Tales of an Antiquary was written by Richard Thomson. Thomson (1794-1865) was for over thirty years the librarian of the London Institution, an early science popularization organization. He also wrote several histories of London and Britain. The stories in Tales of an Antiquary are fictionalized retellings of British and London folklore.

Ptolemy Horoscope is an astrologer and interpreter of the stars. In 1716 he is living in Little Britain, the “bibliopolitical part of London,” where all the booksellers and publishers live. His former landlady says that Horoscope “tauld the fortunes o' a' the warld, for the people wad be coming in the morn, and in the day-time, and in the dark night when naebody could see them.”¹ Horoscope does serve the public, but because his readings are so accurate he is consulted by the highest in the land, even the nobility. The stories hint that Horoscope has been a consultant to not just the loftiest members of Parliament and the British royalty but also to foreign dignitaries. But Horoscope serves all who come to him, down to the meanest members of society.

This includes Dick Turpin (see: Rookwood). But Horoscope is not home when Turpin comes to him for advice, so Horoscope's assistant, Titus Parable, poses as Horoscope. Parable is greedy for lucre and hopes for a reward from Turpin, but while Parable is giving Turpin a false prediction, a mysterious, hollow voice speaks, predicting Turpin's future. It is a true prediction, and the implication the reader is left with is that it was God who spoke, and who Horoscope gets his predictions from. In other stories the hollow voice adds to Horoscope's predictions, always accurately.

Written during the dying years of the Gothic craze and the early years of the Walter Scott-fueled historical romance fad, Tales of an Antiquary is an unusual attempt to wed the occult to the historical romance, but with the London-centric nature of the Newgate novel (see: Proto-Mystery), and with the final result of stirring patriotism for London and England in readers in the same fashion that Scott did for Scottish readers with Waverley.

The use of Turpin in this fashion, six years in advance of Ainsworth’s Rookwood, is unusual, in that it was Ainsworth who “set Turpin going on so long a career as a hero.”² Turpin was certainly famous in 1828–his reputation as the English highwayman continued on unabated despite the passage of years–but it was Ainsworth who “underwrites Turpin’s notoriety as a highwayman with amplitude of gallant, red-blooded manliness; the famous highwayman becomes the romantic gentleman highwayman.”³ The Turpin of Tales of an Antiquary begins to approach this characterization.

Interesting, too, is the use of Dr. John Dee (1527-1608/9)—of whom Ptolemy Horoscope is an obvious, updated analogue—in this fashion, twelve years before Ainsworth’s Guy Fawkes, which features Dee disinterring the “prophetess” Elizabeth Orton and resurrecting her to ask her several important questions. Thomson, as mentioned an antiquarian, would have been familiar with the stories and perhaps the writings of Dee, and likely used the character of Horoscope, whose status as an analogue of Dee would have been clear to the audience of the 1820s, to add a sensationalistic element to his story.

Print: Richard Thomson, Tales of an Antiquary. Nashville, TN: Rarebooksclub, 2012.

¹ Richard Thomson, Tales of an Antiquary, volume 3 (London: H. Colburn, 1828), 53.

² Keith Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel 1830-1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens and Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), 105-106.

³ Mackie, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates, 100.