The novelist as historian: Essays on the Victorian historical novel [Reprint 2015 ed.] 9783111392134, 9783111029658

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THE NOVELIST AS HISTORIAN Essays on the Victorian Historical Novel

by

JAMES C. SIMMONS

1973

MOUTON THE HAGUE · PARIS

© Copyright 1973 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co., N.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 73-79278

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., The Hague.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This monograph profited immensely at an earlier stage from the patience and wisdom of Professor U. C. Knoepflemacher of the Department of English at the University of California in Berkeley who shared with me many of his insights into Victorian culture and literature while serving as the chairman of my dissertation committee. I should also like to thank the editors of Victorian Studies and Studies in Scottish Literature for their permission to reprint here portions of essays which originally appeared in their journals. Boston, Mass. 14 March 1973

CONTENTS

Acknowledgement 1.

2.

3.

4.

3

Of Kettledrums and Trumpets: The Early Victorian Followers of Scott

7

The Romancers and Historic Truth: The Question of Responsibility

22

The Novelist as Historian: An Unexplored Tract of Victorian Historiography

34

The Decline of a Literary Fashion: The Historical Romance After 1850

55

Further Reading

64

Index

65

1 OF KETTLEDRUMS AND TRUMPETS: THE EARLY VICTORIAN FOLLOWERS OF SCOTT

In the early autumn of 1826 Sir Walter Scott perused two new historical romances that had made their appearance that year, William Harrison Ainsworth's Sir John Chiverton and Horace Smith's Brambletye House. He noted in his journal that they were "both clever books" and went on to exclaim: "I am something like Captain Bobadil who trained up a hundred gentlemen to fight very nearly, if not altogether, as well as myself."1 Very few of Scott's contemporaries would have agreed with his paternalistic evaluation that his imitators handled their material "very nearly, if not altogether, as well as myself". But it is undeniable that the success of the Waverley novels prompted scores of lesser talents to take up the genre and produce hundreds of volumes closely modeled upon the formulas introduced or modified by Sir Walter Scott.2 In their hands the historical romance underwent a sharp artistic depreciation, although it continued to remain a most profitable field for its innumerable practitioners. A critic for The Edinburgh Review, taking cognizance in 1837 of the numerous 1

The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (London, 1950), 247. Henceforth Journal. To select only one example, many of Ainsworth's later romances were patterned directly after specific novels by Scott. Rookwood (1834) is indebted to The Bride of Lammermoor, the chief character of that novel drawing heavily upon Scott's conception of Ravenswood. Crichton (1837), a tale of a Scottish adventurer in the court of medieval France, is an obvious reworking of Quentin Durward. Even as late a novel as The Star Chamber (1854), in which Ainsworth depicted the court of James I, shows the influence of Scott, in this case his The Fortunes of Nigel. 2

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professional romancers who wrote to fill the circulating libraries, observed in an understatement that "the state of Romance, since the death of Sir Walter Scott, has not been of the most high and palmy kind". 3 The Athenaeum lumped all of Scott's imitators together under the label of the "Wardrobe School of Novelists" and characterized them as writers "who give the costume of the time without the life and nerve". 4 Scott himself had evinced little regard for the novel as a truly significant branch of literary endeavor. From his many statements in his prefaces, journals, and letters we know that he placed it in a subordinate position to poetry and drama with very limited possibility for the serious moral or practical instruction of the reader. It was, however, wonderfully suited for amusement and this, he felt, should be taken as the chief value of fiction. This was qualified somewhat by Scott's belief that the reader could gain limited knowledge from the depiction of Scottish manners and character and the portrayal of important historical personages, such as Louis XI, Mary, Elizabeth, and James I. Nevertheless, as Walter Houghton has said, Scott's fictions belonged to "the easy-going world of old Leisure before the crisis of the thirties", 5 and in a very real sense this was also true of many of his imitators writing in the 1830s and '40s. G. P. R. James, William H. Ainsworth, Emma Robinson, Horace Smith, and a host of others produced a multitude of historical romances that the more earnest Victorians would have considered as little more than self-indulgence in frivolous escapist literature. After reading through Ainsworth's historical romance Rookwood in 1839, Henry Crabb Robinson noted in his journal that while the book "interested me during the day I was reading it, ...I felt ashamed of the lost time". 6 Many of the historical romances of the early Victorian period in fact offered the reader a real escape from the didactic fiction then flooding the market. Frequently these romancers wrote with little more purpose than that of telling a rapidly paced adventure story 3 4 5 6

"Recent English Romances", Edinburgh Review LXV (April, 1837), 180. Athenaeum, 21 April 1832, 251. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven and London, 1963), 228. On Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (London, 1938), II, 575.

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9

and their works were, in the context of the critical temper of the age, an escape from responsibility for both the author and the reader. By deliberately catering to the desires of many readers for light amusement unspoiled by Utilitarian and Evangelical insistence upon practical values, the historical romancers won for themselves a broad popular support. The Victorians in their drive for informal education sometimes forgot the delectare in their rush for the prodesse. As early as 1833 we find John F. W. Herschel forced into a lengthy public defense of the right of people, especially the working classes, to read for amusement rather than instruction and insisting upon the responsibility of public and private libraries to provide good books that would satisfy that basic need.7 And yet, though there was severe pressure from many leading critics and periodicals and the Utilitarian and Evangelical interests to discourage those books felt to be irresponsible, frivolous, and escapist, such literature flourished. Scott's romances continued to enjoy phenomenal sales in spite of the carping from some quarters that they lacked intellectual substance and falsified history: 78,270 sets of the Waverley novels were sold between 1829 and 1849. Ainsworth's Windsor Castle (1843), roundly condemned by the critics, found favor with the reading public who purchased more than 30,000 copies in the cheap edition. The sales of James Grant's historical romance The Romance of War (1856) passed the 100,000 mark by 1882.8 And the public at large continued to buy up huge quantities of G. P. R. James' novels. Between 1847 and 1860 the cheap reprints of the Parlour and Railway Libraries carried 47 titles by James, 28 ahead of his nearest rival, Bulwer Lytton.9 Many of the circulating libraries, especially those in the working class areas, provided abundant opportunity for those readers who wished to 7 "Address to the Subscribers to the Windsor and Eton Public Library and Reading Room" (29 January 1833); reprinted in Herschel, Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Review (London, 1857). Cf. especially, pp. 7-11, 14. For a good discussion of the relevance of Herschel's "Address" to the temper of the times, cf. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago, 1957), 96. Henceforth Altick. 8 Altick, 383,384, 385. 9 Margaret Dalziel, Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago: An Unexplored Tract of Literary History (London, 1957), 81.

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while away the time with an entertaining historical romance. The London Statistical Society conducted a survey in 1838 of the contents of ten circulating libraries in the working class districts of Westminster and found that the largest proportion of volumes were books by Scott and his imitators. 10 In terms of sheer bulk there is little doubt that the historical romance dominated the fiction market throughout the early Victorian period. When we compare the historical romances of Scott with those of his followers, we find, not unexpectedly, that they took over those features most easily imitated. The strengths of Scott's fictions lay in his realistic handling of the Scottish setting and the skillful delineation of characters drawn from the lower classes. It was this latter aspect, especially when coupled with the colloquial liveliness of much of the dialogue, that accounted for much of the dramatic vigor of his narratives and can still appeal to a responsive modern audience. Scott himself was perpetually caught up between realism and romance and his most successful novels are those in which the realistic element assumes proportionately greater emphasis. And these novels, those dealing with eighteenth century Scotland, allowed him the fullest potential for the utilization of his own experiences and observations. When he shifted the setting from Scotland to England or a foreign country and moved back in time, the personal element disappeared from his fictions and the romance eclipsed the realism. It is significant that Thackeray in Henry Esmond, perhaps the finest historical novel produced in the Victorian period, emphasized the realism and reduced the romance and melodramatic elements to a minimum. But the host of minor novelists who took Scott as their mentor eschewed the realism and followed the romance, patterning their works after such novels as Quentin Durward, Ivanhoe, and Kenilworth rather than Waver ley, The Heart of Midlothian, and Old Mortality. Thus, writers such as Ainsworth, G. P. R. James, Emma Robinson, and Horace Smith produced a flood of historical romances that lacked the strengths of Scott's best work but contained most, if not all, the faults, many of them grossly exaggerated. 10

Altick, 217.

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11

One aspect of Scott's fictions open to ready exaggeration was inherent in the basic formula of the romance (Active) characters and plot in the foreground and the historical personages and events behind, only occasionally coming into prominence. At its best, as in The Heart of Midlothian, both the historical event (e.g. the storming of the Tolbooth) and the historical characters (e.g. the Duke of Argyle) are integral parts of the story and have a definite organic relationship to the whole. They are not superfluous, and occupy a meaningful place in the story. But in other novels, primarily those dealing with non-Scottish subjects and set further back in time, this technique is abused. There we find the historical characters, especially literary figures, are introduced to give the reader a sense of historical milieu and serve no real function in the story. Rather they are names to be dropped, like the details of costume and architecture, in a reconstruction of the age. Scott's Kenilworth is an excellent example of this abuse: Shakespeare, Raleigh, and Spenser are briefly introduced even though their appearance in no way furthers the plot or has any effect upon the careers of the chief personages. In The Fortunes of Nigel the young hero accompanies Lord Dalgarno to the Fortune Theater for a performance of Burbage in Richard III; afterwards the pair sup at the Mermaid Tavern among the famous wits and poets of the day. This can admittedly be justified in terms of plot since Nigel's initial good impression at court is destroyed in part because of his loose "running-about", but here again one feels uncomfortable about the patness of the scenes in question. Essentially what Scott is doing is forcing the names and places familiar from literary association to do his work of evoking the appropriate historical setting and atmosphere. This was not what he had done in those novels dealing with later Scottish life where he relied upon details drawn from the cottage, castle, inn, and so forth. There considerable skill and effort were necessary to evoke a plausible historical and cultural milieu and the success did not depend upon the author jerking the strings to yank a familiar historical figure onto the stage. The minor characters in these novels are developed with life-like vigor; they are most certainly not the grotesque pasteboard contrivances forced into place and

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labeled a Burbage, a Shakespeare, or a Raleigh. Scott's readiness to fall back on names of literary and historical significance was exploited in an exaggerated fashion by his imitators. The number of historical characters jerked awkwardly into place proliferated at an alarming pace even before Scott's death. Horace Smith in Brambletye House (1826), a historical romance set in the time of the English civil wars and the Restoration and patterned closely after Scott's Peveril of the Peak, is one of the first to exhibit this abuse. The novel is filled with numerous detached incidents, arising from Smith's desperate attempts to introduce as many well-known personages and events from the age as possible. Yet they only serve to break the unity of the narrative and insult the reader's intelligence. At one point Jocelyn, the young hero, fleeing through London, seeks shelter in a small non-descript house and by sheerest "chance" finds himself rudely interrupting Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters. A few pages later on he encounters for a brief moment Isaac Walton quietly fishing on the Lea. Edward Bulwer Lytton in Devereaux (1829), an early historical romance set in the eighteenth century, paraded before the reader an endless procession of stiff figures lifted from the society of the day: Alexander Pope, John Gay, Jonathan Swift, Bolingbroke, Peter the Great, Louis XIV, etc., each coming forward briefly to be introduced, clay models on a fashion boardwalk. Thackeray's historical personages in Henry Esmond (1852) are among the weakest points in that novel. An extreme manifestation of the irresponsible use of this technique occurs in Emma Robinson's romance Whitefriars (1844). There she strings her historical events and persons together like so many beads on a necklace. The episodic nature of the story allows Miss Robinson to shuttle her young hero here and there, so that he is present on the eve of the murder of Lord Aumerle in the Tower, narrowly escapes the London fire, sits on the lap of Nell Gwyn, studies with Titus Oates, witnesses that man's trial where he makes his infamous anti-Catholic accusations, appears as an observer on the scaffold to record the executions of persons unjustly convicted from his testimony, accompanies the Duke of Monmouth at the battle of Both well Brigg, serves Charles II as a courtier and meets Eleanor Gwynne, and encounters a variety of other

OF KETTLEDRUMS AND TRUMPETS

13

historical personages from the period too numerous to be mentioned here. This then was a common abuse in the historical romances of the day. The critics were almost unanimous in their condemnation of the practice, both on artistic and historical grounds. A writer in The Quarterly Review called it all "horrible nonsense" and felt that this "episodic tampering with illustrious names" was a general disease of historical fiction that undercut the dignity of the men and women treated in this fashion.11 The use of historical personages and events haphazardly drawn into the story was but one of the ways in which the romancers sought to give a sense of historical verisimilitude to their fictions. A second means, equally open to abuse, was the use of details of costume, manners, architecture, weapons, and armor to pad out the picture. Many historical romancers in the 1830s and '40s felt that little more was necessary to a reconstruction of a past epoch than a sprinkling of historical characters and a flood of antiquarian detail. Again this exaggerated utilization of descriptive detail can be traced back to Scott, who had himself always been susceptible to this excess. It had been a danger potential in Scott's fictions from the first. In the preface to Waverley he had stated that he had been desirous of repeating the success of Maria Edgeworth in her sympathetic introduction of the Irish peoples and ways to the English reading public. The plot in this novel was chiefly a vehicle for Scottish "habits, manners, and feelings". Scott was always willing, especially in his earlier novels, to deviate upon a tangent descriptive of some aspect of Scottish manners and life. When Scott temporarily abandoned Scotland for England and France, the local color of the Scottish highlands gave way to the color and pageantry of a period piece reconstruction. In such novels as Ivanhoe, The Talisman, and The Monastery

there is a strong

emphasis on a careful depiction of the external aspects of the agethe scenery, costumes, and architecture- while character and sometimes plot are slighted. Scott took considerably more care to insure 11

XLVIII (1832), 395. Horace Smith's Brambletye House and Bulwer's Devereaux are cited as the two chief offenders.

