CHAPTER 1

Historical Unconsciousnessin the novel, 1790–1819

MANY OF THE BEST-KNOWN nineteenth-century historicalnovels lend history an ironic grandeur by dramatizing characters'inability to perceive the historical dimension of the events that surroundthem. Walter Scott's Edward Waverley attends a hunting party in the Highlands—onlyto discover a week later, when he is accused of treason, that thehunting party was in fact the beginning of a Jacobite rebellion. In Stendhal'sCharterhouse of Parma, Fabrizio wanders through the fields of Waterloo, buyingand losing horses, shooting men and being shot at, trying vainly to locatea battle. War and Peace elevates this kind of dramatic irony into a prescriptivetheory of history: "In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the Treeof Knowledge is specially applicable. Only unconscious action bears fruit, andhe who plays a part in a historic event never understands its significance."

Critics of the novel place a high value on these ironies. But they haveinterpreted them in radically different ways. For Georg Lukács, the sideliningof individual protagonists marked a crucial stage in the novel's approximationto Marxism. "What matters ... in the historical novel is not the re-telling ofgreat historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured inthose events." The unplanned entanglements of Scott's "mediocre heroes"foreground these social forces, while marginalizing the sort of historicalnarrative that celebrates fateful individual choice. Approaching the topicfrom a different perspective, Nicola Chiaromonte concluded that theopacity of history in the nineteenth-century novel was an early symptomof the century's waning confidence that history had any humanly accessiblemeaning—providential, Hegelian, or otherwise. What Lukács interpreted asproto-Marxist popular history, Chiaromonte interpreted as a harbinger of"the collapse of socialism."

Given the philosophical differences that separated these two readers, itis not surprising that they attributed different kinds of significance to thenineteenth-century historical novel. But it is a little surprising that theychose to locate those diametrically opposed truths in the same aspect of theform—in the protagonist's inability to grasp the historical significance ofthe plot. Critics have consistently been drawn to this blind spot, which givesaesthetic form to the basic historicist insight that individual perspectives areconstituted by a social structure that may not itself be visible. But critics haveconsistently read that insight as an expression of the principles that shapetheir own methodology. Isaiah Berlin, for instance, traced Tolstoy's theory ofhistory back to a skeptical reaction against the optimism of Enlightenmenthistoriography. Wolfgang Iser discovered in Scott what one might call areader-response theory of history, in which "eye-witnesses bring to life onlytheir own particular section of the fading past, so that each account clearlypresents only one aspect of reality and never the whole." More recently, InaFerris has correlated the formation of the historical novel (and the nationaltale) with a debate that pitted the "official" history of "great public events"against the unreadable traces of social history and local memory. Thereis, in short, a broad critical consensus that the historical novel's emphasison opacity and necessary blindness enacts an important insight aboutrepresentation of the past—but no consensus at all about the insight it issupposed to enact.

This chapter will not offer yet another account of that insight. On thecontrary, I'll argue that there is less epistemological insight to explain thancritics have generally assumed, because versions of the dramatic irony thatcritics appreciate in Scott and Stendhal already darkened the earlier worksof Ann Radcliffe and Lady Morgan. In Gothic novels, the collective past isalready as opaque as it will become in historical novels. In national tales, it isalready evident that protagonists are caught up in a larger story whose contoursexceed their individual field of vision. What changes between 1790 and 1817 isnot that writers discover a newly skeptical theory of social experience—butrather that the mysterious opacity of the collective past (previously embodiedin landed property) is transposed onto personal historical cultivation. Toput this more pointedly: early-nineteenth-century novelists didn't have toinvent a historicist aesthetic, they just had to show that it could serve as afoundation for middle-class cultural distinction. As we'll see in Chapters 2and 3, the limited, perspectival knowledge of history in Scott's novels laterbecame a model for the first period survey courses. So by assigning a peculiarprestige to half-knowledge of history, novelists like Radcliffe, Morgan, andScott were also, unwittingly, building a foundation for the cultural authorityof periodization in English departments.

Since "history" and "the collective past" may sound like synonyms, Ishould explain what I mean by the latter phrase, which will be used here ina broader sense. One of the salient characteristics of social existence is thatit takes place on a temporal scale larger than individual life. A group existedbefore any of its members were born, and it generally continues in someform after they die. When I talk about the "collective past," or "collectivetime," I am referring simply to the way social life is set off from individualexperience by this difference of scale, whether the collective past is embodiedin institutions and inherited property, dramatized as myth and ritual, ornarrated as history.

