Discovering Gilgamesh: Geology, narrative and the historical sublime in Victorian culture 9781526102379

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Discovering Gilgamesh

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Discovering Gilgamesh Geology, narrative and the historical sublime in Victorian culture

Vybarr Cregan-Reid

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Vybarr Cregan-Reid 2013 The right of Vybarr Cregan-Reid to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN

978 0 7190 9051 6 hardback

First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester

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For Johanna, Rebecca, Erika and John.

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Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

page ix xi

Part I – Gilgamesh Introduction 1 Discovering Gilgamesh

3 37

Part II – Narrative and the historical sublime 2 Capturing time: the iconography of water in painting and photography 3 Forgetting the past and the future: Macaulay, Carlyle, and the ‘shoreless chaos’ of history 4 Present endings: rethinking closure in the Victorian novel

73 111 150

Part III – Geology, Gilgamesh, and the historical sublime 5 Conclusion: Gilgamesh and the resublimation of deep time

191

Select bibliography Index

215 233

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List of figures

1. George Smith, probably taken around 1874 (private collection). page 143 2. Nicolas Poussin. Winter, or the Deluge, 1660–64 (Louvre, Paris). 144 3. Thomas Burnet. Illustration from The Sacred Theory of the Earth, 7th ed. 2 vols. 1684. London, 1719. 144 4. Benjamin West. The Deluge, 1790 – retouched 1803 (Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown). 145 5. J. M. W. Turner. The Deluge, 1805 (Tate Britain, London). 145 6. Francis Danby. The Deluge, 1840 (Tate Britain, London). 146 7. John Martin. The Deluge, 1834 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven). 146 8. J. M. W. Turner. Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning After the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, 1843 (Tate Britain, London). 147 9. J. M. W. Turner. Shade and Darkness: the Evening of the Deluge, 1843 (Tate Britain, London). 147 10. William Dyce. Pegwell Bay – a Recollection of October 5th, 1858, 1860. (Tate Britain, London). 148 11. Roger Fenton. Pont-y-Garth, near Capel Curig, 1857 (The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles). 148 12. Roger Fenton. Falls of the Llugwy, at Pont-y-Pair, 1857 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). 149 13. Roger Fenton. Aira Force at Ullswater, 1858 (RPS, National Media Museum, SSPL, Bath). 149

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Acknowledgements

I

t is impossible to write a book without accruing numerous debts of gratitude. First among these is due to Adam O’Farrell for much kindness, loyalty, enduring good humour, and for ‘keeping a lid on things’. Initial research for this book began with the assistance of the Leverhulme Trust who awarded me an Early Career Fellowship at Sussex University. Since then, my colleagues in the School of English at the University of Kent have been kind enough to grant me research leave to write the bulk of the manuscript. Parts of this book have found their way into print in various forms and I am grateful to their editors for their help (among them Adelene Buckland, Ruth Livesey, and Barry Tharaud) and for permission to reprint. A different version of chapter three appeared as ‘Macaulay and the Historical Sublime; or, Forgetting the Past and the Future’ in Nineteenth-Century Prose (33:2, 2006, 225–54). Preliminary ideas for some of the latter sections of the book appeared in ‘The Gilgamesh Controversy: the Ancient Epic and Late-Victorian Geology’, Journal of Victorian Culture (14:2, 2009, 224–37). Writers need numerous readers so I am happy to pay thanks to David Allinson, Jennie Batchelor, Carolyn Burdett, Holly Furneaux, Andrew Hadfield, Caroline Rooney, and Lindsay Smith, all of whom were kind enough to give feedback on various aspects of the book. Rod Edmond, Norman Vance, and Brian Young charitably shared their thoughts on the entire manuscript; advice given by Ralph O’Connor was also gratefully received. Sarah Collins, the Assistant Keeper at the British Museum’s Department of the Middle East, was an invaluable source of information, as was David Damrosch at Harvard; the librarians and staff at the London Library, St Dieniol’s, the British Library, and the Bodleian also deserve thanks. Special thanks also go to Vernon Duker for his help in permitting access to some vital primary source materials, and to all of the staff at Manchester University Press. Over the years many other friends and colleagues have tirelessly

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listened to ‘the Gilgamesh business’, among them the best of friends, Huw Bevan and Sandra Cryan, as well as Margaret Cantwell, Jon Cranfield, Gary Hazeldine, Sarah Horgan, Clive Johnson, Andy Kesson, Robert Maidens, Tom Montgomery, Sian Prime, Ruth Robbins, Courtney Salvey, Karen Sayer, Scarlett Thomas, and Lynne Truss. I owe thanks, too, to Alan Jeffers for much encouragement over the years and to Vivienne Schuster at Curtis Brown for trying to find a way. I also find myself carrying a debt that I cannot settle because of the sad death of Mary Dove. Throughout my time at Sussex she always showed a great interest in my work. I wish she were still here to read this so she may know how dearly she is missed. Finally, thanks to my brother, to my sisters, and to my mother, for whom this book counts as a small instalment of gratitude for their steadfastness and encouragement over the years. This would not have been written without them.

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[I]f only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers. I hear the clink at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.1 (John Ruskin, Letters, 24 May 1851) [A] lot of holes tied together with sediment.2 (Derek Ager, on deep time, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record) The evidence of scholarship is now destroying the inveterate error which has so deeply and injuriously affected the creeds, the legislation, the sympathies, the entire habits of life and thought of the modern world. 3 (Review of George Smith’s Chaldean Account, 11 December 1875)

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Part I: Gilgamesh ‫ﱪﱩ‬

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Introduction

[I]t is mostly in periods of turmoil and strife and confusion that people care much about history.4 (William Morris, News from Nowhere)

T

he rediscovery of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872 became the fulcrum for a series of debates about time and history in the Victorian period. The oldest epic excavated from the earth contained stories that had been thought to be original to the Old Testament, but Gilgamesh, it was revealed, was written many centuries before even the earliest parts of the Bible. The manner in which the discovery was reported in the international media and the way in which the stories of King Gilgamesh were later taken up in periodicals, journals, and geological theory are indicative of an anxiety in Victorian culture concerning the status of history. Many critics, commentators, and historians have assumed that the extreme age of the earth was something of a settled matter for the Victorians after around 1830 (with the publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology).5 If this was the case, then there could not have been a Gilgamesh ‘controversy’ (as the poem’s first translator called it), where ideas about the age of the earth and about the length of humanity’s cultural history, so hotly debated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, again circulated in the international press.6 The time of Gilgamesh’s rediscovery was also one when interpretations and chronologies of the Bible were again being tested against other forms of historical evidence. And finally, the controversy revisited the centuries-old question of whether there had ever been a global flood with only a few survivors from which we are descended. There are whole series of such debates about the age of the earth, going back to the chronologies of the Venerable Bede, but they take on a certain urgency and considerable loquacious variety in the Enlightenment through to the early/mid-nineteenth

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century. At the latter point, the once-volcanic debates that had fascinated, rather than simply divided, geognosists, earth physicists, and finally geologists, cooled somewhat. For the savants of the early nineteenth century the age of the earth was believed to consist of aeons of time far beyond the five to six millennia of the most prominent biblical chronologers. For Europe and America’s mid-nineteenth century savants deep time was not really an issue when set against the young-earth model of time; instead, deep time was only something that needed to be titivated and refined by further research. So if the idea of deep time was more or less settled for ‘western’ savants, then what is the controversy that surrounds the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh? It is a number of things, but the first is a cautionary warning that savants are not an entire culture; they do not write all of its novels, paint all of its canvasses, or compose all its music. What we can see in the nineteenth century is that some of the debates that emerge as a result of the epic’s translation reveal at the very least a considerable tension in Victorian ideas about the past, the present, and the future. Had the Victorians internalised ideas about deep time (the 4.55 billion years of history in which we now believe) then the rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh would have been of interest principally to antiquarian specialists rather than the newspaper- and periodical-reading masses. The Gilgamesh controversy tells us that history, for the Victorians, was not a settled matter at all. While there are no stable models for how all ‘the Victorians’ may have thought, the controversy does suggest that the sublimity of deep time and the concept of short-earth, narrative-based biblical time were both stubbornly crouched in the reading public’s consciousness. If this is the case, then the mid- to late-Victorian period begins to look quite different, resembling an era in which numerous conflicting models of time coexist, rather than a more straightforward paradigm of one model shifting and giving way to the other. I was, and still am, fascinated by a sentence that I read a long time ago in Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots in which she explained that ‘evolutionary theory implied a new myth of the past: instead of the garden at the beginning, there was the sea and the swamp’.7 Where history had once been anthropocentric, starting with stories of humanity, the past had become something much stranger and emptier. It seemed to me then as it does now that the Victorians had had to undergo, endure, and internalise a change to their being almost unimaginable in its complexity. They were forced to question who they were, where they had come from, where they were placed in nature, and where they were going. But it is not possible to speak of ‘the Victorians’ as a homogeneous group. The Victorian intel-

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ligentsia may have been cautiously enthusiastic about evolutionary theory (in understandably varied ways), but that does not mean that all ‘Victorians’ had accepted Darwin’s ideas, or indeed Charles Lyell’s. An international debate over the translation of a newly rediscovered ancient epic is a reminder of the innate instability of the Victorian view of history. This book, then, is about the Gilgamesh controversy and what it reveals about the Gordian and complex status of time and history in Victorian culture, as well as how it is tied up in geological theory at the end of the century. This book’s aim, though, is not to demonstrate the unidirectional influence of Gilgamesh on Victorian culture or vice versa; instead, it is an assessment of how the rediscovery of the poem both emerges from and contributes to ongoing debates about the nature of time and history in the nineteenth century. To that end, the book is also a rereading of the Victorians’ principal modes of historical narrative so that a more accurate assessment of the cultural, poetic, aesthetic, and political productivity of what I will call the ‘historical sublime’ in the period is possible. Moreover, it will demonstrate how the Gilgamesh controversy is integral to the conceptualisation of an ever-increasingly sublime model of history at the end of the nineteenth century. At every point throughout this book, the idea that drives the analysis and argument is that in order to understand the complexity of the Victorians’ relationship with the past (and perhaps more importantly, their present and future, too) we must be prepared to accept the state of confusion that they were experiencing regarding the status of time as they understood it. The interdisciplinary approach that this book adopts is integral to this goal. A monograph on the representation of time in any one of the three ‘arts’ that I look at here would yield more specific and detailed results. For example, the chapter on nineteenth-century historiography would be improved by a much wider consideration of the methodologies of Victorian historians like J. A. Froude, E. A. Freeman, William Stubbs, S. R. Gardiner, and even Leslie Stephen. Similarly, the chapters on the representation of time and history in painting and in the novel again would be improved by wider consideration and focus on authors, movements, genres, or subgenres. A study that moves across the disciplines, albeit in a more particular manner, is able to show how the confusion over historical timeframes saturates Victorian culture and is not merely the interest of the novel, or any other individual art form. In each case, the Victorian authors, historians, photographers, and painters that I have chosen reveal the lack of coherence in their precise understanding or knowledge of the past. More importantly, they each demonstrate the move towards a more sublime understanding of history

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that emerges after Gilgamesh is taken up by late-Victorian geological theory. Working under the assumption that the extreme length of history was a completed debate in the Victorian consciousness, many previous studies have taken for granted that Charles Lyell’s theory of gradualism (where the earth is formed through slow change over millions of years) had been triumphant in explaining the mysteries that the earth presented.8 But the Victorian media interest in the new translation of Gilgamesh (coupled with the financial support of a national newspaper for further excavations in Ottoman Iraq), the mainstream publication of the poem, the public interest in it both in Britain and in America, all of these would not have existed were it not for the fact that biblical narratives such as Noah’s flood still held sway in the Victorian consciousness as a valid representation of times past. Many books that address these debates about time and history in the Victorian period have been drawn towards a focus on Darwin’s contribution to the field of study, leading in my view towards two errors concerning the dissemination and understanding of scientific ideas in Victorian culture. Across the disciplines, Gillian Beer, Michael J. Freeman, Nicolaas Rupke, George P. Landow, Sally Shuttleworth, Colin Renfrew, Marcia Pointon, Norman Cohn, John Burrow, and George Levine have all made compelling cases for the pivotal importance of a historicised understanding of both time and history in the Victorian period – particularly in the context of Darwin’s theory of evolution.9 But, in their concentration on Darwin as the focal point for thinking about the impact of science in the period, they have, to very differing degrees, prioritised his influence on the cultural life of the Victorians, rather than the lack of it. As such, they have not been able to sufficiently emphasise the tensions that exist in various forms of Victorian historical representation. While Darwin necessarily had to have internalised the idea of deep time in order to develop a theory of natural selection, the extreme length of history was not something that his theory set out to prove, or indeed contribute to. Furthermore, the approach of historians (of art, literature, or science) that engage with such scientific debates has often been based on a particular author. The majority of the studies of Darwin currently piled high in the bookshops focus more on the ingenuity or controversial nature of his ideas and not on the Victorians’ understanding or reception of them. The longstanding assumption in Victorian studies seems to have been that, except for cases that involved a particular controversy (for example, the Essays and Reviews scandal, or the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, both of 1860) Victorian audiences of science were silenced by their assumed

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passivity and tacit agreement with new ideas. Little account has been taken of the enterprising and creative processes involved in the act of reading itself.10 This book will not attempt to create a new historiographical paradigm that will enable such investigation (James Secord’s expansive Victorian Sensation is very good on outlining the difficulties of such an endeavour while also positing a solution to them).11 It is all too easy to forget that Darwin’s laudable crowning as the principal thinker of nineteenth-century science was posthumous and not contemporary. Even Darwin’s Plots, with its valuable assessment of his influence upon the work of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy (among others), traces the impact of evolution by means of natural selection via the highest of high culture, paying less attention to the Victorian reading public’s lack of engagement with these ideas. While this book is not a reception study, and will not attempt to understand the complexity of all Victorian belief, the subject matter of the controversy itself does reveal that ideas about deep time were still the subject of wide, public interest in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Rather than looking directly at the impact of Darwin’s work or the state of new biblical criticism in the period, as many sophisticated studies have succeeded in doing, this book exposes the Victorian reading public’s confusion over the temporal bedrock of Darwin’s ideas. Writers specifically working on the history of geology (not evolution) have tended to be more alert to the nineteenth-century uncertainty concerning the nature of history. Nicolaas Rupke’s The Great Chain of History is an account of geology’s heyday in British universities in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rupke’s range of periodisation is shared approximately by Martin Rudwick’s two volumes on the politics of geology, Worlds Before Adam and Bursting the Limits of Time, both addressing how geology came to be a historical science; the span of the two volumes reaches from the 1780s through to around 1845. Ralph O’Connor’s The Earth on Show assesses the performative aspects of geology’s cultural transmission, and likewise comes to a halt at the midnineteenth century, as does J. M. I. Klaver’s Geology and Religious Sentiment, and understandably John Wyatt’s Wordsworth and the Geologists.12 Via similar periodisation, each in their way suggests that the debates over the extreme age of the earth that geology revealed were over by the mid-nineteenth century. One of the finest accounts of the life and impact of geology and deep time, again in the first half of the nineteenth century, is James Secord’s Victorian Sensation. It is an excellent redrawing of the received landscape or understanding of the circulation of scientific discourse in the mid-nineteenth century. It seeks to challenge the

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accepted view of science in nineteenth-century culture, persuasively arguing that the supremacy of Darwin has been written back into history, and that we ought to attempt to understand the period on its own terms, rather than those of the twenty-first century (which readily accepts Darwin’s theory as the most persuasive). True to its title, Mott T. Greene’s Geology in the Nineteenth Century does straddle both halves of the century, including discussion of Eduard Suess (with even a brief mention of Gilgamesh), but this is a geologist’s history, rather than an intellectual one.13 Greene’s subject matter is the progress of the science towards a more complete understanding of its own central issues (like the formation of mountain ranges or global plate tectonics); receiving perhaps insufficient attention is the science’s cultural or historical meaning in the period. Of the comparative-literature studies of the Epic of Gilgamesh, David Damrosch’s The Buried Book stands out as the fullest assessment of the life of the poem through the ages. With an innovative reverse-narrative structure, his is a deft history of the poem’s life and dissemination. He carefully reconstructs how the poem has stepped in and out of the spotlight in the several millennia since its creation using some fascinating source material, but he is rightly less concerned with tracing the broader cultural impact of the poem in the time of its rediscovery. While there is evidently a strong field of existing studies, either on Gilgamesh or on debates on the historical sublime in the period, none of these works bring together the material in one focussed study. To the detriment of Victorian studies, cultural historians of geology have proved themselves less interested in the science’s life in the late nineteenth century. By exposing our received misunderstanding of the Victorians’ relationship with time, this book aims to provide a reassessment of how history was (or was not) understood by the Victorians, and how that tension was so very productive in nineteenth-century culture.

The historical sublime ‘The historical sublime’ is a way of describing the new paradigms of time and history that emerge in the nineteenth century as a result of geological endeavour and debate. It is a means of describing the change that takes place when historical ideas formed through biblical interpretation are rewritten, reconceptualised, or even replaced by others that are neither didactic nor mythical but predominantly theoretical. In drawing upon ideas of sublimity, the term attempts to convey the complex and

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elaborate character of the emergent model of history in the period. Namely, that it is one that mobilises emptiness, extreme perspective, and narratological lack. To some extent it signals its own negation; the historical sublime is sublime precisely because it is not historical in the traditional sense. The historical sublime represents depths of time that are not narratable in the same way as other forms of historiography in the period. In Macaulay and Carlyle’s histories (which I will go on to discuss in Part II) there is a human chain that reaches back at least two millennia, and this is what their histories are concerned with. Amongst others, Austen Henry Layard, Henry Rawlinson, and George Smith (three figures that I will return to in the next chapter) pushed back into a third and fourth millennium in their committed interest in Babylonian history. Geology, though, reached much farther and deeper into time. Charles Lyell refused to be drawn on the question of the age of the earth; there simply was not sufficient data. Geologist James Hutton could not even bring himself to conceive of the idea of a beginning in what he saw as an unending ‘abyss of time’.14 In geological narrative, hundreds, thousands, even millions of years may pass that are unrecordable, so not only does the historical sublime carry with it the descriptive and epistemological criteria of lack or absence, but the emotive aspect of the sublime is relevant, too. Geology and the sublime have been linked since their inception in Western culture; both concepts as well as their relationship are key in understanding the Victorians’ notion of history and deep time. Returning to the beginning of British geological endeavour, Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory recounts an engaging shift that took place in the cultural imaginary in the late seventeenth century.15 How was it that mountains, which had once been seen as despicable excrescences that ruptured the natural and classical beauty of the landscape, came later to be regarded as objects of awe, terror and sublimity, Nicolson asks. The earliest reference to the latter view that she notes belongs to one of the most famous early British geologists, Thomas Burnet, who in his Sacred Theory (1681) remarked that: The greatest Objects of Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold, and next to the great Concave of the Heavens, and those boundless regions where the Stars inhabit, there is nothing that I look upon with more Pleasure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the Earth. There is something august and stately in the Air of these things . . . And whatsoever hath but the Shadow and Appearance of the INFINITE, as all Things have that are too big for our Comprehension, they fill and over-bear the Mind with sheer Excess, and Cast it into a pleasing kind of Stupor and Admiration.16

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Neither here nor at any other point throughout the Sacred Theory does Burnet overtly refer to the late seventeenth-century fad of the sublime. Dating approximately from the first to the third centuries of the Common Era, Longinus’s On the Sublime had been circulating in Britain since the mid-sixteenth century, in print for the first time (in its original Greek with Latin notes, edited by Franciscus Robortellus).17 The first edition to attract real attention in Britain was Boileau’s French translation in 1674. What is so significant about this section from Burnet’s thesis is that it does not belong to the Longinian sublime, which is quite different in structure and meaning to the forms of sublimity that succeeded it. The Longinian sublime is fundamentally rhetorical; its domain is to be found in the grandeur and elevation of literary language. It describes a kind of ontological slippage and doubleness, where something is described as both one thing and another. It is a figure frequently found in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), for example, where hell is described as ‘darkness visible’.18 This combination of two seemingly opposed concepts does not produce the nonsense of, for example, a black whiteness or an alive deadness. Instead, their combination successfully conveys a sense of place that is otherworldly, both in existence and in the sense of being beyond one’s immediate comprehension. The combination of these two terms, so easily grasped when used in isolation, transcends the usual possibilities of meaning and raises them to the status of the sublime as a rhetorical trick that conveys the vision of hell, but also as something that resists sufficiently finite explanation and definition.19 Around the same time that Burnet was completing his Sacred Theory, in broad terms English literature was moving away from the romance of courtly love towards the representation of the intensity of psychological experience caused by one’s interaction with, and experience of, nature. It is this particular aspect of the sublime that Burnet deploys in his discussion of mountains. The natural sublime, emerging after the rhetorical sublime, is quite different insofar as sublimity is to be found not within the confines of a linguistic system but ‘out there’ in the world of nature. Yet another firm geological connection is to be found here. Later editions of Burnet’s Sacred Theory included as prefatory amusement a dedicatory poem by Joseph Addison entitled ‘Ode to the most illustrious Dr Thomas Burnet, on his being author of the sacred theory of the earth’.20 In the history of the sublime Addison is notable for producing a series of articles in the Spectator collectively known as ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ (which appeared from 21 June to 3 July in 1712). Addison’s ideas on the location of sublimity (inadvertently concurring with Thomas Burnet’s) were that

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the source of the sublime lies with the natural object. But for Addison, the sublime is still, to some extent, rhetorical insofar as it is derived from the conversion of the natural object into only an idea of that object. And it is only the idea of the object which is pleasurable, because ‘[w]hen we look on such hideous Objects . . . We consider them at the same time, Dreadful and Harmless; so that the more frightful Appearance they make, the greater is the Pleasure that we receive from our own Sense of Safety.’21 For Addison (and other early eighteenth-century thinkers like John Dennis), the sublime emerges when terror transmogrifies into the idea of terror contemplated from safety, it is the ‘triumph of the rational over the real.’22 Much later in the century, Frances Reynolds’ (sister to Sir Joshua) short Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste (1785) was the first treatise that acknowledged the indefinable nature of the sublime. It is the mild admiration of grace raised to wonder and astonishment! . . . It is a pinnacle of beatitude, bordering upon horror, deformity, madness! An eminence from whence the mind that dares to look farther is lost! It seems to stand, or rather to waver, between certainty and uncertainty, between security and destruction. It is the point of terror, of undetermined fear, of undetermined power!23

The century-long exploration and search for the definition of the sublime was inherently flawed for Reynolds, as its ultimate goal was to seek to define that which defied definition. The frontispiece to her essay comprised a diagram of the psychology of perception and taste, where nature was placed at its centre, but sublimity lay at the farthest and highest point on the page, as far from nature as could be expressed. Sublimity was not of nature; it was of ‘man’. Despite Reynolds’ assertions, eighteenth-century commentaries continued to appear, each seeking in its own way to define the indefinable. Indeed the period’s most famous responses to this debate came in the latter half of the century with Edmund Burke’s study of 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790).24 Burke’s Enquiry is to-date the most influential study of the sublime, not only because of its comprehensiveness but also for its juxtaposition and differentiation of the sublime and the beautiful. ‘Beauty’, Burke suggests, ‘should not be obscure’; it should be ‘small’, ‘smooth, and polished’, ‘light and delicate’.25 Each of these adjectives denotes a noun that is perceivable, knowable, recognisable and identifiable. Reynolds more directly described beauty as a ‘demonstrable truth, and that truth is demonstrable beauty. Exactitiude. Completion. The just medium. The satis-

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factory rest of the mind.’26 Burke’s ‘sublime objects’ are, on the other hand, ‘vast in their dimensions’ and they are ‘dark and gloomy’.27 The sublime here, for Burke, is about perspective: that of humanity’s place amongst the vastness of the Alps. The sublime, though, is also produced by a kind of epistemological doubt; the dark and the gloom are that which prevent the viewer from perceiving and knowing the object. Burke also goes on to suggest that ‘[v]astness . . . as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise’.28 It is not so much magnitude that is productive of the sublime, but a particular kind of perspective that is so extreme as to render the simultaneous perception of the differing objects impossible. This kind of perspective applies to the Victorian historical sublime. Parallels may be drawn here between Burkean beauty and historical narrative, insofar as historical narrative is not ‘obscure’ and presents a view of time, history and the past as things that are knowable and intelligible – I explore this idea more fully in chapter three. Historical narrative presents a version of the past that is occupied by the stories of humanity and is consequently anthropocentric. The differing sorts of time and history that emerged particularly in the Victorian period, the geological pasts, were without precisely narratable event and existed only as a theory of the past, because the time involved was so vast as to make meaningful narrative impossible. Therefore, the past (which is not anthropocentric and consequently without narrative) allies itself with the Burkean sublime on a number of levels. At several points in the Enquiry Burke meditates upon the fear and terror of the vast and the infinite and he also explains that obscurity is equally productive of the sublime. To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds, which give credit to the popular tales concerning such sorts of beings.29

The sublimity of history, then, resides not only in its vastness but also in its obscurity, and most significantly, it was geology that endowed history with both of these facets. Burke’s achievement in the Enquiry was that he had returned the debates of the sublime to their starting point, namely Longinus who saw the sublime as a predominantly rhetorical function. Burke had shifted the focus away from the idea that an object presents its

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sublimity to the viewer, and instead suggested that sublimity resides in the psychology of the spectator. And although Burke’s explanation of the epistemology and psychology of the sublime provides a focal point for thinking about the sublimity of history in the Victorian period, it is Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement that provides the fuller context for the model of the historical sublime. Kant’s Critique provides two essential models of sublimity: the dynamical and the mathematical. In both cases, Kant’s sublime is immaterial and psychological in origin: ‘when we speak of the sublime in nature we speak improperly; properly speaking sublimity can only be attributed to our way of thinking’.30 The dynamical sublime for Kant derives from senses of both might and dominance experienced within a specific context. Kant explains that ‘thunderclouds . . . lightning and thunderclaps, . . . the boundless ocean heaved up . . . the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place.’31 Characterised by terror experienced from a place of safety, ‘when in an aesthetic judgement we consider nature as a might that has no dominance over us, then it is dynamically sublime’.32 Kant’s model for the mathematical sublime is much less specific. The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in [the object’s] being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, in so far as we present unboundedness, either [as] in the object or because the object prompts us to present it, while yet we add to this unboundedness the thought of its totality.33

Unlike the thunderclap or the vision of overhanging rocks that is complete in its perception, though shocking in its perspective, the version of the sublime that Kant suggests finds its model in, for example, the idea of the sublimity in the universe. The sublime aspects of the universe are derived not simply from its darkness and immensity, as Burke would have argued. Kant suggests instead that it is the idea of the universe’s totality and the vague sense of its completeness that is productive of the sublime.34 The sense of sublimity is created through the unimaginability of the universe’s vastness, but this must be grounded with a vestigial sense of its limits. The limits of the universe are provided by our reason, but in the knowledge that our reason is insufficiently capable of knowing the wholeness of it. Such an idea finds an analogue in the kinds of temporality that emerged after the geological investigations of the gradualists. Geology was to some extent capable of arranging the past, but it could not do so

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with the narrative sequentiality of the Old Testament. The story of natural history, if you can call it that, is one that is only faintly written between layers of rock; everything else is lost. The strata of the earth, through geological investigation, have provided our reason with an array of vector markings in time, coupled with the sense that what lies between these vectors is both immense and unknowable. This is the historical sublime: geology provides a sense of the past filled with magnesium flashes of knowledge, but with that knowledge also comes a sense of the past’s vastness, its unrecoverability and its silence. The relationship between narrative history and geology is a complex one (with so much history for geology to account for, how could it not be?). Ralph O’Connor’s recent book The Earth on Show with its kaleidoscope of historical, artistic, literary, and scientific evidence goes some way towards suggesting the ways in which the early Victorians attempted to narrate the deep past. In the final chapter, he turns to the geologist, writer, newspaper editor, evangelical, and folklorist Hugh Miller as one who exhibits a sustained and marked attempt to step into deep time and its ‘geological drama’.35 From Miller’s posthumously published Sketch-Book of Popular Geology: The geologic diorama abounds in strange contrasts. When the curtain last rose upon our country, we looked abroad over the amber-producing forests of the Tertiary period, with their sunlit glades and brown and bosky recesses, and we saw, far distant on the skirts of the densely wooded land, a fire-belching volcano, over-canopied by its cloud of smoke and ashes. And now, when the curtain again rises, we see the same tract occupied, far as the eye can reach, by a broad ocean, traversed by a pale milky line, that wends its dimpling way through the blue expanse, like a river through a meadow.36

Any reader familiar with Victorian melodrama may recognise that earth history here is characterised not as narrative, but more as a series of tableaux. Miller’s attempt to recreate the past is a kind of historical pageant employing theatrical figures (the raising and falling of curtains) and literary devices rather than constructing actual narrative. E. M. Forster’s loose distinction between story and plot comes to mind: ‘“The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.’37 In Miller’s example, there is no, to use Forster’s term, ‘causality’ – just a sequence of events interspersed with the silent goings-on behind the fallen curtain of history. The Earth on Show abounds with such examples of diorama, panorama, exhibitions,

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lecture series, fossil collections, and other scientific spectacles, but such representations of the deep past are just that: ideas mobilised from imaginative life into actuality. In short, a full-scale representation of an Iguanadon (by Joseph Paxton, one that you will still find today on a quiet stroll round Crystal Palace Gardens) is not a narrative of deep time; it is a static tableau, and as such it invites us to speculate (anthropocentrically) upon its size, movement, ferocity, diet, lifespan, or its relationship to its landscape, or place in the food chain. It does not tell us the story of its life. How could it, and what would that mean? The conflict over multiple competing histories that took place in the period, and that the Epic of Gilgamesh found itself so bound up in, removed humanity from the centre of history, making us only the last, brief, chapter in a much longer history of the earth. The historical sublime is the acknowledgement that history is much greater than we can possibly understand, that it exists in epochs and eras that are too large for us to understand. Where pre-nineteenth-century histories had been predominantly based on narrative, the historical sublime is a model of history based on theory and supposition. The historical sublime does not fill its contemplator with a sense of ungovernable and petrifying dread; as Kant argued ‘it is impossible to like terror that we take seriously’.38 And, as the nineteenth-century cultural obsession with the historical sublime suggests, I want to argue that the Victorians both benefited from the dread of their past and were stimulated, fascinated, and even titillated by it. The historical sublime was not terrifying, but its sheer force in the nineteenth century was unstoppable. As an intellectual power in the period, it was sufficiently unnerving and stimulating to generate an enormous amount of scientific enquiry into, as I will demonstrate here, the geological past, as well as other kinds of cultural, literary and artistic production. The friction that exists between short biblical and deeper models of time generates the power of the historical sublime. The feeling of awe, however, reported by modern and Victorian-Anglican geologists alike, is one that sees deep time not as dark and terrifying, but rather as something that might be pleasantly and productively unsettling. I am not saying that there was a continual friction between geological and biblical models of time where Europe’s scientific savants fretted over which model to choose and were terrified by the consequences. Instead, part of what I am trying to say in this book is that the cultural output of the nineteenth century implies that the reliance upon these models went a little deeper, and was much more complex, than such a straightforward ‘Bible v. geology’ dichotomy might suggest.

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So, although I will refer to the move towards deep time as a paradigm shift, this is not meant to imply that the change was in any way uniform, coherent, complete, or universal – or indeed that deep time is a static model to move to.39 Paradigm shifts do not really work in such a way. As Thomas Kuhn has suggested, a paradigm shift is ‘like an accepted judicial decision in the common law[;] it is an object for further articulation and specification under new and more stringent conditions’.40 The continuing extrapolation of a paradigm, for Kuhn, is the normal work ‘of a mature science’, where few ‘realise how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be done’.41 The recovery of Gilgamesh and its use in geological theory in the nineteenth century is part of this process of extrapolation. What is particularly interesting in the case of Gilgamesh is that the paradigm does not shift towards another positive model. For example, in the shift from the Ptolemaic model of geocentricity to Copernican heliocentricity the latter is able to positively state the existence of the sun at the centre of the universe, and both that centricity and its various effects throughout the universe are observable. In the case of geology, the model of history that uniformitarianism attempts to work with is one that is deducible from stratigraphical evidence, but not observable in the same way. In the nineteenth century, then, the new paradigm of history that begins to emerge is one that drifts towards an ever-increasing uncertainty. It is a model that the geologist Derek Ager has referred to as ‘a lot of holes tied together with sediment.’42 This book will show that for most of the nineteenth century, history was struggling towards a fully formed sense of its own sublimity, as well as a reimagining of the possibilities of narrative structure and representation. It will also show a later act in these geological debates (for which the first half of the century is so famous), by following them through to the end of the century, when Eduard Suess uses Gilgamesh to fashion a geological methodology that suggests a new kind of sublimity of history and deep time.

Chronologies and deep time The pre-Victorian, Western vision of the past derived its shape from the stories of the Bible, but the desire for knowledge about the past still drove intellectual endeavour to investigate the chronology of events in the Old Testament. The idea that history began a few thousand years ago derives from a number of biblical chronologers; the best known of these is the arch-

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bishop James Ussher.43 Beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century, the longevity of the Ussherian chronology is astonishing. It struggled but endured the challenges of sedimentary gradualism and natural selection and continued throughout the Victorian period into editions printed in the twentieth century.44 This alone suggests a struggle on the part of the Victorian Bible readership to accept a notion of deep time. Despite this, ways of reading the Bible had been changing for centuries. Accommodationist principles characterised much biblical exegesis: the theory that God had accommodated His divine inspiration to the cultural attitudes of those who wrote the texts – so Moses’ accounts, for example, need not be expected to contain scientifically or geographically accurate descriptions – although they can all be interpreted in a way which prevents them from containing outright error. Ussher’s most famous claim is that Creation began at midday on Sunday, 23 October 4004 BC. He was not a lone eccentric, gathering unreliable data; he was part of a larger tradition of biblical chronology that included some not-inconsiderable minds. Isaac Newton was said to have written a similar chronology to Ussher’s, but never published it.45 John Lightfoot claimed that the date of Creation fell in mid-autumn in 3929 BC.46 In 725 AD the Venerable Bede in The Greater Chronicle (De Temporum Ratione) estimated the sixth age of man to have begun in 3952 BC.47 In 1830, William Hales produced a four-volume study, A New Analysis of Chronology and Geography (Second Edition Corrected and Improved). It is an impressive feat of scholarship; the first volume of several hundred pages is entirely devoted to his methodology and the history of chronology – he dated Creation at 5411 BC.48 The reason for the similarities between these figures and authorities (that Hales is so adept at collating) is that they are derived from adding together the days, weeks, months, and years mentioned in the books of the Bible, then using complex and varied methodologies to interpolate the gaps in the chronology.49 The chronologies produced are notable both for their similarities and their differences. They also had an interesting effect upon ideas of the future as many believed in an innate relationship between the day and the millennium derived from a line in 2 Peter 3:8, ‘one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’ (or less specifically Psalm 90:4, ‘For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night’), suggesting that the lifespan of the earth was inclined to be six thousand years as its creation had taken six days. The day of judgement would then have been around 1995 – a not-too-distant future for the Victorians. The subtle differences in the chronologies appear as little more than

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minor nuances when compared to the timeline that geology provided in the centuries following Ussher. What had been a few millennia that were accounted for, albeit in a rather haphazard way, became millions of years whose events were largely unknowable and unnarratable. The historical and epistemological vacuum created a desire for a new history of the earth and of humankind through the emerging science of geology. If the philosophical study of the earth’s strata could be said to have originators, amongst them would be Nicolaus Steno (Danish-born Niels Stensen, 1638–86).50 The Prodromus to a Dissertation Concerning Solids Naturally Contained Within Solids (1669) laid down three key theories.51 The law of superposition states that layers of rock, if left undisturbed, are formed in a temporal sequence with the most recent being at the top. The principle of original horizontality explains that sediment will naturally be deposited in horizontal layers. The principle of lateral continuity suggests that sedimentary rocks are constituted of other rock formations that have been weather-beaten or undergone some other form of chemical process; they are then laid laterally across sometimes extensive geographical areas. In comparison with other philosophical texts on the earth’s strata that would follow within a matter of years, The Prodromus was remarkably uninterested in settling the question of the deluge. Failing to mention the deluge at any point, the text makes it clear that Steno had no doubts as to its actuality.52 Just over a decade later, in 1681, the first two books of Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra or Sacred Theory of the Earth were published; the second two books on the ‘consummation of all things’ were published in 1689.53 Although criticised for plagiarising Descartes’s Principia Philosophiæ of 1644, Burnet’s history added several new layers to the Cartesian model of Creation, specifically the separation of the history of the universe from the history of ‘this Earth, and its Dependencies, which rose out of a Chaos about Six Thousand Years ago.’54 From the very outset of the Sacred Theory Burnet allies himself with contemporary beliefs about the age of the earth derived principally, and most distinctively, from Archbishop James Ussher’s biblical chronology. The foundation that was laid in the Sacred Theory defined the early phases of enquiry about the nature of the earth. The discipline would go on to divide itself, in the broadest possible terms, into two principal categories of philosopher whose approach was respectively textual or telluric in nature; Burnet falls into the first of these. The Sacred Theory is an exercise, albeit a profoundly nuanced and exquisitely prolix one, in bibliolatry. Bibliolatry is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the ‘[e]xtravagant admiration of a book’ and ‘excessive reverence for the

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mere letter of the Bible.’55 Whereas I would not want to suggest that Burnet is excessively reverent to the Bible, nonetheless, the terminology is helpful in characterising his approach to the history of the earth as distinct from the geologists that would emerge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The principal and circumscribing desire of the bibliolater, it seemed, was to detextualise the earth, to remove its signifying possibilities and instead to work hard in order to wipe out the telluric fractures and theoretical discontinuities that the face of the earth presented. Burnet does recount a version of earth history that is detailed, dramatic, poetic, and sublime. He interpolates, as Milton did, the drama of earth history, taking into consideration the formation of mountains or the perfectly smooth globe at the time of the Garden of Eden, neither of which is found in Genesis. His work, then, adds to the story of Genesis, but in outline and structure still it is the story of Genesis. While the Sacred Theory is an extreme example it does goes some way to illustrating how oppositions between religion and science may have built up. More recent studies of geology and the earth sciences in the early nineteenth century (like those by Rudwick and O’Connor) rightly feel there is a strong case that eighteenth-century savants were not hindered in their geological endeavours by the church. As Rudwick explains, ‘“Religion” could certainly not be condemned, as it often was in the past, for having invariably “retarded the Progress of Science”’ (the quotation marks are Rudwick’s emphasis rather than from a source). 56 There is another level to this debate, though, and it is more to do with a passive hindrance than an active one. In the Sacred Theory the Bible and Genesis are repeatedly mobilised as the bedrock of earth history. It is not that the church was active in trying to delay or hinder such work; might the dichotomy between religion and science have arisen in this context because biblical history stood monolithically for the past? For most early earth scientists, and it can be seen in Burnet, it was an ideological monolith that had to be thought around. Inevitable it was, then, that some early earth physicists might be tempted to turn to the fabulous to bring the text of Genesis into agreement with the text of the earth. Within such a context, the facet that contributed most to the Sacred Theory’s longevity was its devotion to rationalism as the most fruitful form of intellectual investigation.57 At no point throughout his argument does Burnet default to the miraculous to explain the causes of the deluge. He never assumes that God has interfered with His own natural laws or suspended them to set in chain this catastrophe.58 Burnet may have held tight to his rationalist ideal but it was a breed of rationalism that was

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structured by a deeply held and exercised belief in the veracity of Genesis. His desire was to discover how an event as sublime as the deluge could have taken place, and to a large extent he felt that he had succeeded. The suggestion that I am moving towards here is that for Burnet, unlike later geologists, artists and historians of the Romantic and Victorian period, the Flood was metaphorically attenuated. Once it was explained in natural and mechanistic terms its sublime power became muted because there was no longer anything miraculous about it. Burnet’s earth was a hermetically sealed text with little polysemic possibility or excess of meaning. This is not to suggest, however, that Burnet’s theory was in any way universally accepted. Erasmus Warren in his Geologia publicly attacked the theory in 1690.59 Warren did not say that the biblical version of events was unbelievable, only Burnet’s rethinking of them. Indeed, Burnet was unconvinced as well, to the extent that he retracted his theory in Archæologiæ Philosophicæ (1692) and instead retreated into an allegorical interpretation of the length of the first six days.60 The tone of the Archæologiæ Philosophicæ, in comparison with the Sacred Theory, is often reverent, occasionally flippant, and sometimes downright camp. At one point God, reproaching Eve for eating from the tree, asserts, ‘As for you Mrs. Curious, who so much love Delicacies, in Sorrow shall you bring forth Children’.61 What is widely attributed as the cause of Burnet’s eventual resignation from his post as Clerk of the Closet to his Majesty (and effectively ending his career as an author) is his treatment of the days of Creation as allegorical: ‘[T]he first Day’s Work would have been finished in the Twinkling of an Eye; and so in my Opinion the second: Whereas the third Day’s Task would have been a vast and tedious Piece of Business.’62 Despite such problems, Burnet’s Sacred Theory only increased in popularity and was perhaps the most influential treatise for the intelligentsia of the eighteenth century, which might go some way to explaining the ferocity with which he is attacked in Lyell’s influential Principles of Geology: ‘Even Milton hath scarcely ventured in his poem to indulge his imagination so freely in painting scenes of the Creation and Deluge, Paradise and Chaos’.63 In this same section, Lyell goes on to attack the natural philosopher and theologian William Whiston. In 1696 Whiston produced A New Theory of the Earth, from Its Original, to the Consummation of All Things, which takes as its basic premise the idea that a comet, making its way through the universe, passed close by the earth and caused (via physical, chemical, and gravitational forces) the deluge.64 Though both Newton and Locke praised the idea, Lyell felt somewhat differently: ‘like all who introduced

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purely hypothetical causes to account for natural phenomena, he retarded the progress of truth’.65 In the seventeenth century, all those who read Thomas Burnet, both his followers and detractors, will have understood the deluge that he was describing as an event that had a final cause. In the particular lifecycle of the earth that Burnet envisioned, the deluge was an unrepeatable event, which must have gone some way to deflating the sublime vision that he was describing (a distant and terrible event is less sublime than one that may occur again – the repeating event bears with it the freight of the future threat). The Sacred Theory, in attempting to explain the deluge, ultimately failed in stemming the deluge’s hermeneutical possibilities. It burst forth with life once again in the Romantic era in a number of different guises thanks to the endeavours of a natural philosopher with an oddly unique vision of time. James Hutton (1726–97) was a man of the Scottish Enlightenment. His key contributions to the nascent discipline of geology came late in his life; before this he had published papers on meteorology, natural history, chemistry, and philology. Two things did immediate damage to his reputation at the end of the eighteenth century. His work was never written or designed to reach a wide audience, and he died leaving half of his fourvolume study, Theory of the Earth, unfinished.66 Unlike Burnet, Hutton reveals himself to be uninterested in the text of Genesis.67 While no explanation is given for this lack, his brief attack on Burnet is derisive, nonetheless. In his scant review of the preceding theory he explains that it ‘surely cannot be considered in any other light than as a dream, formed upon the poetic fiction of a golden age’.68 Hutton’s theory had been in gestation since 1785 with his firstpublished paper on the System of the Earth, where he set forth his eternalist theory of revolution and renewal. 1st, That it had required an indefinite period to have produced the land which now appears; 2dly, That an equal space had been employed upon the construction of that former land from whence the materials of the present came; lastly, That there is presently laying at the bottom of the ocean the foundation of future land, which is to appear after an indefinite space of time.69

What is remarkable, both here, and throughout his other theses, is his lack of interest in historical specificity. Although he is keen to frame geological events within an immediate chronology, his sense of the history that lies on the peripheries of these ideas is non-existent. He shows no interest in when these events may have taken place, only in the

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fact that, whenever it was, the process required an ‘indefinite space of time.’ Throughout the remainder of his career he never tried to domesticate this model of history, stating that in the geological strata he saw ‘no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end.’70 It was not until the early nineteenth century that Hutton’s ideas were translated and popularised by his friend, the mathematician and natural philosopher John Playfair (1748–1819). In Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle Stephen Jay Gould has referred to Playfair as the Boswell to Hutton’s Dr Johnson, but such an analogy is misleading.71 Playfair’s Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802) took on the role of explaining and clarifying Hutton’s ideas: ‘[t]he Treatise here offered to the Public, was drawn up with a view of explaining Dr Hutton’s Theory of the Earth in a manner more popular and perspicuous than is done in his own writings.’72 A more pertinent description of what Playfair did might be that he translated and amended, even domesticated Hutton’s work for a wider readership.73 Where, for example, Hutton makes no direct allusion to biblical matters of chronology, Playfair situates himself as Hutton’s apologist in defending Hutton’s model of deep time and concurrence with ‘the authority of Sacred Writings’.74 The theory of Dr Hutton stands here precisely on the same footing with the system of Copernicus; for there is no reason to suppose, that it was the purpose of revelation to furnish a standard of geological, any more than of astronomical science. It is admitted, on all hands, that the Scriptures are not intended to resolve physical questions, or to explain matters in no way related to the morality of human actions.75

There are no such defences to be found in Hutton’s canon. Playfair took the philosophical structure of Hutton’s account, one that was at best quietly deistic and eternalist, and exchanged it for one that was more mechanical in its worldview, resembling the Newtonian universal machine, a ‘repeating order through time’, as Stephen Jay Gould has called it.76 Early in the year following the completion of his Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth in 1802, John Playfair read his ‘Biographical Account of the Late James Hutton’ to the Royal Society of Edinburgh.77 Like the Illustrations it is an eloquent account of Playfair’s scientific involvement with Hutton. There is one particularly startling passage in the eighty-page biography when Playfair recalls the sublime effect of his visit with Hutton (accompanied by James Hall, who later taught Darwin in Edinburgh) to Siccar Point to see its angular unconformity (an aboveground, deformed, multidirectional series of strata).

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Revolutions still more remote appeared in the distance of this extraordinary perspective. The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow.78

The series of tectonic events presented in the strata at Siccar Point not only made visible the inner workings of the earth, but also suggested that these phenomena were only the most recent in a cycle of other similar or related occurrences.79 What Hutton did with geology was to read it with the essence of Enlightenment and empirical values, supposedly contrary to Thomas Burnet’s thesis in which the text of the Bible is made to equal that of the world and consequently the earth is textually reconstructed to meet the limits of the world as it is interpreted from the Bible. Hutton’s attempt reversed this and instead tried to read the text the earth presented and only then to infer its history from it. In the period between Hutton and Lyell geology proved a highly popular field of enquiry. At the Oxford and Cambridge colleges lectures on diluvialism were avidly attended, especially those given by the eccentric and talented William Buckland. Amongst Buckland’s attendees were Lyell, Ruskin, Newman, Keble, Pusey, and Wilberforce. Although the nature and range of the debate in the period is inevitably challenging to characterise in brief, a good deal of deliberation and dispute centred around the nature or actuality of the flood (or numerous floods) and a range of figures were keen to test the reality of the deluge (whether singular or multiple), such as Joseph Townsend, William Whewell, Adam Sedgwick, Georges Cuvier, and William Smith.80 Norman Cohn has since pointed out that ‘[d]uring the 1820s the reviews gave more attention to natural history than to all the other sciences put together’.81 Diluvialism, in its many and varying forms, was part of the national consciousness during the Regency period in England. There have been a number of studies of this era in histories of geology, and while Hutton and Lyell provide a solid context for what happens to notions of time in the latter half of the century, diluvialism is a little more self-contained in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, so it is unnecessary to provide a tightly compacted snowball of others’ excellent work on the period.82 With the three-volume publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830, 32, 33), the interest in diluvial theories began to stutter towards its end. For most of the Victorian period, Lyell’s many editions of his Principles became a kind of uniformitarian bible. Like James Hutton

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before him, Lyell was a Scottish-born geologist who also believed that the earth was thousands, if not millions of years older than Ussher had suggested in his chronology.83 It was not until 1832 that William Whewell coined the terms ‘uniformitarian’ and ‘catastrophist’ in a piece for The Quarterly Review on Lyell’s second volume of the Principles.84 The full title of Lyell’s study explains one of the kinds of uniformity that characterises his approach: Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation.85 Lyell’s own stated intent for the book in 1827 was ‘to write in confirmation of ancient causes having been the same as modern, to show that those plants and animals which we know are becoming preserved now are the same as were formerly.’86 A uniformitarian geologist would hold that the laws that govern nature have always been in operation, therefore the earth is subject to consistent change over long periods of time, and that those changes can be read in the strata of the earth today. Moreover, a uniformitarian would seek to deny the efficacy of reading the earth as corresponding to the book of Genesis. Catastrophism is not the opposite of uniformitarianism; it is a more dramatic version of it. Catastrophism is characterised by sudden and violent change of such magnitude that it is almost impossible to comprehend (the universal deluge is but one example), but the catastrophist does not necessarily believe in the uniqueness of such violent events. Georges Cuvier’s Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813) presented a catastrophist argument that suggested that many floods had formed the face of the earth.87 So even though the two approaches are related, by the early nineteenth century, there were few geologists who entertained the notion that the earth was only six thousand years old and subject to a single flood. The supposed opposition that existed between uniformitarians and catastrophists was one that was created after the fact. And Charles Lyell was in part responsible for creating this mythically two-sided dispute in order to have an approach that he might argue forcefully against. The Principles’ first five chapters are an attack on previous geology and its practitioners, casting only a very few figures (especially James Hutton) as heroes in its history. At many points in these sections, Lyell points to the theoretical and methodological errors of his predecessors. The first observers conceived that the monuments which the geologist endeavours to decipher, relate to a period when the physical constitution of the earth differed entirely from the present, and that, even after the creation of living beings, there have been causes in action distinct in kind or degree from those now forming part of the economy of nature.88

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For Lyell, the misreadings performed by earlier geologists were exposed by the current state of the strata. The logical corollary of prioritising the data that the strata display is: if the earth presents no immediate evidence of a universal deluge, one must read the data for what it is without attempting to apply narrative to it. For Lyell, previous geology had subsumed itself with an ‘anxiety to accommodate all observed phenomena to the scriptural account of the Creation and Deluge [and] arrived at most erroneous results.’89 Lyell’s prose is cautious, as one might expect a trained barrister’s to be; nonetheless, the earlier pages of the Principles are characterised by an impatience with approaches that seek explicitly to make the earth’s data equal Scripture. His only real hero in the history of geohistory and geotheory was James Hutton, and this praise for Hutton remained all but unchanged through the Principles’ numerous editions.90 Throughout the Principles, Lyell repeatedly stresses the importance of observation, hence the earth having a history deducible from its surface. He is able to envision the past by observing the earth as it is now; not because there is empirical, stratigraphical evidence that he has discovered, but because his empirical approach sees no value in believing that the earth’s processes could ever have been markedly different to the way they are today. He denied that his geotheory was eternalistic; ‘he claimed that his rejection of any beginning was a matter of the limitations of human knowledge, not an assertion that the earth (or the universe) was in fact uncreated and eternal.’91 What is emerging at this point in the discipline of geology is a growing distance, like a universe expanding in all directions, amongst those who believe the earth’s surface is a metaphor, metonym, or synecdoche of its history. These three figures are fundamentally about proximities of description. All three figures are concerned with how close the thing described or represented comes to the thing’s existence in the world. A metaphor stands at the greatest distance from its descriptive subject, a metonym is overtly related to that which it describes, and a synecdoche (being the closest) is a part of the thing described. The three models do not break down into a simple alliance with uniformitarianism and catastrophism (indeed, there is no simple difference between the two terms), neither do they have a linear or coherent history; there is not a consistent and gradual historical progression through the three stages of the ‘science’, although throughout the century there is a tectonic shift away from synecdoche, through metonymy, to metaphor, where the evidence that the earth reveals is gradually believed to stand for less and less in the history of the planet. For example, Burnet (and other earlier theorists like

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Whiston) saw that there was little distinction between the history of the planet presented in the Bible and the data that the earth revealed; one did not stand in for another because they were already the same. Buckland and Townsend, for example, saw the earth as a synecdoche of its history; the history of the planet was deducible from the data the earth presented. Lyell and Playfair (who both, in their own way, domesticated the Huttonian theory of the earth) saw the geological evidence as only being related to a more complex history that was nonetheless deducible from the current state of the strata. Finally, there were those, such as Hutton (and Eduard Suess, who I will discuss in chapter five), who saw the earth as being only a metaphor for its own history. For them the face of the earth was, at best, obliquely related to the many faces that it had worn in the past. To some extent the popularity of the Lyellian model for the majority of the nineteenth century can be ascribed to two aspects of his work: the stylistic and the visual. James Secord has argued that ‘Lyell defined the role of geology in the “crisis of faith” for many Victorians precisely because the Principles held traces of its author’s private anguish over the consequences of science for the place of humanity in nature . . . Balancing reason with feeling, science with silence’.92 For many of Lyell’s readers, his work presented a paradigm that was observable to all; it was a compromised ‘third way’ between the knowability of the Hebraistic linear model of time, and the sublimity of cyclical deep time. This ‘third way’ presented the face of the earth as firmly related to its history and as such was a stable signification system: legible and knowable. It desublimated the past because it suggested that the drowned worlds of the catastrophists that Romantic painters like Martin, Danby and Turner so terrifyingly envisioned (discussed in chapter two) were mythical fancies, not historical facts. In Lyell’s model, the horrors of a universal deluge were never likely to bother the Victorians, or their progeny. The work of the Principles is to some extent characterised by the need to remove both certainty and narrative from history. Accordingly, Lyell never ventured to conjecture a precise age of the earth. No edition of the Principles comes close to replacing the chronological historical model of James Ussher, William Hales and others. Moreover, by sidestepping the specificity of the earth’s age, Lyell succeeded in providing theoretical space for further geological research and extrapolation, as well as the necessary imaginative space that could encompass evolutionary theory.93 It would be more than a century after the Principles that an accurate age of the earth would be arrived at. Not until 1956, half a century after the introduction of radiometry into the earth sciences, was the current figure

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of 4.55 billion years suggested.94 Given this uncertainty in the nineteenth century (namely that no firm proof could be arrived at; that evidence, argument, and persuasion were the principal tools of the geologist) it is no surprise that the status of history became something to be contested in the period, where faith and belief would commingle and coexist with other forms of evidence. While this book will make no claims for a direct connection between radiometry and Gilgamesh, there is nonetheless a skein of relation between them. In the Victorian period the recovery of Gilgamesh contributes to the formation of a model of time that is historically sublime. There were a number of models of deep time in play from the beginning of the century, from Buckland and Cuvier through Lyell and onwards; Gilgamesh, though, contributes to a new model at the end of the century. And without such a model of deep time there would be no extreme age of the earth to measure radiometrically.95

Geology, narrative and Gilgamesh The Epic of Gilgamesh is humanity’s oldest broadly coherent work of literature. It disappeared from culture around the first century AD at about the same time that cuneiform writing ceased to be practised.96 The stories recount the heroic adventures and deeds of the ancient Babylonian king thought to have reigned in the twenty-eighth century BC. The earliest stories of the adventures of the king probably date from around the twenty-first century under the reign of King Shulgi (2094–2057 BC).97 Though the various versions discovered do make intelligible reconstruction possible, there is no single, original version of the poem. As such, Gilgamesh is still in the process of being ‘discovered’.98 Previous to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century geology, the remote past was deemed mythic or literally prehistoric because it signified timelessly and provided eternally valid models, being free from the relativising constraints of historically specific factors. But the possibility that even very ancient materials can be seen to have adapted or responded to or been shaped by particular, identifiable concerns and circumstances changes their mythic and hence their moral authority. This radical change or reconceptualisation counts as a kind of paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense, one that the interdisciplinary approach of this book directly attempts to engage with.99 Gilgamesh’s rediscovery (and its deployment in late-Victorian geological theory) is also part of a much larger turn in the nineteenth century that

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enables us to see the emergence of deep time, and deep time’s influence upon historiography, the Victorian novel, or landscape painting and photography. The rediscovery of the epic does not bring about these debates, but is instead part of something much larger. The excitement the rediscovery generates reflects publicly an ongoing and broad conversation about time in the period, providing a glimpse into the sheer multifaceted complexity of Victorian models of history. So Gilgamesh is not the cause of this crisis in the Victorian psyche; instead, the controversy surrounding its translation is a symptom and evidence of it. Moreover, Gilgamesh’s significance moves far beyond being ‘one of the supreme accomplishments in the humanities’, as the poem’s pre-eminent translator Andrew George has recently suggested.100 Not only did the rediscovery of Gilgamesh remind the Victorians of previous debates about the status of history, but it was also used to settle the question of the earth’s past at the end of the period. It was then that it was deployed by one of the era’s last major geologists to return the discipline to its very earliest debates and to develop a greater sense of what time and history might mean at the end of the nineteenth century. The poem also has a rich thematic relevance for the period of its rediscovery. Myth, fable, and story are the cornerstones of any civilisation, and Gilgamesh is a moral fable that finds numerous parallels in the modern world; it urges us not to forget the presentness of today and the future. It asks us to embrace the inevitability of death, not as a curse but as that which gives value to life. These themes and topoi were also explored in the late-Victorian novel (an idea explored here in the fourth chapter). While the nineteenth century’s rediscovery of Gilgamesh and the historical sublime are not responsible for these traces that we find in modernity, they are nonetheless forgotten sources of intense, intellectual productivity in the Victorian period. Freud has remarked that: Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naïve self-love. The first was when it realised that our earth was not the centre of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him; this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their

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contemporaries. But man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffering under the third and most bitter blow from present day psychological research which is endeavouring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind.101

Freud’s explanation, though, is incomplete: the other ‘outrage’ to our ‘grandiosity’ that we have had to endure is the discovery that we are not the subject of history, but are merely one of its less-significant effects. As Frank Osbaldistone, the narrator of Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1818), explains : We are so apt, in our engrossing egotism, to consider all those accessories which are drawn around us by prosperity, as pertaining and belonging to our own persons, that the discovery of our unimportance, when left to our own proper resources, becomes inexpressibly mortifying.102

The Victorians were asked to consider the ‘inexpressibly mortifying’ revelation of deep time. As I will go on to demonstrate, the work that James Hutton (and numerous others) start with various theories of the machinations of the earth is repeatedly taken up in the nineteenth century, inexorably returned to, argued over, fought and refought. The rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh is one of these exchanges, but its relevance to the cultural history of the period and to geological theory reaches far into the late nineteenth century and beyond.

