History and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Author(s): Karen O'Brien
Source: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 1-2 (March 2005), pp. 397-413
Published by: University of California Press
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History and the Novel in
Eighteenth-Century Britain
Karen O’Brien
this essay examines the interplay between history and the novel in
order to gauge the development of historical consciousness in eighteenth-century
Britain, and in particular the growing recognition of the present as a point within a
process of change. I assume that both historical writing and fiction, the dominant
prose narrative forms of this period, played a leading role in instigating new kinds of
historical awareness and in the representation of social identities, enabling readers to
understand the implication of their own experience in history. In order for this to
come about, the novel had to undergo a double transformation, at first distancing itself from historical kinds of narrative, and then approximating itself to the empirical
norms and authoritative voice of history writing. This process was part of a disciplinary readjustment whereby historians and novelists reclassified, separated, and ultimately realigned their representational territory. It was a highly self-conscious
undertaking, as we can gather from the numerous histories of the novel and of romance that appeared during the eighteenth century.1 The novel, which in its earliest
manifestations appropriated public events by means of allegory, romance, and scandal
chronicle, had first to dissociate from, and then to redefine, its relationship to public
history. Central to this redefinition was the integration of age-old plots about generational conflict—sons running away from fathers, young lovers defying intransigent
parents, and so on—into larger historical narratives about changing times, ideals, and
morals. This essay thus endeavors to shed some light on the perennial question of the
“rise” of the novel by exploring its increasing re-historicization. By looking at the par-
1. Although many attempts were made to distinguish between them, the terms “novel” and
“romance” were often used interchangeably throughout the eighteenth century. To cite just a few examples of contemporary histories of the romance/novel: Pierre-Daniel Huet, The History of Romances,
translated from the French by Stephen Lewis (London, 1715); James Beattie,“On Fable and Romance,”
in Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783); Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (Dublin, 1785); John
Moore, A View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance (London, 1797).
h u n t i n g to n l i b r a ry qua rt e r ly | vol. 68, nos. 1 & 2
397
Pages 397–413. © 2005 by the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights reserved. For
permission to reproduce, consult the University of California Press Rights and Permissions Web site, www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
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ticular cases of narrative history and the novel, it also seeks to extend into the
eighteenth century Daniel Woolf ’s analysis, in his essay in this volume, of transitions in
thinking about the past during the early modern period.
Recent scholarship has accepted that there was a high degree of mutual creative
influence between historical and novel writing. Reciprocal exchange between the two
genres has seemed obvious, unarguable.2 It is certainly the case that the two genres
evolved along parallel lines during the eighteenth century: away from fanciful narrative and myth, and toward stricter standards of factual probability; away from the
idea of the narrator as editor of an archive assessing the provenance of documents,
and toward normative models of narrative mastery and unity; and, above all, toward a
thematic preoccupation with “manners,”customs, and social conventions. By the early
nineteenth century, both genres came to project a historicized understanding, not only
of the past, but also of the present.3 Novels with titles such as The History of Tom Jones,
a Foundling or Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady clearly had thematic and cognitive preoccupations in common with history proper. Yet critics who have tried to explore the issue of reciprocity between history and fiction, as opposed to charting their
parallel development, have encountered difficulties. Although many have argued that
the boundary between history and fiction was porous, they have, in fact, tended to
treat history as an unchanging kind of writing against which the evolution of the novel
can be measured and mapped.4 Or they have exaggerated the extent to which, beginning in the late seventeenth century, history became formally experimental or epistemologically radical in its approach to the distinction between fact and fiction, and
have argued that the novel made creative capital out of a general cultural confusion
about the ontological status of the historical referent.5 I wish to make the opposite
case, that novelists’ often highly ironized statements of factual accuracy should not be
overread as a general indication of the epistemological adventurousness of eighteenthcentury culture. Nor should novelists’ (often mock) deference to ideas of historical authenticity be seen as a sign of a productive theoretical cross-fertilization between
history and fiction. I will argue instead that debates about the nature and knowledgevalue of history were conducted within the novel rather than across the novel/ history
border, and that history was insulated by its antiquity, prestige, and (in some cases)
formal stability from the theoretical challenges posed by the novel, as well as by other
2. See, for example, Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore, 1973); Suzanne Gearhart, The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A Critical
Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J., 1984); Lionel Gossman, Between History and
Literature (Cambridge Mass., 1990); and Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel: Matters of
Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge, 1997).
3. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820
(Princeton, N.J., 2000), 320. Also Karen O’Brien,“History and Literature, 1660–1780,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge, 2005), 365–90.
4. Everett Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British
Novel (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996); and William Ray, Story and History: Narrative Authority and Social Identity
in the Eighteenth-Century French and English Novel (Oxford, 1990).
