20 HERITAGE

Julie Park

Bolsover, a 17th-century castle in Derbyshire, England, managed by English Heritage and built on the site where a 12th-century medieval castle once stood, has recently incorporated reenact­ment into its programming as a method of engaging wider public interest and drawing more visitors.

Yet the impulse to make believe that the heritage site's environment is situated in a long ago past was in fact indulged by at least one of its original owners as a fundamental form of pleasure afforded by inhabiting a historical setting. In the 17th century, Sir Charles Cavendish (Bess of Hardwick's son and William Cavendish's father) recruited architect Robert Smythson to reconstruct the dilapidated castle as a Norman keep, urging inhabitants and visitors to imagine they have entered the age of chivalry when surrounded by its “fanciful, impractical turrets, bat­tlements, lodges” and “battlement walkway” (Worsley, 2007, p. 45). Used as a holiday home and place of entertainment, and called “the Little Castle,” Bolsover was recreated as the architectural embodiment of 17th-century fantasies about life in the Middle Ages. In fact, even throughout the reigns of James I and of Charles I, tournaments were still being held. William Cavendish would carry on with John Smythson (Robert's son) the work begun by his father Charles of building and designing the Little Castle.

As Bolsover demonstrates, cultural heritage sites perform the reenactment that was already part of their history. Yet more interesting is the way that heritage can emerge through a process of reenactment, which in turn is executed through the use of different materials, from human bodies and actors in costume to clay bricks, glass, and ironwork (body and embodiment, mate­rial culture). This entry will trace the role of reenactment in the 18th-century antiquarian practice of supplementing printed books with one's personal collection of engravings as a form of preserving cultural heritage, known as “extra-illustration.” In this practice, heritage is both reenacted and preserved through the rearrangement of paper, printed words, and images of his­torically significant sites and personages.

But first, what constitutes heritage? If we understand heritage as the “material remains” of the past, or history rendered not in the information gleaned from textual documentation but in the traces left by material culture, then what kind of materials does it encompass? They can be, as the fields of conservation and archaeology inform us, any material entity that is changed by human modification or interaction. These include monuments, churches, tools, landscapes, gar­dens, books and manuscripts, costume, and pictures. Heritage can also be located in embodied practices, such as storytelling, rituals, performances, and festivals. And heritage can go beyond human-formed buildings or enacted rituals to include natural environments such as marine sites and forests, as initiatives in UNESCO's World Heritage program indicate to us. In this way, heritage may be further defined as an act that continues the action of viewing, shaping, handling, preserving, and enjoying material substance that was similarly treated by earlier generations.

But what was heritage before it reached this definition for itself? What preceded the current awareness of what it does? How did it come to be what it is now? The primary dictionary defi­nition for heritage identifies it as land or property that is inherited, a meaning derived from the old French eritage. Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia: Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences of 1728 affirms the legalistic meaning and usage of heritage by presenting it not as its own entry, but within the entry for “inheritance,” which is defined as “a Perpetuity in Lands and Tenements to a Man and his Heirs.” The remainder of the definition indicates that “heritage,” like “descent,” is one of the means by which land and tenements come into someone's possession:

this word... is not only understood where a Man hath Inheritance of Lands and Tenements by Descent or Heritage, but also every Fee-Simple and Fee-Tail, that a Man hath by Purchase, may be said to be by Inheritance, for that his Heirs may inherit after him.

(Chambers, 1728)

Responding to this aspect of Chambers' definition, the following entry attempts to trace how heritage in the English tradition (unlike, for instance, indigenous traditions) functions as a vehi­cle for passing down a property from one generation to the next in a chain of conditional own­erships, each impelled by the mortality of every successive possessor. In feudal law, all heritable property entailed a right to real estate and an obligation not to waste or destroy it.

The relationship between architecture, land, and text is central to the life of heritage in cul­tural history and enshrined in the homophone monument/muniment, the stone memorial and the documentary archive in ancient houses. In 18th-century Britain in particular, heritage in the guise of antiquarian pursuits played a prominent role in cultural life. A social identity emerged: that of the antiquary, or person whose love for the past inspired him or her to study its material remains in the surrounding sites of stone circles, battles, barrows, and bones of extinct elks and mammoths. More specifically, an antiquarian was someone curious about his national historical past as it was reflected in ancient artifacts and buildings. By means of collection (of fragments and curiosities), restoration (at Stonehenge, for instance), and exhibition (as museum or pageant) the local population and the nation became aware of what belonged to them as heritage, a feat Rosemary Sweet believes “deserves greater appreciation” (Sweet, 2001, p.

