Antiquarian Transformations in Historical Scholarship

One of the most impressive aspects of A Polite and Commercial People is Paul Langford’s skilful synthesis of a bewildering array of lesser known authors and publications to tap into opinion and sentiment on social, economic, political, and cultural questions, including the remarkable popularity of works of antiquarianism (as well as history) amongst eighteenth-century readers. The progress of manners, a thematic undercurrent throughout the book, allowed eighteenth-century antiquaries such as John Brand and Joseph Strutt to look back upon the manners and customs of the past as the expressions of different social mores, characteristic of ruder, less polished times. Through innovative interdisciplinary research which combined written and visual sources, material culture and architectural analysis, this interest developed into historical accounts of manners and customs, sports and pastimes, which documented the everyday practices of the English people from the time of the Roman conquest onwards: it offered in effect a history of the domestic life of the English people. The historicization of domesticity or everyday life was notably elaborated upon in historical novels by antiquarian-minded writers such as Walter Scott (who had himself worked on Strutt’s failed novel Queenhoo Hall), Harrison Ainsworth, and Bulwer Lytton. Rather than focusing upon novels, however, this chapter analyses how ‘domesticity’ and ‘domestic life’, particularly of the middling sorts, became categories of antiquarian and historical research from the later eighteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth century and in the process provided a social history of the mores and lifestyle of Britain’s polite and commercial classes.