The significance of antiquarian activities reaches right into the quiddity of Romantic writing. Antiquarian researches were certainly politically charged, though their implications remained unarticulated beneath a wealth of accumulated data. Ballad collectors were the antiquaries of poetic culture, their 'artifacts' were recovered remnants of ancient poetry, valued initially for their glimpses into the arts, usages and modes of living. Translation of the oral ballads into printed collections opened chasms of classification and interpretation. Possible in theory, distinction between collection, editing, improvement, imitation and forgery, was elusive in practice. 'Authenticity' became an issue when oral performance was consigned to print. The minstrel-bard was a conserving force and a revolutionary one, an embodied figure of poetic imagination integral to the development of Romantic ideology. Historians and antiquarians were already recuperating medieval quest romance for the evidence they provided about life in the past. The malleability of romance forms and their equivocal association opened capacious possibilities to nineteenth-century historical novels.

In the homes of England, Romantic writers struggled to fix the proper boundaries between publicity and privacy. Economic, political and ideological developments underline the antinomies of domestic space in Romantic writing. Wordsworth's depiction of the happy cottage as a sociable site of natural productivity seamlessly integrated with its surrounding environment is rehearsed by Romantic writers. Illuminated by Romanesque windows and adorned with mock-Tudor furniture, medievalized versions of the cottage orne'e participated in a wider Gothic revival in which castles and converted abbeys enjoyed symbolic pride of place. If Northanger Abbey attempts to reclaim the Gothic interior for a new, enclosed form of domesticity, containment is achieved in the stately homes that form the prime locations of Austen's fiction. The resistance of women authors to strict demarcations between public and private realms is noteworthy in Romantic writing. The transition from the open, public domesticity so characteristic of Romantic writing to the cloying, claustrophobic private households of Victorian literature was never total.