Reinventing Liberty

Front matter

Reinventing Liberty Nation, Commerce and the

Historical Novel from Walpole to Scott

Fiona Price

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Ancient Liberties

3. Uneasy Alliances: Liberty and the Nation

4. Conserving Histories: Chivalry, Science and Liberty 5

Conclusion

Bibliography Index vi

217 235

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of the first part of Chapter 1 is to be found in ‘Ancient Liberties? Rewriting the Historical Novel: Thomas Leland, Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.1 (2011), pp. 19-38, and some of the material on Jane West’s The Loyalists in Chapter 3 also appeared in different form in ‘“Experiments Made by the Airpump”: Jane West’s The Loyalists (1812) and the Science of History’, Women’s Writing 19.3 (August 2012), pp. 315-32. I would like to thank Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons, editors of Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past (Palgrave, 2014) for allowing me to explore some earlier thoughts about Ellis Cornelia Knight in my piece ‘The Uses of History’ (pp. 187-203). I am very grateful to the Huntington Library for awarding me a shortterm visiting fellowship; I would also like to thank Chawton House Library and the British Library as well as the Research Office at the University of Chichester, and our own librarians, particularly Wendy Ellison. For providing intellectual engagement, inspiration and advice my heartfelt thanks goes to colleagues Pamela Clemit, Benjamin Dew, Christina Davidson, Natasha Duquette, Gillian Dow, Jennie Batchelor, Porscha Fermanis, Hugo Frey, Matthew Grenby, Rebecca Probert, Fiona Robertson, Thomas McLean and Devoney Looser. I am also very grateful for the guidance given by my editors, Penny Fielding and Ian Duncan. Finally, I would particularly like to thank Benjamin Noys and my parents for their unfailing help, patience and intellectual support.

Introduction

The British historical novel before Waverley (1814) is often seen as a minor and immature form. Measured against Scott, and presumed to be tediously antiquarian, works of historical fiction are deemed relative failures or, when more successful, re-categorised.! This critical narrative is inaccurate — there are historical novels of considerable complexity and importance in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the work of Scott’s predecessors historical tropes are exploited, recycled and distorted in a complex conversation about the problem of liberty. Worried about King George III’s supposed absolutist tendencies, in the 1760s historical novelists began to re-examine the balance of parliamentary and monarchical authority. But their attempts to rethink the distribution of power were complicated: by a reluctance to undermine the parliamentary settlement achieved after the Glorious Revolution of 1688; by fears of abrupt change generated by the English Civil War; and by ancient constitutionalism, the key mode of thinking about legal and constitutional change in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historical novelists from Leland to Ann Radcliffe interrogated ancient constitutionalism, using the notion of a return to ancient liberty, first, to defend the prerogatives of the nobility against the Crown, and, later, to emphasise the prerogatives of the people. But their work made it evident that the myth of Anglo-Saxon liberty lacked flexibility. The fantasy of return to a pre-feudal past was inadequate in the face of the issues of national debt, inflation and taxation that emerged out of the American and French Revolutions.

A different way of imagining the unwritten constitution, of refiguring the relation of past to present, was urgently needed. Seeking such an alternative, historical novelists turned to stadial history. Understanding the past in terms of particular economic stages, accompanied by characteristic political and social forms, stadial history could allow for narratives of progress, of decline, and even of continuity. For Scottish stadial historian, William Robertson, for instance, the manners of the feudal past and the present were linked by the codes of chivalry. If the idea of an ancient constitution enshrining liberty was fragile, could the notion of ‘chivalry’ provide a benign civic imaginary, a way of understanding the respective roles — and prerogatives — of monarch, nobility and people past and present? Responding in part to Edmund Burke’s nostalgia for chivalry in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), radical writers, like Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith and William Godwin were doubtful. Probing the idea of progress implicit in stadial history, they instead proposed historical narratives which would measure movement towards greater liberty in term of the economic well-being and political awareness of the people. In their turn, such narratives were adapted by historical novelists like James White to question the liberty of the colonial subject, and eventually contested and recuperated by more conservative novelists such as Jane West, transformed in the service of Union.

