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

While Alexandrina Buchanan is certainly right to question the extent to which
antiquarianism was simply mown down by a ‘scientific revolution’ 3 it is undoubtedly
true that the ‘impulse… to classify and taxonomise’ that characterised the later nineteenth
century was inimical to the antiquarianism of the romantic age. 4 In 1851 the organisers of
the Great Exhibition divided more than 100,000 exhibits representing all the works of all
the nations into thirty distinct classes. The years that followed saw the institutionalisation
and categorisation of much that had previously been of interest only to antiquaries. In
1851 work began on the building of a Public Record Office. The Royal Commission of
1850 led to a reorganisation of the British Museum as a result of which, in 1866, the
Department of British and Medieval Antiquities was opened. In 1869 the Historic
Manuscripts Commission was established, two years later the School of History was
founded at Oxford and in 1873 the History Tripos was initiated at Cambridge.
It was, however, a pyrrhic victory for antiquarianism. Its subject matter was being
taken seriously, but it was also being taken away. Lingard had shown the inadequacies of
Hume yet he was still not read in the universities for it was, ‘far from desirable that
English History should be taught [...] by a Roman Catholic’. 5 More generally to those
who, like Alfred Dunkin, a Kentish printer speaking at the first meeting of the British
Archaeological Association, believed that ‘the true antiquary does not confine his
researches to one single branch of archaeology but… aims to bring in every object to
serve the great end and purpose of a knowledge of man and of his habits and customs in
past ages’, these developments were at best a mixed blessing. 6 Academic disciplines,
museum classifications and archival categories not only divided subject matter into
discrete areas and periods, they helped to create or enforce social divisions. What Burns
had called ‘the Antiquarian trade’ was despised by the new professions, as the split
between the British Archaeological Association and the Archaeological Institute had
already demonstrated by 1850.
3
Buchanan, ‘Science and Sensibility’, p. 171.
4
Auerbach, The Great Exhibition, p.99.
5
M. Burrows, ‘Inaugural Lecture’, 1862, quoted in Levine, The Amateur and the Professional, p.138.
6
Quoted in Levine, The Amateur and the Professional, p. 13.
273