Conclusion

Writing in an uncertain age of revolution, historical novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries struggled with both the meaning of history and the shape of the future. Even following Scott’s creation of a tradition of transformation in the Waverley Novels, the motif of breakage and the apparent triumph of commerce remained disquieting. Although Thomas Carlyle argues that a healthy approach to the past is possible, in ...

Ancient Liberties

Chapter One explores how the historical novel emerged in the 1760s as a form which at once employed and interrogated the dominant political narrative of ‘ancient liberties’. The notion of ancient constitutionalism allowed proposals for reform or for limits on monarchical power to be seen as attempts to ensure stability or, at most, (as with the theory of the Norman Yoke) to return to political origin. Yet for Horace Walpole ancient constitutionalism seems at times a troubled jest; Clara Reeve senses that the motif desperately needs reinforcement; and even after the more radical uses of the theory of the Norman Yoke by the Constitutional Society in the 1780s and 90s, Ann Radcliffe considers it a frozen political fable. Haunted by the spectre of the divine right of kings, in the historical novel the narrative of tradition ultimately proves an insufficient underpinning for the constitution.

Uneasy Alliances: Liberty and the Nation

In imagining the safe politicisation of the ‘mass’ in commercial modernity, the idea of the nation as a focus for enthusiasm is key. Yet in the British context the nation itself was a troubled concept. Hence, as Chapter 3 explores, historical novelists drew upon the comparative potential of stadial history, trying to reimagine British liberty in relation to the competing nationalisms of the sister kingdoms and the empire. As novelists like Henry Siddons, Anna Maria Mackenzie, James White, Anna Millikin, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Porter realised, such competing nationalisms would have to be carefully balanced, shaped by new historical narratives, if national feeling were not to be as threatening to the emergent state as class identity. As such, the historical novel is an important forerunner to the national tales of Sydney Owenson and Maria Edgeworth.

The Labours of History

Chapter Two examines how the evocation of sympathy in the historical novel generates both radical and reformist historical fictions. The interrogation of chivalric sentiment, which begins with Sophia Lee, accelerates after the French Revolution. Responding to Edmund Burke, radical writers like Charlotte Smith, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft argue for a redistribution of sympathy and for a new, more rational historiography. After the Terror, these notions of history for the ‘mass’ were themselves subject to reformulation, notably in the historical novel of the recent past. Historicising the French Revolution, Charles Dacres (1797), Lioncel; or Adventures of an Emigrant (1803), Edgeworth’s ‘Madame Fleury’ (1809) and Burney’s The Wanderer [1814] explore the possibility of an commercial exchange at once sympathetic and economic. Along with other historical novels including Ann Yearsley’s The Royal Captives [1795] and Montford Castle [1795]), such works implicitly suggest the need for workers to be safely politicised.

Introduction

The historical novel has often been defined in the terms set by Walter Scott’s fiction, as a reflection on a clear break or change between past and present. Returning to the range of historical fiction written before Scott, Reinventing Liberty explores this often neglected and misunderstood genre by reconstructing how conservatives and radicals fought through the medium of the historical past over the future of Britain. Aware of the events of the Civil War and 1688, witness to the American and French Revolutions, Scott’s precursors realized the dangers of absolutism, on the one hand, and political breakage, on the other. Interrogating the impact of commercial modernity, the works considered here do not adopt the familiar nineteenth-century Whig narrative of history as progress but instead imagine and reimagine the possibilities of transition. As such, they lay the groundwork for the British myth of political gradualism, while problematizing the rise of capital.

The End of History? Scott, His Precursors and the Violent Past

The fifth chapter examines how Scott would finally be unable to erase the unease evident in the earlier historical novel. Having attempted to calm the post-French Revolution debate concerning history in The Antiquary, in Ivanhoe (1820) Scott is unable to escape its tropes, giving a coded response to ancient constitutionalism; to the call for the redistribution of sensibility; to radical readings of stadial history and even to the more conservative narrative of history as a kind of scientific medicine for the national body. Moreover, as he responds to previous points of historiographic and political tension, his sense of the inherent violence of commerce and its fit with governmental structures grow. Finally analysing St. Ronan’s Well (1823) (a novel in which the transitions of modern commerciality are themselves seen as violent), this chapter explores how Scott negotiates the historiographically-shaped economic apprehensions of his predecessors.

Conserving Histories: Chivalry, Science and Liberty

Chapter Four explores how, in the years leading up to the publication of Waverley, historical novelists recuperate the radical and reformist readings of history that had emerged during the post-French Revolution debate. Two overlapping strategies of reclamation emerge. First, as in the works of Anna Maria Porter, Jane Porter and Sarah Green, the radical emphasis on (non-chivalric) sensibility becomes an emphasis on chivalric morality. Second, the radical emphasis on rational historiography is co-opted, as seen, for all their differences in political perspective, in works by Elizabeth Hamilton and Jane West, which gesture towards scientific history. This absorption of reformist and radical energies into more conservative or cautious historical fictions facilitated a myth of modern gradualism against a background of secure commerciality; this myth would be problematized by Walter Scott.