Modern antiques: Imagination, scholarship, and the material past

Nostalgia and the idea of progress split the eighteenth-century historical imagination. "Modern Antiques" argues that these distinctly modern ways of perceiving time were tied to the diverse objects that circulated in the spheres of antiquarian learning and consumer culture. My introduction discusses how the movement of historiography away from rhetoric and toward a notion of scientific precision linked facticity with artifacts. Antiquarians used monuments, coins, and other forms of primary evidence to retrieve England's past in vivid detail. This empiricism is evident in chronologers' treatment of time as a thing that could be measured and graphically fixed in charts. The first chapter examines how, in a commentary on an error in dates in the Aeneid, John Dryden appropriated the language of chronology while refusing its values, extolling anachronism as an emblem of the imagination and a politically useful strategy for reconnecting past and present. After establishing the epistemological value antiquarians assigned to things, the dissertation considers the confrontation between artifacts and commodities that also claimed authority over the past. Chapter two reconstructs a debate between philologists who saw The Canterbury Tales as a historical foundation in need of preservation and modernizers who viewed the poems as merchandise facilitating social refinement. The effects of consumerism on intellectual and artistic labor are also addressed in my third chapter, which reads letters by Thomas Gray in which he sought to distinguish his poetic technique of historically informed imitation from the mass production of wallpaper bearing medieval motifs. My final chapter argues that, toward the end of the century, the line between commodities and artifacts blurred, as the mobility typical of the first began to affect the second. Relating the theme of ephemerality to the decline of aristocracy in an age of commerce, I contend that Horace Walpole grounded history in objects not to recover the past but to come to terms with the contingency of the future. Articulating influential theories of modernity with recent work in the field of material culture, this dissertation demonstrates how novel forms of time consciousness were embedded in the tactile world of the period.