The Emergence of Alternate History in the Nineteenth Century

Arranging the Past, Reconsidering the Present: The Emergence of Alternate History in the Nineteenth Century Submitted by Ben Carver, to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, November 2012. This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature: ................................... 3 Abstract This study examines the expression and patterns of alternate history in nineteenth- century Britain and France. “Alternate history” refers to the presentation of events that did not happen in order to consider historical trajectories that might have been and the consequent displacements of present and future. The central chapters of this thesis correspond to the three fields of writing in which these texts are clustered: in narratives of undefeated and resurgent Napoleons, which I trace from the rival journalistic claims made about Napoleon and his historical significance; in accounts that re-imagine the transition from antiquity to modernity, for example by delaying the passage of Christianity from the Middle East to western Europe; and, as part of the plurality-of-worlds debate, in the popular-astronomical imagination of variant versions of human history upon other planets. Three patterns of alternate history are discernible: the romantic-utopian, the critical-reflexive and the linear- chronological. I attach to these patterns the figures of the garden, the map and the dial. These models do not correspond to the three temporal fields of the recent, antique and planetary past, and there is not a straightforward development of these patterns or modes across the nineteenth century; they rather represent a spectrum of purposes for the fictional alteration of the past which occur at various moments and contexts in the century. Alternate history in this period has never been the subject of in-depth analysis. The approach of this study will not absorb such transformations of history into a tradition of futurist writing, as some critics have done. Maintaining alternate history’s distinctness from futurism makes it possible to avoid framing the texts as precursors to science fiction’s historical anticipations. This study will argue that alternate history should instead be recognised as a category of writing that is aware of and concerned with the way that history is written and received, in particular with history’s interactions with other literary forms and the relationships between writing history and other disciplinary fields. More broadly, alternate history should be interpreted in the context of the often described formation of History as a positivist discipline by the late nineteenth century; but far from indicating a steady progression toward scientific historiography, alternate-historical texts reflect upon that transformation and its consequences in other literary fields (journalism, political theory, popular Astronomy, the romance novel) in the century whose “great obsession” is said to have been history. 4 Acknowledgements This PhD thesis could not have been written without the generosity and patience of many people. Dr Alex Murray, my primary supervisory, encouraged my enthusiasm for the research area, and more importantly taught me to define its borders and internal coherence. My second supervisor, Professor Regenia Gagnier, provided invaluable information as to where to situate my work, and with whom I was or should be in dialogue. I am also humbly indebted to the many colleagues who helped me find books I did not know I needed, realise the ideas I did not recognise in my own hunches, and see connections I had overlooked. Any faults in this thesis are my own. My family deserve acknowledgement for putting up with my absences and—when deep in work—my strangeness. Magda and Daria’s patience has been unbounded, as has my father’s in proofreading and correcting a draft which I thought was relatively clean. 5 Table of Contents Abstract pg. 3 Acknowledgements pg. 4 Table of Contents pg. 5 List of Figures pg. 7 Introduction: The Castle of If pg. 9 Chapter 1. The Afterlives of Nineteenth-Century Alternate History pg. 21 Chapter 2. Napoleonic Alternatives pg. 61 Chapter 3. Editing Antiquity: Political Legacies in Disraeli and Renouvier pg. 97 Chapter 4. Alternate Earths: Philosophical Romance to Materialist History pg. 131 Chapter 5. Late-Victorian Alternate History pg. 171 Conclusion: Contingency pg. 205 Bibliography pg. 211 7 List of Figures Title Page: Charles Renouvier, no title (1876). In Charles Renouvier, Uchronie (l'utopie dans l'histoire): Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilization Européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être (Paris: Bureau de la Critique Philosophique, 1876), 408. Figure 1 (page 75): James Gillray, “48 Hours After Landing!” (1803). In Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London: Pimlico Press, 1994), 283. Figure 2 (page 127): Charles Renouvier, no title (1876). In Charles Renouvier, Uchronie (l'utopie dans l'histoire): Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilization Européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être (Paris: Bureau de la Critique Philosophique, 1876), 408. Figure 3 (page 131): Unsigned, “Ruby Amphitheater” (1835). In the New YorK Sun, August 28. Figure 4 (page 146): Sir John Herschel, “The Great Nebula in Orion” (1826). In Jonathan Smith, “De Quincey's Revisions to ‘The System of the Heavens’,” Victorian Periodicals Review 26, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 206. Figure 5 (page 153): James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, “Aspect of an Eclipse of the Sun by the Earth” (1885). In James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, The Moon Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (London: John Murray, 1885), 185. Figure 6 (page 184): Edward Burne-Jones, “When Adam Delved and Eve Span Who was then the Gentleman” (1888). In William Morris, A Dream of John Ball and A King’s Lesson (London: Reeves & Turner, 1888), frontispiece. Introduction: The Castle of If This thesis will follow the nineteenth-century progress of ‘alternate history’, which refers to the depiction of histories that never happened. The claims that I make depend upon the establishment of a context for these works of fiction and non-fiction, and that context is nineteenth-century historiography. The transformation of history-writing during the period is generally described as a movement toward becoming a positivist discipline, one which would shed its involvement with literary studies and with romantic methods of interpreting the past in order to extract moral messages for the present. This is not to say that works of literature ceased to interrogate the past and the basis on which it could be known, but that History increasingly defined itself through the formation of its own values of disciplinary rigour.1 Alternate history is a form of writing that seems to assume both, and neither, the roles of literature and history-writing; through the prosaic presentation of developmental narratives populated with known historical figures, and of the formation of social arrangements in which those narratives take place, the texts’ prosaic qualities make them resistant to their classification as ‘literary’ works. Equally, the unhistorical nature of the events described divorces them from the practice of history-writing. I do not, however, wish to treat alternate history as a form of writing whose hypotheses are unlike any other. The presence of imaginary history is felt in works of late-Victorian fiction, as I will argue, and the examination of alternate histories leads to the recognition that non-history presses upon many texts of the period and allows us to read them differently, as having an alternate-historical dimension. One such work is The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-5), published in the midst of the historiographical re- assessments that I have referred to. Here, the Count, himself an inventor of biographical pasts, reflects upon the dream-like quality of history that it acquires with the passage of time: ‘What my thinking today lacks is a proper assessment of the past, because I am looking at this past from the other end of the horizon. Indeed, as one goes forward, so the past, like the landscape through which one is walking, is gradually effaced. What is happening to me is what happens to people who are wounded in a dream: they look at their wound and they feel it but cannot remember how it was caused.’2 The Count’s feeling of disjuncture between the past and present is voiced near the end of the novel, after his adoption of multiple personalities in order to exact revenge upon his betrayers. The most significant transformation of his identity is from Edmond Dantès, a 1 I capitalise “History” when referring to it as a discipline (as I do with other disciplines) and will use lower case when referring to history more generally as past events and time. 2 Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (London & New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 1036. Introduction: The Castle of If 10 merchant sailor with good prospects, to the Count of Monte Cristo—the demonic persona he creates for himself after his long incarceration upon the Château D’If. The curtailment of Dantès’ future, with its promise of a loving marriage and successful career, is replaced by the Count’s fabrication of a past for himself that is made possible through the acquisition of an inexhaustible treasure upon the island whose name he takes as his own. It is not only the personal past which is subject to re-imagination in the novel, for the plot is also laden with the contingencies of wider history, being set in motion by the reversals of fortune that characterise the career of Napoleon Bonaparte: Dantès is imprisoned for (unknowingly) carrying a letter on behalf of Napoleonic sympathisers prior to the escape from Elba and the 100 Days, which culminated in the Battle of Waterloo.

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