Despite its influence upon Scott, this conversation has been largely forgotten. In contemporary scholarship Scott problematises the Union; registers economic pressures; ends history and underpins the nation with the dubious legitimacy of romance. The idea of Scott as restorative has long been subject to criticism. Nonetheless, this motif, which emerged quickly and proved so persistent, played a role in rendering the historical novel before Scott invisible.* In the General Preface to the Magnum Opus edition of the Waverley Novels in 1829 Scott recounts how a period of ‘long illness’ threw him ‘back on the kingdom of fiction’, establishing the medicinal power of his work.’ What is at stake in this restorative account becomes evident in Maria Edgeworth’s 1834 novel, Helen. In this, Edgeworth’s last novel, when her hero, Granville Beauclerc, is abused by the company for claiming he is ‘glad’ to ‘have never seen’ Scott, he defends himself from the charge of ‘indifference’. Scott has ‘medicined to repose the disturbed mind’; he is the ‘Great and good enchanter’ ‘for in his magic there is no dealing with unlawful means’.* But Beauclerc still argues that meeting Scott in person would have been a disappointment. Via her character, Lady Davenant, Edgeworth insists that, on the contrary, Scott lived up to all expectations. His healing powers are connected with a manner that recalls the ‘chivalrous courtesy of other times’. Based on first-hand evidence, this quality is as genuine as the signature of the ‘gallant’ Essex that begins the discussion of hero worship.” Elsewhere in Helen forged texts circulate, terrifying and irrepressible, in a manner that recalls the post-French Revolution debate. Against such distortions, Scott and his works stand as instances of authenticity, presenting a last word, a stable past. Clearly, Scott’s implicit positioning of the Waverley Novels as a return to health is persuasive — not least because the recuperation the books offer is more than purely personal: Scott’s ‘kingdom of fiction’ will presumably also facilitate political convalescence.

To extrapolate from Edgeworth’s remarks, if her restorative Scott used no ‘unlawful means’, the earlier historical novel was presumably politically and legally disruptive, darker in its enchantments, more injurious to the social body than medicinal. Shared by other historical novelists including Anna Maria Mackenzie and Clara Reeve, this sense stemmed from the form’s consideration, particularly after 1794, of mass political activity and economic inequality. Previously, the eighteenth century had been characterised by a fear of luxury and the moral and political discontent it might generate. The apprehension caused by the social mobility associated with capitalism is evident, for instance, in Reeve’s own Old English Baron (1778), where she attempts to imagine an Old Whiggish past in which economic and social status — and the liberties supposedly accompanying that status — are fixed. But when radical historical novelists used stadial history to focus on the economic suffering and well-being of the masses, they opened the way to other imaginaries of the commercial realm. What Ernest Gellner calls ‘an enormously complex transformation’ was necessary to create the modern British commercial nation: the historical novel before Scott was a site of the ‘artifice’ and ‘invention’ that shaped this ‘unique’ yet globally influential event.ć In the opening decade of the nineteenth century more moderate writers like Edgeworth herself were able to suggest there were forms of exchange and social mobility that did not threaten abrupt political breakage.

