Antiquaries. The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (review)

Students of the English novel will be as familiar with the archetypal antiquary of the eighteenth century as students of historiography—more so, perhaps, because of the obvious scope for caricature and satire that antiquarianism, cast as the obsessive and thoroughly eccentric preoccupation of the nit-picking obscurantist, was increasingly assumed to offer in this period, culminating in Scott's colourfully drawn Jonathan Oldbuck in The Antiquary (1820), literature's most attractively inept antiquarian.

The perceived divergence between antiquarianism and historiography, whose origins are discernible at least as far back as the seventeenth century, ensured that even during the Enlightenment, let alone in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anyone content to describe himself as an antiquary could find himself being regarded as something of a figure of fun by those self-consciously more sophisticated co-workers who now styled themselves 'historian'. History was, after all, the prestigious calling of men as brilliant and as seminal as Clarendon and Gibbon, Hume and Robertson, the direct descendants of Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus: its solemn purpose was to yield a persuasive and philosophically coherent account of each aspect of the past in all its bewildering complexity. Antiquarianism, by contrast, sanctioned the fetishisation of physical muniments and monuments whilst simultaneously discouraging the critical evaluation of evidence in favour of an approach that permitted, even prized, the wildest flights of the imagination: it could therefore safely be dismissed as little more than a congenial diversion for enthusiastic hobbyists and not a few outright fantasists.

Such is the inherited dichotomy at which Rosemary Sweet takes explicit and very deliberate aim in her new book Antiquaries, significantly subtitled The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. For it is her plausible contention, meticulously documented and eloquently explained, that antiquarianism played a far more prominent role in Enlightenment culture, and was in many ways a more respectable and worthwhile intellectual enterprise, than we have become accustomed to thinking. Nor does she make this argument by the easy route, by reference only to those better-known antiquaries whose scholarship is still remembered and which is now to some extent recognised as a landmark in the understanding of certain historical subjects: for example, William Stukeley, clergyman, student of Druidism and pioneering investigator of Stonehenge; or John Whitaker, historian of Manchester and author of work on Mary, Queen of Scots, that did as much as anything else to stimulate the growing proto-Romantic interest in her status as a tragic heroine; or William Borlase, the Cornish minister who greatly advanced the study of his native county. Instead, Sweet offers up a fascinating cast of now-forgotten men (as Sweet notes, 'The collection and study of antiquities was highly gendered' (p. 69)) who laboured in the documentary and archaeological vineyards. Their work, moreover, so far from being irrelevant to the period's intellectual life, assists us in understanding the eighteenth century's peculiar fascination with history. Indeed, if Hume's apothegm that he lived in 'the historical age' had mileage (and few scholars today would want to argue that it did not), it clearly did so because a sizeable number of authors and investigators had contributed to and helped sustain the Georgian British public's raging enthusiasm for thinking and writing about the past.

Readers of the present review will appreciate why Sweet's interest in Scottish as well as English and Welsh antiquarianism in this period has particular local significance. It is, after all, a commonplace that historical writing was perhaps the central—as it was certainly the most popular and bankable—project of the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole. And here too there has been a tendency to write its story chiefly in terms of a small number of celebrity authors responsible for substantial works of narrative or analysis—not just Hume on England and Robertson on Scotland, Charles V and America but Sir John Dalrymple on recent British politics, Lords Hailes and...