Antiquarian texts focused on local places, including the repositories of records in towns, parishes, and counties, or the more solid traces of rulers and families, such as collections of coins, heraldry, funerary inscriptions, marriage articles, and title-deeds (Sweet, 2004, p. 5). The locales chosen were mainly in Britain, and areas significant to British history, such as Normandy. When arguing that antiquarians were proto-archaeologists, Stuart Piggott points out that the fundamental distinction between history and archaeology lies in the kind of evidence each favors—written versus material and tangible. Whereas “historical research” derives from “obtain­ing knowledge of the human past from written records,” archaeology turns to “material remains” for the same purpose (Piggott, 1976, p. 2). Thus, antiquarianism, with its focus on records of the past that are materially manifest, is highly sympathetic to the historical reenactment practices of heritage, from latter-day performances of druidic ceremonies to the restoration of Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill with its original stucco formula and Renaissance stained glass panels.

Tracing heritage to its antiquarian roots shows that it was a medium for imaginative creativ­ity from its outset. Whereas antiquarian tours such as William Stukeley's or Thomas Pennant's were sympathetic to picturesque objectives and stimulated the fancy of the traveler as eyewit­ness, written accounts and maps associated with sites of antiquarian interest demonstrate how the textual forms of documenting heritage involved imagination at a different level. I will look closely at a particular example of an antiquarian text and its material use as a means by which heritage is treated as a material construction and practice. It is a practice not only of visiting and studying old sites pivotal to cultural history, but also of writing, reading, and making texts that attempt to preserve one's experiences and imaginings of them.

The object under question is an extra-illustrated copy of Anglo-Norman Antiquities Considered in a Tour Through Part of Normandy (London, 1767) by Andrew Coltee Ducarel (1713—1785) (Figure 20.1). The folio-sized (19.25 ? 12 inches) book's beautiful light brown calf binding with elegant gold ornamentation and the Beckford family crest can be easily attributed to one of its owners, the famed novelist and connoisseur William Beckford (1760—1840).

Figure 20.1 Extra-illustration prints of the Abbey of St. Stephen in a copy (once belonging to William Beckford) of Anglo-Norman Antiquities Considered in a Tour Through Part of Normandy by Andrew Coltee Ducarel. London, 1767. Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

many valuable treasures” (Ducarel, 1762, p. i). The book’s copperplate engravings, some that originally came with the book and some that were added to it, illustrate these treasures.

On one hand, Ducarel presents his tour as a serious archaeological excursion in which he sets out to “view and examine such ancient remains as might tend either to illustrate the history and antiquities of the province, or to point out and characterize the piety, valour, and magnificence, of our ancient kings and nobility.” On the other, his tour and the written account of it serve as an archival act of memory-making:

the design therefore, of the following sheets, is to lay before the reader such obser­vations as I made when on the spot, and to preserve the memory, at least, of several remarkable monuments of Anglo-Norman antiquity, which, either from their great age, or the disregard and inattention of their present possessors, are in danger of being intirely destroyed.

(Ducarel, 1762, p. ii)

That Ducarel was self-conscious about the preservational aspect of his book makes the book’s survival centuries later, with its memories of his direct encounters with intact Anglo-Norman antiquities, both dramatic and moving. It is fitting that an author with such an archival impulse was not only a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (founded in 1707), but also a librarian at the Lambeth Library and archivist of state papers. Many members of the Society of Antiquaries throughout the 18th century in fact held positions as librarians and archivists. These posi­tions included keeper of records in the Tower (George Holm), librarian to the earl of Oxford (Humfrey Wanley), keepers at the British Museum (Samuel Ayscough, Richard Penneck, and Francis Douce), and Historiographer Royal (Thomas Madox) (Sweet, 2004, pp. 48—49). Sweet points out that it is impossible to tell whether record keepers and archivists forged their careers out of a desire to “satisfy antiquarian leanings” or if the men became antiquarians as a conse­quence of their occupations (2004, p. 49).

As a privately owned object, Ducarels book exemplifies the type of visually annotated vol­ume that is known as the extra-illustrated book. Throughout the period, it was a pastime for owners of books concerning biography, local history, Shakespeare, travel, and topography to supplement its descriptions with engraved prints from other sources to illustrate visually what was being described in words. On the same principle as the lengthy antiquarian notes in one of Sir Walter Scott's novels, such as the detailed account of the function of the court “demp­ster” in The Heart of Midlothian, readers inserted extra pictures and texts into the printed book. Instead of antiquarianism at second hand, this actively delegated the reader's imagination in the pursuit of corroboration and correction. The prototype for this activity was James Granger's A Biographical History of England (1769), whose “methodical catalogue” of the portraits of notable English figures in history, published without illustrations, unwittingly encouraged readers to add their own engraved portraits to copies of Granger's book. The practice, also known as “granger­izing,” became extremely popular, and extra-illustrators/grangerizers moved on to other types of books, especially tour books such as Ducarel's. A common practice of antiquarianism, extra­illustration was both a “novel method of enjoying texts on England's past” and a symptom of “the prevailing perceptions and popularization of antiquarianism” during the 18th century (Peltz, 1999, p. 115). More than that, grangerizing was the closest that textual study came to reenactment, demonstrating how people in the Enlightenment practiced a form of heritage that involved a visual participation in the re-writing of historical texts. I will suggest that heritage was not just preserved but created in the owning and expanding of this sort of book, not merely metamorphosed by a single reader but handed down from one to the other. It formed the con­stitutive production of cultural heritage.

