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

his own family which his guardian sold off and for which he has long searched. In a variant on
the familiar trope of antiquaries mistaking inscriptions, the broker spins a yarn about the Kist,
claiming it to have been the casket which held the heart of St Clare, looted by the dealer himself
when he was in Egypt with Napoleon’s army. The narrator reveals its true source, hurries up
Wardour Street with his trophy and when he gets the Kist home finds in it, in a secret
compartment, a manuscript, which yields the next stage of the narrative. Truth, for a second time,
is made to emerge from an environment of fakery and lies.
The imitation of Scott extends to the use of lengthy footnotes of the sort with which their
author increasingly encumbered the Waverley novels in later editions. Indeed the Sobieski
Stuarts’ notes, at three hundred pages, are slightly longer than the narrative they supposedly
support. Here, in the dialogue between two levels of text, there is another opportunity for truth
and fiction to be presented in counterpoint. A series of notes on ‘Antiques’ deals with the various
objects mentioned in the text, which include the Holy Grail and the Enchanted Spindles from the
bed on King Solomon’s ship. The authors deploy their antiquarian researches in a perfectly
straightforward way to discuss the history and mythology of such curiosities, thereby adding yet
another facet to their dazzling confection of truth and imagination. The spindles are dismissed as
being ‘among those fables which so unhappily intermix in the machinery of old romances’. 64 At
this point the authors, one cannot help feeling, are sailing extremely close to the wind, though
whether through audacity or in the hope of leaving open an escape route down which they could
retreat under a plea of its all having been a clearly signalled fiction, is impossible to know. If the
latter was the case, they failed. The note that purports to account for the ‘missing years’ in the
life of Charles Edward Stuart, which covers Thomas Allen’s supposed conception and birth, was
judged by Skene and others to be as fabulous as the spindles and its effect on the machinery of
this particular romance was fatal.
By the time Tales of the Century appeared Scott had been dead for fifteen years. The
book would no doubt have exasperated him. Yet the brothers’ complete identification with their
romantic interior might not have seemed so alien to Scott in his later years when, towards the end
of his life, he changed his mind about the advisability of publishing an account of Abbotsford
64 Sobieski, Tales of the Century, p.186.
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