Because the larger temporal scale of collective life is one of the primaryways a group transcends its members, the symbols of collective time haveoften doubled as symbols of public authority. As Zygmunt Bauman observes,"long and carefully recorded pedigrees are significant through setting thescions of long and known lineages apart from the commoners who cannottrace their ancestors beyond a second or third generation ... For similarreasons, the splendour of old, inherited riches can never be matched bythe glitter of brand-new fortune." In early modern Britain, legal authoritydepended quite explicitly on this reification of collective time. Birth andinherited property conveyed authority because they actually contained thepast. This was particularly true, as Wolfram Schmidgen has shown, of themanorial estate. According to Edward Coke's Compleate Copy-Holder (1641),for instance, copy-hold estates were so intimately dependent on custom thatthey contained time itself as a life-giving soul.

[T]ime is the mother, or rather the nurse of manors; time is the soule thatgiveth life to every Manor, without which a Manor decayeth and dieth [...].Hence it is that the King himselfe cannot create a perfect Manor at this day,for such things as receive their perfection by the continuance of time, comenot within the compasse of a Kings Prerogative ... neither can the King createany new custome, nor doe any thing that amounteth to the creation of a newcustome [...].

For this reason it is important for Coke to show that "the self-same form ofmanors remains unaltered in substance" since the Normans, and perhapseven the Saxons.

It would be a misunderstanding to suppose that, by gesturing at theNormans, Coke is invoking the authority of "history." As Reinhart Koselleckhas shown, our habit of invoking the past as "history"—using the word tomean not merely a genre of writing, but the whole course of human events—isa late-eighteenth-century innovation. It became possible to use the wordthat way only after the discourse of universal history had popularized theassumption that all human societies, past and present, were linked togetherby the gradual "realisation of a hidden plan of nature" (to quote Kant). InEdward Coke's time, the authority of history was imagined less abstractly."Historia" was "magistra vitae" simply because books of history containeda storehouse of discrete examples: admirable models and salutary warningsthat might guide a reader. But in most circumstances of daily life it was, ofcourse, impractical to consult a written account. The broader authority of thepast was therefore called "custom" or "antiquity," and it did not have to beborrowed from historians. The collective past was rather embodied in a widerange of living institutions. The Church was a fellowship of the dead and theliving stretching back to Christ. The antiquity of a community was visible inthe graveyard and, as Coke takes pains to show, it constituted legal authorityin the manorial estate.

Wolfram Schmidgen's study of "the law of property" argues thatcommunity, legal authority, and time remained embedded in novelisticdescriptions of things (descriptions of land especially, but also other kinds ofproperty) through the end of the eighteenth century. Schmidgen concludes bysuggesting that in Radcliffe (and more decisively in Scott) this symbolic fusionof time, space, and community began to give way to "the individualized,privatized, and reified outlook of modern capitalism," which disavows theembedding of social relations in things. I agree with Schmidgen's account(and have already been specifically indebted to his interpretation of EdwardCoke) but I want to look more closely at the end of the process he describes,because Schmidgen's account would seem to contradict the critical consensus Isummarized at the beginning of this chapter. Schmidgen's reading of Waverleysuggests that Scott separated time from the estate by insisting on the visibilityof discrete symbols of the past. "While the common law's construction oflegitimacy relies on the assumption that not everything that can be known isvisible, Waverley's description of landed property sponsors an epistemologythat equates the knowable with the visible." The past is therefore reduced toa visible token—for instance, to the famous portrait of Edward Waverley inHighland dress that gets added to the walls of Tully-Veolan.

This reading precisely reverses a prevailing narrative about the historicalnovel. As I began the chapter by noting, many scholars have argued thatScott advanced realism by discovering that "history" is as invisible and asubiquitous as the air. Schmidgen claims that Scott reified the past by makingit visible, where Lukacs and Iser suggested that his innovation was to makehistory disappear. What explains this contradiction? I tend to think thequestion of visibility, as such, is a red herring. There was a robust consensusamong novelists, from Ann Radcliffe through George Eliot, that the temporaldimension of community was concealed from the casual observer. But differentgenres and discourses defined the hidden temporal dimension of communitydifferently. Eighteenth-century novelists had envisioned collective time asembedded in places and things—pre-eminently, in the manorial estate. Butas Gothic novels were displaced by national tales, and eventually by historicalnovels, the customary authority of property was treated increasingly as anempty sign. This is not quite to say that the past was condensed, as Schmidgensuggests, into visible artefacts or museum exhibits. Rather, nineteenth-centurynovelists began to imply that the really important, invisible part ofcollective time was located in the minds of their characters—although only,perhaps, as a slumbering potential, which the events of the narrative wouldhave to awaken and develop.

