Acts of Modernity

The Historical Novel and Effective Communication, 1814–1901

David Buchanan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317029045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Acts of Modernity, David Buchanan reads nineteenth-century historical novels from Scotland, America, France, and Canada as instances of modern discourse reflective of community concerns and methods that were transatlantic in scope. Following on revolutionary events at home and abroad, the unique combination of history and romance initiated by Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) furthered interest in the transition to and depiction of the nation-state. Established and lesser-known novelists reinterpreted the genre to describe the impact of modernization and to propose coping mechanisms, according to interests and circumstances. Besides analysis of the chronotopic representation of modernity within and between national contexts, Buchanan considers how remediation enabled diverse communities to encounter popular historical novels in upmarket and downmarket forms over the course of the century. He pays attention to the way communication practices are embedded within and constitutive of the social lives of readers, and more specifically, to how cultural producers adapted the historical novel to dynamic communication situations. In these ways, Acts of Modernity investigates how the historical novel was repeatedly reinvented to effectively communicate the consequences of modernity as problem-solutions of relevance to people on both sides of the Atlantic.

1 Meaning-making

A history of reading practices

Clear thinking about language and society is impeded all too frequently by attempts to project onto the community a linguistic determinacy of the theorist’s own invention.

– Roy Harris, Integrational Linguistics, 132

Acts of Modernity focuses on uses of the historical novel to communicate chronotopic interpretations of modernity, but it is also about how scholars make histories of literature and reading available to others. Whereas material histories have contributed to the expansion of scholarship on the historical novel in recent years, thematic prioritization and close reading have too often obscured the historical contexts and reading practices that made historical novels meaningful to readers throughout the nineteenth century. For example, in the hands of too many critics, the most popular novelist of the nineteenth century, Walter Scott, is simply ignored, or remains the quintessential man of nineteenth-century letters; his first and best-known novel, Waverley, is boiled down to national reconciliation; the Waverley novel represents a masculine genre that obscures feminine (and other) voices, or a means to contrast history and fiction; and the Waverley novels collectively represent entrepreneurial publishing or gesture to the rise of popular reading. Yet, if a point of contention unites critics of the historical novel, then it is, for better and worse, Waverley that acts as the first real historical novel for some and the obstacle to better understanding of a wider field of study for others. Either way, it is the elephant in the room. I use it here as the means to enter an introductory discussion of the historical novel that connects historical representation, reading-as-subjectivity, and the historicity of critical reading practices.

The road to Waverley involved repeated experimentation with historical representation by authors only lately recognized as significant contributors to the historical novel. In the British context, Diana Wallace recognizes Sophia Lee’s The Recess, or, A Tale of Other Times (1783), for example, as a critical early intervention.¹ Additionally, Anne Stevens documents historical novels by women in the fifty years prior to Waverley, Katie Trumpener describes national tales in the early-nineteenth century, and most recently, Fiona Price considers how historical novelists turned from ancient constitutionalism to stadial history to describe social transformation.² Consequently, Waverley may be loosely described as a continuation of an emerging genre. It was, of course, also a unique response to immediate circumstances. The title Waverley is itself a reference to characters in recent historical novels: Charlotte Smith’s Desmond: A Novel (1792) and Jane West’s The Loyalists: An Historical Novel (1812).³ The introduction to Waverley openly discusses possible titles, noting the well-established conventions attached to sentimental, fashionable, and gothic tales by successful contemporary novelists such as Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, and Charlotte Dacre. Many other factors contributed to Scott’s negotiation of history and romance. Ongoing debates about historical representation and modern progress were a vital aspect of Scott’s education at the university in Edinburgh in the 1790s.⁴ His literary career began with the preservation of Scottish oral culture and the translation of German romance.⁵ In turn, his early narrative poems used the popular ballad form to bring regional and national histories to life.⁶ Concurrent with such experiments in the combination of history and fiction, direct criticism of the sentimental novel by Clara Reeve in 1791, Sarah Green in 1810, and many others in the years in between would not have gone unnoticed.⁷ Description of the circumstances surrounding or resources available to Scott as he wrote Waverley could be extensive. Just as important, Scott built upon a history of critical interpretations that continuously reframed the novel with respect to history and romance.

