)

Gough continues his account over another three letters to George Paton, far too long to quote here. Finally, on 17th July, Gough with some satisfaction reports the savage aftermath:

The late Executions on the several spots where the Crimes were committed conducted with so much Solemnity & regularity have restored Public Tranquillity. Ten criminals have already been executed. Fifteen more are to suffer for ð same thing shortly. No other military force but the Gentlemen of the City association assisted. These marcht in solemn order at ð head of the respective processions & formed a ring round the Gallows wch effectively kept off the amazing Croud who beheld ð scene in silence. Some of the Culprits persuaded themselves they died Martyrs to the Protestant Cause & this false conceit & the Love of Plunder & Mischief seem to have been ð sole Motive to the Riots: at least [no] other has yet been confest. A considerable No of Rioters are convicted by special commission in Southwark, but no bill has yet been found against Ld G.

Such were the Gordon Riots, perhaps the most violent and the most savagely repressed of all the riots in London’s history. Gough was deeply shocked by the riots—repeatedly returning to their awful example. Though the excitement of the riots kept his own troubles out of the papers.

●

Camden’s Britannia, first published in 1586, is the foundation of antiquarian studies in Britain. Camden set out as his ambitions: “To restore Britain to its antiquities, and its antiquities to Britain, to renew the memory of what was old, illustrate what was obscure, and settle what was doubtful”. In 1789 appeared Gough’s elaborate and enlarged edition of Camden’s Britannia, in 3 folio volumes—the text translated from the Latin of Camden; which Gough accomplished, we are told, “with so little interruption of the ordinary intercourse of life, that none of his family were aware that he was at any time engaged in so laborious an undertaking”.(20)  He spared no trouble or expense in obtaining information, personally visited every county, and forwarded proof-sheets to antiquarian friends and others likely to make useful suggestions. This was seven years in translation and nine in printing, and Gough was unsparing in his efforts towards it. The third edition, on the presses and almost completed, was destroyed in a fire at his printer’s in 1808.

In 1786 appeared the first volume of Gough’s grandest work, The Sepulchral Monuments of Great Britain, collecting the materials for which had occupied a large portion of his life. The second volume, in several parts, was issued between 1796 and 1799.

One of the attractions of antiquarian study was the opportunity to explore the margins of the public narrative.(21)  Arnaldo Momigliano writes of a paradigm shift in British historiography in the eighteenth century:

What used to be secondary becomes primary. What used to be primary—wars and dynasties—becomes secondary.(22)

Richard Gough himself commented in the “Preface” to his Sepulchral Monuments:

It is not an HISTORY OF ENGLAND that is here presented to the public. … I have neither the object, the plan, nor the method of an Historian. Our materials are different, and my plan adopts only what his excludes. Great events, great personages, great characters, good or bad, are all that he brings upon his stage.

I talk of graves, of worms, of epitaphs,

And that small portion of the barren earth

That serves as paste and cover to our bones!

Here is a stay

That shakes the rotten carcase of old death

Out of his rags.

Mine are subjects rejected by the historian to the end of each reign, among the prodigies that distinguish it. Yet is this detail not uninteresting. It is a picture of private mixed with public life; a subject in which my countrymen have been anticipated by their neighbours; and if it is here treated without the patronage of religious or literary societies, it wanted not the encouragement of friends who have left the scene before the completion of a work which they some years ago pointed out and would have assisted. I avail myself of their friendship and their hints, as well as of what has been already published abroad on a similar subject.(23)

“Yet is this detail not uninteresting.” Blake put it more forcefully in his annotations to Reynolds: “Singular & Particular Detail is the Foundation of the Sublime” (E 637).

Effigy of Joice, Lady Tiptoft, in St Andrew's Church, Enfield. From Richard Gough, Sepulchral Monuments. Vol.II. Part II.

The first volume of Sepulchral Monuments deals with the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. The second volume, published in 1796, and an introduction to it in 1799, treated of the fifteenth century. Here Gough stopped instead of continuing the work to the end of the sixteenth century as he originally intended. The number and beauty of the plates, chiefly engraved by the Basire workshop, give the Sepulchral Monuments a unique interest among English books.

