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

armour and that the spangled pantaloons he had obtained from a theatrical costumier in response
to an order for chain mail would not do.
It is not surprising perhaps that in the years between his first King John and Victoria’s bal
costumé Planché increasingly came to see costume as history and history itself as the story of
dress. In the introduction to the History of British Costume which he published in 1834 he wrote
that ‘the true spirit of the times is in nothing more perceptible than in the tone given to our most
trifling amusements’, a tone raised in the theatre in recent decades he believed by ‘the research,
intelligence, and industry’ of those authors who had made historical studies popular. 83 Although
they fall outside the scope of this discussion, it should be remembered that the improvements in
costume had been matched by parallel developments in scenery and props. At Covent Garden the
Grieve family were responsible for settings which enhanced Planché’s and others’ costumes and
‘enraptured their contemporaries’ with the mixture of antiquarian detail and spectacular effect. 84
A striking instance of the truth of Planché’s claims for the increasingly educated taste of
audiences was the Grieves’ designs for Charles Kemble’s 1831 production of Henry VIII, in
which the west front of Westminster Abbey appeared as it looked in 1533, that is without the
towers, which were added by Hawksmoor in the eighteenth century and would by then have been
noticed and objected to as an anachronism. 85
By the same token, in Planché’s account, the study of dress was valuable not only for its
improving effects on the theatre but in itself, for it ‘sheds light upon manners and rectifies dates,
stamps the various events and eras in the most natural and vivid colours indelibly on the
memory’. 86 This claim to popular acceptance was amply demonstrated by the fact that his
History was published as a modestly priced volume in Charles Knight’s Library of Entertaining
Knowledge, ‘Under the supervision of the society for the diffusion of useful knowledge’, proof
in itself that ‘the days are gone by when archaeological pursuits were little more than the
harmless but valueless recreations of the aged and the idle’. 87 Now ‘the historian, the poet, the
83 Planché, History of British Costume, p.xi.
84 Rosenfeld, ‘The Grieves’, p.111.
85 Rosenfeld, ‘The Grieves’, p.109.
86 Planché, History of British Costume, p.xi.
87 Planché, History of British Costume, p.xi.
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