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OF KETTLEDRUMS AND TRUMPETS

the accuracy of his manners and costumes than of his historical characters and events. A good example of this is his novel Kenilworth. The action of the novel occurs in 1575, yet the historical elements are notoriously inaccurate. Amy Rosart and Leicester are far less historical personages than melodramatic props from sentimental romances. Elizabeth's love for the Earl, of such crucial importance in the novel, is based on the flimsiest historical evidence. The chronology throughout is hopelessly scrambled: Amy Rosart's death occurred in 1560, not 1575; and Shakespeare at that time was but a boy of eleven, not a fully matured playwright on the edge of retirement. Yet in subsequent years when Scott came to revise the novel, the inaccuracies in the historical aspects of the work (which were later to trouble many Victorian readers) were left unchallenged. But upon obtaining a copy of an inventory of furniture at Leicester's Kenilworth, Scott made several minor modifications of the text to ensure the accuracy of his descriptions of that building and its furnishings. In short, Scott's fidelity in Kenilworth, as elsewhere, was to the manners of the day, not to the history. Scott's novels, especially those set in the earlier centuries of English and French history, contributed to the strong antiquarian interest of the Victorians in the details of dress, architecture, weapons, and so forth of earlier generations. The historical novelists who followed Scott exploited this interest, padding their fictions with excessive descriptions of the superficial aspects of earlier ages. Ainsworth, James, C. Herbert Rodwell, and others undertook extended researches into such areas and all too frequently their utilization of such material degenerated into pedantic floutings of specialized knowledge gleaned from their investigations. Scott had exhibited the good sense of reserving much of his antiquarian information for the notes affixed to the end of the text. His followers, however, chose to include such information in the narrative itself. In many instances the accumulation of masses of historical facts and details became an end in itself. Blocks of historical information were dropped ungracefully into the text, destroying whatever unity the narrative might have possessed. At times this over-zealous use of antiquarian information rendered the story itself incomprehensible. Scott in his journal once advised himself not to "let the background

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15

eclipse the principal figures- the frame over-power the picture". 12 This was something his followers never learned. Both Bulwer Lytton and Ainsworth succumbed repeatedly to this temptation. In his immensely popular The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) Bulwer yielded to his enthusiasm for the place and time, allowing his antiquarian interests to override his good sense as a novelist and consciously "worked up" the topography and buildings of the ancient city of Pompeii. Much archaeological information was included in the novel which had little relevance to the story at hand and was there merely to give the reader a more complete picture of first century Roman life. He thus anticipated Ainsworth's method in such romances as The Tower of London (1840), Old Saint Paul's (1841), and Windsor Castle (1843), a series of historical romances centering around specific buildings and confined to very restricted areas in imitation of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Ainsworth's early fascination with the Gothic tale combined with his antiquarian interests to give to these romances a distinctive sort of local color. It is a local color of a building, embodying its history, legends, and topography, rather than of a region. For The Tower of London and Windsor Castle he "worked up" the area, spending considerable time at both the Tower and the Castle, prowling throughout the structures, making diagrams, taking sketches, filling notebooks with his observations, and later doing abundant reading on his subjects. The extensive and methodical research on the spot accounted for the accuracy of the details of both the text and the accompanying drawings by Cruikshank. Such a method, however, presented inherent dangers and Ainsworth failed to escape them. Obviously, there is the possibility that once so much labor has been expended, the novelist will want to bring into his narrative as much of his researches as possible; descriptive material will assume a dominant rather than subordinate place, and become an end in itself. Ainsworth had done this in regard to his researches into costumes and he did it to an even greater extent in his descriptions of his buildings. In The Tower of London his chief concern was with "exhibiting the Tower in its triple 12

Journal, 249.

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light of a palace, a prison, and a fortress", and all aspects of his story were so contrived to "introduce every relic of the old pile,— its towers, chapels, halls, chambers, gateways, arches, and drawbridge- so that no part of it should remain un-illustrated". 13 In actual fact, The Tower of London and Windsor Castle and Bulwer's The Last Days of Pompeii are an unsuccessful merger of historical romance and guidebook; these twin features are in constant conflict and end in destroying the effectiveness potential in each aspect rather than complementing one another as was originally intended. C. Herbert Rodwell, a disciple of Ainsworth, was also guilty of this same abuse. The following excerpt from his romance Old London Bridge (1848-1849) illustrates this tendency of description to become history, as the author undertakes to parade pedantically the information he has recently acquired. The passage describes a sixteenth century London dinner. T h e silver tankards were all displayed o n a side buffet. William had knocked up at least half a dozen of their neighbors to procure sundry dainties, such as sea-gulls, served up in cold jelly; reys and ruffs, and delicious venison pastry, too, were procured; and conger eels, in a rich sauce o f cream. Then there were fruits, a m o n g which were plums that had been introduced from Italy by Cromwell himself in 1510. A great addition to our fruits had been lately made; for instance, the pale gooseberry, the apricot, and the musk-melon from the Netherlands, had not been in England twenty years before; and cherries were only just brought into notice. T o the Netherlands we also o w e our salads and our cabbages, which were first brought over about 1524. Pippins came about a year after; a n d artichokes were not cultivated until this reign. Currants, which afterwards c a m e from Zante, were n o t yet k n o w n - not indeed until 1555. 1 4

Setting has evolved into history. In actual fact this short essay on the history of English foodstuffs serves little purpose except to show off Rodwell's researches. It cannot be said to contribute substantially to a description of the scene and in effect breaks down the continuity of the narrative. Whereas Scott had consigned much of this pedogogical information to his notes, Rodwell, jealous of his 13

The Tower of London, George Routledge and Sons edition of The Collected Works (London, n.d.), iv. 14 Old London Bridge (London, n.d.), 176.

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researches, injected the material in the text. The extreme instance of this occurs in Ainsworth's Windsor Castle where the entire third book is given over to a lengthy account of the history of that castle from its earliest days to 1843. It is as if Scott in Rob Roy had interpolated the lengthy prefatory essay on the history of the famous Scotch outlaw into the novel itself. Scott himself was aware of this abuse, both in his own novels and those of his imitators. In his journal for 1826 he observed of his followers that They have to read old books and consult antiquarian collections to get their information.... This leads to a dragging-in of historical details by head and shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute descriptions of events which do not affect its progress. Perhaps I have sind [sic] in this way myself - indeed, I am but too conscious of having considered the plot as what Bayes calls the means of bringing in fine things.... 15

History then is there in the romances of the 1830s and '40s and frequently it is accurate, indicating a partial response to the new critical demands on the part of many readers and reviewers for closer attention to factual accuracy. But all too often it takes the form of undigested lumps of pure information forced into the text and upon the reader. Furthermore, accuracy is to be found only in the minuter details of costume and weapons, while the customary liberty is taken with historical events and personnages. The general tendency of the post-Scott historical romancers to "write to the eye, rather than to the mind and the heart" was strongly criticized by the contemporary critics, who found their excessive descriptions tiresome, repetitious, and injurious to the unity of the story. A typical comment is that of The Edinburgh Review in 1842 wherein it was argued that "antiquarian study may injure historical taste" because the reader may accept the superficial details as the substance. In seeking with exclusive earnestness to realize past ages to our imagination, we run the risk of losing sight of those general characteristics common to men in all circumstances, in our attention to those which are distinctive. Substantial reality no longer suffices us - we must have out1S

Journal, 248-249.

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ward verisimilitude also; and we become apt to mistake the show for the substance. W e withdraw our eyes from the man himself, to fix them on his coat-of-mail, trunk hose, or periwig; and history becomes rather a gallery o f pictures than a series of examples. 1 8

The majority of Victorian romancers reduced history to little more than a "coat-of-mail, trunk hose, or periwig". Again the chief offender here was Ainsworth; character in his novels was completely submerged by costume. His greatest efforts were made on behalf of a depiction of the pageantry inherent within the life of past periods. The emphasis upon costume alone assumed a disproportionate place in his romances and Ainsworth's name became synonymous among his contemporaries for elaborate, over-blown descriptions of clothes. R. H. Home complained that his romances consisted of little more than "catalogues of numberless suits of clothes". 17 In contrast, Scott at his best was fully aware of the complex undercurrents in past periods and strove to embody them in his novels, usually in the form of his characters. But as he went further back in time and shifted his locale from Scotland to other countries, the historical element was reduced to little more than a superficial pattern of costume and adventure. To utilize the terminology of the drama, we can say that Scott in his most successful novels used a box set, in which the characters and the historical settings were functionally related. In his weakest novels he was content to employ a flat set, a two-dimensional painted backdrop against which an action unfolded itself to a predictable conclusion. The followers of Scott were never able to achieve more than the latter; their stories are always played out against a historical setting, never in one. One further point should be made in regard to the Victorian 16

LXXIV (January, 1842), 433. A New Spirit of the Age (London, 1844), II, 219. However, this element of exaggeration in the romances of Ainsworth may have accounted in part for his popularity. Louis James has suggested that it was precisely this aspect which appealed most strongly to the lower class readers, for Ainsworth's "love of elaborate, pseudo-poetic descriptions... fitted in exactly with a working-class taste looking backwards to chapbook stories and the costume plays of the Elizabethans". For such readers this love of extravagance was "a reaction against the squalor of [their] living conditions". Fiction for the Working Man, 1830-1850 (London, 1963), 91. 17

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historical romancers. The plots in almost all of their books are complicated intrigues. With James, Robinson, Ainsworth, and the others plot is all. This had not been true of Scott. He generally kept to a fairly simple story. In Waverley, for example, the reader is halfway through the novel before anything exciting happens. Indeed the complex plot was beyond Scott's talents. He usually began a story with a minimum of advance planning. He constantly improvised, never hesitating to embark upon tangents when the urge came upon him. His plots, as E. A. Baker has said, are frequently "of trifling interest, merely contrivances for keeping things moving". 18 In novels, such as The Talisman, The Fortunes of Nigel, and Quentin Durward, where action is more important, the plot is generally developed in a leisurely and casual fashion. The story lines of Ainsworth and James, in contrast, are all action and intrigue, rapidly developing and swiftly moving tales, depending upon the utilization of lost heirs, disguises, incredible escapes, mistaken identities, fantastic coincidences, and missing letters. All of these, it is true, can be found in Scott's works. But his imitators relied more exclusively upon such devices to give interest and forward momentum to their stories. And the Victorian habit of periodical serialization accentuated their tendency to see plot as a rapid, almost dizzy, change of incidents, their stories moving forward at a hectic pace with an abundance of small climaxes and sudden surprises. Scott usually restricted himself to a single plot line in any novel. His followers, succumbing to the Victorian tendency to proliferate plots, generally initiated two, sometimes three, stories in a single romance. G. P. R. James' Philip Augustus (1831) keeps a triple plot going: two dealing in loose terms with historical personages, the third with fictional characters. The three are poorly integrated, and the reader continually loses track of one story as James shifts to a second or third plot. This readiness of the post-Scott romancers to work up incredibly complex, interlocking intrigues was effectively satirized by Captain Frederick Marryat in his first historical romance, Snarleyyou, or The Dog Fiend (1837). This then in general terms was the state of the early Victorian 18

The History of the English Novel (London, 1950), VI, 184.

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historical romance: intrigue, costume, and history mixed together with little imagination and less art. As George Henry Lewes said, "To write a good historical romance is no easy task; to write such as are published... is, we believe, one of the easiest of all literary tasks." 19 In summary we can say that on the whole the post-Scott historical romancers followed Scott only at a distance. They took over from the Waverley novels those features most easily exploited: the costume, the picturesqueness, the sense of pageantry, and the antiquarianism. In these areas they evinced a careful concern with accuracy of detail backed by considerable research. Like Scott, they brought history to the aid of romance. The major characters and events in their novels are still fictional, as they had been in the Waverley novels. Generally, the historical elements in their novels are more accurate than Scott had been inclined to make them; but they still felt free to bend the fact for the sake of the story at hand. There is also a schizophrenic division to their history and their use of it. Careful accuracy is balanced against flagrant violation of historical fact, sometimes (as in Windsor Castle) in the same paragraph. None of their historical romances really forced the reader to reflect upon the complex patterns and causes of events as they affected the lives of individual characters in the story. Scott had done this in his better novels; in Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian, Old Mortality, and a few others the chief characters were inextricably a part of the period in which they were set, and their vacillations and destinies were in a very real sense tied to and preconditioned by the events of the period. For the most part the early Victorian romancers exhibited a paucity of imagination. With few exceptions they were the "industrials", men and women who put together a historical novel in the way a small boy might assemble the parts of a model plane kit: mechanically fitting the pre-cut parts together according to the diagram. Since there were few alterations in the basic pattern, their total productivity exhibits a most monotonous regularity, the sameness altered only superficially by the choice of background 19

"Historical Romance", Westminster Review XLY (March, 1846), 34.

