Walter Scott's Romantic Archaeology: New/Old Abbotsford and The Antiquary.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-01

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University

All changes round us, past, present, and to come; that which was history yesterday becomes fable to-day, and the truth of to-day is hatched into a lie by to-morrow.(1)

The past is recovered as private estate.(2)

A WATERSHED DATE IN THE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY IN SCOTLAND IS 1851. In this year, Daniel Wilson introduced the term "prehistory" into the English language with the publication of Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, the first systematic application in the United Kingdom of the relative dating system of prehistoric artifacts into stone, bronze, and iron epochs developed by Danish archaeologists C. J. Thomsen and J. J. A. Worsaae. In the same year, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, under Wilson's secretariship, donated its entire collection for the establishment of a National Archaeological Museum. Herald of a dawning scientific consciousness in Scotland, Wilson asserts in the preface to Prehistoric Annals that archaeology had outstripped the "laborious trifling" of the amateur antiquary and had joined "the circle of the sciences."(3) The national museum was to play a fundamental role in these shifting sensibilities. In the first volume of the Society's revamped Proceedings, Wilson argues that government sponsorship was needed "to secure the advancement of Archaeological science" by providing funds for proper housing and management of the collection. Within the public sphere of the museum, then, Wilson's professional motives are allied to more democratic principles: in the archaeologist's words, "to promote popular education, and to excite a national interest in the preservation of the monuments of early art and ancient civilization" (2-3).(4) Wilson thus roots the origins of Scottish archaeology within a curious paradox. Having on one hand raised archaeology above the enthusiasms of amateur antiquarianism, Wilson on the other grounds prospects for scientific archaeology within the popular emotive appeal of backward-looking heritage.

Antithetical to "objective" scientific archaeology, heritage assembles objects within a discourse of national identity and educational entertainment, attractions that inevitably transform objects through desire for particular pasts. Peering into his disciplinary crystal ball, Wilson searches for a professional pedigree saturated in cultural value. Promoting amongst the Scots a possessive attitude toward the material past, Wilson, furthermore, locates archaeological origins in a more recent heritage site. In the preface to Prehistoric Annals, the archaeologist asserts that the

zeal for Archaeological investigation which has recently manifested itself in nearly every country in Europe, has been traced, not without reason, to the impulse which proceeded from Abbotsford. Though such is not exactly the source which we might expect to give birth to the transition from profitless dilettantism to the intelligent spirit of scientific investigation, yet it is unquestionable that Sir Walter Scott was the first of modern writers `to teach all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught,--that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled with living men.' (xvii)(5)

Lingering at disciplinary crossroads, Wilson distances scientific archaeology from the "profitless dilettantism" of text-based antiquarianism, yet he draws Scott's (and Carlyle's) humanistic history along with him. Wilson translates for his professional audience the study of material history within a mode of storytelling that takes the place of, or is a substitute for, the objective history the archaeologist claims to represent. Quoting Carlyle's encomium to Scott, Wilson writes Scottish prehistory as ontological narrative. Indeed, Scott's own heritage claims within historical romance--the preservation of "ancient manners," as he states baldly in the "Postscript" to Waverley--encode the affective nature of archaeological discourse that Wilson attaches to the origins of his profession. For Wilson, subjective valuation of the material past rises from a quasi-mythic source antedating the controlled environment of the museum: the popular imagination that Scott helped shape for the tourist/reader of material culture.

In 1884, another Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, J. Romilly Allen, published a similar "state-of-the-profession" address, "The Past, Present, and Future of Archaeology." Allen traces the two "great causes" that have "operated to raise archaeology in the present century from the level of a learned pastime to that of an exact science." These are the Oxford Movement, which "was to revive the study of Gothic architecture, and thus indirectly to influence archaeology generally," and geology, which had begun to "overthrow all previous ideas as to the time during which man had existed on the earth."(6) While Allen was certainly more accurate in the latter attribution (for geological principles of stratification and relative dating were the methodological and hermeneutic cornerstones of prehistoric archaeology), his vague evocation of the religious antiquarianism of the Oxford Movement underscores an emotional and moral valuation of material history. Through ecclesiology (exemplified by the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture and the Cambridge Camden Society) the medieval past was being renovated physically and ideologically within the heritage and aesthetic demands of Anglicanism. Like Wilson, Allen grounds the origins and attributes of archaeology within desire.

Allen likewise contends that professional development was predicated by the "impulse from Abbotsford." Scott is both a mythic character in, and ur-narrator of, the archaeological "story." The two "great causes," states Allen, "were preceded by Sir Walter Scott's novels, which by the descriptions of old buildings contained in them tended to popularize national architecture" (234). Wilson's and Allen's conflation of historical romance with scientific investigation emphasizes that an archaeological imagination--the firm grasp of the object past on the subject or subjective present--humanizes archaeological discourse, and assumes a faith in a recognizable humanity across time, a kinship with even prehistoric peoples. Scientific authority absorbs Carlyle's position that a meaningful past reconstructs identity from stones, material traces, and fragments. The root of archaeological science, then, emerges from the narrative totalities of the Waverley novels, their manipulation of material history for the delineation of authentic manners. Locating Scott at the beginning of their originary stories, the archaeologists, presumably unconsciously, foreground narrative and historical embellishment as part of the archaeological project, one that structures knowledge as romance not only for the heritage demands of the museum, but for their own mythic professional identity. The motivating ideologies of Scott's literary antiquarianism are, it seems, coherent with those of mid to late nineteenth-century "scientific" archaeology in Scotland: the recovery of, in Ian Duncan's words, a "symbolic form prior to itself" (11).

Allen's reference to Scott's popularizing "national architecture" and Wilson's allusion to the archaeological "impulse" arising from Abbotsford suggest, moreover, that temporality has a local habitation in architecture. The "Author of Waverley" and the "Laird of Abbotsford" occupy common structural and mythopoeic space. Scott's correspondence indicates that he was certainly sensitive to the symbiotic relationship between romance and architecture as decidedly discursive structures. Not entirely glib when referring several times in his letters to Abbotsford as a "romance of a house"(7) Scott foregrounds a symbolic exchange between his mode of historical narrative and his domestic life. His anachronistic baronial mansion is a metonymy for historical romance. The composition of the Abbotsford "story" suggests, moreover, a way of reading the "materiality" of Scott's historical fiction. For Wilson and Allen, the "impulse" from Abbotsford blurs distinction between material history and historical narrativity.

If I seem to be confusing materiality with textuality, I defer to archaeological precedent. In the last 15 years or so there has been a movement towards "theoretical" archaeology, fostered by poststructuralist linguistic theory and postmodernist questioning of scientific positivism, essentialist meta-narratives,...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.