Gough’s ambition was the careful recording of monuments of all types—the physical record of the past no matter how crude and, in eighteenth-century terms unsuited to the polite drawing-room. In his plates for Gough, Basire’s goal was “not to exhibit his own personal style but to picture objects with all the literal fidelity his skill would permit”.(24) Gough commented:

The walk of fame for modern artists is not sufficiently enlarged. Emulous of excelling in History, Portrait, or Landscape, they overlook the unprofitable, though not less tasteful, walk of antiquity, or, in Grecian and Roman forget Gothic and more domestic monuments. … I must except from this reproach my friend BASIRE, whose praise it is to be faithful in his transcripts and modest in his prices, though it is almost a perversion of his burin, which shines so much in living portraits to employ it on Gothic ones.(25)

In the years after apprenticeship, Blake continued to engrave antiquarian illustrations which constitute a minor genre within his complete graphic works. These all show the heritage of Basire, for they are engraved with a combination of outline and bold, simple hatching patterns for background and shading. Basire’s plates for Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments often show the tombs and effigies from more than one angle. In his apprenticeship years, Blake had already begun to consider the same subject from different points of view, out of each creating distinct but interrelated works of art. Blake sketched memorial effigies from different vantage points; as Malkin wrote, “he drew in every point he could catch, frequently standing on the monument, and viewing the figures from the top”. Robert Essick suggests that though mechanically predictable views of monuments are of course far less sophisticated than Blake’s psychological perspectivism, yet the same basic mental processes generated the dual perspective offered by Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and are repeated by the engaged reader as he investigates the relationships between those contrary states.(26)

Robert Essick notes that Basire’s wholly practical, almost scientific, purpose in his archaeological illustrations parallels Blake’s aesthetic principles: to eliminate superficial illusions, including perspective and representational environments, so that the viewer’s eye and mind will focus upon those significant particulars by which we know forms to be of the same class, yet which distinguish each individual within that class.  For the engraver, he adds, these individuating shapes must be revealed primarily through a strong and accurate outline. As Blake asks in his Descriptive Catalogue, “How do we distinguish the oak from the beech, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another, but by the bounding line and its infinite inflexions and movements?” (E 450)

Basire’s special field of antiquarian illustration required careful attention to scale, accurate delineation of outlines, and the clear rendering of every detail. Many of Blake’s annotations of about 1808 to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds record the shaping influence of those exacting requirements on his own aesthetic:

To Generalize is to be an Idiot To Particularize is the “lone Distinction of Merit (E 360)

Servile Copying is the Great Merit of Copying (E 364)

General Principle(s) Again!. Unless. You Consult. Particulars. You Cannot, even Know or See Mich: Ang.o or Rafael or any Thing Else (E 634)

Without Minute Neatness of Execution. The. Sublime cannot Exist! Grandeur of Ideas is founded on Precision of Ideas (E 636)

Distinct General Form Cannot Exist Distinctness is Particular Not General (E 638)

In objecting to Reynolds’ generalising principles, Blake harks back to the values of precision and particularity, basic to all copy engraving and especially important to the accurate execution of antiquarian illustrations, he first learned in working on illustrations for Gough’s publications. Blake was to claim in the Descriptive Catalogue of 1809, “Clearness and precision have been the chief objects in painting these Pictures” (E 521). Those few brief years working for Gough in Westminster Abbey would be a permanent influence on Blake’s art.

You may recall Alan Liu’s 1990 essay on the “romanticism of detail” attacking those cultural critics who pretend to detail but terminate their lists with an etc. “In every cultural critic”, he writes, “there is an essential et cetera or similar stigma of incompletion far in excess of the margin of error requirements of normal science”.(28)

But for Gough there never is an etc. Instead, “Yet is this detail not uninteresting?” In all Gough’s writing, from the earliest, there is a staggering ambition for completeness—an endeavour to list everything. The rages, too, are part of that romanticism of bibliography that Gough shares with other antiquaries. Both Richard Gough and Joseph Ritson are noted for their rage—which often enough is Joan Evans’s “disinterested rage”—the rage of the scholar and antiquary for the accuracy, completeness and preservation that fuels bibliography.

And William Blake?

I was once looking over the Prints from Rafael & Michael Angelo. in the Library of the Royal Academy Moser came to me & said You should not Study these old Hard Stiff & Dry Unfinishd Works of Art, Stay a little & I will shew you what you should Study. He then went & took down Le Bruns & Rubens’s Galleries How I did secretly Rage. (E639)

●●

Acknowledgements.

This post has its origins in a paper (“Richard Gough, Enfield Antiquary”) read to the Edmonton Hundred Historical Society in October 1999. A Stephen Copley Research Award from the British Association for Romantic Studies enabled me to work on the Gough-Paton correspondence in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Notes.

1. Descriptive Catalogue, 40; E 542. Blake references throughout are to the Erdman text available online at https://erdman.blakearchive.org/ and are indicated with the letter E followed by page number.

2. There’s an useful introduction to this topic with biographies of many of the leading figures, including Gough, in Edward L. Hart, ed.—Minor Lives : a Collection of Biographies by John Nichols; Annotated and with an Introduction on John Nichols and the Antiquarian and Anecdotal Movements of the Late Eighteenth Century.—Cambridge MA : Harvard University Press, 1971.

3. Pioneering studies are:
Denis Saurat.—“Celts & Druids” in his Blake & Modern Thought.—London : Constable, 1929, 51-85.