5. Mayer, History and the Early English Novel.
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forms of philosophical skepticism. This is to make a different point from the position
of those critics who argue that it was history that eventually “caught up” with the
novel with respect to its theoretical self-awareness.6 What is more clearly the case is
that, in abandoning both the naive realism and corrosive skepticism of its earliest
phase (as Michael McKeon has argued), the novel gradually approximated the
confident representational norms and, indeed, thematic preoccupations of history.7
The eighteenth-century novel had a distinctive, often playfully subordinate and
self-consciously supplementary, relationship to history. In the form that it gradually
came to assume from the 1740s, the novel was quite unlike epic, satire, and romance in
that it it did not seek to replace historical narrative through allegorical absorption or
à clef, coded assimilation.8 The generic establishment of the novel depended, as I shall
argue, upon its articulation of a separate domain of representation outside and alongside that of traditional history. The turn toward social realism in novels heralded the
disengagement of fiction from the kinds of public history espoused by epic and romance. The novel’s increasing focus upon subtly psychologized characters proceeded
from a functional distinction between historians and novelists in relation to the representation of individual life stories. The novel’s disengagement from history led, initially, to horizontal, spatial, and often geographically rangy projections of the present
dimension of time. Ultimately, a realignment of history and fiction did take place
along the lines of avowed complementarity, often within the same texts. But this occurred only after historians themselves had started to redefine their mission against
that of the writers of prose fiction. As I hope to show, the development of a new kind of
British historical imagination came about in part because historians themselves limited their participation in this process to selective borrowings of novelistic techniques
and minor formal experimentation.
The Externality of History
By the late seventeenth century—the point at which, according to the traditional accounts, the modern novel came into being—the generic expectations that readers
had of historical writing were already quite clear and rigid. The elimination, in this
period, of myth and fable from respectable history enabled the genre to achieve an unprecedented degree of categorical distinctiveness and to be written according to wellrecognized protocols. British history writing inhabited a philosophical climate in
which the empiricism necessary for primary research, and especially for the great enterprises of late-seventeenth-century antiquarianism, was not perceived to be at odds
with literary modes of presentation.9 Even the debate between the ancients and the
6. In a general way, this is how Mayer and Zimmerman tend to see the relationship between the
two kinds of writing.
7. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, 1987).
8. Here I disagree with Brean S. Hammond’s Professional Imaginative Writing in England,
1670–1740: “Hackney for Bread” (Oxford, 1997), which emphasizes the role of satire in the formation of
the novel.
9. Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995).
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moderns, which opened up a fissure between amateur historical belles-lettrism and
professional scholarship, did not, as Joseph Levine has argued, ultimately dent historians’ confidence in the value of narrative, sequential presentation of primary data.10
This atmosphere of historical confidence paradoxically created the space out of which
the historical skepticism and ambiguous referentiality of the novel could emerge. Early
novelists’ routine claims to historicity were made in an epistemological climate in
which historicity itself was well understood. The case was quite different in France,
where the Cartesian denigration of history and the advent of Pyrrhonian (or radically
skeptical) philosophy undermined an earlier intellectual consensus about the value
of history. It is not a coincidence that Voltaire, the eighteenth-century writer responsible for rehabilitating French historical writing, was also the most active in promoting English empiricism and natural philosophy in France. It is often argued that it was
the absolutist political conditions of France, and the continuing predominance of
aristocratic cultural norms, that inhibited the transition, in the literary sphere, from
aristocratic prose romance to bourgeois fiction. But it could equally be said that
France’s radically different historical culture played its part in perpetuating, at the
expense of realist novels, fictional forms under which history was subsumed.
In Britain, from the late seventeenth century onward, novelists addressed, parodied, and extended many of the theoretical problems arising from history that historians themselves felt under little pressure to investigate: problems of provenance, of
referentiality, of the role of the editor, and of the knowledge-value of empirical discourse. Many novelists, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and
Oliver Goldsmith, cut their teeth as translators and writers of history but reserved
experimental exploration of these problems for their fiction. Historians, including
novelists writing history, rarely thematized their own narrative practice as novelists
did, and the most interesting articulations of historical skepticism came from within
the novel. By contrast, historians increasingly avoided not only speculative or conjectural subject matter but also thematic foregrounding of their own identities as
writers. After the publication of William Temple’s Memoirs of what pass’d in Christendom, from the war begun 1672 (1691) and Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion
(1702–4), there were fewer and fewer historians on the classical model of the man of
state recording his experiences and advice “that posterity may not be deceived” (with
the notable exception of Lord Bolingbroke).11 If history did not actually become
professionalized during this period, it was certainly more likely to be written by men
(and, in rare cases, women) with little experience of public affairs, and they were less
inclined to make their personal ethos a source of authority in their writing. In general, there was a public tendency to discount and discredit history written from an
avowed or overly subjective perspective. For instance, Gilbert Burnet’s History of His
10. Joseph Levine, Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1991).
11. Memoirs of what pass’d in Christendom, from the war begun 1672, to the peace concluded 1679
(London, 1691; reprinted well into the eighteenth century). Temple was a diplomat and patron of
Swift. See Letters on the Study and Use of History (London, 1752), by the Tory politician Henry St. John,
Viscount Bolingbroke, in Historical Writings, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Chicago, 1972).
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Own Time (1723, 1734), an encompassing history of the period from the Restoration to
1715, was treated, despite its popularity, with some suspicion because it was written in
an obtrusive, first-person narrative. Such works were much less trusted by the public
than aloof, third-person narratives.
