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Time's Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism
How our understanding of the past was transformed between the French Revolution and the Great Exhibition by a band of long-forgotten pioneers, the antiquaries
Between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the opening of the Great Exhibition in 1851, history changed. The grand narratives of the Enlightenment, concerned with kings and statesmen, gave way to a new interest in the lives of ordinary people. Oral history, costume history, the history of food and furniture, of Gothic architecture, theater and much else were explored as never before. Antiquarianism, the study of the material remains of the past, was not new, but now hundreds of men - and some women - became antiquaries and set about rediscovering their national history, in Britain, France and Germany.
The Romantic age valued facts, but it also valued imagination and it brought both to the study of history. Among its achievements were the preservation of the Bayeux Tapestry, the analysis and dating of Gothic architecture, and the first publication of Beowulf . It dispelled old myths, and gave us new ones: Shakespeare's birthplace, clan tartans and the arrow in Harold's eye are among their legacies. From scholars to imposters the dozen or so antiquaries at the heart of this book show us history in the making.
Between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the opening of the Great Exhibition in 1851, history changed. The grand narratives of the Enlightenment, concerned with kings and statesmen, gave way to a new interest in the lives of ordinary people. Oral history, costume history, the history of food and furniture, of Gothic architecture, theater and much else were explored as never before. Antiquarianism, the study of the material remains of the past, was not new, but now hundreds of men - and some women - became antiquaries and set about rediscovering their national history, in Britain, France and Germany.
The Romantic age valued facts, but it also valued imagination and it brought both to the study of history. Among its achievements were the preservation of the Bayeux Tapestry, the analysis and dating of Gothic architecture, and the first publication of Beowulf . It dispelled old myths, and gave us new ones: Shakespeare's birthplace, clan tartans and the arrow in Harold's eye are among their legacies. From scholars to imposters the dozen or so antiquaries at the heart of this book show us history in the making.
390 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 26, 2021
I found this a perplexing book. There is no doubting the research that went into it: the notes and citations attest to that. And the author has a fine record of previous work, as well as a strong reception from professional reviewers for this work.
My issue is with just what the book is about. Its sub-title is “History in the Age of Romanticism”, and the front flap of the dust jacket refers to the work of antiquaries in “rediscovering their national history”. I took this reference to “antiquaries” to mean the people, often clergy, who pottered around ancient sites, Stonehenge, Saxon burial-mounds, Roman villa remnants, dug a little, often drew a little, and collected items of interest, essentially the predecessors of today’s archaeologists.
In fact, the book deals with such people very little. It is interested in the theoreticians (the Grand Tourists, writers and artists, reconstructive architects, museum funders and creators, the politicians, royals and church leaders); there is not much at all on the practitioners, the field workers who did the digging.
I acknowledge that there was no reason the book should have gone in the direction I was hoping for and expecting. However, I am not sure how I would describe the path it actually takes, and therefore to whom I would recommend it. It seems to me rather magazine-like in structure. It has a sustained focus on theatre, especially Shakespeare; and on Scotland, especially the Jacobites and Sir Walter Scott; and on debate over the origins of the Gothic church design.
In amongst all of this, I found fascinating the material on the history of the Bayeux Tapestry (embroidery); the material on the architect, James Wyatt who liked to modernise churches, and his opponents who viewed this as desecration and insisted on historically accurate preservation; and the material on an interest in ecclesiology being seen as crypto-Catholicism. But I am not sure what I would have been looking for in order to choose this book and come across these references.
I have two specific criticisms of the work. The first is that, in a number of sections, I found the writing convoluted, with, in my view, badly constructed sentences. I have two vivid examples:
(1) “A consensus emerged around the belief that, like a living creature, Gothic had grown out of the heaviness of the Norman or, in the coinage of William Gunn, Rector of Irstead in Norfolk, in 1819, the ‘Romanesque’, into the purity of Early English, blossoming, over more or less the biblical human lifespan of threescore years and ten, into the glories of the Decorated, with its complex vaulting patterns, ogee arches and delicately elaborated window tracery, before succumbing to the influence of the Renaissance with the more orthogonal Perpendicular.
(2) “Today the Magdalen May Day ritual is a prime example of a tradition sometimes said to have been invented by the Victorians, which wasn’t, but which, like many of the medieval buildings they were accused of spoiling, would not, in all likelihood, have survived without them.”
The first needed a couple of additional full stops; the second needed a complete re-design, probably including a full stop. Both, in my humble opinion, needed a more active editor.
My second complaint is with the pedantic over-use of “sic”. This is becoming an epidemic. That Sir Walter Scott writes “explaind” and that various authors have spelled the Venerable William’s name as Shakespere [sic] and Shakspere [sic] – he, after all used several versions himself – hardly need the intrusive sic to indicate they are not the author’s misprints. There are, after all, original errors in the publication which might have benefited from attention first: “If he had he come back ten years later he would have found it looking much older”. Sic!
