SOURCE: An introduction to The Victorian Historical Novel, 1840-1880, Macmillan, London, 1978, pp. 1-31.

[In this excerpt, Sanders examines the impact of Sir Walter Scott's work on later historical novelists, discussing in detail the advances made within the genre by such writers as Charles Reade and George Eliot.]

Despite the sharp decline in Scott's critical reputation in this century, the Waverley novels have not lacked powerful friends and committed advocates, notable amongst them being Georg Lukács, a critic himself moulded by his study of Hegel and Marx. To Lukács, Scott's art is both progressive and in a true sense revolutionary, structured on the economic and ideological basis of the European reaction to the Revolution in France. Scott's inherent conservatism, which Lukács readily acknowledges, is seen as giving him a special kind of objectivity as a social critic, for by studying conflict, and by seeking to balance political opposites, Scott emerges as a dialectical thinker looking forward to Hegel and Marx. To Lukács, the 'classical form of the historical novel' evolved by Scott shows a real understanding of the 'progressive' nature of a compromise which leads to evolution, Hegel's 'dialectic of transition':

He attempts by fathoming historically the whole of English development to find a 'middle way' for himself between warring extremes. He finds in English history the consolation that the most violent vicissitudes of class struggle have always finally calmed down into a glorious 'middle way'. Thus, out of the struggle of the Saxons and Normans there arose the English nation, neither Saxon nor Norman; in the same way the bloody Wars of the Roses gave rise to the illustrious reign of the House of Tudor, especially that of Queen Elizabeth; and those class struggles which manifested themselves in the Cromwellian Revolution were finally evened out in the England of today, after a long period of uncertainity and civil war, by the 'Glorious Revolution' and its aftermath [The Historical Novel].

Scott's conservative 'middle way' allows for a broad view which stretches panoramically from Scotland, through England, to Europe beyond. But the essence of his compromise lies in his use of what Lukács styles a 'neutral' hero, a figure caught up, like Edward Waverley, in a political crisis, and coming into immediate contact with men and causes which represent the extremes of political division. The neutral hero stands as the representative of society as a whole, and is able to learn from the extremes he sees and from the humanised historical figures he meets, not as heroes but as men among men.

Lukács is a forceful apologist, despite the fact that his analysis tends to distort or under-rate the work of Scott's major successors in the English tradition. He sees the historical novel as the recorder of social evolution and of'the life of the people' and he is led to trace a line running through Stendhal, Balzac and Tolstoi rather than one which can readily accommodate a Dickensian or Thackerayan dissent or even the determined 'provinciality' of much nineteenth-century English fiction. This bias towards 'social realism' in Lukács's work properly excludes the escapism of a novelist like Harrison Ainsworth, but it also manages to avoid mention of George Eliot's concern with individual spiritual evolution. His philosophical bias insists on seeing history as progressive and that the relevance of a given historical period is dependent upon its meaning to the present, but it blinds him to the real diversity of Victorian historical fiction, and, moreover, to the advances of the twentieth-century novel, breaking away from the well-explored confines of social realism.

Lukács fails to appreciate that the very distinctiveness of English history, and of the inherited tradition in fiction, made for an equally distinctive and varied response to Scott, one which can necessarily be paralleled by developments on the Continent. The prejudices moulded by a bourgeois democracy in a nation which had not experienced invasion since the eleventh century and which had produced a typical compromise in its reaction to the Reformation, made in turn for 'provincial' fictional treatment of subjects derived from incidents in the French Revolution, or the Norman Conquest, or in the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Victorian historical novelists chose individual solutions to problems they found suggested in the Waverley novels, and they felt free either to take what they wanted from Scott's example or to adapt Scott's formulae to their particular ends.

To Nassau Senior, writing in 1821, Scott's novels 'from their number, their merit, their originality, and their diffusion, have more influence than is exercised by any others within the whole scope of our literature'. That influence helped to shift Victorian fiction as a whole away from experiment and away from the diversity of eighteenth-century narrative forms, into a determined realism which saw man as a social animal with pre-eminent social responsibilities. Although they have most often been seen as both symptoms and causes of Romanticism, the Waverley novels examined man in an essentially un-Romantic sense, as gregarious rather than solitary, detached but involved in mankind, viewing society as determining rather than wrecking the individual's destiny, and the individual himself as commonsensical instead of possessed. Scott's central characters may admire the flamboyant gestures of rebels or questors, but they come to acknowledge the need for conformity in the interests of the majority. Although the organisers of the Eglinton Tournament, and later, Mark Twain, considered Ivanhoe to be a call for the revival of chivalry, Scott himself made it plain that his novel was a critique of an absent crusading king and of the divisions perpetuated by a false sense of honour. If we can now see the Victorian novel as, in some degree, a reaction against the wilder excesses of Romanticism, Scott had played an important part in making it so, though he can also be accused of giving it a narrower purpose within the boundaries of realism. The new wave of English fiction in the late 1830s and early 1840s showed itself to be freshly alert to social problems, concerned with local colour, and actively determined to prove that, through the novel, history had a place in modern life. Waverley and its successors had quickened a creative impulse while giving the novel a new prestige and popularity.

Although its influence can be felt through the entire range of Victorian fiction, Waverley's importance for the historical novel lies in what it demonstrated of a means of examining the life of a period separated from the present by at least a full generation, or, in terms of its sub-title, by some sixty years. Scott's later work dealt with far earlier periods, but Waverley had established a pattern of accounting for social change, and explaining even comparatively recent changes to a world that was beginning to lose touch with its past. 'To elder persons', Scott told his readers in 1814, 'it will recall scenes and characters familiar to their youth; and to the rising generation the tale may present some idea of the manners of their forefathers.' Certainly, for the novelist himself, details of his story had to be researched rather than remembered or simply invented. Beyond Waverley Scott stretched further into the dark backward of Scottish, then English, then European time, adapting his heroes and their social environment accordingly. Just as he had made the past present and the distant near to historians like Macaulay and Carlyle, so, to a new generation of novelists, Scott seemed a precedent, a challenge, and an example. Themes of revolution, dissent, war, violence, transition and decay which had been constants in the Waverley novels were consequently to find a readier place in the historical novels of the later nineteenth century than they were to do in stories concerned with contemporary life. The past could be seen to reflect the present, and, as a consequence, modern problems could be judged more detachedly for being considered within an historical perspective. Victorian historical novels are not, as a rule, escapes into a romantic past, but an attempt to prove that man and his society develop as part of a process which includes and envelops the present. At their best, the historical novels of the period deserve to stand beside the major triumphs of Victorian fiction, a place that was certainly granted to them in their own time but which has been often denied them since by changing critical and literary fashions.