In a more fundamental way, the substance of history was increasingly thought
to reside outside the acts and perspectives of its agents, as though history were not so
much the sum of individual experiences but an entity external to them all. This externality of perspective was initially equated, by eighteenth-century readers, with “impartiality,” a naively historicist concept whereby freedom from party-political bias or
personal involvement guaranteed unmediated access to the “truth” of the past. Impartiality was a quality greatly prized by readers, including the eighteen thousand or more
who, during the period 1725–55, acquired complete sets of Paul Rapin de Thoyras’ notoriously detached, unbiased History of England.12 Later, as historians and readers alike
became more aware of the limitations of “impartiality,” the substance of history came
to be regarded as something broader than the twists and turns of high politics. Historical writing became increasingly preoccupied with the rise of civil society in
Britain, including the legal regimes, political and religious identities, and social customs that formed the public framework for individual lives. By the mid- to late
eighteenth century, this synthesis of legal history, political narrative, and social antiquarianism bore fruit in the works of David Hume, William Robertson, Catharine
Macaulay, and Edward Gibbon. Although these historians wrote in a period when
others were beginning to experiment with the speculative essay, the epistolary format, and thematic subsections as means of presenting the past, their style of long narrative history dominated public esteem and continued to do so until well into the
nineteenth century.
The novel largely accepted, and to a significant degree consolidated, a pervasive
historical sensibility in Britain that distinguished history from lived, subjective experience. This separation was very different from the older romance tendency to allegorize
or encode history, and it represented something of a retreat from fiction’s earlier historical ambitions. What romance conveyed was the embededness of the individual life
in public history, particularly when that history was interpreted on the model of dynastic conflict and change. At the same time, romance fiction appeared to de-historicize
and privatize public history, dissolving its specificity into perennial, intimate dramas
of love, loss, and betrayal. Ros Ballaster has argued persuasively that
[r]omance ... absorbs the master narrative of “history”into the privatised discourse of “love.”Historical difference is erased by the totalising
power of love and the diachronic processes and changes of history flattened out by its universalising mythology.13
12. Paul Rapin de Thoyras, The History of England, trans. Nicholas Tindal, 15 vols. (London,
1725–31). The estimate of numbers of readers is supplied by Philip Hicks in his Neoclassical History and
English Culture from Clarendon to Hume (Basingstoke, U.K., 1996), 147.
13. Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford, 1992), 47.
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This was still more the case with other contemporary subgenres such as secret
histories and scandal chronicles, in which contemporary, rather than past, public
events were subsumed into an allegorical frame. These secret histories are explored by
Eve Tavor Bannet, in her essay in this volume, as examples of a fertile point of “cooperation” between history and fiction. Delarivier Manley’s Secret History of Queen Zarah
and the Zarasiens (1705), for example, chronicled the scandalous court life of the
Duchess of Marlborough and her circle under the alibi of fiction, while her Memoirs
of Europe, Towards the Close of the Eighth Century (1710) allegorized the same court in
terms of Byzantine history.14 Burnet (whose History of His Own Time was, as Bannet
points out, considered a “secret history” of sorts) defended secret history as a way of
capturing the true workings of public life. Taking issue with Varillas’ Histoire des revolutions arrivées dans l’Europe en matière de religion (1686–89), Burnet remarks:
[Varillas] pretends to discover many Secrets to give pictures of Men to
the life, and to interweave the Histories that he relates with a thread of
Politiques that is very agreeable, only this appears to be over done, and
those who have had much practice in humane Affairs see that the conduct of the World is not so steady and so regular a thing as he loves to
represent it, unlookt for Accidents, the caprices of some Tempers, the
secrets of Amours and Jealousies, with other particular passions are the
true source of almost all that is transacted in the World.15
Burnet was one of the few attempting to offer a serious rationale for secret history, yet
there were many more commentators in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who objected to romance, scandal fiction, and secret history as usurpers of the
status of history and affronts to the proper empirical recording of the past. Ballaster
quotes a passage from Samuel Pepys’s Diary in which he describes a colleague who “did
much enveigh against the writing of Romances; that five hundred years hence, being
wrote of matters generally true,... the world will not know which is the true and which
is the false.”16 The colleague, Sir Edward Walker, was a noted collector of heraldry, as
well as one of the planners and historians of Charles II’s coronation celebrations—in
other words, one of those men who actively shaped both the political landscape and
the empirical historical sensibility of the post–Civil War era, and for whom romance
represented a threat to the recovery of a usable, stable past.
Others looked for a richer account of human motivation, generalizable to the
14. See Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Oxford, 1994), chap. 3,“Political Crimes and Fictional Alibis: The Case of Delarivier
Manley.”
15. Gilbert Burnet, Reflections on Mr. Varillas’s History of the Revolutions that have happned in
Europe in Matters of Religion (Amsterdam, 1686), 9.
16. Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 47.
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level of “human nature” and beneficial to the reader’s self-knowledge. Hume, in an
early essay,“Of the Study of History” (1741), stated his objections to secret history in
terms that reveal the extent to which the subgenre had come to be regarded as a poor
substitute for history, one to be discredited through its association with a credulous
female readership. Railing against female ignorance of history, Hume writes:
I may indeed be told, that the fair sex have no such aversion to history, as
I have represented, provided it be secret history, and contain some memorable transaction proper to excite their curiosity. But as I do not find
that truth, which is the basis of history, is at all regarded in those anecdotes, I cannot admit of this as a proof of their passion for that study.17
Proper history, Hume insists, might cure women of their erotic obsessions and teach
them “[t]hat Love is not the only passion, which governs the male-world, but is often
overcome by avarice, ambition, vanity, and a thousand other passions.”18 History is not
illicit knowledge but the basic currency of rational conversation, the building block of
other knowledges, and a means of understanding human nature:“history is not only a
valuable part of knowledge, but opens the door to many other parts ... [it] extends our
experience to all past ages, and to the most distant nations; making them contribute ...
