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

specific their claims they exposed themselves to wider scrutiny and the Quarterly Review’s
response to the book, an extensive essay by Professor George Skene of Glasgow University, cast
as a late review of the Vestiarium, destroyed their credibility with many of their admirers. 56 The
antiquarian relationship with history at its most imaginative had met the academic at its most
rigorous and did not survive the impact. The brothers were forced to leave Scotland and spent the
next twenty years in Austria. Yet if Tales of the Century will not stand historical analysis, it
nevertheless repays consideration for the way in which it deploys the themes of the romantic
interior, for its reliance on Scott and its relationship to Scott’s last, long-unpublished work,
which the brothers cannot have known, Reliquiae Trotcosienses.
Tales of the Century takes the conventional form of the nineteenth-century novel with a
Preface and three volumes. Its subtitle, ‘sketches of the romance of history between the years
1746 and 1846’, is taken up in the first sentence, which is a quotation from Walpole: ‘“History”,’
says Lord Orford, “is a Romance which is believed; Romance, a History which is not believed.”
’ 57 It is on this delicate tightrope of what, in Scott, would have been irony, that the authors
attempt to balance throughout the book and by and large, in literary terms, they succeed, if only
because Scott had established such a successful precedent.
The Preface first traces the etymology of ‘romance’ back to the medieval ‘Romaunt’,
which was synonymous with ‘history’. History in the modern sense, the authors argue, is a much
diminished thing. In ‘the days of chivalry’, amid ‘the gloom, the rudeness and the magnificence
of the Gothic arts, edifices, and manners’, it retained the spirit of the Romance. 58 Now it has
dwindled to ‘the dry obituary of Princes and Prelates’. 59 This is the familiar argument in favour
of antiquarianism as an historical enquiry that goes beyond the written records into the artefacts
of the past, and especially those of the Middle Ages, but here it is deployed to suggest that the
artefacts do not merely convey information about the past, they themselves shaped events and
personalities. As the Gothic declined so ‘the world…glided down into a dull and simple
narration’, towards the present and its ‘Quakerism of the mind and body’. ‘With the velvet and
56 Skene, ‘The Heirs of the Stuarts’.
57 Sobieski, Tales of the Century, p. v.
58 Sobieski, Tales of the Century, p. vii.
59 Sobieski, Tales of the Century, p. vii.
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