Among critics of the first half of the nineteenth century there is evidence of a widespread optimism as to the potential of the historical novel and to the challenge it presented to the aspiring novelist. 'All who choose to take the trouble can possess themselves of the antiquarian facts,' wrote J. A. Heraud in the Quarterly Review in 1827, 'but the novelist undertakes something more than merely to transcribe from the old documents.… He is to go beyond the letter that kills, and to give us the spirit that makes alive' [Vol. 35 (March 1827)]. Such dicta were to be regularly echoed. Writing eleven years later in the Monthly Chronicle, Edward Bulwer-Lytton urged that prose fiction now formed 'so wide and essential a part of the popular literature of Europe' that it was appropriate to set out laws as a guide to future progress [Vol. I]. Of the historical novelist in particular, he demanded 'a perfect acquaintance' with the characteristics and spirit of the past, and affirmed that the novelist's art 'will be evinced in the illustrations he selects, and the skill with which they are managed'. Perverse as it might seem to any reader familiar with the drudgery of Bulwer's own historical fiction, he goes on to insist that the novelist should 'avoid all antiquarian dissertations not essentially necessary to the conduct of his tale', simply because 'minuteness is not accuracy'. Bulwer ends by hinting at his own ambitions for, he tells us, an historical novelist who continues from where Scott had left off would have to 'deeply consider all the features of the time, and select those neglected by his predecessor;—would carefully note all the deficiencies of the author of Kenilworth, and seize at once upon the ground which that versatile genius omitted to consecrate to himself.'

It was, with others', Bulwer-Lytton's youthful work as the recorder of the vices, crimes, and whims of his own times, both from a 'silver fork' and a 'Newgate' angle, which appears to have most offended the superior-minded Archibald Allison, taking 'The Historical Romance' as the subject of an article in Blackwood's Magazine in 1845. The Victorian novelist, Allison objected, had a vocation beyond that of an illustrator of low-life subjects:

We protest against the doctrine, that the lofty art of romance is to be lowered to the delineating the manners of cheesemongers and grocers, of crop-head charity boys, and smart haberdashers' and milliners' apprentices of doubtful reputation. If we wish to see the manners of such classes, we have only to get into a railway or steamboat; the sight of them at breakfast or dinner will probably be enough for any person accustomed to the habits of good society. [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine LVIII (September 1845)]

Such disdain is worthy of Lord Melbourne, reacting in a similar manner to Oliver Twist, but for Allison the real strength of modern fiction lay in its power of evoking history, for as such the novel could take its place 'beside the plays of Shakespeare'. The effect of the publication of Waverley thirty years previously, he notes, with an appropriately Shakespearean simile, was 'like the invention of gunpowder or steam (sic)' and worked a similar change in the 'moral world'. He proceeds, waxing yet more effusively pompous:

From that moment the historical romance was born for mankind. One of the most delightful and instructive species of composition was created; which unites the learning of the historian with the fancy of the poet; which discards from human annals their years of tedium and brings prominently forward their eras of interest; which teaches morality by example, and conveys information by giving pleasure; and which, combining the charms of imagination with the treasures of research, founds the ideal upon its only solid and durable base—the real.

Having thus announced his reasons for considering the historical novel to be intellectually serious, he goes on to stress its moral seriousness: 'Considered in its highest aspect, no art was ever attempted by man more elevated and ennobling than the historical romance. It may be doubted whether it is inferior even to the lofty flights of the epic, or the heart-rending pathos of the dramatic muse.' He seeks to cap his claim by arguing, somewhat more spuriously, from the evidence of popularity—'Homer and Tasso never, in an equal time, had nearly so many readers as Scott'—and he notes that it will probably prove to be impossible to estimate the influence of'the fascinating art' of the historical novelist over future ages. He does, however, remark on one happy influence already evident, one that would doubtless have delighted Sir Walter, for we are told that the Waverley novels have 'gone far to neutralize the dangers of the Reform Bill'.

Like Bulwer, Allison was also anxious to define rules for the future writer, and to extract 'principles', in truly Aristotelian manner, from extant examples and evidence. The romance should be above all things 'elevating and yet interesting in subject', and ideally its subject should be drawn from national history, or at least based 'on incidents cousin-german… to those of its own national existence'. As a consequence he prefers Ivanhoe to Anne of Geierstein, and The Last of the Barons to The Last Days of Pompeii, and ends by praising Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and the 'admirable delineation of the manners, ideas, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, of humble life' which he found in Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi. To Allison, as to Bulwer or to Charles Reade, 'the real' and 'truth to nature' find their highest and most accurate expression in historical fiction, with history giving a vital and epic dimension to social realism.

This confidence about the future was not necessarily justifled by the evidence of the present, for in the following year, 1846, G. H. Lewes was to complain bitterly of the 'mediocrity' of most of the numerous progeny of the Waverley novels. Lewes excepts Scott—'that wonderful writer'—from his strictures, but he finds most of the historical fiction of the 1840s to be served up according to a cheap commercial recipe, the secret of which he divulges: '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.'

But the repetitiveness, ignorance and incompetence of Scott's imitators disturbed an unknown reviewer of 1847 in Fraser's Magazine less than the prospect of further fictional challenges to the authority of the conventional historian. Posing the question 'Walter Scott—Has History gained by his writings?', he argued that the historical novel had wrecked a reader's proper detachment:

It is very difficult to take up a volume of Scott in anything like a spirit of critical examination. One cannot read him in cold blood. He sets all one's tastes and sympathies working at once to the dire distraction of the reason. Flooded by his humour, and exhilarated by his heartiness and freshness, one lingers in the company of his gloriously life-like creations about as much disposed to question their title to the name they bear, as the opium-smoker to doubt the existence of his imaginary Houries.

It is an indirect compliment to the power of the Waverley novels, but it is hard to imagine such ideals standing up in the face of the emotive force of the prejudices and style of a Gibbon, a Carlyle or a Macaulay. Nevertheless, the critic does not go further in his censure of Scott's method, though he voices a suspicion of imaginative literature which sets him in an honourably Platonic tradition; instead he transfers his venom to the work of Scott's shabbier successors, and especially to G. P. R. James. It would be vain to attempt to shield James from the attack, but it is interesting to note that this antipathy to the 'dandy littérateurs' was shared by serious historical novelists as disparate as Bulwer, Kingsley and Thackeray, all of whom were offended that Scott's image should have been so recklessly defaced, and his reputation so tarnished. For all three, however, the answer to the impertinent question as to whether or not history had gained from Scott's novels was an emphatic 'Yes'.

By the late 1850s there was good evidence of fresh invention and renewed energy in English historical fiction, and it was understandable that a critic should proclaim that the novel was by now the 'essential' complement to the study of history. Academic history on its own, readers were told, was insufficient to bring out 'the nature and power of a people's genius—what they thought, hated, loved'. The attraction of historical fiction lay 'not in any facility which it affords for the construction of a better story, nor any superior interest that attaches to the known and prominent characters with which it deals, or to the events it describes: but rather the occasion it gives for making us familiar with the every-day life of the age and country in which the scene is laid.'

By suggesting that the strength of any novel lay in its power to evoke 'every-day life', we sense that the reviewer acknowledges both the importance of realism and the consequent variety of response to a variety of situations. Indeed, by the time of the review, Thackeray had brilliantly dispensed with Scott's historic detachment in his Esmond, Kingsley had looked intently at the puckered face of a long-dead Alexandria in his Hypatia, and Dickens was already serialising his very personal response to the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities. All of them had first established their literary bearings in novels dealing with the world of their contemporaries, but history had given each a new dimension. The 1860s were to be marked by the acclaim accorded to George Eliot's Romola and to Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, and by the comparatively muted response to Mrs Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers. The very fact that so many of the major artists of the period had turned to history for subjects, and that novelists in particular chose to attempt stories set in the past, can be seen to stem from Scott's continuing authority over an age so acutely aware of the value and relevance of an historical sense.

Lukács's definition of a 'classical form' based on the novels of Scott, with a neutral hero and a movement towards a balance of opposites, is, generally speaking, a useful one, even though it is restrictive in terms of an appreciation of the variety of character and structure in the Waverley novels themselves. If Waverley is taken as the type case, its pattern can hardly be said to have been followed in some of its most admired successors—Old Mortality or The Antiquary, for example. Rob Roy, it is true, only slightly varies its shape, moving Francis Osbaldistone into Edward Waverley's role as the Englishman caught up in an especially Scottish aspect of the political conflict which affects the combined fortunes of Scotland and England. A second, but more significant variation on the idea is that of the Scotsman in England, Nigel Olifaunt in The Fortunes of Nigel for example, or the Scotsman abroad in Quentin Durward, or even the Englishman abroad, as in Scott's last, floundering novel, Count Robert of Paris. A further important adaptation is to see a Briton mixed up in an alien political struggle within his homeland, as happens in Ivanhoe, The Betrothed, Woodstock and Redgauntlet, and which is a device borrowed later by Stevenson in his most Scott-like novels. Finally, there is the epic, exploratory experience of Jeanie Deans, journeying out into a wider world in The Heart of Midlothian, and symbolically reconciling Scotland to the Union and to a Hanoverian dynasty in London. In all the novels a comparatively innocent, but intelligent, central character learns, matures, and independently works out a kind of resolution of the opposed forces that he or she encounters, either through an acceptance of the status quo or through a commitment to a progressive new order. In some prominent cases, notably Ivanhoe and Woodstock, a concluding marriage brings personal fulfilment to the hero while also standing as a public sign of social reconciliation. In the great majority of Scott's novels—though The Talisman is a possible exception—the hero is neutral because he is also fictional and therefore a free agent, able to form decisions which are not necessarily tied by the restrictive need to follow the events of recorded history. The neutral heroes meet, admire, dislike, follow or reject the 'great men' of history by first seeing them as fallible and human. His heroes can be drawn emotionally, like Scott himself, to Jacobitism and Popery, or to Royalist, Saxon or Highland resistance to change, but like their creator, they are also likely to come to acknowledge the historic inevitability of change. They see rights and wrongs on both sides, and they become involved as rounded human beings, aware of conflicting loyalties, and of family or romantic obligations, while still moving towards a recognition of the creativity and practicality of commitment.

