Every Man is Naturally an Antiquarian: Francis Grose and Polite Antiquities

Stephen Bending is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Southampton. He has written numerous articles on landscape and polite culture in the eighteenth century and has co–edited with James Raven and Antonia Forster The English Novel 1770–1799: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction in the British Isles (Oxford University Press, 2000), and with Stephen Bygrave Henry Mackenzie’s, The Man of Feeling (World’s Classics, 2002), and is editor of the forthcoming anthology, The Writing of Rural England, 1500–1800 (Longman, 2002). Francis Grose produced well over a thousand low–cost antiquarian images of the antiquities of England and Wales. While it may be tempting to dismiss him as a mere popularizer and a charlatan, his works open up to a wide national public the antiquities of their native land. Central to his venture is at once the commodification of the past and an attempt to represent that commodification as nothing of the kind. Grose sets about repackaging the old as the new – a now classic act of consumerism – but also works hard to deny this activity by drawing on the language of scholarship and accuracy. Ultimately, his cheaply produced and mass–marketed images and texts demonstrate an antiquarian past which repeatedly collapses into a commercial present: cheap prints for a mass market create a national past in the very act of contemporary consumer aesthetics.