“Commodified Antiques and Antiqued Commodities”: Barrett Kalter’s Century of the Mysteries

A review of Barrett Kalter’s Modern Antiques: The Material Past in England, 1660–1780, a book examining the ways in which history was understood and the uses to which it was put by writers including John Dryden, Thomas Gray, and Horace Walpole, with special attention to the influence of object-oriented antiquarianism and consumer culture—which is to say, to the role played by the sorts of objects Kalter calls “modern antiques”—on period conceptions of history, modernity, and ephemerality.