Scott's successors and imitators were able to vary this flexible enough 'classical form' as it best suited their tastes and fictional ends, though they did so at times conscious that they were aiming at a broader and more ambitious kind of historical novel. Tolstoi's variation on the Scott pattern, for example, might at first seem complex, though it is really only an exceptionally subtle and expressive duplication of the Waverley-type, giving War and Peace a shape based on parallel heroes and families, caught up severally, then together, in the Napoleonic disruption of Russian life. In England the fifty years following Scott's death witnessed a considerable amount of experimental activity, rarely the tired, scholarly imitation which has been all too often assumed. Harrison Ainsworth's novels have much to answer for in having given historical fiction a bad name, but they in fact tend to ignore Scott's precedent in an attempt to restore and re-embellish the Gothic fiction of the early century. Despite his considerable initial success, Ainsworth proved to be incapable of development or of sustaining his achievement; he ransacked English history for likely plots, and often he ended up with unlikely ones; he looked to sensationalism to sell his novels, and he pleased neither his early critics nor a later and more critical audience. By the 1850s Ainsworth had already out-written the fashion for the kind of romance he had hoped to rejuvenate. Bulwer-Lytton's drab, learned, and aristocratic historical novels form a surprising contemporary contrast to Ainsworth's and to those of G. P. R. James. Bulwer aimed high, and meditated long and publicly about what he should be doing; he saw Scott as deficient in accuracy and guilty of distortions of chronology and character, and he attempted instead to restore the academic prestige of the novel, making it worthy of serious study. He had a real enough respect for Scott's achievement, however, as the shape of his enduringly popular The Last Days of Pompeii suggests, with its forward looking conclusion and its range of characters invented from miscellaneous archaeological details. Bulwer's later novels took Scott's pattern to an extreme by attempting to function as imaginative, and only partly fictional, biographies of the great men of history. Despite the fecundity of his ideas, he had little talent as a story-teller, and scarcely any at all as a writer of English, and as a consequence his novels remain cramped by their musty artificiality.

Of the abler novelists of the first half of the nineteenth century only Charles Kingsley followed Bulwer in experimenting with the biography of a known historical figure presented as a kind of Heldenleben, though in the case of Hereward the Wake he was lucky to have chosen a hero who was far more shadowy than Bulwer's King Harold. Kingsley's development as a novelist reveals a movement away from the use of a central character who is not so much neutral as opaque (Philammon in Hypatia), towards a muscular Christian type (Amyas Leigh) and finally to a primitive nordic ideal. Like Carlyle, Kingsley believed in heroes and in the virtues of modern hero-worship, and his novels expound ideas which he considered to be vital to the troubled world of his own times. If he now strikes us as a clumsy Jingoist or a blood-curdler it is perhaps because Kingsley reflects precisely those Victorian attitudes which have proved to be least accessible to the postVictorians.

The thinning of the neutral Waverley hero to a state of semi-opacity had already been attempted by Dickens in his Barnaby Rudge of 1841. In his novel Dickens had set out to show states of mental disturbance, not simply in his rabble-rousing villain, but also on a wider, public level in the excesses of the mob and in a general intolerance and lack of social will. With an imbecile prominent amongst his characters, and the one from whom the book is named, the novelist added a new dimension to his theme, for Barnaby is at once exploitable, and capable, because vulnerable, of accentuating both innocence and guilt. With Barnaby's imbecility compensated for by the growing awareness of the commonsensical Gabriel Varden (who was originally to have been the title character), the novel is a far more masterly and intelligent historical study than it has often been credited with being. It is nevertheless remarkable that when Dickens returned to historical fiction, and to the problem of popular unrest and revolution in A Tale of Two Cities, he chose a more individual form to express his by now more developed ideas. Like Quentin Durward, A Tale of Two Cities moves Britons abroad to France and observes their reactions to a foreign political crisis; unlike Scott's novel, however, it includes no wellknown historical figures amongst its characters, and, as its title suggests, it considers phenomena which are common to both London and Paris, even though it shows that the Parisian inheritance of hatred and disorder is the more disastrous. Dickens's knot of fictional characters are only partly detached from the Revolution which overtakes them, but the novel takes family connections, private histories, and the ties of responsibility, and uses them as a means of explaining, and then privately resolving, the public divisions between philosophies, classes, and nations. Dickens uses his plot as a kind of myth which can contain and fulfil the historical problem examined in his novel. Whatever A Tale of Two Cities may be said to lack in comparison to its author's other mature novels, it compensates by transferring a Dickensian formula, a private resolution of a public challenge, into an emotionally charged historical context.

Dickens's posing of a private answer to a general question resembles the solutions evolved intellectually in two very different novels, George Eliot's Romola and J. H. Newman's Callista. In Romola George Eliot explored the central theme of her work, the individual's moral choice between egotism and altruism, within an historical perspective provided by the diversity of Renaissance Florence. Newman's Callista, set in third-century North Africa, is a far less impressive achievement but it too looks at moral choice, and considers the struggle of an intelligent woman for belief in an alien world. Both novels are shaped around the progress of the heroine, and, as many contemporary commentators recognised, the struggles of both Romola and Callista project a very Victorian Ahnung backwards into history. The yearning of the individual for purpose is seen as a constant human aspiration rather than as the product of specific historical circumstances, but the growth of the heroine's awareness is taken as a token of the parallel between the progress of the soul and the forward movement of humanity.

The shift away from the 'classical form' is yet more pronounced in two novels centred in provincial communities rather than in a political vortex. Thackeray had dispensed with the heroic in Henry Esmond, but both Mrs Gaskell in Sylvia's Lovers and Hardy in The Trumpet-Major looked at societies in which the possibility of heroism is restricted by the milieu of the province. Both novels consider the historical process as it touches the lives of ordinary men and women, troubled by war and the rumour of war, but rarely probing the meaning of their experience or able to see the long-term consequence of it. For Mrs Gaskell and Hardy, village or small-town society has changed only in outward circumstances in the sixty years which separate the writer from his subject, but both take as a central idea the real edge of violence added to maritime life in the Napoleonic Wars by the presence of the press-gang. 'Great men' only marginally involve themselves, but their decisions interfere indirectly with the patterns of life otherwise determined by the seasons or by landscape. Sylvia's Lovers and The Trumpet-Major are primarily love-stories in which private malice, the pains of unrequited love or simply jealousy, find a new dimension in the violence of war. Both writers, from their very different points of view, offer a new stress on the private worlds of their characters, minutely recording the overlappings of private and communal pasts, or recorded and unrecorded history, or of tradition and 'unhistoric' action. Simple men and women are seen to contribute as fully to the slow progress of humanity as the kings and the generals.