As such, the historical novel is an important site in the development of the gradualist myth of modern British national identity — the myth that in Britain political change takes place incrementally and judiciously, against an implicit backdrop of safe commerciality. In the second Waverley novel Guy Mannering (1815) the lawyer Mac-Morlan replaces the ‘deplorable’ garments of Dominie Sampson ‘judiciously’ by ‘degrees’; despite the violent transitions that form the substance of Scott’s novels, here Scott imagines that the alterations necessary for commercial modernity proceed peacefully, aided by the law.” Above all, Abel retains only an ‘indistinct and embarrassing’ consciousness that ‘metamorphofsis]’ has taken place.* Were even the mild Dominie to notice the changes his superiors decree, resistance might follow. To avoid this threat, to allow the new to be accepted as the old, history needs to be rewritten. As a result of historiographic work performed by, amongst others, Elizabeth Hamilton, Jane West and Jane Porter, national culture was reshaped: the emphasis on political and economic

A Reinventing Liberty freedoms for the individual was transformed into the idea of a struggle for the liberty of the nation. Thus, while a moderated form of ‘liberty’ was retained, in one influential strand of discourse the very idea of (another) revolution became un-British.

While these novels claim the notion of gradual political change for the parliament and monarchy, they also testify to an intense struggle and uncertainty regarding the British future, imagining and reimagining the processes and possibilities of transition. Even though, like Scott, these novelists engage with shifting feudal and commercial social imaginaries, their works register deep anxiety regarding the changing nature of modernity: the economic present can be dangerous, disruptive and potentially cruel. Hence, instead of foregrounding inevitability, they champion intervention. As such, these works speak to the present moment — a moment in which, Fredric Jameson suggests, it is easier ‘to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism’.? Uneasy about the increasing dominance of the market, or sometimes about the distortion of primogeniture on that market, Scott’s predecessors try to find alternative sources of political and social value.

In Karl Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (1852), the philosopher suggests that at the moment of revolution, the attempt is made to borrow costumes and masks from the spirits of the dead. Change is clothed in the language of the past. This is the first step in the creation of a truly ‘new language’, which can only be assimilated when the speaker ‘moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue’.!° Such total construction of the new is, though, challenging, as Sanja Perovic’s work on the earlier revisions to the French Republican Calendar suggests.'! Frustrated with the narratives of the past available to them, British historical novelists before Scott did not directly adopt a ‘new language’. Instead they sought to rewrite the past itself: as ‘artist[s] of the historical process’, they would forge a new grammar by which the past was to be understood.'* The Waverley Novels complete this movement. Scott’s narratives confirm the creation of an innovative history to replace the ‘tradition of all dead generations’.! Nonetheless, Scott’s writing is deeply marked by the tension that characterises the work of his predecessors.

The Invisible Novel

Usually mentioned only briefly in surveys of the historical novel as part of the genre’s prehistory, the historical novel before Scott is a surprisingly elusive form.'* Most frequently, individual historical novels have come into view when considered in relation to other genres. A tendency to interpret the early British form primarily as an offshoot of the French tradition was begun by James R. Foster’s ‘The Abbé Prévost and the English Novel’.!> Foster’s study benefitted certain works, most notably Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783-5), but it also foreshadowed the trend of positioning such works as ‘gothic’.'° In accounts of the development of the gothic, the marginal presence of historical fiction is usually signalled by the inclusion of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron and Sophia Lee’s The Recess, that is, two works that explore the discourse of ancient constitutionalism and a third which rejects it. It is because the narrative of ancient constitutionalism is always concerned with the decline of liberty, constantly haunted by the spectre of (Jacobite) royal absolutism, that these works are so easily read against the gothic novels of the 1790s, in which the imagining of feudal oppression takes its most vivid form. In addition, in their rejection of the (entertaining) tyrannies of previous times, gothic novels of that revolutionary decade implicitly invoke the Whiggish narrative of progress that is critiqued in Lee’s work. However, Lee and her fellow historical novelists probe the past with a suspicious historiographic eye that distinguishes them from their later gothic counterparts. Far from serving a straightforwardly patriotic agenda, the early historical novel re-examines the way the past is constructed, querying the nature of ‘progress’ in order to engage in a sceptical reappraisal of the economics of the present.