The central effect of this change, I will argue, was to shift the authorityof the collective past away from landed property and toward personalcultivation. In this way, the national tale and historical novel participate in alarger romantic-era argument that systematically redefined a whole range ofvirtues (independence, for instance) so that they could be possessed not justby landowners but by urban professionals and entrepreneurs.

Personal cultivation gives characters access to the collective past mosttransparently when it takes the form of historical learning, and romantic-eranovelists did find a host of ingenious ways to make historical learningdrive a plot. Characters discover old manuscripts, study inscriptions, cleangravestones, argue about Irish history, and claim to exhume Roman relics orburied treasure. But the connection between cultivation and history is justas frequently made in subtler ways, so that knowledge of poetry or naturalphilosophy can carry the same social weight as historical learning. Toaccomplish this, it is only necessary that the psychological depth charactersreveal, when they are quoting Shakespeare or studying Irish botany, shouldeventually turn out to be temporal depth. It is only necessary that cultivationshould produce eerie parallels, or dreams, or flashes of déjà vu, which connectpresent-day characters to an ancestral past, and reveal its persistence withinthem. To foreshadow, briefly, a topic that the fifth chapter of this book willtackle at more length: one of my reservations about the discourse of collective"memory" in recent criticism is that it has tended to overread the figurativedifferences between official history and this sort of déjà vu. "Memory" and"history" are often, in post-romantic writing, different names for a singlefantasy—different ways of imagining collective time as something anindividual can internalize.

History becomes important in the romantic novel, in short, becauseit allows characters to internalize the authority of the past—previouslyembedded in institutions and property—as a portable attribute of character.This promotes the importance of historical cultivation in particular, but itis also a sign that learning in general was taking on a new social function.The logic that fostered this new function has been explored convincingly inErnest Gellner's account of the rise of nationalism. To sketch this briefly: inindustrializing societies, education acquires an economic importance thateventually begins to shape collective identity. Ties of kinship and locality giveup some of their economic significance in favor of the portable social capitalthat permits a worker to move from one occupation or location to another. Asan (indirect) consequence of these shifts, there is growing pressure to identifythe boundaries of the state with the boundaries of a distinctive nationalculture, and to imagine collective identity in terms of cultivation. This logiccan confer a new social consequence even on forms of learning like botanyand chemistry, which might not immediately seem national. But the newsocial centrality of learning is dramatized even more forcefully by literary andhistorical cultivation, which illustrate the spatial boundaries that separateeach nation from others, as well as the temporal continuities that bind it toitself. The eighteenth-century expansion of historiography to encompass thehistory of manners and private life, as well as commerce and the arts, needs tobe understood in this context: the shift from a strictly political to a culturalhistory parallels the rising economic significance of the "nation" vis-à-vis the"state."

To return, then, to the question that opened this chapter: What wasthe insight that permitted Scott—and other early historical novelists—torepresent history as something invisible and ubiquitous? The question isbadly formed because no special insight was needed. Eighteenth-centurywriters were already fascinated by the radical differences of scale that madeit difficult for individual observers to grasp collective change; "historicism"is partly a name for growing consciousness of that blind spot. Eighteenth-centurynovelists often embedded the mystery of the past in descriptionsof landed property, representing houses and landscapes as palimpseststhat record multiple overlapping layers of time. But at the beginning of thenineteenth century, the mystery of the past takes up residence in a differentaspect of novelistic form. Instead of informing the setting, it moves graduallyinto character, where it manifests itself as a mode of cultivation that includesboth knowledge of the past and eerie blindness to it. This chapter traces thatprocess of translocation. In the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, I'll argue,personal cultivation remains so intimately bound up with the obscureauthority of landed property that it is difficult to distinguish the two. Therelationship between property and culture in the national tale is more difficultto characterize, because one of the central projects of the genre is to rethinkthat relationship. The national tales of Lady Morgan, for instance, begin bylinking national culture to the antiquity of property in a very Radcliffean way.But in Morgan's later novels, property loses much of its symbolic power, andthe grandeur of collective time is dramatized mainly by mysterious parallelsthat bind characters to their precursors in a remote era of Irish history. Thechapter concludes by comparing two of Morgan's novels to two of Scott'spublished in the same period, to highlight the way both authors use theirprotagonists' ignorance of the past to represent historical cultivation as asublimely elusive distinction that transcends ordinary categories of class. Inthe late Regency period, the generic boundary between "national tales" and"historical novels" is often less important than this shared fantasy.