to our improvement in wisdom.”19
Fictional Disengagements from History
Hume’s essay was published in the decade (that of Pamela, Tom Jones, and Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless) in which the novel enjoyed something of a rebirth as a realist
genre, self-consciously distanced from its previous incarnations as romance, politics
à clef, and feminized erotic fantasy.20 The best-selling novels of the 1740s operated at a
remove from public history, and in this respect they had more in common with Defoe’s
works than with the earlier novels of amorous intrigue. We have become accustomed
to think of Defoe, in particular, as an experimenter in historical writing, highly irreverent in his approach to the interface between fact and fiction. Yet, in other respects, his
work can be said to have pioneered a separation of fiction from history, however
much he played with his readers’ uncertainties about the status of his many novelistic
and historical works. This separation is disguised by Defoe’s nomenclature (he called
Robinson Crusoe an “Allegorick History” and Moll Flanders a “private History”), yet it
was partly through the influence of his work that the gap between fiction and history
widened. Defoe and those who adopted his particular brand of social realism re17.“Of the Study of History” (1741), in David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary,
ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1987), 564.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 566.
20. For this reading of the history of the novel, see William Warner, Licensing Entertainment:
The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley, Calif., 1998).
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counted experience in ways that led to a paradoxical distancing of life stories from the
historical. By steadily restricting serious fictional narrative to the actual and the familiar world, and by creating and observing realist conventions of time, psychological
motive, probability, and location, he and other novelists produced a horizontal projection of the historical. In these works public events and structures featured, if at all, as a
static context or obstacle course within which characters struggled for personal happiness or interior self-mastery. There is very little sense of an external world as something subject to change or to the influence of individual acts; there emerges, instead, a
peculiarly de-historicized sense of the quotidian.21 In the picaresque narratives of
Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett, the characters’ movement through time is represented
metonymically as a movement through space, as one (rarely revisited) place is superseded by another. During the journey, it is the protagonists, not the locations, that
evolve; the places to which they do return after long absence (Gulliver and Crusoe
coming home to unsatisfactory family life in England, for example) remain the same,
while transformations across time are internal to the characters. Historical settings for
novels, where they appear, are largely notional. Many of Defoe’s fictions are set back in
the seventeenth century: Crusoe washes up on his island in the year 1659 and Moll
Flanders’ account of her life is said by Defoe to have been “written in the year 1683.”
Defoe himself wrote histories (of the Union of England and Scotland, and of the life of
the Duke of Marlborough), yet his fictional historical settings are painted without any
local color, any effect of distance or sense of the past furnishing an explanatory prehistory of modernity. One need only contrast Defoe’s constructions of a fictional past
with Walter Scott’s Old Mortality (1816) or John Galt’s Ringan Gilhaize (1823), in both
of which a vibrantly imagined seventeenth-century setting functions as a turbulent
crucible of modernity, a fire of fanaticism through which history must pass.
Novelists who employed contemporary settings and detail to bring greater realism to their stories tended to produce a flattened sense of history in which neither
the past nor the present were meaningfully periodized. Eliza Haywood, having forged
an early career as a writer of romance and amatory novellas, graduated to that of a
successful realist novelist, inserting greater quantities of factual data into her later
works. The Fortunate Foundlings (1744), for instance, features a male protagonist who
attends Westminster school, serves in Marlborough’s campaigns, and joins the army of
Charles XII of Sweden. Yet Haywood’s later novels are only notionally historicized,
and, as John Richetti has argued, the “lip service paid to historical particularity” in
these works is essentially of a piece with the “vaguely de-historicized settings of
her many amatory novellas in the 1720s.”22 Commentators did welcome the specificity
of contemporary detail in novels, but they too tended to treat it as an adventitious
element. Factual accuracy, however, was a requirement. One review, of Fielding’s
Amelia (1751), enables us to see how literal-minded expectations of accuracy could be:
21. On this aspect of eighteenth-century fiction, see Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding, and Gibbon (Princeton, N.J., 1970).
22. John Richetti,“Histories by Eliza Haywood and Henry Fielding: Imitation and Adaptation,” in
Kirsten T. Saxon and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio, eds., The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on
Her Life and Work (Lexington, Ky., 2000), 244.
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A novel, like an epick poem, shou’d at least have the appearance of truth;
and for this reason notorious anachronisms ought to be carefully
avoided. In this novel, there is a glaring one; for Gibraltar has not been
besieged since the year 1727, consequently, if Mr Booth was wounded at
the siege, and married to his Amelia before it, he could neither be a young
man, nor his wife a young handsome lady, when the masquerades began
at Ranelagh, which is not above three or four years since.23
Here the reviewer uses the traditional category of vraisemblance —the criterion of an
artistically satisfying appearance of truth, originally applied by neoclassical critics to
epic—and finds Fielding wanting. The reviewer is not unusual in expecting dates of
battles and sieges to function as the principal historical markers in fiction (for instance, the ’45 in Tom Jones or the War of the Spanish Succession in Tristram Shandy).
But he is forward-looking in the way that he applies the notion, essential to the development of historical awareness, of anachronism to quite trivial details of modern social life, such as the masquerades at Ranelagh. There is no suggestion that he is looking
for greater historical depth in modern fiction (a sense of the changing times between
the 1720s and the late 1740s), but a hint, at least, that it might be possible to imagine
battles, sieges, and masquerades as part of a unified historical field. At a deeper level,
the review gives some evidence, in the mid-eighteenth century, of a functional distinction between the uses of empirical data in history and fiction respectively. Accuracy in the historical writing of this period was judged according to the forensic
model of documentary evidence, credible testimony, and the sound adjudication of
conflicting evidence.24 Historical accuracy in fiction was assessed only according to
standards of vraisemblance.