So, for someone looking for an idle browse, ready to be entertained but not seeking a sustained scholarly explanation of anything much, this could suffice.
My issue is with just what the book is about. Its sub-title is “History in the Age of Romanticism”, and the front flap of the dust jacket refers to the work of antiquaries in “rediscovering their national history”. I took this reference to “antiquaries” to mean the people, often clergy, who pottered around ancient sites, Stonehenge, Saxon burial-mounds, Roman villa remnants, dug a little, often drew a little, and collected items of interest, essentially the predecessors of today’s archaeologists.
In fact, the book deals with such people very little. It is interested in the theoreticians (the Grand Tourists, writers and artists, reconstructive architects, museum funders and creators, the politicians, royals and church leaders); there is not much at all on the practitioners, the field workers who did the digging.
I acknowledge that there was no reason the book should have gone in the direction I was hoping for and expecting. However, I am not sure how I would describe the path it actually takes, and therefore to whom I would recommend it. It seems to me rather magazine-like in structure. It has a sustained focus on theatre, especially Shakespeare; and on Scotland, especially the Jacobites and Sir Walter Scott; and on debate over the origins of the Gothic church design.
In amongst all of this, I found fascinating the material on the history of the Bayeux Tapestry (embroidery); the material on the architect, James Wyatt who liked to modernise churches, and his opponents who viewed this as desecration and insisted on historically accurate preservation; and the material on an interest in ecclesiology being seen as crypto-Catholicism. But I am not sure what I would have been looking for in order to choose this book and come across these references.
I have two specific criticisms of the work. The first is that, in a number of sections, I found the writing convoluted, with, in my view, badly constructed sentences. I have two vivid examples:
(1) “A consensus emerged around the belief that, like a living creature, Gothic had grown out of the heaviness of the Norman or, in the coinage of William Gunn, Rector of Irstead in Norfolk, in 1819, the ‘Romanesque’, into the purity of Early English, blossoming, over more or less the biblical human lifespan of threescore years and ten, into the glories of the Decorated, with its complex vaulting patterns, ogee arches and delicately elaborated window tracery, before succumbing to the influence of the Renaissance with the more orthogonal Perpendicular.
(2) “Today the Magdalen May Day ritual is a prime example of a tradition sometimes said to have been invented by the Victorians, which wasn’t, but which, like many of the medieval buildings they were accused of spoiling, would not, in all likelihood, have survived without them.”
The first needed a couple of additional full stops; the second needed a complete re-design, probably including a full stop. Both, in my humble opinion, needed a more active editor.
My second complaint is with the pedantic over-use of “sic”. This is becoming an epidemic. That Sir Walter Scott writes “explaind” and that various authors have spelled the Venerable William’s name as Shakespere [sic] and Shakspere [sic] – he, after all used several versions himself – hardly need the intrusive sic to indicate they are not the author’s misprints. There are, after all, original errors in the publication which might have benefited from attention first: “If he had he come back ten years later he would have found it looking much older”. Sic!
So, for someone looking for an idle browse, ready to be entertained but not seeking a sustained scholarly explanation of anything much, this could suffice.
July 15, 2021
A bit long-winded in some places but very very interesting.
March 21, 2022
This is a difficult book to categorise - would it appeal to those interested in the history of history, or who like to know about those characters who were antiquaries, or those interested in Romantic writers? Or is it a book about social myth-making or the comparative sense of nationalism of Britain, France and Germany? Only parts of this book satisfied my particular interests, and those parts, on novelists such as Scott, Shakespeare, Hugo and Stendhal I found most insightful.
October 15, 2024
Rosemary Hill reinstates the antiquaries
Although this book is arguably of lesser significance than her outstanding biography of Pugin, it performs a similar service, by assessing the relative importance of antiquarians to the architectural and historical record. She makes a good case for that many were unsung champions. Not all were leisured gentlemen, but many of those who didn’t have to work for a living but chose deep study and the accumulation of historic material performed a great historiographical service. The book makes clear the enormous damage triggered by the French Revolution and the narrowness of Voltaire’s Enlightenment view of history, not very enlightened at all, as it turned out.
Although this book is arguably of lesser significance than her outstanding biography of Pugin, it performs a similar service, by assessing the relative importance of antiquarians to the architectural and historical record. She makes a good case for that many were unsung champions. Not all were leisured gentlemen, but many of those who didn’t have to work for a living but chose deep study and the accumulation of historic material performed a great historiographical service. The book makes clear the enormous damage triggered by the French Revolution and the narrowness of Voltaire’s Enlightenment view of history, not very enlightened at all, as it turned out.
March 13, 2024
Well written and wide ranging there is an amazing depth of knowledge on display here. In the first half of the 19th century what we call history first became a subject for study and literature. This book explores that pivotal moment in the British Isles. If you have any interest at all in history you should enjoy this book.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews