SOURCE: "The Romancers and Historic Truth: The Question of Responsibility," "The Novelist as Historian: An Unexplored Tract of Victorian Historiography" and "The Decline of a Literary Fashion: The Historical Romance After 1850," in The Novelist as Historian: Essays on the Victorian Historical Novel, Mouton de Gruyter, 1973, pp. 22-33, 34-54, 55-63.

[In the following excerpt, Simmons analyzes the changing role of historical accuracy in the Victorian historical novel.]

As many Victorian novelists gravitated toward the social, political, and religious issues of their age, critical hostility increased towards previous and contemporary writers who were thought not serious enough for the changed temper of the times. For most Victorians Scott's position as the chief of the English novelists remained secured and unquestioned. His novels continued to enjoy wide popular sales and continued critical support. He served for many as the touchstone by which subsequent novelists were tested and often found wanting. Furthermore, Scott's popularity, based in part on his exemplary life, was expanded and secured by the frank biography of his son-in-law.

But Scott proved an easy target for those more earnest critics who were opposed on general principles to any literature which professed merely to entertain its readers. He himself had repeatedly voiced opinions to the effect that the novel form was woefully unsuited to any serious endeavor, and for this reason considered it inferior to both drama and poetry. He continued to express skepticism toward the defense of fiction that rested upon its presumed moral influence. "The professed moral of a piece", he stated in an essay on Fielding, "is usually what the reader is least interested in; it is like the mendicant, who cripples after some splendid and gay procession, and in vain solicits the attention of those who have been gazing upon it." He then went on to insist that the novel was

a mere elegance, a luxury contrived for the amusement of polished life, and the gratification of that half love of literature, which pervades all ranks in an advanced state of society, and are read much more for amusement, than with the least hope of deriving instruction from them. [The Lives of Eminent Novelists and Dramatists, 1887]

And in the introductory epistle to The Fortunes of Nigel [1893] he trumpeted, almost as a challenge: "I care not who knows it—I write for general amusement."

But an increasing number of readers found Scott's professed goal of amusement to be inadequate in light of the newer emphasis upon the seriousness of the artist's responsibility to his public. A dissentient minority of important Victorian thinkers and critics took issue with the popular consensus and began censuring him on grounds that distinctly reflected the changed temper of the post-Scott years. For the first time his novels were scrutinized for their philosophy and history. In each case there were those who found the Wizard of the North sadly lacking in those qualities they held to be essential to great literature.

Thomas Carlyle was one of those writers who insisted upon the seriousness of the literary endeavor and reacted accordingly in his evaluation of Scott's fiction. His statement, made in a lengthy review of Lockhart's Life in 1838, is generally taken as definitive of the Victorian hostility toward Scott. Here he amplified a charge recorded in the privacy of his notebooks over a decade before when he labelled the novelist "the great Restaurateur of Europe". "What is his novel, any of them?" he had asked sarcastically. And the answer had come back, "A bout of champagne, claret, port or even ale drinking. Are we wiser, better, holier, stronger? No; we have been—amused [Two Notebooks, 1898].

In his lengthy evaluation of Scott for The Westminster Review Carlyle took him to task for being a "mere entertainer" who had "no message whatever to deliver to the world". His novels, Carlyle insisted, were

Not profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for edification, for building up or elevating, in any shape! The sick heart will find no healing here, the darkly-struggling heart no guidance: the Heroic that is in all men no divine awakening voice. We say, therefore, that they do not found themselves on deep interests, but on comparatively trivial ones.

As such, Carlyle felt, Sir Walter Scott participated in his age, the spiritual emptiness of his writings merely reflecting the spiritual vacuum of the early nineteenth century, an age "fallen languid, destitute of faith and terrified at scepticism".

As James Hillhouse has pointed out, this criticism of Scott was nothing new by 1838. Rather Carlyle, writing from a Scottish Calvinist background, was only giving more eloquent expression to charges that had been leveled against the novelist for the past decade by other critics working within the Evangelical and Utilitarian frameworks. John Stuart Mill, writing a decade earlier in The Westminster Review, attacked the Waverley novels on much the same grounds. "There is no one of [Scott's] productions", he concluded, "from which, unless it be by chance, any one useful lesson can be derived" [WestminsterReview, (April, 1824)]. And at the same time F. D. Maurice expressed the regret that men of such obvious genius, such as Scott, "instead of doing something to reform their age, should submit themselves to the meanest eddies of that current which they might have turned from its wanderings" [The Athenaeum, 11 March, 1828].

Harriet Martineau perhaps best points up the changing attitude toward Scott. Shortly after his death she wrote two essays, "The Genius of Scott" and "The Achievement of Scott", which are a sympathetic evaluation of his measure as a writer and a hope for a new fiction based on the techniques initiated by him but refined for new ends. Unlike Maurice and Carlyle, Miss Martineau did not feel that Scott's novels merely amused "indolent languid old men". Rather they exerted a strong moral force and taught all men "the power of fiction as an agent of morals and philosophy". Scott was for her both a "vindicator of genius and an unconscious prophet of [fiction's] future achievements". She called upon the new generation of writers to refine upon his techniques to produce "the philosophical romance". She went on to criticize the "spurious brethen", those imitators of Scott who had taken over his techniques for the historical romance without adapting them to meet the new demands of the changing times and of a reading public, which on the scent of utility, "cannot be interested without a larger share of philosophy, or a graver purpose in fiction, than formerly". As Richard Stang has observed [in The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850-1870, 1959], such criticism embodies a radically different view of fiction and the role it is to play than that expressed by Scott and his contemporaries.

Scott's defense, when such criticism was sometimes brought to his attention late in his life, was that if a historical romancer avoided a too gross confusion of the manners of various peoples and periods, presented a reasonably accurate portraiture of the historical characters, and in general maintained a sense of credulity, the author could not in all fairness be assigned to the company of "the light and frivoulous associates with whom a careless observer would be disposed to ally him", but would "take his seat on the bench of the historians of his time and country". And in the prefatory remarks affixed to Peveril of the Peak Scott defended his novels against the charges of corrupting history and misguiding his readers, asserting that his historical fictions encouraged in his readers an interest in formal histories. At the very least, the less ambitious reader would quit one of his romances "with a degree of knowledge, not perhaps of the most accurate kind, but such as he might not otherwise have acquired". The possibility that the historical romance might be utilized for the serious instruction of the reader in history was recognized quite early by both Scott and his advocates as a chief potential in this form of fiction. This, however, was due to Scott's innovation of introducing historical events and personages into his narratives. Previous historical romancers had generally been content with setting their stories in a distant time without any real concern for the manners, costumes, events, and people of the earlier period.

As it turned out, this proved to be one of the most common defenses of Scott's fictions and historical fiction in general throughout the Victorian years. Archibald Alison, the historian, asserted in a eulogistic appraisal of the historical romance that it was one of "the most delightful and instructive species of composition … and can give the truth of history without its monotony" ["The Historical Romance", Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine LVIII (September, 1845)]. And in the mid-1860s another critic insisted that

After reading Sir Walter Scott's "Kenilworth", we are irresistibly led to consult history to learn if he has given a faithful representation of Elizabeth and Leicester, and we are influenced in precisely the same way by Bulwer, Dickens, and others ["Is the Perusal of Works of Fiction Right or Wrong?", The British Controversialist, and Literary Magazine (1865)].

There is some indication that exactly this happened. John G. Lockhart noted that each of his father-in-law's novels had been followed by the re-issue of the principal sources for the work. The popularity of Quentin Durward, for example, led to the re-publication of Philip de Comines, which enjoyed a brisk sale in its new edition. But the evidence is overwhelming that the majority of readers of Scott and the romancers who followed after him were content to get their history from the historical romances and did not use them as stepping stones into the more academic treatments of the subject. There is no doubt that one of the chief reasons for the phenomenal popularity of the historical romance throughout the early decades of the Victorian period was that readers had convinced themselves that with a minimum of effort and a maximum of pleasure they could learn history while reading an entertaining story. As has often been observed, the nineteenth century was a time of increased historical consciousness when men for the first time became aware of the past as being pro-foundly different from the present. And in England this developing awareness was nurtured and encouraged by the profusion of historical romances which provided many Victorian readers with their sense of the historical past. The volumes of Turner, Hallam, Palgrave, Grote, and Thirlwall, unread, collected dust on the library shelves, while readers turned with interest to the latest historical romance. In 1836 a critic in Blackwood's commented upon the extent to which his contemporaries were indebted to Scott for their sense of the past, asking rhetorically, "… who is there who must not have observed in general conversation, that the notions of bygone times and characters, most interesting to us from a national point of view, are more often taken from the unperishable novels of Sir Walter Scott and others, rather than from the documents of more sober research?" ["Irish Tales," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine XXXIX (May, 1836)]. Even as late as 1876 the prominent historian Edward A. Freeman noted that a chief error which any historian of the twelfth century had to contend against was "the notion that for many generations … after the Norman Conquest, there was a broadly marked line, recognized on both sides, between 'Normans' and 'Saxons' ". He traced this misconception back to Scott's Ivanhoe and admitted that no amount of argument by prominent historians to the contrary had been successful in putting down this popular belief, indicating the extent to which the general reader derived his impressions of a past epoch from the historical romances rather than the histories.

There were several reasons for this state of affairs. George Henry Lewes was no doubt correct when he asserted that a chief factor was "Idleness;—a wish to get at knowledge by a royal route" ["The Historical Romance", Westminster Review XLV (March, 1846)]. But things were more complex than Lewes realized. A much more significant reason was that these novels introduced the reading public to an aspect of historical studies almost wholly neglected by the formal historians of the 1820s and '30s. As a critic in The Edinburgh Review observed in 1832, Scott took his readers "below that surface on which float the great events and stately pageants of the time" and acquainted them "with the minor details and with the habits, condition, and opinions of former races". The result was that readers could now "institute a closer comparison between the complexion of their times and that of our own" ["The Waverley Novels", Edinburgh Review LV (April, 1832)]. Even Carlyle conceded this point, admitting that Scott's novels "taught all men this truth… that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies and abstractions of men.… History will henceforth have to take thought of it." In short, many readers found in Scott's fictions an aspect of history that appealed strongly to them and was conspicuously absent from the formal histories of the day.

A further stimulus to the readiness of readers to gain their history from romances lay in the fact that historical instruction had not yet been allotted a place in the educational systems of most English schools. Thomas Arnold's introduction into the curriculum at Rugby of a broad range of historical studies proved to be a major innovation in the early 1830s and the cause of considerable controversy in the years following the adoption. The situation was little better in the major universities at Oxford and Cambridge. At Cambridge, for example, there were only two triposes in the first half of the century, one in mathematics, natural religion, and moral philosophy with the emphasis upon mathematics, and a second in classical studies. Once again it was Thomas Arnold who was chiefly responsible for the introduction of historical studies into the curricula of the higher schools. In August of 1841, the year before his death, he was appointed to the Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford and proved to be the first holder of the chair to take his title literally and lecture on modern history. The lectures, enormously successful, marked the "beginning of the effective teaching of modern history in both Universities" [G. M. D. Henderson-Howatt, "Thomas Arnold and the Teaching of History", Quarterly Review CCCII (April, 1964)]. Within the following decade historical studies had become a formal part of the curricula at both universities: Cambridge in 1848, Oxford in 1852.

The unimportance of historical studies in the universities is underscored by the fact that the major historians of the first fifty years of the century lived and worked outside of the academic communities of Oxford and Cambridge. George Grote was a London banker and a Member of Parliament; Connop Thirlwall, a bishop in the Anglican Church; Thomas Carlyle, a man of letters; Thomas Macaulay, a Member of Parliament; and Sir Francis Palgrave, a civil servant, lawyer, and Keeper of the Records. After 1860 this all changed, so that the major historians of the latter half of the century, Edward Freeman, William Stubbs, John Green, and Lord Acton, were all formally connected with the faculties of one of the major universities.

History, then, for the first half of the nineteenth century was an area of study conspicuous both for the intense interest it aroused and its absence from the formal curricula of virtually all the schools in the island. If it was to be learned at all, the knowledge had to be gained through a program of independent study. A man's understanding of history, both ancient and modern, was then a measure of both his own interests and his personal initiative. But this was the time of self-education and self-help, of Mechanics Institutes and the Library of Useful Knowledge. Given the background, it is not surprising that so many people turned to the historical romances for the historical knowledge they thought could be gained from them.

With historical romances being read by so many people in place of the more formal histories, it soon became apparent to many Victorian critics that the authors of historical fiction were under a special obligation to their readers to insure the accuracy of the historical portions of their narratives. A reviewer in Blackwood's in 1836 argued that "writers of historical romances, tales, and novels [are] under a greater moral responsibility than the compilers of real history". The reason for this was that fact and fiction in their works are so subtly interwoven that the majority of the readers will be quite unable to distinguish the two. Care must thus be taken not to falsify or misrepresent historical personages and events.

The problem was rendered more acute by the disregard of historical accuracy by the historical romancers of the day. Scott and his followers were frequently bound by the popular conception of the past, what Herbert Butterfield has called the "picture-gallery of the past"—a popular impression built up over the years from a general blurring of history, ballads, Biblical stories, local traditions, poetry, and romance. Instead of correcting this romantic and popular sense of the past, as some Victorian critics felt they should, the historical romancers frequently catered to it. "Noknowledge is better than mis-knowledge", asserted George Henry Lewes and insisted that it was the latter that most readers picked up from the historical fictions of the day.

Numerous critics now attacked Scott's novels and those of his followers on the grounds of historical inaccuracy and misrepresentation. This is a note peculiarly Victorian. In Scott's own day there had been little discussion of the merit of the historical aspects of his novels and little demand for a precise attention to the niceties of historical fact. He would, no doubt, have agreed with Nassau Senior in his article on the Waverley novels in The Quarterly Review of 1821 when he said of history in Scott's romances that

We do not object to Sir Walter's alterations of facts and characters, on account of their tendency to produce false historical impressions. The object of a novel is not to instruct; and the reader who is absurd enough to look into fiction for truth, cannot hope even to be pitied for having been led into error ["Sir Walter Scott", reprinted in Essays on Fiction, 1864].

But by the time of Scott's death critics had become increasingly less tolerant of such laxity toward historical fact. H. A. Taine, writing much later, observed that "From Walter Scott we learned history. And yet is this history? All these pictures of a distant age are false [History of English Literature, trans. H. VanLaun, 1883]." And Sir Francis Palgrave, the historian and Keeper of the Records, stated in 1851 that "Historical novels are mortal enemies to history", and then attacked Scott's Ivanhoe as "out of time, out of place, out of season, out of reason, ideal or impossible" [The History of Normandy and of England, 1851]. It was largely due to historical fiction, Palgrave argued, that the British reading public had come to consider English history as little more than "a splendid melodrama, set to the sound of kettledrums and trumpets".

Even had Scott wished to have been more precise, he would have found himself at a disadvantage in relation to his successors. Much new material was opened up in the 1820s and '30s, well after he had written most of his novels, but in ample time for those who wrote in the early decades of the Victorian era. This was indeed a time of histories. Sir Francis Palgrave's massive studies began appearing in the late 1820s. His efforts and those of Nicholas Nicolas resulted in many of the records of the Public Records Office being catalogued and made available for the first time to scholars. The volume of historical research swelled to such proportions that Charles Knight noted in 1854 that for the thirty-five year period between 1816 and 1851 books on history and geography far outstripped fiction, titles in the latter category being a full third fewer than in the former.

In accordance with this increased interest in history (aroused ironically enough by Scott's own romances), critics and novelists began paying increased attention to the historical element of historical fiction. The historical novelists in the earlier Victorian decades found an entirely new critical attitude awaiting them. No longer was the factual looseness tolerated by Scott and his contemporaries going unchallenged. As Blackwood's noted in 1863:

It is harder work now to write a historical romance than it used to be in the days of Sir Walter, when it cost the romancer no scruple of conscience to put a new saint into the calender for the sake of a handy oath that would rhyme; and when the great novelist could venture to transport us bodily into the previous centuries, upon his own absolute authority, without citing witnesses, or stopping in the tide of the narrative to prove minutely that he could not be wrong [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine XCIV (November 1863)].

Scott's imitators were continually flayed throughout this period for their misrepresentations and falsifications of history. In 1833 Sir. John F. W. Herschel in a speech before the subscribers to the Windsor and Eton Public Library castigated

the desperate attempts to novelize history which the herd of Scott's imitators have put forth, which have left no epoch since the creation untenanted by modern antiques-and no character in history unfalsified.

Such sentiments were echoed by scores of periodical reviewers who flayed the contemporary historical romancers for their gross inaccuracies and crude distortions of history. A critic in The Athenaeum in 1835 spent over half of his review setting straight the historical inaccuracies in the portrayal of Richard III in a minor novel of the day. "These remarks may seem somewhat out of place in the review of a novel", he concluded, "but historic truth is of more importance than the novel itself." [The Athenaeum, 20 June 1835]

The upshot of this criticism was a pressure on all writers to insure the accuracy of the historical elements in their romances and to discourage the more flagrant abuses of chronology and fact that had occurred in many of Scott's romances. Historical novelists now made readier use of prefaces, footnotes, and appendices to defend their own interpretations, trace a detail back to its source, and attack other historians. The attitude of many was now a most defensive one. Edward George Howard in his Sir Henry Morgan, the Buccaneer (1844), a factual biographical historical romance, included in the next a lengthy resume of his sources and his reasons for selecting one over another when the two conflicted. This was done, he insisted, "in order to guard against cavils concerning our accuracy as biographers". And in 1862 we find George Eliot destroying the first draft of her manuscript of Romola and beginning again because of the numerous mistakes in the historical aspects of the story.

To sum up, in the 1820s through the 1840s we find that many critics and readers looked upon the historical romance as a potential rival to formal history, and that indeed for much of the reading public the historical fiction from Waverley on was so employed.… [These] newer demands for a historical romance that was neither frivolous nor grossly inaccurate forced historical fiction to assume a radically new shape, as it responded to the demands of the age.

THE NOVELIST AS HISTORIAN:
AN UNEXPLORED TRACT OF VICTORIAN
HISTORIOGRAPHY

In 1852 a critic for Fraser's Magazine, reviewing the third and fourth volumes of Macaulay's History of England, commented upon the incredible reception accorded the work by the British peoples. It was, he noted, a bulky work of several thick volumes on a subject which the great mass of readers "might have been expected to turn from, at the very outset, as special and scientific". Why, he wondered, this intense interest in the History? The reviewer offered several possible explanations. The steady, ever increasing spread of a liberal education and the recent admission of large sections of the British populace into the active political mainstream had, he felt, stimulated both historical writing and reading. Then he offered a third suggestion, the proliferation of works of "light history" that had in recent years filled the bookstalls. These

works making at all events some pretension to the name of histories, have to a great extent driven books of mere fiction out of the market; purveyors of what used, not long since, to be called light literature, are now become purveyors of light history [Fraser's Magazine LIII (February, 1856)].

It was, he argued, chiefly this indulgence by large numbers of readers in "light histories" that had created for Macaulay an audience more extensive and responsive to his History than otherwise would have been the case.

As I suggested [previously], a principal source of this "light history" in the early decades of the Victorian era was the historical romance, which in terms of sheer bulk dominated the fiction market throughout the period and eventually stimulated the public appetite for some of the more formal histories. As one reads through this flood of historical romances published in the 1830s and '40s, he soon becomes aware of its schismatic nature. On the one hand, he finds a large body of writers who faithfully followed the formula for the historical romance developed and popularized by Sir Walter Scott in such novels as Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward. Writers such as Wm. Harrison Ainsworth and G. P. R. James were imitative rather than original, and content to follow Scott at a distance. Their novels were invariably adventure tales, depicting the actions of fictitious personages played out against a historical backdrop. The historical element generally took the form of excessive attention to costume and pageantry, occasionally punctuated by the introduction of historical events and personages. Like Scott, they all saw their role primarily as that of entertainers, allowing themselves the customary latitude in regard to historical facts and chronology.

But throughout the 1830s and '40s many Victorian reviewers leveled considerable criticism at Scott and his followers, objecting both to the lack of any real intellectual substance in their fictions and to the innumerable liberties taken with historical fact. Such criticism was distinctly Victorian and reflected the new earnestness of an age imbued with the Utilitarian demands for a literature that consciously instructed its readers. Because of these newer pressures for a historical romance that was neither frivolous nor grossly inaccurate, some historical fiction in the 1830s assumed a radically new shape, as it responded to the demands of the age. A handful of writers—significantly, all of them historians in one capacity or another—did produce a type of historical fiction, which, although it flourished for a short time only, does represent the first substantial attempt to meet the demands of the age. They did so in the easiest and most logical manner, one which would suggest itself naturally to men and women accustomed to work as historians. They all emphasized the historical aspect of the genre at the expense of the fictive and wrote as historians rather than romancers. For them the historical romance became a vehicle for the popularization and commercialization of the most recent findings of historical research. These writers were not content to go to history for an exciting backdrop nor to portray an age merely through a representation of its costumes, manners, and architecture. The historical novel in their hands became a vehicle for the exegesis of a historical period, an exegesis from the perspective of a historian, not a romancer.

Such a solution—the emphasis of history over romance—entailed a drastic change in the form of historical fiction as it had been developed by Scott. He usually set his imaginary characters and episodes in the foreground, preferring to keep the actual historical elements in the background and allowing them only occasional prominence. Scott was generally quite unconcerned with the accuracy of the historical portions of his romances, always permitting himself considerable liberty in regard to the facts and never feeling himself under any real obligation toward a fidelity to historical accuracy.

However, with this later generation of historical novelists the artist's responsibility became that of a close factual fidelity to the historical material. Their novels are about historical personages and events, each treated from the point of view of the historian rather than the romancer. Their works were carefully researched, and scholarly accuracy was one of their goals. Rigidly excluding those elements of tradition, legend, and fantasy that Scott had utilized so extensively and following only bona fide historical sources, these writers reconstructed an earlier period with the deliberate patience and care of an archaeologist fitting together the fragments of some shattered pot. They maintained a strict control over all the fictional elements introduced, never permitting them to dominate. History was not compromised for the sake of the story at hand, as was true of the novels of Scott and his imitators. The goal of these later writers was emphatically not entertainment but rather the instruction of the reading public in the important moments of the past. Edward Bulwer Lytton in Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes (1835), The Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848), Harriet Martineau in The Hour and the Man (1841), Edward George Howard in Sir Henry Morgan, the Buccaneer (1842), and Charles Macfarlane in The Camp of Refuge (1844) utilized the historical novel as a ready means of forcing a re-evaluation of a particular historical personage, hitherto looked upon unfavorably. Frederick Chamier found in the historical romance the surest means of reminding the reading public of the finer moments of British naval history during the Napoleonic wars. The historian and Keeper of the Records Sir Francis Palgrave turned to the historical tale in Truths and Fictions of the Middle Ages: The Merchant and the Friar (1837) and the unfinished Three Generations of an Imaginary Norfolk Family to popularize his recent findings in fourteenth century British jurisprudence and Parliamentary procedure. The Reverend Richard Cobbold utilized two carefully researched biographically oriented romances, The History of Margaret Catchpole (1845) and Mary Anne Wellington, the Soldier's Daughter, Wife, and Widow (1846), to treat the impact of historical events on ordinary people. They all wrote "light history". As a group they flourished for a short time only, about fifteen years; by 1850 they were themselves a part of literary history.

Thus, there developed in the 1830s and '40s the concept of the historian-novelist. Writers such as Bulwer, Macfarlane, and Palgrave saw themselves in competition, not with their contemporary romancers, but with the formal historians of their day. The factual literalness and heavy scholarship of their novels gave added weight to the authors' claims that such books were to be taken as a loose kind of history by their readers.

It would be a mistake, however, to see these historian-novelists as an isolated and freakish phenomenon on the Victorian literary scene. Rather they are but one aspect of the general and pervasive movement toward a consciously didactic fiction. The literary tastes of many Victorian readers ran pre-eminently in favor of what T. H. S. Escott called "the literature of positive information and instructive fact" [England, Her People, Polity, and Pursuits, 1880]. This was the time of the ascendancy of Bulwer's Mr. Bluff, "the sensible, practical man", the embodiment of vulgar Utilitarianism. Mr. Bluff, as Bulwer made clear in England and the English [1833], was a most prominent type by 1833. He was the individual who "hates both poets and philosophers … has a great love of facts … does not observe how the facts are applied to the theory … [and] only wants the facts for themselves". The Bluffs, and their near relations, the Gradgrinds and the Bounderbys, exerted a crucial influence on the literature of the period, especially, the novel, in their drive for facts, facts, and more facts. As early as 1831 Mrs. Gore, the novelist, could lament that "Nothing but books or plays administrant to unnatural excitement, or of a nature to gratify the outcry for useful knowledge, have now any vogue in London."

Thus, those historical novelists who emphasized the historical side of the genre and utilized the form for the elucidation of specific historical personages and events were part of a much larger phenomenon in the Victorian world. By focusing upon factual rather than imaginative experiences, they managed to escape the evangelical and Utilitarian strictures against a literature of "mere entertainment" and produced a series of novels which appealed to an instruction-oriented reading public, imbued with its responsibilities for self-education. They too wrote their novels of purpose. And though their purpose was academic rather than social, religious, or political, their affinity to Kingsley, Disraeli, Froude, and Gaskell should not be overlooked.

The fact that the claims of these authors to the status of historians rather than romancers were honored by their contemporary critics and the reading public alike should not appear too surprising. This acceptance reflects the unsettled state of English historigraphy in the early decades of the Victorian era, a time in which the historiographic theories and practices of Carlyle, Froude, and Macaulay were in the ascendant, while the stricter standards of the "scientific" school of German historiography, laid down by Neibuhr and Ranke, were still relatively unknown in England.

Indeed, it is advantageous to think of these historian novelists as representing an extension of those principles of romantic historiography as practiced by the literary historians of both England and France. The difference between a historical novel by a Bulwer or a Macfarlane and a more formal history by a Froude or a Macaulay is one of degree rather than kind. For all these historians the emphasis fell upon a concept of history as a narration rather than a dissertation. They represent a reaction against the analytical, abstract, and stylistically "dead" histories of Sharon Turner, Henry Hallam, James Mill, and other professionals. The progression was away from a concept of history as abstract exposition toward an idea of history as a fully developed narrative drama. Carlyle, for instance, wished to reinstate the historian as the teller of tales, whose finished works, reconstructing the past in the most graphic, dramatic, and detailed manner possible, permitted the reader to experience history, to be made contemporary with the facts, acquiring them with the ingenuous spirit of a contemporary. To this end all the literary historians stressed the importance of the imagination to the historian. "Stern Accuracy in inquiring, bold Imagination in expounding and filling-up", wrote Carlyle, "these are the two pinions on which History soars." Carlyle, Froude, and Macaulay all used their artistic imaginations to flesh in the "dry bones" of research, to create a sense of suspense and tension and mood on the part of the reader. There was a pronounced tendency in all their historical writings to see history almost exclusively as drama, color, and passion, and by focusing on these elements they sometimes excluded or subordinated the less picturesque but more consequential matters. Macaulay wrote in his journal in 1853 that his technique was to pass quickly over all that was dull and to dwell at length upon that which was dramatic. This desire for picturesqueness frequently dictated extensive treatment of incidents of negligible historical importance. All these historians are content to describe, but rarely do they explain. The surface is covered with an unprecedented thoroughness, but little attempt is made to explore the depths. We leave their histories with a sense of vivid tableaux indelibly etched on our memories, but with little real understanding of the events detailed and the personages represented. "To exalt the drama is to condemn the history" [History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century 1935]. G. P. Gooch said this of Carlyle's French Revolution, but it applies to all these literary historians.

Thus, by writing history in a vivid, dramatic, and imaginative fashion, Macaulay, Carlyle, and Froude produced historical narratives that rivalled the historical romances both in readability and popular sales. One result was that the distinction, hitherto clearly defined, between historical fiction and formal history broke down completely at this time. Bulwer's historical novels were treated by the reviewers as history, not fiction, and judged as such. And at least one journal, The Gentleman's Magazine, in a series of reviews on Froude's volumes of his History of England refused to consider them as history, but did think them excellent romance and compared him to Ainsworth in his treatment of the sixteenth century. However, the exact nature of this aspect of Victorian historiography and historical fiction can be best appreciated through a close examination of the novels of Edward Bulwer Lytton, Edward Howard, and Harriet Martineau.

Edward Bulwer Lytton (1830-1873) was the innovator and the foremost exponent of the new type of historical fiction based on extensive research, careful attention to factual accuracy, and the depiction of historical events and personages. His novel Rienzi initiated the new vogue in 1835 and his Harold marked its close in 1848. Of all the men and women to work in historical fiction, Bulwer Lytton enjoyed the highest reputation among his contemporaries. His major historical novels represent the most scholarly and complex use of history by any Victorian novelist.

Of all the men to work with the post-Scott historical novel, Bulwer evolved the most comprehensive and articulate theory of the composition of the historical romance. He was perhaps more acutely aware than his contemporaries of the various paths open to him. He wrote in his preface to Harold that he had early realized there were two options available to him:

the one consists in lending to ideal personages to an imaginary fable the additional interest to be derived from historical groupings; the other, in extracting the main interest of romantic narrative from History itself.

Bulwer had taken up the first option in his first three historical romances, The Disowned (1828), Devereux (1829), and The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). However, he felt uneasy about the possibility of factual distortions slipping into his fictions when the historical portions were subordinated to a melodramatic narrative. Therefore, he abandoned it for the alternate means of using romance in the service of history, an approach Bulwer claimed to have initiated.

In his three major historical novels Bulwer was less interested in the portrayal of "mere manners" which modern scholarship and the multitude of historical romancers had already rendered familiar to the reading public. Instead he concentrated upon developing the great personages of past epochs whom he felt had been "carelessly dismissed in the long and loose record of [the] centuries". He set famous historical figures at the nucleus of his works and attempted to show how the dynamic, powerful, and continually vital makers of history went about their work.

Bulwer not only selected major historical personages for his fictions, but he looked also for those periods of tremendous social upheaval when the men involved were placed under the abnormal stress of cataclysmic events. He favored epochs of momentous change, when an older order was giving away to a newer, and a country's history was being decisively settled for the next several hundred years. Scott, too, had frequently chosen periods of transition; but, as he made clear in his preface to The Fortunes of Nigel, this was for the increased possibility of picturesque development available to the novelist working in these periods. Bulwer, uninterested in picturesque contrast and juxtaposition, went to these periods of violent change for other reasons. The portrayal of the historical characters at those times presented the greatest challenge to his powers as a novelist and historian. The juxtaposition of the old against the new threw the representative qualities of each period into the clearest relief for historical analysis.

Bulwer, in thus taking upon himself the task of dramatizing great and famous personages and significant moments from history, broke completely with the tradition established by Scott. The role he accepted for himself was that of historian, not novelist. His chief problem was "how to produce the greatest amount of dramatic effect at the least expense of historical truth". This difficulty was first grappled with in Rienzi in 1835, and the success of that "experiment" confirmed him in his belief that

the true mode of employing history in the service of romance, is to study diligently the materials as history; conform to such views of the facts as the author would adopt, if he related them in the dry character of the historian.

Such a method, Bulwer stressed, placed the writer under close restrictions. The chief events of the narrative are set and the characters already drawn; they cannot be tampered with by the author. Imaginative speculation is permitted only in the development of the "inner, not outer, history of man". That is, the author is free to conjecture about private passions and motivations, but this must always be speculation hedged about by close historical scholarship. In all these novels Bulwer was careful to insist that he took no liberties with the facts, but rather constructed his stories upon the real facts: "[My] boldest inventions are but deductions from the amplest evidence [I] could gather."

For the main materials of the three Historical Romances I have composed, I consulted the original authorities of the time with a care as scrupulous as if intending to write, not a fiction, but a history. And having formed the best judgment I could of the events and characters of the age, I adhered faithfully to what, as an Historian, I should have held to be the true course and true causes of the great political events, and the essential attributes of the principal agents.

For his three major historical novels, then, Bulwer assumed the mantle of the historian. In each case he was convinced by his own extensive investigation that a particular man or event had been misjudged by contemporary historians, and he wished to set the record straight. In Rienzi he was primarily concerned with salvaging the Tribune's character from the "superficial and unfair" treatment by Gibbon:

I regarded the completion of these volumes, indeed, as a kind of duty;for having had the occasion to read the original authorities from which modern historians have drawn their accounts of the life of Rienzi, I was led to believe that a very remarkable man had been superficially judged, and a very important period crudely examined.

The novel, which was originally intended to be a history, was in fact the first comprehensive treatment of Rienzi to appear in England and sustained Bulwer's promise that the reader would gain "a more full and detailed account of the rise and fall of Rienzi, than in any English work of which I am aware".

In The Last of the Barons Bulwer undertook to explicate the complicated events of the latter half of the English fifteenth century:

I venture to think that the general reader will obtain from these pages a better notion of the important age, characterized by the decline of the feudal system, and immediately preceding that great change in society which we usually date from the accession of Henry VIII, than he could otherwise gather, without wading through a vast mass of neglected chronicles and antiquarian dissertations.

Hume's judgments on the period are constantly attacked in the notes to the novel as "hasty", "inaccurate", and "more than ordinarily incorrect". The novel also contains considerable scholarly speculation regarding both the character of Richard III ("I think I shall give a new reading of Richard the Third's crimes and character-new, but I hope not untrue") and the reasons behind the sudden and desisive rupture between Edward IV and his baron Warwick in February of 1470, an aspect of their relationship that had long been obscured in histories. Bulwer's final resolution was that Edward had foolishly attempted the virtue of one of Warwick's daughters, but he did not arrive at this solution of the rupture because it was the most satisfying in terms of a romance situation. Rather he came to this conclusion only after painstaking and exhausting research into the chronicles. Since this represented an original interpretation of a crucial moment, and one at odds with the opinions of most former scholars on the period, Bulwer was careful to present his argument with an extensive annotation of sources to support his thesis.

Bulwer was equally explicative in Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings. There he detailed the political, social, and intellectual features of the age, so that the reader would understand "why England was conquered, and how England survived the Conquest". And to this end he devoted much of his leisure time for close to a decade in doing research.

Bulwer always stressed the accuracy of the history in his fictions. He did considerable research and was proud of the pictures and explications of past periods that he crammed into his novels. He never took an "unwarranted liberty with the real facts", but rather constructed his tales on the historical facts. Bulwer himself traced the popularity of his historical fiction to his "faithful narration of historical facts" rather than to any fictional elements he might have employed in the composition of the novels. Confident of his researches and the suppositions he drew, he stood by the validity of his historical novels as history:

Nay, [the author] ventures to believe, that whoever hereafter shall write the history of Edward IV. will not disdain to avail himself of some of the suggestions scattered throughout these volumes, and tending to throw new light upon the events of that intricate but important period.

And it should be stressed that Bulwer's research for his novels was extensive and thorough. Before attempting to write, he systematically studied all available material, both ancient and modern, on his subject. Bulwer's general technique in regard to his sources was to rely heavily and narrowly upon a single work for a particular section of the novel at hand, going to other sources only when some secondary circumstance, which lacked support in the main reference work, could be found elsewhere. When a particular source coincided with his own interpretation of a person or an event, Bulwer generally followed it with close exactitude. In this respect he shares in the general attitudes and practices of the literary historians of his day. Macaulay, for instance, had often argued that there was no reason why, with the proper research and restraint, the formal historian could not portray a historical figure such as Elizabeth with a vividness comparable to Scott's portraiture in Kenilworth and "without employing a single text not authenticated by ample testimony" ["History", in Miscellaneous Essays and the Lays of Rome, 1910].

Bulwer, like the literary historiographers, insisted upon the importance of imagination in breathing life into the facts of history. "Fiction", he asserted, "when aspiring to something higher than mere Romance, does not pervert, but elucidate Facts." Bulwer here echoes Carlyle's dictum that "Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold Imagination in expounding and filling-up, these are the two pinions on which History soars." For Bulwer, as for the other literary historians, the artist in history should exercise his imagination to flesh in "the cold outlines of the rapid chronicler", achieving immediacy through color and detail.

In Bulwer's historical novels the fictional element is rigidly restricted to the depiction of the "inward life" of his historical personages, specifically in regard to determining their motives. All is worked toward a more complete understanding of the "genuine natures of the beings who actually lived [in order] to restore the warmth of the human heart to the images recalled from the grave". The purely imaginary characters, when they are introduced, are always few in number and so ordered as not to interfere with the actual historical events and motivations. Always these wholly fictitious characters are merely the passive sufferers in the panorama of history and never its active agents. Furthermore, we find that most of these minor characters exist less as fully realized individuals and more as academic abstractions. Writing as a historian and wishing to examine each age as fully as possible, Bulwer frequently set up his minor characters to embody some particular force he felt to be at work in the epoch in which he was interested. Therefore, if Nicholas in The Last of the Barons represents the incipient middle and commercial classes coming into prominence at the end of the fifteenth century, then we can assume that Nicholas' destiny is that of his class, for he takes his validity as a representative of a historical type rather than as an individual.

This readiness to see character as abstraction, together with Bulwer's selection of epochs of transition, led to another characteristic feature of his historical fiction: namely, the artificial balancing of characters, one against the other, the older order up against the new. This is most evident in The Last of the Barons where we find the dichotomy expressed chiefly in the figures of Warwick (representing the feudal order of a landed aristocracy) and Edward IV (standing for that segment of the aristocracy allied with the new commercial classes). The same division is carried out on other levels. Marmaduke, a retainer in Warwick's household, and Nicholas Alwyn, an ambitious merchant and the future mayor of London, repeat the Warwick-Edward axis. Other characters are set up, however, to illuminate various aspects of this division. Adam Wamer represents the forces of modern science and knowledge incipient at this time; he is juxtaposed with Friar Bungay, who embodies medieval superstition and finally works the destruction of the scholar.

In his own day Bulwer's historical fictions were received by most critics and readers as worthy additions to the historical publications of the age. Henry Crabb Robinson, a voracious reader, worked through Bulwer's historical novels in 1843 and noted in his journal that "I could not but consider [them] as instructive as the general history of Hume". The long hostile Fraser's Magazine took a kinder view of Harold and found that in spite of too much unassimilated history in the narrative, it still gave "a better account of the causes which led to the Norman Conquest than any book we know". Edward A. Freeman in his History of the Norman Conquest of England observed that Harold was a work "which, if the sentiment and super-natural parts be struck out, forms a narrative more accurate than most so-called histories of the time" and insisted that Bulwer's treatment of the age was superior to that of Palgrave in the latter's multi-volume study of Saxon England. And at a number of points in his own history Freeman acknowledges debts to Bulwer's novel. Even as late as 1914 an American critic could call The Last of the Barons "indispensable to the student of English history" [E. G. Bell, Introduction to the Prose Romances, Plays, and Comedies of Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton, 1914].

Bulwer's books thus capitalized upon the demand of many Victorian readers for a historical narrative that was dramatic, entertaining, and accurate. And the popular success enjoyed by his books encouraged other novelists to follow his lead and use the historical romance as a vehicle for their own historical speculations and researches. One of the most successful imitations was that of Edward George Greville Howard (?-1841), Sir Henry Morgan, the Buccaneer, which appeared posthumously in 1842. The book reflects Howard's long career as a naval officer. Upon retiring, he became a member of Captain Frederick Marryat's circle and worked for a time in editorial capacities with several magazines when not writing his own naval novels that enjoyed a moderate popularity with the reading public of the day.