In these novels, the writing of history rehearses and thus reveals the operations and fantasies of power. While initially the genre focuses on political representation and judicial fairness, the issue of the composite nature of Britain and Ireland rapidly becomes a central preoccupation. It is for this reason that the ‘historical fiction’ has had a liminal presence in criticism on the national tale.” In Bardic Nationalism, for instance, Katie Trumpener fills the ‘blank’ of a Scotland, ‘neither a nation or a province’, that Edwin Muir had, in 1936, suggested Scott was writing into.'® To do so, she draws on a vast range of sources (including the earlier historical novel). Her focus is on how ‘in Britain Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-Irish cultural revivals partly offset a process of cultural centralization’.!? In respect to this project, as Trumpener allows, the early historical novel is ambiguously placed. It can be used to support nation-building (although uncomfortably the nation in question is often a Union) yet it also exposes the weaknesses in any such project. When the history of the genre itself is examined, what becomes apparent is nationalism’s duality. In The Scottish Chiefs (1810), for example,

Wallace’s fight against Edward I is not used simply to promote the liberties of the ordinary people, or to plead for Scottish independence; instead, Jane Porter redirects nationalist sentiment to the British efforts against Napoleon. Even whilst nationalism apparently allows the small nation to fight exploitation in the historical novel it ultimately facilitates the dissipation of progressive political energies.

Partially visible through the lens of the gothic and the national tale, often awkwardly positioned in relation to discourses of commercial progress and of Union, the early historical novel has also in the past suffered as a result of the low status of eighteenth-century historiography: ‘scientizing’ developments in nineteenth-century historiography led to a tendency to dismiss or undervalue the period’s history writing that persisted into the twentieth century.” Along with Karen O’Brien’s Narratives of Enlightenment (1997), Mark Salber Phillips’s Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 (2000), began to correct this situation. Drawing attention to the generic diversity of eighteenth-century historical discourse, Phillips’s work has led to a re-examination of the diversity of history writing and the representation of the past, as, for example, in Ruth Mack’s Literary Historicity (2009).7! Yet, despite this interest in the eighteenth-century presentation of time, the British historical novel remains oddly neglected. In his wide-ranging The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650-1950 (2009), Richard Maxwell, for example, draws on James R. Foster to argue that the French historical novel influences Scott and Scott influences Europe. However, the eighteenth-century British historical novel falls largely outside his scope. And while Anne H. Stevens’s British Historical Fiction before Scott (2010) is an honourable exception to the tendency to underestimate the predominance of the genre, adapting Franco Moretti’s ‘quantitative’ approach to focus on print culture, Stevens’s title suggests a certain discomfort with the label ‘historical novel’.*?

Such critical unease is a lingering result of Georg Lukacs’s influential definition of the form. In The Historical Novel (1937) Lukács raises the possibility of an eighteenth-century historical novel only to foreclose it. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) is the ‘most famous “historical novel” of the eighteenth century’ but it is a piece of ‘mere costumery’.”? Walter Scott is the first historical novelist because he registers a sense of history as a force linked ‘in its national element [. . .] with problems of social transformation’, a sense which Lukács primarily connects with the French Revolution, and, across Europe, with the ‘Napoleonic Wars’.*+ As such, Scott ‘fathom|[s] historically the whole of English development to find a “middle way” for himself between warring extremes’ — the extremes of feudalism and capitalism. In tracing this path, Scott ‘exonerate[s] nothing in the development of capitalism’ and, despite his acute sense of sympathy, ‘display[s] no violent opposition to the features of the new development.” In other words, for Lukács, Scott’s work correctly diagnoses the breakage represented by the French Revolution. Additionally, (through their realism) these works contain the kind of revelations of commercial political life that Lukacs saw as a necessary stage on the road to political enlightenment. To draw out the logic of Lukacs’s argument, whereas the Waverley Novels finally ask the reader to leave the world of feudal romance for that of commercial modernity, earlier historically themed fictions presumably rehearse no such generic shift.