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drapery. Rarely has literary composition been so reduced to a mechanical assembly of parts. George Henry Lewes in a devastating review of current historical romances in 1846 was painfully correct when he asserted that the Victorian historical romancer needed no style, no imagination, no fancy, no knowledge of the world, no wit, no pathos; he needs only to study Scott, and the historical novelists; to "cram" for the necessary information about costumes, antiquated forms of speech, and the leading political events of the epoch chosen; and to add thereto the art, so easily learned, of complicating a plot with adventures, imprisonments, and escapes. As for character, he need give himself no trouble about it: his predecessors have already furnished him with types; these he can christen anew. Probability he may utterly scorn. If he has any reflections to make, he need only to give them a sententious turn; truth, novelty, or depth are unimportant. Sprinkle largely with love and heroism; keep up the mystery overhanging the hero's birth, till the last chapter; and have a good stage villain, scheming and scowling through two volumes and a half, to be utterly exposed and defeated at last-and the historical novel is complete. 20

Other novelists, utilizing the general Scott formula of a Active story played out against a historical backdrop, would find new ways of adapting their material to the tastes of the age. Later writers would employ the historical romance as a medium for the discussion of contemporary problems; the past for them would reflect the present. Dickens would go to the historical novel to deal with the current social problems of England; Kingsley, to preach muscular Christianity and patriotism; Edwin Abbot and Dean Frederic W. Farrar, to defend the Broad Church principles; and Cardinals Wiseman and Newman, to set forth Catholic doctrine. In their hands the historical romance would cease to be the vehicle of escapism it had been with many of the earlier romancers.

20

"Historical Romance", 34-35.

2 THE ROMANCERS AND HISTORIC TRUTH: THE QUESTION OF RESPONSIBILITY

As many Victorian novelists gravitated toward the social, political, and religious issues of their age, critical hostility increased towards previous and contemporary writers who were thought not serious enough for the changed temper of the times. For most Victorians Scott's position as the chief of the English novelists remained secured and unquestioned. His novels continued to enjoy wide popular sales and continued critical support. He served for many as the touchstone by which subsequent novelists were tested and often found wanting. Furthermore, Scott's popularity, based in part on his exemplary life, was expanded and secured by the frank biography of his son-in-law.1 But Scott proved an easy target for those more earnest critics who were opposed on general principles to any literature which professed merely to entertain its readers. He himself had repeatedly voiced opinions to the effect that the novel form was woefully unsuited to any serious endeavor, and for this reason considered it inferior to both drama and poetry. He continued to express skepticism toward the defense of fiction that rested upon its presumed moral influence. "The professed moral of a piece", he stated in an essay on Fielding, "is usually what the reader is least interested in; it is like the mendicant, who cripples after some splendid and gay procession, and in vain solicits the attention of those who have been gazing upon it." He then went on to insist that the novel was 1

For a full history of Scott's reputation throughout the Victorian period, see James T. Hillhouse, The Waverley Novels and Their Critics (Minneapolis, 1936).

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23

a mere elegance, a luxury contrived for the amusement of polished life, and the gratification of that half love of literature, which pervades all ranks in an advanced state of society, and are read much more for amusement, than with the least hope o f deriving instruction from them. 2

And in the introductory epistle to The Fortunes of Nigel he trumpeted, almost as a challenge: " I care not who knows i t - 1 write for general amusement." 3 But an increasing number of readers found Scott's professed goal of amusement to be inadequate in light of the newer emphasis upon the seriousness of the artist's responsibility to his public. A dissentient minority of important Victorian thinkers and critics took issue with the popular consensus and began censuring him on grounds that distinctly reflected the changed temper of the post-Scott years. For the first time his novels were scrutinized for their philosophy and history. In each case there were those who found the Wizard of the North sadly lacking in those qualities they held to be essential to great literature. Thomas Carlyle was one of those writers who insisted upon the seriousness of the literary endeavor and reacted accordingly in his evaluation of Scott's fiction. His statement, made in a lengthy review of Lockhart's Life in 1838, is generally taken as definitive of the Victorian hostility toward Scott. Here he amplified a charge recorded in the privacy of his notebooks over a decade before when he labelled the novelist "the great Restaurateur of Europe". "What is his novel, any of them?" he had asked sarcastically. And the answer had come back, " A bout of champagne, claret, port or even ale drinking. Are we wiser, better, holier, stronger? N o ; we have beert-amused."* 2 The Lives of Eminent Novelists and Dramatists (London and New York, 1887), 432. 3 The Fortunes of Nigel, in The Border Edition, ed. Andrew Lang (London, 1893), I, xxxviii. 4 Two Notebooks, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (New York, 1898), 71. The entry was written between December 3 to 5, 1826. Oddly enough, the young Carlyle, immersed in the popular novels of the day, thought Scott's Waverley a great book. However, this initial enthusiasm soon wore off, as the above remarks demonstrate. Cf. Carlisle Moore, "Thomas Carlyle and Fiction: 1822-1834", in Nineteenth Century Studies, ed. Herbert Davis (Ithaca, 1940), 134.

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THE ROMANCERS AND HISTORIC TRUTH

In his lengthy evaluation of Scott for The Westminster Review Carlyle took him to task for being a "mere entertainer" who had "no message whatever to deliver to the world". His novels, Carlyle insisted, were Not profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for edification, for building up or elevating, in any shape! The sick heart will find no healing here, the darkly-struggling heart no guidance: the Heroic that is in all men no divine awakening voice. We say, therefore, that they do not found themselves on deep interests, but on comparatively trivial ones. 5

As such, Carlyle felt, Sir Walter Scott participated in his age, the spiritual emptiness of his writings merely reflecting the spiritual vacuum of the early nineteenth century, an age "fallen languid, destitute of faith and terrified at scepticism". 6 As James Hillhouse has pointed out, this criticism of Scott was nothing new by 1838. Rather Carlyle, writing from a Scottish Calvinist background, was only giving more eloquent expression to charges that had been leveled against the novelist for the past decade by other critics working within the Evangelical and Utilitarian frameworks. John Stuart Mill, writing a decade earlier in The Westminster Review, attacked the Waverley novels on much the same grounds. "There is no one of [Scott's] productions", he concluded, "from which, unless it be by chance, any one useful lesson can be derived." 7 And at the same time F. D. Maurice expressed the regret that men of such obvious genius, such as Scott, "instead of doing something to reform their age, should submit themselves to the meanest eddies of that current which they might have turned from its wanderings". 8 Harriet Martineau perhaps best points up the changing attitude toward Scott. Shortly after his death she wrote two essays, "The Genius of Scott" and "The Achievement of Scott", which are a sympathetic evaluation of his measure as a writer and a hope for a 6 "Sir Walter Scott", in The Collected Works of Thomas Carlyle, The Centenary Edition (New York, 1899), XXIX, 54. 6 Ibid., XXIX, 76. 7 Westminster Review, I (April, 1824), 536. Mill is identified as the author by George L. Nesbitt, Benthamite Reviewing: The First Twelve Years of the Westminster Review, 1824-1836 (New York, 1934), 105. 8 The Athenaeum, 11 March 1828,217-219.

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new fiction based on the techniques initiated by him but refined for new ends. Unlike Maurice and Carlyle, Miss Martineau did not feel that Scott's novels merely amused "indolent languid old men". Rather they exerted a strong moral force and taught all men "the power of fiction as an agent of morals and philosophy". Scott was for her both a "vindicator of genius and an unconscious prophet of [fiction's] future achievements". She called upon the new generation of writers to refine upon his techniques to produce "the philosophical romance". She went on to criticize the "spurious brethen", those imitators of Scott who had taken over his techniques for the historical romance without adapting them to meet the new demands of the changing times and of a reading public, which on the scent of utility, "cannot be interested without a larger share of philosophy, or a graver purpose in fiction, than formerly". 9 As Richard Stang has observed, 10 such criticism embodies a radically different view of fiction and the role it is to play than that expressed by Scott and his contemporaries. Scott's defense, when such criticism was sometimes brought to his attention late in his life, was that if a historical romancer avoided a too gross confusion of the manners of various peoples and periods, presented a reasonably accurate portraiture of the historical characters, and in general maintained a sense of credulity, the author could not in all fairness be assigned to the company of "the light and frivoulous associates with whom a careless observer would be disposed to ally him", but would "take his seat on the bench of the historians of his time and country". 11 And in the prefatory remarks affixed to Peveril of the Peak Scott defended his novels against the charges of corrupting history and misguiding his readers, asserting that his historical fictions encouraged in his readers an interest in formal histories. At the very least, the less ambitious reader would quit one of his romances "with a degree of knowledge, not perhaps of the most accurate kind, but such as he

9

"The Genius of Scott", in Miscellanies (Boston, 1836), I, 53-54. The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850-1870, (New York and London, 1959), 11. 11 Quarterly Review XVI (January, 1817), 467. 10

26

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might not otherwise have acquired". 12 The possibility that the historical romance might be utilized for the serious instruction of the reader in history was recognized quite early by both Scott and his advocates as a chief potential in this form of fiction. This, however, was due to Scott's innovation of introducing historical events and personages into his narratives. Previous historical romancers had generally been content with setting their stories in a distant time without any real concern for the manners, costumes, events, and people of the earlier period. As it turned out, this proved to be one of the most common defenses of Scott's fictions and historical fiction in general throughout the Victorian years. Archibald Alison, the historian, asserted in a eulogistic appraisal of the historical romance that it was one of "the most delightful and instructive species of composition... and can give the truth of history without its monotony". 13 And in the mid-1860s another critic insisted that After reading Sir Walter Scott's "Kenilworth", we are irresistibly led to consult history t o learn if he has given a faithful representation of Elizabeth and Leicester, and we are influenced in precisely the same way by Bulwer, Dickens, and others. 1 4

There is some indication that exactly this happened. John G. Lockhart noted that each of his father-in-law's novels had been followed by the re-issue of the principal sources for the work. The popularity of Quentin Durward, for example, led to the re-publication of Philip de Comines, which enjoyed a brisk sale in its new edition. 15 But the evidence is overwhelming that the majority of readers of Scott and the romancers who followed after him were content to get their history from the historical romances and did not use them as stepping stones into the more academic treatments of the subject. There is no doubt that one of the chief reasons for the phenomenal popularity of the historical romance throughout the 12

Peveril of the Peak, in the Border Edition, ed. Andrew Lang (London, 1893), I, lxxvii. 13 "The Historical Romance", Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine LVIII (September, 1845), 346. 14 "Is the Perusal of Works of Fiction Right or Wrong?", The British Controversialist, and Literary Magazine (1865), 33. 15 Quarterly Review XXXIV (September, 1826), 371.

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27

early decades of the Victorian period was that readers had convinced themselves that with a minimum of effort and a maximum of pleasure they could learn history while reading an entertaining story. As has often been observed, the nineteenth century was a time of increased historical consciousness when men for the first time became aware of the past as being profoundly different from the present. And in England this developing awareness was nurtured and encouraged by the profusion of historical romances which provided many Victorian readers with their sense of the historical past. The volumes of Turner, Hallam, Palgrave, Grote, and Thirlwall, unread, collected dust on the library shelves, while readers turned with interest to the latest historical romance. In 1836 a critic in Blackwood's commented upon the extent to which his contemporaries were indebted to Scott for their sense of the past, asking rhetorically, "...who is there who must not have observed in general conversation, that the notions of bygone times and characters, most interesting to us from a national point of view, are more often taken from the unperishable novels of Sir Walter Scott and others, rather than from the documents of more sober research?"16 Even as late as 1876 the prominent historian Edward A. Freeman noted that a chief error which any historian of the twelfth century had to contend against was "the notion that for many generations... after the Norman Conquest, there was a broadly marked line, recognized on both sides, between 'Normans' and 'Saxons'". He traced this misconception back to Scott's Ivanhoe and admitted that no amount of argument by prominent historians to the contrary had been successful in putting down this popular belief, indicating the extent to which the general reader derived his impressions of a past epoch from the historical romances rather than the histories.17 There were several reasons for this state of affairs. George Henry Lewes was no doubt correct when he asserted that a chief factor was "Idleness;-a wish to get at knowledge by a royal route". 18 But 18

"Irish Tales", Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine XXXIX (May, 1836), 687. The History of the Norman Conquest of England, Its Causes and Results (Oxford, 1867-1876), V, 825, note W. 18 "The Historical Romance", Westminster Review XLV (March, 1846), 35. 17

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things were more complex than Lewes realized. A much more significant reason was that these novels introduced the reading public to an aspect of historical studies almost wholly neglected by the formal historians of the 1820s and '30s. As a critic in The Edinburgh Review observed in 1832, Scott took his readers "below that surface on which float the great events and stately pageants of the time" and acquainted them "with the minor details and with the habits, condition, and opinions of former races". The result was that readers could now "institute a closer comparison between the complexion of their times and that of our own". 19 Even Carlyle conceded this point, admitting that Scott's novels "taught all men this truth... that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies and abstractions of men.... History will henceforth have to take thought of it." 20 In short, many readers found in Scott's fictions an aspect of history that appealed strongly to them and was conspicuously absent from the formal histories of the day. A further stimulus to the readiness of readers to gain their history from romances lay in the fact that historical instruction had not yet been allotted a place in the educational systems of most English schools. Thomas Arnold's introduction into the curriculum at Rugby of a broad range of historical studies proved to be a major innovation in the early 1830s and the cause of considerable controversy in the years following the adoption. The situation was little better in the major universities at Oxford and Cambridge. At Cambridge, for example, there were only two triposes in the first half of the century, one in mathematics, natural religion, and moral philosophy with the emphasis upon mathematics, and a second in classical studies. Once again it was Thomas Arnold who was chiefly responsible for the introduction of historical studies into the curricula of the higher schools. In August of 1841, the year before his death, he was appointed to the Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford and proved to be the first holder of the chair to take his title literally and lecture on modern history. The lectures, enormously successful, marked the "beginning of the effective teaching of 16 20

"The Waverley Novels", Edinburgh Review LV (April, 1832), 77-78. "Sir Walter Scott", XXIX, 77-78.

