Kalter - Modern antiques: the material past in England, 1660-1780

Acknowledgments

A n antiquary, according to the seventeenth-century satirist Samuel Butler, has his Being in this Age, but his Life and Conversation is in the Days of old. Its a pleasure now to thank the people who have made my time in the eighteenth century so interesting and enjoyable. I had the good fortune to study with Michael McKeon at Rutgers University. Incomparably learned and just as generous, he remains my model of what a scholar should be. Jonathan Kramnick, who suggested the title, Paula McDowell, and Suvir Kaul all gave valuable direction and encouragement at an early stage of this project. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Mark Netzloff has offered sound advice and friendship, and Kristie Hamilton more than once supplied critical feedback that allowed me to see my project anew. For their conversation, enthusiasm, andon occasionmuch needed nudging, I want to thank them both, as well as my colleagues Sukanya Banerjee, Gwynne Kennedy, and Bill Van Pelt. The kind words and inspiring work of several people helped sustain me through the process: thank you, then, Luisa Cal, Rita Copeland, Lynn Festa, Robert Folkenflik, Judy Frank, Bill Galperin, George Haggerty, Alan Kalter, Jonathan Lamb, Chris Lezotte, Erin Murphy, Julie Park, Ray Ricketts, and Larry Scanlon.

This book was written with indispensable and much-appreciated financial assistance from the Center for Critical Analysis at Rutgers, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Architecture, The Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, and the Center for 21st Century Studies at UWM. I also wish to acknowledge the assistance of the staff at the British Library, the British Museum Prints and Drawings Study Room, the Bodleian Library, the Newberry Library, the Golda Meir Library at UWM, and especially Maggie Powell and Sue Walker at the LWL. At Bucknell University Press, Greg Clinghams great patience gave me the opportunity to complete the book. I would also like to thank the anonymous reader for providing detailed and constructive feedback on the manuscript. Karen Ackermann, Brooke Bascietto, and Kate Parker oversaw the production of the book with great care. Wim Delvoye kindly permitted me to use a picture of his striking sculpture for the cover. My thanks to him and Astrid Vergauwe, who provided the image. An early version of chapter three appeared in ELH ; I thank the journal for allowing me to reprint that material.

Finally, I owe my greatest thanks to my mother Judy Kalter, for teaching me to enjoy reading and writing, for her consistent support, and for her terrific sense of humor. This book is dedicated, with much love, to her.

Introduction

The Time Bound and the Modern Antique

A belief in the materiality of the pastthat which no longer exists and is therefore by definition immaterialis a central paradox of early modern historical consciousness. This materiality was both literal and conceptual: objects were thought to embody the past, and history itself was constituted as an object of inquiry through empirical procedures of collection, observation, analysis, and classification. The foregrounding of the object in historical scholarship can be traced back to the sixteenth century, when scholars seeking to revive antiquity advanced the idea that the past was best known through the study of its physical remains. This attention to the particular features of artifacts from different periods aided a shift from a traditional historical paradigm of cyclical change and enduring essences to a new paradigm of linear change and particularity. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, these innovative connections between things and time were disseminated to a large nonscholarly audience by way of print media, school curricula, the first public museums and circulating libraries, heritage tourism, and consumer culture. In short, a confluence of economic, intellectual, and cultural trends made a newly objectified and chronologically-organized history accessible, and indeed available for consumption, to an unprecedented degree.

This book studies the historical imagination in an age when history and imagination were becoming polarized. If an increasingly dominant empiricism deemed the imagination an ineffective, even misleading means of gaining access to the past, the tangible manifestations of history circulating in material culture made the very act of imagining the past seem redundant. Modern Antiques explores this dilemma by reading authorscentrally John Dryden, Thomas Gray, and Horace Walpolewhose perspective on the past was fundamentally shaped by their engagement with modern forms of historical scholarship. But while scholars promoted their work by claiming to have eliminated from history the illusions they associated with imagination, the writers I study upheld imagination as a faculty that could extend and reflect critically on the practices, findings, and tenets of contemporary scholarship. In this introduction I lay the groundwork for my analysis of the modern antique in the chapters that follow. Examining the complex convergence of the temporal and the material in the long eighteenth century, I will contend that it was not only the rupture from, but also the re-creation of the past that made the period modern.