A Novel in Ruins: Thomas Amory’s Antiquarianism

Abstract:This essay considers Thomas Amory’s Memoirs of the Lives of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1755) and The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq. (1756) as experiments in the novel form. Amory’s novels flout many of the genre’s central conventions—like plot and character development—and instead present a deluge of facts, theories, and natural historical and antiquarian descriptions. I argue that these novels offer a peculiar sort of formal or fictional realism that attends not to particular people or places but to the general impressions of objects and ideas. In light of William Stukeley’s antiquarianism, which includes a model for what I label an “ecstatic epistemology” that affectively registers a general sense of the whole in excess of a ruin’s fragments, I read the formal peculiarities of Amory’s novels as a means for producing knowledge about the forms of ideas. By attaching feelings to these ideas—feelings that range from boredom to sublimity— Amory’s novels can give us the general sense of their form.