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

e-discovery and presentation of historic artefacts to create emotional resonance, played a
central part. As ever, the intention is to discover how and why certain ideas developed
and either took root or did not, rather than to establish who was right.
While there is no doubt that the poems of Ossian, Johnson and Boswell’s accounts
of their journey to the highlands and Francis Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland, had all
reflected and encouraged a growing sympathetic curiosity about Scotland among the
English, it is equally certain that it was Scott’s first novel, Waverley or ’Tis Sixty Years
Since, that opened the floodgates of popular taste to the point where by 1825 Hazlitt
could complain that: ‘It may be asked, it has been asked, “have we no materials for
romance in England? Must we look to Scotland for a supply of whatever is original and
striking of this kind?” And we answer “yes!” ’ 52
Waverley, though often considered as an historical novel, only just fits the
definition. Begun, by Scott’s account, in about 1805 and published in 1814, it deals with
events still within living memory. ‘Neither a romance of chivalry, nor a tale of modern
manners,’ it was based on Scott’s own recollections of the stories his father’s friend and
client Alexander Steuart of Invernahyle in Argyllshire had told him. 53 Invernahyle had
been ‘out’, as aficionados say, in both the ’15 and the ’45, and his tales, Scott recalled,
‘were the absolute delight of my childhood’. 54 All of Scott’s contemporaries who had had
grandparents to tell them tales would have heard, from one side or another, about the
Jacobite risings, the most dramatic events in domestic politics in their lifetimes. Thus
they were able to share in that potent combination of national history and personal
nostalgia that Waverley, evoked.
Oral history, what Willson noted down under the heading of ‘notes collected from
the remembrance of old people’, was at this date a relatively new and peculiarly
antiquarian field of study. 55 As collectors of ballads, folk customs and dialect words
52
Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, p.106.
53
Scott, Waverley, p. 4.
54
Quoted in Claire Lamont, ‘Introduction’, Scott, Waverley, p. viii.
55
Society of Antiquaries, Willson Collections, 786/13.
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