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

‘veritable épopée de notre âge’ [the true epic of our time]. 109 Its influence on Notre Dame de
Paris will be discussed later, but its peculiarly contemporary character was, I would suggest, due
largely to its use of a past already familiar by way of antiquarianism, its conscious deployment of
the antiquarian repertoire of references and its development of that vocabulary into narrative.
With its knights and tourneys, castles, archery contests and elaborate costumes Ivanhoe must
have seemed to its first British readers as if the popular topography of the age had come to life,
as if they were walking through Britton’s Architectural Antiquities in three dimensions.
(Conisburgh Castle, which sees the climax of the action and is described in considerable detail in
Ivanhoe, features in Volume Four of the Antiquities, published in 1814.)
Scott emphasised this relationship to antiquarianism quite deliberately, introducing
readers to the story by way of it. This was, not, however, antiquarianism as Dawson Turner
invoked it, citing the actual works of Douce, Ducarel or other modern authors. Scott led his
readers into his novel via a labyrinth of intertwining fictions, all of them his own. Writing still
anonymously as the Author of Waverley he took for the introduction or ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ to
Ivanhoe an alias, Laurence Templeton. 110 The Epistle is addressed to Dr Drysasdust FAS, whom
readers would remember from The Antiquary. It assures Dryasdust that what follows is not to be
a mere fiction, one of the ‘idle novels and romances of the day’ such as the one in which
Drysasdust’s ‘learned northern friend, Mr Oldbuck of Monkbarns’ was so unlucky as to
feature. 111 It is ‘a work designed to illustrate the domestic antiquities of England’ 112 and its lost
‘traditions and manners’. 113 The work of the antiquary, Templeton suggests, is to reanimate the
past and he returns to the imagery of ghosts and battles, suggesting that Robin Hood’s name ‘if
duly conjured with’ would summon him up although, he concedes, to raise the English past is
more difficult since it is more remote from present day life than the Scottish. 114 The Scottish
antiquary could, like Lucan’s witch walking over the battlefield, ‘select for the subject of
resuscitation… a body whose limbs had recently quivered with existence’. 115 In lighting on such
109
Quoted in Dargan, ‘Scott and the French Romantics’, p 605.
110
This was true only in Britain. In France his work was published from the beginning under his own name.
111
Scott, Ivanhoe, p.5.
112
Scott, Ivanhoe, p.5.
113
Scott, Ivanhoe, p.6.
114
Scott, Ivanhoe, p.6.
115
Scott, Ivanhoe, p.7.
135