Nevertheless, the most radical departure from the Waverley from in the fifty years following Scott's death remains Thackeray's Henry Esmond of 1852. Thackeray saw history not as a charted stream but as a series of currents and eddies moving slackly forwards. But his real challenge to the Scott norm lies in his choice of an autobiographical narrator, a moody, sensitive, and involved character who can only describe what has happened to him from the point of view of his own 'uniscience'. The 'history' witnessed by Henry Esmond is vivid and significant enough, ranging from the 'Glorious Revolution' and the Seven Years War to the succession of the Hanoverians, but because Esmond is telling his own story as well, he can never have the detachment of Scott's omniscient narrator. As a further consequence of his chosen form Thackeray rejects the tidy resolutions of the Waverley novels, leaving us instead with his hero's withdrawal from the political arena, still, it seems, divided in his loyalties but married to the woman he never suspected he loved. There is a chance of private happiness, but, as with most human observers, many other aspects of experience are left unresolved, avoided, forgotten or abandoned by the wayside. In the end the 'hero' of an 'unheroic' but virtuous life leaves for a traditionless new world in Virginia. For Esmond history is an act of memory, and as an alert, but frequently biassed, narrator he views the heroic and the tragic through the quotidian, acknowledging the equal importance for the individual of the petty and inconsequential decision as well as of political or social resolve. History emerges in Thackeray's disconcerting scheme as a series of arbitrary acts, not as a determined progress, and, for the novelist, art alone gives shape and meaning because it tells a human truth.

To many Victorian critics, however, the most successful and innovatory historical novel of the century was Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth. To modern readers it might well seem to have a claim to have been the most overrated English novel of the age, and even George Orwell, a rare twentieth-century admirer of Reade's, considered it the novelist's bad luck 'to be remembered by this particular book, rather as Mark Twain, thanks to the films, is chiefly remembered by A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court'. Nonetheless, when The Cloister and the Hearth first appeared in 1861, the Saturday Review proclaimed that Reade had achieved what scarcely any other Englishman of his generation had shown himself able to do. He had written an historical novel 'that is pleasant and touching to read'. The story was declared to be not unworthy of comparison to one of Scott's, but, the reviewer went on to note, time had begun to expose Scott's shortcomings:

There is a certain thinness—not a poverty, but a scantiness—in the Waverley Novels, which modern readers, turning back to them after the interest of the first reading has long passed away, can scarcely fail to feel. There are heroes in Scott's historical novels, there are attempts to paint and analyse character, there are many passages introduced in order to bring before us the historical era as the author conceives it. But there is much that is left sketchy and in outline in all this. The heroes are amiable dummies, and so are the heroines. Their feelings, and the feelings of their friends and enemies, are mostly on the surface. It is astonishing in how very few pages we come to the end of even the best scenes of Scott.

It is a rare Victorian response, though a valid enough one, but the reviewer continues by remarking on the rapid development of new literary styles and attitudes; 'modern romances of the highest class', he told his readers, 'are more thorough and elaborate':

Sir Edward Lytton has shown us what industry and a power of combination can do in this way although the great inferiority of his conception of character will not permit us to rank him as an historical novelist with Mr. Reade. What we have gained, so far as it is a gain, since Scott wrote, has been gained by the greater minuteness of reflection, analysis, and knowledge which we have cultivated during the last thirty years [Saturday Review LXXVII (1862)].

Reade is seen, then, as reflecting advances in fictional and historical investigation. Some months later the Westminster Review added its own acclaim. 'There are some novels', it remarked, 'of which the general excellence is so conspicuous, that judges need not hesitate about stamping them with the seal of their approbation.' Reade's characters merited like praise: 'No creation of modern fiction is more true to nature and, at the same time, a more loveable character' than Margaret Brandt; Catherine, Gerard's mother, bore 'a certain resemblance to Mrs Poyser', while Denys was nothing short of a French Falstaff. To Swinburne, in an essay still republished as a Preface to the Everyman edition of the novel, it was difficult to find 'a story better conceived or better composed, better constructed or better related.'

Such adulation was not unmitigated, even some admiring critics complained of the novel's excessive length, but The Cloister and the Hearth continued to be thought of by many readers as the greatest English historical novel until well into the twentieth century. Since its decline in popularity it has, like the rest of Reade's output, been, not always unjustly, neglected. It is certainly now a hard book to appreciate as heartily as its original audience appreciated it, impeded as it is by melodramatic twists, digressive excursions into aspects of mediaeval life, and by a painfully artificial dialogue. But The Cloister and the Hearth remains typical of its period as a serious and ambitious historical novel of the second rank, one which neither broke new ground nor consolidated familiar fictional territory.

Its interest lies in its Englishness, for despite its Continental setting and Reade's cosmopolitan reading, it is quirky, untidy, provincial, and lacking in real philosophical or intellectual direction. Reade's contemporaries mistook its bittiness for a varied and accurate account of life in the period before the Reformation, but it is more likely to strike a modern audience as ragged and uneven, learmed and lyrical by tums, but as often frenetic and more than a little vulgar.

The novel's loose structure gave Reade's encyclopaedic mind full play, and its central wandering movement from the Netherlands to Italy and back again allowed for an episodic treatment of jarring characters, ideas, and cultures. Its structure, so strangely admired by Swinbume, depends upon discord, and Reade attempts to balance the settled, domestic life of his Dutch family against the southward wanderings of their alienated son. It is a balance which Reade's digressive and woolly mind finds it hard to maintain. The Cloister and the Hearth has a variety and freedom which might well have appalled Scott, but it sadly lacks the order and developed resolution of the best of the Waverley novels, and it falls short of the looser control over the elements of an historical plot evolved after Scott by Thackeray, Dickens or George Eliot.