Lukacs’s own political perspective, his notion that transformation is necessary and inevitable, means he has a restricted notion of how change should be figured in the historical novel. His implicit narrative, from feudalism, to bourgeois and then to proletarian culture, contains an assumption of progress but, Murray Pittock warns, the (Whiggish) idea of history as progress is one to which it is easy to ‘surrender’, particularly where the historical novel is concerned.”® As the work of Miranda Burgess and Jan Duncan on romance has suggested, other, less ‘Whiggish’ paradigms are possible.”” The historical novel before Scott sometimes refuses and often probes the value and meaning of progress. The ancient constitutionalism so important to the genre relies on the idea of return. Even when the genre draws on stadial history, the acceptance of the ‘new development’ Lukacs finds in Scott is lacking. Comparing geographically and chronologically distinct social formations, the early historical novel instead offers choice: primitivism, a return to a state of nature in which social relations can be reconstituted (a possibility raised in the anonymous Arville Castle [1795]), or a commitment to Roman Republicanism (as in Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Marcus Flaminius [1792]) are, for example, investigated as a solution to British constitutional difficulties.

In line with this doubt over the nature of progress, in the early historical novel the relationship between the feudal and capitalist, or between the aristocratic and the commercial, is (appropriately enough for late eighteenth-century Britain) less clear than Lukacs’s account suggests. This is evident in Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792). There, the French aristocrat and revolutionary sympathiser Montfleuri complains of the ‘the imposts levied at the gates of every town’, burdens imposed on the poor ‘because they were poor’, not ‘noble’.?° In ancien régime France history ensured that aristocratic vested interests blocked individual self-determination and social mobility. Then again, similar obstacles exist in British commercial modernity. Lord Newminster is (as his name suggests) only second-generation nobility — his father has bought the title — yet the young man is idle, arrogant and intolerant to the poor, assuming all the traditional privileges of his newly adopted class. The system of oppression reproduces itself. In these fictions, feudal and capitalist extremes can be imagined, but they are tightly intertwined, sometimes in struggle, sometimes in support. It is also noticeable that, in this intricate debate, attempts to think through the relation between capitalism and feudalism rarely lead to the moderation of tone ‘middle way’ suggests. Even the Shandyesque whimsicality of Ann Yearsley’s The Royal Captives (1795) operates to deliver radical sentiment. More often, the novels stage violent scenes of political conflict. In Louis de Bruno’s Lioncel (1803) demagoguery leads to robbery and bloodshed. Such conflict still echoes in Helen through the ‘loud voice of universal execration’ that follows Granville’s declaration of his happiness at not seeing Scott; historical fiction itself becomes the site of controversy.? Finally, Scott’s own tone of moderation was studied; it did not, Richard Cronin states, reflect political neutrality.°°

Once the emphasis on progress and the moderation of the ‘middle way’ is removed, a new way forward emerges. Historiographic awareness is the key to the form. It is the interrogation of the subject matter, methodology, purpose, manufacture and reception of history, broadly understood, that constitutes the historical novel. When this is understood, it becomes evident that there is an eighteenth-century British historical novel of considerable historiographic and political complexity. The historical novel before Scott registers history as a ‘mass experience’ of transformation from the inception of the Revolution but it also engages with another crisis less central to Lukacs’s original account of the genre — a crisis that emerged out of the particular circumstances of mid-to-late eighteenth-century Britain.*!

British History and Crisis

Admittedly, in terms of discovering such a sense of crisis, the British eighteenth century initially looks rather unpromising — insufficiently marked by conflict. First, for historians 1688 (connected with the ‘Glorious’ Revolution in which James II was replaced by William III and Mary II) is seen as a key transitional moment in British history. Consequently, as J. C. D. Clark puts it: ‘the “eighteenth century” is... coupled to an industrial-democratic engine of change and drawn off into “the future”’.>* His metaphor suggests the strange kind of passivity often conferred on the period — if it belongs to modernity, it does not get there under its own steam. Second (but not altogether inconsistently), the British eighteenth century is often seen as a time of political stultification: after 1688, 1832 is seen as the next significant landmark in British parliamentary reform.*?