Notes 1 John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), vol. 26, p. 28. 2 Derek V. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, 3rd ed. (Chichester: J. Wiley, 1993), p. 53. 3 ‘The Chaldean Genesis,’ Examiner 11 December 1875. 4 William Morris, News from Nowhere and Other Writings, 1890, ed. Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 67. 5 Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1830–33). 6 George Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis: Containing the Description of the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, the Times of the Patriarchs, and Nimrod; Babylonian Fables, and Legends of the Gods; from the Cuneiform Inscriptions (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1876), p. 284.

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7 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1983, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 118. 8 There have, however, been a few more recent studies that have been attentive to the idea that important theories in the history of science, like gradualism, are predominant precisely because they exist alongside other conflicting or complementary ideas. See M. J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: the Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); M. J. S. Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam: the Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Nicolaas A. Rupke, The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School of Geology (1814–1849) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 9 Beer, Darwin’s Plots; Michael J. Freeman, Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Rupke, The Great Chain of History; George P. Landow, Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982); Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and NineteenthCentury Science: the Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge University Press, 1984); Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: the Making of the Human Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007); Marcia Pointon, ‘The Representation of Time in Painting’, Art History I.1 (1978), pp.99–103; Marcia Pointon, William Dyce, 1806–1864: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Norman Cohn, Noah’s Flood: the Genesis Story in Western Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); J. W. Burrow, ‘Images of Time: From Carlylean Vulcanism to Sedimentary Gradualism,’ History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini et al (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.198–223; George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 10 There have been recent studies of scientific popularisation that have been alert to the ways in which science was disseminated in the period. See Aileen Fyfe and Bernard V. Lightman, Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, et al, Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 11 James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: the Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 12 J. M. I. Klaver, Geology and Religious Sentiment: the Effect of Geological Discoveries on English Society and Literature between 1829 and 1859 (Leiden: Brill, 1997); John Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 13 Mott T. Greene, Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982). 14 John Playfair, ‘Biographical Account of the Late Dr James Hutton,’ Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: 1805), vol. 5, part III, p. 72. 15 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: the Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1959). Inevitably, there are difficulties with Nicolson’s thesis. Shifts of such magnitude rarely find

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their source in a single document or individual, and in the case of culture’s relationships with mountains, Burnet does not give birth to these ideas fully formed. They are to be found in much earlier texts, like the Psalms or the Old Testament more generally, both of course being texts that continue to be a major influence on the sublime. Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth: Containing an Account of the Original of the Earth, and of All the General Changes Which It Hath Already Undergone, or Is to Undergo Till the Consummation of All Things; the New Heaven and New Earth with a Review of the Theory, Especially in Reference to Scripture; to Which Are Now Added, Memoirs of the Author’s Life and His Writings, and His Defences of This Work, against Warren, and Keil’s Objections, 1684, 7th ed., 2 vols (London: 1719), vol. 1, p. 172. Dionysius Cassius Longinus, Dionusiou Longinou Rhetoros Peri Hupsous Biblion. Dionysij Longini . . . Liber, De Grandi, Siue Sublimi Orationis Genere, Nunc Primum a F. Robortello in Luce Ed., trans. Franciscus Robortellus (Basil: 1554), p. 23. See also Dionysius Cassius Longinus, Dionysius Longinus On the Sublime: Translated . . . With Notes and Observations, and Some Account of the Life and Writings and Character of the Author, trans. William Smith (London: 1739). John Milton, Paradise Lost, eds Stephen Orgel, Jonathan Goldberg, and Philip Pullman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), book I, line 63. Philip Shaw has succinctly explained this phenomenon as the ‘co-implication of seemingly natural opposites’. See Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 25. See for example Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth, 7th ed. Joseph Addison, ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination,’ Spectator 21 June–3 July 1712, p. 568. John Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry; a Critical Discourse, in Two Parts (London: 1701); Shaw, The Sublime, p. 38. Frances Painter Reynolds, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty, 1785 (London: 1789), pp. 17–18. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, 1790, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). See also Immanuel Kant, ‘Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime,’ 1764, in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick R. Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 11–64. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 113. Reynolds, The Principles of Taste, p. 9. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 113. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 66. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 54. Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 142 [Ak. 280]. Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 120 [Ak. 261]. Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 119 [Ak. 260]. Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 98 [Ak. 245]. A more explicitly explored example of this is given in James Kirwan, Sublimity: the NonRational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 54. O’Connor, The Earth on Show, p. 390.

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36 Hugh Miller, Sketch-Book of Popular Geology; Being a Series of Lectures Delivered Before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, ed. Lydia Miller (Edinburgh: Constable, 1859), p. 177. 37 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 1927, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 87. 38 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 120 [Ak. 261]. 39 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 40 Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 23. 41 Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 24. 42 Ager, Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, p. 53. 43 James Ussher, The Annals of the World: Deduced from the Origin of Time, and Continued to the Beginning of the Emperour Vespasians Reign, and the Totall Destruction and Abolition of the Temple and Common-Wealth of the Jews; Containing the Historie of the Old and New Testament, with That of the Macchabees; Also the Most Memorable Affairs of Asia and Egypt, and the Rise of the Empire of the Roman Cμsars, under C. Julius, and Octavianus, 1650–54 (London: E. Tyler for J. Crook, 1658). See also Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology: Principles of Time Reckoning in the Ancient World and Problems of Chronology in the Bible (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964). 44 Ronald L. Numbers, ‘“The Most Important Biblical Discovery of Our Time”: William Henry Green and the Demise of Ussher’s Chronology,’ Church History 69.2 (2000). 45 It was published by his nephew-in-law, John Conduitt, a year after Newton’s death. Isaac Newton, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (London: 1728). 46 John Lightfoot, A Few, and New Observations Upon the Booke of Genesis (London: 1642). 47 Bede, ‘The Greater Chronicle,’ The Ecclesiastical History of the English People; the Greater Chronicle; Bede’s Letter to Egbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 307. 48 William D. D. Hales, A New Analysis of Chronology and Geography, History, and Prophecy; in Which Their Elements Are Attempted to Be Explained, Harmonized, and Vindicated, Upon Scriptural and Scientific Principles . . . Improved, 2nd ed., 4 vols (London, 1830). 49 See James Barr, ‘Why the World Was Created in 4004 BC: Archbishop Ussher and Biblical Chronology,’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 67 (1985); and John Fuller, ‘Before the Hills in Order Stood: the Beginning of the Geology of Time in England’, Geological Society, London, Special Publications 190 (2001). M. J. S. Rudwick, ‘Geologist’s Time: a Brief History,’ The New Science of Geology: Studies in the Earth Sciences in the Age of Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2004), pp. 1–7. 50 The claim is problematic because he was by no means the first thinker to consider the problems that the face of the earth presents to the defender of the Mosaic tradition. Even the term ‘geology’ is not coined until Jean-André Deluc’s Lettres physiques et morales sur les montagnes et sur l’histoire de la terre et de l’homme in 1778. The earliest known influential investigations were conducted by a student of Aristotle, Theophrastus, in his Peri Lithon, a work that predominated in Western culture for over a thousand years. The first to consider the problem of how the fossils of sea creatures could be found on the mountaintops was the Chinese polymath Shen Kua (1031–95). He suggested and consequently formulated the first hypothesis of land erosion and deposition. See also Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians, 1665–1750 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press,

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1997), pp. 99–105; Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 51–9. Nicolaus Steno, The Prodromus to a Dissertation Concerning Solids Naturally Contained Within Solids. Laying a Foundation for the Rendering a Rational Account both of the Frame and the several Changes of the Masse of the Earth, as also of the various Productions of the same, 1669, trans. H.O. (London, 1671). He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1992. Thomas Burnet was an Anglican clergyman, and for a time was clerk of the closet to William III. It was thought that the Reverend Burnet would go on to become Archbishop of Canterbury, but he had to resign his position in 1692 because of the way that his Archæologiæ Philosophicæ treated the six days of Genesis as allegorical. Thomas Burnet, Archæologiæ Philosophicæ: Or, the Ancient Doctrine Concerning the Originals of Things, 1692 (London: 1736). Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth, 7th ed., vol. 1, p. 2. OED, ‘bibliolatry,’ online edn, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/18633 (accessed 13 February 2013). Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, p. 7. Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth, 7th ed., vol. 1, p. 178. Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth, 7th ed., vol. 1, pp. 131–2; see also vol. 2, p. 3. Erasmus Warren, Geologia: Or, a Discourse Concerning the Earth Before the Deluge, Wherein the Form and Properties Ascribed to It by J. Burnet, in a Book Intitled the Theory of the Earth Are Excepted Against (London: 1690). See also Don Cameron Allen, The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), pp. 100–1. Thomas Burnet, Archæologiæ Philosophicæ: Or, the Ancient Doctrine Concerning the Originals of Things, 1692 (London: 1736). Burnet, Archæologiæ Philosophicæ, p. 7. Burnet, Archæologiæ Philosophicæ, pp. 43–4. Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1st ed., vol. 1, p. 37. William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, from Its Original, to the Consummation of All Things. Wherein the Creation of the World in Six Days, the Universal Deluge, and the General Conflagration, as Laid Down in the Holy Scriptures, Are Shown to Be Perfectly Agreeable to Reason and Philosophy (London: 1696). Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1st ed., vol. 1, p. 39. Hutton’s abstract was delivered to the Royal Society in 1785: James Hutton, Abstract of a Dissertation Read in the Royal Society of Edinburgh . . . Concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration and Stability (Edinburgh: 1785). These ideas were worked up into his ‘Theory of the Earth’ published in the Royal Society papers for 1788: James Hutton, ‘Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of Land Upon the Globe,’ Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (London: 1788). This paper was then further developed into a full-length study, just over half of which was completed before his death in 1797: James Hutton, Theory of the Earth: With Proofs and Illustrations in Four Parts, 2 vols (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1795). Martin Rudwick has recently provided a compelling case for the reasoning behind Hutton’s mechanistic world view and his deist eternalism. See Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, pp. 158–72. Hutton, Theory of the Earth . . . in Four Parts, vol. 1, p. 271.

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69 Hutton, Abstract . . . Concerning the System of the Earth, pp. 27–8. 70 Hutton, ‘Theory of the Earth,’ p. 304. Though Lyell is often credited with providing the timeframe for Darwin’s later theory of evolution, Hutton had already begun to realise the significance of his own theory of time. So much so that just before his death in 1797 (the year of Lyell’s birth), Hutton was working on the mundanely entitled Principles of Agriculture. The manuscript, never published, contains the kernel of a theory that would not emerge for another half-century. ‘To see this beautiful system of animal life (which is also applicable to vegetables) we are to consider, that in the infinite variation of the breed that form best adapted to the exercise of those instinctive arts, by which the species is to live, will be the most certainly continued in the propagation of this animal, and will be always tending more and more to perfect itself by the natural variation which is continually taking place. Thus, for example where dogs are to live by the swiftness of their feet and the sharpness of their sight, the form best adapted to that end will be the most certain of remaining, while those forms that are least adapted to this manner of chase will be the first to perish; and the same will hold good with regard to all the other forms and faculties of the species, by which the instinctive arts of procuring its means of substance may be pursued.’ Cited in Edward Bailey, Charles Lyell (London: Thomas Nelson, 1962), p. 84. 71 Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, p. 61. 72 John Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh: 1802), p. iii. 73 Accounts of how Playfair changed, or translated, or muted Hutton’s ideas may be found in Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, pp. 93–7. See also Dennis R. Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp 102–25; Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, pp. 465–6. 74 Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, p. 125. 75 Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, p. 126. 76 Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, p. 78. 77 Playfair, ‘Biographical Account of the Late Dr James Hutton.’ 78 Playfair, ‘Biographical Account of the Late Dr James Hutton,’ pp. 72–3. 79 For discussions of the significance of Siccar Point see Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, pp. 60–3, 70–3; Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, pp. 164–72. 80 See for example William Buckland, Vindiciæ Geologicæ: the Connexion of Geology with Religion, Explained in an Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before University of Oxford, May 15, 1819, on the Endowment of Readership in Geology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1820); William Buckland, Reliquiæ Diluvianæ; or Observations on the Organic Remains, Contained in Caves, Fissures and Diluvial Gravel, and on Other Geological Phenomena, Attesting the Action of an Universal Deluge, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1823); Joseph Townsend, The Character of Moses Established for Veracity as an Historian, Recording Events from the Creation to the Deluge, 2 vols (Bath: 1813). 81 Cohn, Noah’s Flood, p. 117. 82 Among them, see Leroy Earl Page, ‘The Rise of the Diluvial Theory in British Geological Thought’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Oklahoma, 1963); Roy Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time; Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam; Rupke, The Great Chain of History; Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists. 83 Hutton was the geologist whom Lyell sought to associate himself with. In fact, most savants of the early nineteenth century would have been in agreement with Lyell concerning the Ussherian chronology. See Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time;

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Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam; O’Connor, The Earth on Show; Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660–1815. See also William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Times, 3 vols (London: 1837). The specificity of Lyell’s approach is by no means straightforward. The subtitle to the Principles defines what is known as actualism. As Stephen Jay Gould explains, it is a kind of present-ism, rather than real-ism. It is ‘the notion that we should try to explain the past by causes now in operation.’ Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, p. 120. Martin Rudwick has also defined no fewer than four different kinds of uniformity in Lyell’s work. See Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology (London: Macdonald and Co., 1972); Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, pp. 119–26. See also Martin Rudwick’s ‘Introduction’ to the facsimile edition of Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, 3 vols, 1830–33 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. xiv. Cited in Lyell’s biography Edward Bailey, Charles Lyell (London: Thomas Nelson, 1962), p. 65. Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1813). Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1st ed., vol. 1, p. 75. Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1st ed., vol. 1, p. 37. Leonard G. Wilson, Charles Lyell, V. 1: the Years to 1841: the Revolution in Geology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 262–93, 503–18; Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology, p. 241. Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam, p. 389. James Secord, ‘Introduction’ to Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, ed. James A. Secord (London: Penguin, 1997), p. xxxviii. It was not until much later in the century that the age of the earth debate was taken up by scientists such as William Thomson Kelvin and W. J. Sollas, and that the accuracy of the earth’s age became an investigation in itself. See William Johnson Sollas, The Age of the Earth, and Other Geological Studies (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905). See Claire Patterson, ‘Age of Meteorites and the Earth’, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 10.4 (1956). See also Cherry Lewis, The Dating Game: One Man’s Search for the Age of the Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The name for this particular kind of writing is ontological in origin. The French word ‘cunéiforme’ is derived from the Latin cuneus meaning ‘wedge’; therefore, cuneiform literally translates as ‘[writing of] wedge[-shaped] form’. The wedge shapes come about by the inscriber cutting a reed and then using it to imprint a series of vertical and horizontal ‘arrowhead’ lines into damp clay which is then dried or, more rarely, baked. The range of cuneiform texts that have been found over the years vary greatly in size: some are the size of a thumbnail, others will cover the expanses of a vast Babylonian sculpture. Sometimes they come in cylindrical form where pages of writing will flow down the sides of a hexagonal drum that is usually one or two feet tall. However, most cuneiform texts come on dried clay and are around the sizes of reading material that we would expect to read today, namely something between the dimensions of a paperback and a coffee-table book. And, just like those produced by our flexible modern printing systems, the letters could be

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Gilgamesh very small indeed; the deluge tablet that Smith deciphers in 1872 is about the size of a paperback book. In 1872, the New York Times referred to the writing as looking ‘as if somebody had spilled ten-pennyworth of tacks upon an unbaked brick, and set the result to be cooked.’ ‘The Flood; Reading of the Chaldean Story of the Deluge – the Records of the Past the Means and Method of Deciphering Them – the Key to the Mystery,’ New York Times 27 December 1872. See A. R. George, ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh,’ The Cambridge Companion to the Epic, ed. Catherine Bates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 3–6. And also Stephanie Dalley, ‘Introduction to “the Epic of Gilgamesh”,’ Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others, ed. Stephanie Dalley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 45–9. Andrew George’s most recent translation drew from over two hundred separate sources of the poem. A. R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). ee Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions. George, ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh,’ p. 1. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, ed. Joan Riviere (London: Allen & Unwin, 1922), 18th Lecture, pp. 240–1. Walter Scott, Rob Roy, 1818, ed. Ian Duncan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 85.

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Discovering Gilgamesh

History was jealous of Romance until last week; but then suddenly she gave to the world, by the marvellous skill of a scholar in the British Museum, a fragmentary story far more wonderful and entertaining than any work of fiction. Everybody of intelligence has by this time read that narrative which Mr George Smith has deciphered from the tablets of Assurbanipal. With what a magic spell those strange, broken sentences carried our minds backward! How far backward? Nobody can safely answer that question within ten centuries or so; but very cautious people amongst the learned speak of six, seven, or even eight thousand years.1 (New York Times, December 1872) A strange scene, surely, was this, and one to do justice to which would require the fertile genius of a Macaulay. Of the New Zealander sitting upon the ruins of London Bridge and endeavouring to reconstruct the history of London, we have all heard. The proceedings of Tuesday evening present us with the reverse side of the picture. We have the leading statesmen and scholars of England assembled to discuss an account of the Deluge, scratched with a wooden style on a tablet of damp clay by some Chaldean scribe, separated from the events which he narrates by a period so brief that in it history has not yet passed into tradition.2 (Daily Telegraph, December 1872)

Tuesday, 3 December, 1872; Conduit St, London, 8.30pm

A

young, little-known, self-taught cuneiform scholar from Camden presented a paper to an audience whose fame and grandeur must have been intimidating for him. The Prime Minister of the time, Gladstone, was in attendance, as were Arthur Stanley (Dean of Westminster), Henry Rawlinson (daring explorer and cuneiform scholar), Hugh Childers (member of Gladstone’s government), and John Roebuck

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(right-wing liberal MP). Both the Times and the Daily Telegraph had reporters in the bustling audience. The Society of Biblical Archaeology had heard a number of papers before but there was a buzz of excitement as word of George Smith’s (figure 1) findings had been circulating for a fortnight after a small announcement in the Daily Telegraph. It was one that gave little indication of the magnitude of the story that was about to break.3 The Deluge – An important discovery in Biblical Archaeology has been made by Mr Geo Smith, of the British Museum, who has, among the Assyrian records, met with an account of a deluge similar to that recorded in Genesis. Mr Smith will read a paper on the subject before the Society for Biblical Archaeology in the course of next month.4

In the days that followed more information leaked out. The story was taken up in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, the Aberdeen Journal, the Birmingham Daily Post, the Newcastle Courant; both the Pall Mall Gazette and the Illustrated London News also announced the date of the paper and the venue.5 The Belfast News-Letter boasted that the paper offered ‘[f]resh corroborative evidence of Old Testament history’.6 The presentation of ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge’ was a cultural event that would change Smith’s life, and those of many others.7 In the days, weeks, months, and years that followed, the rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh would spark debates that were wide-ranging in character. Assyriologists, antiquarians, historians, theologians, and amateur scholars would all question the meanings of the discovery. Querying what its implications were for biblical chronology, veracity, or accuracy. Asking what the discovery told them about the horizon of history: the point where the historical becomes the mythical or prehistoric. They worried about or defended the number of Flood myths and whether one particular story could be said to be authentic. These positions, and the way that they interact with one another, suggest a proliferating variety of opinion over the status of history, one that we may not expect to find in such a postDarwinian period. George Smith, who would later be known as ‘the decipherer of the now world-famous “eleventh-tablet,” which contains that Chaldean [NeoBabylonian] story of the Flood’, had a tough intellectual life.8 Born to working-class parents in the borough of Chelsea in 1840 (his father was a carpenter), he was apprenticed to the print firm Bradbury and Evans when he was fourteen years old.9 He had been interested in Bible history since he was a child, and as he matured through his adolescent years he became increasingly fascinated by archaeology and cuneiform transla-

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tion, and considerably less interested in plate engraving. Soon, he was spending all his money and time indulging his obsession. He was even noticed by Sir Henry Rawlinson (the discoverer of the Behistun monument, a Rosetta Stone of cuneiform languages), who asked him to become involved in the sorting and classifying of fragments shipped back to the British Museum from the Near East.10 The Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, as it then was, only employed two staff: a keeper and an assistant. When Smith began at the museum he was employed merely on contract under the advice of Rawlinson. During this time he produced some minor works that were respected by his peers, and of specialist interest to Assyriologists and Near East antiquarians.11 Only after December 1872 did the Museum act and offer him a position as a junior assistant. This was the lowest grade that the institution then offered; even so, his salary of £150 per annum was a vast improvement upon what he had been earning under contract for the immediately preceding years (where he was paid little more than the window cleaners). Poorly paid on temporary contracts, with a house on Crogsland Road in Kentish Town, a wife (Mary) and six young children to support, Smith worked slowly and methodically through the slush pile (or ‘precious rubbish’) of broken fragments of cuneiform which had lain buried in the library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal (seventh century BC).12 The fragments had been excavated in 1851 by Hormuzd Rassam (another much-exploited employee of the Museum’s, working under the guidance of Austen Henry Layard). So by the time that Smith read the deluge tablet (still on display in the British Museum, today) it had been sitting in storage for around twenty years. The Epic of Gilgamesh’s reconstruction and translation was a slow process but George Smith’s work gave it a resounding start. In his own words: On looking down the third column [of the tablet], my eye caught the statement that the ship rested on the mountains of Nizir, followed by the account of the sending forth of the dove, and its finding no resting-place and returning. I saw at once that I had here discovered a portion at least of the Chaldean account of the Deluge. I then proceeded to read through the document, and found it was in the form of a speech from the hero of the Deluge to a person whose name appeared to be Izdubar.13 I recollected a legend belonging to the same hero Izdubar K. 231, which, on comparison, proved to belong to the same series, and then I commenced a search for any missing portions of the tablets.14

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On first reading a broken fragment of the following section of the poem in the British Museum, Smith was much later (and probably spuriously) reported to have become so breathless and mute with excitement that he began to tear off his clothes.15 It is this same section that Smith first reported to the Society of Biblical Archaeology. The narrative begins at the point when Utanapishtim (the ‘Noah’ figure) recounts his story of the flood to King Gilgamesh.16 134. To the country of Nizir, went the ship 135. the mountain of Nizir stopped the ship, and to pass over it, it was not able. 136. The first day and the second day, the mountain of Nizir the same. 137. The third day and the fourth day, the mountain of Nizir the same. 138. The fifth and sixth, the mountain of Nizir the same. 139. On the seventh day in the course of it 140. I sent forth a dove, and it left. The dove went and searched and 141. a resting place it did not find, and it returned. 142. I sent forth a swallow, and it left. The swallow went and searched and 143. a resting place it did not find, and it returned. 144. I sent forth a raven, and it left. 145. The raven went, and the corpses on the Avaters it saw, and 146. it did eat, it swam, and wandered away, and did not return.17 Though with some variations from the book of Genesis, it is an instantly recognisable story, one which had been central in geological debates over the status of the past from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries (when the likes of Thomas Burnet, Erasmus Warren, William Whiston, Benoãit de Maillet, James Hutton, John Playfair, Georges Cuvier, William Buckland, Charles Lyell, and William Whewell fought to find the most valid narrative of earth history).18 Victorian interest in the extreme age of the earth had bowed out of the public spotlight after the diluvial decades of the 1820s and 30s.19 Having so keenly debated in the preceding decades, the men of science who had tilled either the probability or impossibility of deluge had, by the mid-century, become increasingly persuaded by variations on the uniformitarian hypothesis (that the earth had been formed through slow and gradual change).20 The Society of Biblical Archaeology was a relatively small group of MPs, QCs, scholars, and gentleman enthusiasts, consisting of about 120, thirteen of whom were women (the society’s membership would double in the year following Smith’s paper). Smith had presented to them on at

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least two previous occasions, but he had been hunting for his ‘Gilgamesh’ for a long time.21 He needed to make some discovery that would provide permission to travel to Nineveh and conduct excavations there, furthering both his career and the discipline. The Gilgamesh paper is not in the least showy or dramatic. It does not give in to the rhetoric of suspense, surprise, hyperbole, or histrionics. In his first few words he explains, ‘I discovered among the Assyrian tablets in the British Museum, an account of the flood’.22 He moves on to explain the various ways that he is able to date the tablets through processes of philological decoding of the scribal techniques employed. The text itself professes to belong to the time of a monarch whose name, written in monograms, I am unable to read phonetically, I therefore provisionally call him by the ordinary values of the signs of his name, Izdubar. Izdubar, from the description of his reign, evidently belonged to the Mythical period23 . . . the offer of marriage made to him by the goddess Ishtar, the monsters living at the time . . . [the spirits, and mythical journeys:] all these things and many others show the unhistorical nature of the epoch.24

The significance of the historical and the ‘unhistorical’ are passed over relatively quickly here, but the shifting of the divide between the two was one of the key contributions that Smith made to Victorian understandings of the difference between natural and cultural history. Smith did not acknowledge or seem to understand the irony in what he was asserting. He was translating a written text from an ‘unhistorical epoch’, but the fact that it was a written text made it by its nature not ‘unhistorical’. Moreover, the text’s existence and Smith’s translation of it, in time, pushed back the boundaries of what the West understood as constituting documented history. The other principal effect of the controversy was the sheer weight of the questions that it brought to bear on enduring understandings of the Old Testament. The press were excited at the discovery: ‘[a]n extraordinary public interest has been aroused by the Assyrian records . . . so great a result of patient investigation has seldom crowned scholarship. A hundred absorbing problems are suggested by these wonderfully ancient memoranda.’25 In this same article, the reporter of the Daily Telegraph asked, ‘How are we to reconcile the conflicting results of philology and of [biblical] history? . . . Hitherto we have held, or have been taught to hold, that the record of the universal Deluge rested upon the authority of the Book of Genesis alone.’ It was a question asked by many, given the spirit of the readers’ letters that the paper would go on to print. However, in

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the later published ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge’ as indeed for his entire career, Smith never made transparent his views on the status of Bible history. To what extent his interest was in the validation of the sacred text, or in continuing the weakening of its hold on the historical sciences, is never made clear. The chair of the Society, Samuel Birch (then the Keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum) had read a sober address to the Society the previous year, urging caution and patience in the hermeneutic endeavour of its membership. There has been some conflict between Assyrian and Jewish history, and although Assyrian scholars, dealing with the special subject of Assyria, naturally lean with favour to the information the monuments of Nineveh afford, it is by no means sure that the Assyrians, especially in speaking of foreign nations, may not have recorded errors. As the research advances, the difficulty of reconciling the chronology of the Assyrians will melt away before the additional monuments that may be obtained, or the more correct knowledge that may be acquired. There is nothing to alarm the exegetical critic in the slight discrepancies that always present themselves in the world’s history when the same fact is differently recorded by the actors in some national struggle. For truth, the whole evidence is required, and the monuments of antiquity too often reach our hands as broken pieces of an imperfect puzzle. Is it, then, wonderful that the reconstruction should be embarrassing?26

Birch’s calm, heedful, responsible, even reassuring perspective was not consistent throughout the membership of the Society. Although his was clearly a form of accommodationism, there was also a range of more conservative responses to archaeological material to be found in the Society. Alex Mackenzie Cameron’s ‘Illustrations from Borneo of Passages in the Book of Genesis’ makes little attempt to use the cloak of scientific objectivity, but announces its intention of validating of the Old Testament from its title. It is very interesting to come upon remains and ruins, traditions, names and peculiarities, which confirm Biblical accounts, especially those earlier records which are to be found in the Book of Genesis . . . It is, thus, a twofold pleasure we experience when the accounts of the first Book of Moses are confirmed to us by the researches of patient and learned scholars, and the discoveries of fortunate travellers. I am fortunately enabled to add a few stones to the great building of independent, undoubted, and concurrent testimony to the history of the Book of Genesis, the testimony coming from the far-off, isolated, and semibarbarous Island of Borneo.27

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‘Illustrations from Borneo of Passages in the Book of Genesis’ is representative of a strong, prevailing belief in nineteenth-century culture in monogenesis or diffusionism (the spread of civilisation from a primary source) which drives the assimilation of the new knowledge with the old. From much earlier in the period, William Ellis, missionary to Tahiti, published his Polynesian Researches (1829) in which he explained his theory that the Polynesians were one of the lost tribes of Israel.28 Much of the career of the ethnologist James Prichard (1786–1848) was devoted to the idea that the various races had emerged from a single primitive source.29 Later in the period, with the expanded temporal framework of deep time to draw upon, evolution provided the dominant model. Civilisation had developed and was continuing to do so independently in all cultures according to universal laws of social evolution; Edward Tylor was the main proponent of such an approach.30 Such a philosophical underpinning is also what drove the feverish interest in the Atlantis myth (another originary narrative), which comes back into focus around the same time. It is not that Atlantis appears in the 1870s; cultural awareness of it had existed for millennia (the island’s first mention appears in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias). Rather what emerges is a historically, geologically, and geographically specific interest in exactly what and where Atlantis was and how it might have drowned.31 In both cases, the paradigms offered a framework for the assimilation of the old to the new.32 In this particular context, then, Cameron’s article appears to be a little behind his times. While he still rushes headlong at conclusion, arguing that he wishes to ‘confirm statements and inferences of the Book of Genesis’, he does so because he is drawing on a pre-existing philosophical structure of assimilation. In the article, he goes on to explain that the Dyaks (the inhabitants of Borneo) have two traditions which ‘are strangely confirmative of several very interesting and important particulars of the Book of Genesis’, but ignores the ideological productivity of the points of difference.33 The first tradition is one relating to a great Deluge . . . The second tradition tells us that, at a very early period of Dyak history, a great ancestor of the Dyaks determined to construct a ladder by which he could climb up to heaven. It is stated that he went on with his work, and got up pretty high, when suddenly one night a worm ate into the foot of the ladder, and brought it all down. Here, then, we have two undoubted, original, and independent confirmations of the Bible accounts of the great Deluge and the Tower of Babel.34

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There are a number of things that Cameron does not do in this essay and that Smith, undertaking thematically similar research, did manage. He does not discuss which of these traditions is likely to have come first; his grounding assumption is that it is the biblical one. Neither does he explain how old the Dyak tradition actually is, or might be. This said, he is unable to countenance the more likely possibility that both stories stem from an older tradition – or finally, that the Dyak deluge narrative might be older than the Mosaic one. In the Transactions’ many volumes there are a number of examples of such intellectual labour, though there are a far greater number of Fox Talbots, Birches, Sayces, and Smiths who were more scientific in the collection and presentation of their data. In his many published works, Smith’s careful analysis never collapses into rash conclusion or misleading supposition. On reviewing the evidence it is apparent that the events of the Flood narrated in the Bible and the Inscription are the same, occur in the same order; but the minor differences in the details show that the inscription embodies a distinct and independent tradition. In spite of a striking similarity of style, which showed itself in several places, the two narratives belong to totally distinct peoples. The biblical account is the version of an inland people, the name of the ark in Genesis means a chest or box, and not a ship; there is no notice of the sea, or of launching; no pilots are spoken of, no navigation is mentioned. The inscription on the other hand belongs to a maritime people, the ark is called a ship, the ship is launched into the sea, trial is made of it, and it is given in charge of a pilot . . . All these accounts, together with considerable portions of the ancient mythologies have, I believe, a common origin in the Plains of Chaldea. This country, the cradle of civilisation, the birthplace of the arts and sciences, for 2,000 years has been in ruins; its literature, containing the most precious records of antiquity, is scarcely known to us, except from the texts that the Assyrians copied, but beneath its mounds and ruined cities, now awaiting exploration, lay, together with older copies of this Deluge text, other legends and histories of the earliest civilisation in the world.35

Like many of his contemporaries, Smith’s interest is fundamentally philological and etiological. But instead of tracing the emergence of language, Smith is attempting to discover the source of the Flood myth itself, in the knowledge that more tablets like the one he has translated are ‘out there’. In the concluding remarks of his paper Smith publicised what had become for him a private frustration: the refusal of both the Government and the Museum to fund further excavations in Ottoman

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Iraq. Earlier that year Smith had written to Austen Henry Layard explaining that: If I cannot raise the money any other way, I would if possible take any temporary employment out there (provided the museum allowed it) so that by any means I might reopen the scene of some of your labours. I have written to you first and will take no further steps in the matter until I hear your advice.36

A month later, he wrote again to Layard in greater frustration that: Sir H. Rawlinson declined at present to take part in raising a fund for excavations, so I must try to get the money without his help . . . I quite agree with you that £1,500 would be a much better sum than £500, but I see no present chance of getting the larger sum, Government will not assist the movement in the least, at present, in fact I think they will not give a penny until something is discovered.37

And maybe not even then. Much like Byron, George Smith woke the day after giving his paper to find himself suddenly famous.38 Overnight, the Times and the Daily Telegraph had both provided detailed reports of the lecture. And, in the week that followed, many other periodicals made column space for the story. The Daily News devoted two long articles to the paper on consecutive days. Reports are also to be found in various forms in the Glasgow Herald, Manchester Times, and North Wales Chronicle.39 The Times had immediately picked up Smith’s plea for funding, also reporting Gladstone’s enthusiasm for the discovery.40 The Prime Minister did not praise Smith’s findings for what they might add to either biblical or scientific scholarship; instead he congratulated Smith on providing ‘a solidity to much of the old Greek traditions’.41 The same Times article (as well as one of the same date in the Daily News) gave account of the Prime Minister’s serpentine refusal to fund further excavation to find the remainder of the broken tablet.42 Gladstone was quoted as having noticed ‘the pointed appeal which has been made to the meeting, and to a body outside the meeting supposed to have the command of the public purse.’ The Prime Minister concluded with ‘it has been the distinction and pride of this country to do very many things by individual effort that in other countries would be effected by . . . the vulgar expedient of applying to the Consolidated Fund’.43 The Government refused to help, as did the British Museum. Smith was to publish two follow up articles that year in the Daily Telegraph, both of

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which would end in endearing pleas for public or private support for excavations.44 Finally, in the New Year, it was Edwin Arnold, the editor of the paper, who publicly celebrated the new discovery. Arnold had been a once-popular poet and orientalist, former Principal of the Deccan Sanskrit College in Poona, and so imaginatively and intellectually fascinated by Smith’s work that he agreed to put up a thousand guineas to finance excavation of Assurbanipal’s library in Ottoman Iraq. After taking travel advice from Arnold, Smith set off a few weeks later on 20 January 1873. His first-published major work, Assyrian Discoveries (1875), is a predominantly narrative-based account of his travel to and from the East, rather than an archaeological thesis.45 The book gives account of some of the terrible scrapes that he got into with Ottoman officials, recounting how he was refused permission (although already granted) to dig at the site, how he lost half of his finds to a form of unofficial extortionate border tax. The second half of the book is a contextualised translation of his discoveries there. He finally began excavating the site for a copy of the broken deluge tablet on 7 May, 1873, a full five months after leaving London. By 10 May, three days after digging had begun, this was what he had to report: On removing some of these stones with a crowbar, and digging in the rubbish behind them, there appeared half of a curious tablet copied from a Babylonian original, giving warnings to kings and judges of the evils which would follow the neglect of justice in the country. On continuing the trench some distance further, the other half of this tablet was discovered.46

Unbeknown to Smith, he had actually discovered an entirely different Mesopotamian flood poem: the epic of Atrahasis.47 In his excitement, though, and as agreed with the Daily Telegraph, he reported his findings. In his own words: The proprietors of the ‘Daily Telegraph,’ however, considered that the discovery of the missing fragment of the deluge text accomplished the object they had in view, and they declined to prosecute the excavations further, retaining, however, an interest in the work, and desiring to see it carried on by the nation.48

The Daily Telegraph deemed the find confirmation of the dig’s success, so recalled him early. Excavations at the site closed a few weeks later on 9 June and he returned to London on 19 July. The firman (the permission to dig) was valid until March 1874. This time it was the British Museum that despatched him to dig at Kuyunjik, where he arrived on New Year’s Day

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of 1874. The excavations were much greater than they had previously been, employing hundreds of men to exploit a relatively small window of opportunity. Smith returned to London in the early summer of 1874 and began work translating for publication his newly discovered ancient versions of the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, and Nimrod, to be published in Assyrian Discoveries.49 The popular success of Smith’s work prompted the trustees of the British Museum to fund a third dig. Smith departed for ‘Iraq’ at the end of 1875, but Ottoman bureaucracy (perhaps in revenge for Smith’s criticism of it in Assyrian Discoveries) delayed him for six months. He did not get to Nineveh until July 1876, and only then discovered that further excavations were impossible in the political climate. During his delay, Smith had requested to return home early because of an outbreak of cholera or dysentery that was flooding Syria and Ottoman Iraq. It was refused; the idea, they told him, was something that the trustees considered ‘very objectionable’.50 In his efforts to return home Smith died. On the precise cause of his death his obituaries are not very helpful: the Annual Register records that he was still ‘comparatively young at the time of his third mission to the East, his death, at the age of 36, appears to have been owing to the hardships and privations he went through in the pursuit of his undertaking.’51 Smith periodically kept a pocket-sized notebook while travelling, and the final entries make sorrowful reading. He recounts feeling ill then well again. Then, on 12 August 1876, in careful, neat script, he records: not so well, purge brought low if Doctor present I shou recover but he has not come very doubtful case if fatal farewell to my dear Mary and all the little ones my work has been entirely for the science I study I hope the friends protect my fami collection includes som important specimens includ the two earliest bronze statuettes Known in Asia before the Semitic period they are in my long boots beside in my trunk there . . . I do not fear the change but desire to live for my family perhaps all may be well yet Vul-bal-idin the early Babylonian monarch associated someone perhaps his son with him on the throne I have however no means of proving this because I am away from the Museum People here are kind after their fashion but make a great noise so I cannot rest trying to shake myself up and feel a little better, better still, might attempt to sleep out strong wind better cold go in again sleep52

After this point in the notebook Smith’s entries become poorly written and brief to the point of insensibility. The next three days:

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Gilgamesh August Mathewson not returned and Mr Parsons dentist at Aleppo decided improvement bottle of beer appetite returning – fail a little in the evening – takaravan very bad start night 13-14 rought jolting put up at Caracos Caracos bad Caracos little better and night 15-16 to Chibombek53

After the 15th, Smith was too ill to write, yet there is still a record of his last three days. The story was taken up by, of all things, a travelling dentist who was found by Smith’s assistant, Peter Mathewson. Mathewson had been in search of a doctor, and left Smith to travel on to Bab el Naub (a quarter of Aleppo) with news that Smith was laid in a village some seventy miles southeast of the city.54 The dentist was the most medical man he could find. When John Parsons saw Smith, he was keen to blame Mathewson for the neglect of his master. Parsons writes of his discovery that Mathewson ‘was not English at all, but a Bulgarian’ (for emphasis he underlined this three times); ‘this at once explained to me why Smith had been so badly looked after.’55 They tried to transport him back to Aleppo for treatment, but he died shortly after arriving there, never knowing the full impact that his work would make.

4 December, 1872 The central theme of Gilgamesh, as it unfolded in the months that followed its rediscovery, like other Babylonian and Sumerian poetry, is that of a man who must suffer mortality for refusing to subject himself to the desire of the gods. It is the story of a man who discovers death so that he may learn how to live. While Gilgamesh recounts a series of trials and adventures, it does so in the earlier stages to impart the king’s arrogance and isolation. At the start of the poem, the gods decide that Gilgamesh must be punished for his selfish behaviour as a ruler, so they send a barely-tamed wild man, Enkidu, to stand up to him. At the threshold to a marriage ceremony Enkidu blocks the king’s path. The two fight for so long that they have to call a draw and promise friendship to one another. They go off on an adventure together to steal cedar wood from the forest, one that is protected by the demon Humbaba, whom they kill. The goddess Ishtar, aroused by the heroism of the men, offers herself to Gilgamesh, but he refuses her. The gods, angry at their thwarted plans to change Gilgamesh’s ways, decide to punish the two men by killing one and having the other suffer through grief. Seen from Gilgamesh’s coign

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of vantage, Enkidu’s decline and death is a moving one. After the death of his friend, Gilgamesh longs to avoid such a fate and goes in search of Utanapishtim (Noah), the survivor of the terrible flood, so that he may discover the means to everlasting life. In the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh, Utanapishtim recounts the story of the flood and also imparts to Gilgamesh the whereabouts of the plant that will grant him the immortality that he seeks. Gilgamesh finds his treasure, but on his way back to Uruk a serpent steals it while Gilgamesh bathes, leaving only its shed skin, a symbol of its newfound immortality. Gilgamesh returns home empty handed. The gods have won. He returns to the city with the knowledge that he will one day die, but he also knows that humankind will live. Gilgamesh’s final celebration of his city’s walls (today, still standing in Iraq) is the poem’s final symbol of longevity and immortality. This is the story of Gilgamesh that has been built up over the last 140 years, using various sources of the poem to arrive at a complete idea of what it might have been in the second millennium BC.56 In its earliest phase, after Smith’s first announcement of his findings, Gilgamesh was appropriated as proof of the reality of Noah’s Flood. Although there were a number of ways of reading the discovery, the variety of exegetical approaches to Gilgamesh was somewhat muted as many championed the newfound ‘proof’ of Genesis. The tone of many of the responses was one of relief as here, at last, was confirmation that gradualism was the nonsense they had suspected. Smith himself drew attention to the question in his first paper to the Society on the subject: The Cuneiform inscription, after giving the history of the Flood, down to the sacrifice of Sisit [Utanapishtim, or Noah], when he came out of the ark, goes back to the former part of the story, and mentions the god Bel in particular as the maker of the tempest or deluge; there appears to be a slight inconsistency between this and the former part of the inscription which suggests the question whether the Chaldean narrative itself may not have been compiled from two distinct and older accounts . . . In conclusion I would remark that this account of the Deluge opens to us a new field of inquiry in the early part of the Bible history. The question has often been asked, ‘What is the origin of the accounts of the antediluvians, with their long lives so many times greater than the longest span of human life? Where was Paradise, the abode of the first parents of mankind? From whence comes the story of the flood, of the ark, of the birds?’ Various conflicting answers have been given to these important questions, while evidence on these subjects before the Greek period has been entirely wanting. The Cuneiform inscriptions are now shedding a new light on

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Gilgamesh these questions, and supplying material which future scholars will have to work out. Following this inscription, we may expect many other discoveries throwing light on these ancient periods, until we are able to form a decisive opinion on the many great questions involved. It would be a mistake to suppose that with the translation and commentary on an inscription like this the matter is ended. The origin, age, and history of the legend have to be traced, and it has to be compared with the many similar stories current among various nations.57

Smith was wise enough to know that the materials he had discovered asked a good many questions of the received and interpreted wisdom of biblical exegesis. Wise enough also to know that he did not have answers to these questions (an approach that he was praised for).58 Later in his career, in his last book, he still refused to budge on the question: ‘the views of Biblical scholars on the matter are so widely at variance, and some of them so unmistakably coloured by prejudice, that I feel I could not take up any of the prevailing views without being party to the controversy.’59 Here, though, he urges caution, pointing out that too many answers have been posited to questions of biblical accuracy without there being sufficient data ‘before the Greek period’ to draw upon. Smith is careful, clear and quite deliberately does not overstate the weight of his findings. Such an approach was not always reflected in the reports that began on 4 December 1872. On that date, the Times and the Daily Telegraph reported the event with considerable length and accuracy. Reading Smith’s paper that was published a year later shows both newspapers to have got even the finer details of it right. They both did the job of reporting Smith’s findings and some of the discussion that followed the paper. They did not interpret the findings for themselves, as almost all other reports would later do. In the following day’s edition the media speculation on the age of Gilgamesh began. A lot was at stake in such a question. If a more accurate date for the poem could be arrived at, then this date would mark the new beginning of cultural history, and it would inevitably push back the boundary of where recorded history and civilisation began.60 There were several consequences that would arise as a result of the epic’s reappearance. It would mean that the Greeks, rather than being the source of culture, were relative latecomers in the development of social, intellectual, political, and artistic endeavour. The Deucalion myth was previously the best-known ancient non-biblical deluge narrative, but Gilgamesh made it appear barely ancient in comparison. As such the Deucalion myth could be reidentified not so much as confirmation of the biblical flood, but as a very late version of an ultimately separate

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Mesopotamian tradition which might have links not with Noah but with Gilgamesh. The Ussherian chronology would have to be completely rethought or indeed discarded altogether (many had already ceased paying it much attention). Moreover, ways of reading the Bible would need to continue being ever more agile if they were to accommodate the rapidly-changing landscape of scholarship (as previously foregrounded by German scholarship, and the famous Essays and Reviews and Bishop Colenso scandals of the 1860s).61 The Daily Telegraph devoted thousands of words of fine print over two of its pages to the story. After summarising the contents of Smith’s lecture, it explains that Rawlinson had guaranteed the accuracy of Smith’s translations except for the proper names (something Smith himself had acknowledged as inaccurate in the paper). ‘The most important point, and the question which would be asked generally, was, What was the antiquity of the legend?’62 Rawlinson posited a possible answer. Because the tablets held in Assurbanipal’s library were copies, some of the tablets translated had colophons on them explaining that the item that Assurbanipal’s scribes were copying was too old to read, or was damaged. This led Rawlinson to conclude ‘by a masterly train of reasoning, that the historical era of the Assyrians dated back 5,150 years before Christ, and that the legend belonged to the mythological period, probably 1,000 or 1,500 years earlier still’.63 Also on the 4th, the Pall Mall Gazette presented a briefer, more concise, account of Smith’s paper; unlike the Times it only devoted a short paragraph at the end of the article to Gladstone’s response, focussing more on Smith’s findings. Nonetheless, the Pall Mall Gazette did report the Prime Minister asserting that ‘the result of archaeological researches would not be the destruction of old [biblical] traditions, but their confirmation.’64 The editorial goes on to agree that the discovery of Gilgamesh is not a threat to the Old Testament, celebrating ‘that we are about to see a disinterring and building up of what was conceived to be buried for ever, and that not merely the recollections of the ancient world, but its actual history is about to undergo a great process of retrospective enlargement.’65 The Daily News report adds further embellishment to this speech of Gladstone’s by including some acknowledgement of the questions raised by the discovery. The Prime Minister, it seems, was worried about what the public might make of the implications of the discovery, as he did not know the effect it ‘might have in unsettling the minds of others’.66 The following day, the Daily News devoted three columns to the extrapolation of the previous day’s reports, drawing attention to Smith’s estimation that King Gilgamesh may have lived ‘30,000 years before the

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Christian era.’67 The North Wales Chronicle also showed considerable interest in the age and chronology of Gilgamesh. It reports Smith’s findings in some detail including Henry Rawlinson’s estimate of the commencement of the historical era around 5150 BC.68 The Chronicle, as well as the Manchester Weekly Times, teases its readership with news of Smith’s findings and then suddenly breaks off: ‘Mr Smith ended by minutely comparing this description with the Bible record and the Chaldean account given by Berosus, into which, however, we have no space to enter.’69 Where the Daily Telegraph had noted that Smith’s ‘conclusion is that the events of the Deluge as narrated in his inscription and in the Book of Genesis are substantially the same’, that year’s Annual Register recalls that the ‘Cuneiform account, Mr Smith said, agrees with the biblical narrative in making the Deluge a Divine punishment for the wickedness of the world; but the minor differences in the detail show that the inscription embodies a distinct and independent tradition.’70 In each case here, in the syndicated reports in the regional press, and in the Annual Register, there is an anxiety over the relationship between the cuneiform and the biblical texts. The syndicated reports all stop at the point where biblical exegesis is about to begin, and the Annual Register is a little too quick to assert Smith’s defence of the ‘distinct and independent tradition’. While they are quoting Smith, they are also guilty of domesticating the plurality of his ideas. He does say that ‘the two narratives belong to totally distinct peoples’, but elsewhere in the article he explains that ‘biblical critics consider that there are two versions of the Flood story in Genesis itself’, finally concluding that the Chaldean account of the deluge is probably ‘compiled from two distinct and older accounts.’71 In both cases, then, the deluges of the Bible and Gilgamesh are presented by Smith as borrowing from existing traditions. They are compound, hybrid texts derived from other traditions that equally may not be original either. Both texts suggest that there is a much wider variety of myth behind them. On 27 December 1872, the New York Times was quite excited by Smith’s findings, even going so far as to call him an ‘alchemist’.72 In this it was representative of a kind of public pressure that was being brought to bear upon the material that Smith was translating: the search for an Ur-text, an original document that would be the source of all other flood narratives. He can almost put his hand on the place where Noah’s story is told in full, with that of the Creation, the building of Babel, and the rise of diverse tongues – nay, all the great legends of the Bible may find here their

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fountain-text; and he may even hit upon the real editio prima, the actual clay or stone from which all these were copied.73

There is nothing here to suggest that Smith believed there would be an original. In the paper delivered to the Society, he does not cower from the sublimity of his findings; instead, he is aware that he has discovered something that is a part of a much larger tradition. He had only grazed the surface of what was still to be found in the sands of Mesopotamia.

Ageing Gilgamesh and the epic’s biblical exponents The responses to the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh were varied. George Smith was to conduct a total of three digs at Assurbanipal’s library near Mosul and would publish two books on the digs: Assyrian Discoveries and The Chaldean Account of Genesis. Though the digs had varying success, his findings were often reported in the press. The Daily Telegraph always followed his work, but the four years of his career as a public figure meant that his discoveries found their way on to the pages of many of the major periodicals of the late nineteenth century.74 In most cases of the reporting of Smith’s findings, the press were not so adept at conveying the complexity of his argument. While they were keen to laud Smith’s discoveries with some excitement (and, as I will go on to show here, many followed suit), one of the intellectual responses to Smith’s work was to leave its significance unquestioned. One who did so was Alfred Edersheim, an Austrian-born cleric who wrote a number of books and contributed to many others as a translator or editor, but is best known for The Bible History, Old Testament (1876–87).75 His chapter on the book of Genesis begins with Edersheim’s assessment of the ‘grandeur and majestic simplicity’ of the flood narrative. He makes plain how ‘all historical investigations, when really completed and rightly applied, confirm the exactness of what is recorded in the Holy Scriptures’.76 His reading of the story is later informed by George Smith’s translation of Gilgamesh, but Edersheim’s way of dealing with Smith’s discoveries is to all but discard them. After a lengthy quotation from Smith’s Assyrian Discoveries, Edersheim sidesteps any of the textual problems that the Chaldean account of the deluge raised for Genesis and truth-finding belief and instead concludes that Gilgamesh is merely an expression of the ‘primitive knowledge of Divine things, though mixed with terrible corruptions’.77 Similar grades of response came from the likes of Sir George Cornewall Lewis (philologist, historian, and politician), who

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remarked that the cuneiform translations were not to be trusted, as one could not be sure of the translations’ accuracy.78 Some readers of the news reports felt spurred to write in with their opinions and support. Cautious, sceptical, even angry readers’ letters began to appear in the Daily Telegraph soon after Smith’s paper. This initialled letter, while enthusiastic about the discovery, distrusts Smith’s loose identification of the flood as ‘Chaldean’: Sir – Among the many thousands of your readers who perused with interest the translation of the Assyrian tablets so zealously deciphered by Mr George Smith, and recorded in your impression of the 4th inst., there are, doubtless, many who, like myself, would be glad to hear in what manner the above discovery, as bearing upon our received and accepted theological traditions, is regarded by the literati.79

The writer then goes on to complain that the two versions of the Flood are synonymous with one another, explaining that floods are a common occurrence and we cannot be sure that these two global inundations are one and the same. Like those that would follow, the letter finishes with a call for public support for further excavations. Especially given that the integrity of the biblical text was yet to be mentioned by Smith or the first news reports, another reader’s letter (Dunbar Isidore Heath) somewhat radically announced that: [T]he Church of England leaves absolute and complete freedom of belief or disbelief to all her children on such subjects as ‘Adam and Eve,’ ‘the Deluge,’ and ‘the confusion of tongues.’ Nowhere in the Old Testament does Moses or anyone else claim any authority at all to speak as one inspired in such matters and among the early Christians most certainly it did not enter into the heads of any of the Fathers to insist that whatever the Bible said upon such matters must necessarily be true. At the revival of learning, the clergy were much degraded, and, being anxious to prevent the spread of knowledge, and to silence Galileo, they learnt to believe themselves in a historical accuracy for the Bible which had certainly never been thought of previously. Hence, and hence alone, arose our ‘received and accepted theological traditions’ on such points.80

Heath goes on to assert (sans evidence) that the Chaldean and Hebrew traditions are the same, just written in different languages, adding that ‘this is not the place or time to enter into minutiae’. The time for the ‘minutiae’ did come a few years later, after there had been a steady stream of further discoveries. ‘The progress of discovery, had, in fact, been so rapid and continuous that very little information was to be

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obtained by consulting books of a few years back, they being out of date already’ was how a lecturer at the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society described the changing historical climate.81 The Church Congress was an annual meeting of members of the Church of England both lay and clerical and was established in 1861 to discuss a wide range of religious and social matters. They met in Sheffield in 1878 to discuss ‘discoveries in Egypt, Nineveh, and Palestine.’82 In the Times, it is reported that two papers were presented: one by Smith’s old teacher and mentor Sir Henry Rawlinson, and another by the Reverend Canon Tristram. Both papers present lively and carefully argued theses and conclude that Smith’s discoveries confirm scriptural integrity in one form or another. Rawlinson tries to demonstrate the effect produced on the interpretation of Scripture by recent Assyriological discoveries. He rewinds thirty years to a time when, he argues, the system of interpretation almost universally prevalent in Germany and largely current in England was the ‘mythological.’ The historical books of the Old Testament were regarded as a bundle of myths. It was held and taught that they contained, not narratives of facts, but romantic tales, the invention of their several authors. The tales were divided into ‘myths’ and ‘legends,’ and it was sought to point out which were most properly to be regarded as coloured and poeticised representatives of some actual occurrence, and which were to be referred to the single source of imagination or invention. The theory was mainly supported by two assertions: – 1. That the scriptural narrative was in many important points absolutely at variance with profane history, and was consequently false; and 2, that the manners and customs of the foreign nations brought into contact with the Jews were greatly misrepresented.83

Like many before him (Charles Lyell, for one), Rawlinson constructed his portrait of the 1840s to serve his polemical goals. ‘Mythological’ exegesis made inroads into English forms of exegesis only very slowly, and was still controversial in the 1870s with the Bishop Colenso and Essays and Reviews scandals (amongst others) still fresh in the reading public’s minds. Rawlinson, here, misleadingly presents the discovery of Gilgamesh as restoring a proper exegetical conservatism to a liberal theological establishment. And, like others before him, Rawlinson goes on to argue that the Chaldean and biblical accounts of a deluge recount the same event, rather than reinterpret older traditions. He scolds the system of German interpretation that had hampered biblical exegesis; in his view it had fooled scholars into thinking that the Bible was best read mythologically. He claims that:

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Gilgamesh The mounds of Mesopotamia gave up their treasures; the enigmas of the hieroglyphic, hieratic, and cuneiform characters were penetrated; . . . a contemporary literature was dug out of the earth; . . . and a light was thereby shed upon ancient history such as it had never received before. Then a just comparison was made between the sacred narrative and authentic profane history, and they were found to be in most remarkable accord.