The Generic Problems of Reader Identification
The public acceptance, by the mid-eighteenth century, of a categorical and functional
distinction between prose fiction and historical narrative alerted commentators to a
new, potentially serious, area of confusion between the two kinds of writing: affect.
New, affecting histories had been in relatively short supply during the first half of the
eighteenth century, when publishers concentrated their resources on long, classicalstyle political histories of England, Europe, and the world.25 There was a widespread
perception that Britain had failed for decades to produce a genuinely compelling history that could capture the imagination while conveying the deeper unity of events.
Samuel Johnson spoke for the national mood when he commented, in a Rambler
23. Review of Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751), London Magazine 20 (April 1751).
24. See Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1720 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000).
25. See Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture; and Karen O’Brien,“The History Market in
Eighteenth-Century England,” in Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century
England: New Essays (London, 2001), 105–34.
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number, “Histories of the downfall of kingdoms, and revolutions of empires,
are read with great tranquility,” and have little power to move.26 Historians responded
to the perceived need to engage their readers emotionally in the grand stories they
were trying to tell. Where romances had asserted or encoded the historical actuality of
their characters in order to enhance their affective appeal, historians now borrowed
strategies from novels in order to promote reader identification with their characters.
One of the most famous examples was William Robertson’s heart-rending portrayal of
the doomed Mary Queen of Scots in his History of Scotland (1759). There were also
Hume’s and Goldsmith’s tragic renditions of the execution of Charles I in their histories of England (respectively, 1754–62 and 1777) and Smollett’s moving account, in his
Complete History of England (1757–58), of the fate of the Scottish Jacobites after the defeat at Culloden.27 Recognition of the role of reader identification slowly transformed
the moral vocabularies that had traditionally been used to describe the function of historical character. Both historians and novelists had previously fallen back on a somewhat undeveloped rhetoric of exemplarity to describe and defend the moral value of
character portraiture, and many continued to do so long after the debates about the
role of affect were concluded. Sarah Scott, for instance, in her preface to The Life of
Theodore Agrippa D’Aubigné (1772), made the case for her choice of subject in conventional terms:“The undeviating rectitude, the perfect consistency, the unspotted virtue
of Agrippa D’Aubigné’s character render him one of the best examples, that history
can exhibit [and] a subject of imitation.”28 Yet, in tandem with this more traditional
defense of exemplarity, other writers were expanding the ethical possibilities of character presentation both in sentimental fiction and in revitalized forms of historical biography. Mark Phillips has described how the convergence of history and fiction at the
point of consumption opened a space for biography, a genre that can combine affective appeal and historical accuracy.29 Here, the emblematic individual (the saint, the
hero, the martyr, or the convert) of older figural biographical forms became the historically typical man or woman or the untypical genius. The rhetoric of exemplarity did
not disappear, but it did become more elastic, embracing new opportunities for moral
edification. One reviewer even found subjects for moral instruction in Mary Hays’s
Female Biography, a pantheon of (often less-than-virtuous) women: “It is sometimes
started as a question, whether history or biography be the more improving study, . . .
but ... biography, as it is the most interesting form of detached history, will often prove
26. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and A. B. Strauss, 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn.,
1969), 1:320.
27. On this aspect of histories, see Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan
History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997), 60–69, 114–22; and Phillips, Society and Sentiment,
chap. 4,“The Sentimental Reader.”
28. [Sarah Scott], The Life of Theodore Agrippa D’Aubigné (London, 1772), ix, xiii. The work is
almost certainly a translation.
29. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 139–46. See also Joseph W. Reed Jr., English Biography in the
Early Nineteenth Century, 1801–1838 (New Haven, Conn., 1966).
30. Monthly Review, 2d ser., vol. 43 (1802): 92.
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the most instructive and eligible mode as it regards political history.”30 It was not until
late in the century, with the publication of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), that the historically integrative potential of the individual life, including the life of a genius, was
fully realized. Boswell’s work was not only a portrait of a heroic, inimitable genius, but
also a window onto a brilliant metropolitan literary scene. John Wilson Croker’s landmark edition of Boswell’s Life (1831) presented the work to nineteenth-century readers
as a vivid portrait of the London of its times, into which the individual life was a portal.
The shift in emphasis from exemplary life to broader, edifying historical insight, over
the forty years between the two major editions of the Life, bears out Daniel Woolf ’s
observation, in his contribution to this volume, that after the seventeenth century
“exemplarity now derived preferentially from historical processes rather than iconic
individuals or even singular episodes.”
Despite the increasingly affective nature of historical writing, eighteenthcentury commentators generally remained committed to the notion that, even when a
historical work invited reader identification with a character, the emotional experience was qualitatively different from that of reading fiction. Hume wrote in his Treatise
of Human Nature:
If one person sits down to read a book as romance, and another as a true
history, they plainly receive the same ideas, and in the same order.... [But
the reader of history] has a more lively conception of all the incidents. He
enters deeper into the concerns of the persons: represents to himself
their actions and characters, and friendships, and enmities: He even goes
so far as to form a notion of their features, and air, and person.31
Not all of Hume’s contemporaries would have agreed that the truth elicits a more
powerful emotional response than fiction, and many, like Johnson, were worried that
the opposite was the case (especially with women), and that novels had an excessive
hold on the imagination. But most would have concurred that at the point of reading,
as well as writing, there was a clear ontological distinction between history and fiction
that even the importation of novelistic techniques into history writing could not efface.