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29

modern history in both Universities". 21 Within the following decade historical studies had become a formal part of the curricula at both universities: Cambridge in 1848, Oxford in 1852. The unimportance of historical studies in the universities is underscored by the fact that the major historians of the first fifty years of the century lived and worked outside of the academic communities of Oxford and Cambridge. George Grote was a London banker and a Member of Parliament; Connop Thirlwall, a bishop in the Anglican Church; Thomas Carlyle, a man of letters; Thomas Macaulay, a Member of Parliament; and Sir Francis Palgrave, a civil servant, lawyer, and Keeper of the Records. After 1860 this all changed, so that the major historians of the latter half of the century, Edward Freeman, William Stubbs, John Green, and Lord Acton, were all formally connected with the faculties of one of the major universites. History, then, for the first half of the nineteenth century was an area of study conspicuous both for the intense interest it aroused and its absence from the formal curricula of virtually all the schools in the island. If it was to be learned at all, the knowledge had to be gained through a program of independent study. A man's understanding of history, both ancient and modern, was then a measure of both his own interests and his personal initiative. But this was the time of self-education and self-help, of Mechanics Institutes and the Library of Useful Knowledge. Given the background, it is not surprising that so many people turned to the historical romances for the historical knowledge they thought could be gained from them. With historical romances being read by so many people in place of the more formal histories, it soon became apparent to many Victorian critics that the authors of historical fiction were under a special obligation to their readers to insure the accuracy of the historical portions of their narratives. A reviewer in Blackwood's in 1836 argued that "writers of historical romances, tales, and novels [are] under a greater moral responsibility than the compilers of real history". The reason for this was that fact and fiction in their works are so subtly interwoven that the majority of the readers will be 21

G. M. D. Henderson-Howatt, "Thomas Arnold and the Teaching of History", Quarterly Review CCCII (April, 1964), 219-220.

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quite unable to distinguish the two. Care must thus be taken not to falsify or misrepresent historical personages and events. 22 The problem was rendered more acute by the disregard of historical accuracy by the historical romancers of the day. Scott and his followers were frequently bound by the popular conception of the past, what Herbert Butterfield has called the "picture-gallery of the p a s t " - a popular impression built up over the years from a general blurring of history, ballads, Biblical stories, local traditions, poetry, and romance. 23 Instead of correcting this romantic and popular sense of the past, as some Victorian critics felt they should, the historical romancers frequently catered to it. "No-knowledge is better than mis-knowledge", asserted George Henry Lewes and insisted that it was the latter that most readers picked up from the historical fictions of the day. 24 Numerous critics now attacked Scott's novels and those of his followers on the grounds of historical inaccuracy and misrepresentation. This is a note peculiarly Victorian. In Scott's own day there had been little discussion of the merit of the historical aspects of his novels and little demand for a precise attention to the niceties of historical fact. He would, no doubt, have agreed with Nassau Senior in his article on the Waverley novels in The Quarterly Review of 1821 when he said of history in Scott's romances that W e d o not object to Sir Walter's alterations of facts and characters, on account of their tendency to produce false historical impressions. The object of a novel is not to instruct; and the reader w h o is absurd enough t o look into fiction for truth, cannot h o p e even to b e pitied for having been led into error. 2 5

But by the time of Scott's death critics had become increasingly less tolerant of such laxity toward historical fact. H. A. Taine, writing much later, observed that "From Walter Scott we learned history. And yet is this history? All these pictures of a distant age are false." 26 And Sir Francis Palgrave, the historian and Keeper of the Records, 22 23 24 25 28

"Irish Tales", 687. The Historical Novel: An Essay (Cambridge, England, 1924), 2. "The Historical Romace", 35. "Sir Walter Scott", reprinted in Essays on Fiction (London, 1864), 172. History of English Literature, trans. H. VanLaun (London, 1883), IV, 434.

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31

stated in 1851 that "Historical novels are mortal enemies to history", and then attacked Scott's Ivanhoe as "out of time, out of place, out of season, out of reason, ideal or impossible".27 It was largely due to historical fiction, Palgrave argued, that the British reading public had come to consider English history as little more than "a splendid melodrama, set to the sound of kettledrums and trumpets". 28 Even had Scott wished to have been more precise, he would have found himself at a disadvantage in relation to his successors. Much new material was opened up in the 1820s and '30s, well after he had written most of his novels, but in ample time for those who wrote in the early decades of the Victorian era. This was indeed a time of histories. Sir Francis Palgrave's massive studies began appearing in the late 1820s. His efforts and those of Nicholas Nicolas resulted in many of the records of the Public Records Office being catalogued and made available for the first time to scholars. The volume of historical research swelled to such proportions that Charles Knight noted in 1854 that for the thirty-five year period between 1816 and 1851 books on history and geography far outstripped fiction, titles in the latter category being a full third fewer than in the former. 29 In accordance with this increased interest in history (aroused ironically enough by Scott's own romances), critics and novelists began paying increased attention to the historical element of historical fiction. The historical novelists in the earlier Victorian decades found an entirely new critical attitude awaiting them. No longer was the factual looseness tolerated by Scott and his contemporaries going unchallenged. As Blackwood's noted in 1863: It is harder work n o w t o write a historical romance than it used to be in the days o f Sir Walter, when it cost the romancer n o scruple of con27

The History of Normandy and of England (London, 1851), 1,88. Three Generations of an Imaginary Norfolk Family, in The Collected Historical Works of Sir Francis Palgrave, ed. R. H. Inglis Palgrave (Cambridge, 1922), VIII, 230. 29 The Old Printer and the Modern Press (London, 1854), 262. The largest class of books published were those on divinity, approximately 10,300 titles; next were histories and geographies, 4,900; the foreign language and school books, 4,000; and finally fiction, 3,500. 28

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32

science to put a new saint into the calender for the sake of a handy oath t h a t would rhyme; and when the great novelist could venture t o transport u s bodily into the previous centuries, u p o n his own absolute authority, without citing witnesses, o r stopping in the tide of the narrative t o prove minutely that he could not be wrong. 3 0 Scott's imitators were continually flayed throughout this p e r i o d f o r their misrepresentations a n d falsifications o f history. In 1833 Sir. J o h n F. W . Herschel in a speech before the subscribers t o the W i n d s o r and E t o n Public Library castigated t h e desperate attempts t o novelize history which the herd of Scott's imitators have put forth, which have left n o epoch since the creation untenanted by modern a n t i q u e s - a n d n o character in history unfalsified. 3 1 S u c h sentiments were e c h o e d b y scores o f periodical reviewers w h o flayed

the contemporary historical romancers for their gross in-

accuracies and crude distortions o f history. A critic in The

Athena-

eum in 1835 spent over half o f his review setting straight the historical inaccuracies in the portrayal o f Richard III in a m i n o r novel o f t h e day. "These remarks m a y seem s o m e w h a t out o f place in the review o f a novel", he concluded, "but historic truth is o f m o r e importance than the novel itself." 3 2 The upshot of this criticism w a s a pressure o n all writers to insure t h e accuracy o f the historical elements in their romances a n d to 30 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine XCIV (November 1863), 626. This rage for historical accuracy was not limited merely to the historical romances. James Robinson Planche, playwright and producer, castigated English painters of the mid-Victorian era for their violation of historical truth and the perpetuation of the grossest absurdities and anachronisms in regard to details of costumes, weapons, and architecture in their depictions of earlier periods. Planche himself insisted upon the strictest attention to historical accuracy in the minutest details of his theatrical productions. His revival of Shakespeare's King John was preceded by intense research into the background of that play. Cf. Richard Henry Stoddard, ed., Personal Reminiscences by Henry F. Chorley, James R. Planche, and Julian C. Young (New York, 1875), 120-123. And Tennyson, in his preparation for the Idylls of the King, did extensive research into the early Celtic traditions and "made an honest effort to ground his Idylls on the most reputable authorities of his day". Cf. Tom Peete Cross, "Alfred Tennyson as a Celticist", Modern Philology XVIII (January, 1921), 485-492. 31

"Address to the Subscribers to the Windsor and Eton Public Library and Reading Room" (29 January 1833), reprinted in Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews (London, 1857), 15. 32 The Athenaeum, 20 June 1835,472.

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discourage the more flagrant abuses of chronology and fact that had occurred in many of Scott's romances. Historical novelists now made readier use of prefaces, footnotes, and appendices to defend their own interpretations, trace a detail back to its source, and attack other historians. The attitude of many was now a most defensive one. Edward George Howard in his Sir Henry Morgan, the Buccaneer (1844), a factual biographical historical romance, included in the next a lengthy resume of his sources and his reasons for selecting one over another when the two conflicted. This was done, he insisted, "in order to guard against cavils concerning our accuracy as biographers". 33 And in 1862 we find George Eliot destroying the first draft of her manuscript of Romola and beginning again because of the numerous mistakes in the historical aspects of the story. To sum up, in the 1820s through the 1840s we find that many critics and readers looked upon the historical romance as a potential rival to formal history, and that indeed for much of the reading public the historical fiction from Waverley on was so employed. As we shall see in the next chapter, these newer demands for a historical romance that was neither frivolous nor grossly inaccurate forced historical fiction to assume a radically new shape, as it responded to the demands of the age.

38

Sir Henry Morgan (London, 1841), III, 1-3.

3 THE NOVELIST AS HISTORIAN: AN UNEXPLORED TRACT OF VICTORIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

In 1852 a critic for Fräser's Magazine, reviewing the third and fourth volumes of Macaulay's History of England, commented upon the incredible reception accorded the work by the British peoples. It was, he noted, a bulky work of several thick volumes on a subject which the great mass of readers "might have been expected to turn from, at the very outset, as special and scientific". Why, he wondered, this intense interest in the History? The reviewer offered several possible explanations. The steady, ever increasing spread of a liberal education and the recent admission of large sections of the British populace into the active political mainstream had, he felt, stimulated both historical writing and reading. Then he offered a third suggestion, the proliferation of works of "light history" that had in recent years filled the bookstalls. These works making at all events some pretension to the name of histories, have to a great extent driven books of mere fiction out of the market; purveyors of what used, not long since, to be called light literature, are now become purveyors of light history.1

It was, he argued, chiefly this indulgence by large numbers of readers in "light histories" that had created for Macaulay an audience more extensive and responsive to his History than otherwise would have been the case. As I suggested in the previous chapter, a principal source of this "light history" in the early decades of the Victorian era was the 1

Fräser's Magazine LIII (February, 1856), 147.

