ABSTRACT
Lovel is as slight a hero, his love-affair as slight a romantic interest, and the missing heir business as slight a plot-line as Scott could possibly have manufactured without his production ceasing altogether to be a novel. The great unity and originality of The Antiquary is to be found, as Scott himself suggests, in the novel's portrait of 'manners' in the modern age. The nature of the modern age and its relationship with the past are the real subjects of the novel. The real hero of the novel is the antiquary himself, Jonathan Oldbuck, who dominates the other characters in the novel just as the middle class to which he belongs securely controls the town of Fairport and its environs. Yet antiquarianism in the modern age fulfils an even greater need for both Oldbuck and Sir Arthur, merely by providing matter for argument.