The technique of supplementation, by which a print produced separately would be glued onto a page in the book or bound into it, is called “tipping in.” In Beckford's copy of Ducarel's Anglo-Norman Antiquities, there are 27 plates that are bound or “tipped” in, with a number of prints noted in the catalog as missing, both original and added. The tipped in pages, though, are not all necessarily the extra-illustrated ones, for a printed list at the back of the book providing directions for the placement of designated engravings indicates what was usually the case with printed books of the period: its engraved plates were not part of the original printer's gatherings and were meant to be added separately when having the book bound. Yet the basic procedure of extra-illustration is one of altering the original composition of a book as well as using handi­work either to paste in new engravings or dismantle the original binding and putting it back together to incorporate the additions. Given this, one might say that an extra-illustrated volume is as much the creation of the book owner as it is of the original author. Among the prints that are clearly extra-illustrated (the borders outlined with glue traces on the back of some of the pages on which they appear help reveal them) are three nearly identical images of the Cathedral Church of Rouen, described on page 12 of Ducarel's text; Ducarel's frontispiece portrait; and an illustration of a section of the Bayeux Tapestry that appears in the book's appendix.

There are at least two possibilities for who created the extra-illustrated version of Ducarel's Anglo-Norman Antiquities that is in the holdings of UCLA's Special Collections. Six owners are listed in the library catalog entry for the book, beginning with Benjamin Thomas Pouncy (d. 1799) and ending with Charles K. Ogden (1889—1957). Beckford, after Pouncy, was the book's second owner. Because the book appears in Beckford's binding, it is safe to assume that its extra-illustration was performed either by him or by Pouncy. An inscription written in a neat 18th-century round hand on the fly-leaf of laid paper (part of the original gathering) states that the book was given to B.T. Pouncy, the first owner, by the author, “Dr Ducarel,” on July 31, 1778. While it is thrilling to imagine someone as renowned as Beckford being the one to add the book's extra-illustrations, it is in fact even more appealing to consider that it was Pouncy, in consultation with Ducarel himself, who chose and inserted the extra prints. Even if he himself were not the owner responsible for grangerizing Ducarel's book, it is evident that Beckford had enough regard for the extra-illustrated copy to buy and have it beautifully rebound for his own library.

Regardless of which owner was responsible for the extra-illustrations, their status as inter­locutors with the text is clear. Their presence in the book furthers the dialogue between word and image already initiated by the original plates. The language of Ducarel's guide cries out for visual supplementation, for it is highly descriptive of the spatial and material details belonging to the buildings and topography that he encountered in his tour of Normandy. For example, about the landscape of Caen he writes:

The ramparts of the town are covered with trees, which form most delightful walks, and, together with the vast length of the cours, the great plenty of water, and the abun­dance of beautiful outlets, yield the eye a pleasure which it does not often enjoy in flat countries, or where the prospect is much limited.

(Ducarel, 1762, p. 49)

Such a sentence reminds us that a significant aspect of 18th-century tours of antiquities was the visual pleasure they gave. And yet the careful insertion of an owner's corresponding prints from his own collection into the book suggests the pleasure was extended to a tangible one as well.

An example of this palpably emitted “echo” of the book's visual supplementation of Ducarel's writing appears in the two identical small engravings (see Figure 20.1) of the Abbey of St. Stephen described on pages 50—52 and already illustrated by the book's original engraving. Extra-illustration not only allows further pleasure to the eye to be yielded through an act of handiwork, but also gives the book owner an opportunity to contribute to the book's word and image system of providing information, making meaning, and preserving memory. The effect is one of visual and material doubling—an act of reenactment that demonstrates heritage is passed down as much through the material creation and recreation of texts as it is through passing the text itself from one set of hands to another, eventually landing in the heritage institution of the library, the traditional residence of antiquarians themselves. In such an institution, the extra­illustrated copy of Ducarel's book demands to be read as a heritage document—that is, read not so much for the information it yields textually, but for the material traces of its prior owners who have creatively worked to recreate its meaning in the present as a flexible record of the past.

Further reading

Harvey, D., 2001; Peltz, L., 2017, Samuel, R., 1994; Sweet, R., 2004.