Fiona Price

Introduction: Visions of History

Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, in his essay ‘Of History and Romance’, William Godwin distinguishes ‘two principal branches’ of history. The first corresponds with the stadial history of the Scottish Enlightenment, the ‘study of mankind in a mass, of the progress, the fluctuations, the interests and the vices of society’. For Godwin, this has many ‘subordinate’ branches, including ‘the examination of medals and coins’ — in this schema, even the antiquarian impulse has been subsumed under the banner of stadial history.1 The other dominant trend is, however, in implicit competition with such narratives of mass progress. ‘The study of the individual’ not only enables the ‘solemn act of se If-investigation’ and furthers the study of ‘mind’, ‘elucidât [ing]’ ‘science’2 it also allows the ‘contemplation of illustrious men’ under the strain of historical circumstance and is, as such, inspirational.3

“A great deal of history”: Romantic women writers and historical fiction

Mary Robinson, novelist, poet, polemicist and former mistress to the Prince of Wales, begins her Memoirs (1801) not with the expected autobiographical ‘‘I’’, but with an account of a civil war battle. ‘‘At the period when the antient city of Bristol was besieged by Fairfax’s army’’, she writes, ‘‘the troops being stationed on a rising ground in the vicinity of the suburbs, a great part of the venerable MINSTER was destroyed by the cannonading before Prince Rupert surrendered to the enemy’’. Robinson’s opening strikes a tone of regret that hints at loyalist sympathies, while simultaneously suggesting the potential deterioration of royal authority. By establishing a public context, the lines seem to foreshadow what the work implicitly promises but, teasingly, only briefly delivers: an account of the affair between ‘‘Perdita’’ (Robinson herself) and ‘‘Florizel’’, the Prince of Wales. But the opening to the Memoirs suggests that this narrative is no longer to be positioned as a Shakespearian romance; instead, Robinson’s initial frame of reference is history, quickly moderated into Gothic. This combination establishes a dual justification for the Memoirs: while the allusion to history works to validate her readers’ curiosity, the Gothic narrative (in which Robinson herself is heroine) generates sympathy. However, Robinson’s opening pages display more than a shrewd exploitation of the close alliance between history and Gothic in the period; they also position Robinson within a narrative of political struggle and change. The generic interpretation of the past had become a matter of national importance, used to consider the desirability and mode of (political and economic) progress in the present. Reflecting this, at the beginning of the Memoirs, Robinson gives herself a genealogy that indicates her fallen aristocratic status while simultaneously connecting her with the more modern failed ‘‘commercial concerns’’ of her father. This mixed genealogy is paralleled in Robinson’s account of the house in which she was born, a house built on the site of the Augustan monastery near the minster and partly constructed from that older building. Half-ruined houses, decorated by inappropriate echoes of the past, also occupy the pages of Anna Letita Barbauld and Jane West,

“Experiments made by the airpump”: Jane West's 'The Loyalists' (1812) and the science of history

Historical novels written in the decade before Scotts Waverley (1814) are rarely subject to any serious consideration, possibly due to the assumption that this is not only a conservative genre, but one characterized by uninteresting uniformity. This essay highlights the complexity of the use of fictionalized history in the post-French Revolution debate, even when such historical fictions are written by those usually considered conservative. It examines Jane Wests The Loyalists (1812), arguing that in this novel, while West is led to reject the chivalric view of history that in part characterizes Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), she also attempts to reclaim history from misinterpretation by the radicals. Reappropriating radical historiography for the Church of England and the state, West contributes to historical discourse by coming to see history, understood as a science, as the guarantor of the healthy political body. In doing so, she foreshadows the “scientizing” tendency that is more usually connected with the nineteenth-century historiography of Leopold von Ranke.