Even though several years have gone by, the specificity and intellectual gravity of Smith’s findings seem slightly unclear to Rawlinson, who is perhaps unable to countenance the sublimity of history that Smith postulated with his account of lost or non-existent origins. Nonetheless, Rawlinson was not the scholar-scientist that his public persona might suggest. Although Smith’s Chaldean Account was dedicated to Rawlinson, and Rawlinson had supported Smith’s work, their relationship must have been a difficult one. Publicly, Rawlinson fashioned himself as an imperious adventurer and a man of fine intellect. Much of his historical reputation seems to have derived from two highly suspect sources: his brother’s biography of him, and his great friend E. A. W. Budge’s highly influential The Rise and Progress of Assyriology (1925).84 His career-making claim to deciphering the Behistun Monument is far from straightforward. A poor Irish rector, Edward Hincks, it seems, had already achieved much of the philological groundwork. Moreover, most of the work for Rawlinson’s series The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia (1861–84), though published under his name, was actually the work of his protégés (including George Smith).85 It is not a great surprise, then, to find him championing, even misunderstanding, recent Assyriological work. Neither was he alone at the conference in advocating how Gilgamesh might be seen to confirm the biblical text. The second paper that the Times reports upon was interrupted by frequent applause, and lacked slightly the detail and subtlety of Rawlinson’s. In the nineteenth century, and before, there had been an existing debate over ‘gap theory’ as a means of harmonising the creation account with deep time. Thomas Burnet had postulated a similar idea in the follow-up to Sacred Theory of the Earth, in Archæologiæ Philosophicæ (1692).86 John Henry Pratt had argued for the existence of a great temporal gap between the days of Genesis in Scripture and Science not at Variance (1856).87 In ‘On the Mosaic Cosmogony’, Charles Goodwin’s contribution to Essays and Reviews, he argued forcefully against Pratt. In such a context, the Reverend Canon Tristram’s paper at the Church Congress fits into a very long line of similar debate. His principal query: ‘[w]hat definite result as to the interpretation of Scripture has been produced by recent discover-

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ies?’88 His starting point is not so different to those that preceded him: ‘[t]wenty-three points in the narrative of Genesis are given in the [Gilgamesh] tablets, with some few discrepancies, enough to show that neither narrative was copied directly from the other.’89 In order to settle the questions that Gilgamesh asks of Mosaic chronology, Tristram then descends into a detailed and intellectually creative explanation for how the two conflicting chronologies might be assimilated. The problem is: From Nimrod or Izdubar downwards the chronology stands scarcely disputed. Bishop Ussher and the modern Assyrian scholars agree in placing him about B.C. 2,250. The difficulty is in the antecedent period from the Flood to his [Izdubar’s] date, for which the received chronology allows only a century. But we can scarcely conceive so vast a multiplication of mankind in the space of three generations.90

Tristram gets round this problem by suggesting that ‘in the Hebrew and other Semitic tongues there are no distinct words for the degrees of genealogy’, so ‘son-of’ in translation may equally mean ‘descendant-of’; entire generations may be erased in the difference between the two terms. It is likely, Tristram suggests, that the questions of chronology may be settled if we accept that generations may exist in between those mentioned in the Bible, where the existing translation of ‘son-of’ could mean ‘distant descendant-of’.91 And although this solves the problem of the Assyrian and biblical texts not being in chronological agreement, it leaves in its wake another difficulty, namely that of chronology itself. Tristram finally concedes that the actual date of the flood must be ‘about B.C. 3,500, or 1,000 years earlier than the popular chronology.’92 Although his interpretation of Gilgamesh has effected a rewriting of history, Tristram still concludes with a battle cry for his audience: the ‘historical assault has been triumphantly repulsed all along the line. We calmly await the next charge; for “Magna est veritas et praevalebit.” (Loud applause.)’93 The freight of the initial discoveries of Gilgamesh had too much momentum to be stopped by biblical exegesis. So much so that after this point, the Gilgamesh ‘controversy’ (as Smith had called it) is rarely mentioned in the non-specialist media. The public, and indeed the national press, did not share the enthusiasm of the Society of Biblical Archaeology and lost interest in a question which for them was already settled: Noah’s Flood was part of a mythology that was long, long lost, and the version of it in the Bible, as Smith had said, was part of a much larger tradition. It derived from earlier Sumerian and Mesopotamian traditions, both of which lay beyond the horizon of history. The Epic of

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Gilgamesh was finally given its rightful name at the end of the nineteenth century by Theophilus Pinches (another protégé of Rawlinson’s with whom he had a complex relationship).94 Edersheim and Lewis were among the exceptions to the otherwise enthusiastic responses towards the implications of the discovery. One of the most common forms of response focussed on issues that suggested there was a longer and deeper perspective to the history of civilisation and culture than had previously been thought. Where did natural history pass over into cultural history? Where was the horizon of history? The Victorians, it seems, were persuaded by both Smith and his more conservative allies that the biblical account was not the sole source for information on the Flood, that it was constructed from older traditions, and that Gilgamesh proved the existence of such traditions, but that none of this had any necessary bearing on the question of the overall ‘reliability’ of Genesis.

Searching for the horizon Back to 1872. Salmoning upriver, the New York Times was the first publication after Smith’s first reading of the paper to swim against the tide of Gladstonian support for the discovery’s confirmation of scriptural integrity. One of its earliest pieces on the paper did not reproduce the contents without opinion as the London Times and others had done. Instead, it reported: Noah’s log of the deluge is said to have turned up among some ancient Chaldean inscriptions . . . This discovery is destined to excite a lively controversy. For the present the orthodox people are in great delight, and are very much prepossessed by the corroboration . . . to Biblical history. It is possible, however, as has been pointed out, that the Chaldean inscription, if genuine, may be regarded as a confirmation of the statement that there are various traditions of the deluge apart from the Biblical one, which is perhaps legendary like the rest.95

While much of the ground that this report goes on to cover is traversed more effectively elsewhere, this particular piece clarifies for the first time some of the ways in which more sceptical commentators pitted Gilgamesh against Genesis. Moreover, it gives a greater sense of the debates that are about to begin. It is the issue of date that almost all the reports and commentaries seem

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to turn upon: when was the epic first pressed in clay? If it descended from an oral tradition, when did that tradition begin? Most importantly, if documented history does not begin with Genesis and Moses then when and where does it begin? Where exactly is the horizon of history? The Daily Telegraph weighed in with an early estimate a couple of days after Smith’s paper, acknowledging that ‘to do justice to the hundred and one questions which this little tablet of baked clay has raised, month upon month of keen discussion and erudite research will be required’, going on to guess that the ‘text itself cannot possibly be less than three thousand five hundred years old, and is probably much older.’96 In a private, handwritten notebook, George Smith meditated on what the discovery revealed about this horizon. In the present imperfect state of our materials it is impossible to say where mythology ends and the true history of Babylonia begins. When the nation had consolidated and attained a government and a settled religion, looking back into the dark confused past through which they had progressed its learned men constructed a system of history and chronology partly from tradition and partly from mythology. It is probable that this history was first written in that great age of romance the era of Izdubar and it is also probable that the history of the subsequent period is authentic and reliable.97

Smith was not the only one who was eager to understand the historical point of the poem’s origin. On the evening of the presentation Rawlinson had shown interest in the question, as had some of the news reports. Without the inevitable reflex speed of the dailies, the periodical press was freer to explore the questions at a more leisurely pace. Reading Mary Bennett (novelist and reviewer) it is easy to see her interest and excitement over the importance of Smith’s discoveries. She wrote two articles for the Dublin University Magazine on Gilgamesh’s implications for contemporary understandings of history. In one of these she wrote that ‘the dynasty that preceded that event [the deluge] would place the commencement of the historical period [the beginning of written records] about B.C. 5150. The legend of the Flood is much older than that, for it was composed in the mythological period.’98 While her definitions of the historical and mythological periods might differ from Smith’s (and are clearly borrowed from Henry Rawlinson’s speech on the evening of the paper itself), Bennett suggests the ‘legend’ of the flood precedes the beginning of the historical period by a considerable margin, suggesting a gap of thousands of years between the story’s origin and its appearance in Genesis.

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A reviewer for the Examiner was a little more explicit in exploring the implications of Smith’s work: Chaldean and Genesis have long stood in the popular imagination as representatives of two irreconcilable ideas. The one has suggested infallible truth and immaculate piety, the other superstition amounting to sin. The evidence of scholarship is now destroying the inveterate error which has so deeply and injuriously affected the creeds, the legislation, the sympathies, the entire habits of life and thought of the modern world . . . These legends, therefore, were written down, not necessarily originated, some time between 2000 and 1550, the latest of which dates is still two centuries anterior to Exodus. Even were the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch established, the writer would still appear as a borrower from a more ancient literature. At the present stage of Biblical criticism, however, the principal point to be determined will be whether the Chaldean legends can have been adopted by the Hebrews at any time before the Babylonian captivity, as we certainly think they may.99

This figure was modified and complicated over the last couple of years of Smith’s life, but he never gave in to the temptation of fixing a year. In his final-published book, The Chaldean Account of Genesis, Smith recognised that the ‘chronological notes in the book are one of the weak points’; the point of origination was unlikely to be discovered because it belonged to the mythological period, rather than the historical.100 By the time that The Chaldean Account of Genesis was published in 1876 (the year of Smith’s death), the public excitement over the question of biblical integrity had rather died down. After the initial discovery of Gilgamesh so much seemed at stake, but as the months drew on and countless more of Smith’s discoveries were revealed the doubts and questions over the accuracy of the translation of Gilgamesh, or its status as a genuine, pre-existing account of the deluge, all but ceased. In the years after the discovery in 1872, there was not a great deal of lively debate in the pages of the periodicals and the Daily Telegraph. Instead, the reporters and letter writers seem to have given in to, or be unshaken by, the wave of findings that were periodically shipped back from Mosul from 1873 onwards. The titles of Smith’s two popular books are revealing: Assyrian Discoveries boasts the plurality of archaeological success. His last book, after all, is not a Chaldean account of the deluge (like his initial paper), but The Chaldean Account of Genesis: Containing the Description of the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, the Times of the Patriarchs, and Nimrod; Babylonian Fables, and Legends of the Gods; from the Cuneiform Inscriptions. Smith had not ended his career with a finer

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knowledge of the Noachian deluge, but had succeeded in digging up Babylonian versions of ‘the origin of the world, the creation of animals and man, the fall of man from a sinless state’, ‘the pestilence’, ‘Babel, and dispersion’, and ‘various fragments of other legends.’101 The best estimates of the antiquity of the Chaldean deluge are given in his last paper to the Society of Biblical Archaeology: the ‘present copies of the Chaldean account of the Creation were written during the reign of Assurbanipal, B.C. 673–626, but they appear to be copies of a much older Chaldean work, the date of the composition of which was probably near B.C. 2,000.’102 Moreover, as ‘these stories were traditions in the country before they were committed to writing, their antiquity as traditions is probably much greater’.103 Finally, he fixed on a date in the posthumously published Babylonia, where he claimed that the ‘epic is a redaction of a number of independent poems of earlier date . . . put together in its present form about 2000 years BC.’104 Although others would pick up where Smith had left off, Gilgamesh did not secure the attention of the press or public in the same way that it had once done. Fine-tunings were exercised upon Smith’s chronology, but they were not far from his initial estimation.

Gilgamesh after Smith After Smith died, archaeological work continued near Mosul as and when it was permitted, as did the work of investigation and translation. The Society of Biblical Archaeology continued publishing Transactions until 1893, and with a depleting membership continued meeting until 1919 when it was amalgamated into the Royal Asiatic Society. Smith’s last book sold relatively well, but his status was far from secure. He had left behind a wife and six children, and had never been on a large salary. On 20 October 1876 (shortly after Smith’s death), Fox Talbot wrote to Samuel Birch complaining that ‘the claim of Mr Smith’s family for a pension appears to me the clearest case that has ever yet occurred, and if Mr Gladstone were now Prime Minister it would be certainly granted. But Ld Beaconsfield [Benjamin Disraeli] is very probably unacquainted with Mr Smith’s writings and discoveries’, Talbot’s implication being that Disraeli was not an educated man of the right sort.105 On the very same day as Talbot’s complaint was written, another note was crossing London, from Whitehall. On black-trimmed mourning paper, the note was to Smith’s wife, and it informed her that the Queen wished to communicate her sympathies to Mary Smith and inform her that she was

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to be the beneficiary of a £150 pension because of her ‘bereavement, [at] the loss of one, whose interesting and devoted labours have shed fresh light on ancient history.’106 The Gilgamesh controversy, debated in the media of Britain, Ireland, and America, in periodicals, in travel writings, in archaeological histories, in biblical commentaries, while wide-ranging and varied in its responses is, nonetheless, revealing of a particular kind of tension in Victorian thought. Namely, that the past was thought by the Victorians to have been both long and short, biblical chronologies correct and confirmed and yet simultaneously insecure and questionable. In such a context, it becomes possible to suggest that the idea of short, Ussherian time and of deep time coexisted in Victorian culture as possible, albeit contradictory, versions of the historic and distant past. At the very least, it demonstrates that Victorian consciousness had certainly not let go of the idea of universal inundation as an originary source point in its past. In all but ignoring the biblical deluge, Charles Lyell in Principles of Geology had not succeeded in wresting the idea of a global flood from the Victorians. He may have presented theories of the earth’s history that had no need for Noah’s Flood, but he did not actively disprove its validity. To some extent, the rest of this book is an attempt to dramatise this failure of Lyell’s, to demonstrate the fluctuating tension in Victorian representations of time and deep time. For many Victorians, the idea of Noah’s Flood (and its complex relationship with other traditions still in the process of discovery) remained unresolved, to be taken up again later by another ambitious geologist: Eduard Suess.107 In Suess’s work, Gilgamesh and the Flood find an explanation so cogent that it is practically the same one as we have today, well over a century later. Suess would succeed in finding a way of making sense of Charles Lyell’s gradualism, in a much larger, violent, and sublime context. The tendrils of the Gilgamesh controversy reach outward to other disciplines and, in some cases, disrupt our received ideas of them. Amongst other things, it reminds us that for most of the nineteenth century, there is not a monolithic and predominating way of seeing or speaking about the past. Victorian notions of time and history are complex and not reducible to a single scientific philosophy. As such, there are questions that arise about how history and historical narrative circulate in Victorian culture. How are they exchanged? What are their functions and meanings? To what extent is the emergence of history as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century connected to the burgeoning belief in Victorian culture that the Bible did not present a coherent narrativeversion of the past? In art history we might ask if the genre of the deluge

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painting really disappears in Victorian culture as a result of the advancement of geological investigation, or what implications there were for history painting when the history that was being painted was undergoing such revolutionary change. And, if a fully narrative history was in the throes of being replaced by one that consisted instead of theory, how did history painters represent time without recourse to narrative iconographies? In literary history, to what extent is one of the major narratological shifts in poetics – the stubborn emergence of open-endedness in the novel – an expression of dissatisfaction at the idea of true lineage, origination, or real history that the Gilgamesh controversy highlights? While there are a number of reasons for these particular paradigm shifts in narratology, the Victorians’ changed relationship with time is surely a rich contributory factor. The debate surrounding the rediscovery of Gilgamesh suggests that we cannot look at nineteenth-century representations of the past and see in them the passive acceptance of only one model of time. Instead, the controversy troubles the idea that Victorian thought about history had changed from a short biblical model to a deep one. The strange times mobilised and highlighted by the controversy enable us to cautiously reconsider these modes of historical representation, to find their inconsistencies, to see their tensions at work, and to engage with their anxieties and crises of uniform representation. Times had certainly changed since Sir Thomas Browne’s query in Religio Medici of 1645: ‘who can speake of eternitie without a solecisme, or thinke thereof without an extasie? Time we may comprehend, ’tis but five days elder than our selves.’108 King Gilgamesh’s own journey in the epic finds a parallel in the Victorians’ relationship with history. Both, it seemed, had little choice in embracing the profound uncertainty of the past and future. The Victorians proved themselves polyglot in finding ways to speak about the past; different modes saturate their cultural and historical output, and so it is to painting and photography, historiography, and the novel that I now turn in order to assess the presence and productivity of the historical sublime in Victorian culture.

Notes 1 ‘The Flood; Reading of the Chaldean Story of the Deluge,’ New York Times. 2 ‘On Tuesday Evening Last. . .’ Daily Telegraph 5 December 1872. 3 The society was quite a prestigious one. Philip Henry Gosse was also one of its members, as was the inventor of calotype (negative/positive) photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, though it is not known if either attended Smith’s paper.

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4 ‘The Deluge,’ Daily Telegraph 14 November 1872. 5 ‘Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 17 November 1872; ‘Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ Aberdeen Journal 20 November 1872; ‘Editorial,’ Birmingham Daily Post 19 November 1872; ‘Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ Newcastle Courant etc. 22 November 1872; ‘Reuters Telegrams,’ Pall Mall Gazette 22 November 1872; ‘Society of Biblical Archaeology . . .’ Illustrated London News 1872. 6 ‘Editorial,’ Belfast News-Letter 18 November 1872. 7 George Smith, ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 2 (1873). 8 ‘What We Know of Assyria,’ Daily Telegraph 16 December 1872. 9 ‘The Late George Smith,’ Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times 16 September 1876, p. 183. 10 See Lesley Adkins, Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon (London: HarperCollins, 2003). 11 George Smith, On the Reading of Cypriote Inscriptions (London: 1870); George Smith, On the Chronology of the Reign of Sennacherib; with Remarks on Some Other Dates in Connection with Assyrian and Babylonian History (London, 1871); George Smith, History of Assurbanipal, Translated from the Cuneiform Inscriptions (London: Williams & Norgate, 1871); George Smith, The Phonetic Values of Cuneiform Characters (London: 1871); George Smith, Notes on the Early History of Assyria and Babylonia (London: Harrison, 1872); George Smith, ‘Early History of Babylonia,’ Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 1 (1872). 12 ‘The Flood; Reading of the Chaldean Story of the Deluge,’ New York Times. 13 Later to be translated as ‘Gilgamesh’. ‘Izdubar’ also has minor variation of spellings in different works. 14 George Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis: Containing the Description of the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, the Times of the Patriarchs, and Nimrod; Babylonian Fables, and Legends of the Gods; from the Cuneiform Inscriptions (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1876), pp. 4–5. 15 E. A. W. Budge, The Rise and Progress of Assyriology (London: Martin Hopkinson & Co, 1925), pp. 152–3. 16 There are variations in the translations of the names in the Epic; for clarity I will use the modern versions of the characters’ names whenever possible. 17 Smith, ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ pp. 222–3. For a modern translation of this passage see Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Andrew George (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), Tablet XI, lines 142–56. 18 See Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth, 7th ed.; Burnet, Archæologiæ Philosophicæ; Erasmus Warren, Geologia: Or, a Discourse Concerning the Earth Before the Deluge, Wherein the Form and Properties Ascribed to It by J. Burnet, in a Book Intitled the Theory of the Earth Are Excepted Against (London: 1690); William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth; Benoãit de Maillet, Telliamed: Or, Discourses between an Indian Philosopher, and a French Missionary, on the Diminution of the Sea, the Formation of the Earth, the Origin of Men and Animals, and Other Curious Subjects Relating to Natural History and Philosophy. Being a Translation from the French Original of Maillet (London: 1750); Hutton, Theory of the Earth . . . in Four Parts; Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth; Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth; Buckland, Vindiciæ Geologicæ; Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1st ed.; Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences. 19 Rupke, The Great Chain of History, pp. 64–74, and Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists, pp. 17–51.

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20 James Secord rightly issues a word of warning on such stances. ‘No one adopted Lyell’s views wholesale . . . It would be misleading, however, to judge the effect of the book – or the reception of any text – by the number of converts or the comments of a few specialists. As with most widely-read books, the effects were subtle and pervasive. Notably, critics of all shades of opinion agreed that debate about the earth was pursued on a new plane of sophistication as a result of the Principles.’ James Secord, ‘Introduction’ to the Penguin edition of Lyell, Principles of Geology, p. xxiii. 21 Smith, ‘Early History of Babylonia,’ pp. 28–92. He also gave one on 6 June 1871. 22 Smith, ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ p. 213. 23 Elsewhere, Smith concisely defines mythical notions as those that ‘go beyond written records’. George Smith, Note-Book (Vol. 2) – Assyrian Inscriptions, London, p. 58. 24 Smith, ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge.’ 25 ‘An Extraordinary Public Interest . . .’ Daily Telegraph 6 December 1872. 26 Samuel Birch, ‘The Progress of Biblical Archaeology: an Address; Read before the Society of Biblical Archaeology, on the 21st March, 1871,’ Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 2 (1873), p. 6. 27 Alex Mackenzie Cameron, ‘Illustrations from Borneo of Passages in the Book of Genesis,’ Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 2 (1873), p. 264. 28 William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Etc., 1829 (London: Dawsons, 1967). 29 James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 3rd ed. (London, 1836–47); James Cowles Prichard, The Natural History of Man (Paris: Bailliere, 1843). 30 Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871). 31 Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). I will return to the specificity of Atlantis’s emergence in nineteenth-century culture in the ‘Conclusion’ of this book. 32 See Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: the Antediluvian World (London: 1882); George W. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951 (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). 33 Mackenzie Cameron, ‘Illustrations from Borneo,’ p. 265. 34 Mackenzie Cameron, ‘Illustrations from Borneo,’ p. 265. 35 Smith, ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ pp. 232–4. 36 George Smith to Sir Austen Henry Layard, 5 Jan 1872, Add Ms. 39000 f. 123, George Smith, Assyriologist: Letters to Sir A. H. Layard: 1867–1872, British Library, London. The subtext of the letter as a whole suggests a mutual respect between Layard and Smith, and a suppressed antipathy between Smith and Rawlinson who seemed only to offer help when he could ride on the coat tails of Smith’s hard won successes. 37 George Smith to Sir Austen Henry Layard, 11 Feb 1872, Add Ms. 39000 f. 196, George Smith, Assyriologist: Letters to Sir A. H. Layard: 1867–1872, British Library, London. 38 As any celebrity should, Smith even made an appearance in Punch, where they mocked up a ‘Defamation of Character’ article on Izdubar’s behalf. ‘Defamation of Character,’ Punch 14 December 1872, p. 251. 39 ‘Society of Biblical Archaeology,’ Daily News 4 December 1872; ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ Daily News 5 December 1872; ‘The Chaldean Story of the Deluge,’ Glasgow Herald 6 December 1872; ‘Chaldean History of the Deluge,’ Manchester Times 7 December 1872; ‘Chaldean History of the Deluge,’ North Wales Chronicle 14 December 1872.

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Gilgamesh ‘Chaldean History of the Deluge,’ Times 4 December 1872. ‘Chaldean History of the Deluge,’ Times. ‘Society of Biblical Archaeology,’ Daily News. ‘Chaldean History of the Deluge,’ Times. Support for excavations was also coming from other quarters. The paper published an enthusiastic letter from a reader who felt the public needed to know more. See ‘What We Know of Assyria,’ Daily Telegraph; George Smith, ‘What May Be Found in Assyria,’ Daily Telegraph 26 December 1872; W. Houghton, ‘“Assyrian Explorations” – Letter to the Editor,’ Daily Telegraph 30 December 1872. George Smith, Assyrian Discoveries: An Account of Explorations and Discoveries on the Site of Nineveh, During 1873 and 1874 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1875). Smith, Assyrian Discoveries, pp. 96–7. ‘Atrahasis,’ Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others, ed. Stephanie Dalley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 1–38. Atrahasis is a fascinating poem. It seems that its function was to reveal the stupidity, myopia, and downright selfishness of the gods, recounting what humanity has had to endure at their hands. A fragment of the poem which is held at the British Museum dates from about 1635 BC – the poem itself is thought to be around a millennium older than that. Smith, Assyrian Discoveries, p. 100. See George Smith, ‘On Some Fragments of the Chaldean Account of Creation,’ Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 4 (1876). Secretary to the British Museum S. McAllister Jones, Letter to George Smith, George Smith ‘Personalia’ held at the Department of the Middle East – Early Mesopotamia Collection, London. I am indebted to David Damrosch’s The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Holt, 2006), here, which ably recounts the politics of Smith’s difficult negotiations with his seniors. The Annual Register – a Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1876 (London: Rivingtons, 1877), p. 152. See also ‘The Late George Smith.’ George Smith, Note-Books of George Smith of the British Museum, Principally Containing Copies and Translations of Assyrian Inscriptions Discovered by Him in His Expeditions to Syria and Mesopotamia in 1873–1876, Together with Various Notes and Memoranda, held at the British Library, London, pp. 27–8. Smith, Note-Books of George Smith of the British Museum, p. 30. John Parsons, Travels in Persia and Turkey in Asia by John Parsons, an English Dentist, Circ. 1874–1876; Written by an Amanuensis, with Corrections, Add. MS 39300, held at the British Library, London, p. 341–5. Parsons, Travels in Persia and Turkey in Asia, p. 348. On the dating of the poem see Stephanie Dalley, ‘Introduction to “the Epic of Gilgamesh”,’ Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others, ed. Stephanie Dalley (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 45–9. Smith, ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ p. 233–4. This approach of Smith’s did not go unnoticed. In a review of his last book, the writer remarked, ‘[h]e abstains from almost every approach to controversial discussion . . . All he has to do is to publish the translation of the texts discovered or interpreted by him, along with the simple and conclusive evidence of their antiquity . . . and the question of their relative priority may be safely left to the decision of common sense.’ ‘The Chaldean Genesis,’ Examiner.

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59 Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 284. 60 The dating of ‘Genesis’ is still under discussion but it is thought to have been written between 450 and 550 BC. See Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11: A Commentary (London: SPCK, 1984), pp. 384–480. 61 Essays and Reviews caused enormous controversy when it was first published, as did Bishop Colenso’s series of critical examinations of the Pentateuch and Book of Joshua. (F. Temple, R. Williams, et al., Essays and Reviews (London: John W. Parker, 1860); John William Colenso, The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua: Critically Examined (London: Longman, Roberts & Green, 1865).) Between 1860 and 1865 alone, Essays and Reviews went through thirteen editions. Two of the authors, Rowland Williams and Henry Wilson, were charged with heresy and found guilty by the ecclesiastical court (though both were later acquitted). See also Michael Wheeler, Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion, and Science: Fundamentalism Versus Irony, 1700–1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mark Knight and Emma Mason, NineteenthCentury Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Victor Shea and William Whitla, Essays and Reviews: the 1860 Text and Its Reading (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999); Timothy Larsen, Contested Christianity: the Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2004). 63 The nature of the ‘masterly train of reasoning’ is unreported. ‘Chaldean Story of the Deluge,’ Daily Telegraph 4 December 1872. 64 ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ Pall Mall Gazette 4 December 1872. 65 ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ Pall Mall Gazette 4 December 1872. 66 ‘Society of Biblical Archaeology,’ Daily News 4 December 1872. Gladstone found himself embroiled in debate with the Spectator after he implied on the night that he read Homer every day. He had to publish an emendation to this in a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph, in which he assured the public that his current duties as Prime Minister precluded such luxuries. See William Ewart Gladstone, ‘To the Editor of the Spectator,’ Daily Telegraph 16 December 1872. 67 ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ Daily News 5 December 1872. 68 ‘Chaldean History of the Deluge,’ North Wales Chronicle 14 December 1872. 69 ‘Chaldean History of the Deluge,’ North Wales Chronicle 14 December 1872; ‘Chaldean History of the Deluge,’ Manchester Times 7 December 1872. See also ‘The Deluge – Discovery and Promulgation of the Chaldean History of the Flood,’ New York Times 20 December 1872. 70 ‘On Tuesday Evening Last. . .’ Daily Telegraph; The Annual Register – a Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1872 (London: Rivingtons, 1873), p. 374. 71 Smith, ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge,’ p. 232, p. 231, p. 233. 72 ‘The Flood; Reading of the Chaldean Story of the Deluge,’ New York Times. 73 ‘The Flood; Reading of the Chaldean Story of the Deluge,’ New York Times. 74 The Aberdeen Weekly Journal, Athenaeum, Belfast News-Letter, Daily Telegraph, Daily News, Derby Mercury, Examiner, Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, Glasgow Herald, Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, Hull Packet and East Riding Times, Liverpool Mercury, Leeds Mercury, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Manchester Times, New York Times, Newcastle Courant, North Wales Chronicle, Pall Mall Gazette, Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, Reader, Spectator, Times, and Western Mail all carried Smith or Izdubar-related stories between 1872 and 1876. 75 Alfred Edersheim, The Bible History, 7 vols (London: Religious Tract Society, 1890),

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vol.1, chapter 6, ‘The Flood, Genesis VII–VIII’. 76 Edersheim, The Bible History, vol. 1, p. 14. 77 Edersheim, The Bible History, vol. 1, p. 15. 78 Mary Bennett, ‘The Chaldean Legend of the Flood,’ Dublin University Magazine 81 (February 1873), p. 156. 79 H.W.W., ‘Letter to the Editor – Chaldean Story of the Deluge,’ Daily Telegraph 10 December 1872. 80 ‘Letter to the Editor,’ Daily Telegraph 12 December 1872. 81 W. H. Stone, ‘Mr W. H. Stone on Assyrian and Babylonian Explorations,’ Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle etc. 4 December 1875. 82 ‘The Church Congress,’ Times 5 October 1878. 83 ‘The Church Congress,’ Times. 84 George Rawlinson, A Memoir of Major-General Sir H. C. Rawlinson (London: Longmans, 1898). 85 Rawlinson and Budge were not the most generous of mentors. Both had treated Hormuzd Rassam (one of Smith’s contemporaries) appallingly. Budge even ended up in court in 1893 charged by Rassam with slander after he had publicly suggested that Rassam had been responsible for stealing antiquities on their way back from British Museum sites in Iraq. Budge’s 1925 Rise and Progress has been responsible for the repetition of many errors and damaging whispers. He consistently portrayed Rassam (after his death) as Rawlinson’s feckless assistant. Moreover, Budge is the only source for the oft-repeated story of Smith tearing off his clothes on first reading the Gilgamesh deluge tablet. See Henry Rawlinson, The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia (Prepared for Publication by Sir H. C. Rawlinson, Assisted by E. Norris, Vol. 1, 2; by George Smith, Vol. 3, 4; by T. G. Pinches, Vol. 5), 5 vols (London, 1861–84). See also W. Ferrier and Stephanie Dalley, ‘Rawlinson, Sir Henry Creswicke, First Baronet (1810–1895),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23190 (January 2008, accessed 25 August 2009), and Damrosch, The Buried Book, pp. 136–50. 86 Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth, 7th ed.; Burnet, Archæologiæ Philosophicæ. 87 John Henry Archdeacon of Calcutta Pratt, Scripture and Science Not at Variance: Or, the Historical Character and Plenary Inspiration of the Earlier Chapters of Genesis Unaffected by the Discoveries of Science (London, 1856). 88 ‘The Church Congress,’ Times. 89 ‘The Church Congress,’ Times. 90 ‘The Church Congress,’ Times. 91 ‘The Church Congress,’ Times. 92 ‘The Church Congress,’ Times. 93 ‘Truth is mighty, and will prevail.’ ‘The Church Congress,’ Times. 94 See Theophilus Goldridge Pinches, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (London: Constable, 1906). The translation of Izdubar to ‘Gilgames’ was first announced in ‘The Babylonian and Assyrian Inscription,’ Pall Mall Gazette 25 October 1890. 95 ‘Noah’s Log,’ New York Times 22 December 1872. 96 ‘On Tuesday Evening Last. . .’ Daily Telegraph. 97 Smith, Note-Books of George Smith of the British Museum, p. 9. 98 Mary Bennett, ‘Chaldea and Assyria,’ Dublin University Magazine 81 (April 1873). 99 ‘The Chaldean Genesis,’ Examiner 11 December 1875. 100 Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. viii. 101 Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 17.

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Smith, ‘On Some Fragments of the Chaldean Account of Creation,’ pp. 363–4. Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 169. George Smith, Babylonia, ed. A. H. Sayce (London: 1877), p. 29. William Fox Talbot, Letter to Samuel Birch (Keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum), 20 October 1876, Smith ‘Personalia’ – Department of the Middle East – Early Mesopotamia Collection, London. 106 Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli), Letter to Mrs George Smith, 20 October 1876, Smith ‘Personalia’ – Department of the Middle East – Early Mesopotamia Collection, London. 107 Exactly how Suess would use Smith’s translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh to formulate a new theory of global plate tectonics is something that I will return to in my final chapter. 108 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1643, 2nd ed. (London: 1645), sect. 11.

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Part II – Narrative and the historical sublime ‫ﱪﱩ‬

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Capturing time: the iconography of water in painting and photography

It is like trying to paint a soul.1 (Ruskin, on water in Modern Painters)

T

he plurality of Victorian ideas or beliefs about time is ably represented in the visual arts of the period. The ideological productivity of Victorian ideas concerning temporality came in part from a sort of dynamic energy; energy derived from their sheer difference to that which had preceded them. The vision of the distant past that circulated most widely in early nineteenth-century culture was essentially medieval, relying heavily on biblical trope and narrative structural coherence.2 For around two hundred years the genre of deluge painting remained practically unchanged as it drew upon an iconographical tradition that had been around for centuries. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries the genre’s iconography and meanings endured social, political, and aesthetic upheavals; then, two things happened in the first part of the nineteenth century. The deluge underwent revolutionary change; it disappeared entirely and found its voice using a new optical vocabulary. In the visual arts of the early nineteenth century the theme of Noah’s Flood (where volleys of water engulfed the earth) was amongst the most popular of apocalyptic or historical themes. Frequently seen in Old Testament cycles during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the theme of the deluge was to reach pandemic proportions between 1790 and 1850 when there were more than fifty painterly versions of it exhibited in Britain and Europe. In the second half of the century, however, there is not one major rendition of the deluge to be found. While there are lateVictorian artists who approach the theme of the deluge, considered below, they do so obliquely and without recourse to representing the actual event as it takes place. Where the deluge had been one amongst

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many popular tropes circulating in Romantic culture, for the Victorians (after about 1850) it was seemingly void.3 What happened to the deluge? Reasons for this relatively sudden change, adaptation and extinction have been advanced before. Michael G. Freeman, like Norman Cohn and George P. Landow before him, sees in the relatively sudden decline of deluge painting that the Victorians no longer felt the sublimity of Noah’s Flood once the geological and biblical deluges became separated in light of geological investigation.4 In their view, once the deluge was explained away by science it was no longer in circulation as a key trope for the Victorians. The historian John Burrow’s approach to the problem was quite different. In ‘Images of Time’, he noticed that in both the painterly and the literary arts ‘catastrophic and volcanic analogies’ became ‘less noticeable’ as the nineteenth century progressed.5 His reason: the triumph of sedimentary gradualism as the major paradigmatic metaphor of Victorian thought. Such a fact, for Burrow, presents an art form like painting with a very specific problem, namely that gradual change, unlike apocalyptic change, is so slow as to be rendered imperceptible to the human eye, and in Burrow’s view ‘the imperceptible is also necessarily the unpaintable’.6 He suggests that it is not so much that the deluge’s interest had waned in the Victorian consciousness, but that the emergent notion of the earth’s history – one characterised by slow and gradual change – was unrepresentable in a spatial medium like painting (unlike, perhaps, an essentially temporal medium like the novel). While being indebted to existing readings of the deluge genre, I will explore in this chapter, not so much the chain of relations between these paintings as others have done, but their historical specificities, their relationship to the narrative traditions upon which they were drawing, as well as the cult of the sublime. Finally, via sublimity, I will move more broadly towards an assessment of the representation of time in the Victorian visual arts. The iconography of deluge paintings does not suggest a stable or consistent form of representation that runs neatly in parallel with the chronology of scientific discovery. Instead, an approach prioritising and examining the ruptures and inconsistencies of representation is free to reject a progressive model of history, one which presents a narrative of science empirically explaining the truth behind ‘the myth’ and assuming such a new truth’s universal acceptance. Focussing on the tensions and discontinuities that the pre-1850 paintings express can reveal the essential duality of the Victorians’ sense of their past; a duality which holds in balance a number of versions of geological history present in the Victorian imaginary (one which is also expressed more overtly in the Gilgamesh controversy).

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Looking more closely at the deluge paintings that continue into post1850, one can see that there was some ideological leakage that crossed the boundary of the mid-century, suggesting that the theme of the deluge was still present for the Victorians. There is another problem that emerges: as sedimentary gradualism is increasingly explored in the latter part of the nineteenth century, it presents history painting with a very specific question. Namely: with a narrative of origination, such as Noah’s Flood, the past is representable as the painter has recourse to narrative and familiar tropes and iconographies, like the Ark or the dove carrying the olive branch. Without narrative, the past becomes much stranger. It exists as theory. It cannot be anthropocentric as geological theory seeks to recount the events of an unpeopled earth. How then can it be visually represented? As I will go on to explore, the mid- to late-Victorians proved themselves adept at finding ways to visually explore the complexity and length of the past without narrative. From here, I want to add to the ongoing debate about the deluge by suggesting that the paintings did not really disappear. The issues that the genre mobilised found their articulation and expression with different and new iconographies in both painting and photography. These new issues gave shape to a kind of art in an emergent form that was free to explore the odd and imaginatively productive dichotomy of simultaneously holding on to the idea of history as consisting of both a few thousand years, and millions upon millions.

From the Flood to the deluge The sublimity of the deluge is connected to its etymology. In many of the texts, paintings, poems, new and old, the words deluge and flood have seemingly been used interchangeably.7 There is some space for difference though, and it is a difference that is made clear in the contrast between the terms’ usage in early-modern and Romantic culture. Flõd/flood was the earliest English term used to translate biblical references to inundation, particularly in Genesis (6:17, etc.). In the Wycliffite Bible the phrase used is the ‘greet flood of watris’. The word flood, the OED explains, preexists the English language as we know or identify it, being part of the common Germanic word-hoard that underwent Latin and NormanFrench enrichments following the eleventh-century invasions.8 The word deluge derives, via French, from the Latin diluvium (the word used for ‘flood’ in the Latin Vulgate Bible).9 The Gawain Poet makes one of the earliest references to Noah’s Flood in English poetry in Cleanness, thought to date from around 1370.10 God

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tells Noah, ‘For I schal waken up a water to wasch alle the worlde, / And quelle [kill] alle that is quik with quavende flodes.’11 The description that continues, though, has more in common with the epic paintings of the Romantics than it does with the text of the Bible, as its focus becomes the desperate efforts of the damned to escape the flood waters. Bi that the flod to her fete flowed and waxed, Then uche a segge sey that synk him behoved; Frendes fellen in fere and fathomed togeder, To dryy her delful deystyné and dryen alle samen12

The story of the last family escaping the floodwaters, introduced here (and also a feature of the early fifteenth-century miracle play Noyes Fludd), was to become a mainstay in later deluge iconography, a tradition which emerges in the seventeenth century.13 So it is not the case that one of the terms gives way to the other, that one falls completely from favour in the language. Shortly after the Gawain Poet, there is a reference in the OED to Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale (from approximately 1386) in which ‘God dreynte [drenched or drowned] al the world at the diluge’. Before the vogue of the sublime, the two terms are practically synonymous, but it is the deluge that tends to take precedence from around the seventeenth century. While there are obviously exceptions to this, as a rule, ‘flood’ stories, during this period, tend to refer to Noah and his family, and are consequently about survival. ‘Deluge’ stories, on the other hand, do not focus on ‘us’, but rather on ‘them’, being those that were drowned. The ‘flood’ becomes the ‘deluge’ because the latter suggests an enhanced sense of sublimity, in keeping with the developing fashion of the sublime from the seventeenth century onwards. There are all kinds of floods; a room might become flooded, a road, an engine, a town, even a city, country, or continent. The term includes all such possibilities, but it is also a passive as well as an active term. The process of flooding can be quick or slow, and to say that ‘there is a flood’ may also mean that the process of flooding is over. The deluge is much more specific: it refers to an engulfment on a grand scale, and it refers to the process itself so includes a temporal aspect that the flood has to share with its other meanings. The painting that begins the genre uses the French ‘déluge’ in its title. Each painting exhibited on the theme in that period rejected the tame ‘flood’ in favour of the epic and sublime ‘deluge’ as the appropriate terminology. There is a peculiar historical simultaneity to one of the beginnings of

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modern geology with Nicolas Steno’s Prodromus (1669) and the first deluge painting that approaches the real terror and sublimity of the event, Nicolas Poussin’s L’Hiver ou Le Déluge (1660–64, figure 2), which when exhibited at the Louvre in Paris caught the attention of the travelling classes.14 On his visit to the Louvre in 1802, in personal notes Henry Fuseli remarked: ‘“Winter, or the Deluge” in every requisite of real painting, places Poussin in the first rank of art. It is easier to feel than to describe its powers . . . What we see before us is the element itself, and not its image . . . Hope is shut out, and Nature expires.’15 Fuseli’s experience of such an image is Romantic to the core and provides a template for his contemporaries’ responses to the deluge paintings that were to follow Poussin’s in the early nineteenth century. For Fuseli, the painting transcends the status of representation and instead presents itself as the true and terrifying Platonic form of the deluge, presenting the viewer with the horrible experience of the event. There is, at work, a Romantic hierarchy of perception: it is ‘easier to feel than to describe’. Fuseli expects to experience the near-expiration of nature, and so he does; but it is not there. Fuseli’s (indeed, Romantic culture’s) notion of the sublime circumscribes aesthetic responses to this painting and to some extent explains his reaction to it. Fuseli’s response to Poussin’s Winter was not unique: Percy Bysshe Shelley had also seen it in 1814. Mary Shelley reported that he thought it was ‘terribly impressive. It was the only remarkable picture which we had time to observe’.16 And John Constable, in his 1833 lectures, remarked that in its ‘awful sublimity [Poussin] has surpassed every other painter, who has attempted the subject; nor can there be a greater proof of the effective power of landscape than that this portentous event should have been best told by landscape alone, the figures being few and entirely subordinate.’17 Constable’s statement is consistent here with his own work on landscape, where the ‘figures’ are ‘few and entirely subordinate’, but like the story narrated in the Gawain Poet’s Cleanness, the point of Poussin’s painting is that it is a human story of struggle against the power of landscape. What characterises Constable’s reaction is the fact that Poussin had made the ideological jump from earlier Renaissance images of the flood, where the animals went in two by two, and where the actual flood was frequently absent from the pictorial narrative. Moreover, medieval imagery focussed almost exclusively on those that would survive the Flood rather than those that lost their lives to it. There is, though, an odd symmetry insofar as this is also what the later Victorian images of the deluge returned to: the story of Noah’s family and depictions of the animals that survived. While there are medieval

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and early-modern representations of the drowned in Noah’s Flood such as Jan Van Scorel’s The Flood of 1515, the more common imagery depicting animals entering or inhabiting the Ark is found in Old Testament illustration or in paintings such as Roelandt Savery’s Noah’s Ark (1621), or Jan Griffier’s Noah’s Ark (1700).18 Earlier images focus principally on the aspects, characters, and figures of survival in the narrative. They are taxonomic studies of the Ark’s inhabitants. They recount the beginning of how things are in our world and abandon to their fates the untold stories of those that die leaving behind a lost world. The tension between these two narratives that gave life to two different kinds of Flood painting in the nineteenth century is at the nub of the Victorian dualism about the nature of history and time. Such a tension between representing the drowned and the saved is one that is already being articulated in Poussin’s Winter, in which both survivors and victims are represented, the former obliquely on an Ark in the middle distance, the latter in the forefront drowning before us. The painting’s emotional power derives from its empathetic response to the damned. Its place in art history is due to its unique approach to the story which invites us to consider the price that was paid for our (the viewers’) existence. But the painting’s power is also tenuous: it relies on an empathetic response to a real event and not something that is simply a story. Its power is historical and documentary rather than fantastical. Given the influence of Winter it is unsurprising to learn that the tensions that it articulates also belong to the subgenre of paintings that it began, and these tensions would be taken up in three connected ways. Each of the paintings that attack the theme of the Flood in the period do so by including, balancing, or lacking three topics that run in a skein throughout all of them: the iconography of Genesis, the anthropocentric story of the damned, and the Romantic or Victorian sublime.

Iconographic centrality of the Ark While there are many potentially iconographical aspects to the Genesis narrative, the one figure that is central in most Flood studies is the Ark. The figure as it is depicted in the images over a number of centuries has a significant trajectory in revealing the ideological function of the paintings. Returning to Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory, one of the illustrations from the body text is emblematic of earlier ways of imagining the Flood (figure 3).19 This relatively large engraving appears with the text and

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depicts Noah’s Ark being carried and cared for by heavenly angels, and although the Ark is small in the context of the size of the illustration, the context of scale is altogether different. The illustration, surely for the sake of clarity, depicts a slightly smaller Ark than that of the corresponding image on the frontispiece of the Sacred Theory. Nonetheless, the gargantuan size of the Ark is similar to the landmass of Great Britain. The Ark as a metonym of Genesis in this image is literally central, but also provides the iconographical lens through which the image may be understood. The image signifies in a stable way, as there is little in the way of tension or slippage (unlike the frontispiece, for example).20 In comparison with the Poussin there is not the least interest in a human aspect to the story (that is, the plight of the drowning or the drowned); the damned are drowned and gone and all that is left is the Ark, standing as a metonym for the Bible. Here, the Ark-Bible claims explicative supremacy for describing the earth’s history. In contrast, Winter holds in tension the biblical narrative with the story of the damned. The silhouette of Mount Ararat towers in the distance behind Noah’s Ark, which floats on calm waters, a stark contrast to the depiction of the desperation and struggle for both human and animal life in the foreground. Slithering on the rocks is another symbol from Genesis (though not from the Flood narrative) that does not need the Ark: the serpent. While the deluge paintings that I will go on to consider are always biblical either in subject matter or response, the early nineteenth century’s obsession with the deluge is more complex. The theme’s significance is encompassed by the fact that there is no ‘deluge’ in the Bible. God’s words are: ‘For after seven more days I will cause it to rain on earth forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all things that I have made.’21 The text suggests that the waters do not splash down from the heavens causing the spectacular deluges that the Romantics were so interested in; the rains fall gradually over a thousand hours. The dynamics of the weather in the Poussin adequately represent this: the water in motion is not a huge torrent that engulfs all life immediately. Instead, the deluge only manages a rather small motion. It moves quite calmly over the three-foot-high waterfall, and there are no waves to be seen anywhere in the painting. There are considerable dynamics, not so much in the sublimity, but in the perspective and scale in Winter, and in the deluge paintings that would follow. And, given the historical coincidence between the beginnings of geology and deluge painting, there is an association between the two that these paintings go on to work out in various ways. It is not that the word of God or the Bible is being brought into question, but that the

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earth is seen to present an enigmatic text that is not legible to the layman and has to be troubled over and explained by the savant.

A genealogy of the deluge Most of the deluges that were to appear in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century painting were a response to Poussin. On the whole, they did not return to medieval iconographies and focussed instead on the plight of the damned. While the deluge was undoubtedly serious subject matter, its execution in painting was not always a dignified response to the event. Although the reality, extent, and nature of the earth’s inundation were being hammered out in geological debate, many of the images are workaday exercises in the sublime. They depict the danger and terror experienced by those in the throes of death, and employ dynamic perspectives, imperceptible darkness, and naked bodies violently ravaged by the absolute power of nature. Despite the sometimes-cynical motivation behind them, there are several works that stand apart for the ways in which they break with the continuity of tradition to comment revealingly on the meaning and status of the deluge in early nineteenth-century culture. Where Poussin set the ideological benchmark for thinking about the Flood and its real consequences for humanity, Benjamin West’s The Deluge of 1790 reworked the human tragedy to depict its aftermath (figure 4).22 Biblical iconography weighs heavily in the painting. The Ark – at the central point in the image and its largest component – rests upon calm waters with its destination of Mount Ararat on the left in the distance. The serpent and the Ark are both more prominent than in Winter.23 West adds an olive-branch-carrying dove and a raven from Genesis 8. The rainbow that gloriously garlands the Ark (from Genesis 9) is surprisingly not a common addition to deluge images. It is an opportunity for the painter to demonstrate particular abilities with colour but its attractiveness dampens the sublime effect in comparison with the sturm und drang of Winter. Where both paintings break from the text of Genesis is in their depiction of what looks like a last family. And, as the waters have only just begun their recession, they are the first revealed.24 They are the most significant aspect of the image, but why are they naked? And why are they partially draped in this continuous material that stretches serpent-like from figure to figure? Their nakedness is connected more to traditions of representing the human form than ideas of the sublime; nonetheless the effect of sublimity is there, in the repre-

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sentation of the vulnerability of the human body.25 The figures’ form has other functions, too. Although their nakedness derives from either the rush of the floodwaters or some idea of antediluvian perversity, the drapery weaves together in a single motif the figure emerging from the sea on the left to the serpent on the branch on the far right. The branch that the serpent is coiled around stretches out as an extension to the limb of the dead man. There is no metaphorical difference between the phalanx of the damned and the serpent; they are one. This bottom third of the picture is in stark contrast to the unerring optimism of the rest of the piece: the rising sun, the rainbow, and the white dove all signify beginning for us, ending for them. The sexualised dead-or-dying body is another of the central themes that become increasingly overt as the century continues. There is a sexual aspect to ways of death by water that is not seen in earlier images or stories that recount the Flood.26 As the nineteenth century progresses more of the images depict an increasing number of naked bodies. Also, just like in West’s Deluge, the figures are often depicted with torn clothing as if the swelling water is the culprit of some kind of naturalised violent sex crime. Such an idea sits comfortably with the long intellectual tradition from Edmund Burke onwards of discussion on gender and the sublime, which typically situates the sublime as masculine. ‘Power’ for Burke is godly. Thus when we contemplate the Deity, his attributes and their operation coming united on the mind, form a sort of sensible image, and as such are capable of affecting the imagination. Now, though in a just idea of the Deity, perhaps none of his attributes are predominant, yet to our imagination, his power is by far the most striking. Some reflection, some comparing is necessary to satisfy us of his wisdom, his justice, and his goodness; to be struck with his power, it is only necessary that we should open our eyes. But while we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with Omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him. And though a consideration of his other attributes may relieve in some measure our apprehensions; yet no conviction of the justice with which it is exercised, nor the mercy with which it is tempered, can wholly remove the terror that naturally arises from a force which nothing can withstand. If we rejoice, we rejoice with trembling; and even whilst we are receiving benefits, we cannot but shudder at a power which can confer benefits of such mighty importance.27

The definitively sublime object for Burke is gendered as male through God. But Burke further exposes such gender difference by classifying the

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lesser quality of beauty with feminine traits. The subtitles that Burke uses for his work in Part Three are telling enough: ‘smoothness’, ‘feeling’, ‘elegance’, ‘grace’, ‘delicacy’. I need here say little of the fair sex, where I believe the point will be easily allowed me. The beauty of women is considerably owing to their weakness, or delicacy, and is even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it. I would not here be understood to say, that weakness betraying very bad health has any share in beauty; but the ill effect of this is not because it is weakness, but because the ill state of health which produces such weakness alters the other conditions of beauty; the parts in such a case collapse; the bright colour . . . and the fine variation is lost in wrinkles, sudden breaks, and right lines.28

Although Burke is never keen to make overt his connection between the qualities of beauty and the ‘fair sex’, this is the one passage where his correlation is made.29 Within such a tradition, Benjamin West’s painting can be reconsidered as one in which the bodies may display a way of death that is subtly gendered. The rising waters of the deluge, having been the indirect expression of the ultimately male and sublime object of God, have stripped, penetrated, and taken the life from these bodies. A discrete tension emerges in the image as a result: namely that The Deluge represents the absolute power of God, but also the related amoral powers of nature. With the iconographic presence of God in the painting, He is depicted as the one responsible for the state of these bodies. West’s Deluge is in many ways an example of how Romantic culture was influenced by this particular work of Poussin. While the story being told by West is similar to Poussin (the fate of the last family), it is the sublime aspect of representation that we can see here being exploited, mainly through the more extreme spatial perspectives of the painting. West, though, depicts the consequences of a much more disturbing act of violence (by nature or God) where the viewer’s sympathy is ironically drawn to the fate of the damned, and not the saved. But then, the representation of the saved would hardly be productive of the sublime. As such, the popularity of the deluge in the period is due, at least in part, to its potential as a conduit of sublimity.

