TIME’S WITNESS
HISTORY IN THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM
ROSEMARY HILL
Allen Lane, 416pp, £25
In Time’s Witness Rosemary Hill examines the influence of British and Continental antiquaries on historiography, particularly between the French Revolution and the Great Exhibition. Unlike the great enlightenment historians or their more professionalised 19th-century successors with their grand narrative sweep, antiquaries tended to be of lower social status and more interested in detailed local records and material evidence. Their studies embraced architecture and archaeology, botany and geology and widened the scope of the history with a new spirit of empiricism. The depredations of the French Revolution fed a nostalgic hunger for the desecrated remains of the past; while Romanticism helped re-orient the imagination from classical scenes to a murkier interest in the Gothic, where the remains were both more plentiful and easier to fake.
Most reviewers agreed with John Carey in the Sunday Times that ‘Hill is a magnificent historian and commands a vast range of sources’. In the Daily Telegraph Rupert Christiansen remarked on ‘the unassertive grace and quiet wit’ of Hill’s prose, while warning that ‘some of its matter is densely circumstantial and one wouldn’t recommend it to anyone in search of narrative thrills or scandalous spills’. Nicholas Penny in the London
Review of Books reflected on the irony that a book that ‘records with such verve the steady extension of subjects deemed fit for scholarly investigation two hundred years ago, is published at a moment when much of the curiosity and many of the pursuits it documents are endangered’ while in museums cataloguing the antiquities in store is no longer a priority.