Fictional Plots as Social History
Aside from the concern with affect, there were other ways in which novelists sought to
claim some commonality of purpose between their work and the writing of history.
When Fielding stated in Joseph Andrews, “I describe not Men but Manners; not an individual but a species,” he was voicing an aspiration that would be shared by many
subsequent eighteenth-century novelists and historians. Historians’ interest in “manners” (a people’s customs, cultural practices, and habits of thought) began with the
English translation, published in 1758, of Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs (1756) and rap31. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1969), 147.
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idly became a defining characteristic of most eighteenth-century histories. The new
vocabulary of manners became a fertile point of intersection between history and fiction. It marked a shift in preoccupation from the cognitive to the anthropological
value of historical knowledge and enabled novelists to locate the points at which
personal experience could be understood, not as providentially figurative, but as historically participatory. More importantly,“manners” embodied the idea of the exemplarity of historical process, since comparative cultural and anthropological data were
thought to broaden readers’ minds. One reviewer of Voltaire’s Essai commented enthusiastically: “Our author’s researches into manners and customs have been of general benefit to mankind, as they evidently tend to humanize the mind, by dispelling
those prejudices which are merely the effect of education.”32 From the 1760s onward,
there were few historical works that did not embrace (in however perfunctory a way)
the new cultural history, and many professed to give systematic treatment to the history of manners.33 Historians’ accounts of manners, although they provided readers
with insights into the social life, gender relations, and cultural practices of previous
generations, often lacked human interest because they treated individual experience as
part of a collective entity. Their works were a very long way from the kinds of microhistories through which twentieth-century Annales and cultural historians provided
insights into the lived experience of individuals and communities in the past. The
shortcomings of history, in this respect, gave an opportunity to novelists. As Clara
Reeve wrote in The Progress of Romance,“The Novel is a picture of real life and manners,
and of the time in which it was written.”34 The historical vogue for manners provided
novelists with a means of articulating the historicity of their own endeavors, allowing
them to present their detailed depictions of social context as portraits of the times and
yet giving them the advantage of the individual perspective. It was of considerable
strategic value to novelists, struggling to establish the respectability of their genre, to be
able to liken their work to the serious, exemplary business of history. If claims to moral
exemplarity by way of the individual cautionary tale—the romantic adventuress who
ends up ruined or exiled, the penitent whore, the reformed rake, the disobedient
daughter, and so on—often rang hollow, the exemplary value of manners, accurately
and sensitively portrayed, was rarely in doubt. Public anxiety about the pernicious
moral influence of novels, especially upon female readers, may have been significantly
allayed by the thought that they offered something of an education in the nature of
manners past and present.
The idea of manners allowed novelists such as Maria Edgeworth (writing, in
Castle Rackrent [1800], of the changes over recent generations in Ireland and the
softening of the “national identity” of the Irish) to integrate generational and histor32. Critical Review 18 (July 1764): 20.
33. See A. M. Rousseau,“L’école historique anglaise de Voltaire,” in L’Angleterre et Voltaire, Studies
on Voltaire, no. 147 (1976): 754–851; and Thomas Preston Peardon, The Transition in English Historical
Writing, 1760–1830 (New York, 1933).
34. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (1785), in Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785, ed. Gary Kelly, Elizabeth Eger, Judith Hawley, et al., 6 vols. (London, 1999), 6:259.
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ical change along an imagined historical trajectory. Here again, a major precedent
and influence was Voltaire, who, in his Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), provided a record of
the political, religious, and cultural life of one great era of French history for his own
generation of self-conscious after-comers. As he reflected in a later work,“J’envisage
encore le siècle de Louis XIV comme celui du génie, et le siècle présent comme celui qui
raisonne sur le génie.”35 As novelists came to present themselves as respectable documenters of manners, the romantic plots at the heart of most of their works took on
new historical depth and meaning. Judging from James Raven’s and Antonia Forster’s
magisterial survey, most prose fiction of the late eighteenth century continued to rely
upon timeless stories of the young overcoming obstacles put in their way by economic
circumstances, social constraints, and the old, and eventually finding true love.36 The
perennial stories of generational conflict became increasingly integrated into a narrative of historical change, and the experience of the young increasingly interpreted and
given resonance as that of a generation at a particular point in history. In the nineteenth century, these stories of generational conflict and change would become tragic
dramas of historical displacement: one need only think of Tom and Maggie Tulliver in
George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), whose tragedy is owing to the fact that they,
like other “young natures ... in the onward tendency of human things have risen above
the mental level of the generation before them.”37 In the more optimistic historical climate of the later eighteenth century, these generational stories were more usually
treated as tales of modernization, in which a hero or heroine represented the next
phase in the progress of civilization. To a degree this is the case with Haywood’s Betsy
Thoughtless, a woman who grows emotionally from an old-fashioned coquette into a
modern woman of sense; and with Frances Burney’s Evelina, a young woman who
triumphs over her parental background by virtue of her superior skill in negotiating
the obstacle course of contemporary metropolitan life. It is also very much the case
with early gothic novels in which the protagonists—terrified, yet, underneath it all,
embodiments of fairness and rationality such as one might find in subjects of a
limited, Protestant constitutional monarchy—represent a stage of human evolution
several steps beyond the forces of tyranny and (usually Catholic) superstition that
oppress them.
