History as a Temporal Continuum: From Walter Scott to William Stubbs

Kingstone, Helen

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-49550-7_2

Helen Kingstone³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

Victorian thinkers followed Hegel’s historicist principle that the same processes unite past, present, and future: what Kingstone terms a temporal continuum. This is visible in writers as diverse as Walter Scott, Auguste Comte, Charles Lyell, Karl Marx, and John Ruskin. Kingstone argues that the nineteenth-century “death of religion” is better understood as a transfer of religious feeling to history. The second half contrasts early-Victorian fluidity between history and journalism with late-Victorian professionalization. Early-Victorian critiques of hindsight by Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Macaulay are contrasted with William Stubbs’ and J. R. Seeley’s definitions of history as a scientific discipline modelled on Leopold von Ranke. The final section shows how histories by David Hume, Charles Dickens, and others all finish with the 1688 Glorious Revolution and avoid contemporary history.

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Notes

1.
Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 1.
2.
Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History, 1.
3.
Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France, 177.
4.
Although the Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded use of “hindsight” as a corollary of “foresight” is not until 1883, it is a useful term here in bringing together the notion of temporal distance with that of clear vision. See “Hindsight,” Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/87082?redirectedFrom=hindsight#eid (accessed September 22, 2016).
5.
See Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History; Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Rigney, Imperfect Histories; Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
6.
J. W. Burrow, “Images of Time: From Carlylean Vulcanism to Sedimentary Gradualism,” in History, Religion and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 215.
7.
Burrow, “Images of Time,” 199.
8.
Scott, Waverley, 340.
9.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], ed. Leslie George Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 96.
10.
John Ruskin, “Seven Lamps of Architecture,” vol. 8 of The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, (London: George Allen, 1903), 245.
11.
Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 249; Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
12.
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Essays, and Leaves from a Note-Book, 71.
13.
Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History, 9.
14.
Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History, 9.
15.
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 194.
16.
Koselleck, Futures Past, 194.
17.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Wiley, 1944), 60.
18.
Jim Reilly, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot (London: Routledge, 1995), 8.
19.
Reilly, Shadowtime, 8–9.
20.
Maitzen, Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing, 4.
21.
It is, therefore, an approach intrinsic to the kinds of graphic mappings of collective memory that Eviatar Zerubavel argues we all engage in as a means of constructing national histories. See Zerubavel, Time Maps.
22.
For their first usage, see John McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind 17, no. 68 (October 1908): 458; Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 17.
23.
See Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry, 7 (1980), 5–27 (5); Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), i, 3.
24.
Burrow, A Liberal Descent.
25.
Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional.
26.
Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race; Leslie Howsam, Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain, 1850–1950 (London and Toronto: The British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2009).
27.
Hesketh, Science of History.
28.
Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present [1843], ed. Richard Daniel Altick (New York: NYU Press, 1977), 239.
29.
Carlyle, Past and Present, 239.
30.
Macaulay, i, 421.
31.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City [1973] (London: Hogarth Press, 1985), 9–12.
32.
Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” 781.
33.
Soffer, Discipline and Power; T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 15. Gieryn uses the writings of John Tyndall (1820–1893) as his opening case study (784).
34.
Ian Hesketh, “Diagnosing Froude’s Disease: Boundary Work and the Discipline of History in Late-Victorian Britain,” History and Theory 47 (October 2008): 373–95.
35.
Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 161; George T. Rider, “The Pretensions of Journalism,” North American Review 135, no. 312 (November 1882): 471.
36.
Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America, 161; Rider, “The Pretensions of Journalism,” 473, 471.
37.
Rider, “The Pretensions of Journalism,” 471.
38.
Rider, “The Pretensions of Journalism,” 474.
39.
Rider, “The Pretensions of Journalism,” 472.
40.
William Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), 15.
41.
Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures, 13.
42.
Popper, Poverty of Historicism.
43.
Hesketh, Science of History.
44.
Deborah Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 122.
45.
J. R. Seeley, “The Teaching of Politics:– an Inaugural Lecture Delivered at Cambridge,” in Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1870), 302.
46.
Seeley, “The Teaching of Politics,” 302.
47.
J. R. Seeley, “The English Revolution of the Nineteenth Century,” Macmillan’s Magazine 22, no. 131 (September 1870): 347.
48.
Seeley, “The English Revolution of the Nineteenth Century,” 347.
49.
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 61. Italics in original.
50.
Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 172.
51.
J. R. Seeley, “History and Politics,” Macmillan’s Magazine 40, no. 238 (August 1879): 297.
52.
Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History, 53.
53.
Lecky, “The Political Value of History,” 26.
54.
Mandell Creighton, “Modern History,” Contemporary Review 45 (February 1884): 281.
55.
Creighton, “Modern History,” 282.
56.
George Saintsbury, A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature (London: Macmillan, 1896), v–vi.
57.
Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History, 13.
58.
See Kenneth O. Morgan, The Oxford History of Britain, (Oxford: OUP, 1984; updated edition 2010); Simon Schama, A History of Britain, Volume III: The Fate of Empire, 1776–2000 (London: BBC, 2002); Rebecca Fraser, A People’s History of Britain (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003).
59.
David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the Revolution in 1688 [1754–1762], 8 vols. (London: A. Millar, 1783). See Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
60.
See Mitchell, Picturing the Past, 43, 45.
61.
Henry Hallam, The Constitutional History of England: From the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of George II [1823], 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1842).
62.
John Lingard, The History of England: From the First Invasion by the Romans to the Accession of William and Mary in 1688 [1819–30], 6th ed., 9 vols. (London: C. Dolman, 1855). See Peter Phillips, John Lingard: Priest and Historian (Leominster: Gracewing, 2008).
63.
Charles Dickens, “A Child’s History of England,” Household Words VIII, no. 194 (December 10, 1853): 360.
64.
Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 2:13–14.
65.
R. G. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854 (Newcastle-on-Tyne: Browne & Browne, 1894), x.
66.
Justin McCarthy, A History of Our Own Times, from the Accession of Queen Victoria to the General Election of 1880, 4 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880); Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854.
67.
William Nassau Molesworth, The History of England from the Year 1830–1874 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1871), v.
68.
John Robertson, “Introduction,” in The Martyrdom of Man, by Winwood Reade (London: Watts & Co., 1924), vii.
69.
Stephen J. Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 38, 11.
70.
S. R. Gardiner, A Student’s History of England, from the Earliest Times to 1885 [1890], (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897), 3:969.
71.
Charlotte M. Yonge, The Victorian Half Century: A Jubilee Book (London: Macmillan, 1887).
72.
Yonge, The Victorian Half Century, 22.
73.
Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race, 36.
74.
H. O. Arnold-Forster, A History of England from the Landing of Julius Caesar to the Present Day [1897] (London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1904).
75.
Arnold-Forster, A History of England, 3.
76.
Arnold-Forster, A History of England, 732.
77.
Arnold-Forster, A History of England, 754.
78.
Arnold-Forster, A History of England, 758.
79.
Arnold-Forster, A History of England, 766.
80.
Arnold-Forster, A History of England, 782, 785.
81.
Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race, 7.
82.
C. R. L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling, A School History of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 220.

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Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, Leeds Trinity University, Leeds, United Kingdom
Helen Kingstone

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Kingstone, H. (2017). History as a Temporal Continuum: From Walter Scott to William Stubbs. In: Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49550-7_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49550-7_2
Published: 26 February 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49549-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49550-7
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