This uneasy sense of political stultification was registered in contemporary historiography. In An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794) Mary Wollstonecraft writes that, following the ‘revolution’ of 1688, Englishmen were ‘with reason, proud of their constitution’. However, she argues, the revolution itself ‘soon introduced

corruption’; ‘noble pride’ ‘degenerated into arrogance’ as ‘its cause [English constitutional superiority] became less conspicuous’.**4 Although Wollstonecraft’s radical agenda is one with which many of her more conservative contemporaries would have disagreed, hers is a narrative of conjectural history in which progress has stalled: liberty is being eroded. On the one hand, ‘arrogance’ in relation to the constitution is a symptom of the difficulty of thinking about further political change. On the other, this very ‘arrogance’ indicates a context in which there is continued commitment to the notion of liberty - a commitment that might eventually require action. The self-satisfaction which Wollstonecraft identifies as a retardant to political ‘progress’ in the eighteenth century is neither straightforward nor unmixed. As J. G. A. Pocock suggests, the notion of the balanced constitution that emerged from the events of 1688-9 allowed for considerable dispute throughout the century.’ While Wollstonecraft’s initial mention of ‘corruption’ is probably a reference to Sir Robert Walpole’s use of royal patronage during his period of political dominance (from around 1721 to 1745), her narrative seems to place the period of actual ‘arrogance’ later. Significantly for the historical novel, disquiet about the constitution became particularly acute following the accession of King George III in 1760. At this point, although the possibility of a Stuart restoration seemed largely at an end, the anxiety concerning a return to royal absolutism resurfaced.*°

Even as the seeming intransigence of the monarchy generated concern, however, the issue of imagining political change remained a thorny one. Writing after the Civil War and 1688, Scott’s precursors knew very well that political transition could become revolution: the stress placed throughout the eighteenth century on 1688 as the return to original political purity (as implicitly opposed to the events of the midseventeenth century) attests to that general anxiety. Hence a suspicion of political breakage marks the form. Yet, at the same time, the works of these historical novelists also bear witness to a prolonged sense of a society on the threshold of crisis. Both the conventional constitutional smugness and the actual sense of unease are evident, for example, in the anonymous Edward de Courcy (1794), set in the reign of Richard II. Essentially describing romance blocked by priestly machinations (and rival contenders for the throne), the novel begins on an appropriately Whiggish note, asserting the ‘flourishing condition’ of religious and civil liberties ‘at the end of the eighteenth century’ before emphasising how the ‘line of the Brunswick’ is linked with this development.*” In opposition to this, though, the work also suggests that ‘millions of intelligent beings’ are ‘equal by nature’.** Initially, the anonymous author’s anti-Catholicism seems to sit safely with King George III’s resistance to Catholic emancipation. Nevertheless, fears of Catholic oppression could also be used to drive a progressive agenda which that monarch would have rejected utterly. As Edward de Courcy’s mention of equality suggests, this was not only a period in which the meaning of revolution shifted, but one in which other revolutions continued to impact on British political life. It was also a time of growing anxiety about possible tensions between commerce and the existing British political system. The Scottish historian David Hume, for example, suggested that the beginnings of the shift towards commerciality had already proved a factor in the downfall of the Stuarts.*? Although this is, then, in one sense, in the British context, a post-revolutionary period, for Scott’s precursors and arguably for Scott himself, in terms of an imaginatively felt sense of political stability the post-revolutionary era refuses to be born.