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The deluge as the ultimate sublime Nancy L. Pressly has argued that the ‘deluge emerged as a popular theme during this period in part because it so obviously fulfilled the requirements of the sublime’, but I think that there is an important distinction to be made.30 Not all images of the deluge are ‘sublime’ in Burkean terms. If the sublime only comes into focus when God recedes from the world (as Thomas Weiskel has argued), then any image of the deluge that presents an image of God triumphing over evil is too characterised by affirmation and reassurance to be sublime; its signification is too stable (Weiskel’s sublimity is created in the productive breakdown between signifier and signified).31 The sacred world is triumphant and evil has suffered in the guise of the limp and dead serpent. In West’s image, God is present in the world and He is to be feared, but a more fearsome object would be something uninterested in the plight of humanity. God may be allpowerful, as He is seen in West’s Deluge, but he only punishes the wicked. A more sublime image would depict nature, free from the hand of God and capable of punishing all. In this way, Poussin has a much better claim for the status of sublimity than West. Winter’s terror and sublimity derive from the depiction of the struggle for life; West’s image depicts the completion of that struggle. While there is terror in the struggle for life, it is not the same for death itself. Moreover, when death is used as a figure for a new beginning or birth of all that we are here today, its status as sublime art is brought into question because the viewer contemplates it with a sense of a peculiar and perverse form of gratitude, for they would not exist were it not for the death of those depicted. Pressly also notes that there were only two types of deluge painting.32 Both types indicate the horror of the catastrophe but they do so by different means. Pressly suggests that Turner, Danby, and Martin (each discussed below) all use the terror of the landscape as the focus of power, whereas in Jacques de Loutherbourg, Poussin, and West it is the ‘hopeless plight of humanity’ that is key.33 Although this is a productive and relevant categorisation of deluge paintings, Turner, Danby, and Martin might be assessed in a different way. The real difference between them is to be found in the mode of representation, and the extent to which each of their works wipe out the text of Genesis. It is not the landscape alone that the images derive their effect from; it is the landscape and the more important ways that they play with the absence of biblical iconography that endow them with sublime affective power. J. M. W. Turner both straddles and transcends these traditions. His

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earlier The Deluge (1805) employed the iconography of its time (figure 5). It is what was by 1805 a fairly ordinary exercise in the tradition of the deluge according to Poussin. Its focus is on the struggle for life and its hopelessness in the face of the sheer ferocity of the elements. In Modern Painters (1843), Ruskin felt that: The merits of Poussin as a sea or water painter may, I think, be sufficiently determined by the Deluge in the Louvre, where the breaking up of the fountains of the deep is typified by the capsizing of a wherry over a weir. . . . [T]here is a just medium between the meanness and apathy of such a conception as [Poussin’s], and the extravagance still more contemptible, with which the subject has been treated in modern days. I am not aware that I can refer to any instructive example of this intermediate course; for I fear the reader is by this time wearied of hearing of Turner, and the plate of the Deluge is so rare that it is of no use to refer to it.34

The middle ground that Turner had found was indebted to Poussin but it also reimagined the event: the waves are bigger; the body count, higher. The Ark and the serpent are present; one sits on the horizon, and the other slithers for its life in the foreground, once again. The palette is similar, too; the cloud and sky, particularly the lightning, owe much to Poussin. The key difference between the two paintings, a feature John Gage has observed in Turner’s other work in this period, is the weather.35 In Turner’s deluge, the wind is spectacular, conveying a real sense of nature’s threat and the fragility of Man. This is the key change in Romantic culture. It is the beginning of the shift away from the bibliolatry of the earlier iconography to ways of imagining the deluge that prioritised the role of nature, rather than the hand of God. The image functions as a kind of amplified Poussin. Turner did return to the theme of the deluge in the 1840s and he was to approach it in ways not considered by his contemporaries. But there are two other indispensable paintings that appear before this by Francis Danby and John Martin. Francis Danby’s The Deluge (1840) is a step along the aesthetic scale of the iconography of deluge representation (figure 6).36 ‘He has painted the picture of “The Deluge”; we have before our eyes still the ark in the midst of the ruin floating calm and lonely, the great black cataracts of water pouring down, the mad rush of the miserable people clambering up the rocks’ was how William Makepeace Thackeray responded to it in 1840.37 As far back as 1826, Danby was said to have begun making preliminary studies for the painting but instead began to work on his An Attempt to Illustrate the Opening of the Sixth Seal (1828).38 Danby’s Deluge is an exceptionally dramatic painting. Its sheer size at three metres by four and a half

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means that the viewer needs to stand at some distance to be able to see all of it. In scope and execution it is very different to Poussin (the latter being only about an eighth of the size of Danby’s Deluge). Still, in the guise of the angel, the coiled serpent, and the Ark, the Bible is part of the painting’s ideological structure, albeit as a presence that is darkening and becoming more distanced. As in Poussin, the figures, both human and animal, are still very much alive in their struggle against death, but it is a more violent work. The nakedness of the bodies adds to the effect of human frailty in the rush of the water and horrific weather. The historical significance of this painting is that it dramatises a shift in focus in deluge painting from representing a biblical or real story from the past towards a more naturalised vision of the deluge. As a metonym for the decline of belief in the biblical version of the distant past, the text of Genesis clings at the very edge of the horizon with an almost imperceptibly small Ark. It is bathed in moonlight; otherwise its size would mean it would be lost in the maelstrom. The Ark, receding into the distance, to some extent addresses what was happening to biblical representation in Flood painting, but also what was happening to the deluge in geology. While John Martin’s The Deluge (1834) more articulately dramatises this, Danby’s painting suggests that the Bible’s explicative supremacy in describing the earth’s history is in danger of falling off the edge of the world.39 There is a tension in the image between Genesis and geology, though the contest for iconographic wall space is being lost by the sacred text and claimed by nature. Consequently, the claims for sublimity in Danby’s Deluge are stronger than Poussin’s. One of the key reasons for its sublimity is what Danby manages to do with his seascape. Modern Painters devotes a number of chapters in its first volume to ‘Of Truth of Water’. Here, Ruskin explains that: Of all inorganic substances, acting in their own proper nature, and without assistance or combination, water is the most wonderful . . . But to paint the actual play of hue on the reflective surface, or to give the forms and fury of water when it begins to show itself; to give the flashing and rocket-like velocity of a noble cataract . . . to do this perfectly is beyond the power of man; to do it even partially has been granted to but one or two, even of those few who have dared to attempt it.40

In this section Ruskin goes on to elucidate the nature of water as it is received by the eye: why it is so difficult for the painter to capture the characteristics of its transparency, reflectiveness and surface movement.41 Ruskin’s laws provide a lens through which the success of Danby’s Deluge may be understood. Unlike other flood painters Danby allows us

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to feel two aspects of water’s characteristics that Ruskin praised in Turner’s work. ‘You will find nothing in the waterfalls even of our best painters, but springing lines of parabolic descent, and splashing shapeless foam; and, in consequence, though they make you understand the swiftness of water, they never let you feel the weight of it.’42 The ‘weight’ of water is a subject that Ruskin returns to a number of times in his estimation of Turner’s achievements. It is this particular aspect of water’s representation that contributes to the sublimity of Danby’s Deluge. His is the only image in which ‘the surges roll and plunge with such prostration and hurling of their mass . . . that we feel that the rocks are shaking under them.’43 The painting foregrounds the tremendous powers of nature; its space, its mass, its force. Although not original to Danby’s work, the painting’s effect is that it does manage to convey something quite outside its literal and conceptual framework. This deluge’s success derives in part from the sense, not so much of the water’s appearance, but of its mass. Although his rendition of water is not quite so effective, John Martin is probably the most famous painter of the apocalyptic sublime in British Romanticism, and his version of the deluge contrasts with Poussin’s on a number of levels. Like many of the deluge paintings, the images are difficult to see in greyscale reproduction, John Martin’s original, though, is not that clear either. One contemporary reviewer – John Wilson, writing under the name ‘Christopher North’ in the Noctes Ambrosianae – remarked on the first version of the painting, As to the ‘Deluge,’ yon picture’s at first altogether incomprehensible. But the longer you glower at it, the mair and mair intelligible does a’ the confusion become, and you begin to feel that you’re looking on some dreadfu’ disaster. Phantoms, like the taps o’ mountains, grow distincter in the gloom, and the gloom itsel’, that at first seemed clud, is noo seen to be water. What you thocht to be snawy rocks, become sea-like waves, and shudderin’ you cry out, wi’ a stifled vice. ‘Lord preserve us, if that’s no the Deluge’!44

Although it precedes Danby’s Deluge by a number of years, it is a painting much more modern in its composition rather than its style. Contrasting with Danby, the sense of water’s weight is lost; the painting’s power and sublimity derive from the terrifying perspective that Martin employs, the dimensional differences between wave, rock, and body, but also from the eccentric and dynamic use of light. Where Danby employed a cool hue throughout the painting (except for his pinpoint of a setting

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sun), Martin washes his painting in sunlight, moonlight, lightning, and the blackness of falling rocks and waves. Plant life has also disappeared. Unlike Danby, Martin’s painting contains no trees or foliage anywhere. Humankind has retreated to the last and higher points of the earth only to find that there is no escape from the floodwaters. The painting is almost untroubled by biblical iconography. The original version of Martin’s Deluge (figure 7) was first shown at the British Institution in 1826, but was lost soon after that. He then turned it into a highly popular mezzotint in 1828, an image rich in contemporary and biblical reference as Nicolaas Rupke has noted; the mezzotint even includes a hyena den as a nod to William Buckland’s researches.45 There is also an Ark practically imperceptible, but it is there on the slope of Mount Ararat, and can be found with the assistance of Martin’s Key Sketch that accompanied the mezzotint.46 In this image, then, biblical and geological iconographies coexist. The 1834 painting is altogether different. Unlike the mezzotint, the blackness and the painter’s violent technique make it practically impossible to locate the small Ark. Buckland’s hyena den is gone, too. The focus, like in Danby, is shifted away from the familial human drama of the Poussin and the Genesis story of the flood to the terrorising power of nature. The three-foot waterfall in the Poussin seems derisory in comparison with Christopher North’s mountainous ‘sea-like waves’ that are so great as to be indistinguishable from the heavy clouds. Martin’s vision of the deluge is more shocking than the story in Genesis principally because of its aesthetic debt to the sublime. Like Danby’s, it is a large painting (around five foot by eight); the painting’s dimensions, the relative size of the figures in comparison with their ‘natural’ surroundings, the darkness of the painting all suggest a strong influence of the Burkean sublime. In this light, William Feaver’s assessment of the painting as one that ‘concentrates on the powers of God’ seems problematic.47 The painting by its nature is a religious one; it does, after all, depict a religious subject, but only by denying, cloaking, even deliberately withholding many of the tropes of the biblical narrative that its predecessors employed. The painting was accompanied by an abridged extract from Byron’s Heaven and Earth (1821), spoken by the Chorus of Mortals, which equally sidestepped overt biblical reference.

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Like all of the deluge paintings that were contemporary with Heaven and Earth, the text as quoted here and throughout the verse drama is guilty of a fantastical overdramatisation or interpolation of Genesis. The metaphorical structures at work in Martin’s painting (in part derived from Byron’s vision) form a confused understanding of the power of nature as presented in the geological discoveries of the decade. The metaphorical structure of Martin’s Deluge finds a relation in the principal issues that were being debated by William Buckland and Georges Cuvier. The painting attempts to move away from parts of the biblical tradition, but it is other aspects of that same tradition that the painting also enforces in its belief in the deluge as a universal experience. The 1826 version being lost, Martin repainted The Deluge for exhibition in 1834. This second version incorporated changes that had also been included in the popular mezzotint version of 1828. Other commentators on Martin’s work have addressed his debt to the geological discourses of the time available to him during the painting of the first and ‘lost’ deluge.49 In the 1828 mezzotint, along with representing Buckland’s hyena den, Martin is also said to have conformed to William Whiston’s theory of a comet passing the earth and causing a massive gravitational shift.50 In reference to this earlier version, Edward Bulwer-Lytton recorded that: Martin gives, in the same picture, a possible solution to the phenomena he records, and in the gloomy and perturbed heaven, you see the conjunction of the sun, the moon, and a comet! I consider this the most magnificent alliance of philosophy and art of which the history of art can boast.51

This focus on the geological and the astronomical is also said to have satisfied Georges Cuvier, who visited Martin and ‘expressed himself highly pleased’ by the fact that he and Martin were in agreement about

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the natural causes of the deluge.52 Cuvier was renowned by then for his theory of the earth, one of constant revolution, the deluge of the Bible being only one of many.53 Martin’s Deluge had succeeded more so than any of its predecessors in pictorially representing the most sublime and terrifying vision of the deluge, precisely because the flood of Genesis is hardly portrayed in the image, and the hand of God is barely perceptible. The divine absence does cause a tension in the image somewhere between God and nature. The image still mobilises the deluge as an anthropocentric narrative, like Genesis, and it is still a story about our history and not that of the earth. It is still a story of the past, suspended in anthropocentric narrative, practically stripped of religious iconography, but enduringly interpreted from Scripture. The last set of images that were to be produced on the theme of the deluge, before it disappeared to be reformulated in the mid-Victorian period, belonged to J. M. W. Turner. These were a pair of images: Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (figure 8) and Shade and Darkness: the Evening of the Deluge (figure 9).54 Both paintings are radically small for deluges (each painting is around thirty inches square). Both were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843 and both also have the same breed of tensions found in Martin’s work. In Notes on the Turner Collection at Marlborough House (1856), Ruskin ascribed four periods to the work of Turner.55 Turner’s second attempt at the theme of the deluge, Light and Colour, is representative of the second period that Ruskin ascribes: from ‘1820–1835, he worked on the principles which during his studentship he had discovered; imitating no one, but frequently endeavouring to do what the then accepted theories of art required of all artists – namely, to produce beautiful compositions or ideals, instead of transcripts of natural fact.’56 In the context of its predecessors in the history of deluge painting, Light and Colour is by far the most abstract exercise yet. Unlike in Martin’s Deluge, biblical iconography is central to the image. A serpent is depicted at the centre of both the image and the vortex of light, with Moses just above it writing the Pentateuch. Rather than being the serpent from the Garden, this is the bronze serpent from Numbers: ‘So Moses made a bronze serpent, and put it on a pole; and so it was, if a serpent had bitten anyone, when he looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.’57 The lower part of the painting is saturated in bodies; whether these are corpses from the ‘morning after the deluge’ or they are the joyful ‘children of Israel’, having been led out of Egypt by Moses, is unclear.58

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Either way, this is not a depiction of the terror of the deluge. Even its palette, the soft and golden light, has the effect of an ethereal calmness. William Dyce and G. F. Watts later use an almost identical palette. Both painters sought to represent the settled, static, ever-present nature of time, rather than its upheaval at a particular moment.59 These laterVictorian images use time as a sublime constant, as something cyclical, unending, incomprehensible, and fundamentally as something that has no interest in the struggles of humankind against its fate. Despite the palette, the iconography of the painting still rallies the same kinds of tensions as Martin’s 1834 Deluge. It does not attempt to represent the event itself; it temporally withdraws from the theme by portraying the ‘morning after the deluge’, and goes further by not including any iconography that one might expect in a deluge painting. Yet still, this is a vision of history that puts humanity at its centre, depicting the past through historical narrative – depicting the act of writing history itself. Light and Colour’s partner, Shade and Darkness: the Evening of the Deluge (figure 9) shares a number of its attributes. Again there is the great vortex of golden light, but more dynamic this time. At the centre of it this time is an Ark, so far in the distance as to be rendered barely perceptible. Animals and birds flock and swirl towards the Ark as in Genesis. Unlike its predecessors that included biblical iconography, Turner foregrounds the drama of both light and weather. The swirls of luminescence, the flourishes of black cloud, the daubs of moist earth, none of these detract from the fading though specific presence of Genesis in these deluge paintings. They have not continued within a nice comfortable historical paradigm where Genesis is gradually written out of art history, as paintings that predate Turner’s brace had already attempted to do that. What has taken place, though, is something more quietly significant. The tradition of deluge painting had stuttered to a close with Francis Danby and John Martin. Danby had placed the Bible’s Ark so deeply into the horizon that it was scarcely visible, and Martin was not particularly interested in the iconography of the Bible in any direct way. What Turner does with the tradition of the deluge, and it is what is still being done towards the end of the Victorian period, is remove the event of the flood from its own representation. After Martin and Danby’s deluges in the first half of the nineteenth century, the theme practically disappears in Western art.60 What had been a major trope and regularly employed subject dissolves in mid- and lateVictorian art, only occasionally stuttering into life in a very different form as genre painting or stories of Noah and his family. The deluge itself may

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have gone, but its meanings and the ideas of history and time with which it engaged moved into other painterly forms to find their articulation. The interpretation found in John Linnell’s Noah: the Eve of the Deluge (1848) borrows heavily from the Turnerian representations of the same decade.61 Linnell’s deluge is bathed in the same golden light and a flock of birds swirl towards the horizon. The water, though, is even calmer than Poussin’s ‘pre-sublime’ seventeenth-century attempt at depicting the flood. The theme of the deluge in Linnell, just as it is in the Turners, is temporally displaced by the fact that it depicts the ‘eve’ of the deluge, rather than the deluge itself. This is also found in other contemporary deluges. William Bell Scott’s The Eve of the Deluge of 1865, with its accompanying verse ‘they were eating and drinking’, takes as its theme the narcissism, vanity, and complacence of the damned.62 But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.63

Smirking, goading, lovemaking, languidly drinking, they wallow in the sunset as they watch Noah enter the Ark with his sons and their wives. Though it is less technically adept than the other deluge images, there is a much greater sense in Scott’s work that he is using the genre of history painting as a means of contemporary commentary. Surveying their domain, the Mesopotamian throng rest, having built an empire, to enjoy their supremacy and dominance. They have ceased work, and now expend energy on the enjoyment of their acquired riches. The theme of the complacency of the rich is a common one throughout the Old and New Testaments, and it was something that spoke also to the Victorian sensibility. It touches, in theme and meaning, on ideas and anxieties of empire. The image of the deluge about to betide the complacent, in a Victorian context, is where global inundation becomes social revolution.64 G. F. Watts also produced two thematically and temporally displaced deluge paintings in which there was no water at all. The first, Building the Ark in 1863, was a traditional family-at-work image, and the second in 1885–86, After the Deluge: the Forty-First Day, substantially distances itself from its original theme and uses no recognisable iconography at all.65 There is a Turnerian smear of land and/or water at the base of the painting. The rest is a blindingly bright sunrise that bleaches almost the entire canvas. It is a figure of triumph, but the image contains nothing to

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enjoy or celebrate the victory. It is a painting which disassociates the Victorian viewers from their past by excluding them from it. Watts’s late deluge strips the anthropocentric narrative from the story of the flood and renders it as a geological event in which there is no human involvement. As such, the image’s meaning is stripped of narrative and metaphor; it does not stand for anything other than what it is. The tension in representing the past emerges here again, insofar as it is still a painting with a religious theme and so cannot fully ignore or destroy its biblical lineage.

Time, the unpaintable? The deluge as it was worked through in the 1840s and beyond is different to its predecessors. Such a difference has been noted in previous histories of science and art.66 Landow, Burrow, and to a lesser extent Rupke each explain the images’ changing iconography by recourse to a reflective model of history. Namely, because scientific explanation had moved away from the Bible as a text that could explain the earth’s past, painterly art also effected such a move. The fact that deluge images continued to exist after the 1830s is indicative of a hermeneutical slippage. The earth’s history was not ‘explained’ by science; it was complicated by it. Science did not suppress the meanings attached to the earth’s past; instead meaning was fructified by scientific intervention. So much so that the tradition of the deluge in painting continued precisely because the arts still had something to work out ideologically. The model for thinking about art’s relation to history in this context is one in which the paintings continually draw attention to the shortcomings of geological explanation. They do not passively reflect it. Neither do they represent the ‘steps forward’ being made in geological theory; instead, they seem to want to highlight the uncertainties of thinking about the past in anthropocentric ways. At the very least, the emergence of temporally displaced deluges in the Victorian period marks an anxiety in representation. How might one reproduce the deluge? What should such an image contain? Was there a deluge to portray? All questions that artists in previous decades had not had to ask themselves. These questions compelled nineteenth-century visual artists into rethinking the contours of the past, and how they might be represented without recourse to narrative iconographies. This is the nub of the problem for the mid-nineteenth century artist: with geology effecting a conflicting model history that was from its very core structurally opposed to the narrative model that gifted the painter

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with all kinds of deployable iconographies, how could the artist represent the past without recourse to narratives that they could either draw upon or rely on the viewer being able to comprehend? In short, how can the static medium of the visual arts represent the ever-changing mutability of time? Returning to John Burrow’s essay: Burrows notes that ‘catastrophic and volcanic analogies become less noticeable’ as the nineteenth century moves on.67 He continues: the reason for this disappearance is the triumph of sedimentary gradualism or uniformitarianism as the major paradigmatic metaphor for the past in Victorian culture. Thinking about the past as one characterised by slow and consistent change presents an art form like painting with a very specific problem. Uniformitarian change, unlike catastrophic or apocalyptic, is so slow as to be rendered imperceptible to the human eye, and ‘the imperceptible is also necessarily the unpaintable’.68 What I am suggesting, however, is that in early nineteenth-century painting the iconographies of the past are easily deployable because they draw upon recognisable narrative tropes. Once these iconographies become fantastical (through scientific explanation or biblical criticism, say), the tropes cannot be deployed as their meaning has been changed by their cultural context. Under uniformitarianism, the Ark, for example, no longer represents the ancient history of the earth, but a chapter from the Bible. Under uniformitarianism there is no recognisable iconography of the past to draw upon. Hence Burrow’s assertion that the past and the passage of time consequently become ‘unpaintable’. Victorian visual artists (in both painting and photography) took up precisely this challenge of finding a new optical vocabulary for representing history without recourse to narrative tropes or iconographies. They would go on to prove themselves highly articulate in the new visual language of the past. The historical is a persistent theme in nineteenth-century art, and the rise of geology did not change this fact. Each of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood doggedly returned to historical themes.69 An ideal case is that of John Everett Millais’s The Return of the Dove to the Ark (1851).70 Depicting two of Noah’s daughters-in-law receiving the dove back to the Ark, the image is stark in its representation with only two figures, a bare interior, the dove, and the olive branch. Except for what is dictated by the painting’s theme, the book of Genesis is muted in this painting (the dove in Genesis returning only to Noah). Unlike his Romantic forebears, who attempted to depict the whole inundation of nature, Millais shows himself to be interested in the representation of nature only as synecdoche, by obliquely representing the Genesis story.

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History painting, in all its forms, is one of the principal modes of pictorial representation in the Victorian period. The tradition of using narrative tropes, as in deluge paintings, continues throughout the period. But history painting and genre were combined in Victorian painting to create a form of art that conveyed the present, as well as the presence of the past. The most famous painting of the period that deals with the difficult subject of the representation of time is William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay (1860, figure 10), but before going on to consider its particularity in the contributions that it makes to this debate, I first want to look at some of Dyce’s other works from the same year that try to work through the ideas of historical sublimity and temporality in less comprehensive ways.71 Marcia Pointon has already drawn the comparison between Pegwell Bay and Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting (1860).72 Like Pegwell Bay, there is an otherworldly quality to the painting and there is an innate ambiguity to its intention. There is no iconographic or narratological explanation for the existence of these two women knitting in the midst of a harsh, craggy, cold, and exposed landscape. It is neither cynical nor emotive: it is utterly unsentimental. It does not provide the comforts of a warm palette and a cosseted existence. Instead, the painting seems to be an exercise in the exploration of temporal perspectives. The two women’s ages differ by five or six decades. One, young, is standing straight-backed, head bent in concentration on her work; the other sits slightly hunched, her feet not reaching the ground, creating the uncanny effect of infantilising her pose and extreme age. Unlike the younger woman, she does not concentrate on her work, but gazes into the distance over our shoulders. The two women’s similarity of dress suggests that this might be a study of the ageing process itself, where the two figures are one and the same (like the possible dual representation of differing selves in Augustus Egg’s 1862 The Travelling Companions).73 Pointon remarks that there is ‘no concession to nostalgia, memory, or affection, that is to those elements that man uses as a weapon against time’ in order to desublimate it.74 The women’s occupation of knitting itself is also related to time’s sequentiality, insofar as it does not present a paradigm of change in the way that uniformitarianism might do. Instead, it represents a form of chaos that becomes ordered and permanent with the passing of time, a metaphor for the Whig version of history that sees all as process towards an idealised present. Like Pegwell Bay, temporality is played out in other ways in the painting in which the figures function only as a place marker. The ominous presence of the crescent moon in the sky is a reminder of the cyclicity of the universal that lies beyond human control and under-

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standing. And, like Dyce’s other paintings from 1860, it is also a work which diminishes the centrality of the human figure by the forensic depiction of landscape. Dyce’s The Man of Sorrows (also exhibited in 1860) is a characteristically challenging response to a longstanding tradition in religious painting.75 Rather than portraying Christ exhibiting his wounds, he depicts a lonely and exhausted figure, seated in a barren landscape. Situated at the far left of the canvas, Christ is almost peripheral to the image which, like Dyce’s other works from this period, prioritises the representation of landscape over the human figure and narrative. The representational eccentricity of subordinating Christ into the surrounding landscape was also to be exercised in Dyce’s other religious work at this stage of his career. The Good Shepherd, exhibited at the RA in 1859, depicts Christ tending sheep. In one hand a lamb is cupped, with a crook in the other as he guides his sheep through a narrow gap in a fence; the fence is strewn with vigorous ivy and is supported by gnarled oak trees just coming into leaf.76 The aperture leads through to a field in which there is also some quite deliberate anachronism in the use of contemporary farm buildings and a feeding trough. In the following year, Christ and the Woman of Samaria (1860) employed the same spatial anachronism.77 Christ sits contemplatively by a ground well, again surrounded by the trappings of the Scottish landscape that Dyce had so enjoyed. There are high-built drystone walls and steps that both protect and domesticate the immediate geological landscape that Dyce yet again lovingly recreates. The only suggestion that this is not a British scene derives from the two figures, and two succulents painted into the thick green grass. There are ways of reading these geographical anachronisms. Michaela Giebelhausen’s stimulating examination of ‘Holman Hunt, William Dyce and the Image of Christ’ takes three examples of cultural and aesthetic work from 1860 (Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, Dyce’s The Man of Sorrows, and the infamous Essays and Reviews) and uses their arguments and iconographies to read one another.78 Giebelhausen notes that although Hunt’s pictorial approach to the representation of Christ seems to suggest that of the ethnographer, anthropologist, and historian, the busy iconography of the painting in fact conflates the Old and New Testaments. In his refusal to employ such traditional iconographies, William Dyce, she argues, achieves an amaranthine, divine, and bravely supernatural depiction of Christ as a temporally and geographically omnipresent God. While Dyce himself would have approved of such a reading, The Man of Sorrows seems to slip away from such closure, its nature not really containable within Giebelhausen’s context.

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The man of sorrows is a theme frequently exercised in Western art, and medieval art in particular.79 Portraying the Christ of the Passion and his suffering for humankind, the men of sorrows are typically images in which the figure of Christ exhibits wounded hands, feet, and midriff; a crown of thorns blots his face with blood. Dyce’s rendering of this is markedly different: the only iconography that his man of sorrows shares with its predecessors is the figure of the sorrowful Christ himself. The painting’s most striking aspect, as in Dyce’s other work at this time, is not what peoples the painting, but the depiction of landscape. Its character is such that the painting seems barely able to contain its theme. The figure of Christ is thrust off to the extreme side; the range of rock and earth dwarfs his perspective in the image. His hunched and subdued pose abstractly suggests the figure of Christ (as synecdoche for Christianity) is one whose historical and cultural significance is diminishing under the influence of scientific studies of nature and the earth. If there is a dichotomy between science and religion in this image, then science seems to be prevailing. The landscape, and its geological features, as a metonym for scientific endeavour, is the focus of this image. The Man of Sorrows does not, for me, affirm the temporal and geographical omnipresence of Christ. As well as marking a battle for explicative supremacy, Dyce’s man of sorrows mourns the loss of faith in a world devoted to the study of the material rather than the ideal. Christ bears no wounds or crown of thorns here; instead it is the landscape and its revelations concerning the history of the earth that affect Christ’s sorrow. The landscape is Christ’s wound. The ambiguity of Man of Sorrows is itself testament to the conflicts not only of religious belief in the Victorian period, but of ideas about the nature of the past and who may claim ownership of it. Dyce’s most famous work, of the same year, would also mobilise this ambiguity, but would strengthen it to include ideas of futurity, too. Pegwell Bay (figure 10) was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860 alongside St John Leading Home his Adopted Mother and Man of Sorrows to mixed, and often confused, reviews.80 The critic and art historian Frederick Stephens commented that: Mr Dyce’s ‘View of Pegwell Bay,’ notwithstanding its extreme delicacy and careful treatment, from the want of due gradations of tone and breadth of effect, pleases us less [than either St John Leading Home his Adopted Mother or Man of Sorrows]. Bits of nature, seen especially in the foreground rocks, glittering pools of water, and shining, saturated sand, are really delicious.81

In a piece on ‘The Royal Academy and Other Exhibitions’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, J. B. Atkinson called Pegwell Bay ‘a marvel of its kind’

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and ‘a beauteous work, which almost for the first time reconciles an infinite detail with a broad, solemn, and poetic general effect.’82 In Dyce’s canon, there is nothing else like it. He was a deeply religious man. He had hopes of establishing a Christian school of art and was referred to by Lawrence MacDonald as ‘narrow, High Church Nazarene’.83 His oeuvre consists mostly of traditional religious works, which is what makes Pegwell Bay so unusual. It is a work which juxtaposes four kinds of time, the first being that of an afternoon spent desultorily collecting shells and fossils on a beach that contrasts with the wider notion of a human lifetime. The tiny figures are depicted in the shadows of Huttonian, Bucklandian, and Lyellian deep time, emphasised by the caves that have been gradually dug into the cliffs by the action of the sea. But even this sense of time cowers in the magnitude of astronomical time, which Dyce represents with his skilful use of the particular day and date. The painting’s full title is Pegwell Bay – a Recollection of October 5th, 1858. Marcia Pointon’s 1978 article on ‘The Representation of Time in Painting’ provides an intellectually rigorous introduction to the painting’s themes by drawing attention to the historical specificity of the painting’s date.84 The reason that Dyce uses this particular day, she explains, can be seen in the sky above the heads of the ignorant fossil collectors: a comet, often lost in reproduction but very clear in the original. On 2 October 1858, the Illustrated London News printed an account of the progress of Donati’s comet. As a short sketch of the history of the present remarkable comet, we may state that it was discovered by M Donati, the astronomer, at Florence, on June 2 of the present year when it was of extraordinary faintness . . . the comet is now passing directly to the star Arcturus, and, as the comet and this star are the brightest objects in the western heavens during the evenings, its course on Oct. 5th may be easily traced. At 6pm of Oct. 5 . . . we hope our readers may have a clear sky to witness the conjunction of two such bright objects.

The date selected by Dyce is the one on which the comet was at its brightest. And to give some further sense of how this is a painting which engages with the historical sublime, Donati’s comet last visited Earth a couple of centuries before Christ was born and is not due to visit again until the year 3811.85 The painting’s origins lie in two family holidays that Dyce took in Ramsgate in 1857 and, probably, 1858. The kernel of the idea for Pegwell Bay is first worked up in a watercolour sketch painted in 1857.86 It is less stylised than the later version, and, though similar in perspective, scale,

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and point of view, the contrasts between the two are productive in thinking about the representation of time. The emotional power of the sketch derives from the lack of a human story in the painting. The figures’ significance is marginalised to that of landscape. The faces of the two cliffs are significantly different: the one in the painting is higher and with shallower indentations and fewer caves giving a more ominous and monolithic appearance, also creating a more traditionally sublime perspective to dwarf the painting’s characters. In a piece that sought to change thinking about Dyce’s lack of reliance on photography, Clare Willsdon has asserted that Pegwell Bay is notable for its reliance on the scrupulous ‘observation of geographical and geological phenomena.’87 I think, however, that the hyperrealism of Dyce’s depiction of landscape, and that we know the extent to which he changed the face and size of it for aesthetic reasons, is one of the central issues of the painting. The landscape cannot be ‘real’ or ‘photographic’; its presence and perspective to the observer have to have a quality of life and character that matches those of the figures in the landscape. In fact, the landscape of Pegwell Bay is much more peopled than critics have tended to acknowledge; there are fourteen in all. The figures are separate and exposed, vulnerable to the carefree malevolence of time and nature. So vulnerable that the youngest element in the painting (the child on the left – presumably Dyce’s son) is threatened by the menacing presence of the oldest – the comet’s trajectory points directly at him.88 No one on the beach can protect him, or indeed cares to. In each and every case, human contact is unreciprocated though the figures are oddly connected by their presence in this particular landscape. Even where one figure might be said to be glancing at another, there is no reciprocation; glances are not returned, but they pursue a shared interest in fossil collecting. It is history and time that connects these people. On the far right, the figure that contemplates the comet in the sky, thought to be Dyce himself, merges almost into the rock face, his colour and texture being almost identical. Dyce’s function in the painting is one of a humanist who seeks to connect the polarised threads of time, history, and humanity into a single moment, but with his back turned upon the viewer, like the other figures that people the landscape, he fails to engage the emotions in not regarding another human face either within or outside the image. Another failed connection is effected via the figure in the central middle distance. He seems to look out of the canvas towards us, but he is ominously faceless. The layers of differentiation between the two images increase when we consider the significance of the temporal quality of the latter painting; it

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is a work of memory entitled Pegwell Bay – a Recollection of October 5th 1858. Unlike much mid-Victorian painting, the placement of the figures has nothing to do with a complex narrative. Instead, their situation seems random, strewn. They are recollected and represented in order that the intellectual gravity of the painting may be conveyed over and above the more facile and straightforward implications of Pegwell Bay as a genre picture of Dyce and his family. The figure placement in the painting is a challenge to conservative Victorian aesthetics because Dyce, his family, and the beach workers collectively seek to remove the possibilities of narrative from the image by not taking part in a traditional tableau. They all function to highlight the painting’s real goal of representing the past without recourse to narrative-based iconography. Astronomical time (in the guise of Donati’s comet), geological time (depicted by the exposed strata of the cliffs), the lifetime of a species (now fossilised), and human lifetime in its various cyclical divisions are all put together in this painting, but they do not converse. They formally exist as if they are superimposed upon one another like a Henry Peach Robinson combination photograph. The figure of Dyce is the gossamer thread that draws together the three central motifs of the painting. His body belongs to the cliff face, and his mind is engaged by the heavens. What is also implicit, though, is the painting’s apparent assertion that each form of time that is represented on this canvas is barely connected with the others. Geology cares nothing for the fate of Man as the house teeters upon the shifting soil of the cliffs. When I went to the bay I was surprised to find the cliffs almost crumble at a touch. The heavens, represented by the speeding comet, care nothing for the fate of the Earth, and which seems worse for Dyce, the shell collectors care for neither, and engage in the ironic pastime of fossil and algae collecting so encouraged by the likes of G. H. Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies (1858), Charles Kingsley’s Glaucus (1855), and Philip Henry Gosse’s Tenby: a Sea-side Holiday of 1856.89 The painting seems to denigrate the utilitarian drive behind such books, which all in their way suggested that the seaside holiday might be put to better use. In this way, the painting also functions as a depiction of a superior kind of knowledge, one in which we as viewers are invited to reflect upon the desultory and pointless nature of leisure and to consider our significance in temporal and spatial perspective. Indeed, the painting only really works because these are precisely the things that Dyce’s family miss, even though they are engaged with collecting evidence of deep time from the sands. Given the trajectory of Dyce’s career, which consisted of exercising his art mainly upon religious and classical subjects, Pegwell Bay is a very

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unusual painting for its nihilism. The painting insists that little is connected; its subjects miss the sublime significance of fossil collecting. Space, time, and the human all exist on separate planes, and that none can comprehend the others functions as a religious rallying call that the iconography of the painting never articulates because there is no hope in this painting. Perhaps the most important aspect of these failures to connect is the fact that the comet is a metonym for heaven, and its fleeting appearance in earthly skies is not a heavenly visitation for humankind, but a confirmation of man’s unimportance and disconnectedness from the stars. The sun is setting on humankind. The palette of the painting is reducing everything into a soluble oneness of unidentifiability. The patterns and colours of the shawls and scarves of Dyce’s family are a vain attempt to introduce life and formal variety into the painting. It is an antideluge; the waters of Genesis have subsided then receded, leaving behind a desolate landscape peopled by those who try aimlessly to occupy their time rather than face infinity and oblivion. Pegwell Bay functions as a profoundly articulate exploration of the historical sublime in the mid-nineteenth century, not for what it includes, as such, but for what it is able to suggest in its absences. The iconographies of time and space employ Kant’s mathematical sublime, as the magnitude of each is touched upon in the painting. Time and space are implied as possessing a sense of completeness, but they are ideas that are knowably inaccessible to the viewer. Time and space’s signifiers are present in person, cliff, rock, sand, and comet, but the signifieds are made strange to us by their proximity to one another. Likewise, Kant suggested that the dynamical sublime is brought about by the viewer perceiving terror from a place of safety; this model, though, is not appropriate to the Victorian viewers of Pegwell Bay precisely because the painting suggests that there is no place of safety from which to consider the ideas that it mobilises. The hopelessness depicted in the painting is the same as that experienced by the viewer. We are the subjects of this painting, not Dyce’s family. The sublimity of Pegwell Bay derives, effectively, from the ways in which Dyce is able not only to exploit the mappable space that exists outside the canvas but, more significantly, to paint John Burrow’s ‘unpaintable’ aspects of the temporal sublime. He achieves this by juxtaposing the enormous and overwhelming presence of time past, present, and future, from which there is no escape for the Victorians, or for any post-Lyellian viewer, including us. It is the modern human condition, atomised, disaffected, nihilistic, overwhelmed by the powers of history and time that it cannot bear to face.

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While Dyce is rightly credited with having found a visual vocabulary for representing time in a way that his contemporaries were not able to do, there was another emergent art form in the period which, though known for capturing the stillness of its subject, proved adept at representing the passage of time. Dyce was indebted to photography, which he used in the earlier stages of the painting process. Photography, especially in these relatively early days, was an elegiac form. Much of the work of, for example, Julia Margaret Cameron, Henry Peach Robinson, and Charles Dodgson is characterised by the static pose or the still life.90 One artist, though, used the form quite deliberately to challenge its possibilities of representation. Roger Fenton’s meteoric rise in popularity in the period is remarkable. He began his professional life as a lawyer, but an inheritance that made him independently wealthy allowed him to pursue a career as an artist. Beyond exhibiting at The Royal Academy between 1848 and 1851, little is known of his achievements. It was also at this time that Fenton and the public at large were developing their interest in photography. The form received its first exhibition in 1852 at the Society of Arts; it was organised by the Photographic Society of London, of which Fenton was the honorary secretary. In 1854, at the Photographic Society’s first exhibition, he was responsible for taking Queen Victoria and Prince Albert round the gallery. His sudden fame in photographic circles was not down to his early adoption of the technology; the wide range of theme in his work as well as the unusually high quality of its execution is a more plausible explanation of his longevity. He became the first war photographer when in 1854 he travelled to the Crimea. Like some of his contemporaries (Cameron, Dodgson, and others) he enjoyed the façade and simulated exoticism of the studio photograph, mocking up the sensuality of ‘oriental’ life. He indulged in typically Victorian still lives which portrayed flowers in full bloom and ripe fruit stacked in heaps suggesting abundance and indulgence. He is, however, most famous for his landscapes and topographical studies, which are remarkable for the ways that they solved the problem that Ruskin considered in Modern Painters: that trying to represent water ‘is like trying to paint a soul’.91 The problem of portraying water is one that is given many pages in Modern Painters; despite the problems of reflectiveness and colour saturation, it is water’s motion that presents the artist with the difficulties of an abundance of choice (some sense of which is conveyed in the sheer variety of representation in the deluge images already discussed). Since photography has matured, it is now possible to capture a gushing torrent’s energy in a hundred-thousandth of a second, where every

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chaotic spatter and drop of spray is caught mid-motion. But which captures water’s essence of motion? When it is rendered in a camera exposure of one millionth, a hundredth, or a tenth of a second? What about ten seconds, or a minute? Each exposure produces quite different results. And because the human eye does not work in the same way as a camera’s shutter and aperture, no depiction of water’s movement in photography is one that we recognise from sight; instead, we recognise its characteristics, that it is behaviour of water that is being represented rather than its true essence. What early photography was adept at doing, it seems, was capturing not the splashes and dashes of water mid-torrent, but its long slow work of movement through a valley or over a weir. In 1857, Fenton travelled around England and Wales, photographing a number of landscapes for an exhibition at the London Photographic Society the following year. In almost all cases, Fenton proved himself fascinated by how the camera captured the movement and natures of water. He never photographed water in isolation, however; he was uninterested in seascapes, and never recorded a featureless river or pond. Always, water was captured with the additional context of topographical features to punctuate the arrangement in the frame. The most common subject that Fenton returned to repeatedly was how water behaved and moved over, around, and through rocks (much of the very fine detail of Fenton’s photography is sadly lost in reproduction). Pont-y-Garth, near Capel Curig (in Snowdonia, 1857) shows movement under, too (figure 11).92 A manmade bridge of wood and stone over the Pont-y-Garth River straddles the water’s shallow point which is scattered with rocks. The water runs away from the lens. The formal contrast between the water and rock is what is central to this image (and many others of Fenton’s). The frame is deliberately set to capture the dissimilarity of time and texture. Because of the time elapsed during exposure, the water appears silky soft; even its foam as it falls over the stones is a ghostly white that looks more like gas than liquid. The overall appearance is characterised by its stillness rather than its motion. The difference in texture that Fenton reveals in the process captures an aspect of water’s nature that is not perceivable by the eye. It is a vision of water, consequently, that is not found on painters’ canvasses; this young technology has brought with it a new form of representation. Water is not a compound that we commonly associate with order, form, and grace. And it is only the passing of time that allows water’s nature to pass through the camera’s aperture. In short, this is an image that draws attention to the fact that a segment of time has been caught on the collodion-coated plate. In the same series, Falls of the Llugwy, at Pont-y-Pair (1857) captures a

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similar arrangement to much greater effect (figure 12).93 Here, time past is felt much more keenly. There is the same contrast between the atomic sleekness of the water and the aged, flint-sharp cragginess of the rock. But whereas the Pont-y-Garth foregrounded the manmade structure of the bridge, here, taking centre point in the photograph, is an immovably large boulder that has found its way into the middle of the stream. There is hectic activity all around it; its absolute stillness invites the question of how something so firmly anchored and of such bulk might have got there. Like the house teetering on top of the cliff in Pegwell Bay, the farmhouse in the upper left suggests a kind of anthropocentric stability that the ominous presence of the rock unthreads, as there is the suggestion of some geological catastrophe in the distant past which has placed the boulder there, but it is an event of which humankind has no knowledge. The speed of the water also suggests a time in the future when it will erode its way through the boulder until there is nothing left of it at all. The photograph captures the swiftness of water to find its way around any obstacle, while also discovering a visual vocabulary for capturing the relative stillness (in anthropocentric terms) of uniformitarian geological time. Taken the following year, on a tour of the Lake District, similar ideas find their way into Aira Force at Ullswater (1858, figure 13).94 Like Falls of the Llugwy, at Pont-y-Pair, it is an image that attempts to capture water’s movement. Aira Force, however, also captures its power, strength, ferocity, even its noise. In what is often a dry and elegiac form, this picture is wet and loud. Taken using the same collodion process (which means an exposure of anything up to a few minutes), Fenton again captures the flint-hard blackness of the rock. The impression it conveys is one of weight, immovability, and rigidity. The swift downwards motion of the water is clear, but what the contrast between the water and the rock shows us is the sheer depth to which the rock has been cut by the water by a steady act of erosion. So deep has the soft water cut into the hard rock that some of the water is hidden from view, invoking a process that would take thousands of years. It is a photograph about contrasts in mass, weight, speed, colour, and movement; but it is also an image about time. The profundity of Fenton’s achievement here, as in his other water photography, is that he captures time ‘the unpaintable’ by finding a visual vocabulary to represent gradual change and, consequently, to represent natural history without recourse to narrative iconography. These images, as well as many of William Dyce’s better-known works, fit into a long tradition of history painting. Deluge paintings had repeatedly articulated the biblical

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catastrophist’s view of history, endowing it with a kind of importance through its repeated representation. When the catastrophist’s model of history was brought under serious examination, deluge iconography tried to move towards more scientific ideas, but was unable to plainly represent them. The result was a deluge iconography that was confused, and instead became adept at representing the dichotomous tension between biblical and natural history. Images that do not articulate this tension between biblical and natural history are the Victorian versions or reworkings of the tradition of the deluge. They are to be found in the work of Dyce and Fenton (among many, many others) insofar as they explored a way to represent the distant past, the present, and the distant future.95 Their work mobilises the same sorts of ideas that deluge paintings had for the pre-Victorians – but in a more complex context. They necessarily approached their subject matter in a more abstract manner than their pluvial predecessors. Earlier deluge paintings did not depict the passing of time, they contained only the camera-flash moment; Fenton and Dyce managed to convey the past and the future as well as the momentary present and as such are the real inheritors of the philosophical considerations of the deluge. These images are a new kind of representation; they blend together the genre mode of representation, the variety of landscape, and the suggestiveness of history painting in such a way that only the Victorians were able to do. While the optical vocabulary that Dyce, Fenton, and others would survey was an astonishingly creative invention, these images did also coexist with the mid- to late-Victorian deluges. New images, ideas, and iconographies troubled the deluge, but they did not destroy it. Poussin, Martin, and Danby did not convey the sublime power that they once had, but they were still of interest to the Victorians. Indeed, Gustave Doré’s illustrated English Bible was one of the greatest successes of his career, with the deluge engravings being amongst his most reprinted works.96 The Gilgamesh controversy, as I have already argued, suggests that we cannot look at Victorian visions of the past and see in them the acceptance of sedimentary gradualism as the paradigmatic metaphor for understanding history. What happened to the deluge tells us not that science won the debate, just that the sublime had found new ways of conveying itself to a Victorian audience, rather than a Romantic one. Romanticism and the sublime are synecdoches for one another, but what was the Victorian sublime? Both romanticism and the sublime are concerned with breeds of perspective, but one is most commonly spatial, the other temporal. Victorian art, it seems, was no stranger to sublimity; in the work of

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Dyce and Fenton, it is mobilised in new ways. The attempt to use spatial perspective in order to disturb the viewer’s perceptual ability was for the Victorians an overused and old trick; the novelty of the Victorian sublime was to use the static image to represent unimaginable deserts of time past, present, and future.

Notes 1 John Ruskin, Modern Painters Volume One (1843), in Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3, p. 494. 2 For an overview of the rise of historicity in this period see Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), pp. 3–29. 3 In the context of these paintings, I use the terms ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’ rather loosely. They are not meant to designate specific periods of history, but are more connected instead with how the ideas or aesthetic priorities of each culture are represented in the paintings themselves. For example, Francis Danby’s The Deluge, though exhibited in 1840, would nonetheless constitute ‘Romantic’ art. 4 Freeman, Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World; Cohn, Noah’s Flood. Cohn’s study is remarkable both for its depth and for its concision. While I am indebted to his work in this book, work that demonstrates an ability to draw together materials from various cultural, religious, and historical traditions, I am not tracing the narrative of the cultural life of the Flood in Western culture. My work here differs in that I am trying to draw attention to the ruptures not only in the cultural life of the Flood, but in its seemingly more coherent representations in early nineteenth-century culture. See also Landow, Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present. 5 Burrow, ‘Images of Time,’ p. 215. 6 Burrow, ‘Images of Time,’ p. 218. 7 There is a third term: ‘cataclysm’. It comes from cataclysmos, the word used in the Septuagint Bible (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) to translate the original Hebrew for ‘flood’ and used by New Testament writers (who wrote in Greek) for floods. It is current in English from around the seventeenth century, but its use does not specifically refer to an inundation of water in the same way that ‘flood’ or ‘deluge’ may do. For this reason, perhaps, there is no subgenre of ‘cataclysm’ painting in Romantic culture. 8 OED, ‘flood,’ online edn, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/71808 (accessed 13 February 2013) 9 OED, ‘deluge,’ online edn, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/49540 (accessed 13 February 2013) 10 Gawain Poet, Cleanness, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, eds A. C. Cawley and J. J. Anderson (Rutland: J. M. Dent, 1991), pp. 49–130. 11 Gawain Poet, Cleanness, lines 323–4. 12 ‘When the flood came and swelled at their feet, then each man saw that he would sink; friends came together and embraced, to meet their doleful destiny and die as one.’ Gawain Poet, Cleanness, lines 397–400. 13 R. M. Lumiansky, David Mills, et al., The Chester Mystery Cycle, eds R. M. Lumiansky

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Narrative and the historical sublime and David Mills (London, 1974); Maurice Hussey, The Chester Mystery Plays (London: Heinemann, 1957). Steno, The Prodromus; Nicolas Poussin, Winter, or the Deluge, Louvre, Paris. Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, ed. John Knowles, 3 vols (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1831), vol. 1, p. 272. Mary Shelley’s Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947), see entry for 5 August 1814, p.5. Charles Robert Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable: Composed Chiefly of His Letters (London: Phaidon Press, 1951), p. 316. This is from one of six lectures that Constable gave at the Hampstead Assembly Rooms in June 1833 (Lecture III, 9 June 1833). Jan Van Scorel, The Flood, Prado, Madrid; Roelandt Savery, Noah’s Ark, National Museum, Warsaw; Jan Griffier, Noah’s Ark, Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol. See my ‘Introduction’. Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth, 7th ed. For a reading of the ruptures of continuity in this frontispiece, see the introduction to Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. Robert P. Carroll and Stephen Prickett, eds, The Bible: Authorised King James Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Genesis 7:4. Benjamin West, The Deluge, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (The painting ought really to be entitled ‘the assuaging of the waters’.) While Michelangelo was one of the first painters to move away from the medieval representation of the Ark and its inhabitants, looking instead at the plight of the last family and the more human elements of the story (as part of his fresco for the Sistine Chapel), Poussin was the first to make this story the narrative mainstay of his image by resituating the topos of the deluge into a story of human struggle against the elements. He was also the first to introduce the figure of evil in the guise of the serpent. There are other slippages between Genesis and the image. The raven and the dove do not venture out of the Ark together, and there is no land visible from the Ark when the dove first returns with the olive branch. On the status of the nude in art see Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art, 1956 (London: Penguin, 1985). And its correctives, John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC/Penguin, 1972); Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992). A good deal of work has been done on the representation of the dead and the dying in nineteenth-century culture. See Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: the Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993); Brian Maidment, Reading Popular Prints, 1790–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Vybarr Cregan-Reid, Drowning and the Life of Water in Nineteenth-Century Culture, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Sussex, 2003; Ron M. Brown, The Art of Suicide (London: Reaktion, 2001). Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 62–3. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 106. Even Lyell, in the Principles, ascribed an apparent mark of gender to the face of the earth. ‘But in whatever direction we pursue our researches, whether in time or space, we discover everywhere the clear proofs of a Creative Intelligence, and of His

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foresight, wisdom, and power.’ Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1st ed., vol. 3, p. 384. 30 Nancy L. Pressly, Revealed Religion: Benjamin West’s Commissions for Windsor Castle and Fonthill Abbey (San Antonio, Texas: San Antonio Museum of Art, 1983), p. 30. 31 See Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). See also Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Fiona J. Stafford, The Last of the Race: the Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 32 Pressly, Revealed Religion, p. 36, note 8. 33 De Loutherbourg was no stranger to creating emotional effect. The majority of his career was spent as a name renowned throughout Europe, for his skills as a scene painter, lighting technician, and special effects expert in the theatre. Pressly, Revealed Religion, p. 36, note 8. 34 Ruskin, Modern Painters Volume One, in Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3, pp. 518–9. It is of little surprise to find Ruskin championing the work of Turner; here though, he is also out of step with so many of his predecessors in his view of Poussin’s Winter as a banal execution of a sublime theme. What had been the epitome of sublimity in painting was already by 1843 hopelessly dated. 35 See John Gage, J.M.W. Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 36 Francis Danby, The Deluge, Tate Britain, London. 37 Frazer’s Magazine, 1840, p. 420, quoted in Francis Greenacre, Francis Danby, 1793– 1861 (London: Tate Gallery, 1988), p. 114. 38 This is the painting for which John Martin was accused of plagiarism in his original The Deluge (the first work that was to paint Genesis out of deluge representation). Francis Danby, An Attempt to Illustrate the Opening of the Sixth Seal, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. 39 John Martin, The Deluge, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. 40 Ruskin, Modern Painters Volume One, in Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3, pp. 494–5. 41 See Ruskin, Modern Painters Volume One, in Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3, pp. 499–508. 42 Ruskin, Modern Painters Volume One, in Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3, p. 553. 43 Ruskin, Modern Painters Volume One, in Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3, p. 565. 44 John Wilson, ‘Noctes Ambrosianae,’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine XXV (March 1829), p. 381. 45 See Rupke, The Great Chain of History, pp. 77–8. 46 Martin J. S. Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (University of Chicago Press, 1992), see pp. 21–4. See also O’Connor, The Earth on Show, pp. 289–92. 47 William Feaver, The Art of John Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 94. 48 George Gordon Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, eds Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), vol. 6, lines 850–910. 49 Feaver, The Art of John Martin, p. 94; Rupke, The Great Chain of History, pp. 77–8. 50 Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth. See also Cohn, Noah’s Flood, pp. 62–9. 51 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English, 2 vols (New York, 1833), vol. 2, pp. 136–7.

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52 Feaver, The Art of John Martin, p. 94. 53 Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth. 54 J. M. W. Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, Tate Britain, London; J. M. W. Turner, Shade and Darkness: the Evening of the Deluge, Tate Britain, London. 55 This would change during Ruskin’s career, as he sometimes counted an earlier period of ‘development’ making the total five. See Notes on the Turner Collection at Marlborough House (1856) in Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 13, pp. 93–181. 56 Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 13, p. 99. 57 Carroll and Prickett, eds, The Bible, Numbers 21:9. 58 Carroll and Prickett, eds, The Bible, Numbers 21:10. Turner’s occasional flourishes give the impression of a smiling face amongst the mass of people, suggesting they are a ‘Numbers’ crowd rather than a ‘Genesis’ one. 59 William Dyce, Pegwell Bay – a Recollection of October 5th, 1858, Tate Britain, London; G. F. Watts, After the Deluge: the Forty-First Day, Watts Gallery, Guildford, Surrey. 60 As I will go on to demonstrate with other artists, even the paintings and engravings by figures like Charles Gleyre and François Pannemaker in France, who produce deluges in the 1850s and 60s, actually depict the assuaging of the waters, or are Bible illustrations rather than exhibited paintings. 61 John Linnell, Noah: the Eve of the Deluge, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. Norman Cohn’s analysis dates this painting as 1880, but it was actually exhibited much earlier in 1848. 62 William Bell Scott, The Eve of the Deluge, Fine Art Society, London. 63 Carroll and Prickett, eds, The Bible, Matthew 24:37–9. 64 For contemporary ideas about the relation between inundation and revolution, see Rebecca Stott, ‘Thomas Carlyle and the Crowd Revolution, Geology and the Convulsive “Nature” of Time,’ Journal of Victorian Culture 4.1 (1999). Ruskin’s politically charged The Stones of Venice also draws attention to such an anxiety about empire. It begins with a warning that signifies degenerative fear. ‘Since the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through the prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.’ John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Volume One, in Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 9, p. 17. 65 G. F. Watts, Building the Ark, Manchester City Art Galleries, Manchester. There is also Chaos (1875–82), but this is a sublime evolutionary painting, rather than a deluge. G. F. Watts, Chaos, Tate Britain, London. 66 I am thinking here of George P. Landow’s Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present and John Burrow’s ‘Images of Time’ that I discuss below. 67 Burrow, ‘Images of Time,’ p. 215. 68 Burrow, ‘Images of Time,’ p. 218. 69 Because historical themes in (particularly mid-) Victorian painting are practically omnipresent, there are too many to list. These definitions and examples are meant to be neither exhaustive nor all-inclusive; they are only to convey a sense in which historicity was central to Victorian painting. Some examples follow. The biblicalhistorical: William Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham. See also Michaela Giebelhausen, ‘Holman Hunt, William Dyce and the Image of Christ,’ The Victorian

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Supernatural, eds Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 173–94. The classical-historical in Joseph Noel Paton, Hesperus, Glasgow Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow. The literary historical in John Everett Millais, Isabella, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. The literal historical in Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton, Tate Britain, London. See also T. J. Barringer, The Pre-Raphaelites: Reading the Image (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998). In addition to these there are those that were influenced by them in the latter half of the nineteenth century, like William Dyce, Lawrence AlmaTadema, Edward Coley Burne-Jones, and Albert Moore; see Elizabeth Prettejohn, ed., After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). For an overview of the rise of historicity in this period see Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History, pp. 3–29. John Everett Millais, The Return of the Dove to the Ark, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Dyce, Pegwell Bay – a Recollection of October 5th, 1858. Pointon, William Dyce, p. 174. William Dyce, Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting, Tate Britain, London. Augustus Egg, The Travelling Companions, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham. Pointon, William Dyce, p. 174. William Dyce, The Man of Sorrows, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. Pointon, William Dyce, p. 161; William Dyce, The Good Shepherd, Manchester City Galleries, Manchester. Pointon, William Dyce, p. 161; William Dyce, Christ and the Woman of Samaria, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham. In Bown, Burdett, et al., eds, The Victorian Supernatural. Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple. Temple, Williams, et al., Essays and Reviews. It is a theme derived from a verse in Isaiah: ‘He is despised and rejected by men, A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.’ Carroll and Prickett, eds, The Bible, Isaiah 53.3. William Dyce, St John Leading Home His Adopted Mother, Tate Britain, London. F. G. Stephens, ‘The Royal Academy,’ 1860, Victorian Painting Essays and Reviews. Volume Two, 1849–1860, ed. John Charles Olmsted (New York: Garland, 1983), p. 734. J. B. Atkinson, ‘The Royal Academy and Other Exhibitions,’ 1867, Victorian Painting Essays and Reviews. Volume Two, 1849–1860, ed. John Charles Olmsted (New York: Garland, 1983), p. 749. Pointon, William Dyce, pp. 48–9. Pointon, ‘The Representation of Time in Painting.’ This is Gould’s estimation; see Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: the Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 45. William Dyce, Study for ‘Pegwell Bay – a Recollection of October 5th 1858’, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, Aberdeen. Clare Willsdon, ‘Dyce “in Camera”: New Evidence of His Working Methods,’ Burlington Magazine 132.1052 (1990), p. 763. Other images of the comet’s last visit in various periodicals suggest that the trajectory that Dyce depicts is correct. George Henry Lewes, Sea-Side Studies at Ilfracombe, Tenby, the Scilly Isles, and Jersey (Edinburgh, 1858); Charles Kingsley, Glaucus; or, the Wonders of the Shore (Cambridge, 1855); Philip Henry Gosse, Tenby, a Sea-Side Holiday (London, 1856). See Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: Enigma of Visibility in

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Narrative and the historical sublime Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus: Women, Children, and Nineteenth-Century Photography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Daniel Akiva Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995). Ruskin, Modern Painters Volume One, in Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3, p. 495. Roger Fenton, Pont-y-Garth, near Capel Curig, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Roger Fenton, Falls of the Llugwy, at Pont-y-Pair, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Roger Fenton, Aira Force at Ullswater, RPS, National Media Museum, SSPL, Bath. There are many other artists that could have been chosen to make this point; Dyce and Fenton are the most explicit surveyors of deep time in the visual arts. (I am thinking of figures such as John Brett, John Everett Millais, James Mallord William Turner, and William Holman Hunt among others). Gustave Doré, The Holy Bible with Illustrations by Gustave Dore, 2 vols (London: Cassell, 1866). Doré was no stranger to sublimity in art; he was also a celebrated engraver of Dante and Milton.