Howard chose as the subject of this, his final novel, the life of the most famous British buccaneer. This man of the mid-seventeenth century rose from a position as an obscure indentured servant in the West Indies to become one of the most powerful men in the hemisphere. Through a combination of genius, skill, and daring he collected a fleet of 36 ships and 1846 men under his command, and with them proved to be for a number of years the major threat to Spanish commerce in the American area. His most famous exploit was the march across the Isthmus of Panama and the subsequent capture and sacking of Panama City, then the richest and most important city in the Spanish colonial empire. Regardless of the difference of opinion regarding Morgan's character, there is no doubt that this feat was the result of brilliant leadership and martial skill. For his exploits against the Spanish authorities, Morgan was knighted by the English king and appointed governor of Jamaica.

Howard's attitude toward Morgan vacillates throughout the novel. In the earlier portions of the book the pirate is seen as "more a demon than a man". The author is repelled by the ruthless cruelty and brutality of the buccaneer, especially in the early days of Morgan's career. But, as the story progresses, Howard finds himself caught up in the adventures of his subject. The author then holds the reader back from a condemnation of Morgan, many of whose actions are now explained and extenuated by constant reference to the wholly corrupt Jamaican society. The epic sacking of Panama City, a triumph against unbelievable odds, firmly establishes Morgan as a hero in Howard's eyes. Now we find the author referring to his subject as "our hero" and insisting that the capture of the city was

one of the most wonderful military achievements on record. There was no surprise, no treachery. The conquest was gained by the most consummate generalship, and a courage that was never surpassed. If deeds of war can confer honour, Morgan and his associates must stand pre-eminent amongst mankind. They had to contend with and conquer a brave and cautious enemy. England should be proud of these men, though they have been stigmatized as pirates; and glory in their achievements.

The apotheosis is now complete. Morgan's band of cutthroats, bandits, and pirates has become his "associates". His achievements at Panama City now place him on a level with the greatest of English military heroes. Howard continually defends Morgan's character against charges made by the French and Spanish historians. From the middle of the second volume the author's chief purpose is to use his novel as a vehicle for a general re-evaluation of Morgan's place in history. And from here to the end of the book Howard takes a generally uncritical approach to his hero. Even Morgan's slide into a state of perpetual drunkenness and licentiousness while governor of Jamaica does not shake his faith.

Howard did considerable research for his novel. Virtually nothing is known of Morgan's youth in Wales, and the novelist's account is pure fiction. Howard gives Morgan a frustrating love affair and a rivalry with a Spanish duke washed to the Welsh shores after a shipwreck. But this unpromising opening soon gives way to a more interesting, and certainly less orthodox, treatment of his subject once Howard begins the narration of Morgan's life about which more is known. Now he follows the facts of his career closely. Numerous documents relating to the important moments of Morgan's life are quoted from at length. For instance, at the close of the book Howard inserts in full the official report of Sir Hans Sloane, Morgan's personal physician, in his own account of the pirate's death. For many of the details of Morgan's exploits, especially the accounts of the storming of the fort at Chagre and the siege of Panama City, Howard relied heavily upon the narrative of John Esquemeling, The Buccaneers of America. Esquemeling had served as a physician under Morgan and had participated in the numerous actions described. Howard accepts the validity of his account of events but quarrels with him on the nature of Morgan's character.

As the novel progresses, Howard takes his task more seriously. His purpose becomes less that of writing an entertaining novel and more that of biographer striving to salvage his subject from the unfair treatment of earlier historians. Thus, we find Howard viewing himself as a novelist in the earlier portions of the book, but as a biographer and historian in the latter. As his concept of his task becomes more serious, Howard allows himself decreasingly less liberty in regard to the facts. Not only does he examine numerous authorities, but he also strives to achieve some sort of critical evaluation of each source in an attempt to find that which is the most accurate. There is greater hesitation to fill in those areas about which his authorities tell him little. This greater sense of scholarly objectivity is perhaps present more in theory than practice. But Howard continues to insist upon his identity as a historian:

We well know that the writer of a romance is expected to know every undivulged emotion of the characters of his creation, and also to be able to account for every incident. This responsibility must not be thrown upon us, for these especial reasons: the first is, that we are writing biography, and speak only from authorities, many of them dubious, we must confess, and from what our hero has himself divulged in occasional conversations; and the second, that many of the transactions-must we call them atrocities?-that have been imputed to him, he resolutely denies. These atrocities we are forced to record, and let the reader himself judge, by the manner in which we relate them, whether or not they may justly be attributed to him.

In other words, Howard will refuse the license allotted to romancers to modify history for the ends of drama and hold himself to a faithful depiction of the facts. He follows his lengthy description of the battle for Panama City with a testimonial to the reader assuring him of the accuracy of his account. He has, he insists, "collated numerous authorities and many manuscripts in the British Museum" to achieve "as faithful a record as any that history can produce of a remote transaction". All this is done "in order to guard against cavils concerning our accuracy as biographers".

Howard's novel then is essentially a biography of Morgan and an evaluation of his place in the history of the time and area. As one contemporary reviewer noted, the book was more a history than a romance: "The book is fearfully and painfully true to the actual history of its extraordinary hero, and may be regarded quite as much in the light of a 'Life' of Morgan the Buccaneer, as of a 'Romance'" [New Monthly Magazine LXIV (March, 1842)].

Much the same could be said of Harriet Martineau's carefully researched biographical novel The Hour and the Man (1841) which took as its subject the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture. Martineau (1802-1876) was strongly committed to the idea that didacticism was perhaps the surest index to an author's importance. In her essays on literature she continued to remind her contemporary authors that the temper of their times demanded a strong, unequivocal commitment to the principles of the Utilitarian value of literature. Her own writings were almost exclusively didactic, written to serve a specific end in the cause at hand. Possessing the two-fold ability to grasp abstract principles and embody them simply and clearly in illustrative fictional narratives, Harriet Martineau was one of the most successful of the Victorian popularizers.

The Hour and the Man reflects her ideas on the importance of utility and serious purpose in fiction. The book was one of her "philosophical romances", heavily burdened with the author's ideas on morality and politics. The plot, supplied to her by history, concerned the emergence of Toussaint L'Ouverture as the liberator of the slaves in the French colony of Haiti. The novel is a document in the abolitionist movement; here Martineau pleaded the cause of the Negro. In Toussaint L'Ouverture she gave to the anti-slavery forces a black hero for their cause.

In August of 1791 the Haitian slaves revolted. Their struggle was singularly ineffectual until Toussaint L'Ouverture emerged as their leader a few months later. A slave himself for the first forty-five years of his life, he was a self-educated black with a deep commitment to the progress of his race. As the circumstances demonstrated, he proved to be a master at military and political organization. Within a short time he had worked his ragged and illdisciplined force of ex-slaves into the finest army in the Western Hemisphere. In a series of brilliantly executed campaigns, he defeated the two foremost military powers of Europe, virtually annihilating vastly superior English and French forces. As absolute ruler of the Haitian people, Toussaint proved to be a force for moderation, bringing peace and prosperity to the country.

Such was the man who captured Martineau's imagination. In her biographical novel Toussaint emerges as an idealized embodiment of the Noble Savage recast in terms of the abolitionist agitation of the early Victorian years, an Oronookoo crossed with an Uncle Tom. All this represented a sharp departure from the traditional attitude toward the man, most historians before Martineau regarding Toussiant as a man blessed by a natural genius for both politics and war, but hypocritical and treacherous, "in all affairs, the prince of dissemblers". However, Martineau concluded after considerable investigation that the man had been unfairly judged, that in fact he was "an honest, a religious, and a mild and merciful man".