Reade proclaimed his purpose at the outset:

Not a day passes over earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows. Of these obscure heroes, philosophers, and martyrs, the greater part will never be known till that hour, when many that are great shall be small, and the small great; but of others the world's knowledge may be said to sleep: their lives and characters lie hidden from nations in the annals that record them. The general reader cannot feel them, they are presented so curtly and coldly: they are not like breathing stories appealing to his heart, but little historic hailstones striking him but to glance off his bosom: nor can be understand them; for epitomes are not narratives, as skeletons are not human figures.

Thus records of prime truths remain a dead letter to plain folk: the writers have left so much to the imagination, and imaginationis so rare a gift. Here, then, the writer of fiction may be of use to the public—as an interpreter.

Reade is not mouming the silence of village Hampdens, for, like Thackeray, he is aspiring to a history which is 'familiar rather than heroic', or like George Eliot in the Finale to Middlemarch he is proclaiming his faith in 'unhistoric acts'. Like his greater contemporaries he is doubting the Carlylean historical thesis and looking to the novel as an amplifier of conventional history. But The Cloister and the Hearth only partly justifies this opening statement of intent, for Reade undermines his stated intention by giving us, if not the history of a great man, at least the history of a great man's parents. Gerard's and Margaret's experience is given a fresh relevance at the end of the story by the revelation of the future destiny of their son. Like Tolstoi in War and Peace, though with hardly any of Tolstoi's deftness, Reade suggests that the future will develop dramatically in the period after the close of the narrative. Erasmus looms over the novel's last pages, and a sudden flash illuminates our understanding of what has gone before, but the 'little historic hail-stones' cease simply to glance off our bosoms once we are bidden to look up to the Reformation storm-cloud.

The musty chronicle, 'written in intolerable Latin', which the novelist mentions as his source for the story in his third paragraph proves to be Erasmus's by no means ill-written or obscure autobiographical fragment published posthumously as the Compendium Vitae at Leiden in 1615. Indeed, at the end of the narrative Reade himself admits to having derived some of his best scenes from Erasmus's 'mediaeval pen', having borrowed both ideas and details directly from the Colloquies and the Encomium Moriae. It is an excusable enough sleight of hand and even the initial dismissal of the 'musty chronicle' helps to maintain the secret of the real future identity of young Gerard. Otherwise Reade emerges from all of his novels, and not just The Cloister and the Hearth, as much a determined 'truth-teller' in fiction as Bulwer-Lytton. While he was working on his historical novel, Reade remarked on the relationship between fact, fiction, and history, citing Erasmus's Colloquies as supporting evidence: 'They are a mine of erudition and observation; but so are most of his works; but in the 'colloquies' there is fiction, and its charm, super-added to his learning, language, method, and philosophy—as in the immortal Macaulay.' It is a clumsy and somewhat illogical sentence, but it is one which is attempting to link the philosopher to the historian and to the writer of fiction—the interpreter of dead letters to plain folk: 'Where things so rare and solid as long and profound research, lucid arrangement, and empire over language, meet in an historian, there he has a good chance of immortality; but, where he blends with these rare virtues the seductive colours of fiction, he turns that good chance into a certainty.' Reade balances uneasily, and probably unwittingly, between two distinct schools of thought; on the one hand, he sides with 'the immortal Macaulay' as an historian first and an inventor of history second; on the other, he feels himself one with Thackeray as an accurate story-teller, incorporating facts into fiction. Reade does not go on to explain himself further, nor does his historical novel suggest what he believed the real distinction between an historian and an historical novelist to be. He does not even appear to recognise any distinct philosophy of history. Like Bulwer, he claims equality and respect for the novelist's contribution to the study of the past, but he blurs definitions and claims to sovereignty to leave his readers instead with the impression of a vacillating and unsteady mind.

Like most of Scott's successors, however, Reade devoutly trusted in the virtues of 'realism' and in the developing msthetic doctrine of 'truth to nature'. With George Eliot and Sir David Wilkie, though not with Ruskin, he admired the popular domesticity of the seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters; his artist-figure in the earlier Christie Johnstone, having expressed solidarity with 'Gerard Dow and Cuyp and Pierre de Hoogh', goes on to proclaim loudly in italics:

The resources of our art are still unfathomedl Pictures are yet to be painted that shall refresh men's inner souls, and help their hearts against the artificial world; and charm the fiend away, like David's harp!! The world, after centuries of lies, will give nature and truth a trial. What a paradise art will be, when truths, instead of lies, shall be told on paper, on marble, on canvas, and on the boards!!!

As some early critics of Reade suggested, it is the mediaeval Dutch school which most touches The Cloister and the Hearth, and the novelist even goes to the length of introducing artists and paintings into his tale. But Reade's doctrine of accuracy went deeper than a desire to describe interiors or the circumstances of fifteenth-century scullery-maids; he believed in the radiance of the commonplace, and in the intensity of ordinary experience. Like Jan van Eyck, who appears briefly in the novel, he crowds his canvas with people and things, but each part is intended to capture and express the wholeness and wonder of creation. The novel takes the details of a lost world, from its faith to its fleas, and makes a picture of them. Reade assumes that his picture will have a natural unity simply because it is true to life. The pains he took to compose A Good Fight, the fragmentary original of The Cloister and the Hearth, were stressed by the tired but proud novelist in a letter to James Fields:

You may well be surprised that I am so long over 'Good Fight', but the fact is, it is not the writing but the reading which makes me slow. It may perhaps give you an idea of the system in which I write fiction, if I get down the list of books I have read, skimmed, or studied to write this little misery.

He then lists the titles of some seventy-nine volumes, adding 'etc., etc.,' when he had done. 'Surely this must be the right method,' he commented with a hint of desperation. There was, in fact, nothing unique about his method; Romola left George Eliot 'an old woman', and even Dickens claimed to have consulted a 'cartload' of reference books in the preparation of A Tale of Two Cities, but like a literary Pre-Raphaelite Brother, Reade seemed to trust solely to the efficacy of detail, and to the idea that accuracy imparted life to his art.

