Victorian Negotiations with the Recent Past: History, Fiction, Utopia
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Victorian Negotiations with the Recent Past: History, Fiction, Utopia Helen Kingstone Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds Leeds Trinity University Department of Humanities September 2013 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2013 The University of Leeds and Helen Kingstone The right of Helen Kingstone to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Acknowledgements Most obvious and important thanks go to my supervisors, Rosemary Mitchell and Nathan Uglow at Leeds Trinity University, and Richard Salmon at the University of Leeds, for their generous, patient and encouraging support, without which this thesis certainly would not have reached completion. Particular thanks to Rosemary for her generosity with her time, her ideas and her collection of highly relevant books. This thesis would also not have come into being without the intellectually exciting and collaboratively supportive training I received during my MA studies at York. I owe a great deal to Jane Moody, who got me there, and who was always an inspiration. She is much missed. Trev Broughton was incisively insightful as my dissertation supervisor, but her help has not stopped there, and I am very grateful to her for voluntarily applying her critical eye to my opening chapter at a difficult stage. Chapter 3 was equally generously read by Muireann O’Cinneide, who taught me as a first-year undergraduate at St Peter’s College, Oxford, and to whom I owe my delight in Victorian Studies. I also owe many more personal debts. My housemates have kept me sane, and I’m very grateful to Rachel for lunchtime conversations, mutual book-swappings and PhD companionship. To Dan, many thanks for healthy doses of reassurance and teasing, and for letting himself be a sounding-board for ideas. I owe most to my family – Jannet, Erik and Kamie – whose keen eye for detail, intellectual rigour, and enthusiasm for debate are largely responsible for all this. Abstract The challenges of contemporary-history-writing were brought into relief in Britain in the nineteenth century. Philosophical and pragmatic factors made the recent past a subject of discomfort for historians, but popular with novelists. Changing concepts of time and social value made it more difficult to draw boundaries on the remit of historiography, and to decide which individuals were worthy of inclusion. As a period still present in diverse living memories, the recent past was associated with multiplicity and particularity, in an era that valued grand and singular narratives, and looked to history to provide them. This was exacerbated in the later Victorian period by the establishment of history as a university discipline. Historians sought professional credibility, and thus avoided including the as-yet inconclusive recent past in their national histories. Those historians who did incorporate it often struggled to maintain a consistent tone, seeking overview while aware of their lack of hindsight. They resorted to the trope of ‘nation’ to impose apparent social unity. By contrast, the recent past was popular with novelists. This more personal genre enabled mid-century women writers to write provincial and localised narratives. By using polyphonic and ironic narrators, they commented on history without claiming definitive judgement, and gave voice to ‘unhistoric’ individuals. They included women, however, more successfully than they did the working class. At the end of the century, socialist writers seeking social transformation set utopian fictions in the future, enabling them to look back with an imaginary hindsight, and write contemporary history with impunity. They were, however, still faced with the problem of agency. The quasi-religious significance that had earlier been attributed to ‘History’ was now transferred to the collective. These genres, therefore, all offered different opportunities for contemporary-history-writing, but could not solve its intrinsic challenges. Contents Introduction Who’s afraid of contemporary history? .................................................................... 1 The temporal continuum ........................................................................................... 9 The social continuum .............................................................................................. 15 Methodology ........................................................................................................... 23 Chapter 1 Analogous anxieties: situating the recent past in a conceptual framework ......... 34 Particularity and generality ................................................................................. 37 1. Gender ................................................................................................................. 40 Femininity and the particular in nineteenth-century discourse ........................... 42 2. Antiquarianism .................................................................................................... 45 3. Historical fiction.................................................................................................. 51 Claiming singularity: ‘Truth’ .............................................................................. 55 4. Drawing the boundaries ...................................................................................... 62 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 69 Chapter 2 Historians and the recent past ................................................................................. 71 The status of hindsight ............................................................................................ 75 Where does history end? ......................................................................................... 82 The temporal continuum: overview and immersion ............................................... 87 Harriet Martineau ................................................................................................ 87 J. R. Green ........................................................................................................... 94 Spencer Walpole ............................................................................................... 100 The social continuum: what counts as history? .................................................... 103 The ‘nation’ ....................................................................................................... 111 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 117 Chapter 3 The recent past in the mid-Victorian provincial novel ........................................ 120 ‘Novels of the recent past’ .................................................................................... 123 The social continuum: who counts as historic? .................................................... 128 Retrospection and the temporal continuum........................................................... 131 Nostalgia resisted: Waverley as a foundational paradigm..................................... 136 Nostalgia undermined: Elizabeth Gaskell’s My Lady Ludlow .............................. 142 ‘Not more happy’: Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley ...................................................... 150 Balancing two worlds: George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Middlemarch.................... 159 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 169 Chapter 4 Utopian imaginings: the contemporary history of the future ............................. 172 The fin de siècle and utopia ................................................................................... 173 Solving the problem of hindsight .......................................................................... 179 The advantages of hindsight .............................................................................. 181 Alienation and mediation .................................................................................. 184 The limitations of hindsight .............................................................................. 188 Agency and the individual..................................................................................... 191 Historic and unhistoric reversed ........................................................................ 193 Internally conflicted texts .................................................................................. 196 Collectivity and how to find it............................................................................... 205 Action beyond reading .......................................................................................... 212 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 215 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 217 Bibliography ...........................................................................................................