Edward B. Hungerford.—“Blake’s Albion” in his Shores of Darkness.—New York, 1941, 35-62.

Ruthven Todd.—“William Blake and the Eighteenth-Century Mythologists” in his Tracks in the Snow.—London, 1946, 29-60.

4. Philip Whittemore & Chris Byrom.—A Very British Antiquary : Richard Gough, 1735–1809.—London : Wynchmore Books, 2009.

5. A Catalogue of the Entire and Valuable Library (With the Exception of the Department of British Topography, Bequeathed to the Bodleian Library) of That Eminent Antiquary, Richard Gough, Esq., Deceased; Which Will Be Sold by Auction ... On Thursday, April 5, 1810, and Nineteen Following Days, (Sunday and Good Friday Excepted) At 12 O’clock (London : Leigh & S. Sotheby, 1810), xii.
    With a biographical preface by J.N. , i.e. John Nichols.

6. [David Martin].—The history of the Bible, translated from the French, by R. G., Junior, 1746.—London : printed [by James Waugh], 1747.

7. Oxford DNB.

8. [Richard Gough].—The history and antiquities of Croyland-abbey, in the county of Lincoln.—London : printed by and for J, Nichols, 1783 [i.e. 1784], v.

9. Juanita Burnby.—John Sherwen and Drug Cultivation in Enfield.—Occasional Papers, new series; 23.—Enfield : Edmonton Hundred Historical Society, 1973, 6.

10. Richard Gough.—Anecdotes of British topography. Or, An historical account of what has been done for illustrating the topographical antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland.—London : printed by W. Richardson & S. Clark; sold by T. Payne; W. Brown, 1768, xviii.
    Cited in David Bindman.—“Blake’s ‘Gothicised Imagination’ and the History of England,” in Morton D. Paley & Michael Phillips, eds.—William Blake : Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes.—Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1973, 31.

11. Joan Evans.—A history of the Society of Antiquaries.--Oxford : Printed at the University Press by Charles Batey for the Society of Antiquaries, London, 1956.

12. Alexander Gilchrist.—Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus”.—London & Cambridge : Macmillan & Co., 1863, vol.1, 18-19.

13. Geoffrey Keynes.—Blake Studies: Essays on his Life and Work.—2nd ed.—Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1971, 25.

14. 12 May 1774, Richard Gough (from Winchester Street) to George Paton. Edinburgh. National Library of Scotland: Adv. MS. 29.5.6.i, fol. 51. There is a copy of this letter in the Glasgow. Mitchell Library: S.R. 167 (124146) Vol.1: 1771-1775.

15. Benjamin Heath Malkin.—A Father’s Memoirs of his Child.—London : Longman, 1806, xx.

16. Geoffrey Keynes.—Blake Studies : Essays on his Life and Work.—2nd ed.—Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1971, 25.

17. J.T. Smith.—A Book for a Rainy Day, or, Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833; edited by Wilfred Whiutten.—London : Methuen, [s.d.}, 110.

18. Edinburgh. National Library of Scotland: Adv. MS. 29.5.6.i [fol. 247]; copy: Glasgow. Mitchell Library: S.R. 167 (124146) Vol.3: 1780 1786

19. Edinburgh. National Library of Scotland: Adv. MS. 29.5.6.i [fol. 239]; copy: Glasgow. Mitchell Library: S.R. 167 (124146) Vol.3: 1780 1786

20. John Nichols.—“Biographical Memoirs of Mr. Gough”.—Gentleman’s Magazine (April 1809), 318.

21. Mark Salber Phillips.—“Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism : Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain”.—Journal of the History of Ideas, vol.57, no.2 (1996) 297-316.

22. Arnaldo Momigliano.—“Eighteenth-century Prelude to Mr. Gibbon” in his Sesto contributo (1980)

23. Richard Gough.— Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain applied to illustrate the History of Families, Manners, Habits, and Arts at the different periods from the Norman conquest to the seventeenth century. With introductory observations.—3 vols.—London : printed by J. Nichols, for the author, 1786-1799, “Preface”, 4.

    Gough’s reference to “what has been already published abroad on a similar subject” is to Bernard de Montfaucon.—Les monumens de la monarchie françoise.—5 vols.—Paris : chez Julien-Michel Gandouin & Pierre-François Giffart, 1729-1733.

24. Robert N. Essick.—William Blake, Printmaker.—Princeton NJ : Princeton University Press, 1980, 6.

25. Richard Gough.—Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain applied to illustrate the History of Families, Manners, Habits, and Arts at the different periods from the Norman conquest to the seventeenth century.—London : 1786-1799), “Preface”, 9.

26. Robert N. Essick.—William Blake, Printmaker.—Princeton NJ : Princeton University Press, 1980, 37.

28. Alan Liu.—"Local Transcendence : Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail."—Representations , Autumn, 1990, No. 32 (Autumn, 1990), 86.

●●