Each episode in the novel is arranged by another, not purely for dramatic effect, or for contrast, or as a means of moving his plot forward, but because each 'tells the truth' about the particular aspect of mediaeval life he wants to describe. The Cloister and the Hearth is really little more than an assemblage of not always harmonious parts; plot, for Reade, comes second to cumulative experience, and, rather than let his characters shape his narrative, or find their destiny in themselves, he lets them wander until he sees fit to nudge them back into the loose arching pattern provided by his love-story. Reade never keeps an idea or a theme steadily before us and, as a consequence, his story neither holds us while we read it, nor brings us to a point of rest when we have finished it.

If Reade had models in mind for The Cloister and the Hearth they were probably the comic novels of Fielding and, before him, of Cervantes. Unlike most Victorian historical novels, Reade's remains in an eighteenth-century picaresque tradition. Nonetheless, Fielding's notion of a comic epic in prose in Tom Jones had derived as much from the Homeric and Virgilian epic shape as it had from Cervantes, providing his novel with its twelve books and its tripartite structure. Tom's journey to London merely forms the second third of the narrative account of his developing fortunes and moral awareness, sandwiched as it is between sections which establish him first as Squire Allworthy's ward, then as an independent man in Town. As Coleridge was to acknowledge, Fielding's complex and neat plot gives the novel much of its distinction. Reade possessed neither Fielding's ordering imagination, nor a hero to match Cervantes's. If he can be said to have aimed at 'unity by inclusion', he really has so vague a sense of architectural design, that his details habitually impede our appreciation of his whole. Gerard discovers little during his lengthy journey away from Holland, but if, like Thackeray in Henry Esmond, Reade had wished to persuade us of the arbitrary nature of experience, it would have greatly assisted his scheme if, like Thackeray, he had first determined the balance of art to learning, and fiction to fact. The Cloister and the Hearth attempts too much, and tries to be too many kinds of novel, without ever managing to persuade us of its own consistency and its own conviction.

In common with Thackeray, however, and later, with Mrs Gaskell and Hardy, Reade was proposing a view of history in his novel which ran counter to Carlyle's. His anti-Carlyleanism is most blatantly stated in Christie Johnstone, where the novelist's mouth-piece, Lord Ipsden, loudly but somewhat clumsily attacks a mediaeval enthusiast's opinion of past and present, suggesting that

'Five hundred years added to a world's life made it just five hundred years older, not younger,—and if older, greyer,—and if greyer, wiser.

'Of Abbot Sampson,' said he, 'whom I confess both a great and good man, his author, who with all his talent belongs to the class muddle-head, tells us, that when he had been two years in authority his red hair had turned grey, fighting against the spirit of his age; how the deuce, then, could he be a sample of the spirit of his age? …

'The earnest men of former ages are not extinct in this.…There still exist in parts of America, rivers on whose banks are earnest men, who shall take your scalp, the wife's of your bosom, and the innocent child's of her bosom.…

'Moreover, he who has the sense to see that questions have three sides is no longer so intellectually as well as morally degraded as to be able to cut every throat that utters an opinion contrary-to his own.'

However much Reade may be distorting, or simply misunderstanding the thread of the argument of Past and Present, Lord Ipsden's words do manage to suggest why the novelist came to treat mediaeval history as he did in The Cloister and the Hearth. He saw the 'spirit of the age' expressed in common life, not in the thoughts and actions of the world-historical hero, and he saw earnestness as responsible for intolerance, bigotry, and cruelty. Trust as he might in progress, Reade believes in Erasmus's satiric darts rather than Luther's or Knox's cudgels. Firm convictions make heroes and martyrs, but they also contribute to antagonism and oppression. Modern man should be open to the three sides of any given question. Reade's historic heroes are limited by the narrowness of their own times and, in their passivity, represent the true spirit of the world he is describing.

Nevertheless, as its title suggests, The Cloister and the Hearth deals with the tension that Reade saw as symptomatic of the end of the Middle Ages, that between the Church and the family, between celibacy and marriage, and between the contemplative and the active life. The novel's comment on mediaeval religion and, by extension, on a romanticised view of the pre-Reformation Church, is as deliberate and critical as its opposition to the 'heroic' view of history. The central tragedy of the story derives from the Church's imposition of celibacy on its clergy, and this Reade sees both as a restriction of personal freedom and as a perversion of human sexuality. Celibacy distorts relationships and infects public morality. To the novelist himself, his enforced bachelorhood as the Fellow of an unreformed Oxford College was a vexing survival of a defunct prejudice. At the end of his novel his anger breaks through the otherwise tolerant surface:

Thus, after life's fitful fever these true lovers were at peace. The grave, kinder to them than the Church, united them for ever; and now a man of another age and nation, touched with their fate, has laboured to built their tombstone, and rescue them from long and unmerited oblivion.

He asks for them your sympathy, but not your pity.

No, put this story to a wholesome use.…

I ask your sympathy, then, for their rare constancy and pure affection, and their cruel separation by a vile heresy in the bosom of the Church; but not your pity for their early but happy end.

The vile heresy is celibacy—'an invention truly fiendish'—and the story is intended to stand as a warning to a freer and maturer age, one that has outgrown the restrictions accepted by its benighted ancestors. Like Kingsley in his Hypatia, Reade finds a relevant modern message in a study of pre-Reformation Christianity; he assents to progress which moves men away from superstition, and he hints at the dangers to the nineteenth century of a revival of monasticism. Unlike the yet more rabid and unbalanced Kingsley, however, Reade might strike us elsewhere as being suprisingly tolerant of the abuses he attacks; he implies criticism rather than attempting frontal assaults on moral patterns that his characters take for granted. Gerard and Margaret accept the state of society in which they find themselves, they see its shortcomings and argue over them; they suffer, but they submit only to love each other at a distance.