Particularly in the case of gothic novels, readers came to expect a measure of historical accuracy, color, and depth in the portraits of ancient manners. One astute reviewer of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) complained that the novel
failed as a gothic drama because it lacked a fully realized imaginative sense of history:
The manners do not sufficiently correspond with the aera the author has
chosen; which is the latter end of the sixteenth century. There is, perhaps,
35.Voltaire, Défense de Louis XIV (1769), in Oeuvres historiques, ed. René Pomeau (Paris, 1957), 1294.
36. James Raven and Antonia Forster, The English Novel, 1770–1799, vol. 1 of A Bibliographical Survey
of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (Oxford, 2000).
37. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. A. S. Byatt (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1979), 363.
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no direct anachronism, but the style of accomplishments given to the
heroine, a country young lady, brought up on the banks of the Garonne;
the mention of botany; of little circles of infidelity, &c. give so much the
air of modern manners, as is not counterbalanced by Gothic arches and
antique furniture. It is possible that the manners of different ages may
not differ so much as we are apt to imagine, and more than probably that
we are generally wrong when we attempt to delineate any but our own;
but there is at least a style of manners which our imagination has appropriated to each period, and which, like the costume of theatrical dress, is
not departed from without hurting the feelings.38
This review can be instructively compared with the one of Amelia that was cited earlier. Anachronism, being a matter of material detail, is of less concern to this reviewer
than authentic-feeling historical atmosphere. This is no longer a matter, merely, of
vraisemblance. Rather, the reviewer regards the novel as an arena for the evocation of
the manners of the past. The reviewer may be skeptical as to how far it is possible to
recreate the past in fiction, but the review as a whole reveals a new degree of public
debate about the potential of the novel as an instrument of historical cognition.
The reviewer’s simultaneous enthusiasm for and skepticism about the novel’s
capacity to extend historical awareness and knowledge was certainly shared by later
eighteenth-century novelists. Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778) was one of the
very first novels to be set in the distant past (in this case, the English medieval past) and
to attempt to make instructive use of historical manners. In her preface to the work
Reeve struggled to define her own historical enterprise, stating that the work was
designed “to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient
Romance and modern Novel, at the same time it assumes a character and manner of its
own, that it differs from both; it is distinguished by the appellation of a Gothic Story,
being a picture of Gothic times and manners.”39 She asserts that the psychological
depth in her portrayal of character corresponds to that in modern novels, but that the
historical setting entails an element of “romance” notwithstanding the historical
verisimilitude of “Gothic times and manners.”The use of the notion of “romance”here
implies some hesitancy about the historical value of her work. Subsequent historical
novelists made similarly tentative claims for their works as forms of history, even as they
became increasingly attentive to factual accuracy. A new kind of self-consciousness
about historical representation can be seen, for example, in novels of Roman antiquity.
This subgenre, which eventually culminated in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of
Pompeii (1834), found an early exponent in the Bluestocking intellectual and writer Ellis
Cornelia Knight. The historical ambitions of her epistolary novel Marcus Flaminius; or,
38. Review of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe, Critical Review, 2d ser., 11
(August 1794): 362.
39. The Old English Baron (1778) [original title The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story, 1777],
ed. James Trainer (Oxford, 2003), 2.
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a view of the Military, Political, and Social Life of the Romans (1792) are evident from its
title. Knight confronts the unease she may have felt about assuming the mantle of a historian by making the documenter of history internal to the text. The hero, Marcus,
functions as the historian’s fictional proxy by providing analysis and commentary, first
as a long-time captive of a Germanic tribe (“‘ [their women do not have] that gentleness
of manners which are the natural characteristics of the sex in civilized countries’”), and
then as a virtual stranger in his native city of Rome.40 A similar device is used by Elizabeth Hamilton in her historical novel The Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, The Wife of
Germanicus (1804). Here again, the subject is the contrast between the mentality and
manners of the Romans and those of the Germanic tribes, an issue of enormous interest
to contemporary British readers wanting to learn more about the ethnic roots of their
own culture. Hamilton likewise employs an internal historical commentator, a role
played by Agrippina, whose observations in turn reinforce Hamilton’s “Preliminary
Observations on the History and Character of the Ancient Romans.” Other novels set
in various eras of the past aspired to create not only rarefied atmosphere but also a
kind of historical vocabulary through which their readers might arrive at a comparative understanding of their own manners, mentalities, and morality. Among the many
historical novels published before Scott’s Waverley (1814), a significant number evoked
the ancient feudal or tribal manners of the Scottish or Irish Celts, often as a means of
measuring both the barbarism and heroism left behind in modern times.41 There
were many others ranging across European and North American history, often describing themselves as “historical romances”or “historical novels,”but confident of the wider
educational benefit to their readership conferred by informed access to the manners
of the past.42
Even before Scott’s historical fiction, novelists felt increasingly assured of their
historical mission to offer a portrait of manners with the greatly added interest of a
mediating individual point of view. Something of this new confidence can be discerned in an unpublished essay by William Godwin,“Of History and Romance” (1797),
in which he reviews the current state and status of both historical writing and novels,
and assesses their degree of convergence. Modern history, he argues, is mainly about
the progress of civilization, and as such has become too abstract and not sufficiently
compelling to the imagination. This kind of history—the history of “Hume, Voltaire
and Robertson”—has diverged excessively from the other kind of history, the “study
of the individual”: “He who would study the history of nations abstracted from indi40. Marcus Flaminius; or, a view of the Military, Political, and Social Life of the Romans, 2 vols. (London, 1792), 1:28.
