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

antiquarian enterprise than the image of the dead reviving and moving once more among the
living, but the effect is very different in the two authors. In Scott’s poem the ghostly visitants the
night before the battle are more poignant and melancholy than frightening. Their function is to
cast the reader’s mind back in time and to broaden the field of action to Scotland and to Flodden.
In Langlois’s account, which will be discussed in more detail later, the dead are macabre. They
populate the streets of Rouen and invade the present. In this part of my study I shall first consider
Scott and his catalytic influence on France and then, by way of Victor Hugo and Langlois, the
developments in France itself.
It was four years after his first trip across the Channel that Scott published Ivanhoe. It
appeared in Paris in 1820. All nine of his previous novels had been translated and proved popular
but this one marked the beginning of the great French vogue for Scott, which peaked in 1835. 107
Ivanhoe was the first of Scott’s prose fictions to be set in the Middle Ages and the first to be set
in England rather than Scotland. It no doubt owed much of its popularity in both Britain and
France, however, to the fact that it dealt with just that Anglo-Norman past on which
antiquarianism was now shining such intense illumination. It is set during the reign of the
absentee Richard I, a period when an older generation of brave but savage Saxons was still
resisting the proud but savage Normans under the regency of Prince John, while the younger
generation, as typified by the Saxon knight Wilfred of Ivanhoe were content to be loyal to King
Richard. The happiness of the ending is not only in the marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena but in a
union symbolic of ‘harmony betwixt two races, which, since that period, have been so
completely mingled, that the distinction has become utterly invisible…the Normans abated their
scorn, and the Saxons were refined from their rusticity’. 108 The story reaches this happy
conclusion with the help of Robin Hood, Friar Tuck and the mysterious Black Knight who turns
out, inevitably, to be the Lionheart himself.
Ivanhoe expressed that view of Anglo-Norman history that so appealed to the English
and was espoused by Dawson Turner and Francis Palgrave, and it was also, for Victor Hugo, the
107
For details of Scott’s publications in France and their relative popularity see Dargan, ‘Scott and the French
Romantics’.
108
Scott, Ivanhoe, p.398.
134