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3

Forgetting the past and the future: Macaulay, Carlyle, and the ‘shoreless chaos’ of history

To us, who have lived in the year 1848, it may seem almost an abuse of terms to call a proceeding, conducted with so much deliberation, with so much sobriety, and with such minute attention to prescriptive etiquette, by the terrible name of Revolution.1 (Macaulay, History of England) Beginnings are always troublesome . . . Even Macaulay’s few pages of introduction to his ‘Introduction’ in the English History are the worst bit of writing in the book. 2 (George Eliot, Letter to Sarah Hennell, 15 August 1859)

C

ertainly in the earlier half of the nineteenth century, narrative-based history painting became the predominating form in art. But as the past’s sublimity began to make itself known to a wider Victorian reading public, the narrative drama of the Romantics’ drowned worlds became a more abstract, philosophical representation of the past that did not endorse the narrative reassurances of history painting. Having traced the impact of emergent sublimity on narrative representation through the iconographies of paintings that attempted to recall the distant past, I turn here to another form of historicity in the early nineteenth century: that of the discipline of history itself. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the emergence and triumph of the golden age of historical narrative in the early and mid-nineteenth century. To ask why it is that history as a formalised discipline exercised in narrative form emerges at this particular historical moment in the nineteenth century – not only emerges, but also captures the popular imagination in a way unprecedented in the histories of history.3

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Why Macaulay and Carlyle?4 There are other Victorian writers of history who have weathered well, such as James Froude, William Stubbs, or even John Henry Newman, but no other historians came close to achieving Macaulay’s and Carlyle’s popularity in the period – at the height of its success, Macaulay’s The History of England (1848–61) outsold the century’s most popular novelist, Dickens.5 Macaulay and Carlyle were both committed in their writing to using language and narrative in stylistically distinct and substantially different ways. Macaulay spoke to the popular Victorian imagination in a way that his contemporaries, though successful in their own ways, had failed to do. They were both masters of narration, of weaving historical fact and event into Macaulay’s plot of progress or Carlyle’s chaos of sublimity. Much of this chapter concerns itself with the exploration of these two aspects of Macaulay’s and Carlyle’s uniqueness, but, in my view, both of their approaches to historiography are connected. Macaulay’s narrative mode, his historical style, and his delivery are all intimately related to his popularity in the Victorian period. Each of these facets of his writing work together to forget the sublimity of both the past and the future, and in doing so they reveal a deep-seated concern with it. His case is slightly different to that of Carlyle, principally because his narrative style is like the magician’s sleight-of-hand; it is there to distract us from its own shortcomings. Macaulay’s history hides the sublimity of the past; Carlyle’s exposes it. But it was Carlyle who was to wither somewhat in the age of equipoise, his finest works behind him. In the more settled decades of a century there is less need for a cultural prophet who hails the bloody chaos and sublime potential in modern history. Between the 1830s and 1850s, however, they were the Burke and Paine of a period just beginning. They were intellectual innovators trying to make sense of their past for a new age. In their work, we can see the tension that exists in conceptions of space and time that differ gravely. One could see the chaos and emptiness of history, just as in Hutton, Lyell, and Cuvier’s vision of deep time; the other found narrative linearity, clarity, and knowledge. Both approaches were responses to the historical sublime. Even though there had been extensive historical writing before the Victorian period, the practice of history was reborn in the nineteenth century.6 It was a period possessed with questions of origination. In so many aspects of its cultural exchange the society of the time was one that needed to see itself in relation to that which had preceded it. In The Order of Things Foucault writes that history’s functions previous to the nineteenth century were to serve:

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memory, myth, transmission of the Word and of Example . . . What characterised this History . . . was that by ordering the time of human beings upon the world’s development . . . it was conceived of as a vast historical stream, uniform in each of its points . . . And it was this unity that was shattered at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the great upheaval that occurred in the Western episteme: it was discovered that there existed a historicity proper to nature.7

In Foucault’s view, previous to the nineteenth century, history was essentially anthropocentric and consequently always existed as narrative. There are, naturally, problems with a statement as unbendingly monolithic as this, presupposing as it does catastrophic changes in intellectual history that are neither evidentially supported nor provable. Nonetheless, there are threads of this idea to be found throughout the cultural output of the period. As the temporal expansion of the earth’s history seemed to be spinning out of control, so too did the nineteenth century’s spatial relationship with the world. It was an age characterised by rapid and sizeable imperial expansion on a scale also unprecedented in history. Just as the cartography of the globe was increasingly being traced, contoured, and improved upon during this period, so too was the temporal cartography of the past. And unlike the periods that preceded it, the nineteenth century was able to envision the past with a philosophically rigorous theory of history being teased out by the likes of Auguste Comte, Friedrich Hegel, and to a lesser extent Thomas Babington Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle. Although Macaulay and Carlyle’s ideas of what constituted history and the ways in which they executed it are the fulcrum of the discussion here, exploring their relationship to the discipline, their colleagues, and their competitors is revealing of their historical and cultural significance. Their historical work, particularly their essays ‘On History’ and, to a much lesser extent, The History of England and The French Revolution, are the necessary responses to the ever-growing burden of history in the nineteenth century. Their narratological modes of delivery, though seemingly opposed philosophically and stylistically, are both an effect of history’s sublimity as well as the discipline’s relative nascence in the period. Both of the rival historians devoted much of their lives to the interrogation of revolutions past and both of their conceptual relationships with the idea of revolution are indicative of each one’s political, personal, and historical standpoint. The instability of interpretation and expression that they expose in their very different histories articulates a tension in thinking about the past in a meaningful or a truthful way.

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Macaulay, history and personality Macaulay’s public persona could not have been more different from his private one. The two are connected, though. The extreme sensitivity and susceptibility to emotion of his private life both relate to the extraordinary solidity of personality created in his historiography and political speeches.8 Brought up by Zachary and Selina Macaulay, influential members of the Clapham Sect, he never married, and never seemed very interested in any breed of Christianity (beyond its powers of civilising those who came to it). His relationship with his sisters (both of whom did marry) was one of fondness on each side. Macaulay’s public and authorial persona was one of confidence, one that presented a vision of certainty and assuredness for past and future. The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the revolution of 1688 is this, that it was our last revolution. Several generations have now passed away since any wise and patriotic Englishman has meditated resistance to the established government. In all honest and reflecting minds there is a conviction, daily strengthened by experience, that the means of effecting every improvement which the constitution requires may be found within the constitution itself.9

In The Boundaries of Fiction George Levine explains that Macaulay’s art ‘presents an impregnable, virtuous, self-assured, and knowledgeable “I”’ and that ‘[h]e differed from almost all of the major prose writers of his time in writing no autobiography, fictional or otherwise.’10 It was not in his character to delve too deeply; perhaps he was afraid of what he might find. The remarks by his two sisters, Hannah and Margaret, both of whom knew him intimately, paint their portrait from a very different palette. Those around him noticed his quick and easy susceptibility to pain. His sister Margaret noted in her journal that ‘[t]he sight of pain puts him into an agony, but he is, I think, a little too fond of reasoning himself out of feeling, and tries too much to forget unpleasant things. I believe, however, he feels as much as other people in half the time.’11 In 1834, his life changed dramatically when he learned of Hannah’s engagement to Charles Edward Trevelyan. While the couple celebrated their honeymoon in December of that year, Macaulay received the news that Margaret had died from scarlet fever that August. Macaulay retreated into the life of the mind. His books became more than his friends. Many months after his sister’s death he wrote to Thomas Flower Ellis from Calcutta on 8 February 1835, ‘That I have not utterly sunk under this blow I owe chiefly to literature. What a blessing it is to love

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books as I love them, – to be able to converse with the dead and to live amidst the unreal.’12 And again on 30 December 1835: ‘The tremendous blow which fell on me at the beginning of this year has left marks behind it which I shall carry to my grave. Literature has saved my life and my reason . . . Even now I dare not, in the intervals of business, remain alone without a book in my hand.’13 Print was dead for Macaulay. Although a death had brought about his collapse, literature seemed to provide his younger self with a solidity and certainty that people could not. Books could not change, disappoint, upset him, or force him to do the thing that perturbed him most: to feel. The dead, once dead, could not die again. Print was static, enduring, and immutable. A fascinating dichotomy emerges between Macaulay the historian and Macaulay the man. Macaulay is perhaps most famous for his Whiggery. Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) explains that Whig history is characterised by a particular relationship between the past and present insofar as its study of the past is only really done in relation to the present.14 As such, it sees the characters of history, like those of a romance, as heroes who sought to facilitate and accelerate progress toward civilisation, and villains who sought to hinder it.15 In Macaulay’s historical writings, the history of England becomes a kind of melodrama, in their use of sensational and exaggerated language and their reliance on the simplicity of opposition. Morality and goodness become the beacon of history. The present is what the past is always moving toward. The present represents a force for good that will always triumph over the selfishness and the indulgence of the overprivileged in history. Macaulay, it seems, frequently retreated from the present into the unreal, into the world of his imagination. Even history, for him, was a kind of romance. His sister Margaret recounts in her journal a conversation with Macaulay where he explained that: With a person of my turn . . . the minute touches are of as great interest, and perhaps greater, than the most important events. Spending so much time as I do in solitude, my mind would have rusted by gazing vacantly at the shop windows. As it is, I am no sooner in the streets than I am in Greece, in Rome, in the midst of the French Revolution. Precision in dates, the day or hour in which a man was born or died, becomes absolutely necessary. A slight fact, a sentence, a word, are of importance in my romance.16

Facts were the seeds of both romance and history. Even romance, though, could be unbearably emotive for the historian. ‘I generally avoid all

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novels which are said to have very much pathos. The suffering which they produce is to me a very real suffering, and of that I have quite enough without them.’17 The seed of historical knowledge is only the metonym for what will later become history; it is not the synecdoche. The seed of historical knowledge is not the thing itself, but it is the beginning of Macaulay’s romance of history. As such, Macaulay’s seeds led him to construct the characters of his History in a way that led to significant criticism for the careless manner of characterisation that allowed for little sense of his subjects’ innate conflicts and complexities. John Clive has suggested that ‘Macaulay was a person of strong prejudices’ and that this, coupled with his desire to make history both ‘vivid’ and ‘entertaining’, may have worked against the very fabric of the expression of a true historical imagination.18 Macaulay’s certainty and absolutism were famous. Charles Darwin cautiously remarked in one of his Autobiographies that: Lord Stanhope once gave me a curious little proof of the accuracy and fullness of Macaulay’s memory: many historians used often to meet at Lord Stanhope’s house, and in discussing various subjects they would sometimes differ from Macaulay, and formerly they often referred to some book to see who was right; but latterly, as Lord Stanhope noticed, no historian ever took this trouble, and whatever Macaulay said was final.19

Elsewhere, though, Darwin was to dramatically refer to Macaulay in Victorian demotic as ‘d – d cocked sure.’20 Macaulay’s sensibility and personality were not alone responsible for the kinds of history that he was to produce (there was of course something of a melting pot of other forces and discourses at work, too) but his sensibility, his renowned certainty, and his imagination meant that he was particularly attuned to write history in the way that he did. The cultural and intellectual climate was a catalyst for Macaulay’s personality that together predetermined the kind of historical writing that he produced and the kind of historian that he would become. It is of little surprise that such a man, living in fear of turbulent change, should adopt a political standpoint that was focussed upon what is potentially the most sublime of historical events: revolution.

The history of a revolution ‘I purpose to write the history of England from the accession of King James the Second down to a time which is within the memory of men still

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living’ was Macaulay’s stated intention at the beginning of The History of England.21 These words were written in 1848 when the stench of revolution was in the air. His objective when he began work on The History of England was that it would cover the period from the accession of James II in 1685 through to the House of Hanover and the reign of George III (1760–1820); his work, though, never reached the French Revolution of 1789, only getting as far as the death of William III in 1701. Nonetheless, the French Revolution was never going to be a part of his history because its terrifying chaos did not belong in his philosophy. The History begins with an introductory chapter, narrating at breakneck pace with the Romans, Saxons, and Normans in the first ten pages; the prestissimo of these opening pages becomes a sudden andante when Macaulay reaches the seventeenth century. Throughout the four volumes that Macaulay completed before his death, the History slows and slows to a tectonic pace. If Macaulay were to have finished his intended history at that rate, another lifetime would have been needed for its completion. The focus of the English Revolution, though, is one that Macaulay’s politics particularly celebrated, from which two questions emerge. What was it about that tumultuous period in English history that spoke so to Macaulay? What was it about that tumultuous period in English history that spoke so to the Victorian public who flocked to read the History? J. W. Burrow in A Liberal Descent goes some way to positing an answer to the first question: The history of England was that of a deeply, almost, it seemed, providentially favoured country; favoured by circumstance, by the spirit of its people and institutions from an early date, and by its history. In constitutional essentials England was qualified to be the tutor, not the pupil, of a more distracted world. This, in outline and in much of its detail, was the version of English history inherited by Macaulay, and displayed by him with all the imaginative energy of a copious, unperplexed mind.22

Not only was the History a celebration of Englishness, but it also stood as an exemplar to Europe of how a revolution ought to be conducted: with taste, good manners, and as little violence as possible. Macaulay’s History is saturated in revolution – not necessarily in theme, but in its construction and modes of response. He had been politically involved in the series of Acts in 1832 known as the Great Reform Act, which in part reorganised the suffrage and Parliamentary arrangements as laid out in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Moreover, that revolution of 1688 had been a tranquil one, in comparison not only to the French Revolution of 1789 (the sort of chaotic event that most disturbed Macaulay) but to the

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revolutions that spread like a pandemic over Europe and the world in 1848. Just over the water in France, the Orleans monarchy was brought to the end of its reign and a Second Republic inaugurated – the ‘revolution’ was the result of a year’s agitation. Austria, the German states, the Italian states, Poland, Hungary, Brazil each had their own revolutions in that same year. Poised upon the edge of massive imperial expansion and economic growth, England was at the point when it both was ready and needed to hear that it was (ironically, given the nature of imperialism) the least inclined to chaos, violence, and revolution; that Englishness meant a general progression toward greater civilisation, perfection even; that England was not as other nations and as such its responsibility was to spread its message of civilisation throughout the globe. Although a highly cautious and, at best, tacit supporter of the French Revolution, Macaulay clearly was an antirevolutionary revolutionary.23 He was not a Tory who saw the threat of revolution as a reason to avoid all modes of change, neither was he a radical who saw it as a model of how to effect change; instead, he was a reformer who felt change was necessary only insofar as it warded off the horrific and bloody sublimity of revolution. On 21 March 1831, in the first of a series of Parliamentary speeches on the Reform Act, Macaulay asserted that the goal of the proposed reform was ‘to admit the middle class to a large and direct share in the representation, without any violent shock to the institutions of our country.’24 He concluded that ‘the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve.’25 And on 16 December of the same year, he explained that ‘I have, from the beginning of these discussions, supported Reform on two grounds; first, because I believe it to be in itself a good thing; and secondly, because I think the dangers of withholding it so great that, even if it were an evil, it would be the less of two evils.’26 Over a decade later Macaulay’s fear of future social upheaval was again articulated in a speech to the Commons on ‘The People’s Charter’ (3 May 1842). The Charter’s principal stipulation was a motion in favour of universal suffrage; Macaulay’s fear was that the result of such a fundamental change in the educational standards of the voting population would lead to ‘knowledge [being] borne down by ignorance,’ even going so far as to assert that ‘universal suffrage is . . . incompatible with civilization.’27 The answer, then, to both questions posited above (why both Macaulay and his public were fascinated by the period around the Glorious Revolution) is a fear of sudden and catastrophic change, a fear of bloody revolution. Geology was teaching the intelligentsia that catastrophe in the guise of Noah’s Flood, or as Francis Danby or John Martin

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envisioned it, or as suggested by William Buckland and Georges Cuvier, was a global paradigm. It was something that had shaped the face of the earth; it could easily shape the fortunes of humankind. The difference for the Whigs and for Macaulay was that political catastrophe could be averted through analysis, preparedness, and knowledge. In such a cultural and intellectual climate as this, the lessons that history may be able to teach take on a certain urgency. History as a pedagogical tool is also highly politicised. It is of little surprise, then, to find Macaulay – at the commencement of his career – mapping out the profile of ‘good’ historical practice.

‘On History’(s)28 Macaulay’s fourth article for the Edinburgh Review, ‘On History’, was a critical piece ostensibly on The Romance of History (1828) by Henry Neele (whose name is not mentioned in the forty-page review).29 Neele’s book was a substantial three-volume study of various adventures in English history. (In the February of the year that Neele’s book was published he was found dead in his rooms near London having cut his own throat. He had mistakenly believed himself bankrupt.) Macaulay’s article is an absorbing assessment of the state of early nineteenth-century historiography. To write history respectably – that is, to abbreviate despatches, and make extracts from speeches, to intersperse in due proportion epithets of praise and abhorrence, to draw up antithetical characters of great men, setting forth how many contradictory virtues and vices they united, and abounding in ‘withs’ and ‘withouts’ – all this is very easy. But to be a really great historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.30

Macaulay goes on to suggest that the writing of history is an art, but that it is much more problematic an art than that of the poet or playwright because it requires skills beyond the conceptual and imaginative that the creative artist is, in Macaulay’s view, free to draw upon. The great historian ‘must be a profound and ingenious reasoner. Yet he must possess sufficient self command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis . . . [H]istory begins in novel and ends in essay.’31 Thomas Carlyle’s first foray into outlining his philosophy of history was published in Fraser’s Magazine, two years after Macaulay’s, in 1830, and his also found space for the historian-as-artist.

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But the Artist in History may be distinguished from the Artisan in History; for here, as in all other provinces, there are Artists and Artisans; men who labor mechanically in a department, without eye for the Whole, not feeling that there is a Whole; and men who inform and ennoble the humblest department with an Idea of the Whole, and habitually know that only in the Whole is the Partial to be truly discerned.32

Although both men deify the historian, they do so for quite different reasons. Macaulay champions the ability to reason. Carlyle’s historian, however, senses the ‘whole’ of history and is an artist who borrows most heavily, it seems, from Kant’s mathematical sublime; history is, after all, ‘ranked amongst the highest of the arts’.33 For all his descriptive acrobatics, Macaulay’s assertion of history borrowing from both the novel and the essay is troublingly vague, but it does acknowledge, at least, the constructedness of the historian’s history, for after all ‘[i]t is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory’.34 In this miasma of fiction and history, Macaulay did believe that truth was to be found and the job of the good historian was to impart to the reader the distinction between the two. Even the best classical historians found such a task insurmountable, as Macaulay says of Herodotus in particular: ‘[w]e know that there is truth; but we cannot exactly decide where it lies’.35 It is a noteworthy point for Macaulay that receives greater attention in the main body of his essay, and as it is also a key to the argument that follows, it would be unproductive not to quote it at length: Diversity, it is said, implies error: truth is one, and admits of no degrees . . . When we talk of the truth of imitation in the fine arts, we mean an imperfect and a graduated truth. No picture is exactly like the original; nor is a picture good in proportion as it is like the original . . . The same may be said of history. Perfectly and absolutely true it cannot be: for, to be perfectly and absolutely true, it ought to record ALL the slightest particulars of the slightest transactions – all the things done and all the words uttered during the time of which it treats. The omission of any circumstance, however insignificant, would be a defect. If history were written thus, the Bodleian Library would not contain the occurrences of a week. What is told in the fullest and most accurate annals bears an infinitely small proportion to what is suppressed . . . No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth: but those are the best pictures and the best histories which exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole. He who is deficient in the art of selection may, by showing nothing but the truth, produce all the effect of the grossest falsehood. It perpetually happens that one writer tells less truth than another, merely because he tells more truths. In the

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imitative arts we constantly see this. There are lines in the human face, and objects in landscape, which stand in such relations to each other, that they ought either to be all introduced into a painting together or all omitted together . . . An outline scrawled with a pen, which seizes the marked features of a countenance, will give a much stronger idea of it than a bad painting in oils.36

Historiography, then, is merely a synecdoche for history. In Macaulay’s theory of history the past is to be reined in and controlled, truths withheld, fictionalised even, in order that a very different breed of truth may thrive, namely the now almost oxymoronic ‘historical truth’. In Macaulay’s theory of history there is only some truth in the historical. The cacophonic voices of the past are to be suppressed so that only one tuneful and truthful melody strikes the ear and is not only audible but also clearly perceptible. Historical ‘truth’ is only ever a part of history itself, but like all good synecdoche it conveys its essence nonetheless. Historical truth is nowhere to be found in the archives, libraries, and Parliamentary Papers that Macaulay consulted; instead, it is an abstract thing that flourishes in the dusts, between the lines and pages, facts, truths and half-truths of history’s flotsam. As such, Macaulay’s theory of history suggests that it is the fictive and narratological aspects of the historian’s performance that are key in the creation of historical narrative, where facts are little more than ‘the mere dross of history’.37 Macaulay prioritises that which lies between history’s ‘facts’: its narratological glue, the ‘ore’ that both creates and preserves the ‘gold.’ History’s essence derives from the contemporary narrative practice of the historian that binds it together, that subsumes the experience and events of history into language and contiguous, expository, and desublimating narrative. Both figures see narrative as an essential aspect of historiography and history-making. For Carlyle the force of history is ‘an ever-living, everworking Chaos of Being’, and only narrative can make sense of it.38 Indeed, others have noted, Carlyle’s sense of not only what makes history, but also what makes us human, is that we are fundamentally narrative makers.39 Our very speech is curiously historical. Most men, you may observe, speak only to narrate; not in imparting what they have thought, which indeed were often a very small matter, but in exhibiting what they have undergone or seen, which is a quite unlimited one, do talkers dilate. Cut us off from Narrative, how would the stream of conversation, even among the wisest, languish into detached handfuls, and among the foolish utterly evaporate! Thus, as we do nothing but enact History, we say little but recite it: nay,

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rather, in that widest sense, our whole spiritual life is built thereon. For, strictly considered, what is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?40

With narrative so central to both models of historiography, the historian has more in common with the dramatist or novelist than the essayist, but with one crucial difference: where ‘[t]he dramatist creates; the historian only disposes. The difference is not in the mode of execution, but in the mode of conception. Shakespeare is guided by a model which exists in his imagination; Tacitus, by a model furnished from without’.41 Macaulay’s historian is one who doesn’t so much recount and record the past, but deliberately discards and recreates the past impressionistically with a narrative solidity that draws the facts of history together. As such, there seems to be little difference between the historian and the historical novelist. It is for this reason that Macaulay summons the new hero of the historical novel, Walter Scott, who ‘has used those fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind them in a manner which may well excite their envy. He has constructed out of their gleanings works which, even considered as histories, are scarcely less valuable than theirs.’42 Scott was still something of a phenomenon at the end of the 1820s. For Macaulay, he was a special passion. On publishing the first volume of the History he boasted to his brother Charles Macaulay that they ‘were all well and prospering. The sale of my book has been enormous, – twelve thousand copies in three months. None of Sir Walter’s novels went faster.’43 Although there had been historical novels that appeared before the publication of Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), which was a success all over Europe, Scott’s work had proved to be different from these.44 In Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), as in many Gothic novels that both preceded and succeeded it, the historical setting functions as a kind of proscenium arch that frames the action taking place in the novel.45 The novels’ various historicities never really advance beyond the department of stage management to impinge upon the dramatic action on stage. Instead, the principal function of the historical setting in Gothic fiction was to make strange and distanciate the experience of the novels’ action by displacing the events relayed both temporally and geographically. Scott’s novel, on the other hand, concerned itself with the very stuff of history. It sought not to make history strange, not to make it horrific and sublime, but to recover it and make it knowable to a wide readership by suspending it in a form of narrative to which historiography was not accustomed.

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Waverley, like most narratives and unlike history, had both a beginning and an end. Even though historical accounts of distant periods (like Gibbon’s for example) had these particular features, they did not imply that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire had to end in the marriage of hero and heroine. Both historical novels and historical accounts, it seems, are subject to the same strictures of verifiability and authenticity, but in the historical novel these are secondary to the desires of the governing plot. It is ironic that in Macaulay’s time the plot was precisely what drew readers to a new kind of history that existed outside the corridors of power, that took place both off and on the battlefield, that featured both the public and the private, that featured women, even. So, to some extent at least, the historical novel represented to Macaulay the ideal history: ‘The perfect historian is he in whose work the character and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature’.46 Thus far, Macaulay’s ideal historian could be Walter Scott, but he goes on to explain that the novelist’s exercise is doomed to failure in comparison to that of the historian because the historian ‘relates no fact, he attributes no expression to his characters, which is not authenticated by sufficient testimony. But, by judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement, he gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction’.47 Fiction’s usurped attractions present something of a generic knot here in terms of historiography. The historian must retrieve the garlands of fiction and turn them into historical truth through processes of verification and authentication. But can a form that borrows heavily from fiction in terms of structure and figuration ever be regarded as inherently truthful? Macaulay seems to think so: truth is bald, bland, and overwhelming; historical truth is entertaining, informative, and ultimately consumable. It is an aesthetics and philosophy of deduction and relation, a philosophy of metonymy. Such philosophies where the thing is related to the whole, or where the temporally or spatially concealed is deducible from the surface, received a good deal of currency in Victorian Britain. Such was the predominating theory of the earth for most of the period with Charles Lyell’s subtitle to his Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation. For Lyell, the earth’s surface did not so much present an episode of its history as the history and constitution of the earth was deducible from its surface. The relational paradigm also finds its way into Macaulay’s idea of history. He explains that: Bishop Watson compares a geologist to a gnat mounted on an elephant, and laying down theories as to the whole internal structure of the vast animal,

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from the phenomena of the hide.48 The comparison is unjust to the geologists; but is very applicable to those historians who write as if the body politic were homogeneous, who look only on the surface of affairs, and never think of the mighty and various organisation which lies deep below.49

Macaulay here suggests that his history, although fundamentally metonymic, is capable of representing the complexity of socio-political reality. He liked the idea in theory, but not so much in practice: his call for a quasi-social history never really found its articulation in his incomplete masterpiece, which is after all a history of kings, courts, parliamentarians, and Bills. Carlyle also had a stated objection to such an approach, remarking, ‘Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life, but only the house wherein our Life is led’; unlike Macaulay, he was able to incorporate such an approach into his histories.50 Macaulay’s complaints of oversimplicity in the work of some historians (a complaint that he goes on to embellish in the paragraphs that follow) is an objection that has often been levelled at him by many a historian who doesn’t come close to Macaulay’s ability. In the nineteenth century, Walter Bagehot was perhaps his most accurate and nuanced critic. In his review of the first volume of Macaulay’s The History of England, he writes, ‘You rarely come across anything which is not decided; and when you do come across it, you seem to wonder that the positiveness which has accomplished so much, should have been unwilling to decide everything.’51 Bagehot continues, distrusting the façade of certainty that pervaded Macaulay’s work, ‘history is a vestige of vestiges; few facts leave any trace of themselves, any witness of their occurrence; of fewer still is that witness preserved’.52 Seeing the magnitude of history that Macaulay is quite deliberately forgetting, he goes on to note that ‘[i]t is not possible that these data can be very fertile in certainties’.53 Finally, he remarks that relief would have been brought to Macaulay’s readers if from time to time ‘he had shown a little the outside of uncertainties . . . the gradations of doubt . . . the singular accumulation of difficulties, which must beset the extraction of a very easy narrative from the very confused materials’.54 For Charles Firth, writing his lectures in 1914 that would become his 1938 Commentary on Macaulay’s History, the practice of history never reached the lofty heights of Macaulay again.55 Instead, by the twentieth century: modern writers of history were not merely partial but dull and superficial. They confined themselves to relating political events, and neglected social

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changes and social facts [such as] the changes of manners and morals, the transition of communities from poverty to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance, from ferocity to humanity.56

Firth sides with Macaulay on the function of historiography. The need to suspend it within the criteria and confines of fictional narrative is effectively shackling the multiplicity of history which the ‘dull and superficial’ historians of the early twentieth century were producing. As Firth well knew, there are other choices for the historian over and above the constraints of coherent historical narrative. Analysis via a specific theme, though inevitably taking on an aspect of narrative in its structure of argumentation, is not the same as the ‘facts’ of history being reduced to the atomised structure of the fable or the story. Moreover, it was not merely that Macaulay’s history was reduced to the parameters of narrative structure. As Peter Gay ably remarks in his Style in History, ‘The profusion of parallel clauses in Macaulay’s writings suggests that he perceived history as a succession of dilemmas, debates, and combats – between conscience and ambition, bravery and cowardice, Protestants and Catholics, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Whigs and Tories, passive obedience and manly rebelliousness. For Macaulay, history was a vast antithesis.’57 Gay’s analysis implies a kind of melodramatic rhetoric of binary oppositions where good must do battle with evil before it can triumph. What is also significant is that Macaulay’s clear intention in ‘On History’, and his other historical writings, was to convey that truth can only be found in history’s clarity. After the initial publication of the History, Macaulay in his journal (18 January 1850) remonstrated: How little the all-important art of making meaning pellucid is studied now! Hardly any popular writer, except myself, thinks of it. Many seem to aim at being obscure. Indeed, they maybe right in one sense; for many readers give credit for profundity to whatever is obscure, and call all that is perspicuous shallow. But Corragio – and think of A.D. 2850. Where will your Carlyles and Emersons be then? But Herodotus will be read with delight.

Other commentators that have deployed this particular passage in order to analyse Macaulay’s stylistic sensibility have all but ignored a distinct aspect of it that is suggestive of Macaulay’s desire to write histories in the particular way that he did.58 Moreover, this is not the only example of Macaulay leaping into the abyss of futurity. One of his earlier works from 1824 was a humorous piece entitled ‘A Prophetic Account of a Grand National Epic Poem, to Be Entitled “The Wellingtoniad,” and to Be

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Published A.D. 2824’.59 Here he joked that ‘in the year 2824, according to our present reckoning, a grand national Epic Poem, worthy to be compared with the Iliad, the Æneid, or the Jerusalem, will be published in London’; the article then proceeds with a jovial chapter-by-chapter breakdown which draws comparisons between the epic form and the ‘epic’ events of recent history.60 While his criticism of Emerson and Carlyle in his journal entry is telling, it is the initial consideration of the year ‘2850’ that is most startling. Historicity was deeply engrained in nineteenth-century culture in its arts, literature, science, politics, and consciousness. What is not so frequently present at the beginning of the period is consideration of the future and futurity, especially in historical contexts. The privately stated connection is that for Macaulay, futurity and historicity were symptoms of the same condition: temporal vertigo, or the historical sublime. Many Victorians had begun their century standing upon a few thousand years of knowable and documented history and ended it amidst a dizzying vortex of deep times. By the time of Macaulay’s journal entry, the few thousand years had long gone, and worse, it had been replaced by nothing; where once there was narrative (or at least the possibility of narrative because history was anthropocentric) now there was only theory. Macaulay and the Victorians found themselves standing upon aeons of history; they did not know how much, only that it was vast. The polar relation of the past’s vastness becomes that of an unknown future, too. And it is a boundless future, as vacant and empty as the recently (un)recovered past. The rise of history in the nineteenth century can to some extent be attributed to an anxious interest in futurity that became widespread towards the end of the century. The anxiety can be seen emerging particularly around discourses of degeneration that really take firmer hold after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859.61 Neither was this Macaulay’s only speculation upon the deep future of ‘2850’. Perhaps his most famous, though brief, flight of futuristic fancy is to be found in his review of von Ranke’s History of the Popes of Rome (1840).62 She [the Catholic church] was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.63

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The figure of the New Zealander is one that exploits the juxtaposition of extremities. In the January of 1840 Britain had annexed New Zealand with the Treaty of Waitangi. The population of the islands at the time was very low, and imperial expansion was encouraged by a land lottery in London. So, to have a travelling New Zealander in the future sketching the ruins of London represents an absolute volte face in imperial power, one in which the British empire like its brethren throughout history had fallen into decay, and another had taken its place. The lines in the review are throwaway, Macaulay does not return to them again, but they resounded with sufficient strength for them to inspire Gustave Doré’s final plate in his and Douglas Jerrold’s London: a Pilgrimage (1872) in which fallen London resembles contemporary engravings of Roman ruins.64 The anxieties that drive these reflections on the destruction of the modern world appear because the sudden advances in geology, palaeontology, and historiography led to the conclusions that the destiny of humanity was that it would persist in being exceptional amongst the evidences of natural history, or that extinction was just as probable for humanity as it was for the vanished species being dug out of the earth. The poet of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) articulates this particular fear in the famous fifty-sixth lyric when Nature ‘cries, “A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go”’, going on to consider ‘shall he, / Man, her last work . . . / Be blown about the desert dust, / Or seal’d within the iron hills?’65 Is the ultimate destiny of humanity to become fossilised, to be as the petrified remains of long-dead species? Later and more explicitly explored, this anxiety can be found in the work of Richard Jefferies and H. G. Wells, as well as much of Thomas Hardy’s fiction.66 The first section of Jefferies’ After London (1885) is ominously entitled ‘The Relapse Into Barbarism’, where the future becomes a return to the savage past; the novel shapes London’s degenerative destiny as a melded soluble mass of nothingness ‘so that all the country looked alike’ and ‘truth was lost.’67 H. G. Wells deploys a similar trope of the future as a double of the past in The Time Machine (1895) where the time traveller journeys to the end of time only to find that the future has become a ‘blood-red’ swamp.68 The examples are numerous and compelling. In such a cultural climate Macaulay’s history can be seen as articulating a concern not so much about the stories of the past or even about the past’s relationship with the present; instead, history becomes a kind of act that presents a paradigm of prognosis. Prognosis is found in Carlyle, too, where history is ‘a looking both before and after; as, indeed, the coming Time already waits, unseen, yet definitely shaped, predeter-

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mined, and inevitable, in the Time come; and only by the combination of both is the meaning of either completed.’69 In Macaulay, history has to have a more didactic role in the future; a historical narrative that is defective as a form of prognosis ‘is as useless as a medical treatise that should pass by all the symptoms attendant on the early stage of a disease and mention only what occurs when the patient is beyond the reach of remedies’.70 Others have argued that one of the functions or goals of literary fiction in the nineteenth century was to occupy the epistemological space that the Bible was increasingly drifting away from.71 For many Victorians, the Bible had been a text that presented a history of both the past and the future of the earth (as well as humanity’s role in it), but as the century progressed, the Bible was to assume an ever more metaphoric role in its modes of explication. Replacing it was the role not only of literary fiction, whether realistic or historical, but of history as well. The rise of history in the nineteenth century can be seen as a response to, or desublimation of, the temporal absence not only of history itself, but also of the Bible, not literally, but in terms of the decline of its chronological interpretations as opposed to metaphoric ones.72 The later Victorians were prisoners of time. On both sides, the past and the future, they were flanked by newly discovered spaces of emptiness. In this context, the turn towards narrative as a mode of historical explication or enquiry can be seen as a turning away from the sublimity of time, or at least an effort (whether successful or not) to explain, make sense of, or domesticate it. For Carlyle, history was at the very core of what it means to be human; it was ‘the first distinct product of man’s spiritual nature; his earliest expression of what can be called Thought.’73 And, like Macaulay, he also sensed history’s innate futurity. He saw it as: a looking both before and after; as, indeed, the coming Time already waits, unseen, yet definitely shaped, predetermined and inevitable, in the Time come; and only by the combination of both is the meaning of either completed.74

In comparison with Macaulay’s gymnastically descriptive style, Carlyle’s prose reads more like blank verse. His prosodic writings suggested a version of history that was neither as certain nor as cognitively mappable as Macaulay’s. Indeed, Carlyle’s experiments in prose history led to an excellent book on Cromwell in which he attempted to let history speak for itself. It is an approach that Macaulay could not have countenanced: he would have seen it as a form that fundamentally lacked dramatic

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structure.75 Macaulay’s style was incompatible with Carlyle’s linguistic creativity, as well as Carlyle’s conception of history, expressed elsewhere, as a ‘shoreless chaos’ and as a ‘real Prophetic Manuscript [that] can be fully interpreted by no man.’76 Both of these images of sublime uncertainty suggest an imprecision that was opposed to Macaulay’s more conclusive view of history. Carlyle’s use of imagery, then, quite deliberately lacks the rhetorical precision and dexterity of Macaulay’s Parliamentary speeches on reform, for example, but it gains something in its inexactness because the blurred nature of the figurative language that Carlyle uses is suggestive of the blurred nature of historical veracity.77 For Macaulay, the facticity of the past speaks in a kind of polyphonic cacophony, from which it is the historian’s task to pick out the single overarching melody and make it audible to the ears of his readership. Carlyle’s incomplete and inexact imagery, however, is more suggestive of history’s sublimity. It acknowledges a sense of history’s simultaneous barrenness and abundance as it explains that historiography does a rather bad job of recording experience. At best it only translates it in the most piecemeal of fashions, translates it and suspends it in language, and thus it fundamentally changes the thing that it once was. Having suggested in his essay ‘On History’ that the occurrences of a week would not fit in Oxford’s Bodleian, Macaulay goes on to argue that ‘[w]hat is told in the fullest and most accurate annals bears an infinitely small proportion to what is suppressed’.78 This last word is an interesting choice for Macaulay, indicating an interest in that which is already in existence. What is lost, it seems, not only is forgotten, but ought to be forgotten. And we are to be grateful to the historian for omitting that which is unimportant in history. For Macaulay, it is imperative that much of history is lost and unrecorded. Such an approach to history facilitated the task that he would come to many years later in his rediscovering, connecting, and desublimating the history of England. Carlyle, though, was not only able to sense history’s silence, he was not afraid to attempt to represent it. Part of the task of the historian for Carlyle was to make knowable the fact that history by its nature could not answer all the questions that the historian would bring to bear upon it. Where Macaulay’s style is fundamentally an act of ventriloquistic violence, in which the historian’s figurative, narratological, and rhetorical dexterity reshapes the contours of history by speaking for it, Carlyle is content to let history speak in the discomfiting knowledge that it will never amount to more than an ‘inarticulate slumberous mumblement’: something distant to the past that almost wholly remains lost. 79 This is not to say, in any way, that Carlyle thought the historian’s task was a hopeless one. The

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French Revolution may have been criticised later in the century when the job of the historian became an increasingly specialised one, but it was still one of the most popular accounts of that period of upheaval.

The revolutions of Carlyle and Macaulay Revolution was the theme of the two most popular histories published in the early-Victorian period. Both appeared at key moments. Macaulay’s History, itself an account of an earlier revolution, was published amongst many other revolutions: in 1848. In the year of Victoria’s coronation, 1837, Carlyle’s The French Revolution was published and inspired love and loathing amongst the critics.80 As a new epoch was beginning, it was a book that was trying, to some extent, to make sense of the era that preceded it. Carlyle himself was something of a cultural orphan. When the book was published he was not part of a young intelligentsia setting out on his career, excited by the new age; he was a man of forty-two. Although he would live to the age of eighty-five (dying in 1881), he was identifiably neither Romantic nor Victorian, neither Whig, Tory, nor Radical. On publication, a young Thackeray writing for the Times tried to make sense of the oddness of Carlyle’s history. But never did a book sin so grievously from outward appearance, or a man’s style so mar his subject and dim his genius. It is stiff, short, and rugged, it abounds with Germanisms and Latinisms, strange epithets, and choking double words, astonishing to the admirers of simple Addisonian English, to those who love history as it gracefully runs in Hume, or struts pompously in Gibbon – no such style is Carlyle’s. A man, at the first outset, must take breath at the end of a sentence, or, worse still, go to sleep in the midst of it. But those hardships become lighter as the traveller grows accustomed to the road, and he speedily learns to admire and sympathise; just as he would admire a Gothic cathedral in spite of the quaint carvings and hideous images on door and buttress.81

As with so many other reviews, both at the time and since, Thackeray’s principal interest is style. He grasped that in Carlyle, form and style are the content. While this might be said of any historian, Carlyle’s philosophy of history is intimately entwined with the opacity of his language. The French Revolution is a religious text, sodden with biblical imagery, but its vision of history belongs more to the earth sciences. It shares its vision of the convulsive nature of history with catastrophists like Georges Cuvier. ‘Chaos’ is used nearly fifty times throughout the two volumes,

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‘sublime’ nearly thirty, ‘catastrophe’ ten, and ‘volcanic’ five – all terms used with extreme rarity, if at all, in Macaulay. Unsurprisingly, Carlyle’s fondness for the Old Testament is more commonly in evidence than the New, although the apocalyptic sublime of Revelation is something of an exception. ‘The fountains of the great deep boil forth; fire-fountains, enveloping, engulfing. Your “Earth-rind” is shattered, swallowed up; instead of a green flowery world, there is a waste wild-weltering chaos; – which has again, with tumult and struggle, to make itself into a world.’82 In using the biblical text to illustrate the end of the ancien régime, Carlyle sees the French Revolution as a fiery punishment, a visitation of moral and divine justice upon a hopelessly ungodly, decadent, and outmoded feudal aristocracy. Elsewhere, the range and combination of cultural, literary, classical, and biblical reference seems deliberately constructed to obfuscate meaning, to stand in the path of narrative clarity: Or is the ground itself fate-stricken, accursed: an Atreus’ Palace; for that Louvre window is still nigh, out of which a Capet, whipt of the Furies, fired his signal of the Saint Bartholomew! Dark is the way of the Eternal as mirrored in this world of Time: God’s way is in the sea, and His path in the great deep.83

The effect is that of a wild and whirling vortex. Instead of paint, quotation, classical reference, and historical allusion intermingle, merge, and compete for space on a crowded canvas where the Oresteia and the Massacre of St Bartholomew are plundered to illustrate the French Revolution. This, followed swiftly by the dark, elemental, and quasibiblical providentialism of the next sentence, makes for a multi-referential linguistic effect, the verbal equivalent of a Turnerian vortex. Elsewhere in The French Revolution techniques are employed to exploit the narrator’s ability to draw attention to specific elements with detail, immediacy, and clarity. Carlyle’s methods for doing this are various: the deictic, the synecdochic shift (or focus pulling), reader address, and comedy. The last is not often found in histories, and is certainly nowhere in evidence in the entire canon of Macaulay. This is not to say that it is a common facet in Carlyle’s work, but there is an occasional rhythmbreaking lightness of touch. On the much maligned queen (Marie Antoinette), he notes with simplicity that ‘[n]ew Clothes are needed; as usual, in all Epic transactions . . . No Queen can stir without new clothes.’84 And, towards the end of the second volume, aware of the crosscurrents of cause and effect that the history is drifting into, the narrator breaks from his explanation: ‘and then – O Reader! – Courage, I see land!’85 The reassuring authorial hand reaches out from the page, aware

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of the weight of historical explication that his readers are also having to bear. The rhetorical sleight of hand suggests an immediacy and presentness to the reading experience. Such a deictic trick (the ‘thisness’) is quite a common turn of Carlyle’s; like ‘Courage’ it is a means by which the narrator may cut away from the analysis and engage the reader’s attention with a directness of address. A corollary of the deictic, found in much popular historical writing, is that the past narrative wanders into the present tense. History becomes now; we are there; the action is about us. ‘But hark, through the dead of midnight, what tramp is this? Tramp as of armed men, foot and horse; Gardes Françaises, Gardes Suisses: marching hither; in silent regularity; in the flare of torchlight! . . . It is Captain D’Agoust . . . a man of known firmness; – who once forced Prince Condé himself . . . to give satisfaction and fight’.86 The presentness of the past is here given formal expression. The twenty-first century, it seems, did not give birth to the trope of the documentary historian who speaks direct to camera as they plod unseen through a dramatised vignette. Dramatic tropes abound in Carlyle. And their usage in The French Revolution is in most cases to enhance the deictic sense of immediacy, the now of the past. He shifts from the large to the small at the greatest of speed. In crowd scenes, he will rapidly pull focus from the pack to the person, as his narrator stands in frame and singles him out. But now if Mirabeau is the greatest, who of these Six Hundred may be the meanest? Shall we say, that anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking man, under thirty, in spectacles; his eyes (were the glasses off) troubled, careful; with upturned face, snuffing dimly the uncertain future-time; complexion of a multiplex atrabiliar colour, the final shade of which may be the pale seagreen . . . That greenish-coloured (verdatre) individual is an Advocate of Arras; his name is Maximilien Robespierre.87

Dramatic liberties are exploited in this passage. For effect, Carlyle invokes the past, present, and the future-past into one brief character analysis. He sees the future of the revolution in the complexion of one man amongst six hundred. Such a stylistic choice is one that has to dispose of a mass of material – effectively five hundred and ninety-nine men are consigned to the trash heap of history, here only finding synecdochic or metonymic representation through their relationship to Carlyle’s Robespierre. Carlyle creates the drama of this moment by exploiting a particular point of view, but elsewhere, dramatic or novelistic liberties are taken at moments of extreme excitement. In the rush-to-arms sequence in the first volume, Carlyle makes claims to an overarching knowledge of Paris in 1789 when he explains ‘[a]ll

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shops, unless it be the Bakers’ and Vintners’, are shut: Paris is in the streets; – rushing, foaming like some Venice wine-glass into which you had dropped poison.’88 The biblical imagery in this passage is easily missed; the bread and wine are the body and the blood: the blood which flows in the body politic, and is raging. ‘A slight sputter; – which has kindled the too combustible chaos; made it a roaring fire-chaos! Bursts forth insurrection, at sight of its own blood (for there were deaths by that sputter of fire), into endless rolling explosion of musketry . . . The Bastille is besieged!’89 And here, Carlyle lurches between a chaotic then and a deictic now. Scene setting of a different kind is found at various moments throughout the history. Carlyle breaks from the chaos of revolution to pan around all of France, to remind us that even though these events may seem convulsive, volcanic, and all-encompassing, the world (even France) will carry on. O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on Balls at the Orangerie of Versailles, where high-rouged Dames of the Palace are even now dancing with doublejacketted Hussar-Officers; – and also on this roaring Hell porch of a Hotel-de-Ville! Babel Tower, with the confusion of tongues, were not Bedlam added with the conflagration of thoughts, was no type of it. One forest of distracted steel bristles, endless, in front of an Electoral Committee; points itself, in horrid radii, against this and the other accused breast. It was the Titans warring with Olympus; and they scarcely crediting it, have conquered: prodigy of prodigies; delirious, – as it could not but be. Denunciation, vengeance; blaze of triumph on a dark ground of terror: all outward, all inward things fallen into one general wreck of madness!90

Just like in Georges Cuvier’s vision of earth history, the earth may repeatedly suffer convulsive catastrophe, but it will survive. Carlyle’s sense of the political life of France is the same; the infrastructure may collapse but the nation will continue in a changed form. Macaulay’s use of such a trope is indicative of the difference not only between their styles, but also of their worldviews. In his History, Macaulay cuts from the political action in the heart of the nation to the West Country, with the arrival of the Duke of Monmouth, leader of the Pitchfork Rebellion in 1685. The appearance of the three ships, foreign built and without colours, perplexed the inhabitants of Lyme; and the uneasiness increased when it

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was found that the Customhouse officers, who had gone on board according to usage, did not return. The town’s people repaired to the cliffs, and gazed long and anxiously, but could find no solution of the mystery . . . From these boats landed about eighty men . . . Among them were Monmouth . . . [who] commanded silence, kneeled down on the shore, thanked God for having preserved the friends of liberty and pure religion . . . As soon as it was known under what leader and for what purpose the expedition came, the enthusiasm of the populace burst through all restraints. The little town was in an uproar with men running to and fro, and shouting ‘A Monmouth! A Monmouth! The Protestant religion!’91

One of the principal differences between the two is that there is no space in the Macaulay narrative: everything happens in the right order, and there is consensus and agreement even amongst the potentially revolutionary populace. In narrative terms, he sets up the ‘uneasiness’ of the locals in Lyme, and then satisfies narratological need with the revelation that it is Monmouth. Here in the little town of Lyme, as elsewhere in the History, Macaulay works hard to find universal political consensus. In a later volume he naïvely asserts consensus where none existed; instead of prophesying two centuries of bloody civil unrest and terrorism, he contends, ‘May he [the historian] be able also to relate that wisdom, justice and time gradually did in Ireland what they had done in Scotland, and that all the races which inhabit the British isles were at length indissolubly blended into one people!’92 Carlyle was more cynical regarding the capabilities of the democratic process. ‘One thing an elected Assembly . . . is fit for: Destroying. Which indeed is but a more decided exercise of its natural talent for Doing Nothing. Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.’93 It is on the rights and powers of the elected assembly that Macaulay’s History becomes its most nationalistic. In a Burkean eulogy of the Glorious Revolution he explains ‘[n]ot a single flower of the crown was touched’, and he goes on to compare it to more recent political upheavals.94 As our Revolution was a vindication of ancient rights, so it was conducted with strict attention to ancient formalities. In almost every word and act may be discerned a profound reverence for the past. The Estates of the Realm deliberated in the old halls and according to the old rules . . . The conference was held with all the antique ceremonial . . . The speeches present an almost ludicrous contrast to the revolutionary oratory of every other country. Both the English parties agreed in treating with solemn respect the ancient constitutional traditions of the state . . . When at length the dispute had been accommodated, the new sovereigns were proclaimed

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with the old pageantry. All the fantastic pomp of heraldry was there . . . To us, who have lived in the year 1848, it may seem almost an abuse of terms to call a proceeding, conducted with so much deliberation, with so much sobriety, and with such minute attention to prescriptive etiquette, by the terrible name of Revolution. And yet this revolution, of all revolutions the least violent, has been of all revolutions the most beneficent.95

Both historians were amongst the greatest storytellers in the discipline, but what emerges quite clearly, here, is that their historical subjects are exemplars of their historical methodology. When reading the History, one finds that Macaulay’s range of knowledge is utterly astounding; his patience with the breadth of the source material and his ability to make sense of it are both his strength and his weakness as a historian. Devoted to clean lines and clarity of representation, he is the Canaletto of history. Carlyle was its Turner. For him, the past was inaccessible and so was only recoverable impressionistically. Towards the end of writing the second volume of The French Revolution he wrote on 24 July 1836, to his wife, Jane, that: For two or three days I am to have the most perfect rest now. Then Louis is to be tried and guillotined; then the Gironde &c &c: it all stands pretty fair in my head; nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to splash down what I know, in large masses of colours; that it may look like a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance, – which it is.96

The splashes of colour are not found throughout The French Revolution, but they are what is without doubt most memorable about Carlyle’s achievement: the idea that history’s essence is chaotic, cannot be made sense of, and that, like much painting, its narrative is not really linear, but spatial. This is the key difference between Macaulay and Carlyle. The goal of all history for Carlyle is poetical; it uses language, figuration, and is rich in metaphor. Carlyle had already noticed this facet of narrative. ‘The most gifted man can observe, still more can record, only the series of his own impressions: his observation, therefore, to say nothing of its other imperfections, must be successive, while the things done were often simultaneous; the things done were not a series, but a group.’97 Throughout The French Revolution Carlyle’s voice is one that emphasises the incendiary potential in any action, event, or speech; history sits upon friable earth and is subject to sudden and violent change. Macaulay’s implied narrator throughout The History is one that emphasises control and absolute knowledge. ‘The violence of revolutions’, that is all revolutions in history and across the globe, ‘is generally proportioned to the

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degree of the maladministration which has produced them.’98 His use of tense, point of view, rhetorical flourish all move towards situating the narrator as one who speaks from an igneous, immovable, surefooted coign of vantage.99 For Macaulay’s implied narrator, history is solid and linear, with a specific set of relations that is recoverable by the historian – odd, given that Macaulay’s ‘On History’ so systematically asserts the absences of history. Both Macaulay and Carlyle were trying to make sense of their past, to cordon off the mistakes of history as a new era was beginning to take shape. For Brian Young, the retelling of the French Revolution marked ‘a space in which much of the destruction that it had caused, particularly of religion, might yet be undone.’100 This is certainly true, but the Revolution was also a subject matter for Carlyle that met with his own philosophy of history. The approach, style, and content all reveal him as a radical, even a Romantic, who favoured the heroic potential of the populace.101 Here was an event that proved Carlyle’s instinct true: history was bloody, comic, epic, and chaotic. The epic form, which John Stuart Mill had so enthused about when he reviewed Carlyle, is the only form that can speak the true spirit of history, because in lesser narrative forms, too much is done to suppress and homogenise the turbulence and magnitude of the past.102 Moreover, Young is right to stress Carlyle’s attempt to record the whole of the French Revolution, but there is also a sense in which his work is equally a critique of the possibilities of history itself. One of Carlyle’s final comments on the character of conclusion in historical narrative is one that draws from antiquity, but also acknowledges the innate contiguity of history that cannot be ended in the same way that, say, a novel can: ‘Homer’s Epos, it is remarked, is like a BasRelief sculpture: it does not conclude, but merely ceases. Such, indeed, is the Epos of Universal History itself.’103 The same argument may be applied to Macaulay’s History. He had stated from the outset that he had wanted to reach the French Revolution, but his politics, historiographical style, and sensibility could not have countenanced it. He had chosen his subject because it reflected his outlook on the past. His focus on the Glorious Revolution is revealing of his politics, insofar as here was proof that Whig progress was not only possible but also quite real.

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Forgetting the past Returning to Foucault’s dramatic assessment that in the nineteenth century historiography was affected by ‘a great upheaval that occurred in the Western episteme’ that ‘shattered’ the unity that existed at the beginning of the period, is there more to add?104 There is a convergence in the nineteenth century of a variety of forces that give rise to implications of the need both to record and, more significantly, to forget history. Both of the historians’ styles, although seemingly opposed, are a response to the same historical effect. In Carlyle’s case, this inevitable act of forgetfulness is articulated particularly in his use of the language of sublimity, and also at many points quite overtly in his choice of theme and content. But it must also be acknowledged that The French Revolution is, after all, a history. It is didactic and attempts to shape the early-Victorian political inheritance. For Macaulay, the attempt to forget is a conscious one; he states that an essential part of history-making is forgetting. Moreover, with the absence of critical attention to the act of forgetting in both the form and content of the History, Macaulay’s act of forgetting is one that tries to forget itself, too. Carlyle’s narrator is aware of the literary form; Macaulay tries to forget it. Carlyle’s narrator sees a canvas; Macaulay’s, a pane of glass. The sudden conflation of history and the novel at the beginning of the period is not to be underestimated. Macaulay’s writings effectively acknowledged and responded to the need to explain the past’s evergrowing absences. Like the popular fiction of the period, Macaulay’s narrative style was ideal for mid-Victorians because it rendered the past contiguous while it sought to drown out the cacophony of the modern world. As such, Macaulay’s popularity was destined to suffer in the historically altered period of the latter half of the century, which began to show impatience with most breeds of architectonic explanation. Later, historiography even moved away from narrative as its principal mode of execution, which lasted beyond the period only as a mere indulgence that the now professionalised ‘science’ of history would inevitably distrust.105 Macaulay’s death on 28 December 1859 symbolically marked the end of an era, just a few weeks after the publication of a book that would go on to cause great controversy: Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. On the last day of that year, Walter Bagehot, in his obituary of Macaulay, concluded by quoting one of his subject’s earlier comments on Burke: ‘He had in the highest degree that noble faculty whereby man is enabled to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and the unreal.’106 Bagehot’s assessment could not have been a more timely and pertinent

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description for this unusual Victorian who both sensed time’s sublimity and sought to thwart it through selective remembrance. History for Macaulay and the Victorians became not only an act of recovering the past, but simultaneously a kind of forgetting of history’s magnificence, tumultuousness, capriciousness, and its strange sublimities.

