Rosemary Hill - Times Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism

William Camden (15511623), founding father of British antiquarianism. Title page of Camdens Britannia, 1610. William Dugdale (160586), author of the Monasticon Anglicanum. John Aubrey (162697), one of the most original minds of his or any age. Alloway Kirk from Francis Groses The Antiquities of Scotland (178991), for which Robert Burns wrote Tam OShanter, based on the tradition of witches meetings at Alloway. Francis Grose (bap.173191), Burnss friend and an inspiration for his poetry. John Philip Kemble (17571823) as Coriolanus. Kemble pioneered correct historical costume in productions of Shakespeare. Francis Douce (17571834), expert on Shakespeare and the history of the Dance of Death. Dawson Turner (17751858), a botanist who became an expert on the antiquities of Normandy, a friend of and sometime collaborator with Hudson Gurney. Joseph Ritson (17521803), Jacobin, vegetarian and specialist on the Robin Hood legends. Anna Gurney (17951857). Though paralysed from childhood, she published the first English translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and was the first woman admitted to the British Archaeological Association. Hudson Gurney (17751864), Annas half-brother, banker and authority on the Bayeux Tapestry.The Antiquarys Last Will and Testament, Thomas Rowlandson, from The English Dance of Death (1814). The Romantic age saw a revival of interest in the Danse Macabre. Stonehenge, as imagined in Smith and Meyricks Costume of the Original Inhabitants of the British Islands (1815). History, fiction and drama were becoming ever more entwined. John Britton (17711857) dominated topographical and architectural publishing in the late Georgian decades. His Beauties of England and Wales was the last full county survey until Pevsners. Edward Willson (17871854). Willsons essays on medieval architecture inspired his young friend A. W. N. Pugin to see the Gothic as uniquely Catholic. Frederic Madden (180173), librarian and palaeographer who discovered the manuscript of Gawain and the Green Knight. John Lingard (17711851), Catholic priest, author of The History of England (181930). Alexandre Lenoir (17611839) defending the royal tombs in St-Denis from the revolutionaries, c.1793. Violation of the royal vaults at St-Denis, 1793. In three days were destroyed the work of twelve centuries. The Salle dintroduction, the former convent chapel, at the Muse des Monumens Franais, where the tombs from St-Denis were displayed. Jean-Lubin Vauzelle, c.18047. Thomas Rickman (17761841), the first person to establish the dates and periods of Gothic architecture in Britain, c.1819. Eugene-Hyacinthe Langlois (17771837), Norman antiquary, Bohemian and tutor to Flaubert. Self-portrait engraved by Mary Dawson, c.1820. Temporary burials after Waterloo at Hougoumont Farm, where John Gage found the body of his friend Thomas Crawfurd. Waterloo cuirasses and a sword among Walter Scotts battlefield souvenirs. The battle was seen to mark an era, and the battlefield became an instantly historic landscape, with British sightseers collecting every fragment of material remains they could get their hands on. Scotts visit was the impetus for his novel The Antiquary, published the following year. South Transept of Notre-Dame, Rouen, John Sell Cotman, published in Dawson Turners Architectural Antiquities of Normandy (1822). Turner sponsored Cotmans drawing tours to make illustrations for the book.Next page