Passion for past
Rosemary Hill explores how antiquarians, agreeable or otherwise, were the great romantics of history.
Time’s Witness by Rosemary Hill
At the centre of Rosemary Hill’s immensely engaging book is a simple question – what is an antiquarian? It is subtitled “History in the Age of Romanticism”, and it draws some clear delineations. An antiquary was not a historian; nor were they merely collectors for their cabinets of curiosity. What emerges is that antiquarians were normally not attached to major universities, not always agreeable individuals but had that most Romantic feeling of all: Passion.
It was a passion particularly for the particular, for the local rather than the grand narrative. Although Hill’s study is bookended by the French Revolution and Crystal Palace, she does hint at the ongoing nature, by referring to Pevsner’s guides to architecture as a late heir to the antiquarian project. Though I must confess I was disappointed she did not mention Pevsner’s addiction to lollypops.
The depiction of these people in literature tended towards either satire or pity. Dr Fossil is the butt of Alexander Pope’s farce Three Hours After Marriage, and Casaubon in Middlemarch, working away on his history of mythology, is a meagre figure. Even Sir Walter Scott, himself an antiquarian, satirises them in The Antiquary, where at the outset the old foes Oldbuck and Wardour are feuding over whether a ditch is Roman or Pictish, until a local vagrant turns up and tells them he “minds the biggin o’ it”. But in the same novel there is the dastardly Dousterswivel, and there are plenty of forgers, thieves, chancers and the like in Hill’s exceptional book. When she describes the “romantic interior” of the antiquary as being full of books, papers on the floor and various gew-gaws, artefacts and knick-knacks, I had to have a quiet word to myself looking at my study.
Hill excels at showing how antiquarianism was not a hobby, but a vocation. This vocation was not neutral, and coincided with the political and theological positions of the various antiquaries. This is keyhole biography, in that a whole range of significant issues are seen through a wee keek. The reader encounters radicalism and reactionary stances, the promotion of Catholic emancipation and a virulent hatred of “popery”, beliefs in Britain’s exceptionalism and arguments for it having European roots.
Although the book has copious accounts of English and French antiquarians, Hill puts Walter Scott centre as the “fulcrum” between statistical approaches and imaginative ones. More surprisingly, she devotes much to the so-called Sobieski Stuarts, a pair of Englishmen, from near Waverley ironically enough, and their invention of clan tartans. There is something lovely about her not merely writing them off as a pair of fraudsters, and indeed, the friable nature of truth, illusion and sheer wanting is evident in the career of the Sobieski Stuarts.
Although this is a serious book, it is certainly not without moments of humour. I was particularly delighted by a dispute over the history of trousers in Wales. The very words capture the paradox of the
subject. Things become “sophisticated” or “re-edified” as the antiquarians turn architectural consultants.
Antiquarianism was about making the past live again, and Hill makes the past of the antiquarians live again. They lived in a time of turmoil, decadence and nitpicking. This brings us to another work, Ruth Scurr’s ingenious Napoleon, subtitled “A Life in Gardens and Shadows”. Given its subject lived in the same period as Hill’s motleys, it seems appropriate and logical to pair them.