In Martineau's depiction of the man and his life she continually insists upon his Christian ethics of love and patience. When the revolt first erupts, he does not lend it his support, for he feels that, though slavery is wrong, revenge and lawlessness are not the solution: "'…if [the whites] have oppressed their negroes, as they too often have, our duty is clear,—to bear and forbear, to do them good in return for their evil.'" He joins the revolution only when he learns that the revolutionary government in Paris has conferred upon the Negroes their freedom and the rights of French citizenship; thus, it is the slave-owners, not the blacks, who are against the law of France. As leader of the blacks he is a constant and unswerving force for moderation, justice, and racial harmony; as governor of the island his cardinal principle is "No Retaliation". A racial holocaust is thus averted. A man of honor, Toussaint remains completely impartial in his fulfillment of his duties; he himself has no private interests, no concern for anything but the good of all the people under his rule. Martineau continually contrasts him with the thoroughly unscrupulous, treacherous, and cruel whites who succeed in capturing him only through a Machiavellian duplicity.

Martineau thus idealized her Toussaint out of all credibility. Carlyle wrote to Emerson to complain how she had made a "Washington-Christ-Macready … of a roughhanded, hard-headed, semi-articulate gabbing Negro". Carlyle's criticism was valid to the extent that Martineau had deliberatedly idealized her Toussaint, but then he had always been unsympathetic to the abolitionist movement. In actual fact, there is much in common between the historiographic methods of The Hour and the Man and those Carlyle employed in his own biographies of Sterling, Frederick the Great, and Cromwell. Both biographers wrote around a principal idea and ideals and the result was more an abstraction than a recognizable character of individual distinction, a quasi-historical icon for the reader's contemplation. Both were ready to apotheosize their subjects and Carlyle especially fell far short of detached objectivity, ruthlessly suppressing everything that might jeopardize the heroic stature of his subjects.

Thus, Carlyle's disgust over The Hour and the Man was finally little more than Caliban's rage at seeing his own face in the mirror. Indeed, it is advantageous to think of all those authors who undertook to write historical novels that were factually accurate as representing an extension into the realm of fiction of the theories and practices of romantic historiography and biography and, as such, their works of "light history" all share to varying degrees in the strengths and weaknesses of romantic historiography: its nationalism, partiality, hero worship, and the lack of a truly critical spirit. Like Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude, these historian-novelists were all amateurs and men of letters, who looked upon history as an adjunct to belles lettres, rather than a science as did Neibuhr, Ranke, and their followers in England. These men were primarily interested in the depiction of individuals and events and avoided the discussion of the more abstract questions of economic, political, social, religious issues. By slighting opportunities for reflection, generalization, and the discussion of more abstract matters, these historians reduced history to a well-told tale. Behind the approach of Macaulay, Carlyle, and Froude was a firm conviction that a factual story may be, and should be, told as agreeably as a fictitious one, that the incidents of real life, both domestic and political, may be so arranged without subsequent corruption of accuracy to command all the interest hitherto allotted to a fictional story. And a novel such as Bulwer's Rienzi, H. Martineau's The Hour and the Man, or Howard's Sir Henry Morgan finally realized the ultimate implications embedded within the theory and practice of romantic historiography.

In Benjamin Disraeli's The Infernal Marriage [1881] a bored Proserpine inquires of Tiresias what books he has that she might read. When he offers her some historical novels, her reply is sharply critical:

Oh! if you mean those things as full of costumes as a fancy ball and almost as devoid of sense, I'll have none of them. Close the curtains; even visions of the Furies are preferable to these insipidities.

When this first appeared in The New Monthly Magazine in 1834, Disraeli and Proserpine were considerably in advance of their age, for the vogue for historical fiction was then at its height. But when the novelette was reprinted in book form in 1853, such sentiments were common. By then the fashion for historical fictions of all kinds was well into its decline and the critical reaction to the form was strongly hostile.

In a way this is paradoxical, for by 1850 the major Victorian historical novels had yet to be published; Thackeray's Henry Esmond appeared in 1852; Newman's Callista in 1856; Kingsley's Hypatia in 1852-1853, Westward Ho/ in 1855, and Hereward the Wake in 1865; Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities in 1859; Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth in 1861; and George Eliot's Romola in 1862-1863. It is surprising, then, to find that the most prominent and successful efforts in the field came during this decade and a half when the vogue for historical fiction had expended itself and these writers could no longer count on the tide of literary fashion to insure the popularity of their books with the reading public. Indeed there was even a considerable risk for a major artist to turn to the genre at this time. Anthony Trollope in 1857 encountered this changed attitude toward the historical romance. In that year when he was going from publisher to publisher seeking an outlet for the manuscript to his novel The Three Clerks, he was advised by one house: "Whatever you do, don't be historical; your historical novel [La Vendee, 1850] is not worth a damn." The advice suggests the waning of public interest in the form and the hesitancy of publishers to take the risk on a second or third-rate specimen, even though a few years before they turned them out by the score.

Further evidence of this decline exists in abundant measure in the reviews of the periodicals in the latter half of the century. The Quarterly Review in 1868 felt it a matter of duty to run a lengthy article on Lockhart's Life of Scott in a futile attempt to counter the sharp decline of Scott's popularity among the readers of the day: "… not Lockhart only, but Scott himself, both as a man and as a writer, seems to be in danger of passing—we cannot conceive why—out of the knowledge of the rising generation." This was looked upon as "a great public misfortune" [Quarterly Review CXXIV (January, 1868)]. And Leslie Stephen in an essay written on the hundredth anniversary of Scott's birth observed that many people in private freely admitted that "Scott is dull" and that his books ("most amusing nonsense") had been moved from the library to the schoolroom.

The Victorian critics were now for the first time able to gain a perspective on the deluge of historical romances that had appeared in the 1830s and '40s. For many of them it was the clarity of mind one gains upon emerging from a long, irrational, and exhausting binge. The Athenaeum in an obituary of G. P. R. James in 1860 found upon looking back that it was not "one of the least curious features in literary history, that during a prolonged period there was a public and a popularity for second and even thirdrate romancers who could present the sovereigns, generals, and statesman of past times and foreign countries, if only in name" [The Athenaeum, 23 June 1860]. And in 1892 the Oliphants saw fit to congratulate their age upon the fact that since the death of James Grant, no professional historical romancer had arisen to take his place. This was, they felt, a definite sign of progress in the development of readers' tastes. But by that time no writer with any pretense to importance (with the exception of Robert Louis Stevenson) thought in terms of the historical romance. The state of the genre in the last decades of the century was neatly summed up by William Sharp writing in The Academy in 1889.

The historical novel is at a low ebb. It is unpopular with the highly cultured reader, for it must almost inevitably annoy him with more or less gross and disillusioning anachronisms; it is wearisome to the mass of library subscribers, for it deals with episodes of no present significance and with personages of alien speech and manners; and it is of no strong appeal to those who love to have their wine of literature diluted with the water of instructive facts. No writer who has gained the ear of the public can afford to indulge in a historical romance unless he have very good ground, indeed, for his conviction that he can be weighed in the balance of public estimation and not be found wanting [William Sharp in a review of Arthur Sherburne Hardy's Passe Rose in The Academy, 13 July 1889].

The most obvious reason for the decline of interest in the historical romance would appear to be the innumerable and incompetent imitations of Scott that flooded the market for a thirty year period and surfeited the public taste for the form. This was the explanation offered by The British Quarterly Review in 1859: "We are scarcely surprised that the public should of late years have turned away from this class of fiction when we remember the many wretched imitations—weak sketches in washy water-colours" ["Novels and Novelists", The British Quarterly Review XXX (October, 1859)].

It was this, but also much more. No longer were people accepting the original premise that readers could learn history through the historical romance, no matter how carefully researched the work may be. The genre, in a word, ceased to be a rival to history, both in theory and in practice. In the late 1850s and the 1860s the ascendancy of the historiographic methods of Germanic scientific scholarship was secured, as Freeman, Stubbs, and Green began publishing. The earlier forms of literary historiography came under increasingly heavy critical attack as the amateur historian gave way to the professional.