Notes 1 Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England, The Works of Lord Macaulay, Edited by His Sister Lady Trevelyan, vol. 1–4, 8 vols (London: 1866), vol. 2, p. 396. 2 George Eliot, Letter to Sarah Hennell, 15 August 1859, Novelists on the Novel, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Routledge, 1959), p. 250. 3 There have been numerous studies on the rise of and enduring popularity of historywriting from the classical period to the present day. See J. W. Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 2009). 4 There are three works on Macaulay to which I am particularly indebted for the direction taken in this chapter, all of which have contributed to my understanding of Macaulay’s status as a historian. George Levine’s is perhaps the most incisive study of Macaulay’s historical sensibility and I use it here to suggest that Macaulay’s temperament and persona were particularly attuned to responding to the cultural and ideological pressures that I am foregrounding; George Levine, The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). J. W. Burrow’s A Liberal Descent has proved an invaluable work; it is remarkable for its wit, breadth of investigation, and creative assessment of Macaulay’s literary and political objectives as a historian; J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). The argument here complements rather than takes issue with Burrow’s, insofar as I am attempting to draw attention to the cultural pressures that Macaulay was responding to, and I am suggesting that Macaulay’s objectives as a historian were intensified by these pressures. Finally, perhaps the most interesting study of Macaulay’s historical style is to be found in Peter Gay, Style in History (London: Cape, 1975). For a lively assessment of Carlyle’s career and his queer relationship with the century that preceded him, see B. W. Young, The Victorian Eighteenth Century: An Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). On the emergence of historical style in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century see Mark Salber Phillips, ‘Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transformation from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography,’ PMLA 118.3 (2003); Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Victor G. Wexler, David Hume and the History of England (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1979). 5 Macaulay, History of England. The Dictionary of National Biography notes that ‘[t]welve days from publication 3000 copies had been sold. By 10 January 1849 a second edition of 3000 had gone, and of a third edition of 5000, 1250 had been already ordered.’ William Thomas, ‘Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron Macaulay (1800– 1859),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online

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edn, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17349 (January 2008, accessed 23 November 2010). See J. W. Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 2009); Gay, Style in History; Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997); Edward Hallett Carr and R. W. Davies, What is History?: the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, January–March 1961, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1987); Pieter Geyl, Debates with Historians (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1974); Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 400–1. In Macaulay’s canon there is little evidence that his political opinions or writing style changed much throughout his adulthood until he died at the age of fifty-nine. Macaulay, History of England, vol. 2, p. 397. Levine, Boundaries of Fiction, p. 80. Margaret Macaulay, Recollections by a Sister of T. B. Macaulay (London: 1864), pp. 23– 4. Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. Thomas Pinney, 6 vols (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), vol.3, p. 129. Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, p. 158. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, 1931 (New York: Norton, 1964), p. 11. It is important to point out that in Macaulay’s praise of the Glorious Revolution, he is keen to acknowledge that it is still an England that needs the Reform Acts of 1832. ‘The people had become Roundheads; but the body which alone was authorised to speak in the name of the people was still a body of Cavaliers.’ Macaulay, History of England, vol. 3, pp. 623–4. George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), vol. 1, p. 133. Quoted in Levine, Boundaries of Fiction, p. 101. For further discussion of this particular aspect of Macaulay’s sensibility, see Levine, pp. 85–102. Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Editors’ Introduction,’ Selected Writings, eds John Clive and Thomas Pinney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. xxix. Charles Darwin, ‘From My Marriage, January 29, 1839, and Residence in Upper Gower Street, to Our Leaving London and Settling at Down, September 14, 1842,’ Autobiographies, eds Michael Neve and Sharon Messenger (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 65. Adrian J. Desmond and James R. Moore, Darwin (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 370. Macaulay, History of England, vol. 1, p. 1. Burrow, A Liberal Descent, p. 35. Pieter Geyl points out that even though Macaulay seemed to favour the French Revolution, his writings seem terrified of the actuality of such events. ‘He stood firmly by the middle position of the Whig, he wanted reform in order to ward off revolution and the deplorable excesses to which revolution gives rise.’ Geyl, Debates with Historians, pp. 32–3.

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24 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speeches of the Right Honorable T. B. Macaulay, Corrected by Himself (London: Longman, 1854), p. 2. 25 Macaulay, Speeches, p. 18. 26 Macaulay, Speeches, p. 73. 27 Macaulay, Speeches, p. 267, p. 261. 28 Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘On History,’ The Works of Lord Macaulay, vol. 5 (London: 1866); Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History,’ Historical Essays, ed. Chris Vanden Bossche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History Again,’ Historical Essays, ed. Chris Vanden Bossche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 29 The review was first published in May 1828. 30 Macaulay, ‘On History,’ p. 122. 31 Macaulay, ‘On History,’ pp. 122–3. 32 Carlyle, ‘On History,’ p. 9. 33 Carlyle, ‘On History,’ p. 4. 34 Macaulay, ‘On History,’ p. 122. 35 Macaulay, ‘On History,’ p. 124. 36 Macaulay, ‘On History,’ pp. 129–30. 37 Macaulay, ‘On History,’ p. 131. 38 Carlyle, ‘On History,’ p. 7. 39 See Young, Victorian Eighteenth Century, pp. 15–17. 40 Carlyle, ‘On History,’ p. 4. 41 Macaulay, ‘On History,’ p. 144. 42 Macaulay, ‘On History,’ p. 163. 43 Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, vol. 5, p. 30. 44 Walter Scott, Waverley, 1814 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). 45 Ann Ward Radcliffe, The Italian; or, the Confessional of the Black Penitents: A Romance, 1797, ed. Frederick Garber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 46 Macaulay, ‘On History,’ p. 157. 47 Macaulay, ‘On History,’ pp. 157–8. 48 Bishop Watson (1737–1816). Richard Watson, bishop of Llandaff, was not as unscientific as Macaulay suggests; among other things in his career he had been a Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge. 49 Macaulay, ‘On History,’ p. 156. 50 Carlyle, ‘On History,’ p. 6. 51 Walter Bagehot, The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St. John-Stevas, 15 vols (London: The Economist, 1965), vol.1, p. 425. 52 Bagehot, Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 1, p. 425. 53 Bagehot, Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 1, p. 425. 54 Bagehot, Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 1, pp. 425–6. 55 Charles Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay’s History of England, 1938 (London: Frank Cass, 1964). 56 Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay’s History of England, pp. 24–5. 57 Gay, Style in History, p. 111. 58 Both Levine and Gay use this passage but neither considers the significance of futurity in Macaulay’s writing. See Levine, Boundaries of Fiction, p. 82; Gay, Style in History, p. 122. 59 Rupke, The Great Chain of History; Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time; Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam; Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660–1815;

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Page, ‘The Rise of the Diluvial Theory in British Geological Thought.’ 60 Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘A Prophetic Account of a Grand National Epic Poem, to Be Entitled “The Wellingtoniad”, and to Be Published A.D. 2824,’ 1824, Miscellaneous Essays and the Lays of Ancient Rome (London: J. M. Dent, 1910), pp. 323–32. 61 See William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel: 1880–1940 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 15–31. 62 Leopold von Ranke, The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome, During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 3 vols (London, 1840); Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Von Ranke,’ Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (London: Longman, 1851). 63 Macaulay, ‘Von Ranke,’ pp. 535–6. 64 William Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Dore, London: A Pilgrimage (London: Grant, 1872), see opp. p. 188. 65 Alfred Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam,’ Tennyson’s Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Robert W. Hill, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1999), 56: lines 3–4. 66 In the case of Hardy I am thinking here of novels like Two on a Tower, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The Woodlanders, and A Pair of Blue Eyes – the last has that sublime moment of terror experienced by Henry Knight as he hangs from a cliff and stares the past and the future in the face, contemplating his own mortality in the countenance of an embedded fossil. See Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ed. Tim Dolin (London: Penguin, 1998); Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, ed. Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin, 1998); Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. Dennis Taylor (London: Penguin, 1998); Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower: A Romance, ed. Sally Shuttleworth (London: Penguin, 1999); Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Pamela Dalziel (London: Penguin, 1998). 67 Richard Jefferies, After London, Wild England and Amaryllis at the Fair, 1885 (London: J. M. Dent, 1939), p. 3, p. 14. 68 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1895 (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), p. 76. 69 Carlyle, ‘On History,’ p. 3. 70 Macaulay, ‘On History,’ p. 160. 71 Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970). Williams calls this phenomenon the ‘problem of the knowable community’ (p. 26) and suggests that the genre of the novel, in part, responded to and allayed these emergent fractures in Victorian epistemology. Terry Eagleton argues a tangentially similar, though less rigorous, point: ‘If one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies . . . one could do worse than reply: “the failure of religion.”’ See Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp. 22–3, also pp. 93–4. 72 This is not to suggest that metaphoric readings of the Bible only emerge in the nineteenth century, but merely that literal interpretations of the Bible move increasingly to the fringes of the European Church. 73 Carlyle, ‘On History,’ p. 3. 74 Carlyle, ‘On History,’ p. 3. 75 Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, 1845, 3rd ed., 5 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, 1887). 76 Cromwell and Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, vol. 1, p. 2; Carlyle, ‘On History Again,’ p. 8.

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Narrative and the historical sublime Macaulay, Speeches, pp. 1–81, pp. 85–93. Macaulay, ‘On History,’ p. 129. Cromwell and Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, vol. 1, p. 3. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, 1837, eds K. J. Fielding and David Sorenson, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). William Makepeace Thackeray (unsigned), ‘The Times, 3 Aug, 1837,’ Thomas Carlyle: the Critical Heritage, ed. Jules Paul Seigel (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1971), p. 69. Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. 1, p. 40. Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. 1, p. 307. Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. 1, p. 463. Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. 2, p. 418. Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. 1, p. 106. Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. 1, p. 143. Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. 1, p. 188. Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. 1, p. 199. Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. 1, p. 206. Macaulay, History of England, vol. 1, p. 446. Macaulay, History of England, vol. 3, p. 458. Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. 1, p. 227. Macaulay, History of England, vol. 2, p. 395 – see pp. 392–8. Macaulay, History of England, vol. 2, pp. 395–6. Thomas Carlyle, The Collected Letters, Volume 9, 1836; online edn, http://carlyleletters. dukejournals.org (accessed 4 December 2009). Carlyle, ‘On History,’ p. 7. Macaulay, History of England, vol. 3, p.1. See also Burrow, History of Histories, pp. 384–5. Young, Victorian Eighteenth Century, p. 25. A stylistically different, Tory, and popular account of the French Revolution was written by John Wilson Croker. His work was characterised by a kind of fear that tradition was under attack in any sort of social or philosophical change. Appearing over a number of decades in the Quarterly Review, the essays were published collectively in the year of his death. He was equally the enemy of Macaulay. They had each sought the satisfaction of publicly embarrassing one another, either in print (with scathing reviews of one another’s work) or in reported debates in the House. See John Wilson Croker, Essays on the Early Period of the French Revolution . . . Reprinted from ‘The Quarterly Review,’ with Additions and Corrections (London: John Murray, 1857). ‘This is not so much a history, as an epic poem; and notwithstanding, or even in consequence of this, the truest of histories. It is the history of the French Revolution, and the poetry of it, both in one; and on the whole no work of greater genius, either historical or poetical, has been produced in this country for many years’. John Stuart Mill, ‘Carlyle’s French Revolution,’ Collected Works of John Stuart Mill – Essays on French History and Historians, ed. John M. Robson, vol. 20 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 133. Quoted in Young, Victorian Eighteenth Century, p. 27. Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. 2, p. 451. Foucault, Order of Things, p. 401. The Oxford History School began teaching history to undergraduates in 1850. Bagehot, Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 1, p. 431.

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1 George Smith, probably taken around 1874.

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2 Nicolas Poussin. Winter, or the Deluge, 1660–64.

3 Thomas Burnet. Illustration from The Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684.

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4 Benjamin West. The Deluge, 1790 – retouched 1803.

5 J. M. W. Turner. The Deluge, 1805.

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7 John Martin. The Deluge, 1834.

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8 J. M. W. Turner. Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning After the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, 1843.

9 J. M. W. Turner. Shade and Darkness: the Evening of the Deluge, 1843.

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10 William Dyce. Pegwell Bay: a Recollection of October 5th, 1858, 1860.

11 Roger Fenton. Pont-y-Garth, near Capel Curig, 1857.

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12 Roger Fenton. Falls of the Llugwy, at Pont-y-Pair, 1857.

13 Roger Fenton. Aira Force at Ullswater, 1858.

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4

Present endings: rethinking closure in the Victorian novel

Conclusions are the weak points of most authors, but some of the fault lies in the very nature of the conclusion, which is at best a negation.1 (George Eliot, Letter to John Blackwood, 1 May 1857)

T

he faultline in Victorian culture that the Gilgamesh controversy both highlights and contributes to suggests that the arts were at best struggling to form a sense of their relationship to the past within conflicting and emergent models of time. So while Hutton, Lyell, and Darwin may have been able to work within depths of time that were unthinkable, where absence was fructifying and productive rather than sublime and intellectually crippling, we have seen that the arts were struggling to keep apace. In the 1850s both William Dyce’s philosophically engaging Pegwell Bay and the forensic landscape photography of Roger Fenton squared the circle of representing deep time without recourse to narrative iconography. Earlier in the century, Thomas Carlyle in his essays and historiography was able to sense the darkness and magnitude of history, though his levels of engagement with narrative form have to be acknowledged as a means of controlling and taming the sublimity of history. Carlyle did still try to ‘know’ the past despite his suspicion of such an endeavour. Literature, in the guise of prose fiction or the novel, the most popular form in the Victorian period, was decades behind these forms. The primary means of dissemination or aesthetic communication in the visual, painterly arts is not narrative; narrative shares its role in painting, if it appears at all, with colour, shape, idea, arrangement, space, and perspective among others. Historiography has more organic connections with narrative form: it is at least written in prose, one of the most standard forms of a story. Nevertheless, as the discipline became increasingly specialised in the nineteenth century, historiography discovered means of historical analysis that circumvented the need for traditional

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Macaulayesque narratives of heroes and villains. But the novel: ‘Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.’2 From its much-contested date of inception to the overtly experimental time of our period, the form has almost exclusively prioritised narrative as its principal means of dissemination. Romances, bildungsromane, satires, petites histoires, picaresque adventures, all in their differing ways have to prioritise narrative as their means of presentation and communication. In the Hebraic tradition the Bible exists as one of the principal models of narrative structure. It is a set of stories that tells the West about itself, about its origins and ending. It is a text that blankets all of time past, present, and future – not encyclopaedically, but the extreme beginning and end of time are between its covers. It is a model of time borrowed by the novel. And in the nineteenth century it was a model of time that the novel became increasingly troubled by, as it noticed the artificiality and arbitrary nature of the beginning and ending.3 What is an ending in fiction? It is something that makes sense of the end of a narrative, or that in its own way attempts to complete the meaning of the work. An ending is what happens at the end: in the end Cordelia and Lear both die; Eugene and Lizzie get married and live outside society; Maurice escapes into the greenwood with Scudder ‘leaving no trace of his presence’; Aschenbach stays too long in Venice and dies from cholera; or Helen notices that ‘there will be such a crop of hay as never!’4 All are satisfactory endings, but they are different in execution and effect. The more traditional ‘fairy tale’ or ‘closed’ ending (neither term is particularly helpful; here I refer to it as the ‘dead-end’) is one that attempts to resolve fully the meanings and questions raised in the text, but this is fundamentally different to a novel’s closure. If we think of some canonical fiction, Jane Austen, say, it is easy to see that her six completed novels all have a similar ending for the protagonists: marriage. No one, though, would say that these novels have the same closure. The focalising couples may marry in Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Mansfield Park (1816), but the landscapes of closure in the novels are very different, as are the politics of theme with which they engage.5 For example, where Henry and Maria elope from Mansfield and eventually divorce, Willoughby and Miss Grey are forced to endure the longevity of a loveless match. Even so, both modes of closure in the novels mark a point of conclusiveness or stasis. Closure is the means by which the ending satisfies the need for what David Richter repeatedly refers to in Fable’s End as ‘completeness’.6 In such a context open-closure is possible and likely. The text may refuse to resolve all themes and questions, or may not quell the rising of forms of consciousness in the novel. Effective

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closure lies not in a story’s completion but in the integrity of the ending’s relationship with the rest of the novel, to the extent that it gives shape to that novel. Effective closure is where the novel makes sense of itself. The novels read in this chapter are in no way meant to dramatise the entire species of narrative closure that the Victorian novelist was free to draw from (for there are nearly as many particular forms of closure as there are novels themselves). The works chosen here, instead, show the form mapping new territory by night – tentatively feeling in new directions toward the edges of narratological openness. These novels experiment with new modes of epistemological doubt; they find completeness in their moment of termination without corralling all of time-future. These fictions inaugurate a particular shift that turns away from temporal speculation, seeing it as a hopelessly fictive endeavour. They turn instead towards the spatial and the knowable. Emergent models of time had such a destabilising effect in Victorian culture that they not only changed the way that histories could be written, scenes painted, but also the very ways in which stories could be told. In rejecting Hebraic models of narrative that focus on a final ending, these closures may be seen to be attempting to shape a response to various models of deep time. Lambently, these endings struggle to illuminate such a vision. They move towards very particular kinds of openness where we can see that the novel form wants to move away from the vagaries of the satisfaction of its readership towards a form that more clearly represents the epistemological incompleteness of modernity. Modes of closure proliferate across the mid-century to encompass newer forms that correspond to the strangeness of the historical sublime. In describing different forms of closure, finding appropriate terminology is problematic because the differences amongst narratives can be so subtle as to evade specific categorisation. Nonetheless, my aims are not to identify taxonomically the range of endings, as there seems little ideological mileage to be gained from this. Instead the goal is to clarify the relations between the endings, to demonstrate the pattern or structure that they create. That is, to organise modes of closure so that the tension in conflicting models of time (the ‘Ussherian’ and the ‘deep’) may be more easily identifiable. As a descriptive term ‘open’ is gravely lacking in precision, but useful nonetheless. It does not mean that the novel is without closure. ‘Open’ describes closure of a different kind. The term is most unhelpful because a truly ‘open’ closure is not possible in narrative fiction. The sequencing of any narrative makes it inevitable that questions are resolved as part of the process of storytelling itself. The genuinely open ending is one that an

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implied reader, familiar with the proprieties, etiquette, and cartography of fiction, would not recognise as being such. What critics mean when they say ‘open-ended’ is that the key ideas that a particular fiction might mobilise are left to the implied reader to resolve or, more radically, to leave unresolved. The term ‘open’ merely functions as a means of referring to the range of possibilities that lie in opposition to that of the closed ‘dead-end’ in narrative. For my purposes here, there are three different kinds of openness and I use them only to navigate through the variety of closure that I will go on to consider. They show the struggle of the novel form to engage with emergent models of time. The ‘dead-end’ is my starting point, being a model of absolute closure found in, for example, Dickens’s David Copperfield.7 The ‘withheld end’ features narrators who deliberately break from their narratives at the point of enlightenment to leave the implied reader seemingly adrift in narratological possibility (like in Brontë’s Villette, or perhaps Great Expectations).8 The ‘progressive end’ is one that steps into the future beyond the immediate scope of the novel to explain, or merely suggest, the destinies of its characters (like Middlemarch or James’s Washington Square).9 The ‘present end’ is a narrative that ceases without venturing into the future. The most obvious and justifiable criticism of such an endeavour is that it is not possible to discuss meaningfully the endings that occur in all Victorian fiction. Such an undertaking would only be possible with an army of researchers, perhaps utilising the statistical methodology of Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees.10 Selection is necessary, so it is the novels that are most demonstrative of particular types of closure, rather than ones that use biblical iconography or geological metaphor, that are included. Moreover, the novel is such a fertile form that it is not feasible to assert that narrative fiction changed direction in this period. Nonetheless, the novels selected show that these new forms were not hidden away in experimental, oblique, or unread texts. This was a very public form of aesthetic innovation. Neither is it the case that selectivity is necessary only because this is a chapter in a wider interdisciplinary endeavour. The full-length studies devoted to the form of the novel are equally selective. Unsurprisingly, it has been mainly formalist critics that have been most interested in modes of closure. Marianna Torgovnick’s Closure in the Novel focusses on a handful of Victorian novels and novelists ending with Virginia Woolf.11 The drive towards modernism, which see the late-Victorians’ literary output as a prelude to the ‘high art’ of the early twentieth century, is also in evidence in Alan Friedman’s The Turn of the Novel.12 D. A. Miller’s Narrative and its Discontents selects only three novelists (Austen, Eliot,

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and Stendhal) to formulate his ‘discomfort with the processes and implications of narrative itself’.13 All three critics demonstrate a lack of enthusiasm in querying what socio-cultural, historical, scientific, or economic forces were being brought to bear upon the form through history, or how history might bring about so fundamental a change, not to narrative, but to narratability itself.14 There are three influential figures in nineteenth-century studies who have provided historicised accounts of the function of narrative. Sally Shuttleworth’s 1984 monograph on George Eliot is an author-based study of the complex interrelations between text and culture.15 So is Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots of the same year, though with a slightly larger authorial bailiwick which assesses Darwin, Eliot, Hardy, Charles Kingsley, and Richard Jefferies. George Levine’s work has attempted to move across a broader range of material in The Boundaries of Fiction (1968), The Realistic Imagination (1981), Darwin and the Novelists (1988), and Dying to Know (2002).16 Although broadly historicist in its approach, Levine’s work foregrounds the impact of Darwin and has tended to focus on the broader aspects of narrative, rather than focussing on the emergence of newer forms of closure.17

Dead-end closure Where, for the complete expression of one’s subject, does a particular relation stop, giving way to some other not concerned in that expression? Really, universally, relations stop nowhere. And the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so . . . The prime effect of so sustained a system [that which makes a story interesting], is to lead on and on; while the fascination of following resides, by the same token, in the presumability somewhere of a convenient, of a visibly appointed stoppingplace. Art would be easy indeed if, by a fond power disposed to ‘patronise’ it, such conveniences, such simplifications, had been provided. We have, as the case stands, to invent and establish them, to arrive at them by a difficult, dire process of selection and comparison, of surrender and sacrifice. The very meaning of expertness is acquired courage to brace one’s self for the cruel crisis from the moment one sees it grimly loom.18

In this, added as the Preface to the 1907 New York Edition, James returns to his first-published novel Roderick Hudson of 1875, and writes of the problem of the web of relations that so occupied George Eliot in

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Middlemarch. It is a knot of a problem. If the novelist is to admit of a web of relations in the society of which they write, then they may not reasonably assume that it is possible for the entire web of relations to be brought happily to a close. The most basic forms of narrative may be characterised by instability or suspense, followed by closure.19 Social, domestic, political, economic, sexual, and familial equilibrium all are non-narratable states. They may be spoken of but they cannot constitute narrative, as can be seen in novels of ‘dead-end’ closure. Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50) was to be his last novel with a complete happy ending of marital stasis and bliss, where there is little space for a reader’s doubt after the final lines have been read. The first words of the novel, however, convey some sense of what it is attempting to do on a wider level. In Shandyean fashion, the chapter entitled ‘I AM BORN’ steps back briefly before David’s birth. The opening of the bildungsroman as a form is not inherently problematic; either the birth of the main character or some incident of their youth (like being physically and mentally abused and sent away to school in Jane Eyre) is the marker from which the coming of age story begins: ‘[t]o begin my life with the beginning of my life’.20 It is a reflexive and complex form, though. In the mid-Victorian bildungsroman, such as David Copperfield, the child cannot grow up; instead he must always return to the moralities and epistemologies that were already in place in childhood. In short, the protagonist of the bildungsroman must not develop, mentally, ethically, or politically. Such a novel is ‘closed’; it has reached an ideological and narratological dead end. Time must stand still: its happy ending – in fact, the happy ending in general – marks the desire for time to come to a dead stop. Mobility and change are the harbingers of sin; they breed anxieties, fears, and jealousies that can be annihilated if the end of time may only be reached. Although David Copperfield is a novel essentially about the young and youthfulness, it takes as its endpoint a particular moment in David’s life where it considers the character to have arrived at a kind of developmental or ontological stasis. This is not so significant in itself, except for the fact that the novel’s end, which tells of the marital bliss of David and others, marks the point at which the reader’s interest in David is supposed to cease. David has arrived at normality, and normality only exists without narrative. Franco Moretti, in his pioneering study of the European bildungsroman, has referred to normality as ‘a true semantic void.’21 A graph that mapped David’s emotional experiences throughout the novel would appear dynamic; at the point of the novel’s closure, however, David’s dynamic range of experience is unconditionally muted.

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Happiness is the order of the day, and every day until his death. We might ask: would David be happier if Steerforth were still alive? Or would he be happier with Uriah Heep out of prison? These questions are not straightforward to answer, but they flag up that the end of this particular story is not so much about the granting of happiness to its protagonist as it is to do with a kind of closing off from moral issues rather than narratological ones. Dickens attempts to suppress in a quite artificial manner the narratability of David’s life. Later, for example, closure in George Eliot or Henry James is characterised by impatience, fuss, confusion, or ambiguity on the level of both language and narrative. The earlier dead-end form of closure is then connected to anxieties over moral management rather than with readerly satisfaction. The fairy tale dead-end is a death, but of a happy sort. It is an arbitrary conclusion that functions in many ways on the same level as a tragic death, insofar as it marks a specific point when desire ends for the protagonist. The perfect union of David and his second wife has to end the novel, and David must subdue his ‘desire to linger’, for if he fails to do so his end will not be a perfect and happy one.22 And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet, these faces fade away. But one face, shining on me like a Heavenly light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond them all. And that remains. I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me. My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company. O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward! The End23

The finality of the ending is absolute. It takes David’s marriage as its central image and motions forwards towards his death, in which he cannot foresee a parting from his wife. The final gesture, as reality melts away, of ‘pointing upward’ to a heavenly bliss where the two shall never be parted, functions as a model of the infinite born of Western Christianity. Importantly though, it is a model of the infinite that is devoid of narrative in a specific way. It is not that a life of possibility in their ethereal existence is opening up to David and Agnes; they are to be together, that is their future. It is a certain future because it is static. It is free of desire, and as such is without narrative. Other novels that would emerge in the period gesture towards the future, but they do so in entirely different ways to this one.

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Opening dead-end closure E. M. Forster worried that ‘[i]f it was not for death and marriage I do not know how the average novelist would conclude’24 In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) both are possibilities at the end of Lucy Snowe’s story. A clutch of critics have been interested in the narratological and ideological productivity of the mode of closure itself. Terry Eagleton rightly accepts the possibilities of the novel’s conclusion and sees in it a fitting expression of its principal themes. For him, the novel’s ambiguity (is M. Paul drowned, or are they eventually wed?) is suggestive of the text’s inability to provide an appropriate end for Lucy, outside the bounds of love and marriage. The ambiguity of the novel then draws away from the rails of both tragedy and romance, insofar as despair is denied just as much as happiness is. With the novel ending as it does, both tragedy and happiness continue in perpetuity as endless possibilities for Lucy: [T]he conclusion remains calculatedly unresolved, underlining the delights of domestic settlement at the same time as it protests against the bland unreality of such an ending, witnessing to the truth of an emotional agony which cannot be simply wished away. In the end, the novel is unable to opt for either possibility: it cannot betray its sense of the reality of failure, but swerves nervously away from the corollary that this might imply – that worldly achievement may be empty and invalid.25

Eagleton sees in the novel’s unresolved conclusion a commentary upon the transparency and shallowness of material desire, coupled with an inability to envision the world as one steeped in tragedy. It is an effective and focussed reading, but ultimately it is one that leaves us hermeneutically adrift between two poles as the novel itself seems to. Where Sally Shuttleworth has remarked upon the novel’s narrator as one who ‘teases and bewilders her audience, contradicting herself, withholding vital information, and confounding, as in the notorious open ending, biographical fact with readerly desire’, her new historicist study of Victorian psychology steers clear of over-interpreting Lucy’s particular pathology; it also attempts to draw conclusions about the nature of closure in the novel.26 Others have not been so cautious or, indeed, openly aware of the novel’s essentially fictive status. Athena Vrettos sees narrative closure as the end to a set of troubling symptoms: the narrative must ‘cure the heroine in order to end the text. As in a medical case history, the state of wellness collapses the need for narrative.’27 The refusal of closure (did M. Paul return or drown?), for Vrettos, reveals Lucy’s future as open and pregnant with possibility, but the presence of

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storm imagery is indicative of a continuing unsettlement of Lucy’s nerves. Her pathology continues beyond the end of the text.28 Beth Torgerson’s more recent study finds value in this approach, explaining that, ‘Lucy Snowe writes her narrative years after the storm, the completion of the text itself should be read as an indication of the state of her psychological health . . . she may never achieve perfect health.’29 Both readings touch on an important facet of the novel’s closure. They both suggest that the novel’s completeness is revealed through the withholding of what would traditionally be seen as essential information in a novel’s closure. This is a ‘withheld end’. While there is narratological stability, and indeed readability, at the end of this text, their readings are still a little troubling in their insistence on seeing Lucy as a stable, signifying agent. For Vrettos and Torgerson, Lucy is an autonomous being whose symptoms may be read as those of a patient might be. Lucy, however, is not governed by our worldly practices, situations, or systems of care and analysis; she is, to use A. J. Greimas’s term, an actant. She is a set of narratological functions in a story. She is not an impermeable and complex analysand; she is the representation of one in a novel. These are, of course, difficult and convoluted questions, with a nexus of related issues, but that does not mean that we are free to ‘read’ Lucy unproblematically through her symptoms. This still leaves us with the Gordian question of the ‘notorious open ending’:30 is this the first high-profile, mainstream, Victorian novel that deliberately sets out to confound readerly expectation by denying adequate closure? For a number of reasons, Villette is a much darker, more imaginative and disturbing work than the more traditionally feminine bildungsroman that is Jane Eyre (1847), or Dinah Craik’s Olive (1850), for example.31 Lucy’s role as the teller of her own tale is also one that is shot through with complexity. She is a peevish narrator who on occasion appropriates the power of her reader by withholding essential information about her own story. The most obvious example of such behaviour in the novel is the famous revelation of Dr John. The novel begins with Lucy’s teenage sojourn at her godmother’s (Mrs Bretton’s), where she meets the young Graham Bretton. As a young adult, Lucy has moved on from the Brettons and is forced to take employment at a boarding school in Belgium, where a handsome young doctor comes to call upon one of the school’s more attractive, ignorant, and vain pupils: Ginevra Fanshawe. The pairing is unsuitable and misfires, and the young doctor, Dr John, develops a friendship with Lucy. The way in which events unfold that connect the present with the past, when Dr John is revealed to be the same Graham Bretton of Lucy’s childhood, is a relatively well-used tactic in the mid-

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Victorian novel. What is striking, though, is the oddness of manner in which the revelation is narrated. Graham courteously rose up to greet me. He stood tall on the hearth, a figure justifying his mother’s unconcealed pride. ‘So you are come down,’ said he; ‘you must be better then . . . I trust you really do feel better?’ ‘Much better,’ I said calmly. ‘Much better, I thank you, Dr John.’ For, reader, this tall young man – this darling son – this host of mine – this Graham Bretton, was Dr John: he, and no other . . . The discovery was not of to-day, its dawn had penetrated my perceptions long since. Of course I remembered young Bretton well; and though ten years (from sixteen to twenty-six) may greatly change the boy as they mature him to the man, yet they could bring no such utter difference as would suffice wholly to blind my eyes, or baffle my memory . . . I first recognised him on that occasion, noted several chapters back, when my unguardedly-fixed attention had drawn on me the mortification of an implied rebuke. Subsequent observation confirmed, in every point, that early surmise.32

The deictic strangeness of this moment in the novel is heightened by the fact that no reason is given by Lucy for having withheld this seemingly vital piece of information, this remarkable coincidence. The behaviour of the narrator is meant to baffle the implied reader, being one who is familiar with the ways that fiction is constructed – one who expects separate characters to be treated as such – one who naïvely trusts the integrity of their narrator. After this point in the novel, an implied reader is aware that Lucy’s status as a transparent and reliable narrator of her own story is problematic. They are aware that, while she may not deliberately lie, the narrator is comfortable with the withholding of key information. The implied reader carries this knowledge with them inexorably towards the ‘open’ ending. In terms of Villette, the openness to which critics have referred translates as the question of whether Lucy married and attained happiness and satisfaction in her emotional and interior life. Or, on a more basic level, it is a question of whether we are reading romance or tragedy. This is surely a problem at the level of narration, and not one of reading. The dark, sometimes gothic, psychological violence of the novel, the truthfulness of its heroine’s difficulty in ‘fitting in’ with those around her, the querulousness and unreliability of the narrator, the array of lost opportunities, all suggest that the novel’s reader is not wandering in the golden realms of romance. One could – as Sally Shuttleworth has – read the novel’s closure as successfully explaining its own politics. She has

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written that the novel’s readership forms ‘one more layer of social surveillance which Lucy, our narrator, is determined to frustrate. Her autobiography operates not as a form of confession, which would then transfer power to the reader, but rather as a form of creative evasion which leads finally to a new vision of embodied selfhood.’33 While I am not so optimistic for the security of Lucy’s selfhood at the close of the novel, Shuttleworth’s comments suggest a particular politics of narrative in this context: that the withholding of narrative is a means by which power may be retained by our narrator. So although the ending may seem open, this is still an effective form of closure as it succeeds in confirming the ‘power’ of our narrator to exist separate from her world. But it does so by confirming a continuing pathology on the part of the narrator. An open ending is also one that does not use a tense of past or future; it is something that exists only in the present. If the text gestures towards any kind of future, then to some extent the text is attempting to explain itself beyond the ending. Looking at the language of the narrator is revealing of the rising pressure of conscience in the novel. And now the three years are past: M. Emanuel’s return is fixed. It is Autumn; he is to be with me ere the mists of November come. My school flourishes, my house is ready: I have made him a little library, filled its shelves with the books he left in my care . . . The sun passes the equinox; the days shorten, the leaves grow sere; but – he is coming. Frosts appear at night; November has sent his fogs in advance; the wind takes its autumn moan; but – he is coming.34

The style here can be read in both ways: as one that is leading up to his return, and as one that suggests tragedy, particularly in the overemphatic rhyming repetition of ‘he is coming’ (even the pathetic fallacy of autumn is deployed – and not spring). She goes on to implore, ‘God watch that sail! Oh! Guard it!’, ‘Peace, peace, Banshee – “keening” at every window! It will rise – it will swell – it shrieks out long’.35 The narrator continues to relay that the ‘storm roared frenzied, for seven days. It did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their full of sustenance.’ And ‘when the sun returned, his light was night to some!’36 At this moment, her narration breaks with, ‘Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope.’37 Though without certainty, this is the strongest suggestion of tragedy that the novel has to offer. There is little likelihood of a ‘kind heart’ being troubled by M. Paul’s return, though hope is as permissible for the tragedians as it is for the romantics. She

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continues, ‘Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.’38 With certainty only an utterance away, the tone mocks the desires of the wish-fulfilling reader and confirms, compliments even, the sturdiness of the realist. I understand that such a reading risks falling prey to precisely the traps of phallocentric reading that Gilbert and Gubar were rightly mistrustful of; however, I am not seeking to ‘solve the problem’ that the ending of the novel presents us with. Instead, I am trying to suggest that in the tone and language of the closing sections, the novel is not as ‘open’ as it is all too frequently appropriated as being. Metaphor, simile, tonality, the rising pressure of conscience in the novel, the emotional momentum of the narration, all push forwards into a future that Lucy desires the implied reader to understand as characterised by tragedy. Indeed, it is all too easy to forget that Lucy is narrating from this future. The final lines of the text confirm that ‘Madame Beck prospered all the days of her life; so did Père Silas; Madame Walravens fulfilled her ninetieth year before she died. Farewell.’39 The narrator knows the ‘ending’; she has arrived at the point of certainty, but refuses to relay it to us. The novel, then, takes us to the brink of an epistemological abyss, but withdraws from it, unable finally to avoid the trappings of the traditional forms of romance or tragedy. Does our heroine step bravely into an unknown future of ‘embodied selfhood’?40 The text seems to suggest not. It is a future that she has already arrived in and one which she chooses to withhold from us (much like the narrator in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Winter: My Secret’), and one where her nervous pathology prevents her from a fully socialised interaction with her reader.41 In Villette, the end may indeed be uncertain, but it is an end in which the future exists. It is narrated from and it is gestured towards. The narrative is still fundamentally biblical at its most core, structural, level. It is stubbornly present in the closing lines of the text. It is a novel that toys with the notion of openness but cannot fully envision it.

Too-great expectations Villette’s mode of closure has striking structural similarities to two other canonical Victorian fictions, both of which suggest a suspicion of the idea of a biblically narratable future: George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), and Great Expectations. The circumstances surrounding the rewriting of

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the original ending of the latter novel has been a cause of interest for biographers and literary critics alike, from John Forster’s life of 1872 through to Michael Slater’s in 2009.42 In reading the initial proofs for the novel, Edward Bulwer-Lytton disapproved of the ending as too dark. He worried that it ‘should leave Pip a solitary man’.43 This earlier version has drawn in debate that compares the effectiveness of the two endings, so much so that most modern editions of the novel feel the need to include both finales. The first ending is almost universally seen as one that is ‘closed’, in that it tells us the destinies of the two main characters in the text. Pip returns to England after a number of years in Africa. Out one day, walking with Biddy and Joe’s son – Little Pip – in London, he is stopped by Estella and learns that she has remarried a doctor (after an unsuccessful marriage with the brutish Drummle). She mistakenly assumes that Pip’s nephew is his son, and Pip does not correct her in her error. Instead, he decides to take satisfaction in the fact that he ‘was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.’44 The end depicts permanence, a slow and steady disappointment, a confirmation that Pip understands that Estella is finally not to be his. He has arrived at certainty, as has Estella. It is a ‘closed’ end, but is it a sad one, as Bulwer-Lytton complained?45 Pip is disappointed, but the closure of the novel marks the end of a pathological and potentially destructive desire in Pip. He does not plead with Estella; he leaves her to misunderstand his own marital status. He walks away. Would a ‘happy’ ending, after all, be one in which we see the couple wed? Surely this is not the case. The novel teaches us that Estella has had the heart educated out of her; were she to marry Pip we cannot believe that future would be statically happy and without narrative. The novel’s original close marks a new beginning of the self for Pip: true to the form of the bildungsroman, Pip has found his place in the world. He is the happiest that he could be precisely because he is not with Estella. One of Dickens’s earliest critics, his friend John Forster, described this closure as one that ‘seems to be more consistent with the drift, as well as natural working out, of the tale.’46 In writing to Forster, Dickens had explained Bulwer-Lytton’s objections, but Dickens was not one to be easily persuaded, and must already have felt the need for the change. He explained that ‘I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration’, perhaps because like Villette it suggests a shallow and happy ending to those who want or need it.47

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The rewritten finale (the one found in the novel) is traditionally conceived of as the ‘happy ending’, where ‘boy finally gets girl’.48 Michael Slater warns that ‘those who detect a telling ambiguity about the second ending are surely in the right.’49 Like so many of Dickens’s works, Great Expectations is a novel about education. Pip’s journey, like David Copperfield’s, is characterised by learning and relearning what he always knew from the beginning. His journey is to become the kind of man that he would have been had he stayed at the forge with Joe. He returns, also, to his first love and finds that he cannot escape from it. Despite this it is a very different novel indeed when compared to the earlier autobiographical bildungsroman: it does not – in fact, cannot – resort to the dead-end closure, the completeness, and the moral pigeonholing and categorisation of David Copperfield. Indeed, Great Expectations is a rather queer book. On a number of planes it differs from that which came before and after it. It is a great deal shorter than most of Dickens’s other works; it does not have a conventionally ‘happy’ ending; it is also one of only two Dickens novels that are not named after either the main character – Oliver Twist (1837–39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), Dombey and Son (1847–48), David Copperfield, Little Dorrit (1855–57), Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Edwin Drood (1869–70) – or a place: Pickwick Papers (1836–37), Bleak House (1852–53), A Tale of Two Cities (1859).50 Hard Times (1854) is a contender for the most abstract title, but it does at least truthfully convey the tone of narrative that lies between its dustcovers.51 The title of Great Expectations is far more cunning: an implied reader may believe that the title’s function is to encapsulate the narrative, only to discover later that it is a lie – Pip’s ‘expectations’ are not great, and they are finally taken away from him. So, while the possession of great expectations may seem to be an inherently valuable asset (Pip certainly seems to see it that way), the title may also suggest that the novel’s readers are – like Pip himself – to have great expectations for his future. But the novel’s title refers not to the tone or theme of the narrative. Instead the closure of the novel seems to suggest that it refers to Pip’s pathology, of being unable to read those around him, of having too-great expectations. ‘I have often thought of you,’ said Estella. ‘Have you?’ ‘Of late, very often. There was a long hard time when I kept far from me, the remembrance, of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth. But, since my duty has not been incompatible with the admission of that remembrance, I have given it a place in my heart.’ ‘You have always held your place in my heart,’ I answered.

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And we were silent again, until she spoke. ‘I little thought,’ said Estella, ‘that I should take leave of you in taking leave of this spot. I am very glad to do so.’ ‘Glad to part again, Estella? To me, parting is a painful thing. To me, the remembrance of our last parting has been ever mournful and painful.’ ‘But you said to me,’ returned Estella, very earnestly, ‘God bless you, God forgive you!’ And if you could say that to me then, you will not hesitate to say that to me now – now, when suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends.’ ‘We are friends,’ said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench. ‘And will continue friends apart,’ said Estella. I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.52

The levels of uncertainty in these closing lines of the text are startling, and not in the least what we would expect from the ‘dead-end’ novel. Estella may assert that she has ‘often thought’ of Pip, but does not say in what particular way. Her next lines emphasise the distances of time and thought in their relationship. Estella acknowledges her loss of Pip, and her attempts not to regard that loss once she had begun to understand its gravity. Her next utterance is damning for the continuance of their friendship: ‘I little thought . . . that I should take leave of you in taking leave of this spot [the grounds of the, now ruined, Satis House of her upbringing]. I am very glad to do so.’ Pip’s next line and the OED both confirm that to ‘take leave’ does not have an obscure meaning particular to the mid-nineteenth century, but refers to parting.53 In her response, she lays further emphasis on her education where she has been ‘taught’, not to feel, but ‘to understand’ what Pip’s feelings for her used to be. And again, stepping back from certainty, she hopes that she has ‘been bent and broken . . . into a better shape.’ Estella’s inability to feel her connection with Pip is confirmed by the last clause in this speech when she asks ‘tell me we are friends.’ Verification must come from without, because it is not felt within. Pip’s final line in the novel is incomplete: ‘“We are friends,”’ he answers, but the comma use suggests an omission or a caesura that the novel cannot faithfully answer. Pip’s desire continues into a void of expectation, signalled by grammatical incompleteness. This is emphasised in Estella’s confirmatory response explaining that they ‘“will

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continue friends apart,”’. The accentuation of incompletion receives further attention in Estella’s comma-ended grammatical fragment. These words also carry the freight of solemnity in their status as the final spoken expression of the novel: ‘apart’ is the last word said. Pip’s final narration reveals a number of facets of his character. Taking her hand in his and walking ‘out of the ruined place’ draws upon the cliché of a romantic happy ending. The paragraph then lurches into a rich temporal metaphor of the rising mists as that which obscures perception. The metaphor, though, cleverly loops back, like an oxbow in the timeline, to remind us of the permanence of Pip’s mental state. The mist was something that had petrified him as a child when he first ventured out on to the marshes to aid the convict Magwitch. The mist recalls the time when Pip left the moral and ideological strictures of the family by investing them elsewhere, making a deal with Magwitch (a force so clearly not that of home and hearth).54 Just as the mists rose then on the marshes, they are rising now in the grounds of Satis House; just as his expectations falsely rose then, they are rising now; just as his inability to perceive through obscurity rose then, so it is rising now. In such a context it makes perfect sense that Pip would foresee ‘no shadow of another parting from her.’ D. A. Miller, one of the most careful readers of Stendhal, Austen, Dickens, and Collins, has been guilty of oversimplifying Great Expectations. ‘The chief interest of the endings – the first forever parting Pip and Estella, the second forever joining them – lies in the sheer fact that they were both possible,’ he has remarked.55 The context of the forked path ending is one borrowed from Peter Brooks’s famous paper on Great Expectations and the semiotics of narrative.56 Here, Brooks suggests that: [C]hoice between the two endings is somewhat arbitrary and unimportant in that the decisive moment has already occurred before either of these finales begins. The real ending may take place with Pip’s recognition and acceptance of Magwitch after his recapture – this is certainly the ethical dénouement – and his acceptance of a continuing existence without plot, as celibate clerk for Clarrikers.57

The turn of the ethical aspect of the plot is, indeed, to be found at that point in the text. Miller goes on to assume that the choice between the endings is an either/or: either they remain together, or they part forever.58 Miller’s and Brooks’s paradigm is only valid if it is a novel about ethics, and not one about finding oneself. On a Venn diagram the two concepts would share a good deal of common ground; finding oneself and discovering how to be good are natural bedfellows in the bildungsroman. But it

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is the case that the novel is flanked in beginning and ending by the question of finding one’s place in the world. Steven Connor’s Lacanian reading of the novel is adept at flagging up the chief signifying processes in the opening chapters of the novel concerning Pip’s entrance to Lacan’s symbolic order by linguistically finding his correct place amongst ‘the identity of things.’59 The novel’s closure also wants us to believe that Pip has arrived at a point of ontological stasis. The parallels in this model of closure with Villette are telling. Pip, as the writer of his own narrative, is situated in a time at some undisclosed point in the future, long after all the events that he has recounted in the novel have happened. Presumably he also knows how he and Estella got on in their future which for Pip as narrator is already past. Pip would be able to say that he and Estella found happiness in marriage. As the novel consistently demonstrates to its reader, however, Pip’s expectations for the future are not to be relied upon. The novel is effectively a study of Pip’s pathologically rose-tinted view of his world, stumbling through life like a guilt-ridden Dr Pangloss. The novel is good deal more ‘open’ than Villette. The pathology of Pip is confirmed, but the mire that it will lead him into is left undisclosed. While in one sense this published ending does close off the rising narratological pressure in the novel, insofar as we understand that Pip and Estella will remain friends apart, it does so by suggesting that there is a kind of continuance ad infinitum of Pip’s expectations. They will continue as too-great expectations. Morality is managed, but we are well aware that we have not reached the end, as it would be expected to be in the dead-end narrative. Where David Copperfield had ended with a physical gesture towards a narratologicallyvoid infinity, there is not the comfortable suggestion that narrative has ended in the latter novel. Unlike David’s, Pip’s future is still uncertain; all we know as readers are his provenly naïve expectations for it. In my view, much previous criticism has got the two endings of Great Expectations the wrong way around. In the struggle to identify which of the endings best represents the novel’s themes, I am at a loss to find philosophical or narratological value in the unpublished one. The latter one is truer to the spirit of the novel, showing Pip still living in hope that his first love will finally not return to home, but come to him for the first time: that his greatest expectation will at last be fulfilled. The future, although open to possibility (where the romantic among us may believe that they were not parted), is so circumscribed by Pip’s particular pathology that the end of the novel tries to make a certainty of its future. After all, it is only the novel’s untrustworthy first-person narrator who hopes for a bright future, not an omniscient one.

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Prising open the future Throughout the nineteenth century, the realist novel develops an increasing impatience with the range of problems surrounding the innate artificiality of narrative, and its inability to hold a mirror up to life. Pressure builds in the form, to erupt at deictic moments of reader address. The narrator in Charlotte Brontë’s mid-century novel Shirley (1849) warns us from the outset: [I]f you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken . . . Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.60

Eliot’s narrator in Adam Bede (1859) breaks from the unfolding action of the novel to explain the importance of truthfulness in the artist’s endeavour, her aim being ‘to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind.’61 She continues: I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her.62

Neither Eliot nor Brontë fall into the trap of seeing a transparent relationship between life and art in their work. The very existence of these interventions flags up a need to overtly repel traditional readerly expectations. Moreover, neither narrator wishes to present the truth of reality; instead both demonstrate in their interventions the openness with which these two authors engage with the artificiality of their endeavour, but both equally want to aim towards an authenticity that they believe is, nonetheless, possible. The two passages above are often quoted and discussed in work on the nineteenth-century realist endeavour. There are other moments that take the form of extreme impatience with the parameters of fiction. David Copperfield may have hailed the passing of the dead-end form of closure in the Dickens canon but that does not mean that the matter of replacing that form was without its difficulties. Dickens continued to rush headlong at marriage, returning to his old friend that

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all too easily presented a means by which loose ends might be neatly tied. Bleak House ends with Esther’s marriage to Woodcourt, and although it is a marriage that both parties desire, Esther’s status is still far from unproblematic, her identity still unstable. Her transplantation away from sites of the novel’s energies fits with the emotional trauma of parental abandonment that still endures. The lack of fulfilment is further emphasised in the novel’s final sentence, which is left unfinished.63 Dickens turned once again towards marriage as a mode of closure in his next novel, Little Dorrit. As in the previous work, marriage is not the catch-all solution to the main characters’ needs and desires. Arthur and Amy marry, but they still have secrets from one another. The novel ends ‘when the signing was done, and Little Dorrit and her husband walked out of the church alone.’64 This is as close to a dead-end as the novel gets. What happens next may be read as an expression of sheer authorial rage and frustration. In a novel of extraordinary political and dramatic ambition and also one of extraordinary length (more than a third of a million words), the idea that all narrative possibilities must be satisfactorily resolved in the signing of a register is one that Dickens finds unconscionable. He does not presume to tell us that the couple lived happily ever after. Instead, the passage reads as if its narrator is incensed by his inability to explore the lives of those that his narrative must leave to the streets. He tells us that ‘[t]hey paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun’s bright rays, and then went down.’65 The dramatic pause on the steps of the church right outside the Marshalsea on London’s bustling Borough High Street functions as a moment in which the couple are able momentarily to enjoy the absolute happiness and permanence of their union. In this moment they hover on the periphery of life, like Esther and Woodcourt at the end of Bleak House, but this is not the Clennams’ destination. It is where we as implied readers expect the novel to end. Then, there is one of the finest caesuras of nineteenth-century prose. The final clause of the sentence, which allows the narrator to segue into the fray, and into the future that Dickens still cannot resist. Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. Went down to give a mother’s care, in the fulness of time, to Fanny’s neglected children no less than to their own, and to leave that lady going into Society for ever and a day. Went down to give a tender nurse and friend to Tip for some few years, who was never vexed by the great exactions he made of her in return for the riches he might have given her if he had ever had them, and who lovingly closed his eyes upon the Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed;

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and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.66

Here, as in the realist fictions that would succeed it, Dickens expresses controlled rage as he relinquishes authorial and authoritarian control of his characters. He cannot resist leaping into the future to recount the destinies of his principal players, Arthur and Amy (who were ‘inseparable’); Tip and Fanny are also endowed with a future in which they are cared for. But Dickens bemoans the loss of ‘the noisy and the eager’; their stories remain untold and must disappear into the nexus of history despite the sublime ‘uproar’ at the swelling tide of narratives unexplored. Never has D. A. Miller’s ironic pronouncement on the double-bind of narrative seemed more appropriate: ‘The narrative of Happiness is inevitably frustrated by the fact that only insufficiencies, defaults, deferrals, can be “told” . . . [T]he narrative of happiness might be thought to exemplify the unhappiness of narrative in general.’67 A considerably more controlled, well thought out, and indulgent version of this same form of closure, one that soft-heartedly cannot resist the temptation to stride forwards into what ought to be a void of the future, can be found in a much later Victorian novel. With its ‘progressive end’, Middlemarch is a novel that is observably engaged with the problems of the realist endeavour. The author of Adam Bede was fully conversant with the difficulties and necessary mediations that realism forced upon the pen. In one of her pieces for the Westminster Review, on the third volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Eliot praises Ruskin for relaying ‘the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality.’68 Such a desire for a representation of nature, not fogged or tainted by romantic intention, but fairly conveying the moral substantiality of the real, was one that predetermined Eliot’s poetics from her beginnings as a novelist. Although the precise nature of moral didacticism would change radically throughout the canon of her work, Middlemarch may still be taken as one of the most complete achievements of this commitment to the real in the novel genre.69 It is a novel that plays with readerly expectation through its unusual narrative structure. It begins in Austen-like fashion with two sisters on the brink of courtship. Our ‘heroine’, though, is married in the decades of the first Book of the novel, and from there the text reaches outwards to explore its fabric of relations in the eponymous town. As

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Gillian Beer has acknowledged, ‘[r]elationships become the organising principle of all life and in Middlemarch this is emphasised in repudiation of any search for origins or even of succession. Middlemarch is a single work preoccupied with the “web of affinities”’.70 One of the practical difficulties in mobilising the metaphor of the web is that of its continuity. Interconnectivity is something that Middlemarch achieves with extraordinary success, but progression presents a more formal difficulty. In an unsigned review Henry James noted that Middlemarch ‘sets a limit, we think, to the development of the old-fashioned English novel’, perhaps because in its attempt to break the mould of the traditional novel, it inevitably fell into the trap of reproducing its shortcomings.71 But James still saw the novel as signifying the end of an epoch: ‘If we write novels so,’ he worried, ‘how shall we write History?’72 George Levine, in the opening paragraphs to The Boundaries of Fiction, noticed that ‘British Victorian writers . . . frequently bring us . . . to the brink of the modern vision, but they inevitably seem to retreat from the full and usually gloomy consequences of that vision’.73 Levine’s point is that realist novels like Middlemarch attempt to create a plausible and ideologically recognisable world for the Victorian reader. The action of the novel seems to suggest that, unlike in melodrama or the sensation novel, vice is not necessarily punished and kindness and beneficence may go unrewarded and, in the case of Dorothea, unremembered. One of the ironies of Middlemarch is that it lurches between omniscience and the acknowledgement that the nature of narrative itself is synecdochic: selective, partial, and incomplete. Even the novel’s ‘Finale’ – itself an ironic title that draws attention to its own artifice and its place in the story as a performance piece – over-reaches itself in tying up many of the loose ends of the novel. Its ‘progressive end’ is one where characters are rewarded with stability, and have demonstrably learned moral lessons.74 Taking, once again, David Copperfield as the ‘dead-end’ starting point (where the principal characters arrive at developmental and ontological stasis), in Eliot we find mediation, obfuscation, and moderation in both language and narrative. Reading the ‘Finale’, it is easy to see that the text of Middlemarch cannot bear the artificiality of such a firm conclusion, yet also cannot resist the gravitational draw towards epistemological completeness. The novel, it seems, wants to create an epistemological break in the action but cannot bring itself to do so. The possibility of openness haunts Middlemarch. The promise of the section’s lofty opening sentence, ‘Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending’, where it is implied that the finding of the self in the novel may be seen as an end in itself, is a model of closure more properly exercised in Eliot’s next and

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final novel, Daniel Deronda.75 In Middlemarch, as soon as the possibility of openness is uttered it is retreated from. The rhythm of the first sentence is broken by the rhetorical misfire of the second: ‘Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years?’76 The novel’s narrator seems not to comprehend the obvious answer: us, that is readers familiar with the challenges to continuity that modernity forces upon us. These are the same challenges that the novel itself also seems conscious to dramatise. Unlike Villette, or Great Expectations, Eliot’s ‘Finale’ steps into the future because it has a philosophical engagement with notions of realism that it cannot easily relinquish. The narrator explains that ‘the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.’77 Even at the level of language, syntactical modifiers displace the certainty of the future. In the novel’s final sentence we are told of Dorothea that ‘the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive’. The incalculability may be read in two ways: as a synecdoche for incalculably large, or its more literal meaning where it was simply not possible to calculate her effect with any certainty. The sentence continues, thick with modifiers highlighted here in my italics: ‘for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’78 So in one sense, the provision of the future narrative is essential to prove the falsity of the ‘happy’ dead-end model of closure, but it also falls into the trap of the dead-end by, for example, recounting Fred and Mary’s hard-won and enduring contentment, coupled with the subtle shortcomings of the novel’s other principal players. The ‘Finale’ is by no means a happy ending; much fulfilment of desire is mediated through, and disturbed by, others – but the ending is there. The clock stops at the end of the novel with Lydgate dead, Rosamund remarried, Fred a jovial and hardworking father, and Dorothea finally lying in her ‘unvisited’ tomb.79 In the ‘Finale’, Eliot becomes a kind of Casaubon. Casaubon chases the sense-making possibilities of literature and history in his research into the ‘key to all mythologies’, but in their way this is what our implied author does, too. In a time where models of the past are in contest, models of analogous futures are as well. Eliot’s provision of a futurenarrative that explains the destinies of its principal characters represents a kind of surrender to the forces of provinciality, of tradition, and of

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history. The novel, then, resists the epistemological break that it seems to desire. In dramatising a community struggling at the cusp of modernity, one aware that its knowable community (to use Raymond Williams’s term) is stumbling towards extinction, the novel steps back into the knowledge economy that it is attempting to dramatise the decline of. In comparison to the leisurely pace of the rest of the novel, the ‘Finale’ leaps decades forward into the future at a breakneck pace. The section serves to punctuate the future with magnesium flashes of knowledge, unable to wrest itself free from the needful provision of origin and destiny. What we can see here is a phenomenal tension in Eliot’s use of time that seems typically Victorian in the light of the deep time debates that the rediscovery of Gilgamesh responded and contributed to. One the one hand the novel seeks tentatively to explore the spatial connections between groups and various social structures. On the other, it desires the certainty of conclusion to be found in Hebraic narrative structures. As such, it is a janiform novel that senses the abyss of time but in its structure and form cannot fully articulate it.