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historical romance, which in terms of sheer bulk dominated the fiction market throughout the period and eventually stimulated the public appetite for some of the more formal histories. As one reads through this flood of historical romances published in the 1830s and '40s, he soon becomes aware of its schismatic nature. On the one hand, he finds a large body of writers who faithfully followed the formula for the historical romance developed and popularized by Sir Walter Scott in such novels as Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward. Writers such as Wm. Harrison Ainsworth and G. P. R. James were imitative rather than original, and content to follow Scott at a distance. Their novels were invariably adventure tales, depicting the actions of fictitious personages played out against a historical backdrop. The historical element generally took the form of excessive attention to costume and pageantry, occasionally punctuated by the introduction of historical events and personages. Like Scott, they all saw their role primarily as that of entertainers, allowing themselves the customary latitude in regard to historical facts and chronology. But throughout the 1830s and '40s many Victorian reviewers leveled considerable criticism at Scott and his followers, objecting both to the lack of any real intellectual substance in their fictions and to the innumerable liberties taken with historical fact. Such criticism was distinctly Victorian and reflected the new earnestness of an age imbued with the Utilitarian demands for a literature that consciously instructed its readers. Because of these newer pressures for a historical romance that was neither frivolous nor grossly inaccurate, some historical fiction in the 1830s assumed a radically new shape, as it responded to the demands of the age. A handful of writers-significantly, all of them historians in one capacity or another-did produce a type of historical fiction, which, although it flourished for a short time only, does represent the first substantial attempt to meet the demands of the age. They did so in the easiest and most logical manner, one which would suggest itself naturally to men and women accustomed to work as historians. They all emphasized the historical aspect of the genre at the expense of the Active and wrote as historians rather than romancers. For them the historical romance became a vehicle for the popularization

36

THE NOVELIST AS HISTORIAN

and commercialization of the most recent findings of historical research. These writers were not content to go to history for an exciting backdrop nor to portray an age merely through a representation of its costumes, manners, and architecture. The historical novel in their hands became a vehicle for the exegesis of a historical period, an exegesis from the perspective of a historian, not a romancer. Such a solution-the emphasis of history over romance-entailed a drastic change in the form of historical fiction as it had been developed by Scott. He usually set his imaginary characters and episodes in the foreground, preferring to keep the actual historical elements in the background and allowing them only occasional prominence. Scott was generally quite unconcerned with the accuracy of the historical portions of his romances, always permitting himself considerable liberty in regard to the facts and never feeling himself under any real obligation toward a fidelity to historical accuracy. However, with this later generation of historical novelists the artist's responsibility became that of a close factual fidelity to the historical material. Their novels are about historical personages and events, each treated from the point of view of the historian rather than the romancer. Their works were carefully researched, and scholarly accuracy was one of their goals. Rigidly excluding those elements of tradition, legend, and fantasy that Scott had utilized so extensively and following only bona fide historical sources, these writers reconstructed an earlier period with the deliberate patience and care of an archaeologist fitting together the fragments of some shattered pot. They maintained a strict control over all the fictional elements introduced, never permitting them to dominate. History was not compromised for the sake of the story at hand, as was true of the novels of Scott and his imitators. The goal of these later writers was emphatically not entertainment but rather the instruction of the reading public in the important moments of the past. Edward Bulwer Lytton in Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes (1835), The Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848), Harriet Martineau in The Hour and the Man (1841), Edward George Howard in Sir Henry Morgan, the Buccaneer

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37

(1842), and Charles Macfarlane in The Camp of Refuge (1844) utilized the historical novel as a ready means of forcing a re-evaluation of a particular historical personage, hitherto looked upon unfavorably. Frederick Chamier found in the historical romance the surest means of reminding the reading public of the finer moments of British naval history during the Napoleonic wars. The historian and Keeper of the Records Sir Francis Palgrave turned to the historical tale in Truths and Fictions of the Middle Ages: The Merchant and the Friar (1837) and the unfinished Three Generations

of an Imaginary Norfolk Family to popularize his recent findings in fourteenth century British jurisprudence and Parliamentary procedure. The Reverend Richard Cobbold utilized two carefully researched biographically oriented romances, The History of Margaret Catchpole (1845) and Mary Anne Wellington, the Soldier's

Daughter, Wife, and Widow (1846), to treat the impact of historical events on ordinary people. They all wrote "light history". As a group they flourished for a short time only, about fifteen years; by 1850 they were themselves a part of literary history. Thus, there developed in the 1830s and '40s the concept of the historian-novelist. Writers such as Bulwer, Macfarlane, and Palgrave saw themselves in competition, not with their contemporary romancers, but with the formal historians of their day. The factual literalness and heavy scholarship of their novels gave added weight to the authors' claims that such books were to be taken as a loose kind of history by their readers. It would be a mistake, however, to see these historian-novelists as an isolated and freakish phenomenon on the Victorian literary scene. Rather they are but one aspect of the general and pervasive movement toward a consciously didactic fiction. The literary tastes of many Victorian readers ran pre-eminently in favor of what Τ. H. S. Escott called "the literature of positive information and instructive fact". 2 This was the time of the ascendancy of Bulwer's Mr. Bluff, "the sensible, practical man", the embodiment of vulgar Utilitarianism. Mr. Bluff, as Bulwer made clear in England and the English, was a most prominent type by 1833. He was the individual 2

England, Her People, Polity, and Pursuits (New York, 1880), 536.

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who "hates both poets and philosophers... has a great love of facts... does not observe how the facts are applied to the theory... [and] only wants the facts for themselves". 3 The Bluffs, and their near relations, the Gradgrinds and the Bounderbys, exerted a crucial influence on the literature of the period, especially, the novel, in their drive for facts, facts, and more facts. As early as 1831 Mrs. Gore, the novelist, could lament that "Nothing but books or plays administrant to unnatural excitement, or of a nature to gratify the outcry for useful knowledge, have now any vogue in London." 4 Thus, those historical novelists who emphasized the historical side of the genre and utilized the form for the elucidation of specific historical personages and events were part of a much larger phenomenon in the Victorian world. By focusing upon factual rather than imaginative experiences, they managed to escape the evangelical and Utilitarian strictures against a literature of "mere entertainment" and produced a series of novels which appealed to an instruction-oriented reading public, imbued with its responsibilities for self-education. They too wrote their novels of purpose. And though their purpose was academic rather than social, religious, or political, their affinity to Kingsley, Disraeli, Froude, and Gaskell should not be overlooked. The fact that the claims of these authors to the status of historians rather than romancers were honored by their contemporary critics and the reading public alike should not appear too surprising. This acceptance reflects the unsettled state of English historiography in the early decades of the Victorian era, a time in which the historiographic theories and practices of Carlyle, Froude, and Macaulay were in the ascendant, while the stricter standards of the "scientific" school of German historiography, laid down by Neibuhr and Ranke, were still relatively unknown in England. Indeed, it is advantageous to think of these historian-novelists as representing an extension of those principles of romantic historiography as practiced by the literary historians of both England and 3

England and the English (London, 1833), 1,126-127. Letter dated 1831. John A. Doyle, Memoir and Correspondence of Susan Ferrier, 1782-1854, vol. IV in the Holyrood edition of The Works of Susan Ferrier (London, 1929), IV, 192. 4

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France. The difference between a historical novel by a Bulwer or a Macfarlane and a more formal history by a Froude or a Macaulay is one of degree rather than kind. For all these historians the emphasis fell upon a concept of history as a narration rather than a dissertation. They represent a reaction against the analytical, abstract, and stylistically "dead" histories of Sharon Turner, Henry Hallam, James Mill, and other professionals. The progression was away from a concept of history as abstract exposition toward an idea of history as a fully developed narrative drama. Carlyle, for instance, wished to reinstate the historian as the teller of tales, whose finished works, reconstructing the past in the most graphic, dramatic, and detailed manner possible, permitted the reader to experience history, to be made contemporary with the facts, acquiring them with the ingenuous spirit of a contemporary. To this end all the literary historians stressed the importance of the imagination to the historian. 'Stern Accuracy in inquiring, bold Imagination in expounding and filling-up", wrote Carlyle, "these are the two pinions on which History soars." 5 Carlyle, Froude, and Macaulay all used their artistic imaginations to flesh in the "dry bones" of research, to create a sense of suspense and tension and mood on the part of the reader. There was a pronounced tendency in all their historical writings to see history almost exclusively as drama, color, and passion, and by focusing on these elements they sometimes excluded or subordinated the less picturesque but more consequential matters. Macaulay wrote in his journal in 1853 that his technique was to pass quickly over all that was dull and to dwell at length upon that which was dramatic. This desire for picturesqueness frequently dictated extensive treatment of incidents of negligible historical importance. All these historians are content to describe, but rarely do they explain. The surface is covered with an unprecedented thoroughness, but little attempt is made to explore the depths. We leave their histories with a sense of vivid tableaux indelibly etched on our memories, but with little real understanding of the events detailed and the personages represented. "To exalt the 5

"Count Cagliostro in Two Flights", in The Centenary Edition of The Collected Works (New York, 1899), XXVIII, 259-260.

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drama is to condemn the history." 6 G. P. Gooch said this of Carlyle's French Revolution, but it applies to all these literary historians. Thus, by writing history in a vivid, dramatic, and imaginative fashion, Macaulay, Carlyle, and Froude produced historical narratives that rivalled the historical romances both in readability and popular sales. One result was that the distinction, hitherto clearly defined, between historical fiction and formal history broke down completely at this time. Bulwer's historical novels were treated by the reviewers as history, not fiction, and judged as such. And at least one journal, The Gentleman's Magazine, in a series of reviews on Froude's volumes of his History of England refused to consider them as history, but did think them excellent romance and compared him to Ainsworth in his treatment of the sixteenth century. 7 However, the exact nature of this aspect of Victorian historiography and historical fiction can be best appreciated through a close examination of the novels of Edward Bulwer Lytton, Edward Howard, and Harriet Martineau. Edward Bulwer Lytton (1830-1873) was the innovator and the foremost exponent of the new type of historical fiction based on extensive research, careful attention to factual accuracy, and the depiction of historical events and personages. His novel Rienzi initiated the new vogue in 1835 and his Harold marked its close in 1848. Of all the men and women to work in historical fiction, Bulwer Lytton enjoyed the highest reputation among his contemporaries. His major historical novels represent the most scholarly and complex use of history by any Victorian novelist. Of all the men to work with the post-Scott historical novel, 6

History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York, 1935), 326. 7 Cf. especially Gentleman's Magazine CCIV (May, 1858), 480-487. In many ways, the comparison is an apt one. Like Ainsworth, Froude has a preoccupation with costume and a flair for narrative painted in the boldest colors with a heightened atmosphere. But there is perhaps a closer resemblance between Froude's History, the latter volumes, and Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! In both works we have books imbued with a strong anti-Catholicism, a fervent sense of patriotism, hero-worship crossed with muscular Christianity, and the desire to relate the exploits of the sixteenth century to a nineteenth century anemic in grand deeds. And finally the climax in each is an extended narrative detailing the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

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Bulwer evolved the most comprehensive and articulate theory of the composition of the historical romance. He was perhaps more acutely aware than his contemporaries of the various paths open to him. He wrote in his preface to Harold that he had early realized there were two options available to him: the one consists in lending to ideal personages and to an imaginary fable the additional interest to be derived from historical groupings; the other, in extracting the main interest of romantic narrative from History itself. 8

Bulwer had taken up the first option in his first three historical romances, The Disowned (1828), Devereux (1829), and The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). However, he felt uneasy about the possibility of factual distortions slipping into his fictions when the historical portions were subordinated to a melodramatic narrative. Therefore, he abandoned it for the alternate means of using romance in the service of history, an approach Bulwer claimed to have initiated. In his three major historical novels Bulwer was less interested in the portrayal of "mere manners" which modern scholarship and the multitude of historical romancers had already rendered familiar to the reading public. Instead he concentrated upon developing the great personages of past epochs whom he felt had been "carelessly dismissed in the long and loose record of [the] centuries". 9 He set famous historical figures at the nucleus of his works and attempted to show how the dynamic, powerful, and continually vital makers of history went about their work. Bulwer not only selected major historical personages for his fictions, but he looked also for those periods of tremendous social upheaval when the men involved were placed under the abnormal stress of cataclysmic events. He favored epochs of momentous change, when an older order was giving away to a newer, and a country's history was being decisively settled for the next several hundred years. Scott, too, had frequently chosen periods of transition; but, as he made clear in his preface to The Fortunes of Nigel, this was for the increased possibility of picturesque develop8

Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings, Knebworth Limited Edition (Boston, 1892), I, xiii. 9 Harold, l, vi.

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ment available to the novelist working in these periods. Bulwer, uninterested in picturesque contrast and juxtaposition, went to these periods of violent change for other reasons. The portrayal of the historical characters at those times presented the greatest challenge to his powers as a novelist and historian. The juxtaposition of the old against the new threw the representative qualities of each period into the clearest relief for historical analysis. Bulwer, in thus taking upon himself the task of dramatizing great and famous personages and significant moments from history, broke completely with the tradition established by Scott. The role he accepted for himself was that of historian, not novelist. His chief problem was "how to produce the greatest amount of dramatic effect at the least expense of historical truth". 1 0 This difficulty was first grappled with in Rienzi in 1835, and the success of that "experiment" confirmed him in his belief that the true mode of employing history in the service of romance, is to study diligently the materials as history; conform to such views of the facts as the author would adopt, if he related them in the dry character of the historian. 11

Such a method, Bulwer stressed, placed the writer under close restrictions. The chief events of the narrative are set and the characters already drawn; they cannot be tampered with by the author. Imaginative speculation is permitted only in the development of the "inner, not outer, history of man". That is, the author is free to conjecture about private passions and motivations, but this must always be speculation hedged about by close historical scholarship. In all these novels Bulwer was careful to insist that he took no liberties with the facts, but rather constructed his stories upon the real facts: "[My] boldest inventions are but deductions from the amplest evidence [I] could gather." For the main materials of the three Historical Romances I have composed, I consulted the original authorites of the time with a care as scrupulous as if intending to write, not a fiction, but a history. And having formed the best judgment I could of the events and characters of the age, I 10

Harold, I, xii. Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes, Rnebworth Limited Edition (Boston, 1891), I, xi.

