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

part of the understanding of the past gained currency at the same time as the figure of the
antiquary developed in fact and emerged in fiction.
The Antiquary in the Age of Romanticism: image, illusion and
authenticity
In discussing the lives and work of the fourteen individuals I have considered in
detail, as well as some others whose activities contrast or overlap with theirs from time to
time, my object is to demonstrate that the period from 1789 to 1851 saw the rise and
decline of a particular phase of antiquarianism. During this time, as Hugh Trevor-Roper
wrote in The Romantic Movement and the Study of History, ‘the philosophy of the
eighteenth-century historians -Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon’ was transformed into ‘the
philosophies of their nineteenth-century successors- Macaulay, Michelet, Ranke’. 31 In
discussing how this came about Trevor-Roper gives full weight to the influence of Walter
Scott, the importance of a developing empiricism and a growing interest in local, social
and medieval history. What he does not consider, in saying that Scott was ‘not a scholar’
but someone who, in Carlyle’s words ‘knew what history meant’ is that he was an
antiquary, a self-described and enthusiastic antiquary at that and that his methods and
preoccupations were typical of the antiquarianism of these years. 32
It was in fact antiquarianism that bridged the divide between Hume and Macaulay
in a period which saw another spurt in the fitful growth of the sense of the past. The
Romantic period allowed and indeed fostered a relationship with history in which the
antiquary’s peculiar combination of imagination and empiricism brought antiquarianism
into the cultural mainstream as never before or since. It flourished to such an extent that
by the mid-nineteenth century it was to some extent contributing to its own decline. A
greatly increased body of knowledge and general public interest led to professionalisation
31
Trevor-Roper, The Romantic Movement and the Study of History, p.1.
32
Trevor-Roper, The Romantic Movement and the Study of History, p.7.
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