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

antiquarian activities, both are and are not about Abbotsford, and are or are not to be taken
seriously’. 66 This is true so far as it goes but I would suggest that Scott was using the irony for
rather different purposes here in a text that was not a novel (albeit as Hewitt points out given the
three-volume format) but develops out of fiction into documentary fact and finishes as
autobiography. The false scents laid in the ‘Introduction’, ‘Proem’ and ‘Preface’ through which
the reader passes, like a series of air locks, before getting to the main text are there to protect the
author who is, in the main text, unmistakeably present in propria persona.
The most striking indication of this is in the unremarkable, and by Hewitt unremarked,
part of the title, which Scott’s lexicographic shenanigans concerning the rest of it effectively
obscure, ‘the late Jonathan Oldbuck Esq.’. Oldbuck, the original antiquary, Scott’s fictional alter
ego, is, we now learn, dead and it is the imminence of death hanging over the Reliquiae that
gives it its powerful poignancy. Before he died, we are told, Oldbuck tried to get a friend to write
about his collection, but the friend refused, as Scott had earlier refused, on the grounds that it
would be ridiculous: ‘Remember the fate of Woodward who brought every wit in London upon
his head by his antiquarian essays.’ 67 What we are presented with instead is supposedly the
account he himself left of his gabions, yet the narrator explicitly distinguishes himself from
Oldbuck. Who is this then, who has transferred the Oldbuck collection from Monkbarns to his
own home and now takes the reader on a tour of it? It must, of course, be Scott though this is left
unclear. The incoherence in the narrative mechanism at this point may be due to the author’s
failing health. It may also be a product of his reluctance, even after so much subterfuge, to
emerge fully unmasked into his own text.
Despite and because of its weaknesses and incompleteness the Reliquiae is an affecting
work. Beginning with extracts from Burns’s verses on Grose then Adamson’s Threnodie Scott is
not only reprising the literary tradition of making play with antiquarianism, he is also selecting
poems that are elegies, laments for individual antiquaries who, like Oldbuck, are dead.
Everywhere in the text Scott’s endemic cheerfulness is shot through with intimations of
impending mortality. It is in his collection, his gabions that he will survive and they, in turn,
66 Scott, Reliquiae Trotcosienses, p. xv.
67 Scott, Reliquiae Trotcosienses, p.21.
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