41. For example, T. J. Horsley Curties, The Watch Tower, or the Sons of Ulthona: An Historical
Romance (1803–4); Jane Porter, The Scottish Chiefs: A Romance (1810); John Agg, MacDermot, or the
Irish Chieftan (1810).
42. See, for example, Henrietta Rouviere, A Peep at Our Ancestors: An historical romance (1807);
Caroline Maxwell, Alfred of Normandy, or the Ruby Cross: An historical romance (1808); Anna Maria
Porter, Don Sebastian, or the House of Braganza: An historical romance (1809); also Jane West, The Loyalists: An historical novel (1812).
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viduals whose passions and peculiarities are interesting to our minds, will find it a dry
and frigid science.”43 History has been suffering from an overly positivist view of its
factual truthfulness and has lost a proper sense of itself as a creative form of writing:
[T]he noblest and most excellent species of history, may be decided to be
a composition in which, with a scanty substratum of facts and dates, the
writer interweaves a number of happy, ingenious and instructive inventions, blending them into one continuous and indiscernible mass. It sufficiently corresponds with the denomination ... of historical romance.44
While history has been enjoying a period of self-confident (indeed, self-deluded)
isolation from literature, the novel (or “romance,” as Godwin also calls it) has come
to realize its historical potential:
The writer of romance then is to be considered as the writer of real history; while he who was formerly called the historian, must be contented
to step down into the place of his rival.... True history consists in a delineation of consistent, human character, in a display of the manner in
which such a character acts under successive circumstances, in showing
how character increases and assimilates new substances to its own, and
how it decays, together with the catastrophe into which by its own gravity it naturally declines.45
The novel, Godwin insists, must now be recognized as a serious kind of historical
endeavor, one that renders history palpable by demonstrating the pressure of external
events upon individual subjectivity. He stops short of suggesting that subjectivity is
itself historically constituted but argues that it is the interplay between individual
psyche and the forces of change that gives the novel its exemplary force.
Godwin’s article is revealing, not only because of his self-consciously brash assertions about the novel as a form of history, but also because of his understanding of
the eighteenth-century histories of manners and civilization as incompatible with a
fully imagined history of the individual. To this extent he confirms the continuing separation between history and fiction in the late eighteenth century and warns us to be
wary of exaggerating their convergence, even under the banner of “manners.” Lateeighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century historians remained committed to the notion of history as an external structure of events, even as they redefined that structure,
not as a providential or dynastic entity, but as a human collectivity. The historical
novel, as it was pioneered in late-eighteenth-century Britain, and developed by Scott,
43. This unpublished essay, originally intended for the Enquirer, is reprinted in William Godwin,
Caleb Williams, ed. Gary Handwerk, A. A. Markley, et al. (Peterborough, Ontario, 2000), 462, 455, 453.
It is discussed briefly in Clifford Siskin’s searching study The Work of Writing: Literature and Social
Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore, 1998), chap. 6.
44. Godwin,“Of History and Romance,” 462.
45. Ibid., 466.
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Stendhal, Dumas, and Tolstoy, depended upon that sense of historical events as an external, unyielding structure, in order that history and fictional narrative might coexist
as distinct categories within single narratives without fear or danger of usurpation or
cross-contamination. More generally, the consolidation, and then self-confident diversification, of eighteenth-century history as an empirically grounded form of writing insulated it against many of the theoretical challenges posed by prose fiction. Prose
fiction writers slowly caught up with historians, first by endorsing their exclusion of
romance, allegory, secret history, and coded narrative; and second by assimilating their
periodized presentation of time to romantic or picaresque plots of young adventurers
and old curmudgeons. Modern accounts of the rise of the novel have emphasized both
the role of male authorship (in the 1740s) and the increasing moral decorum on the
part of both male and female authors in the genre’s steady acquisition of respectability.
It can also be said that a major part of this growing respectability and public endorsement was the fact that novelists took on board historians’ factual accuracy,
thematic interests, anthropological vocabularies, periodized sense of the past, and
(by the nineteenth century) omniscient narratorial stance. Moreover, novelists felt
confident that they could represent social identities with a historical depth, complexity, and attention to individual variation rarely matched by historians themselves. If, by the early nineteenth century, the novel had emerged from under the
shadow of history, its more prestigious elder sibling, this was because many novelists
felt that they carried out the function of historians to a more exacting standard.
u n i v e r s i t y o f wa rw i c k
abstract
Karen O’Brien sheds light on the perennial question of the “rise” of the novel, refining the current consensus that there was a high degree of mutual creative influence between historical writing and fiction.
The interplay between history and the novel in the mid-eighteenth century was part of a disciplinary
readjustment whereby historians and novelists reclassified, separated, and realigned their representational territory. O’Brien argues that debates about the nature and knowledge-value of history were
conducted within the novel rather than across the novel/history border, and that history was insulated
by its antiquity, prestige, and formal stability from the theoretical challenges posed by the novel, as well
as by other forms of philosophical skepticism. In abandoning both the naïve realism and corrosive
skepticism of its early phase, the novel gradually approximated the confident representational norms
and thematic preoccupations of history.
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