11

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43

adhered faithfully to what, as an Historian, I should have held to be the true course and true causes of the great political events, and the essential attributes of the principal agents. 12

For his three major historical novels, then, Bulwer assumed the mantle of the historian. In each case he was convinced by his own extensive investigation that a particular man or event had been misjudged by contemporary historians, and he wished to set the record straight. In Reinzi he was primarily concerned with salvaging the Tribune's character from the "superficial and unfair" treatment by Gibbon: I regarded the completion of these volumes, indeed, as a kind of duty ; for having had the occasion to read the original authorities from which modern historians have drawn their accounts of the life of Rienzi, I was led to believe that a very remarkable man had been superficially judged, and a very important period crudely examined. 13

The novel, which was originally intended to be a history, was in fact the first comprehensive treatment of Rienzi to appear in England and sustained Bulwer's promise that the reader would gain "a more full and detailed account of the rise and fall of Rienzi, than in any English work of which I am aware".14 In The Last of the Barons Bulwer undertook to explicate the complicated events of the latter half of the English fifteenth century: I venture to think that the general reader will obtain from these pages a better notion of the important age, characterized by the decline of the feudal system, and immediately preceding that great change in society which we usually date from the accession of Henry VIII, than he could otherwise gather, without wading through a vast mass of neglected chronicles and antiquarian dissertations. 15

Hume's judgments on the period are constantly attacked in the notes to the novel as "hasty", "inaccurate", and "more than ordinarily incorrect". The novel also contains considerable scholar12

Harold, Ι,χίν. Rienzi, I, vii. 14 Rienzi, I, vii-viii. In conjunction with Bulwer's ambitions here, it is interesting to note that a critic for The Quarterly Review, writing after the novelist's death, credited Rienzi with "the feat of modifying the generally received estimate of a great historical personage". Quarterly Review CXXXIV (1873), 496. 15 The Last of the Barons, Knebworth Limited Edition (Boston, 1892), I, xxiv. 13

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ly speculation regarding both the character of Richard III ("I think I shall give a new reading of Richard the Third's crimes and character-new, but I hope not untrue") 1 6 and the reasons behind the sudden and desisive rupture between Edward IV and his baron Warwick in February of 1470, an aspect of their relationship that had long been obscured in histories. Bulwer's final resolution was that Edward had foolishly attempted the virtue of one of Warwick's daughters, but he did not arrive at this solution of the rupture because it was the most satisfying in terms of a romance situation. Rather he came to this conclusion only after painstaking and exhausting research into the chronicles. Since this represented an original interpretation of a crucial moment, and one at odds with the opinions of most former scholars on the period, Bulwer was careful to present his argument with an extensive annotation of sources to support his thesis. Bulwer was equally explicative in Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings, There he detailed the political, social, and intellectual features of the age, so that the reader would understand "why England was conquered, and how England survived the Conquest". 1 7 And to this end he devoted much of his leisure time for close to a decade in doing research. Bulwer always stressed the accuracy of the history in his fictions. He did considerable research and was proud of the pictures and explications of past periods that he crammed into his novels. He never took an "unwarranted liberty with the real facts", but rather constructed his tales on the historical facts. Bulwer himself traced the popularity of his historical fiction to his "faithful narration of historical facts" rather than to any fictional elements he might have employed in the composition of the novels. Confident of his researches and the suppositions he drew, he stood by the validity of his historical novels as history: N a y , [the author] ventures to believe, that whoever hereafter shall write the history of Edward IV. will n o t disdain to avail himself of s o m e of the

16

Victor Alexander George Robert Bulwer Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer, the First Lord Lytton (London, 1913), II, 34. 17 Harold, I, xvi.

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suggestions scattered throughout these volumes, and tending to throw new light upon the events of that intricate but important period.18

And it should be stressed that Bulwer's research for his novels was extensive and thorough. Before attempting to write, he systematically studied all available material, both ancient and modern, on his subject. Bulwer's general technique in regard to his sources was to rely heavily and narrowly upon a single work for a particular section of the novel at hand, going to other sources only when some secondary circumstance, which lacked support in the main reference work, could be found elsewhere. When a particular source coincided with his own interpretation of a person or an event, Bulwer generally followed it with close exactitude. In this respect he shares in the general attitudes and practices of the literary historians of his day. Macaulay, for instance, had often argued that there was no reason why, with the proper research and restraint, the formal historian could not portray a historical figure such as Elizabeth with a vividness comparable to Scott's portraiture in Kenilworth and "without employing a single text not authenticated by ample testimony". 19 Bulwer, like the literary historiographers, insisted upon the importance of imagination in breathing life into the facts of history. "Fiction", he asserted, "when aspiring to something higher than mere Romance, does not pervert, but elucidate Facts." 20 Bulwer here echoes Carlyle's dictum that "Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold Imagination in expounding and filling-up, these are the two pinions on which History soars." 21 For Bulwer, as for the other literary historians, the artist in history should exercise his imagination to flesh in "the cold outlines of the rapid chronicler", achieving immediacy through color and detail. In Bulwer's historical novels the fictional element is rigidly restricted to the depiction of the "inward life" of his historical personages, specifically in regard to determining their motives. All 18

The Last of the Barons, I, xix. Macaulay, "History", in Miscellaneous Essays and the Lays of Rome, Everyman edition (London, 1910), 38. 20 The Last of the Barons, I, v. 21 "Count Cagliostro in Two Flights", XXVIII, 259-260.

19

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is worked toward a more complete understanding of the "genuine natures of the beings who actually lived [in order] to restore the warmth of the human heart to the images recalled from the grave". 22 The purely imaginary characters, when they are introduced, are always few in number and so ordered as not to interfere with the actual historical events and motivations. Always these wholly fictitious characters are merely the passive sufferers in the panorama of history and never its active agents. Furthermore, we find that most of these minor characters exist less as fully realized individuals and more as academic abstractions. Writing as a historian and wishing to examine each age as fully as possible, Bulwer frequently set up his minor characters to embody some particular force he felt to be at work in the epoch in which he was interested. Therefore, if Nicholas in The Last of the Barons represents the incipient middle and commercial classes coming into prominence at the end of the fifteenth century, then we can assume that Nicholas' destiny is that of his class, for he takes his validity as a representative of a historical type rather than as an individual. This readiness to see character as abstraction, together with Bulwer's selection of epochs of transition, led to another characteristic feature of his historical fiction: namely, the artificial balancing of characters, one against the other, the older order up against the new. This is most evident in The Last of the Barons where we find the dichotomy expressed chiefly in the figures of Warwick (representing the feudal order of a landed aristocracy) and Edward IV (standing for that segment of the aristocracy allied with the new commercial classes). The same division is carried out on other levels. Marmaduke, a retainer in Warwick's household, and Nicholas Alwyn, an ambitious merchant and the future mayor of London, repeat the Warwick-Edward axis. Other characters are set up, however, to illuminate various aspects of this division. Adam Warner represents the forces of modern science and knowledge incipient at this time; he is juxtaposed with Friar Bungay, who embodies medieval superstition and finally works the destruction of the scholar. 22

Harold, I, xv.

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In his own day Bulwer's historical fictions were received by most critics and readers as worthy additions to the historical publications of the age. Henry Crabb Robinson, a voracious reader, worked through Bulwer's historical novels in 1843 and noted in his journal that "I could not but consider [them] as instructive as the general history of Hume". 2 3 The long hostile Fräser's Magazine took a kinder view of Harold and found that in spite of too much unassimilated history in the narrative, it still gave "a better account of the causes which led to the Norman Conquest than any book we know". 2 4 Edward A. Freeman in his History of the Norman Conquest of England observed that Harold was a work "which, if the sentiment and super-natural parts be struck out, forms a narrative more accurate than most so-called histories of the time" and insisted that Bulwer's treatment of the age was superior to that of Palgrave in the latter's multi-volume study of Saxon England. And at a number of points in his own history Freeman acknowledges debts to Bulwer's novel. 25 Even as late as 1914 an American critic could call The Last of the Barons "indispensable to the student of English history". 26 Bulwer's books thus capitalized upon the demand of many Victorian readers for a historical narrative that was dramatic, entertaining, and accurate. And the popular success enjoyed by his books encouraged other novelists to follow his lead and use the historical romance as a vehicle for their own historical speculations and researches. One of the most successful imitations was that of Edward George Greville Howard (7-1841), Sir Henry Morgan, the Buccaneer, which appeared posthumously in 1842. The book reflects Howard's long career as a naval officer. Upon retiring, he 23

On Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (London, 1938), II, 632. "Sir Ε. B. Lytton and Mrs. Grundy", Fraser's Magazine XLI (January, 1850), 107 25 The History of the Norman Conquest of England, Its Causes and Its Results (Oxford, 1868), II, 26, note 2. Cf. also II, 304, note 1; III, 476, note 1; III, 745 where Freeman acknowledges his debts to Bulwer's novel. Since the book enjoyed this sort of endorsement, Tennyson felt fully justified in using Bulwer's romance as his chief source for his own play Harold. 28 E. G. Bell, Introduction to the Prose Romances, Plays, and Comedies of Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (Chicago, 1914), 163. 24

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became a member of Captain Frederick Marryat's circle and worked for a time in editorial capacities with several magazines when not writing his own naval novels that enjoyed a moderate popularity with the reading public of the day. Howard chose as the subject of this, his final novel, the life of the most famous British buccaneer. This man of the mid-seventeenth century rose from a position as an obscure indentured servant in the West Indies to become one of the most powerful men in the hemisphere. Through a combination of genius, skill, and daring he collected a fleet of 36 ships and 1846 men under his command, and with them proved to be for a number of years the major threat to Spanish commerce in the American area. His most famous exploit was the march across the Isthmus of Panama and the subsequent capture and sacking of Panama City, then the richest and most important city in the Spanish colonial empire. Regardless of the difference of opinion regarding Morgan's character, there is no doubt that this feat was the result of brilliant leadership and martial skill. For his exploits against the Spanish authorities, Morgan was knighted by the English king and appointed governor of Jamaica. Howard's attitude toward Morgan vacillates throughout the novel. In the earlier portions of the book the pirate is seen as "more a demon than a man". The author is repelled by the ruthless cruelty and brutality of the buccaneer, especially in the early days of Morgan's career. But, as the story progresses, Howard finds himself caught up in the adventures of his subject. The author then holds the reader back from a condemnation of Morgan, many of whose actions are now explained and extenuated by constant reference to the wholly corrupt Jamaican society. The epic sacking of Panama City, a triumph against unbelievable odds, firmly establishes Morgan as a hero in Howard's eyes. Now we find the author referring to his subject as "our hero" and insisting that the capture of the city was one of the most wonderful military achievements on record. There was no surprise, no treachery. The conquest was gained by the most consummate generalship, and a courage that was never surpassed. If deeds of war can confer honour, Morgan and his associates must stand pre-eminent amongst mankind. They had to contend with and conquer a brave and

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cautious enemy. England should be proud of these men, though they have been stigmatized as pirates; and glory in their achievements. 27

The apotheosis is now complete. Morgan's band of cutthroats, bandits, and pirates has become his "associates". His achievements at Panama City now place him on a level with the greatest of English military heroes. Howard continually defends Morgan's character against charges made by the French and Spanish historians. From the middle of the second volume the author's chief purpose is to use his novel as a vehicle for a general re-evaluation of Morgan's place in history. And from here to the end of the book Howard takes a generally uncritical approach to his hero. Even Morgan's slide into a state of perpetual drunkenness and licentiousness while governor of Jamaica does not shake his faith. Howard did considerable research for his novel. Virtually nothing is known of Morgan's youth in Wales, and the novelist's account is pure fiction. Howard gives Morgan a frustrating love affair and a rivalry with a Spanish duke washed to the Welsh shores after a shipwreck. But this unpromising opening soon gives way to a more interesting, and certainly less orthodox, treatment of his subject once Howard begins the narration of Morgan's life about which more is known. Now he follows the facts of his career closely. Numerous documents relating to the important moments of Morgan's life are quoted from at length. For instance, at the close of the book Howard inserts in full the offical report of Sir Hans Sloane, Morgan's personal physician, in his own account of the pirate's death. For many of the details of Morgan's exploits, especially the accounts of the storming of the fort at Chagre and the siege of Panama City, Howard relied heavily upon the narrative of John Esquemeling, The Buccaneers of America. Esquemeling had served as a physician under Morgan and had participated in the numerous actions described. Howard accepts the validity of his account of events but quarrels with him on the nature of Morgan's character. As the novel progresses, Howard takes his task more seriously. His purpose becomes less that of writing an entertaining novel and 27

Sir Henry Morgan (London, 1842), II, 236.

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more that of biographer striving to salvage his subject from the unfair treatment of earlier historians. Thus, we find Howard viewing himself as a novelist in the earlier portions of the book, but as a biographer and historian in the latter. As his concept of his task becomes more serious, Howard allows himself decreasingly less liberty in regard to the facts. Not only does he examine numerous authorities, but he also strives to achieve some sort of critical evaluation of each source in an attempt to find that which is the most accurate. There is greater hesitation to fill in those areas about which his authorities tell him little. This greater sense of scholarly objectivity is perhaps present more in theory than practice. But Howard continues to insist upon his identity as a historian: We well know that the writer of a romance is expected to know every undivulged emotion of the characters of his creation, and also to be able to account for every incident. This responsibility must not be thrown upon us, for these especial reasons: the first is, that we are writing biography, and speak only from authorities, many of them dubious, we must confess, and from what our hero has himself divulged in occasional conversations; and the second, that many of the transactions-must we call them atrocities?-that have been imputed to him, he resolutely denies. These atrocities we are forced to record, and let the reader himself judge, by the manner in which we relate them, whether or not they may justly be attributed to him. 28

In other words, Howard will refuse the license allotted to romancers to modify history for the ends of drama and hold himself to a faithful depiction of the facts. He follows his lengthy description of the battle for Panama City with a testimonial to the reader assuring him of the accuracy of his account. He has, he insists, "collated numerous authorities and many manuscripts in the British Museum" to achieve "as faithful a record as any that history can produce of a remote transaction". All this is done "in order to guard against cavils concerning our accuracy as biographers". 29 Howard's novel then is essentially a biography of Morgan and an evaluation of his place in the history of the time and area. As one contemporary reviewer noted, the book was more a history than a romance: "The book is fearfully and painfully true to the actual 28 29

Sir Henry Morgan, 11,236. Sir Henry Morgan, III, 1-3.

