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

close to accidental satire. The juxtapositions of high art and knick-knack teeter on bathos, the
anecdotes strain credulity and the overall impression is not as far as Dibdin must have intended
from William Combe’s verses, published twenty years earlier, to accompany Thomas
Rowlandson’s ‘The Antiquarian and Death’:
Well I am going, (Fungus said)
As Lawyer Sly approach’d the bed…
To my old friend Sir Edmund Plumb,
I leave the Eighth King Harry’s thumb:
’Tis well preserv’d; -in gold ’tis set,
At top and bottom tipp’d with Jet;
And I can prove, by word and date,
And other documents of weight,
That Cromwell, for he oft abus’d it,
As a Tobacco-stopper us’d it. 25
The staff of Regiomontanus is little more plausible than Henry VIII’s thumb and Dibdin’s
description indeed proved easier to relate to literature than to life. ‘All absolute Bedlam’ was
Douce’s tart response when he read it, ‘not one of these articles do I possess or know anything
about them.’ 26
Moving towards the other end of the continuum, past Scott as it were, (for the moment),
we come to those for whom the inhabitation of the past through objects was more, or less, than
art, those for whom there was no self-conscious or ironic distinction between their sense of self
and their creation. Edward Willson may have been one such. His obituary in The Builder, written
by Britton and largely devoted to Britton’s own importance in Willson’s career, refers to him as
a ‘bibliomaniac’ who had ‘filled his house –mostly through my agency and mediation- with
tomes of all sizes and ages’. 27 The catalogue of his post-mortem sale in November 1854 lists
three hundred and ninety five lots of books. These are followed by prints, paintings, ‘ancient and
25 Combe, The English Dance of Death, 1, p.15.
26 Quoted in Joliffe, The Douce Legacy, p.20.
27 Britton, ‘Edward James Willson’.
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