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

heroes and demigods of Greece and Rome.’ 57 Here, as early as 1815, we can see him doing
almost literally that, invading the Continent with his characters.
When he got to Paris, Scott visited Lenoir’s celebrated museum. It inspired mixed
feelings in him. His reservations were not Whittington’s, he was perfectly satisfied that Lenoir
had arranged his collection in ‘the best and fittest order’ of chronology. 58 It was on the
associational level that he was dissatisfied. For the novelist the narrative was too fragmentary, he
was too aware of the context from which the exhibits had come, comparing them to prints taken
from a book to make up a scrap album. It was the original book he wanted, the whole story and
he was later to supply it in Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward. For the moment, however, he returned
to Scotland and, within months, had completed The Antiquary the novel in which the idea of
antiquarianism as a lived relationship between past and present, enacted through artefacts,
emerged for the first time as a theme in literature.
The argument that relics, souvenirs and debris were the focus for British commemoration
of Waterloo is borne out not only by Scott’s experience, which Semmel discusses, but further
underlined by Dawson Turner’s. Turner hurried across the Channel in September when he heard
that the contents of the Louvre were being dispersed. On arrival in Dieppe he ran into Mr
Palmer, a cutler by trade and also:
Proprietor of the Waterloo museum in London, 59 who was now returning from a most successful expedition to Paris,
where he had collected more than 20 boxes containing, as he assured us ‘everything belonging to Napoleon’ besides
the carriage & wardrobe of the king of Rome, the colors [sic] made for the national guard of Elba, the Eagles for the
regiments there, a number of medals…articles, in themselves neither rich nor rare, but curious as having appertained
to the great man. 60
57
Quoted in Wright, ‘Scott’s Historical Novels and French Historical Painting’ , p.287.
58
Scott, Paul’s Letters, p.319.
59
This was at 97 Pall Mall. There were several other displays of Napoleonica nearby. See Altick, Shows of London,
p.239.
60
Turner, ‘Journal of a three weeks tour’, 1815, f10.
119