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

The change of sensibility found expression in fiction. In Coningsby Disraeli had
declared that ‘the age of ruins is past’ and if it was not quite past in 1844 it had certainly
gone by 1860. 7 Charlotte M Yonge, who looked back with such amusement to the
Georgian squire setting up fragments of Netley Abbey in his park as an eye-catcher,
summed up the change in her novel Hopes and Fears: 8
Honor had grown up among those who fed on Scott, Wordsworth, and Fouqué, took their theology from the
British Critic, and their taste from Pugin…Lucilla and Phoebe were essentially of the new generation, that
of Kingsley, Tennyson, Ruskin and the Saturday Review. Chivalry had given way to common sense,
romance to realism…the past to the future. 9
It is an interesting list of names and distinctions. While Tennyson and Ruskin are
certainly different from Scott and Wordsworth it is not, at this distance in time, their
realism and certainly not their common sense that seems to distinguish them. They were,
like John Henry Newman, George Gilbert Scott, the Pre-Raphaelites and all the other
Victorian leaders of thought and taste, the children of romanticism. If their eyes were
fixed on the future, on change and regeneration it was a future often visualised through
the past, whether Ruskin’s Venice or Tennyson’s Camelot. That past, however, was now
internalised, digested, it informed the present from within but it no longer compelled
many people to dress up in armour or fill their houses with oaken furniture. If they wore
tartan or left a rose on Abelard’s tomb it was usually because they were, if anything, less
realistic than their parents’ generation and believed more literally in these things.
As Macaulay had observed in an essay of 1828, ‘history begins in novel and ends
in essay’. 10 His History of England appeared in 1848 and demonstrated how true this had
been in his lifetime. It undoubtedly had its origins in the novel, particularly the work of
Scott, but it was also part of a new philosophy of history in which personal narrative was
7
Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby or the New Generation, (Paris, 1844), p.85.
8
See Chapter 4.
9
Charlotte M. Yonge, Hopes and Fears or scenes from the life of a spinter, 2 vols, (London, 1860), 2,
p.281.
10
Macaulay, ‘History’, p. 233.
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