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history of its extraordinary hero, and may be regarded quite as much in the light of a 'Life' of Morgan the Buccaneer, as of a 'Romance.' " 3 0 Much the same could be said of Harriet Martineau's carefully researched biographical novel The Hour and the Man (1841) which took as its subject the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture. Martineau (1802-1876) was strongly committed to the idea that didacticism was perhaps the surest index to an author's importance. In her essays on literature she continued to remind her contemporary authors that the temper of their times demanded a strong, unequivocal commitment to the principles of the Utilitarian value of literature. Her own writings were almost exclusively didactic, written to serve a specific end in the cause at hand. Possessing the two-fold ability to grasp abstract principles and embody them simply and clearly in illustrative fictional narratives, Harriet Martineau was one of the most successful of the Victorian popularizers. The Hour and the Man reflects her ideas on the importance of utility and serious purpose in fiction. The book was one of her "philosophical romances", heavily burdened with the author's ideas on morality, and politics. The plot, supplied to her by history, concerned the emergence of Toussaint L'Ouverture as the liberator of the slaves in the French colony of Haiti. The novel is a document in the abolitionist movement; here Martineau pleaded the cause of the Negro. In Toussaint L'Ouverture she gave to the anti-slavery forces a black hero for their cause. In August of 1791 the Haitian slaves revolted. Their struggle was singularly ineffectual until Toussaint L'Ouverture emerged as their leader a few months later. A slave himself for the first forty-five years of his life, he was a self-educated black with a deep commitment to the progress of his race. As the circumstances demonstrated, he proved to be a master at military and political organization. Within a short time he had worked his ragged and ill-disciplined force of ex-slaves into the finest army in the Western Hemisphere. In a series of brilliantly executed campaigns, he defeated the two foremost military powers of Europe, virtually annihilating vastly 30

New Monthly Magazine LXIV (March, 1842), 439.

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superior English and French forces. As absolute ruler of the Haitian people, Toussaint proved to be a force for moderation, bringing peace and prosperity to the country. Such was the man who captured Martineau's imagination. In her biographical novel Toussaint emerges as an idealized embodiment of the Noble Savage recast in terms of the abolitionist agitation of the early Victorian years, an Oronookoo crossed with an Uncle Tom. All this represented a sharp departure from the traditional attitude toward the man, most historians before Martneau regarding Toussiant as a man blessed by a natural genius for both politics and war, but hypocritical and treacherous, "in all affairs, the prince of dissemblers". However, Martineau concluded after considerable investigation that the man had been unfairly judged, that in fact he was "an honest, a religious, and a mild and merciful man". 3 1 In Martineau's depiction of the man and his life she continually insists upon his Christian ethics of love and patience. When the revolt first erupts, he does not lend it his support, for he feels that, though slavery is wrong, revenge and lawlessness are not the solution: '"...if [the whites] have oppressed their negroes, as they too often have, our duty is clear,-to bear and forbear, to do them good in return for their evil.'" 32 He joins the revolution only when he learns that the revolutionary government in Paris has conferred upon the Negroes their freedom and the rights of French citizenship; thus, it is the slave-owners, not the blacks, who are against the law of France. As leader of the blacks he is a constant and unswerving force for moderation, justice, and racial harmony; as governor of the island his cardinal principle is " N o Retaliation". A racial holocaust is thus averted. A man of honor, Toussaint remains completely impartial in his fulfillment of his duties; he himself has no private interests, no concern for anything but the good of all the people under his rule. Martineau continually contrasts him with the thoroughly unscrupulous, treacherous, and cruel whites who succeed in capturing him only through a Machiavellian duplicity. Martineau thus idealized her Toussaint out of all credibility. 31 32

The Hour and the Man (London, 1841), III, 248. The Hour and the Man, I, 60.

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Carlyle wrote to Emerson to complain how she had made a "Washington-Christ-Macready... of a rough-handed, hard-headed, semi-articulate gabbing Negro". 33 Carlyle's criticism was valid to the extent that Martineau had deliberatedly idealized her Toussaint, but then he had always been unsympathetic to the abolitionist movement. In actual fact, there is much in common between the historiographic methods of The Hour and the Man and those Carlyle employed in his own biographies of Sterling, Frederick the Great, and Cromwell. Both biographers wrote around a principal idea and ideals and the result was more an abstraction than a recognizable character of individual distinction, a quasi-historical icon for the reader's contemplation. Both were ready to apotheosize their subjects and Carlyle especially fell far short of detached objectivity, ruthlessly suppressing everything that might jeopardize the heroic stature of his subjects. Thus, Carlyle's disgust over The Hour and the Man was finally little more than Caliban's rage at seeing his own face in the mirror. Indeed, it is advantageous to think of all those authors who undertook to write historical novels that were factually accurate as representing an extension into the realm of fiction of the theories and practices of romantic historiography and biography and, as such, their works of "light history" all share to varying degrees in the strengths and weaknesses of romantic historiography: its nationalism, partiality, hero worship, and the lack of a truly critical spirit. Like Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude, these historian-novelists were all amateurs and men of letters, who looked upon history as an adjunct to belles lettres, rather than a science as did Neibuhr, Ranke, and their followers in England. These men were primarily interested in the depiction of individuals and events and avoided the discussion of the more abstract questions of economic, political, social, religious issues. By slighting opportunities for reflection, generalization, and the discussion of more abstract matters, these historians reduced history to a well-told tale. Behind the approach of Macaulay, Carlyle, and Froude was a firm conviction that a factual story 33

The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 18341872, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (Boston, 1883), I, 318.

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THE NOVELIST AS HISTORIAN

may be, and should be, told as agreeably as a fictitious one, that the incidents of real life, both domestic and political, may be so arranged without subsequent corruption of accuracy to command all the interest hitherto allotted to a fictional story. A n d a novel such as Bulwer's Rienzi, H. Martineau's The Hour and the Man, or Howard's Sir Henry Morgan finally realized the ultimate implications embedded within the theory and practice of romantic historiography.

4 THE DECLINE OF A LITERARY FASHION: THE HISTORICAL ROMANCE AFTER 1850

In Benjamin Disraeli's The Infernal Marriage a bored Proserpine inquires of Tiresias what books he has that she might read. When he offers her some historical novels, her reply is sharply critical: "Oh! if you mean those things as full of costumes as a fancy ball and almost as devoid of sense, I'll have none of them. Close the curtains; even visions of the Furies are preferable to these insipidities." 1

When this first appeared in The New Monthly Magazine in 1834, Disraeli and Proserpine were considerably in advance of their age, for the vogue for historical fiction was then at its height. But when the novelette was reprinted in book form in 1853, such sentiments were common. By then the fashion for historical fictions of all kinds was well into its decline and the critical reaction to the form was strongly hostile. In a way this is paradoxical, for by 1850 the major Victorian historical novels had yet to be published; Thackeray's Henry Esmond appeared in 1852; Newman's Callista in 1856; Kingsley's Hypatia in 1852-1853, Westward Ho! in 1855, and Hereward the Wake in 1865; Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities in 1859; Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth in 1861; and George Eliot's Romola in 1862-1863. It is surprising, then, to find that the most prominent and successful efforts in the field came during this decade and a half when the vogue for historical fiction had expended itself and these 1

The Infernal Marriage, vol. IV of Novels and Tales by Benjamin Disraeli (London, 1881), 339-340.

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THE DECLINE OF A LITERARY FASHION

writers could no longer count on the tide of literary fashion to insure the popularity of their books with the reading public. Indeed there was even a considerable risk for a major artist to turn to the genre at this time. Anthony Trollope in 1857 encountered this changed attitude toward the historical romance. In that year when he was going from publisher to publisher seeking an outlet for the manuscript to his novel The Three Clerks, he was advised by one house: "Whatever you do, don't be historical; your historical novel [La Vendee, 1850] is not worth a damn." 2 The advice suggests the waning of public interest in the form and the hesitancy of publishers to take the risk on a second or third-rate specimen, even though a few years before they turned them out by the score. Further evidence of this decline exists in abundant measure in the reviews of the periodicals in the latter half of the century. The Quarterly Review in 1868 felt it a matter of duty to run a lengthy article on Lockhart's Life of Scott in a futile attempt to counter the sharp decline of Scott's popularity among the readers of the day: "...not Lockhart only, but Scott himself, both as a man and as a writer, seems to be in danger of passing-we cannot conceive whyout of the knowledge of the rising generation." This was looked upon as "a great public misfortune". 3 And Leslie Stephen in an essay written on the hundredth anniversary of Scott's birth observed that many people in private freely admitted that "Scott is dull" and that his books ("most amusing nonsense") had been moved from the library to the schoolroom.4 The Victorian critics were now for the first time able to gain a perspective on the deluge of historical romances that had appeared in the 1830s and '40s. For many of them it was the clarity of mind one gains upon emerging from a long, irrational, and exhausting binge. The Athenaeum in an obituary of G. P. R. James in 1860 found upon looking back that it was not "one of the least curious features in literary history, that during a prolonged period there was a public and a popularity for second and even third-rate romancers 2

Autobiography, ed. Bradford A. Booth (Berkeley, 1947), 93. Quarterly Review CXXIV (January, 1868), 1. 4 "Some Words about Sir Walter Scott", in Hours in a Library (London, 1874), III, 219, 246. 3

THE DECLINE OF A LITERARY FASHION

57

who could present the sovereigns, generals, and statesman of past times and foreign countries, if only in name". 5 And in 1892 the Oliphants saw fit to congratulate their age upon the fact that since the death of James Grant, no professional historical romancer had arisen to take his place. This was, they felt, a definite sign of progress in the development of readers' tastes. 6 But by that time no writer with any pretense to importance (with the exception of Robert Louis Stevenson) thought in terms of the historical romance. The state of the genre in the last decades of the century was neatly summed up by William Sharp writing in The Academy in 1889. The historical novel is at a low ebb. It is unpopular with the highly cultured reader, for it must almost inevitably annoy him with more or less gross and disillusioning anachronisms; it is wearisome to the mass of library subscribers, for it deals with episodes of n o present significance and with personages of alien speech and manners; and it is of n o strong appeal to those w h o love to have their wine of literature diluted with the water o f instructive facts. N o writer w h o has gained the ear of the public can afford to indulge in a historical romance unless he have very g o o d ground, indeed, for his conviction that he can be weighed in the balance of public estimation and not be f o u n d wanting. 7

The most obvious reason for the decline of interest in the historical romance would appear to be the innumerable and incompetent imitations of Scott that flooded the market for a thirty year period and surfeited the public taste for the form. This was the explanation offered by The British Quarterly Review in 1859: "We are scarcely surprised that the public should of late years have turned away from this class of fiction when we remember the many wretched imitations-weak sketches in washy water-colours." 8 It was this, but also much more. N o longer were people accepting the original premise that readers could learn history through the historical romance, no matter how carefully researched the work 5

The Athenaeum, 23 June 1860,856. Mrs. Margaret Oliphant and F. R. Oliphant, The Victorian Age of English Literature (London, 1892), 1,9-10. 7 William Sharp in a review of Arthur Sherburne Hardy's Passe Rose in The Academy, 13 July 1889,20. 8 "Novels and Novelists", The British Quarterly Review XXX (October, 1859), 460. 6

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may be. The genre, in a word, ceased to be a rival to history, both in theory and in practice. In the late 1850s and the 1860s the ascendancy of the historiographic methods of Germanic scientific scholarship was secured, as Freeman, Stubbs, and Green began publishing. The earlier forms of literary historiography came under increasingly heavy critical attack as the amateur historian gave way to the professional. A critic for The Edinburgh Review in 1859, referring to historical fiction weighted on the side of history, called it "not a novel but a loose kind of history... written with the license of fiction, an unsound kind of production and dangerous to the integrity of historic truth". 9 The complaint was always the same: "How is the reader to know when the author is giving us fact, and when fiction?"10 And this was asked not only of Bulwer and his followers but also of Macaulay, Carlyle, and Froude. In a way it represents the logical extension of the earlier criticism of historical fiction which violated the facts of chronology, biography, and circumstances. But whereas the earlier critics had been appeased by a new kind of historical fiction that kept strictly to the facts and allowed only a minimal excercise of the imagination, these later critics, imbued with the stricter demands of the new scientific historiography, applied the same vise even more harshly to both the historical romance and the romantic historiography. Furthermore, the Utilitarian antagonism to imaginative literature and its insistence upon facts, facts, and more facts came under increasing attack. In 1846 George Henry Lewes sharply questioned the relevance of facts as the Utilitarians saw them. Is there n o other sort of "information", but that of "facts"? Are there n o things under the sun worth learning, besides the erudition of "Mangnall's Questions?" Is knowledge of the human heart not information? Are your children t o live in the world, to battle with it, a n d not to k n o w it? Are they to mix with men and w o m e n , and rather than learn the natures of men and w o m e n , in the best way they can, to "cram" u p a certain amount o f "information" of mere externals, o f names and dates, and those ancient n a m e s and dates? 11 9