The British historical novel of the late eighteenth century struggles to create this sense of stability by examining the meaning and possibility of liberty. As Wollstonecraft’s remarks in An Historical and Moral View indicate, the concept of ‘liberty’ was a key one in eighteenth-century English (and British) political discourse. According to the discourse of ancient constitutionalism, liberty had emerged from the distant Saxon past. In this historically inflected narrative, liberty was at once connected with the idea of political stability and with recurring threats to that stability: it was vulnerable, in need of defence. This narrative of supposed national freedom was convenient when it came to discussing depopulation of the countryside and enclosure (writers often collapsed the Charter of the Forest [1217] into the Magna Carta) and it could be employed (as Viscount Bolingbroke had in the 1730s) to argue against changes in the commercial and banking sector. However, it was more difficult to use in favour of modernisation. For such change to be managed, the concept of liberty would have to be rewritten. The expansion in the genres of history writing in the eighteenth century arguably stemmed in part from this need to reshape the historically grounded understanding of national life.*°

Introduction Ti

Given the popularity of history-based publications in the eighteenth century, for Anne H. Stevens the amount of historical fiction can in part be explained in terms of commercial good sense.*! Yet there was more at stake. As the way history was written became subject to challenge, the historical novel became a space of political and historical experimentation. Modern (as opposed to classical) history was still not formally taught; however, the eighteenth century saw changes in the subject matter of history and disputes over philosophical and antiquarian approaches, both of which arguably destabilised the use of history as political exemplar. The traditional historical focus on military and political and military subjects was also difficult to align with the developing interest in economics and the new emphasis on ‘manners’ that stadial history writing demanded. Narrative allowed these relations to be reimagined. Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, the Wife of Germanicus (1804), for example, (not a work of ‘fiction’, Hamilton insists) imaginatively applied the stadial approach to fill out classical history. In Feudal Events; Or, Days of Yore (1800) the less historically serious Anna Maria Mackenzie notes that while it would be fruitless to suggest she has found an ancient manuscript preserved like ‘asbestos’, she is indebted to an unpublished historian ‘who has made it his peculiar study to examine the private memoirs of ancient families, for events of a domestic nature; anecdotes of which, (for their minuteness) have been over-looked by more voluminous writers’.*4 Such domestic (but wholly fictional) material could cast provocative sidelights on official history. As a result of such relative flexibility, the historical novel became a space in which the form, content and purpose of history writing could be explored. The implications of history writing for contemporary life could be re-examined in the genre’s pages: the past and its liberties would be reimagined in order to reshape the present.

Historical novelists began to interrogate the notion of desirable continuity between past and present that was so endemic in legal and political life. If John Wilkes, editor of opposition paper The North Briton (1762-3), ‘or the people concerned with The Monitor’, did not see the connection between that ‘great prince’ and legislator, Alfred the Great, and George III but instead suggested some less prestigious historical parallels, after 1762 the historical novel, sometimes inadvertently, magnified such doubts.*° The manipulation of such historical parallels led to a growing suspicion of the performance of history, of tradition, ceremony and courtly set pieces, which sometimes recreated the past in the present in order to enshrine the political status quo. Sophia Lee’s The Recess, for example, undercuts Queen Elizabeth Ps pageant at Kenilworth; the anonymous Lady Jane Grey (1791) contrasts the actual crown with the ‘glorious crown’ the ‘Redeemer’ can confer;*° and Desmond agrees with the National Assembly’s abolition, in June 1790, of hereditary titles. This concern spills out of the historical novel. Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution rejects the artificiality and theatricality of shows of power more generally. By 1810 the conservative Jane West registers a more general preoccupation with the performance of history for political purposes in The Refusal. Rather like the eponymous heroine of Madame de Staél’s Corinne (1807), the Italian Paulina shows a ‘genius as flexible as her form’ when she embarks on a series of historical impromptus: ‘Thus the delighted spectator sometimes gazed on the sober charms of Octavia, beheld Agrippina weeping over the urn of Germanicus, or Cornelia devoting her sons to the service of their country.’ But Paulina seduces a politician. The radical critique of the performance of history is ultimately redirected against radicalism itself.