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

eplaying the episode in The Antiquary in which Oldbuck expounds an elaborate theory
on the meaning of the letters A D L L carved into what he takes to be the remains of a
Roman fortification, only to be told by Edie Ochiltree that it stands for ‘Aiken Drum’s
Lang Ladle’ and that Edie remembers it being carved. 71
The story was already an old one when Scott told it, Earle’s definition notes of the
antiquary that ‘beggars cozen him with musty things’. 72 More remarkable is the extent to
which on the eve of the Victorian age the antiquary might be found so far from a cell or
even a chaotic study, embodied in Dickens’s comic Everyman, his clubbable Quixote.
There is less subtlety, however, in the Pickwick episode than there is in The Antiquary or
in the Noviomageans’ minutes. Pickwick’s mistake is simply that, a joke against him, not
one ironic layer in a densely woven interplay of parody, illusion and authenticity. With
the Society of Noviomagus the antiquaries overtook the popular image that had dogged
them since the Microcosmographie, first appropriating it and then giving it a life of its
own. Yet by the later 1830s the end of the age of romantic antiquarianism was in sight.
The image of the antiquary was becoming, as Dickens’s use of it suggests, a cliché and
the reality was under threat not from satire but from academic specialisation and High
Victorian taxonomy in an age when if ‘Bentham’s name was being forgotten…[yet] his
language was in everybody’s mouth’. 73
While it lasted, however, romantic antiquarianism was vital and mutable and the
following chapters pursue it thematically in its various contexts drawing largely on
primary sources. There have been few previous accounts of the subject as a whole.
Rosemary Sweet’s work deals principally with an earlier period, and Philippa Levine’s
with a later one. 74 Iain Gordon Brown’s The Hobby-Horsical Antiquary of 1980, though
rich in detail and wide-ranging in its analysis is short, a self-described ‘essay’ and
confines its scope to Scotland. Three years later Hobsbawm and Ranger’s collection of
71
Scott, The Antiquary, p.44.
72
Earle, Micro-Cosmographie, p.13.
73
Halévy, History, 4, p.404.
74
Sweet, Antiquaries and Levine, The Amateur and the Professional. I am nevertheless most grateful to
Rosemary Sweet for many useful conversations and general encouragement.
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