A critic for The Edinburgh Review in 1859, referring to historical fiction weighted on the side of history, called it "not a novel but a loose kind of history … written with the license of fiction, an unsound kind of production and dangerous to the integrity of historic truth" [Edinburgh Review CX (October, 1859)]. The complaint was always the same: "How is the reader to know when the author is giving us fact, and when fiction?" [Edinburgh Review CXX, July, 1864]. And this was asked not only of Bulwer and his followers but also of Macaulay, Carlyle, and Froude. In a way it represents the logical extension of the earlier criticism of historical fiction which violated the facts of chronology, biography, and circumstances. But whereas the earlier critics had been appeased by a new kind of historical fiction that kept strictly to the facts and allowed only a minimal excercise of the imagination, these later critics, imbued with the stricter demands of the new scientific historiography, applied the same vise even more harshly to both the historical romance and the romantic historiography.

Furthermore, the Utilitarian antagonism to imaginative literature and its insistence upon facts, facts, and more facts came under increasing attack. In 1846 George Henry Lewes sharply questioned the relevance of facts as the Utilitarians saw them.

Is there no other sort of "information", but that of "facts"? Are there no things under the sun worth learning, besides the erudition of "Mangnall's Questions?" Is knowledge of the human heart not information? Are your children to live in the world, to battle with it, and not to know it? Are they to mix with men and women, and rather than learn the natures of men and women, in the best way they can, to "cram" up a certain amount of "information" of mere externals, of names and dates, and those ancient names and dates? ["The Historical Romance", Westminster Review XLV (March, 1846)].

And the reading public concurred. The sales of Bulwer's Harold, appearing two years later, fell off sharply. Bentley, the book's publisher, had earlier advised the author to edit severely the lengthy passages of factual exposition so prominent in that novel. Bulwer declined the advice, but later came to see the soundness of the criticism. Henceforth, he wrote Bentley afterwards, a writer must include only "unperceived research … to avoid the appearance of erudition which perhaps impeded the popularity of Harold".

Perhaps the most significant reason for the lapse of interest in the historical romance was the ascendency of the realistic novel in the 1840s. Romance, especially the historical romance, became yesterday's fashion and there were few buyers around to take it. Fraser's Magazine in a gently critical review of G. P. R. James' The Woodsman in 1849 advised him to give up the genre, for "the day of mere romance has gone by" [Fraser's Magazine XL (December 1849)]. And The Athenaeum noted, somewhat prematurely in 1841, the decline of romance and attributed it to the charged temper of the age:

… a romance is at variance with the spirit of the present age. The nineteenth century is distinguished by a craving for the positive and the real—it is essentially an age of analysis and of criticism. [The Athenaeum, 25 December 1841].

Whether as the Newgate fiction or as the historical, naval, fashionable, or oriental tale, the romance had dominated the fiction of the 1830s and '40s. The common reader was interested in the extraordinary rather than the ordinary, and the novel dealing with domestic middle-class life was an exception and a definite risk, insofar as any publisher was concerned. In her Autobiography Harriet Martineau recounted the numerous obstacles she encountered in 1838 when she sought to place her manuscript of Deerbrook, a tranquil story of middle-class life in a small English town. John Murray rejected the novel because he felt that the bulk of the readers, desirous only of "high life in novels, and low life, and ancient life", would not accept "a presentiment of the familiar life of every day".

But the demand for realism gained impetus throughout the 1840s, strengthened by the critical response accorded the novels of Thackeray. By the 1850s a new cycle had begun in English fiction and romance had been replaced by the new realism. An "atmosphere of complacent domesticity" dominated the fiction of that decade with such novels as Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, Mrs. Oliphant's The Chronicles of Carlingford, George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, and Anthony Trollope's The Warden and Barchester Towers riding high on the best seller lists [Lionel Stevenson, The English Novel: A Panorama, Boston 1960]. Critics now lauded the "hearth-stone narrative", and demanded novels "perfectly quiet, domestic, and truthful … undisturbed by artificial agitations … [wherein there] is nothing irreconcilable with everyday experience" [Fraser's Magazine XLIV (October, 1851)]. This change in emphasis is most apparent in Bulwer's canon. Rienzi in 1835 initiated a new phase of historical fiction, and Harold in 1848 marked its close. With his usual acumen for detecting shifts in popular tastes, Bulwer abandoned the historical romance for My Novel, a work treating middle-class life.

The romance was now suspect in many critical quarters. The realist Thackeray, who "would have History familiar rather than heroic", expunged the melodramatic and extraordinary elements from his historical novel Henry Esmond. An aging Charles Macfarlane, writing his autobiography shortly before his death in 1858, complained of a new generation of readers who appeared to be "getting rather too fond of realities, and much too indifferent to romance and sentiment", and asked that writers give their younger readers "more generous, more glowing, more ideal pictures; and set up the heroes and heroines of our tales on the pedestal of romance." Much later Stevenson would observe that the "historical novel is forgotten" in the critical and popular emphasis upon a photographic realism.

Stevenson was exaggerating, for the historical novel was not forgotten. It continued to be written and read although its numbers had diminished considerably since the 1840s. The genre was temporarily absorbed with the thesis novels of the 1850s. Charles Kingsley utilized it for the purposes of patriotism and muscular Christianity; Newman and Wiseman, for the bland introduction to Catholic doctrine; Dickens, for social analysis. But these novels all represent the tail-end of one tradition, the final playing out of a cycle going back in somewhat different form to the Waverley novels.

In the 1850s and '60s readers and critics evolved a new set of demands for historical fiction, demands considerably different from those of earlier decades. Historical fiction ceased to be considered ancillary to formal history and became accepted on its own as light literature with little pretension to anything weightier. The American historian William H. Prescott had said much earlier that history and romance were "too near akin ever to be lawfully united" and urged that it was enough "for the novelist if he be true to the spirit" of a past age. In the latter half of the century this became the general attitude toward the romancer's responsibility toward the historical portions of his novels. The historical novelist, insisted a critic in Bentley's Miscellany, "must follow rather the poetry of history than its chronology: his business is not to be the slave of dates; he ought to be faithful to the character of the epoch". He then noted the innumerable inaccuracies in de Vigny' Cinq-Mars, but went on quickly to add: "… after all the value of historical, as well as other fictions, must be measured… by the power and skill it displays, rather than by the historical accuracy or importance of the events and persons introduced" ["The Historical Novel," Bentley's Miscellany XLVI (1859)]. Critics and readers ceased to be bothered by historical anachronisms, and there were now hostile comments about the occasional "hyper-criticism" and the "captious and nibbling critic" who dared to intrude such remarks as had been common a decade earlier. Antiquarian research and concern with the trifles of costume, armor, and architecture were now both unnecessary and unwanted. Leslie Stephen noted that his fellow countrymen had lost their love for buff jerkins and other scraps from the medieval collections in museums, and Anthony Trollope, rereading Old Mortality in 1873, found the historical essays and background material tedious.

Thus, there was a shift in the last three decades of the century away from the historical element in the genre and a general agreement on the part of novelists, critics, and readers alike that the romancer's chief obligation was not to history but to the free exercise of his artistic imagination, unfettered by any demands for factual accuracy. There was no longer any need for practioners of the historical romance to demonstrate their scholarly control over historical portions of their novels. Richard Blackmore, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Thomas Hewlett no longer paraded facts and research before their readers, as had been the common practice of writers in the 1830s and '40s. Stevenson remarked in the preface to Kidnapped, "how little I am touched by the desire of accuracy". Footnotes, scholarly prefaces, and appendices disappeared entirely from their historical romances. Relieved from the burden of antiquarianism and the padding of superfluous details gleaned from exhaustive hours spent in thorough research, the historical romance in their hands discovered a new vitality, an ease and lightness hitherto completely unknown to the genre. The historical romances of the latter half of the century were unabashedly entertainment. The novelists now wrote for the pure love of exotic adventure in distant lands and times. They wrote to amuse and no longer felt defensive about a lack of any intellectual substance to their works. Stevenson, expressing this new attitude, advised the reader of Kidnapped that this work was "no furniture for the scholar's library, but a book for the winter evening schoolroom when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near". Once again the historical novelist was, as in the days of Scott, the teller of tales.