Edinburgh Review CX (October, 1859), 440-441. Edinburgh Review CXX (July, 1864), 56. 11 "The Historical Romance", Westminster Review XLV (March, 1846), 36. 10

THE DECLINE OF A LITERARY FASHION

59

And the reading public concurred. The sales of Bulwer's Harold, appearing two years later, fell off sharply. Bentley, the book's publisher, had earlier advised the author to edit severely the lengthy passages of factual exposition so prominent in that novel. Bulwer declined the advice, but later came to see the soundness of the criticism. Henceforth, he wrote Bentley afterwards, a writer must include only "unperceived research... to avoid the appearance of erudition which perhaps impeded the popularity of Harold"}2 Perhaps the most significant reason for the lapse of interest in the historical romance was the ascendency of the realistic novel in the 1840s. Romance, especially the historical romance, became yesterday's fashion and there were few buyers around to take it. Fräser's Magazine in a gently critical review of G. P. R. James' The Woodsman in 1849 advised him to give up the genre, for "the day of mere romance has gone by". 13 And The Athenaeum noted, somewhat prematurely in 1841, the decline of romance and attributed it to the charged temper of the age: ...a romance is at variance with the spirit of the present age. The nineteenth century is distinguished by a craving for the positive and the r e a l it is essentially an age o f analysis and o f criticism. 1 4

Whether as the Newgate fiction or as the historical, naval, fashionable, or oriental tale, the romance had dominated the fiction of the 1830s and '40s. The common reader was interested in the extraordinary rather than the ordinary, and the novel dealing with domestic middle-class life was an exception and a definite risk, insofar as any publisher was concerned. In her Autobiography Harriet Martineau recounted the numerous obstacles she encountered in 1838 when she sought to place her manuscript of Deerbrook, a tranquil story of middle-class life in a small English town. John Murray rejected the novel because he felt that the bulk of the readers, desirous only of "high life in novels, and low life, and

12

The undated letter is quoted by Royal A. Gettmann, A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers (Cambridge, England, 1960), 211. 13 Fräser's Magazine XL (December 1849), 701. 14 The Athenaeum, 25 December 1841,740.

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ancient life", would not accept "a presentiment of the familiar life of every day". 15 But the demand for realism gained impetus throughout the 1840s, strengthened by the critical response accorded the novels of Thackeray. By the 1850s a new cycle had begun in English fiction and romance had been replaced by the new realism. An "atmosphere of complacent domesticity" 16 dominated the fiction of that decade with such novels as Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, Mrs. Oliphant's The Chronicles of Carlingford, George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, and Anthony Trollope's The Warden and Barchester Towers riding high on the best seller lists. Critics now lauded the "hearth-stone narrative", and demanded novels "perfectly quiet, domestic, and truthful... undisturbed by artificial agitations... [wherein there] is nothing irreconcilable with everyday experience". 17 This change in emphasis is most apparent in Bulwer's canon. Rienzi in 1835 initiated a new phase of historical fiction, and Harold in 1848 marked its close. With his usual acumen for detecting shifts in popular tastes, Bulwer abandoned the historical romance for My Novel, a work treating middle-class life. The romance was now suspect in many critical quarters. The realist Thackeray, who "would have History familiar rather than heroic", expunged the melodramatic and extraordinary elements from his historical novel Henry Esmond. An aging Charles Macfarlane, writing his autobiography shortly before his death in 1858, complained of a new generation of readers who appeared to be "getting rather too fond of realities, and much too indifferent to romance and sentiment", and asked that writers give their younger readers "more generous, more glowing, more ideal pictures; and set up the heroes and heroines of our tales on the pedestal of romance". 18 Much later Stevenson would observe that the "historical novel is forgotten" in the critical and popular emphasis upon a photographic realism.19 15

Autobiography, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston, 1877), 1,414. " Lionel Stevenson, The English Novel: A Panorama (Boston, 1960), 302. 17 Fraser's Magazine XLIV (October, 1851), 388, in a review of The Story of a Family by S.M. 18 Reminiscences of a Literary Life (New York, 1917), 115. 19 "A Note on Realism", in Later Essays, vol. XVI of the Swanston edition of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (London, 1912), 235.

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Stevenson was exaggerating, for the historical novel was not forgotten. It continued to be written and read although its numbers had diminished considerably since the 1840s. The genre was temporarily absorbed with the thesis novels of the 1850s. Charles Kingsley utilized it for the purposes of patriotism and muscular Christianty; Newman and Wiseman, for the bland introduction to Catholic doctrine; Dickens, for social analysis. But these novels all represent the tail-end of one tradition, the final playing out of a cycle going back in somewhat different form to the Waverley novels. In the 1850s and '60s readers and critics evolved a new set of demands for historical fiction, demands considerably different from those of earlier decades. Historical fiction ceased to be considered ancillary to formal history and became accepted on its own as light literature with little pretension to anything weightier. The American historian William H. Prescott had said much earlier that history and romance were "too near akin ever to be lawfully united" and urged that it was enough "for the novelist if he be true to the spirit" of a past age.20 In the latter half of the century this became the general attitude toward the romancer's responsibility toward the historical portions of his novels. The historical novelist, insisted a critic in Bentle/s Miscellany, "must follow rather the poetry of history than its chronology: his business is not to be the slave of dates; he ought to be faithful to the character of the epoch". He then noted the innumerable inaccuracies in de Vigny' Cinq-Mars, but went on quickly to add: "...after all the value of historical, as well as other fictions, must be measured... by the power and skill it displays, rather than by the historical accuracy or importance of the events and persons introduced." 21 Critics and readers ceased to be bothered by historical anachronisms, and there were now hostile comments about the occasional "hyper-criticism" and the "captious and nibbling critic" who dared to intrude such remarks as had been common a decade earlier. Antiquarian research and concern with the trifles of costume, armor, and architecture were now both un-

20 21

Biographical and Critical Miscellanies (New York, 1845), 286. "The Historical Novel", Bentley's Miscellany XLVI (1859), 46,44.

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necessary and unwanted. Leslie Stephen noted that his fellow countrymen had lost their love for buff jerkins and other scraps from the medieval collections in museums,22 and Anthony Trollope, rereading Old Mortality in 1873, found the historical essays and background material tedious.23 Thus, there was a shift in the last three decades of the century away from the historical element in the genre and a general agreement on the part of novelists, critics, and readers alike that the romancer's chief obligation was not to history but to the free exercise of his artistic imagination, unfettered by any demands for factual accuracy. There was no longer any need for practioners of the historical romance to demonstrate their scholarly control over historical portions of their novels. Richard Blackmore, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Thomas Hewlett no longer paraded facts and research before their readers, as had been the common practice of writers in the 1830s and '40s. Stevenson remarked in the preface to Kidnapped, "how little I am touched by the desire of accuracy".24 Footnotes, scholarly prefaces, and appendices disappeared entirely from their historical romances. Relieved from the burden of antiquarianism and the padding of superfluous details gleaned from exhaustive hours spent in thorough research, the historical romance in their hands discovered a new vitality, an ease and lightness hitherto completely unknown to the genre. The historical romances of the latter half of the century were unabashedly entertainment. The novelists now wrote for the pure love of exotic adventure in distant lands and times. They wrote to amuse and no longer felt defensive about a lack of any intellectual substance to their works. Stevenson, expressing this new attitude, advised the reader of Kidnapped that this work was "no furniture for the scholar's library, but a book for the winter evening school-

22

"SomeWords...",Ill,244. Bradford A. Booth, "Trollope on Scott: Some Unpublished Notes", Nineteenth Century Fiction V (December, 1950), 226. 24 Kidnapped, in the Scribner's edition of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York, 1910), p. v. 23

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room when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near". 2 5 Once again the historical novelist was, as in the days of Scott, the teller of tales.

25

Kidnapped, p. vi. See also the article "Novels and Novelists", in the British Quarterly Review XXX (October, 1859), 460, where in a comment on the Waverley novels, the critic states: "We have certainly yet to learn how supplying innocent amusement for thousands can be censurable."

FURTHER READING

In addition to those books listed in the footnotes the reader may find the following titles of interest. Bernbaum, Ernest. "The Views of the Great Critics on the Historical Novel", in PMLA XLI (June, 1926), 424-441. Butterfield, Herbert. The Historical Novel: an Essay (Cambridge, England, 1924). Cam, Helen. Historical Novels (London, 1961). Croce, Benedetto. Theory and History of Historiography, trans. Douglas Ainslie (London, 1921). Dahl, Curtis. "History on the Hustings: Bulwer-Lytton's Historical Novels of Politics", in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays Collected in Memory of James T. Hillhouse, ed. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann (Minneapolis, 1958). Ellis, S. M. The Solitary Horseman: or The Life and Adventures of G. P. R. James (Kensington, 1927). . William Harrison Ainsworth and His Friends. 2 vols. (London and New York, 1910). Escott, Τ. H. S. Edward Bulwer, First Baron Lytton of Knebworth: A Social, Personal, and Political Monograph (London and New York, 1910). Feuchtwanger, Lion. The House of Desdemona: or The Laurels and Limitations of Historical Fiction, trans. Harold A. Basilius (Detroit, 1963). Fleishman, Avrom. The English Historical Novel (Baltimore, 1971). Gooch, G. P. History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York, 1935). Jakob, Karl. Die Historischen Quellen von Bulwers Roman "The Last of the Barons" (Würzburg, 1907). Lucas, Georg. The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston, 1963). Sheppard, Alfred T. The Art and Practice of Historical Fiction (London, 1930). Wheatley, Vera. The Life and Work of Harriet Martineau (London, 1957).

INDEX

Abbot, Edwin: 21. Ainsworth, William H.: 7, 8, 9, 10, 19, 35, 40. Influence of Scott on the novels of Ainsworth, 7 note 2. Excessive use of topographic material, 15-16. Attention to details of costumes, 18. Arnold, Thomas: 28-29. Bulwer Lytton, Edward: 9, 12, 37, 40-47, 58, 60. The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), 15, 16. Reinzi, the Last of the Tribunes (1835), 36, 40 passim. The Last of the Barons (1843), 36,43 passim. Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848), 36, 40, 44 passim, 59. Bulwer's theory of the composition and function of historical romance, 41 If. Breaks with Scott's formula, 41-42. Romances accepted as history, 47. Carlyle, Thomas: 28, 29, 38, 39, 40, 45, 53, 58. Hostility toward Scott, 23-24. Cobbold, Rev. Richard: 37. Dickens, Charles: 21, 55, 61. Eliot, George: Romola, 33, 55. Farrar, Dean Frederic W.: 21. Freeman, Edward Α.: 27, 29, 58. Froude, James Anthony: 38, 39, 40, 53, 58. Grant, James: 9, 57. Green, John: 29, 58. Grote, George: 27, 29. Historical romance: Popularity with reading public, 9-10. Characteristics of romances by Scott's followers, 10 if. Use of historical personages in plot, 11-13. Exaggerated reliance on antiquarian details, 13-18. Use of multiple plots by Scott's imitators, 19. Historical romance used by readers as easy means of learning history, 26-28. New demands for accuracy of historical portions, 30-33. Use of historical romance to popularize historical research, 36 ff. Waning popularity of the form in mid-century, 55 fF. Howard, Edward George: 47-51. Sir Henry Morgan, the Buccaneer (1844), 33, 36, 47-51. James, G. P. R.: 8, 9, 10, 19, 35, 56-57, 59. Kingsley, Charles: 2., 40 note 7, 55, 61. Lewes, George Henry: 20, 21, 27, 30, 58.

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INDEX

Lockhart, John G.: 26, 56. Macaulay, Thomas: 29, 34, 38, 39, 40, 45, 53, 58. Macfarlane, Charles: 39. The Camp of Refuge (1844), 36-37. Martineau, Harriet: 51-53, 59-60. Criticism of Scott, 24-25. The Hour and the Man (1841), 36, 51-53. Maurice, F. D.: 24. Mill, John Stuart: Criticism of Scott, 24. Newman, John Henry: 21, 55, 61. Palgrave, Sir Francis: 29, 30-31, 31, 37. Reade, Charles: 55. Robinson, Emma: 8, 10, 19. Whitefriars (1844), 12-13. Rodwell, C. Herbert: Old London Bridge (1848-1849), 16-17. Scott, Sir Walter: On the didactic value of historical fiction, 8. Popularity with Victorian readers, 9,10,11. Influence on subsequent authors, 10 passim. Use of antiquarian detail, 13-14. Concern with historical accuracy, 14, 25-26, 36. Hostility of some Victorian critics to Scott's kind of romance, 22 ff. Belief in chief value of novel as being entertainment for the masses, 22-23. Decline of popularity in mid-century, 56. Smith, Horace: 8, 10. Brambletye House (1826), 7, 12. Stevenson, Robert Louis: 57, 60, 62. Stubbs, William: 29, 58. Tennyson, Alfred Lord: 32 note 30, 47 note 25. Thackeray, William M.: Henry Esmond (1852), 10, 12, 55. Thirwall, Connop: 27, 29. Trollope, Anthony: 56, 60, 62.