The future in the future tense Two slight, under-discussed, and ‘progressively ending’ novels come to mind for their attempts to experiment with the desire to know: Anthony Trollope’s Cousin Henry (1879), and Henry James’s Washington Square (1880).80 Although by no means as ambitious as Eliot’s realist triumph, both of these novels experiment with narrative structure as well as closure. Cousin Henry is a most peculiar novel. Its mode of closure is by some way its least interesting feature but we can see in it how dramatic innovation is circumscribed by the need for conclusion. It is an ambitious novel, not in its structure, form, or language, but in its lack of actual content. It is deliberately not packed with event and disruption; instead it attempts to dramatise something else entirely. Like so many other nineteenth-century fictions it is a novel about an inheritance. More unusually, it is a novel that examines the consequences of inaction. In what must surely be a quip on the unusual mode of dramatic content in the text, the legator of the narrative is called Indefer Jones. Squire of a large manor, Llanfeare, in Wales, he possesses a great deal of affection for his niece Isabel Brodrick, but feels the pull of tradition and, with failing health, cannot decide between leaving the bequest to her and, more appropriately, leaving it to his nearest male heir – the much

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despised and eponymous cousin Henry. Neither Trollope, nor any of the novel’s characters show any tenderness or warmth for Henry, who is doomed to be someone always on the peripheries of life. Indefer changes his will in favour of Isabel but dies before he can tell anyone. Henry inherits and finds the last will. Much of the novel then concerns itself with the manner in which Henry vacillates between destroying and bringing to light Indefer’s final wishes. Having been a lowly clerk in the city, he finds the draw of wealth considerable, but his desire for riches and happiness is thwarted by his weakness of character, being strong enough neither to admit his discovery of the invalidating will, nor to take action and destroy it – Henry finds himself incapable of filling the role of either villain or hero. The novel is an experiment in the anti-bildungsroman, for Henry makes no progress in his life, and ends the novel seemingly unchanged by the events that have happened to him. It is a difficult novel to pin down. It seems not to be didactic, insofar as when Isabel does find the final will, and inherits, cousin Henry is permitted to return to his post in the city with his reputation intact. The closure of the novel is its most disappointing facet: Trollope cannot resist the future – neither can the text see that the torturous possession of the legacy, left deferred by Henry, would be punishment enough for his inaction.81 Instead, the trajectory of the novel’s final pages plunges into the most traditional of narratological closures in marriage. ‘[T]he reader need not follow the happy pair absolutely to the altar. But it may be said, in anticipation of the future, that in due time an eldest son was born, that Llanfeare was entailed upon him and his son’.82 Structural and narratological play may abound in the novel, but in its conclusion the readerly desire for knowledge of the future must still be obeyed. Also straddling this same awkward structural and narratological abyss is Henry James’s Washington Square (1880). On initial publication, the novel was dismissively received as an instance of literary amateurism.83 Since then, though, it has been compared a number of times by contemporary critics with the work of Jane Austen.84 Like Cousin Henry it seems to borrow from the earlier and later traditions. Like Middlemarch it progressively ends providing a conclusion to the narrative and a sort of future. Unlike Middlemarch, it gives several straggled and deferred endings that intervene at various points throughout the heroine’s more mature life – a stage of life that is not usually the stuff of drama in the Victorian novel. Ultimately, though, the dynamics of the heroine’s experience run flat but remain closed to the reader. The novel recounts the courting of a young and rather plain heiress,

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Catherine, by Morris Townsend. While Catherine is satisfied as to Morris’s good intentions, her father is convinced that he is a fortune hunter and seeks to protect her from unhappiness by refusing to let them marry. Throughout, James is reluctant to reveal which of his characters is playing a part. Morris’s real intentions are never made clear. The father’s steadfastness wins out, the couple do not marry, but we cannot be sure that this is because he was right about Morris. The novel goes through several undramatic endings: the failure of their engagement, the failure of another suitor many years later, and finally the failure of renewed proposal some twenty years on. The last lines of the novel tell us, ‘Catherine, meanwhile, seated in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again – for life, as it were.’85 James here emphasises the inevitability of repetition in his heroine’s life: ‘again’, until death. Instead of a dead-end, Catherine is trapped in a narratological coda, from which there is no escape. The novel initially refuses to provide the dramatic closure where time stands still by moving forward into the decades after Catherine’s father has died. As in Middlemarch, the future is something that is problematised by the author continuing with the story beyond its natural end, but it is Hebraic insofar as it is a vision of the future that is stable and documentable in its finality. In Eliot’s next book, Daniel Deronda, the future would be darker. Daniel Deronda is a great sprawling novel of modernity, rightly praised for its structural innovation. Its deliberate disorganisation of temporal order into a new narratological one, although not a mode invented by Eliot, was one that necessitated an unusual ending.86 The novel recounts the failed connection of its (and I use the terms with great caution) hero and heroine. If Daniel and Gwendolen were players in a more standard romance, the novel would recount their coming together. While they do have a relationship, it is by no means one that the implied reader might expect. The two characters are joined in the first sentence of the novel. ‘Was she beautiful or not beautiful?’ our narrator apostrophises on Deronda’s behalf as he catches sight of Gwendolen at the roulette table.87 After the famous epigraph and its ‘make-believe of a beginning’, the novel’s first action is to wed these characters together with sublime narratological complexity.88 As the novel drives towards its conclusion, Gwendolen’s dreadful and oppressive husband Grandcourt has died, leaving her, at last, free to marry our ‘hero’. The novel, though, turns upon its implied reader when the proposal scene is pre-empted by our hero’s proposal to Mirah Lapidoth.89 Daniel explains that his destiny lies elsewhere:

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‘I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition of my race in various countries there,’ said Deronda, gently – anxious to be as explanatory as he could on what was the impersonal part of their separateness from each other. ‘The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English has, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a task which presents itself to me as a duty; I am resolved to begin it, however feebly. I am resolved to devote my life to it. At the least, I may awaken a movement in other minds, such as has been awakened in my own.’90

As male characters are often free to do, Daniel is able to devote himself to an abstract political concept, but it is more usual for this to be a character’s driving force rather than a satisfactory mode of closure in the genre of the novel. To some extent, the reader knows Daniel’s future in ways that convention might dictate. He may not be married by the end of the novel, but we are certain that he is ‘going to marry’.91 Where Middlemarch leaps into the future to confirm the fates of its main players, Daniel’s end only gestures towards it. It may not be present in the novel, but the promise of his Zionist ambition and the certainty of his marriage to Mirah are sufficient indicators of ideological completion in a novel that bears his name. It is a quite conventional ending for him. Historically, though, it is Gwendolen’s story that has often been of greatest critical interest. From 1876 onwards, a range of critics (amongst them, Henry James and F. R. Leavis) have found the eponymous narrative to be the weaker of the two ‘halves’ of the novel. Daniel’s story certainly relies on the better-trodden pathways of romance: he finds his origins; he finds a wife; he finds a future. What Eliot does with Gwendolen’s narrative is much braver. She does not lose her sense of dread; she does not find the right husband; and most importantly, she can only promise herself a future. I find it difficult to agree with Sally Shuttleworth’s claim that Gwendolen ‘is left in resigned despair’ as there seems also to be a sense of triumph in Gwendolen’s closure.92 Satisfaction of her desires (or those of the implied reader) would only have exacerbated her pathology. Instead, what she finds at the close of the novel is the beginning of her self. Gwendolen’s end is not that of a predetermined future in any recognisable way. Unlike Daniel, she has no abstract political, social, or nationalist ambitions; she has nothing to lead her into the future. In closing the novel, she asserts: ‘I shall live. I shall be better’ (this could be King Gilgamesh speaking at the end of the epic).93 The simplicity of the modal future tense masks the abstraction of the two sentences that gesture towards a future that is, unlike Daniel’s, a vacuum.

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It is not peopled with political ambition or intention, but is a kind of absolute psychological chasm into which her self will grow, like Rilke’s ‘pure space into which flowers endlessly open’.94 The only definable characteristic of Gwendolen’s future is her intention to be ‘better’. Other than that, it is narratologically void. There is a notable shift here from the synecdochic mode of closure in Middlemarch, where the future exists in flashes of narratological time that reaches many decades into the characters’ futures. The structure does not lend itself to entropy: a ‘Finale’ answers its ‘Prelude’. The move between the two novels is not even metonymic, where Gwendolen’s end specifically relates to her future. Instead, it is much more chaotically metaphorical: the skein of relation between the end and the future exists as a kind of spark of light, but little more than that. As Gillian Beer has pointed out, we do not find the ‘future life’ in Daniel Deronda, only the ‘idea’ of it.95 To some extent, part of the remit of Eliot’s later fiction expresses the impossibility of the new. Her novels continually add weight and mass to traditional narrative forms, building the pressure to bursting point, stretching synecdoche to its absolute limits of abstraction, through metonymy, to become metaphor. Her final work, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), with a structure that allies itself with a compendium of commentaries and essays, marks to some extent the acknowledgement that Eliot’s ambition had outgrown the novel form.96 In the wider context of the historical sublime and evolutionary theory, both suggest the pointlessness of envisioning a ‘new’ narrative. In deep time, there is no origin, only descent and variation of related forms. Eliot’s final completed novel is just that: a related form. It is one that senses the burden of future life, but still cannot quite accept the abyss of its sublimity. What Eliot manages to achieve with Gwendolen’s narrative is an evolutionary leap forward in the representation of time in the novel. The future is close to sublimity because, like the ever-receding Ark in early-Victorian deluge paintings, it is very nearly not there at all. Daniel Deronda has a ‘progressive end’ but it is one that is as close to a ‘present end’ as it is possible to get.

Only the present As the case of Eliot’s literary output in the 1870s demonstrates, the novel form was to develop increasing signs of impatience at the possibility of a mappable future. Although uniformity of change throughout the genre is

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not to be found, the emergence of significant structural difference is certainly in evidence. In some classical realist texts the future began to disappear. Ever-opening closure continued to develop. Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, published in 1881, is the Pegwell Bay of the novel form: it is the first novel to challenge effectively the shortcomings of Hebraic narrative structures. James saw that a truly sublime model of futurity does not attempt to foretell that which is to come, but perhaps lies in the present. The future for James was impossibly unknowable. It was as dark as history had become. The story’s themes, of the young Isabel Archer’s inheritance, her cast of promising suitors, the ‘Bluebeard’ of a husband she mistakenly marries, all draw from preceding and popular forms of fiction from the centuryold suitor of Gothic tradition, through Edgewoth, Burney, and Austen, to the inheritance woes of Dickens, Trollope, and Eliot. The novel’s innovation resides not in its themes, but in the ways that it handles them. The psychologically sadistic husband Gilbert Osmond, for example, does not drown (the usual mode of death in the novel for the heartless aristocratic wastrel – see Steerforth or Grandcourt). Neither does Isabel run away with Caspar Goodwood or Ralph Touchett (the latter is not even granted the gift of surviving the action of the novel). And structurally, the novel’s focus on character, indicated in the painterly metaphor of its title, was also something that divided critics, depending on their levels of poetic expectation and engagement. In the Athenaeum’s unsigned review, the critic remarked that ‘[i]t is not impossible to feel that James has at last contrived to write a dull book.’97 In his own notebooks, James anticipated the kind of criticism that he would come in for. Like Eliot, he had worried over the artifice of narrative structure. The obvious criticism of course will be that it is not finished – that I have not seen the heroine through to the end of her situation – that I have left her en l’air. – This is both true and false. The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together. What I have done has that unity – it groups together. It is complete in itself – and the rest may be taken up or not, later.98

James was right about the critical response. William Dean Howells heedfully reported: If we take him at all we must take him on his own ground, for clearly he will not come to ours. We must make concessions to him . . . he teaches that it is the pursuit and not the end which should give us pleasure; for he often prefers to leave us to our own conjectures in regard to the fate of the people

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in whom he has interested us. There is no question, of course, that he could tell the story of Isabel in The Portrait of a Lady to the end, yet he does not tell it. We must agree, then, to take what seems a fragment instead of a whole, and to find, when we can, a name for this new kind in fiction.99

Having married a man who was only after her fortune, Isabel endures the persistent revelations of her husband’s lack of moral depth that lead her to urge her stepdaughter to withdraw from marrying one of Isabel’s previous suitors. She returns to England to comfort Ralph Touchett on his deathbed. There Caspar Goodwood joins her and they finally admit their affection for one another. He glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession. So had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned she was free. She never looked about her; she only darted from the spot. There were lights in the windows of the house; they shone far across the lawn. In an extraordinarily short time – for the distance was considerable – she had moved through the darkness (for she saw nothing) and reached the door. Here only she paused. She looked all about her; she listened a little; then she put her hand on the latch. She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path.100

It is the last we see of the ‘Lady’ in the novel. In its final paragraphs, Goodwood returns to London two days later to look for Isabel but, he is told, she has left for Rome. Isabel’s sense of moral duty to her stepdaughter, and to her marriage, remains strong, but the novel does not venture to answer the questions of its implied reader: why has she gone? What does she intend to do if she returns? Where Eliot had employed the modal future tense in Gwendolen’s affirmation that she ‘shall’ live; she ‘shall’ be better, James breaks off, and it is a mix of the past and present that dominates: ‘She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path.’ The nature of the ‘straight path’ is something that has dominated James criticism since the novel’s publication. Millicent Bell has remarked that Isabel might be made sense of if we can see her as a ‘character in search of its plot’.101 More recently, Robert B. Pippin has remarked that ‘Isabel’s “straight path” is not something one can simply applaud as if it were a great, straightforward, moral triumph.

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It is all too sad and complicated for that.’102 Nicola Bradbury: ‘The “very straight path” she finds eventually is that of her own integrity.’103 Alfred Habegger finds Isabel’s path to be James’s only way out of a fundamentally misogynistic narratological trap.104 Sarah B. Daugherty finds that the path is a means by which James can avoid divorce as ‘an unthinkable alternative’ to Isabel’s impasse.105 This is a text with exceptional polysemic potential; as such, a supplementary reading might see this impasse as the mobilisation of an emergent poetics. So much of nineteenth-century fiction was epistemologically driven.106 The need for truthfulness, both moral and aesthetic, is a desire that appears time and again in the realist endeavour. So James’s refusal to step into the future is a quite deliberate denial of this desire. Ralph remarks, much earlier in the novel, that ‘Henrietta, however, does smell of the Future – it almost knocks one down’.107 Beyond this, the novel is saturated in present concerns. The novel’s odd narratological break celebrates, it seems, the very strangeness of the idea of the present because it accompanies the reader only to desert them at their destination to ponder the unknown. The gaps and silences in this novel, and in those that followed, represent a political effort by James to provide his characters with a kind of agency beyond that of masculine authority. In this there is an ethical, a political, and finally a historical necessity that the early reviewers of the novel missed. The impasse at the end of the novel in some way represents Isabel’s ability to think and feel beyond the limits that society presents her with, but that she is able neither to speak nor to act beyond them, so she must go into silence. The end of the novel functions as a metaphor for the possibilities of fiction itself in the period. The final emptiness of the portrait depicts its heroine as having deserted the frame. It is a rich metaphor that suggests the impossibility of representing an aesthetically satisfactory conclusion for Isabel in such a morally claustrophobic and confined world. Moreover, Isabel’s closure is only metaphorically related to the action of the novel; we know too little about it to be able to assert that it is synecdochic or metonymic. This is a novel that presented a significant challenge to a late-Victorian readership that did not understand this new literary landscape. Howells’ desire to classify ‘this new kind in fiction’ is indicative of the significance of the shift in late-Victorian poetics.108 It suggests, at the very least, that ‘this new kind’ was representative of the beginnings of a much wider formal shift in literature itself. Furthermore, because literature is culturally and historically embedded, the corollary of Howells’ remark is that a ‘new kind in fiction’ also inaugurates a newer kind of world. This is not to say that the late nineteenth-century novel merely chose to represent

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time in a manner that tried to move away from Hebraic narrative forms; the shift in literary poetics was not one of merely aesthetic interest. Instead, this new formal strategy also articulated an ethical and political motivation that is not so frequently present in earlier novels. From the late-Victorian period onwards, open-ended forms of differing kinds became a common feature in realist fiction. Though the examples of an ending in which the narrative is closed off by a turning towards the acceptance of incompletion are far too numerous to mention, I am thinking principally of novels like The Ambassadors (1903), Nostromo (1904), The Wings of the Dove (1904), all of Forster’s novels after The Longest Journey (1907), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), Ulysses (1922), and To the Lighthouse (1927). All of them in their differing ways refuse readerly satisfaction by seeing, at best, the journey to the self as an ending in itself.109 The efforts of Charlotte Brontë’s intention in Shirley, to give us the drab Monday morning, or George Eliot’s intervention in Adam Bede, or the sudden and sharp narratological pulling of focus in Middlemarch (‘but why always Dorothea’?), each are indicative of the need for the façade of directness and truthfulness in nineteenth-century fiction, and each want to explore what the limits of that veracity may be.110 The open-ended novel, in its varied forms that I have discussed here, is an acknowledgement that the realist endeavour was fundamentally flawed. The exploration of openness suggests that an epistemological model of the novel was not one that could effectively, fairly, or perhaps even truthfully represent modern life. But on that kind of criterion the very nature of fiction means that it is always predetermined to fail. In their very impatience and variety of closure, each of these novels reveals itself as concerned with the difficulty of being able to tell the truth about modern life. The new form that the novel genre incorporated in the latter half of the nineteenth century – which either reorientated or dismissed the centrality of the origins of the protagonist – was born of political and democratic necessity. Whereas a good deal of early- and mid-Victorian fiction (not only the bildungsroman, most sensation fiction, and most of the Dickens canon) set itself the task of discovering a protagonist’s origins, in the ‘new’ fiction of the late-Victorian period the search for origins changes into a topos that is about a new kind of collective, communal responsibility. The model used in mid-Victorian fiction is, most commonly, a temporal model, one that is connected with the past and the future, a depth model that looks down into history to discover the meanings and significances of the main character’s identity. Like historiography, it is a

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form of art that is steeped in time and that uses chronology and chronological events as the principal mode of explaining its ontology, its being, and its arrival in the modern world. More significantly though, it is also a model that borrows from early- and mid-Victorian beliefs about the status of the past and the future: namely, it is a model that finds a metonym in the documented Hebraic history of the Bible. Contrary to the mid-Victorian narratological paradigm is the model that begins to emerge in the late-Victorian period. It is not temporal in the same manner; it is spatial. The late-Victorian paradigm does not focus particularly on looking either forward or back in time. It is a model that is concerned instead with spatial relations within a particular social and ethical system. In the form of the novel, this becomes a drama of the hereand-now. It is amnesiac insofar as it has neither a sense of the past nor of the future as a knowable unit. Whereas the mid-Victorian novel finds a familial relation in the structures of historiography, the late-Victorian novel seems to have more in common with the painterly arts (that The Portrait of a Lady borrows its title from). As such, painterly art is also a form that does not frequently concern itself with time, but is more interested in the ways in which the parts of a system work together to create a trace of wholeness. The nuanced shift between these two topoi of mid- and late-Victorian fiction is represented in a variety of late-Victorian actants (among them Daniel Deronda, Isabel Archer, Gwendolen Harleth, and Tertius Lydgate) who in their significantly different ways become implicated in the discovery of the origins, not of themselves, but of others. The lateVictorian novel shows signs of focussing on the social, psychological, cultural, and emotional effects upon the protagonist rather than the romance or bildungsroman’s journey of ‘self’ discovery. The late-Victorian novel, as it emerges in these classical realist texts, explores the social and ethical dilemmas of modern life rather than the ontological or historical mysteries of other earlier Victorian fiction. In David Copperfield the ending was ‘forever’, then it became ‘soon’, and in James the end was ‘here’ and ‘now’ because the future is as strange and incomprehensible as the past. In the world of the late-Victorian novel, a politics of process is mobilised along with a focus on the materiality of everyday life. No longer having faith in either the importance or the existence of the final cause, true lineage, or the precise point of origination, late-Victorian uncertainty about the future gave shape to a kind of democratised bildungsroman that did not believe in the ending as a point of destination, but instead inscribed it as, at best, a new kind of ever-beginning. This truly was ‘a new kind in fiction’, one that saw the seemingly unap-

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proachable sublimity of the past and the future, and consequently invited its readers to engage meaningfully with the present.

Notes 1 George Eliot, Letter to John Blackwood, 1 May 1857, Novelists on the Novel, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Routledge, 1959), p. 250. 2 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, p. 40. 3 The initial rupture of a narrative has received significant critical attention starting with the Romans. Horace’s The Art of Poetry identified the formulation of in medias res as a means of conducting epic narrative. Aristotle, Horace, et al., Classical Literary Criticism – Aristotle – Poetics, Horace – Ars Poetica, Longinus – On the Sublime, ed. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). 4 William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1985); Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 1864–65, ed. Adrian Poole (London: Penguin, 1997); E. M. Forster, Maurice, 1971 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 215; Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. Helen Tracy Lowe Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); E. M. Forster, Howards End, 1910, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 332. 5 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 1811, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1816, ed. Jane Stabler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 6 David Henry Richter, Fable’s End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 7 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis, 1849–50 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 8 Charlotte Brontë, Villette, 1853, eds Herbert Rosengarten, Margaret Smith, and Tim Dolin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1860–61, ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 9 George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871–72, ed. Rosemary Ashton (London: Penguin, 2003); Henry James, Washington Square, 1880, ed. Brian Lee (London: Penguin, 1984). 10 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). 11 Marianna Torgovnick, Closure in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Her strengths are that she does succeed in categorising various methods of closure in fiction. She is interested in identifying the range of various kinds of closure that are available to the novelist ‘like circularity and parallelism, overview and close-up, complementary and incongruent, self-aware and self-deceiving’ (p. 198). This taxonomic work, though outlined with appropriate caution, is just that: it does not lead to concrete conclusions about the novel or narrative form. 12 Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). The Turn of the Novel presents a loose hierarchy of efficient closure; the ‘truer’ ending for Friedman is the more modern one whose characteristics propose ‘either an everwidening disorder or a finally open “order”’ (p. 188). He does have brief moments of socio-cultural interrogation: ‘Whether culture produced the new pattern of the novel, or whether the new pattern of the novel produced a new culture, is a question to which I should certainly answer: culture came first’ (p. 179). But it is a process that

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he is not really interested in, seeing the novel as an ultimately reflective form that follows in the wake of cultural change. He considers it beyond his remit to investigate precisely what changes those may be. D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. x. He notes with interest that Austen’s novels, for example, in their drive towards propriety, are forced to acknowledge the processes of disruption and discontinuity that make such narratives possible, where ‘closure, though it implies resolution, never really resolves the dilemmas raised by the narratable. In essence, closure is an act of “make-believe,” a postulation that closure is possible’ (p. 267). His argument ‘is not that novels do not “build” toward closure, but that they are never fully or finally governed by it’ (p. xiv). Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending remains one of the most influential studies of narrative, and was ground-breaking in its interest in particular aspects of historicised narratology, tracing the manner in which narrative is representative of the ways that we as humans try to make sense of our world. In order to make the claims that he does, he employs architectonic and theoretical explanations and investigations. The only firm textual examples are taken from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea – not a text that draws upon standard narrative techniques. He notices how fictional narrative and its other forms (be they religious, philosophical, or scientific) tend to borrow structures from one another. His discussion, however, tries to encompass all narrative, rather than just the novel, and the narrative of different forms of closure emerging in time is one that receives, as a result, insufficient attention. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, with a New Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). More recently, Peter Rabinowitz, again in a formalist manner, discusses the foregrounding of resolution and how it creates specific readings of the text, rather than how these texts might circulate and function culturally. See Peter Rabinowitz, ‘Reading Beginnings and Endings,’ Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Plot, Time, Closure, and Frames, ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002). Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: the Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge University Press, 1984). Levine, Boundaries of Fiction; Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction; George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For example, in The Realistic Imagination he explains that his concern is ‘not with a definition of “realism”, but with a study of its elusiveness. As an idea realism is one thing (or many things); as a literary practice, it is quite another (or others)’ (p. 7). The argument of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Writing Beyond the Ending focusses on the ending in the traditional novel that deals with women as one which has to negotiate a difficult terrain in which a romance plot is combined with a quest (think of Jane Eyre, for example) – and therein the novels find the need for satiation of romantic or sexual desire at odds with the desire to be an autonomous subject. Her book was noteworthy for its historicisation of the emergence of new endings in the novel. The analysis here complements these readings by foregrounding a different set of cultural pressures that were being brought to bear upon the novel, and moreover by

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Narrative and the historical sublime showing that through various forms of closure the novel was attempting to chisel out a sense of narrative time that more roundly responded to the historical sublime, rather than satisfying the sometimes deadeningly parochial concerns of the closeted world of ‘satisfying’ fiction. ‘Preface to the New York Edition,’ Henry James, Roderick Hudson, ed. Geoffrey Moore (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 37. See H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 13–39. Dickens, David Copperfield, p. 1. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture, 1987, trans. Albert Sbragia, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2000), p. 11. Dickens, David Copperfield, p. 855. Dickens, David Copperfield, p. 855. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, p. 94. Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 73. Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 219. Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 77. See also Athena Vrettos, ‘From Neurosis to Narrative: the Private Life of the Nerves in Villette and Daniel Deronda,’ Victorian Studies 33.4 (1990). Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, p. 79. Beth E. Torgerson, Reading the Brontë Body: Disease, Desire, and the Constraints of Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 87–8. Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, p. 219. Dinah Craik, Olive, 1850, eds Cora Kaplan, Anne Hartman, and Angelique Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Brontë, Villette, pp. 174–5. Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, p. 243. Brontë, Villette, p. 495. Brontë, Villette, p. 495. Brontë, Villette, p. 495. Brontë, Villette, p. 496. Brontë, Villette, p. 496. Brontë, Villette, p. 496. Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, p. 243. Christina Georgina Rossetti, Christina Rossetti: the Complete Poems, eds R. W. Crump and Betty S. Flowers (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 41. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872– 74); Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, vol. 3, p. 368. Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 444. See Slater, Charles Dickens, pp. 494–5. Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, vol. 3, p. 369. Quoted in Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, vol. 3, p. 368. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, ‘Introduction’ to Dickens, Great Expectations, p. xxxiv; Slater, Charles Dickens, p. 495.

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49 Slater, Charles Dickens, p. 495. 50 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, 1837–39 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 1838–39, ed. Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, 1841, eds Jon Mee, Iain McCalman, and Clive Hurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Charles Dickens and Margaret Cardwell, Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843–44 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, 1847–48, ed. Alan Horsman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, 1855–57, eds Stephen Wall and Helen Small (London: Penguin, 2003); Dickens, Our Mutual Friend; Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1869–70 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1836–37, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1852–53, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859, ed. Andrew Sanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 51 Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854, ed. Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 52 Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 442. 53 OED, ‘take leave,’ online edn, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/106777 (accessed 13 February 2013) 54 Dickens, Great Expectations, see Chapter 3 of volume I. 55 Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents, p. 273. 56 Peter Brooks, ‘Repetition, Repression, and Return: Great Expectations and the Study of Plot,’ New Literary History 2 (Spring 1980). 57 Brooks, ‘Repetition, Repression,’ p. 521. 58 ‘Whether Pip loses or gains Estella must considerably affect the emphases of our reading.’ Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents, p. 274. 59 Steven Connor, Charles Dickens (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 3. 60 Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, 1849, eds Herbert Rosengarten, Margaret Smith, and Janet Gezari (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 5. 61 George Eliot, Adam Bede, 1859, ed. Carol A. Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 159. 62 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 161. 63 Esther: ‘But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen, and that they can very well do without much beauty in me – even supposing – .’ Dickens, Bleak House, p. 914. 64 Dickens, Little Dorrit, p. 859. 65 Dickens, Little Dorrit, p. 859. 66 Dickens, Little Dorrit, pp. 859–60. 67 Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents, p. 3. 68 George Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, eds A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 368. Also, Westminster Review 65 (April 1856), p. 626. 69 Consider the volte-face in her approach to the need for sympathy and understanding, or the need for knowledge of the minds of others. Middlemarch is a novel that repeat-

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Narrative and the historical sublime edly enforces the absolute necessity of knowledge of other minds. Dorothea and Casaubon’s marriage is one destroyed by misunderstanding – and the Lydgates’ marriage is far from the happiest one for the same reason. The repeated use of the adjective ‘poor’ throughout the novel in reference to its principal characters also to some extent suggests a desire for our sympathy with her characters’ lot. Everywhere in the novel, knowledge is essential to the understanding of others. In an earlier work of 1859, ‘The Lifted Veil’, Eliot’s protagonist/narrator is one that can hear ‘the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat’ (Middlemarch, p. 249). Just like the narrator in Middlemarch, Latimer can see into others’ minds, but in this novella, knowledge does not lead to understanding; it destroys him. Eliot later tried to dilute Latimer’s message to her reader by adding an epigraph that suggested that the protagonist’s destruction was due to an excess of knowledge of the wrong sort. A commitment to truth of representation is all very well; the real difficulty, it seems, is in deciding which moral truth to relay. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 154. Henry James, ‘Unsigned Review (of Middlemarch) – Reprinted from “Galaxy”, March, 1873, XV, 424–8,’ George Eliot: the Critical Heritage, ed. David Carroll (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), p. 359. James, ‘Unsigned Review (of Middlemarch),’ p. 359. Levine, Boundaries of Fiction, pp. 3–4. Also see George Lewis Levine, ‘Isabel, Gwendolen, and Dorothea,’ ELH 30.3 (1963). One of Eliot’s earlier novels is particularly interesting in this context. The Mill on the Floss flounders between differing narrative modes, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the novel’s ending which depicts a shockingly sudden, dramatic, and quasi-biblical flood as the only acceptable means by which the desires of brother and sister, to be united, may be met. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860, eds Gordon S. Haight and Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 832; George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1876, ed. Terence Cave (London: Penguin, 1995). Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 832. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 832. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 838. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 838. Anthony Trollope, Cousin Henry, 1879, ed. Julian Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); James, Washington Square. Trollope was no stranger to the surprisingly unresolved ending. Lily Dale, in the final pages of The Small House at Allington, refuses the hand of John Eames, and then has the audacity to do so a second time in The Last Chronicle of Barset. Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington, 1864, ed. James R. Kincaid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); James, Washington Square; Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Trollope, Cousin Henry, p. 280. ‘The truest thing we can say of Washington Square is that it is a piece of literary dilletanteism. It does not give Henry James, Jr., credit for being even an earnest trifler.’ From an unsigned review (published in Literary World, January 1881) reprinted in Roger Gard, ed., Henry James: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 91. Graham Greene remarked that Washington Square is ‘perhaps the only novel in

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which a man has successfully invaded the feminine field and produced a work comparable to Jane Austen’s’: Graham Greene, ‘The Private Universe,’ Henry James. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Leon Edel (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 112. Barbara Hardy’s study of James’s later work compares him with Austen on four separate occasions: Barbara Hardy, Henry James: the Later Writing (Plymouth: Northcote, 1996), see pp. 6, 24, 33, 42. See also Mark Le Fanu’s ‘Introduction’ to Henry James, Washington Square, 1880, ed. Mark LeFanu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. viii. James, Washington Square, p. 220. An earlier model of narratological play that disorganises temporal sequence may be found in Gérard de Nerval, Sylvie, 1853 (London: Syrens, 1995). Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 7. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 7. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 792. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 803. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 805. Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science, p. 200. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 807. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Eighth Duino Elegy,’ trans. Stephen Mitchell, Earth Shattering: Ecopoems, ed. Neil Astley (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2007), p. 39. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 173, pp. 169–95. George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1879). Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881, ed. Nicola Bradbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). From an unsigned review (published in Athenaeum, November 1881) reprinted in Gard, ed., Henry James: the Critical Heritage, p. 97. Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 15. W. D. Howells, ‘James as the Modern Novelist (Published in “Century”, November 1882),’ Henry James: the Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Gard (London: Routledge, 1968), p. 129. James, Portrait of a Lady, pp. 627–8. Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 80. Robert B. Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 142. Bradbury, ‘Introduction’ to James, Portrait of a Lady, p. xxiii. See Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the ‘Woman Business’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Sarah B. Daugherty, ‘James and the Ethics of Control: Aspiring Architects and Their Floating Creatures,’ Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics, ed. Gert Buelens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 68–9. Levine, Dying to Know. James, Portrait of a Lady, p. 113. W. D. Howells, ‘James as the Modern Novelist (Published in “Century”, November 1882),’ Henry James: the Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Gard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 129. Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. Christopher Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard, eds Jacques A. Berthoud

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and Mara Kalnins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, ed. Peter Brooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey, ed. Elizabeth Heine (London: Penguin, 1989); E. M. Forster, Howards End, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975); E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979); E. M. Forster, Maurice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975); D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Kate Flint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Moreover, the need for ‘answers’ in fiction (and, frequently, the lack of them) is explicitly explored in the work of Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, B. S. Johnson, and Kazuo Ishiguro. 110 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 278.

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Part III: Geology, Gilgamesh, and the historical sublime ‫ﱪﱩ‬

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Conclusion: Gilgamesh and the resublimation of deep time

The periods which to our narrow apprehension . . . appear of incalculable duration, are in all probability but trifles in the calendar of Nature. It is Geology that, above all other sciences, makes us acquainted with this important though humiliating fact. Every step we take in its pursuit forces us to make almost unlimited drafts upon antiquity. The leading idea which is present in all our researches, and which accompanies every fresh observation, the sound to which the student of Nature seems continually echoed from every part of her works, is Time! Time! Time!1 (George Poulett Scrope, 1827)

T

imes past, present, and future each trouble and pervade the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the poem our hero must learn to dismiss the mythology of the past. In his newly realised mortality he must accept the finality of the future. Finally, he learns that without immortality he must ethically engage with the present. The parallels with the newer forms of closure in the late-Victorian novel are striking, but not because the Izdubar epic directly influenced the novelists of our period. Instead, both belong to a much larger ideological shift in late-Victorian culture. This conclusion will examine how the recovery of Gilgamesh influenced the evolution of the science of geology at the end of the nineteenth century. It will show how the poem, as a model of a newfound flood narrative, was used to postulate another new sublime vision of history. In doing so, it is important to step back to the beginning of the period to look briefly at how earlier natural philosophers had imagined time past. To begin with, it is important to see how the sublimity of James Hutton’s ideas had been translated to be legible for a Victorian reading public. From there, I want briefly to look at other questions that we might ask concerning the past and the future in the light of the Gilgamesh controversy. In particular, to focus upon the ‘recovery’ of other conflicting flood narratives in the

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period, and to query the re-emergence of ‘futurity’, where the future is only a metaphor for what has already been.

Desublimating Hutton The Gilgamesh controversy is the last of its kind in the nineteenth century. Serious conflict between the short biblical and deep geological pasts did not make it on to the front pages of the international presses again in the century. While it is not possible to speak of how all the Victorians may have thought about the past, cultural activity does still provide a metonymic means by which ideas can be seen to circulate. Throughout the nineteenth century, the earth and biological sciences had revealed themselves to be exceptionally adept at incorporating new discoveries into existing theories, or indeed at dialectically postulating modified versions of theories. The deep time debates, though, lost their lustre in some intellectual circles after about 1830. Charles Lyell’s extreme efficacy at creating a fictional opposition between him and those who he deemed had impeded the progress of geology through bibliolatry was in part responsible for muting the debate.2 To champion empiricism, Lyell was required to choose a hero of theoretical endeavour in James Hutton.3 Moreover, the carefully fashioned history that Lyell relates in the opening chapters of the Principles exists to cast the author as the true hero of his own thesis. While the rhetorical display of fair-mindedness in Lyell may have contributed to his reception in the coming decades, on a theoretical level it was his ability to domesticate deep time that made him comprehensible to an early-Victorian audience.4 Lyell’s vision of the past is not inherited from Hutton; it is descended from it with appropriate and civilising variations. Lyell might be seen as the Macaulay of geological history; his work sold widely, he received praise for its clarity of vision and exposition. Hutton, on the other hand, could be its Carlyle, whose writing was not so lucid, whose complex vision of the past derived from a lack of clarity. Hutton’s most brilliant ideological leap was that, unlike his fellow geologists, he never wrote about the history of the earth, only its processes. Never was he concerned with narrative sequence, only cyclicity. In his final and incomplete Theory of the Earth he writes that ‘at all times’ past and future ‘there is a terraqueous globe for the use of plants and animals’ (his use of the present tense, here, is a quite brilliant stylistic turn); he continues, ‘at all times, there are upon the surface of the earth dry land and moving water, although the particular shape and situation of those

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things fluctuate and are not permanent, as are the laws of nature’.5 Twice, here, is the ahistorical emphasis of ‘all times’ pulsing the cadence of a persistent refusal to engage with the Whiggery of progress. Hutton is writing out of space and time, his theory being relevant in all times and places; he is not drawn into the vagaries of attempting to explain the earth’s current state. With historicity bursting forth in the early nineteenth century (in the novel, the museum, art, sculpture, and historiography) it follows that a firmly historicised version of gradualism would not necessarily be more palatable to an early Victorian audience, but would succeed in being more legible. According to Stephen Jay Gould, John Playfair’s famous Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth is the means through which most geologists understood Hutton’s work and ideas.6 Hutton, though, is tamed and historicised by him. For example, Playfair’s explanation of Hutton’s angular unconformity, the cornerstone of early uniformitarian thought, is laid out in historical and sequential terms from the oldest world to the youngest.7 These phenomena then are all so many marks of the lapse of time, among which the principles of geology enable us to distinguish a certain order, so that we know some of them to be more, and others to be less distant, but without being able to ascertain with any exactness, the proportion of the immense intervals which separate them both.8

Playfair brought Hutton back into line with the more traditional and empirical modes of geological endeavour that were emerging at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The profound temporal sublimity of Hutton’s vision was incomprehensible at the beginning of the nineteenth century; had it not been, Hutton would not have needed a Boswell (as Gould refers to him) to translate and civilise his feral ideas. His vision sublime is not anthropocentric; it engages with ideas of endless cyclicity rather than historical sequence. He saw the planet’s past as characterised by endless exchange and recycling between land and ocean, punctuated by epochs of stability: The prodigious waste that evidently appears, in many places, to have been made of the solid land, and the almost imperceptible effects of the present agents which appear, have given, occasion to those different opinions concerning that which has already happened, or that natural history by which we are to learn the system of this world. The object which I have in view, is to show, first, that the natural operations of the earth, continued in a sufficient space of time, would be adequate to the effects which we observe; and, secondly, that it is necessary, in the system of this world, that

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these wasting operations of the land should be extremely slow. In that case, those different opinions would be reconciled in one which would explain, at the same time, the apparent permanency of this surface on which we dwell, and the great changes that appear to have been already made.9

Lyell’s globe is much better behaved in shifting constantly, acting locally, changing slowly and consistently, moving through distinct periods – what Stephen Jay Gould has called ‘time’s stately cycle’.10 ‘Geology is the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature; it enquires into the causes of these changes, and the influence which they have exerted in modifying the surface and external structure of our planet.’11 From the very first sentence of Lyell’s thesis it is apparent which particular version of Hutton he is employing: not the Huttonian, but Playfair’s Huttonian. Lyell’s methodology is couched in narratological terms and as he is his own narrator we must see his definition of the science as partial, even self-serving. This is not Huttonian geology. Hutton was not interested in cause, but process; neither did he see in the strata a sequence of ‘successive’ events. The trajectory of Lyell’s sentence, too, seems almost Whiggish in its focus on the past being a means of investigating a progress to the present. Lyell’s Principles was well-mannered and agreeable. It borrowed, moreover, from the Hebraic linear model of narrative, and as such was legible to an intelligent reading public in the early nineteenth century. In this context, Lyell’s predominance in earlyand mid-nineteenth-century deep time debates makes concrete sense. We know that the Lyellian model of time was not all-pervasive in nineteenthcentury culture; the Hebraic model was stubbornly secured in the Victorian consciousness, waiting to be stirred to reaction. The Hebraic and deep models of time are coexistent in Victorian culture. Their struggle for expression is evident in each of the modes of historical narrative that the preceding chapters here have covered. Whilst it is clear that one paradigm did not take the place of another, neither do they seem to occupy equal ideological space. How the Victorians relate to differing models of time is too complex to reduce to a single ideology. Nonetheless, the preceding chapters have demonstrated the considerable confusion that existed in narratological representations of the past. Perhaps the best way of thinking about what the Gilgamesh controversy reveals in Victorian culture comes from one of Freud’s psychological hypotheses. He remarks in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’ that epistemological crisis is brought about by the reinscription of outmoded belief systems.

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We – or our primitive forefathers – once believed these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we were making a judgement something like this: ‘So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!’ or, ‘So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities,’ and so on.12

In all but ignoring the deluge, Lyell had not succeeded in wresting the idea of a global flood from the Victorians. He may have presented theories of the earth’s history that had no need for such a myth, but he did not actively disprove its validity. Debates over the deluge continued in the earlier part of the century. In the wake of Buckland’s recantation of diluvialism in his Bridgewater Treatise (1836) there had been fierce debate between the conservative literalists and the Bucklandians.13 A range of periodicals and sermons also weighed in with commentary after John Pye-Smith published his theory of a local deluge in 1839 – ‘there never was a period . . . when the earth did not present a varied face; partly dry land with its vegetable and animal occupiers, and partly the wide domain of the waters possessing their numerous inhabitants.’14 A further wave of debate followed the publication of Hugh Miller’s works, like Old Red Sandstone (1841) and The Testimony of the Rocks (1857).15 While the debate may have slowed a little after the first half of the century, Smith’s rediscovery of Gilgamesh provided source material for more discussion in late-Victorian geological theory, with Eduard Suess’s reinterpretation of the poem.

The Suessian deluge At the beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a Britishborn Austrian geologist, Eduard Suess, produced a substantial, four-volume study presenting a new methodology for the science. Suess is not a figure who often appears in histories of nineteenth-century science.16 Despite featuring in recent and popular accounts of geology (for example, Richard Fortey’s The Earth from 2005), Suess’s absence from histories of nineteenth-century science may be accounted for by the fact that he engaged specifically with deep time debates that previous works have mistakenly assumed to have been completed by the mid-nineteenth

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century.17 Nonetheless, Suess’s importance to the progression of the discipline ought not to be underestimated. The Face of the Earth (1883–1909) was geology’s last serious engagement with the idea of the deluge before the trope retreated into the eccentricities of young-earth creationism of the twentieth century.18 As the final volumes appeared in translation it was hailed as a ‘great work’, one ‘marked by profound scholarship and almost superhuman breadth of view’.19 After the first volumes began to appear in English, Suess was also awarded the Copley Medal, the premier award of the Royal Society for outstanding achievement in research; amongst its previous holders had been Jean-André Deluc (1791), Humphry Davy (1805), Buckland (1822), Faraday (1832 and 1838), Richard Owen (1851), Lyell (1858), Adam Sedgwick (1863), Darwin (1864), Pasteur (1874), and Huxley (1888).20 Paul Haupt, the translator of Gilgamesh who succeeded George Smith, considered himself convinced by Suess’s thesis, adding ‘it is my firm belief that the Babylonian account of the Flood is the poetic description of a historical event which actually took place in the valley of the Euphrates and Tigris. Of course, it was no universal flood as the orthodox theologians of the old school would have us believe.’21 Sir James G. Frazer was less convinced by the ‘eminent geologist’, finding a little too much ‘plausible conjecture’ in Suess’s account as opposed to T. H. Huxley’s.22 Suess was not the only geologist working in this period who was interested in the Flood. Henry Howorth’s The Mammoth and the Flood was published in 1887.23 He argued that there had been a catastrophic flood over most of the globe at the same time that Man occupied it, and that this flood was the one found in various ancient traditions. The book was not taken very seriously at the time and the author was taken to task for his ‘abusive tone’ in attacking Charles Lyell’s thesis and numerous errors ‘for which a schoolboy ought to be birched’.24 Suess also had comments to make on the Lyellian thesis. For Suess, Lyellian gradualism was an insufficiently robust theory to explain certain phenomena like the Alps or the Pyrenees. Gradualism, or uniformitarianism, worked only in the way in which Lyell had, with careful rhetorical care, presented it. In the hundreds of pages that comprise Lyell’s three volumes of the Principles only a few pages attempt to address the existence of vast mountain ranges. Whereas Lyell’s uniformitarian thesis explained many slow-acting causes, Suess posited that the face of the earth had been shaped by many different kinds of events outside our immediate frame of reference. Such an approach enabled him to formulate ideas of continental drift, tectonic plate movement, and the original single continent theory.

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Suess’s approach was fundamentally dialectical: he attempted to synthesise the opposing corners of century-old geological disputes in an attempt to form a radically new one. The Face of the Earth would bring together like lithospheric plates the two seemingly incompatible theories of uniformitarianism and catastrophism. For Suess, the only way of explaining the existence of large mountain ranges like the Alps was to consider their cause both as a major tectonic event and as one of long and gradual uplift, a kind of graduocatastrophism. And the reason that other geologists had not seen this possibility was because, like history, geology had been weighed down by the freight of temporal anthropocentrism. Suess explains: The year is a measure of time furnished by the planetary system; but when we speak of a thousand years, we introduce the decimal system, and this is based on the structure of our extremities. We often measure mountains in feet, and we distinguish long and short periods of time according to the average length of human life, that is, according to the frailty of our bodies; and in like manner we unconsciously borrow the standard for the terms ‘violent’ and ‘less violent’ from the sphere of our own experience. . . . [W]e are prone to forget that the planet may be measured by man, but not according to man . . . The earthquakes of the present day are certainly but faint reminiscences of those telluric movements to which the structure of almost every mountain range bears witness . . . Such catastrophes have not occurred since the existence of man, at least not since the existence of written records. The most stupendous natural event for which we have human testimony is known as the Deluge.25

In The Face of the Earth Lyell’s creative vision of the planet is presented as being impaired by his domesticated model of what the past might be. Time, the earth, and the universe were more sublime for Suess. While the past may have been unknowable for Suess, aspects of it were still deducible from correct readings of correct sources. And it was here that his secondary desire of returning geology to its longest-running debate over the reality of a universal deluge engaged directly with the Epic of Gilgamesh. The starting point of Suess’s methodology was straightforward: he felt that any geologists who were using the face of the earth and existing geological speculation to write a theory of the earth were not making appropriate use of all the phenomena, documentation, and scientific speculation available to them. Lyell had used the face of the earth as a synecdoche for its past: what was observable today was representative of the earth’s undiscoverable history.26 Suess shifted drastically the relation-

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ship between the earth’s surface and its history. For Burnet, the face of the earth was its past; for Lyell the relationship was synecdochic (on the surface of the earth was evidence of past actions and processes that had shaped it); Suess’s philosophy of time shifted to the metaphorical, where the earth’s surface bore only the most distant kind of relation to its history and was not wholly representative of it. We cannot see, on the face of the earth, all the processes that it has struggled through to come to its current formation. Lyell’s error was that he had actively ignored the possibility of a deluge. Suess, because for him the earth’s history was unthinkably deep, comprising processes of change so slow that they were inconceivable, contended that catastrophe was the only way of explaining certain geological phenomena. Suess wanted to replace Lyell’s tame notion of time where the past was present on the face of the earth with one that was sublime, where the past was hidden. He accepted that many geological phenomena were in accord with Lyell’s gradualist thesis, but argued that the earth’s surface told of events that were so catastrophic that – just like time – humans were unable to comprehend their enormousness. Suess was by no means the first geologist after Lyell to suggest that the earth had been subject to catastrophic change. From the 1840s onwards, much research went into the questioning and clarification of Louis Agassiz’s ice age theory in the work of, among others, James Geikie and Andrew Ramsay.27 Suess’s methodology was a bold one. It involved reading history from all available sources, including contemporary theory. He wanted to use the text of the earth, but he also wanted to use texts from history. A confluence of data, all available data, was the only way forward for the geologist. Consequently, if one were to attempt a narrative reconstruction of the deluge, he maintained, then the best text to use was not that of the earth, which had long since hidden its evidence, but a narrative account of the flood which was still in existence: Gilgamesh. The ancient epic was to be brought into dialogue with current scientific research into meteorology and seismology. His readings of what was still known as the Izdubar epic were astute. He was attentive to detail and had a keen eye for seeing pattern and structure in the narratives. He quotes a translation of Gilgamesh’s eleventh tablet. 41. from the foundations of the heavens, black clouds 42. in the midst thereof Ramman caused his thunder to roar 43. while Nebo and Sarru advance against each other

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the ‘thronebearers’ stride over mountain and plain The mighty plague god unfetters the hurricanes (?) Adar causes the canals (?) to overflow unceasingly The Anunnaki cause floods to rise, the earth they make to tremble through their power, Ramman’s great billow ascends to the sky: all light is consumed in [darkness].28

Having specified the nature of the geological phenomena as described in Gilgamesh, he moved on to a theoretical interpretation of the data. As the ‘Anunnaki’ are gods of the underworld, this suggested to Suess that the flood was alluvial in origin, contrary to the pluvial version in Genesis. Thus the Izdubar epic states expressly that water came out of the deep, and in the biblical representation water from the deep is mentioned in two places as opposed to rain from heaven. But this rising of great quantities of water from the deep is a phenomenon which is a characteristic accompaniment of earthquakes in the alluvial districts of great rivers. The subterranean water is contained in the recent deposits of the great plains on both sides of the stream, and its upper limit rises to right and left above the mean level of the river. What lies beneath this limit is saturated and mobile; the ground above it is dry and friable. When seismic oscillations occur in a district of this kind the brittle upper layer of the ground splits open in long clefts, and from these fissures the underground water, either clear or a muddy mass, is violently ejected, sometimes in great volumes, sometimes in isolated jets several yards high.29

Suess’s flood theory explained how a boat could be driven inland by rising floodwaters to be stranded amongst the mountains. If the flood had been caused by rainfall then the water would have run from the high ground and would have washed the boat out to sea. But lines 41–45 all refer to ‘atmospheric phenomena’.30 It is at this point that Suess’s new philosophy of time comes into play. He requires us to consider the possibility of two (in human terms, highly uncommon) events taking place simultaneously: earthquake and cyclone.31 His theory of the flood is sufficiently agile to explain most of the natural, physical phenomena that appear in Gilgamesh. In the work of Eduard Suess, the story of Noah’s Flood had found an explanation so carefully worked through that it is practically the same as current geological thought.32 But the issue of scientific truth is something of a smokescreen. For historical purposes it does not matter how modern geological thought marries up with Suess’s theories of over a century

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ago. Whether his theory is correct or not, Suess’s significance, here, is derived from the fact that he was amongst the last nineteenth-century geologists, and certainly the most prominent, to seriously engage with the deluge. His significance is derived principally from the fact that he faced what Charles Lyell’s work had actively ignored: that major catastrophe is an inevitable part of lithospheric formation. Moreover, he refashioned and changed the depth of history to something more sublime by arguing that we cannot think of it in anthropocentric terms and still expect to be theoretically productive in solving the problems that the face of the earth presents us with. He further contributed to the sublimity of history by making the face of the earth’s relationship with its history a metaphoric one. Unlike Lyell, who argued that the evidence on the surface of the earth was the past, Suess suggested that the earth’s surface is only evidence for the recent past; beyond that other data is necessary to draw effective and real conclusions. The surface of the earth is only distantly related to the past; its real history is lost in an abyss of time that we cannot conceptualise. Suess achieved what few scientists before or since have done. He was able to formulate a theory capable of persuading a readership to accept that the full history of the earth was lost and would remain so. He was equipped to see the importance of the Gilgamesh controversy and that it was an opportunity to return geology to its most important debates. His work executed a necessary re-engagement with Hebraic histories that previous geological thought had not dealt with sufficiently. The Face of the Earth responded to the late-Victorian cultural impatience with abstract and alienating models of deep time. (The central chapters of this book have outlined only a few of the forms that this impatience takes.) In deploying Gilgamesh, Suess’s theory of the earth modernised preceding geological debates on the Flood, and so formed a legible hypothesis precisely because it included, rather than denied, the existence of a flood. This was quite different to Lyell at the beginning of the nineteenth century, who had domesticated Hutton’s sublime vision of time that saw ‘no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end.’33 For Lyell, the present, to some extent, was the past. The causes currently in operation were the same as those in the past. Lyell had also taken Hutton’s cycle of time and turned it into a line with God at both extremities. He concluded the Principles: As geologists, we learn that it is not only the present condition of the globe which has been suited to the accommodation of myriads of living creatures, but that many former states also have been adapted to the organ-

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ization and habits of prior races of beings. The disposition of the seas, continents, and islands, and the climates, have varied; the species likewise have been changed; and yet they have all been so modelled, on types analogous to those of existing plants and animals, as to indicate, throughout, a perfect harmony of design and unity of purpose. To assume that the evidence of the beginning or end of so vast a scheme lies within the reach of our philosophical inquiries, or even of our speculations, appears to be inconsistent with a just estimate of the relations which subsist between the finite powers of man and the attributes of an Infinite and Eternal Being.34

Suess argued that earth and human history were only and at best reflected in existing rock strata. The earth’s true narrative would only ever be piecemeal. Suess’s model of time endures in current geological theory. As Derek Ager has recently observed, ‘the history of any part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror’.35 And it is these periods that form the narrative structure of the stratigraphical record; as such, it amounts to little more than ‘a lot of holes tied together with sediment.’36 George Smith’s recovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh and Suess’s use of it in his theory of global plate tectonics formulated a philosophy of history as both a gradual and a catastrophic process, where the origin of humankind can be seen as a persistent and sustained progression towards difference and not as a sudden and cataclysmic speciation event like the deluge. The narrative trope of the deluge gave humanity an epistemological centre and an inherited identity of that which was good, of that which God had deemed worthy of saving. The Gilgamesh controversy allows us to see the landscape of Victorian thought about the past from a slightly different vantage point. The media and public forms of attention drawn by the poem’s use of the Flood myth suggest the depth and extent of the Victorians’ need for an originary narrative. Here, I wish to briefly draw attention to how the controversy might be seen to affect the circulation of other myths in the late nineteenth century. The consideration of flood narratives in the period like Deucalion or the Eddas would be sufficient matter for an entirely separate study. It is, nonetheless, worthwhile to look briefly at how the controversy might encourage sight of other kinds of connection between myth and science in the period.

