Ina Ferris

Pedantry And The Question Of Enlightenment History: The Figure Of The Antiquary In Scott

REVIEWING JOHN Millar’s An Historical View of the English Government for the Edinburgh Review in 1803, Francis Jeffrey declared that Millar’s intellectual character ‘‘corresponded pretty nearly with the abstract idea that the learned of England entertain of a Scotch philosopher.’’ Despite this ironic dig at the ‘‘learned English,’’ however, Jeffrey himself goes on pretty much to reproduce the standard British model of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy, presenting it as an iconoclastic activity (‘‘little or no deference to the authority of great names’’), long on theory and short on facts (‘‘rather indefatigable in argument, than patient in investigation’’). As he sums up the main tenets of the Scottish enlightenment, he makes special note of Millar’s absolute faith in the rationality of historical processes—‘‘He wondered at nothing’’—and in its important corollary that social change all the way down can be explained by reference to ‘‘the opportunities or necessities’’ pertaining to a particular instantiation of one of the general stages of society. ‘‘Instead of gazing, therefore, with stupid amazement, on the singular and diversified appearances of human manners and institutions,’’ Jeffrey concludes, ‘‘Mr. Millar taught his pupils to refer them all to one simple principle, and to consider them as necessary links in the great chain which connects civilized with barbarous society.’’ To underscore Millar’s achievement in this pedagogical enterprise—and herein lies the special pertinence of Jeffrey’s review for my purposes—he activated a contrast between the enlightened historian and the decidedly unenlightened figure of the antiquary: ‘‘While the antiquary pored with childish curiosity over the confused and fantastic ruins that cover the scenes of early story, he [Millar] produced the plan and elevation of the original fabric, and enabled us to trace the connexions of the scattered fragments, and to determine the primitive form and denomination of all the disfigured masses that lay before us’’ ( Jeffrey 156–57). The one, immature and governed by ‘‘curiosity,’’ remains fixated on the physical remnants of the past apparent to the eye, while the other looks through them to reconstruct the logic (‘‘the connexions’’) that once organized the now ‘‘disfigured masses’’ into meaningful structures.

Taking on Authorship: William Hutton’s Testy Relationship to Literary Authority

ABSTRACT This essay argues that William Hutton’s singular literary career—launched late and from an unlikely background—was underwritten by an unorthodox understanding of what it meant to write history. Starting with his pioneering History of Birmingham in 1781, he reworked the protocols of historical and literary authorship by recasting history writing in an embodied, experiential mode that answered to his own condition as a new man in a new city, and turned less on the past than on zones of its intersection with the present.