Much early debate about the novel centered on definitions of the genre, but literary criticism acted as a form of social valuation. For example, the more contentious aspect of the distinction between the novel (as a contemporary reflection on everyday life) and romance (as a fantastic tale derived from the medieval or heroic romance) was the supposed misuse of literature. In the preface to The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe was quick to point out the moral and religious usefulness of his work, which he separated from romance.⁸ Samuel Croxall was similarly positive in the 1720s, defending the Horatian potential of the novel to inspire the virtues while both entertaining and instructing.⁹ As a new form, the novel required a defense; as the genre became popular, authors protected their own interests by attacking or defending it. In the Gentlemen’s Magazine of December 1787, “R.R.E.” argued that novels were a “useless and pernicious commodity” that should be taxed rather than shoes and boots.¹⁰ Ten years later, Thomas Wilson recommended that the number of novels in circulating libraries should be more than double the number of all other books combined.¹¹ Although assessments of the novel and the impact of novel reading varied throughout the century, critics were overwhelmingly concerned that the novel, like romance, was a threat to morality. Following on comparisons of the instructiveness of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and the dangers of Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), Henry Mackenzie, for example, was most alarmed about the consequences of “mingled virtue and vice.”¹² Such fears were pronounced with respect to children and women – those considered vulnerable. Although Vicesimus Knox believed that the novel could help to cultivate a child’s imagination,¹³ Samuel Pegge’s fears of the corrupting influence of romance on young readers were more common.¹⁴ Erasmus Darwin was less than generous when he argued that women should not be “kept in intire ignorance of mankind,” as was his patronizing recommendation of specific novel titles to young female readers.¹⁵ Such paternal treatment would later be extended to the working class – another supposedly susceptible section of the population. Overall, William Jones best summarized the ongoing critique of romance (i.e., popular reading) in the late-eighteenth century by suggesting that ignorance was better than the knowledge gained from novels.¹⁶ The impact of such opinions, which were nothing short of self-interested social management, was far-reaching;¹⁷ long before the “Thought Police” of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), critics taught not only what was worth reading but also how to read it and to what purpose.¹⁸

In response to the novel, history was deemed the bedrock of a better society. The related prioritization of historical realism over romantic fiction was, like critical reception of the novel, seemingly inseparable from morality. Defoe defended the moral usefulness of Farther Adventures, for example, by labeling his most celebrated work as “Fact” rather than “Fiction.”¹⁹ In 1721, Penelope Aubin followed by remarking that her virtuous heroine was more realistic than Robinson Crusoe.²⁰ Using what would become a common means of exploring authenticity, Samuel Richardson created a sense of objective distance by claiming to be editor rather than author of Pamela, which was comprised of letters with a “Foundation in Truth and Nature.”²¹ Similarly, Eliza Haywood declared that The Fortunate Foundlings (1744) was a collection of letters written by “real Characters” and attested to by “Living Witnesses.”²² More playfully, John Cleland described Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49) as “stark naked truth.”²³ In one way or another, the novel was repeatedly, consciously positioned as a form of history, which was framed as the only genuine representation of the past.

Authors strove to create legitimacy for the novel as a form of reading and did so on behalf of their own novels. It was not simply a ploy to mask the pleasures of romance or to piggyback upon the more assured standing of history. The novel differed from romance and history in that it represented everyday life in ways that more and more readers could relate to – not because it was a lesser or corrupted form of historical representation. The transformation of romance into fictitious history, or what Hugh Blair called the “Familiar Novel,”²⁴ was a topic of discussion among critics throughout the eighteenth century.²⁵ James Beattie categorized types of the “New Romance.”²⁶ Clara Reeve showed how the novel sprung from romance and also how the novel and romance were different by providing detailed analyses of major eighteenth-century novelists.²⁷ Awareness that the novel had become something quite distinct from romance emerged again and again in criticism throughout the century. John Moore wrote that Miguel de Cervantes banished the “old romance” and described the development of a “new species of romance” called the novel.²⁸ One reason for the shift was the changing representation of history. In the eighteenth century, histories of statecraft gave way to histories of everyday life; this was true across genres, including national histories, memoirs, novels, tracts, and chapbooks.²⁹ As a consequence, Ann Letitia Barbauld, in her history of the novel, defended the novel as a form of “domestic pleasure,” while also describing it as a means to further “knowledge of the world.”³⁰ By 1810, the novel, not unlike history, could be understood as a practical resource linking everyday life and the wider world. The turn from both history and romance to the historical novel – a combination of history and romance used to represent changes in everyday life over time – was under way before Waverley appeared on the scene.

In 1797, William Godwin, for example, considered the transition from chronology to historical fiction. He opposed romance and invention to history but insisted on their combination to form historical romance, “the noblest and most excellent species of history, … which, with a scanty substratum of facts and dates, the writer interweaves a number of happy, ingenious and instructive inventions, blending them into one continuous and indiscernible mass.”³¹ Not long before Scott’s first narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), and nearly twenty years before the publication of Waverley, Godwin viewed historical romance as a means to improve upon historical record: “He that knows only what day the Bastille was taken and on what spot Louis XVI perished, knows nothing. He professes the mere skeleton of history. The muscles, the articulations, every t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Meaning-making: a history of reading practices
• 2 Heart of the matter: consequences of modernity in Clan Albin and Tales of My Landlord
• 3 Nation of readers: chapbook versions of The Heart of Mid-Lothian
• 4 How the West was one: historification from Waverley to The Pathfinder
• 5 Home and away: Leatherstocking reinvented in America and France
• 6 “Spiders in a pot”: harnessing juggernaut in Le père Goriot
• 7 Industrial productions: from editions populaires to a people’s history
• 8 Community lessons: Canadian tales of national progress
• 9 History in action: dramatizations at Montréal, Paris, New York, and London
• Conclusion: working the historical novel
• Bibliography
• Index