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Other drowned worlds The Epic of Gilgamesh had been absent from history for about two millennia. It had not been missed. Western, Christian culture had no need for an originary narrative because it already had one in the Old Testament.37 Julian Thomas has argued, ‘Modern societies need to understand how they have come to be as they are, but they cannot do this through myth’.38 All societies have to understand their origins; modern societies just do so in different ways. The myth of the Flood in the nineteenth century could not endure the questions brought to bear upon it simply because myth and science use entirely different conceptual languages. Myth is the principal form of knowledge exchange for originary narratives in pre-modern cultures. Modern societies still have the same necessary paradigm of knowledge transfer, but instead they use their own chosen discourses of knowledge exchange: science and reason. For originary narrative, science and reason are the new myth, in that they are endowed with absolute authority to speak about the past in particular ways. Like myth, science and reason have an underlying structure: where myth both seeks and supports longevity, science and reason promise access to truth. Originary narratives, in the guises of myth, fable, story, or discourse, are the cornerstones of civilisation, and Gilgamesh as a narrative of origination may be interpreted as the ideal moral fable for the modern world; in such a light it encourages us to think of today and of the finite future rather than the past, to embrace the inevitability of death, not as a curse but as that which gives us life. The poem urges us to engage with our ethical responsibility to those around us and not to let possible punishment in an afterlife dictate our behaviour. King Gilgamesh’s story is about friendship, loyalty, fame, depression, and loss. Like the Victorian bildungsroman, it is about finding one’s way in the world and seeing the value in life itself.39 The parallels that exist across four thousand years of literary history are striking. Myth develops through ritual and repetition and its aim is to provide a totalising narrative that explains how things have come to be as they are and, more importantly, how they will continue to be. Through its very act of repetition, myth is immovable, constantly returning to the same subject matter, whereas through its act of constant reinvention, fiction is about change. Fiction responds, develops, and evolves to its market in terms of its ideology, politics, shape, and cultural legibility. As epistemological structures around the novel change, so do the form and themes of the genre itself. Drawing such conclusions we must be cautious, however; it is not

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productive to think of this move away from the centrality of the deluge in originary narrative as either uniform or complete. The Epic of Gilgamesh may have injected life into the debate over the deluge, and have contributed to the rethinking of the historical sublime in Eduard Suess, but this does not mean that the Victorians uniformly followed. The Gilgamesh controversy exposes a richer complexity in the Victorian relationship with the past. One of the controversy’s related effects, it seems, is the continuing cultural impatience with science’s commitment to absence and abstraction. Suess, like Hutton, and to some extent Lyell too, wanted his readership to look to the past and accept its emptiness. But the central chapters of this book articulate nineteenth-century culture’s stubbornness and resistance to accepting the strangeness and darkness of deep time. By the 1870s the biblical chronology had been punctured by waves of philological, ecclesiastical, archaeological, and scientific endeavour that had repeatedly tested the integrity of interpretations of Scripture. The majority of this criticism was amplified because it came from within the church: F. D. Maurice’s denial of eternal punishment led to his dismissal from King’s College in 1853; the Essays and Reviews scandal of 1860 culminated in two of the volume’s authors being sacked from their posts and indicted for heresy, as was Bishop Colenso for his Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua which denied the reality of the Flood.40 Nonetheless, the lure of originary narrative still endured for some, principally because the originary narrative in Genesis was key to the Victorians’ sense of themselves. The fascination with biblical chronology also continued (though it was a much more rarefied undertaking). Jabez Bunting Dimbleby’s The Date of Creation (1902) derived much from his predecessors – though the book sold well. He followed closely Ussher’s chronology, though claimed he had arrived at it by a different astronomical methodology. On the copyright page, the date of publication is listed as 5900 AM (‘AM’ is for anno mundi, ‘the years of the world’).41 Dimbleby, understandably, does not have much patience with Darwin, who appears to be ridiculed every few pages. ‘[What] Mr G. Smith has called Izdubar, or Girzdhubar, who is also called Gilgames’ also appears to confirm Dimbleby’s dating of the flood at 1656 AM.42 This marks an attempt by Dimbleby to reinstate Ussher as the architect of time at the beginning of the twentieth century, but by different means. But even in the early nineteenth century William Hales in A New Analysis of Chronology and Geography confirms that ‘Usher’s date, attached to our English Bible, has been relinquished by the ablest chronologers of the present time, from its inconceivableness with the rise of primitive empires, the Assyrian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese; all suggesting earlier dates of the

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deluge.’43 The life of the Flood endured and both its meanings and its presences proliferated. As myth should, the Flood could be seen to function as a means of desublimating the epistemological doubt that existed at the very core of the modern experience. The historical sublime, of course, derived its sublimity from its absence of narrative, and such absence functioned for some as an invitation to replace one punctured narrative with a newly repaired one. As the myth of the deluge receded from Victorian culture, others were waiting to takes its place. The earliest surviving references to Atlantis appear in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias from around the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries BC.44 The city gets scant mention in the Timaeus beyond its introduction by Critias. Plato’s readers are reminded that the story being recounted is around nine thousand years old. We also have the same narrative that Eduard Suess noted in the Izdubar epic: of the waters rising from below. When on the other hand the gods purge the earth with a deluge, the herdsmen and shepherds in the mountains escape, but those living in the cities in your part of the world are swept into the sea by the rivers; here water never falls on the land from above either then or at any other time, but rises up naturally from below . . . There were earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence, and in a single dreadful day and night all your fighting men were swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis was similarly swallowed up by the sea and vanished; this is why the sea in that area is to this day impassable to navigation, which is hindered by mud just below the surface, the remains of the sunken island.45

Although the narrative spreads over a number of pages at the outset of the Timaeus it is not mentioned again throughout the discussion. There is much wider consideration of it in the Critias, which uses it as the paradigm of the ideal world. There is no other independent ancient account of Atlantis outside Plato. For around two thousand years, the idea of Atlantis remains practically absent from Western culture. In the seventeenth century, Olaus Rudbeck’s Atland Eller Mannheim argued that Sweden was Atlantis, but his multi-volume work was not taken particularly seriously.46 Newton also included mention of Atlantis in one part of his posthumously published chronology.47 Even Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis only uses the narrative metaphorically.48 Unlike Gilgamesh, the story of Atlantis was not geographically lost. Neither was it written in an inaccessible language. Atlantis was there, but it was of no interest to Western culture because there was no ideological space for it. The West already had a

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narrative in which its forebears were divinely selected for survival because of their moral, ethical, and intellectual supremacy. But with the receding pressure of a disappearing flood narrative, a space was created for a new myth to take its place. The signifier of global inundation in Noah’s Flood had disappeared beyond the horizon of history. It left behind the signified trope of a race deliberately selected for survival, but without a sign to circulate the idea with. Between 2000 BC and around 1870, the number of works interested in Atlantis would not have filled a bookshelf. In the hundred and fifty years since Gilgamesh, a bibliography of the works published on Atlantis would be considerably heavier than the book you now hold in your hands. To some extent, this is one of the key changes that the Gilgamesh controversy gives rise to in the period. It represents a moment of absolute proliferation of speculation about the past, our place in it, or indeed how our identity derives from it. The question arises: why does Western culture want, or need, these myths of drowned worlds? In so many respects, theories of degeneration at the fin de siècle were a means by which science was able to postulate and articulate a theory for the anxiety over the inevitable decline of empire.49 The evolutionary theories of degeneration, through Buffon, Lamarck, Spencer, Darwin, and Lankester become metaphors that shift from their observations on the phylogenetic destinies of species to ones that take on social, economic, or imperial aspects. It was these anxieties that the Gilgamesh controversy titivated. While the narrative fits into other Old Testament disaster stories (such as the confusion of tongues at Babel, the Fall of Babylon, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah), what is different about the Flood is its scope. All of these stories may be interpreted as God punishing the arrogance of ‘Man’, but the Flood might also be seen to be feeding it. The other stories all discipline or make an example of the inhabitants of cities, not the entire world. So the Flood differs from these stories because it may also be read as providing a lineage of supremacy, situating Man at the head of creation as the agent of God on earth. The metaphor of a receding Ark seen in the paintings of Danby and Turner at the beginning of the century is a rich and productive one. With the explicative supremacy of Noah’s Flood fast disappearing off the horizon of history, the Victorians’ need for further meaning arrived in the work of the Irish-born author and politician Ignatius Donnelly, who achieved a great success on the publication in England and America of his Atlantis: the Antediluvian World (1882).50 This is the book that gives birth to practically all modern ideas about the ‘real’ existence of Atlantis. It is crammed with extrapolation from fallacious historical sources. The

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account begins with a précis of Plato’s history of Atlantis. The first comment that Donnelly makes having presented this history to the reader is that ‘there is nothing improbable in this narrative’.51 His belief in the existence of Atlantis is not problematic in itself but the constructed corollaries of this belief are made clear when Donnelly forms the following questions: How comes it that all the civilizations of the Old World radiate from the shores of the Mediterranean? The Mediterranean is a cul de sac, with Atlantis opposite its mouth. Every civilization on its shores possesses traditions that point to Atlantis. We hear of no civilization coming to the Mediterranean from Asia, Africa, or Europe – from north, south, or west; but north, south, east, and west we find civilization radiating from the Mediterranean to other lands. We see the Aryans descending upon Hindostan from the direction of the Mediterranean; and we find the Chinese borrowing inventions from Hindostan, and claiming descent from a region not far from the Mediterranean. Modern civilization is Atlantean . . . Without the thousands of years of development which were had in Atlantis modern civilization could not have existed. The inventive faculty of the present age is taking up the great delegated work of creation where Atlantis left it thousands of years ago.52

The intellectual sophistication in the Western world is explained because at its core lies Atlantis. The book also goes on to explain that the appearance of writing on the different continents of Asia, Africa, and America may only be explained if there is one source of knowledge. The same is also said for the similarity of the architectural design of pyramids that appear in Egypt and South America. True civilisation, true knowledge, the true human race, humanity as a collective noun and concept are entirely indebted to and derived from the Aryan races of Atlantis. It is an eminently racist model of history, but one that is most useful in the justification of one’s supremacy to vindicate imperial expansion. The interest that was ignited by Donnelly’s investigation took hold in Victorian culture. Once the century’s geologists had explained the deluge, its metaphorical vocabulary was attenuated. Because the Flood is too powerful and central an image to fade in Western culture, its signifier endured. The image or picture of global inundation that the Victorians were familiar with had been emptied out of meaning, but still lived on. The Flood had become a metaphorical space that was available for reinterpretation. As a result, all kinds of socio-cultural anxieties poured into it. The Flood was no longer the judgement passed by a moral God but was instead the answer to so many questions that were being raised

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about origins. And this is really what the Flood myth has always been about. In all its various versions it cleanses humanity by getting rid of its detritus to leave behind a new origin of the species in the form of superior beings chosen by God, gods, or natural selection. In Herbert Spencer’s phrase it is a narrative of the survival of the fittest; whether the source is chosen by nature or God makes little difference to the importance of its existence. The deluge then has the cultural function of a palimpsest upon which the anxieties of any particular moment may be written. In the first half of the century Victorian culture was becoming aware of a version of nature that was capable of behaving like a terrifyingly amoral being that had no hand of God to rein it in. Once these anxieties find their focal point, namely that there is no evidence for the universal deluge that so many had believed in, the metaphor supposedly disperses and attaches itself to yet another anxiety in late-Victorian culture, that of degeneration. George Smith’s discovery, then, fits into a long nineteenth-century history of writing on and representing the deluge. Most of these early geological writings are contemporary with the dramatic deluge paintings of the Romantic period that I have already discussed and the story of the deluge in the nineteenth century is as much a part of as it is connected with the histories of geology, evolutionary theory, and evangelical religion. What happens to the deluge in the nineteenth century is the result of the tectonic pressure of these three different causes. Although it is clear that there was some ideological resistance to the scientific thought and political and economic resistance to the archaeological work done in the nineteenth century, there is proof of what happened to the deluge. It practically disappeared, just like the iconography of the deluge that had changed so much as to make it almost unrecognisable. Once Smith’s discovery was commonplace there was little interest in the universal Flood. It was rendered a relatively insignificant geological event, demonstrated to have been local to Mesopotamia some five thousand years ago. Perhaps it was this spark (where few prominent scholars and almost no scientists believed in a universal deluge) that led to the beginnings of the creationist movement in North America that we still see today.53

Other times In its focus on temporality, history, and the future, the Gilgamesh controversy also drew attention to the very structure of narrative in the nineteenth century. While much of the argument here has concerned

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itself with analysing how the past was reconfigured in the nineteenth century, the controversy also permits us to ask questions of the future. The budding form of the ‘present-ending’ novel, the disappearance of the deluge subgenre in painting, the rise of the discipline of history, all suggest that Victorian culture was gradually moving away from the Hebraic model of narrative derived from the Mosaic account of creation. Moreover, each of these forms demonstrates a gradual move towards characterising our relationship with the past or the future as being metaphorical in structure rather than synecdochic. Noah’s Ark paintings, ‘dead-end’ novels, and popular historians like Macaulay see the past as synecdochically related to the future. An Ark painting in the early nineteenth century is our history; it is supposed to be part of us because it illustrates our lineage. In the ‘dead-end’ novel the protagonist’s arrival point at the end of the narrative is part of a continuing future; David Copperfield is happily married and the symbolism that Dickens employs suggests that he will continue to be so for all eternity. Macaulay’s The History of England also situated his nineteenth-century readership at ‘the end’ of his story; the pride and equipoise of Victorian Britain was the outcome of his narrative. In each of these art forms, though, I have tried to demonstrate the increasing impatience in Victorian culture with the certitude of such temporal models. Macaulay denied the sublimity of history and sought to thwart it with rhetoric and narrative technique. Carlyle’s work shows him embracing the chaos of the past, the chaos of history, or indeed the chaos of knowing. Both historians deploy an arsenal of form, content, and figurative language to demonstrate how the past may be made meaningful. Noah’s Ark paintings became ‘deluges’ that focussed on the damned, and later moved on to map a way in which an unthinkably long past might be represented without recourse to biblical tropes, or indeed any narrative iconography whatsoever. The ‘dead-end’ novel shuffled and struggled its way out of the confines of tight narrative, to proliferate into ‘progressive ends’, and finally ‘present endings’ that see the future as being, like Suess suggested, only metaphorically related to the past or present. A parallel enquiry comes into focus as the forms of closure in the novel undergo change in the mid- to late nineteenth century; a developing interest in an old theme is also foregrounded: consideration of the future. The Gilgamesh controversy, and its role in the development of deep time and historical sublimity, provides a frame of reference that is as relevant to the future as it is to the past. It might equally be seen to be embroiled in the rise of the future. It could be the starting point to answering a much larger question.

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Why is it that before the Victorian period there is almost no consideration of futurity in the canon of English literature? There are a number of possible answers to such a question. The traditional assurances of continuity (of history as a broadly providential path) are not intrinsically very dramatic or indeed interesting when compared with the mid-nineteenthcentury discovery of the horror-story of the remote future. For example, the articulation of the thermodynamic principle of entropy predicting a cooling sun and the running down of the universe.54 Furthermore, to readers of late nineteenth-century fiction ‘futurity’ is a familiar term that is regularly used in novels like H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) where the time traveller ‘flung’ himself ‘into futurity’ by journeying to the end of time only to find that the future has become a ‘blood-red’ swamp.55 A quick look in the OED tells us that the term ‘futurity’, although in use since the seventeenth century (the earliest reference is to Shakespeare’s Othello), is one that gains popularity in the later nineteenth century.56 The Dictionary lists Thomas De Quincey, John Stuart Mill, and Mrs Browning (among others) as its nineteenth-century exemplars of the term. But we can add to that list, among others, Mrs Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66), The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), and Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, or even Dickens’s Hard Times.57 Why does the term become a more enticing one from the mid-Victorian period? There are connections that can be helpfully drawn. The two terms ‘future’ and ‘futurity’ both belong to the same part of speech. They are both nouns which refer to that which is yet to come; indeed, one of the OED’s definitions of the latter term is ‘future time; the future’. What is the need for such similar terminology? ‘The future’ (as a grammatical construction) implies a vestige of certainty in its use, or need, of the definite article. ‘Futurity’, however, describes a vision of the future stripped of its ‘the’-ness, stripped of its grammatical trace of fixity. The suffix ‘-ity’, the OED again explains, is described as the mere ‘state or condition’ of the noun rather than its essence.58 Futurity then is a more blurred and uncertain version of the future. It implies a lack of narrative; it is less anthropocentric; it is less fixed; it is less certain; it is sublime. Futurity’s popularity increases at this point in the Victorian period as a way of expressing a vision of that which is yet to come as descriptively barren as that of the newly resublimated past. If the geological past is deep time, might we then see futurity as its mirror image of a ‘deep’ future? Such a shift in perspective enables us to see that an intimate relationship exists between our ideas of the past and the future. As I have demonstrated here, the past had shifted from one preoccupied with

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narrative to the dark strangeness of theory; might we go on to ask if the Victorians’ landscape of the future had become equally dark and theoretical, too? What happens to time in the nineteenth century may be characterised by loss: the loss of lineage, the loss of knowledge, and the loss of narrative. While this may be the case, it may also be argued that it was equally characterised by gains: the gain of lineage through the emergence of evolutionary theories, the gain of knowledge about the pre-human (and human) past, and the gain of a much larger-scale vision of earth history. Having looked again at painting and photography, historiography, and the novel as the principal modes of historical narrative in nineteenthcentury culture, we can see that there was considerable tension and conflict in their attempts to understand the past. Increasingly, the past’s relationship to the present was seen as metaphorical rather than synecdochic. The tension was a highly productive one for the Victorians. The geological intelligentsia, led by Buffon, Hutton, Playfair, Buckland, Lyell, and Suess, may have found the ‘abyss of time’ an ideologically productive temporal space, rather than a terrifying one, but the arts struggled to keep up.59 The Gilgamesh controversy confirms for us that for the majority of the period there is not an igneous and immovable way of representing the past. It confirms also the allure of global inundation for the Victorians. Their relationship with time, history, and the future is complex and cannot be reduced to a unifying scientific hypothesis. This is confirmed in the stuttering emergence of the historical sublime as it is played out in the slow development of newer narrative and iconographical structures in various art forms. Moreover, in the field of geological theory the rediscovery of Gilgamesh is fundamental to our understanding of the fully formed sense of historical sublimity that emerges at the end of the century through Eduard Suess, who sees through the Epic that the present is, at best, only a metaphor for the past. The significance of such a shift in historical and temporal perspective is not to be underestimated, and to my mind is yet to be fully examined in any past or current scholarship. As a culture we are still discovering Gilgamesh. But the poem’s piecemeal recovery has been responsible for four important contributions to understanding intellectual history. In the work of George Smith and his contemporaries Gilgamesh pushed back the beginnings of documented, written history. It represents, too, the introduction and mobilisation of several other temporal perspectives in the Victorian period. In the work of Suess, Gilgamesh was the fulcrum for a new

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methodology and understanding of time that had the effect of resublimating natural history. Finally, is it possible to consider that Gilgamesh (in the context of its new interpretations in archaeology and geology) also contributed to the emergence of newer narrative forms, ones that were able to articulate the metaphoric sublimity of time? At the end of the nineteenth century the imaginative power of the allencompassing waters of the global flood had been practically written out of history once it was widely believed the event was an over-imagined one. Readers of the Bible and of the earth had interpreted the Flood as proof of biblical veracity. It was also proof of the real powers of nature unleashed; finally, further scholarship might look at the ways that it was appropriated as proof of the racial superiority of the Ayran races.60 In the ideological context surrounding the Gilgamesh controversy, the myth of Atlantis may be seen to derive its popularity precisely because it returns to history the comforts, familiarities, and epistemological certainties of narrative that the novel, painting, and historiography were all increasingly drifting away from. Atlantis, and the conceptual ways that it has been revisited in the last century or so, may be little more than a vestige or residue of the shift from a mythological past to a historical one. It is not really a place, but an idea that perhaps offers succour for, as the preVictorian geologist George Scrope put it, the ‘humiliating fact’ of our insignificance in the face of nature.61 But there are other ways of seeing the long and slow discovery of deep time. It is not just ‘humiliating’; it has been an exceptionally productive, engaging, and even a delightfully rewarding tension.

Notes 1 In George Poulett Scrope, Geology and Extinct Volcanos of Central France (London: John Murray, 1858), pp. 208–9. 2 See Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1st ed., vol. 1, chapter 5. 3 See Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1st ed., vol. 1, pp. 60–5. 4 For an example see his discussion of the universality of the flood in Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1st ed., vol. 3, pp. 270–4. 5 Hutton, Theory of the Earth . . . in Four Parts, vol. 1, pp. 378–9. 6 For further discussion of this point, and for a more in-depth reading of Hutton and Playfair’s philosophical relationship, see Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, pp. 93–7. 7 See Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, pp. 123–5. 8 Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, pp. 124–5. See also Andrew Ure, ‘Introduction,’ A New System of Geology, in Which the Great Revolutions of the Earth and Animated Nature Are Reconciled at Once to Modern Science and Sacred History (London, 1829), p. xx.

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Geology, Gilgamesh and the historical sublime Hutton, Theory of the Earth . . . in Four Parts, vol. 2, pp. 467–8. Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, p. 151. Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1st ed., vol. 1, p. 1. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny,’ Art and Literature, The Penguin Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1919), vol. 14, p. 371. See especially Rupke, The Great Chain of History. John Pye Smith, On the Relation between the Holy Scriptures and Some Parts of Geological Science, 2nd ed. (London: Jackson and Walford, 1840), p. 144. Hugh Miller, The Testimony of the Rocks: Or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Theologies, Natural and Revealed (Edinburgh: Constable, 1857); Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone; or, New Walks in an Old Field (Edinburgh, 1841). See also O’Connor, The Earth on Show, pp. 195–6, 287–8, 411–15. I am at a loss to think of any except for Greene’s discipline-specific Geology in the Nineteenth Century from nearly thirty years ago. Mott T. Greene, Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982). Richard A. Fortey, The Earth: an Intimate History (London: Harper Perennial, 2005). Eduard Suess, The Face of the Earth, 1883, trans. Hertha B. Sollas, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904). The four weighty tomes that comprise Das Antlitz der Erde are a study of the earth’s creation and refashioning. It took Suess over two decades to complete. J. S. F., ‘Review: Geomorphology,’ Geographical Journal 34.4 (1909), pp. 447–8. Haupt also employed the same formulation of ‘great work’, in Paul Haupt, ‘The Dimensions of the Babylonian Ark,’ American Journal of Philology 9.4 (1888), p. 424. Suess also won the Geological Society of London’s Wollaston Medal in 1896, awarded to geologists who have had a significant influence by means of a substantial body of excellent research. Haupt, ‘The Dimensions of the Babylonian Ark,’ pp. 423–4. James George Frazer, ‘Ancient Stories of a Great Flood,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 46 (1916), pp. 260, 262. See also Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Hasisadra’s Adventure,’ Collected Essays (London: Macmillan, 1911), vol. 4, pp. 239–96. Henry H. Howorth, The Mammoth and the Flood (Sampson Low: London, 1887). Anon, Saturday Review 65 (14 January 1888), pp. 52, 53. Suess, Face of the Earth, vol. 1, pp. 17–18. The subtitle of Lyell’s Principles is indicative of his synecdochic approach to the science: the history of the earth is entirely deducible from current processes. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1830–33). Louis Agassiz, Études sur les glaciers (Neuchatel, 1840); James Geikie, The Great Ice Age and Its Relation to the Antiquity of Man (London, 1874); Andrew Crombie Ramsay, The Physical Geology and Geography of Great Britain; a Course of Six Lectures Delivered to Working Men, Etc. (London, 1863). This is the translation used by Suess, in Suess, Face of the Earth, vol. 1, pp. 29–30. Suess, Face of the Earth, vol. 1, p. 18. Suess, Face of the Earth, vol. 1, p. 30. This represents an extreme simplification of Suess’s theory. For over forty pages in

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The Face of the Earth he engaged with various data, theories, and comparative narrative analysis from biblical, Hellenic-Syrian, Indian, Chinese, and other traditions and brought them into dialogue with contemporary meteorological thought in order to arrive at his conclusion. See William B. F. Ryan and Walter C. Pitman, Noah’s Flood: the New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (London: Touchstone, 1998); Fortey, The Earth: An Intimate History, pp. 471–2. Hutton, ‘Theory of the Earth,’ p. 304. Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1st ed., vol. III, pp. 384–5. Ager, Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, p. 141. Ager, Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, p. 53. There are, indeed, many different flood stories that were known of in the Victorian period. The most prominent of these are Deucalion and the Eddas. The reason that I am not considering them in this discussion is because they were never thought of as being replacements for the biblical text. Each was written many hundreds of years after the Old Testament and they circulated in nineteenth-century culture as nonChristian reworkings of Noah’s Flood. See Cohn, Noah’s Flood, pp. 7–9. Moreover, originary narrative was not exclusively Western/Christian, being part of the traditions in Judaism and Islam; the significance lies in the West’s relationship with originary narrative. See my discussion in chapter four, and also Moretti, Way of the World. Frederick Denison Maurice, Theological Essays (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1853); Temple, Williams, et al., Essays and Reviews; John William, The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua: Critically Examined (London: Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863). Jabez Bunting Dimbleby, The Date of Creation, Its Immovable and Scientific Character (London: E. Nister, 1902), p. 1. Dimbleby, Date of Creation, p. 197. Hales, A New Analysis of Chronology and Geography, p. 215. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). Plato, Timaeus and Critias, pp. 22–5; page numbers refer to those of the standard Stephanus edition of 1578 which are marked in current editions. Olof the Elder Rudbeck, Olof Rudbecks Atland Eller Manheim, Etc. Pt. 1. (De Viri . . . O. Rudbeckii Atlantica Diversorum Testimonia.-O. Verelii Auctarium Notarum in Hervarar Saga.-O. Verelii Disputatiuncula De Fanin) (H. Curio: Upsalæ, 1675); David King, Finding Atlantis: a True Story of Genius, Madness and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World (New York: Three Rivers, 2005); Gunnar Eriksson, The Atlantic Vision: Olaus Rudbeck and Baroque Science (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1994). Isaac Newton, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (London: 1728). Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum: Or a Naturall Historie in Ten Centuries . . . Published after the Authors death, by William Rawley. (New Atlantis. A Worke unfinished) (London: J. H. for William Lee, 1627). See Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel. Donnelly, Atlantis. Donnelly, Atlantis, p. 22. Donnelly, Atlantis, pp. 176–7. Numbers provides a fascinating account of the growth of creationism, particularly in his account of the early twentieth century. See Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992).

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54 See Gillian Beer, ‘“The Death of the Sun”: Victorian Solar Physics and Solar Theory,’ Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 219–41. 55 Wells, The Time Machine, p. 17, p.18, p. 76. 56 OED, ‘futurity,’ online edn, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/75863 (accessed 13 February 2013). 57 Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, 1864–66, ed. Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 312; Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, 1857, ed. Clement Shorter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 162, 184; Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lovers, 1863, ed. Andrew Sanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 299; Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. 1, book IV, p. 151; Dickens, Hard Times, pp. 272, 273. 58 OED, ‘-ity,’ online edn, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/100360 (accessed 13 February 2013) 59 Playfair, ‘Biographical Account of the Late Dr James Hutton,’ p. 73. 60 David Livingstone has published a monograph on the politics of origination and the idea of a pre-Adamic humanity that touches upon ideas of racial supremacy. David N. Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), see pp. 113, 188, 217–18. 61 Scrope, Geology and Extinct Volcanos of Central France, p. 208.

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Reports of Gilgamesh in newspapers and periodicals The Annual Register – a Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1872. London: Rivingtons, 1873. The Annual Register – a Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1876. London: Rivingtons, 1877. ‘The Babylonian and Assyrian Inscription.’ Pall Mall Gazette. 25 October 1890, 7988 ed. Bennett, Mary. ‘Chaldea and Assyria.’ Dublin University Magazine 81. April 1873. 376–83. ——. ‘The Chaldean Legend of the Flood.’ Dublin University Magazine 81. February 1873. 146–57. ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge.’ Daily News. 5 December 1872, 8302 ed. ‘Chaldean Account of the Deluge.’ Newcastle Courant etc. 22 November 1872, 10326 ed. ‘Chaldean Account of the Deluge.’ Aberdeen Journal. 20 November 1872. ‘Chaldean Account of the Deluge.’ Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper. 17 November 1872. ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge.’ Pall Mall Gazette. 4 December 1872, 2436 ed. ‘The Chaldean Genesis.’ Examiner. 11 December 1875, 3541 ed. ‘Chaldean History of the Deluge.’ Times. 4 December 1872. ‘Chaldean History of the Deluge.’ North Wales Chronicle. 14 December 1872, 2400 ed. ‘Chaldean History of the Deluge.’ Manchester Times. 7 December 1872. ‘Chaldean Story of the Deluge.’ Daily Telegraph. 4 December 1872. ‘The Chaldean Story of the Deluge.’ Glasgow Herald. 6 December 1872, 10277 ed. ‘The Church Congress.’ Times. 5 October 1878.

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‘Defamation of Character.’ Punch. 14 December 1872. ‘The Deluge.’ Daily Telegraph. 14 November 1872. ‘The Deluge – Discovery and Promulgation of the Chaldean History of the Flood.’ New York Times. 20 December 1872. ‘Editorial.’ Belfast News-Letter. 18 November 1872, 5490 ed. ‘Editorial.’ Birmingham Daily Post. 19 November 1872, 4476 ed. ‘An Extraordinary Public Interest . . .’ Daily Telegraph. 6 December 1872. ‘The Flood; Reading of the Chaldean Story of the Deluge – the Records of the Past the Means and Method of Deciphering Them – the Key to the Mystery.’ New York Times. 27 December 1872. Gladstone, William Ewart. ‘To the Editor of the Spectator.’ Daily Telegraph. 16 December 1872. Houghton, W. ‘“Assyrian Explorations” – Letter to the Editor.’ Daily Telegraph. 30 December 1872. ‘The Late George Smith.’ Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times. 16 September 1876, 787 ed. ‘Letter to the Editor.’ Daily Telegraph. 12 December 1872. ‘Letter to the Editor – Chaldean Story of the Deluge.’ Daily Telegraph. 10 December 1872. ‘Noah’s Log.’ New York Times. 22 December 1872. ‘On Tuesday Evening Last. . .’ Daily Telegraph. 5 December 1872. ‘Reuters Telegrams.’ Pall Mall Gazette. 22 November 1872, 2426 ed. ‘Society of Biblical Archaeology.’ Daily News. 4 December 1872, 8301 ed. ‘Society of Biblical Archaeology . . .’ Illustrated London News. 30 November 1872. Smith, George. ‘What May Be Found in Assyria.’ Daily Telegraph. 26 December 1872. Stone, W. H. ‘Mr W. H. Stone on Assyrian and Babylonian Explorations.’ Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle etc. 4 December 1875, iss. 4518 ed. ‘What We Know of Assyria.’ Daily Telegraph. 16 December 1872.

Artworks Burnet, Thomas. Illustration from The Sacred Theory of the Earth. 7th ed. 2 vols. 1684. London, 1719. Danby, Francis. An Attempt to Illustrate the Opening of the Sixth Seal. 1828. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. ——. The Deluge. 1840. Tate Britain, London. Dyce, William. Christ and the Woman of Samaria. 1860. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham. ——. The Good Shepherd. 1856. Manchester City Galleries, Manchester. ——. The Man of Sorrows. 1860. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

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——. Pegwell Bay – a Recollection of October 5th, 1858. 1860. Tate Britain, London. ——. St John Leading Home His Adopted Mother. 1844–60. Tate Britain, London. ——. Study for ‘Pegwell Bay – a Recollection of October 5th 1858’. 1857. Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, Aberdeen. ——. Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting. 1860. Tate Britain, London. Egg, Augustus. The Travelling Companions. 1862. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham. Fenton, Roger. Aira Force at Ullswater. 1858. RPS, National Media Museum, SSPL, Bath. ——. Falls of the Llugwy, at Pont-y-Pair. 1857. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. ——. Pont-y-Garth, near Capel Curig. 1857. John Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. George Smith. Probably taken around 1874. Private collection. Griffier, Jan. Noah’s Ark. 1700. Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol. Hunt, William Holman. The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple. 1854–60. Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham. Linnell, John. Noah: the Eve of the Deluge. 1848. Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. Martin, John. The Deluge. 1834. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. Millais, John Everett. Isabella. 1849. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. ——. The Return of the Dove to the Ark. 1851. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Paton, Joseph Noel. Hesperus. 1857. Glasgow Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow. Poussin, Nicolas. Winter, or the Deluge. 1660–64. Louvre, Paris. Savery, Roelandt. Noah’s Ark. 1621. National Museum, Warsaw. Scorel, Jan Van. The Flood. 1515. Prado, Madrid. Scott, William Bell. The Eve of the Deluge. 1865. Fine Art Society, London. Turner, J. M. W. Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis. 1843. Tate Britain, London. ——. Shade and Darkness: the Evening of the Deluge. 1843. Tate Britain, London. ——. The Deluge. 1805. Tate Britain, London. Watts, G. F. After the Deluge: the Forty-First Day. 1885–86. Watts Gallery, Guildford, Surrey. ——. Building the Ark. 1863. Manchester City Art Galleries, Manchester. ——. Chaos. 1875–82. Tate Britain, London. Wallis, Henry. The Death of Chatterton. 1856. Tate Britain, London. West, Benjamin. The Deluge. 1790 (retouched 1803). Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown.

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Other works Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Addison, Joseph. ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination.’ Spectator. 21 June– 3 July 1712. Adkins, Lesley. Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Agassiz, Louis. Études sur les glaciers. Neuchatel, 1840. Ager, Derek V. The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record. 3rd ed. Chichester: J. Wiley, 1993. Anderson, Amanda. Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: the Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993. Anon. ‘The Mammoth and the Flood – review.’ Saturday Review 65. 14 January 1888. 52–3. Brooks, Peter. ‘Repetition, Repression, and Return: Great Expectations and the Study of Plot.’ New Literary History 2. Spring 1980. 503–36. Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus. Classical Literary Criticism – Aristotle – Poetics, Horace – Ars Poetica, Longinus – On the Sublime. Ed. T. S. Dorsch. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Atkinson, J. B. ‘The Royal Academy and Other Exhibitions.’ 1867. Victorian Painting Essays and Reviews. Volume Two, 1849–1860. Ed. John Charles Olmsted. New York: Garland, 1983. ‘Atrahasis.’ Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Ed. Stephanie Dalley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 1–38. Bacon, Francis. Sylva Sylvarum: Or a Naturall Historie in Ten Centuries . . . Published after the Authors death, by William Rawley. (New Atlantis. A Worke unfinished). London: J. H. for William Lee, 1627. Bagehot, Walter. The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot. Ed. Norman St. John-Stevas. Vol. 1. 15 vols. London: The Economist, 1965. Bailey, Edward. Charles Lyell. London: Thomas Nelson, 1962. Balston, Thomas. John Martin, 1789–1854: His Life and Works. London: Duckworth, 1947. Bann, Stephen. Romanticism and the Rise of History. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. Barr, James. ‘Why the World Was Created in 4004 BC: Archbishop Ussher and Biblical Chronology.’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 67. 1985. 575–608. Barringer, T. J. The Pre-Raphaelites: Reading the Image. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998. Bede. ‘The Greater Chronicle.’ The Ecclesiastical History of the English People; the Greater Chronicle; Bede’s Letter to Egbert. 725. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 305–40.

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Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 2nd ed. 1984. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ——. ‘“The Death of the Sun”: Victorian Solar Physics and Solar Theory.’ Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 219–41. Bell, Millicent. Meaning in Henry James. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC/Penguin, 1972. Birch, Samuel. ‘The Progress of Biblical Archaeology: an Address; Read before the Society of Biblical Archaeology, on the 21st March, 1871.’ Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 2. 1873. 1–12. Bown, Nicola, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell, eds. The Victorian Supernatural. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley. 1849. Eds Herbert Rosengarten, Margaret Smith, and Janet Gezari. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ——. Villette. 1853. Eds Herbert Rosengarten, Margaret Smith, and Tim Dolin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Brooks, Peter. ‘Repetition, Repression, and Return: Great Expectations and the Study of Plot.’ New Literary History 2. Spring 1980. 503–36. Brown, Ron M. The Art of Suicide. London: Reaktion, 2001. Browne, Sir Thomas. Religio Medici. 2nd ed. 1643. London, 1645. Buckland, William. Vindiciæ Geologicæ: the Connexion of Geology with Religion, Explained in an Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before University of Oxford, May 15, 1819, on the Endowment of Readership in Geology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1820. Budge, E. A. W. The Rise and Progress of Assyriology. London: Martin Hopkinson & Co, 1925. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. England and the English. 2 vols. New York, 1833. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Burnet, Thomas. Archæologiæ Philosophicæ: Or, the Ancient Doctrine Concerning the Originals of Things. 1692. London, 1736. ——. The Sacred Theory of the Earth: Containing an Account of the Original of the Earth, and of All the General Changes Which It Hath Already Undergone, or Is to Undergo Till the Consummation of All Things; the New Heaven and New Earth with a Review of the Theory, Especially in Reference to Scripture; to Which Are Now Added, Memoirs of the Author’s Life and His Writings, and His Defences of This Work, against Warren, and Keil’s Objections. 1684. 7th ed. 2 vols. London, 1719. Burrow, J. W. A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. London: Penguin, 2009.

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——. ‘Images of Time: From Carlylean Vulcanism to Sedimentary Gradualism.’ History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950. Ed. Stefan Collini, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 198–223. ——. A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Butterfield, Herbert. The Whig Interpretation of History. 1931. New York: Norton, 1964. Byron, George Gordon Lord. The Complete Poetical Works. Eds Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller. 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Cantor, Geoffrey, Gowan Dawson, et al. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Carlyle, Thomas. ‘The Collected Letters, Volume 9’. 1836. The Carlyle Letters. 4 December 2009. [www.carlyleletters.dukejournals.org]. ——. The French Revolution: A History. 1837. Eds K. J. Fielding and David Sorenson. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. ——. ‘On History.’ Historical Essays. Ed. Chris Vanden Bossche. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 3–13. ——. ‘On History Again.’ Historical Essays. Ed. Chris Vanden Bossche. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 15–22. Carr, Edward Hallett, and R. W. Davies. What Is History?: the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, January–March 1961. 2nd ed. London: Penguin, 1987. Carroll, Robert P., and Stephen Prickett, eds. The Bible: Authorised King James Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: a Study of Ideal Art. 1956. London: Penguin, 1985. Cohn, Norman. Noah’s Flood: the Genesis Story in Western Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Colenso, John William. The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua: Critically Examined. London: Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863. Connor, Steven. Charles Dickens. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. Craik, Dinah. Olive. 1850. Eds Cora Kaplan, Anne Hartman, and Angelique Richardson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Cregan-Reid, Vybarr. ‘Drowning and the Life of Water in NineteenthCentury Culture.’ Unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Sussex, 2003. Croker, John Wilson. Essays on the Early Period of the French Revolution . . . Reprinted from ‘the Quarterly Review,’ with Additions and Corrections. London: John Murray, 1857. Cromwell, Oliver, and Thomas Carlyle. Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches. 1845. 3rd ed. 5 vols. London: Chapman & Hall, 1887. Cuninghame, William. The Certain Truth, the Science, and the Authority of the Scriptural Chronology. London: Seeleys, 1849.

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Cuvier, Georges. Essay on the Theory of the Earth. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1813. Dalley, Stephanie. ‘Introduction to “the Epic of Gilgamesh”.’ Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Ed. Stephanie Dalley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Damrosch, David. The Buried Book: the Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh. New York: Holt, 2006. Darwin, Charles. ‘From My Marriage, January 29, 1839, and Residence in Upper Gower Street, to Our Leaving London and Settling at Down, September 14, 1842.’ Autobiographies. Eds Michael Neve and Sharon Messenger. London: Penguin, 2002. Daugherty, Sarah B. ‘James and the Ethics of Control: Aspiring Architects and Their Floating Creatures.’ Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics. Ed. Gert Buelens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 61–74. Dennis, John. The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry; a Critical Discourse, in Two Parts. London, 1701. Dean, Dennis R. James Hutton and the History of Geology. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1992. Desmond, Adrian J., and James R. Moore. Darwin. London: Penguin, 1992. Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge. 1841. Eds Jon Mee, Iain McCalman, and Clive Hurst. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ——. Bleak House. 1852–53. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ——. David Copperfield. 1849–50. Ed. Nina Burgis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. ——. Great Expectations. 1860–61. Ed. Margaret Cardwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ——. Hard Times. 1854. Ed. Paul Schlicke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ——. Little Dorrit. 1855–57. Eds Stephen Wall and Helen Small. London: Penguin, 2003. Dimbleby, Jabez Bunting. The Date of Creation, Its Immovable and Scientific Character. London: E. Nister, ‘5900 AM’/1902. Donnelly, Ignatius. Atlantis: the Antediluvian World. London, 1882. Doré, Gustave. The Holy Bible with Illustrations by Gustave Doré. 2 vols. London: Cassell, 1866. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: an Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. ——. Myths of Power: a Marxist Study of the Brontës. London: Macmillan, 1975. Edersheim, Alfred. The Bible History. Vol. 1. 7 vols. London: Religious Tract Society, 1890. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. Ed. Carol A. Martin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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——. Daniel Deronda. 1876. Ed. Terence Cave. London: Penguin, 1995. ——. Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1879. ——. Letter to John Blackwood, 1 May 1857, and Letter to Sarah Hennell, 15 August 1859. Novelists on the Novel. Ed. Miriam Allott. London: Routledge, 1959. 250. ——. Middlemarch. 1871–72. Ed. Rosemary Ashton. London: Penguin, 2003. ——. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. Eds Gordon S. Haight and Dinah Birch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. ——. Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings. Eds A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren. London: Penguin, 1990. Ellis, William. Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Etc. 1829. London: Dawsons, 1967. Epic of Gilgamesh. Trans. Andrew George. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999. Eriksson, Gunnar. The Atlantic Vision: Olaus Rudbeck and Baroque Science. Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1994. F., J. S. ‘Review: Geomorphology.’ Geographical Journal 34.4. 1909. 447–8. Feaver, William. The Art of John Martin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Finegan, Jack. Handbook of Biblical Chronology: Principles of Time Reckoning in the Ancient World and Problems of Chronology in the Bible. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. Firth, Charles. A Commentary on Macaulay’s History of England. 1938. London: Frank Cass, 1964. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Penguin, 1990. ——. Howards End. 1910. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. ——. Maurice. 1971. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872–74. Fortey, Richard A. The Earth: An Intimate History. London: Harper Perennial, 2005. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2002. Frazer, James George. ‘Ancient Stories of a Great Flood.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 46. 1916. 231– 83. Freeman, Michael J. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Uncanny.’ Art and Literature. Vol. 14. The Penguin Freud Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1919. 335–76. Friedman, Alan. The Turn of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Fuller, John. ‘Before the Hills in Order Stood: the Beginning of the

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Index Literary and art works may be found under author or painter name, and ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page.

accommodationism 17, 42 Addison, Joseph 10–11, 130 Agassiz, Louis 198 Ager, Derek 16, 201 anthropocentrism 4, 12, 15, 75, 78, 89, 92, 103, 113, 126, 193, 197, 200, 209 Ark, see Noah’s Ark Arnold, Edwin 46 Assurbanipal 37, 19, 46, 51, 53, 61 astronomy 9, 22, 88, 97–100, 203 Atlantis 43, 204–7, 211 Atrahasis, the epic of 46, 66n.47 Austen, Jane 151, 153–4, 165, 169, 173, 177 Babylon 9, 27, 38, 46–8, 59–61 Bacon, Francis 204 Bagehot, Walter 124, 137 Bann, Stephen 105n.2 Bede 3, 17 Beer, Gillian 4, 6, 154, 170, 176 Bell, Millicent 178 Bennett, Mary 59 Berosus 52 Bible, books of the Genesis 19–24, 38–49, 52–3, 56–61, 75, 77–93, 100, 106n.24, 199, 203 Isaiah 109n.79 Numbers 89, 108n.58 2 Peter 17 Psalms 17 Revelation 131 biblical chronology see chronology

biblical iconography 73–105, 130, 133, 150, 153, 207–8 bibliolatry 18–19, 192 bildungsroman 151, 155–8, 162–6, 173, 180–1, 202 Birch, Samuel 42, 44, 61 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas 10 British Museum 37–47 Brontë, Charlotte 153, 157–61, 167, 180, 209 Shirley 167, 180 Villette 153, 157–62, 166, 171 Browne, Sir Thomas 63 Brooks, Peter 165 Buckland, William 23, 26–7, 40, 87–8, 97, 119, 195–6, 210 Budge, E. A. W. 56, 68n.85 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc 205, 210 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 88, 162–3 Burke, Edmund 11–13, 81–3, 87, 112, 134, 137–8 Burnet, Thomas Archæologiæ Philosophicæ 20, 56 Sacred Theory of the Earth, The (Telluris Theoria Sacra) 9–11, 18–22, 56, 78–9 Burney, Frances 177 Burrow, John 6, 92, 138n.4 A History of Histories 138n.3 A Liberal Ascent 117 ‘Images of Time’ 74, 92–3, 100 Butterfield, Herbert 115 Byron, George Gordon Lord 45, 87–8

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Cameron, Alex Mackenzie 42–4 Canaletto, Antonio 135 Carlyle, Thomas 9, 112–13, 119–37 historical sublime 128, 130–2, 135–8, 150–1 narrative 121–3 writing style 128–36 French Revolution, The 113, 130–5, 137 ‘On History’ and ‘On History Again’ 113, 119–22, 127–9 catastrophism 24–6, 74, 83, 93, 103–4, 113, 118, 130–3, 195–8, 201 Cavaliers 125, 139n.15 Chaldea 37–9, 44, 49, 52–6, 58, 60–1 Chaucer, Geoffrey 76 Church Congress, The 55–6 chronology Assyrian chronology 42, 59, 60 biblical chronology 4, 16–27, 38, 51, 57, 62, 128, 203–5 Gilgamesh/Izdubar chronology 52, 57, 61 Cohn, Norman 6, 23, 74, 105n.4, 213n.37 Colenso, Bishop 51, 55, 203 Comte, Auguste 113 Constable, John 77 Copernicus 16, 22, 28 Craik, Dinah 158 Croker, John Wilson 142n.101 Cromwell, Oliver 128 cuneiform 27, 35–6n.96, 37–9, 49, 52–4, 56, 60 Cuvier, Georges 23–4, 40, 88–9, 112, 119, 130–1, 133 Daily Telegraph 37–8, 41, 45–6, 50–4, 59–60 Damrosch, David 8 Danby, Francis 26, 83–7, 90, 104, 118, 205 An Attempt to Illustrate the Opening of the Sixth Seal 84 Deluge, The 83–7, 90–1, 104 Darwin, Charles 5–8, 22, 28, 116, 126, 137, 150, 154, 196, 203, 205 degeneration 108n.64, 126, 127, 205, 207 Deluc, Jean-André 32n.50

deluge 3, 20, 23–4, 38, 105n.4, 195, 207, 211 see also flood Dennis, John 11 De Quincey, Thomas 209 Deucalion 50, 201, 213n.37 Dickens, Charles 112, 153, 156, 162–3, 165, 167–9, 177, 180, 208–9 Bleak House 163, 168, 185n.63 David Copperfield 153, 155–6, 163, 166–7, 170, 181, 208 Great Expectations 153, 161–6, 171 Little Dorrit 163, 168 Our Mutual Friend 151 diluvialism 23, 40, 79, 195 Dimbleby, Jabez Bunting 203 Disraeli, Benjamin 61 Dodgson, Charles 101 Donati’s comet 97–9 Donnelly, Ignatius 43, 205–6 Doré, Gustave 104, 110n.96, 127, Dyce, William 90, 94–105 historical sublime 92–101, 150 Man of Sorrows 95–6 Pegwell Bay (oil) 94, 96–101, 103, 150, 177 Pegwell Bay (watercolour sketch) 97–8 Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting 94 Eagleton, Terry 141n.71, 157 Edda 201, 213n.37 Edersheim, Alfred 53, 58 Egg, Augustus 94 Eliot, George 7, 111, 150 Adam Bede 167, 169, 180 Daniel Deronda 170, 174–6, 181 Impressions of Theophrastus Such, The 176 ‘Lifted Veil, The’ 185–6n.69 Middlemarch 153, 161, 169–76, 180, 185–6n.69 Ellis, William 43 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 125 Enkidu 48–9

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Index epic 3–5, 28, 46, 50, 59, 136, 198 Essays and Reviews 6, 51, 56, 67n.61, 95, 203 Feaver, William 87 flood Gilgamesh 40–1, 44, 49, 52–8, 62, 191, 196–207 Mesopotamian/Suessian flood 46–7, 196–201 Noah’s Flood 6, 50–9, 62, 73–93, 118, 196–207 Noyes Fludd 76 see also deluge Fenton, Roger historical sublime 101–5 Aira Force at Ullswater 103–4 Falls of the Llugwy, at Pont-y-Pair 102–4 Pont-y-Garth, near Capel Curig 102–3 Firth, Charles 124–5 Forster, E. M. 14, 151, 157, 180 Forster, John 162 Fortey, Richard 195 Foucault, Michel 112–13, 137 Frazer, James G. 196 Freeman, Michael J. 5, 6, 74 French Revolution 142n.101, 113, 115–18, 129–37, 139n.23 Freud, Sigmund 28–9, 194 Uncanny, The 194–5 Friedman, Alan 153–4, 182–3n.12 Fuseli, Henry 77 future/futurity 4–5, 17, 28, 63, 96, 100, 103–5, 112, 114, 118, 125–8, 132, 137, 151–82, 191–2, 202, 207–10 Gap theory 56–7 Gaskell, Elizabeth 209 Gawain Poet 75–7 Gay, Peter 125, 138n.4 Geikie, James 198 George, Andrew 28, 36n.98 ‘German’ scholarship 51, 55 Gibbon, Edward 123, 130

235

Giebelhausen, Michaela 95–6 Gilgamesh, King (and character) 3, 27, 40, 48–51, 63, 202 Gladstone, William Ewart 37, 45, 51, 61, 67n.66 Glorious Revolution, the 117–18, 134, 136, 139n.15 Gosse, Philip Henry 63n. 3, 99 Gould, Stephen Jay 22, 193–4 gradualism 6, 17, 49, 62, 74–5, 93, 104, 193, 196–7 see also uniformitarianism Great Reform Act 117–18, 129 Greene, Graham 186–7n.84 Greimas, A. J. 158 Griffier, Jan 78 Hales, William 17, 26, 203 Hardy, Thomas 7, 127, 141n.66, 154 Haupt, Paul 196 Hegel, Friedrich 113 heliocentricity 16 Hincks, Edward 56 historical sublime see sublime Howorth, Henry 196 Hume, David 130 Hutton, James 9, 21–9, 33n.56, 34n.70, 40, 97, 112, 150, 191–4, 200–3, 210 Huxley, Thomas Henry 6, 196 iconography see biblical iconography Ishtar 41, 48–9 James, Henry 153–4, 156, 170, 175, 177, 180, 181 Portrait of a Lady, The 177–80 Roderick Hudson 154–5 Washington Square 153, 172, 173–4 Jefferies, Richard 127, 154 Joyce, James 180 Kant, Immanuel 11–15, 31n.24, 100, 120 Kermode, Frank 183n.14 Kingsley, Charles 99, 154 Kirwan, James 31n.34

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Kuhn, Thomas 16, 27 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 205 Landow, George P. 6, 74, 92 Lawrence, D. H. 180 Layard, Austen Henry 9, 39, 45, 65n.36 Leavis, F. R. 175 Levine, George 6, 114, 138n.4,154, 170, 183n.17 Lewes, G. H. 99 Lightfoot, John 17 Linnell, John 91 London Photographic Society 101, 102 Longinus 10–12 Loutherbourg Jacques de 83 Lyell, Charles 3, 5, 6, 9, 20–1, 23–7, 40, 55, 62, 97, 100, 112, 123, 150, 192, 194–8, 200, 203, 210, Principles of Geology 3, 20–1, 23–6, 62, 123, 192, 194–6, 200–1 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 9, 37, 151, 192, 208 biliophilia 114–16 Clapham Sect, The 114 Darwin, Charles 116 fear of change 118–19 historical sublime 124–8, 135, 137–8, 150–1 narrative 119–21, 122–3 ‘On History’ 113, 119–30 History of England, The 111–17, 124, 208 Parliamentary speeches 118, 129 personality and writing style 114–16, 130–6 see also French Revolution and Glorious Revolution and Whig history Maillet, Benoãit de 40 Mann, Thomas 151 Martin, John 26, 83, 84, 104, 118–19 Deluge, The 85–90 Deluge, The (mezzotint) 87 Mathewson, Peter 47–8 Maurice, F. D. 203 Mesopotamia 46, 51, 53, 56–7, 196, 91, 207

Nineveh 41–2, 47, 55 Ottoman Iraq 6, 44–7, 49 Michelangelo, Lodovico Buonarroti 106n.23 Millais, John Everett 93 Miller, D. A. 153, 165, 169, 183n.13, 185n.58 Miller, Hugh 14, 195 Mill, John Stuart 136, 142n.102, 209 Milton, John 10, 19, 20 modernity 28, 152, 171, 172, 174 monogenesis 43 Moretti, Franco 153, 155 Morris, William 3 myth see narrative and narratology narrative and narratology Carlyle on narrative 121 closure 150–80 openness 63, 151–3, 157–61, 166–7, 171, 177, 180 originary narrative 43, 62, 76, 62, 201–7 myth, and/or mythology 4, 8, 26–8, 38, 41, 43–4, 50–2, 55, 57, 59, 60, 113, 191, 195, 201–7, 211 presentness 28, 132, 150, 176–82 Neele, Henry 119 Nerval, Gérard de 187n.86 Newton, Isaac 17, 20, 22, 204 Noah’s Ark 44, 49, 73–92 O’Connor, Ralph 7 originary narrative see narrative and narratology Parsons, John 48 Paxton, Joseph 15 Philllips, Mark Salber 138n.4 Pinches, Theophilus 58 Plato 43, 77, 204, 206 Playfair, John 22, 26, 40, 193–4, 210 Pointon, Marcia 6, 94, 97 Poussin, Nicolas 91, 104 Winter, or the Deluge 77–87 Pressly, Nancy L. 83

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Index Prichard, James 43 Radcliffe, Ann 122 Ramsay, Andrew 198 Ranke, Leopold von 126 Rassam, Hormuzd 39 Rawlinson, Henry 9, 37, 39, 45, 51–2, 55–6, 58–9, 68n.85 Behistun Monument 39 Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, The 56 realism 98, 128, 161, 167–82 Reynolds, Frances 11 Rilke, Rainer Maria 176 Robortellus, Franciscus 10 Rossetti, Christina 161 Roundheads 125, 139n.15 Royal Academy, The 89, 95, 96, 101 Rudbeck, Olaus 204 Rudwick, Martin 7, 19, 25 Rupke, Nicolaas 6, 7, 87, 92 Ruskin, John 23, 29, 73, 84–6, 89, 101, 107n.34, 108n. 64, 169 Savery, Roelandt 78 Scorel, Jan Van 78 Scott, Walter 29, 122–3 Rob Roy 29 Waverley 122 Scott, William Bell 91 Scrope, George Poullett 191, 211 Secord, James 7, 26, 65n.20 Sedgwick, Adam 23, 196 sedimentary gradualism see gradualism Shakespeare, William 122, 151, 209 Shaw, Philip 31n.19 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 77 Shulgi, King 27 Shuttleworth, Sally 6, 154, 157, 159–60, 175 Slater, Michael 162–3 Smith, George 8–9, 64n.11 first reading of the ‘gilgamesh (Izdubar) paper 37–41, 49–53, 58–60 death 47–8, 61–2 Assyrian Discoveries 46, 47, 53, 60

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Babylonia 61 Chaldean Account of Genesis, The 53, 56, 60 ‘Chaldean Account of the Deluge, The’ 37–41, 44, 49 subsequent digs conducted in Ottoman Iraq 45–7 Smith, Mary (wife of George Smith) 39, 47, 61–2 Society of Biblical Archaeology 38, 40, 57, 61 Transactions of 44, 61 Spencer, Herbert 205, 207 Stanley, Arthur (Dean of Westminster) 37 Steno, Nicolaus 18, 77 Stott, Rebecca 108n.64 sublime Burkean sublime 11–13, 81–3, 87 dynamical sublime 13, 100 historical sublime 5, 8–27, 63, 92–8, 100, 104–5, 112, 126, 152, 176, 191–3, 198–201, 203–11 Longinian sublime 10, 12 mathematical sublime 13, 100, 120 Suess, Eduard 8, 16, 26, 62, 195–201 Face of the Earth, The 195–201, 212–13n.31 Talbot, William Henry Fox 44, 61, 63n. 3 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 127 Thackeray, William Makepeace 84, 130 Thomas, Julian 202 Tristram, Reverend Canon 55–7 Trollope, Anthony 172–3, 177, 186n.81 Cousin Henry 172–3 Turner, J. M. W. 26, 84–6 Ruskin on Turner 84–6, 89–91, 131, 135, 205 The Deluge 83–4, 205 Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) 89–91, 108n.58 Shade and Darkness 89–91 Tylor, Edward 43 uniformitarianism 16, 23–5, 40, 93–4, 193, 196–7

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238 see also gradualism Ussher, James 16–18, 24, 26, 51, 57, 62, 152, 203 Utanapishtim 40, 49 Warren, Erasmus 20, 40 Watts, G. F. 90–2 After the Deluge: the Forty-First Day 90–2 Weiskel, Thomas 83 Wells, H.G. 127, 209 West, Benjamin 80–3 The Deluge 80–3

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Index Whewell, William 23, 24, 40 Whig history 94, 115, 136, 139n.23, 193, 194 Whigs 119, 125, 130 Whiston, William 20, 25–6, 40, 88 Williams, Raymond 141n.71, 172 Wilson, John (aka ‘Christopher North’) 86, 87 Woolf, Virginia 153, 180 Wyatt, John 7 Young, Brian 136, 138n.4