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

this dissertation. It would be misleading to suggest that it was a necessary concomitant of
antiquarian activity. The romantic interior required a suspension of disbelief and if its presence
was expressive of the personality of its creator, so its absence would also be a reliable indicator
of intellectual temperament. To some antiquaries this passion for imaginative interaction with the
past by recreating it in physical form, appeared a positive menace to the historical enterprise.
On a continuum from scepticism to enthusiasm we must surely place John Lingard and
Robert Willis at the former extreme. I have found no descriptions of the rooms in which they
lived and worked. This in itself suggests that they were of no particular significance to their
owners and it would be surprising, given their commitment to objectivity in their studies, if
either of them viewed the notion of the romantic interior as anything other than absurd. Lingard’s
exasperation with A W N Pugin, who was building a new chapel in the Gothic style at the
seminary at Ushaw in County Durham, of which Lingard had been President, reveals his
impatience with Pugin’s determination to reproduce what he imagined a medieval chapel would
have been. Sending a donation to the building fund in September 1843 Lingard wrote briskly:
‘One thing I will beg that you will not suffer yourselves to be bamboozled with Pugins whims, or
build a church fit for monks of the 14th century instead of ecclesiastical students of the
present.’ 14 This taken with his view of Macaulay’s narrative history as ‘abounding in claptrap’
suggests that he was highly unsympathetic to the antiquarian interior. 15
Towards the centre of the continuum Scott himself presents an unsurprisingly close
match to the popular image. The Antiquary’s Cell could be seen as an only slightly heightened
version of his arrangements at Abbotsford. Indeed Cooke, and his audience, may well have had
in mind William Allan’s Sir Walter Scott in his Study [fig: 36] painted four years earlier. In
Allan’s painting Scott occupies the essential carved ‘oaken’ chair, he studies a parchment, in this
case Mary Queen of Scots’s proclamation of her marriage to Darnley, and is surrounded by
armour and objects in which historical and personal significance combine by association with his
14
Lingard to the Rev Robert Tate, 27 September 1843, Typescript copy of ‘Letters of John Lingard to Rev Robert
Tate’, Ushaw College, Durham.
15
Lingard to John Walker, 27 December 1848, quoted in ‘J Peter Phillips, ‘Lingard, John (1771–1851)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2008
[http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.londonlibrary.co.uk/view/article/16727, accessed 18 Jan 2011]
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