The novel moves forward to its key, the revelation that the house in the Brede Kirk Straet will eventually bear the inscription: 'Haec estparva domus natus qua magnus Erasmus' and we know that Erasmus will herald the changes of the sixteenth century. But, in the course of his narrative, Reade has suggested that change is already in the wind. In Rome, Gerard's semi-pagan friend and patron, Fra Colonna, seems determined to prove that the Church's order and its ceremonies derive from only partly suppressed heathen mysteries. As a man of the Renaissance, Colonna is convinced that he lives in a fallen world, and that ancient virtues are to be preferred to modern ones; at times he is little more than yet another of the novelist's mouthpieces—'Thou seest, the heathen were not all fools. No more are we. Not all.' Although Gerard's journey to Rome does not prove to be a quest, it at least seems to give him sufficient strength and resource to emerge from the temporary atheism, occasioned by the news of Margaret's death, into a quieter, empirical faith. Gerard's rational religion, though we never determine its source and inspiration, looks forward to his son's. In Chapter XCVI he urges the dying Margaret not to invoke a saint as an intercessor, but to turn to Him 'to whom the saints themselves do pray'. She expires with the name Jesu on her lips, to be echoed some time later, at the same hour, by her pining, faithful lover. For Reade the pair have worked out a simple, practical, rational faith which gives some kind of meaning to their muddled, cruel and credulous world. 'To their early death', readers are warned, 'apply your Reason and your Faith, by way of exercise and preparation.' We are also, it seems, being asked to look forward to a temperate Protestantism and to the nineteenth century which is reaping the benefits of the Reformation.

In its time The Cloister and the Hearth was often compared favourably to Romola; both novels are set in the late fifteenth century, and consider a society which is seeking new directions; both Reade and George Eliot look to some kind of spiritual progress to provide meaning to the hurlyburly of history. Swinburne's essay on Reade attempted, not very successfully, to chart a via media between an excessive admiration of Romola and, as it now seems, the extraordinary view that George Eliot had been inspired and influenced by the earlier novel. Swinburne affirmed that no rational admirer would dispute the assertion that the author of The Cloister and the Hearth 'could not have completed—could not have conceived—so delicate a study in scientific psychology as the idlest or least sympathetic reader of Romola must recognise and admire in the figure of Tito', but he urged that there was a 'well-nigh puerile insufficiency of some of the resources by which the story has to be pushed forward or warped round before it can be got into harbour'. Even if he were posing as a strict realist, Swinburne is unnecessarily harsh, but one could hardly expect him to sympathise with the reasons why George Eliot manhandles her heroine's boat into the harbour of the plague-stricken village. Romola is capable of growing, maturing, breaking and growing again; for all the vividness of their setting, Read's characters are comparatively static and bland. To George Eliot the human psyche contains an infinite complexity and potential for choice; to Reade the details of a confused, irrational, and various external world present the only reality that an artist can paint. George Eliot is sure of her moral bearings, and she makes sense of history because of it; Reade looks at fragmentary experience, and takes the design of the whole for granted without caring to explain what the design means. Arthur Conan Doyle is said to have paid tribute to The Cloister and the Hearth by describing it as like 'going through the Dark Ages with a dark lantern'. The dimness of Reade's kindly guiding light now only allows us the odd glimpse of the faded brightness of his historical vision.

'It has been said', Samuel Butler remarked in an aside in Erewhon Revisited, 'that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.' Butler's theological premisses might now strike us as soundly based, but to most nineteenth-century readers an historian was not simply tolerated by Heaven, he was an inspired unfolder and explainer of the ways of God to man. To an age of progress and ringing grooves of change, the study of history offered proof that men were moving efficiently and inexorably onwards, drawn towards the climax of Creation by a divine force. If God, for a growing number, did not exist, it proved intellectually convenient to replace Him with a new faith in an evolving, progressing, creative humanity. The two propositions were not mutually exclusive, even though a religious man might be tempted to settle for social passivity, while the atheist opted for revolution; both were interpreting and expressing the ens realissimum, and both were proving useful to their God.

In literature a more significant moral and cultural gulf now divided those who continued to believe in an unchanging human condition, from those who held, with Sir Walter Scott, that man was conditioned by his environment. It was an argument that had ancient roots in the Pelagian controversy of the fourth and fifth centuries, and it is still shaping branching opinions in our own. Henry Fielding's eighteenth-century lawyer in Joseph Andrews is 'not only alive, but hath been so these four thousand years'. In the Dedicatory Epistle to Ivanhoe, however, Scott suggested that for the majority of his readers it was easier to accept the foreignness of a backward and distant country than that of another age. A modern gentleman reader 'surrounded by all the comforts of an Englishman's fireside' was

not half so much disposed to believe that his own ancestors led a very different life from himself; that the shattered tower, which now forms a vista from his window, once held a baron who would have hung up at his own door without any form of trial; that the hinds, by whom his little pet-farm is managed, a few centuries ago would have been his slaves; and that the complete influence of feudal tyranny once extended over the neighbouring village, where the attorney is now a man of more importance than the lord of the manor.

Fielding's English lawyer might, but for his buckle-shoes, have been recognised on the Athenian stage; Scott's attorney has a social function that changes with time and with shifts in power. The past is another country and as circumstances alter so does the individual's world-view; the novelist's role is not simply to describe mankind in general, but to show how specific men have been moulded by specific historical manners. Fielding spoke with and to the moral prejudices of a neo-classical age; Scott and his successors expressed the confident moralising spirit of their own age.

To the Victorian historical novelists the past was not frozen by eternity, nor was it, unlike the scenes of Keats's Grecian Urn, rendered eternal, silent, and unravished by art. To Scott's successors history was contemporary, synchronic and enveloping; it was living and vibrating in the present, and the artist represented its reality as if it were an act of personal memory. The past reinforced rather than undermined the present. Though to many Victorians the past, like the sea lapping Tennyson's Ithaca, moaned with many voices, those voices seemed to call for continued advance into the future.