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

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to have no acknowledged part. 11 Thus <strong>the</strong> Victorians carried <strong>the</strong> past <strong>in</strong>to <strong>the</strong>ir new<br />

<strong>in</strong>stitutions, clos<strong>in</strong>g <strong>the</strong> doors beh<strong>in</strong>d <strong>the</strong>m on <strong>the</strong> romantic antiquary, who dw<strong>in</strong>dled once<br />

more <strong>in</strong>to caricature. By <strong>the</strong> time George Eliot wrote Middlemarch, when <strong>the</strong> late 1860s<br />

looked back to <strong>the</strong> early 1830s, Jonathan Oldbuck had gone and <strong>in</strong> his place was only <strong>the</strong><br />

unlovely figure <strong>of</strong> Edward Casaubon. 12<br />

11<br />

See Trevor-Roper, The Romantic Movement and <strong>the</strong> Study <strong>of</strong> History, for a detailed account <strong>of</strong><br />

Macaulay’s debt to Scott.<br />

12<br />

Col<strong>in</strong> Kidd’s unpublished sem<strong>in</strong>ar paper ‘Mr Casaubon and <strong>the</strong> <strong>Antiquaries</strong>’, read at All Souls College,<br />

Oxford on 21 February 2011, explored George Eliot’s view <strong>of</strong> antiquarianism <strong>in</strong> <strong>the</strong> earlier part <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong><br />

century.<br />

275

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