Abstract
Professionalizing late-Victorian historians sought status for their discipline by defining it as masculine, while marginalizing other modes as feminine. Chapter 4 first shows how gendered are our ideas of both history and the novel. Charles Reade exemplifies attempts to masculinize the novel through his “matter-of-fact romances.” Kingstone then uses periodical reviews and lectures to show how the historical novel and antiquarianism both became gendered as feminine. Reviews of historical novels by Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer-Lytton praised them as noble and manly. By mid-century, however, reviews characterized the genre as overly full of superficial detail. The same denigrating labels were applied to antiquaries, the amateur scholars of material culture. This chapter shows how heavily gendered were debates about the merits of different historical genres.
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- 1.
Anonymous, “The Historical Romance,” Argosy 17 (May 1874): 367.
- 2.
See Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England; Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
- 3.
Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000).
- 4.
For extended discussion of the concept of the “Other,” see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority [1961], trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969); Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Essence [1974], trans. by Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981).
- 5.
Christina Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and “the Woman Question” (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1.
- 6.
Claire Colebrook, Gender (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 44.
- 7.
Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (London: Methuen, 1987), 3.
- 8.
Schor, Reading in Detail, 4.
- 9.
Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
- 10.
See Brigid Lowe’s discussion of R. H. Hutton’s analyses of women novelists’ work, in Brigid Lowe, Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy: An Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (London: Anthem Press, 2007).
- 11.
[George Eliot], “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Westminster Review 66 (October 1856): 442–61.
- 12.
Charlotte Brontë, Shirley [1849], ed. Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5; Elizabeth Gaskell, My Lady Ludlow and Other Tales, vol. 5 of The Works of Mrs. Gaskell (The Knutsford Edition) [1858–1859] (London: John Murray, 1925), 8, 9; Eliot, Middlemarch.
- 13.
These included It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), and Hard Cash (1863).
- 14.
Charles Reade’s diary, June 20, 1853. Qtd. Wayne Burns, Charles Reade: A Study in Victorian Authorship (New York: Bookman, 1961), 130.
- 15.
See Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Pettitt, Patent Inventions; Ruth, Novel Professions.
- 16.
Tom Bragg, “Charles Reade,” in A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 294.
- 17.
Burns, Charles Reade: A Study in Victorian Authorship, 53.
- 18.
“Charles Reade’s Novels,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 106, no. 648 (October 1869): 488.
- 19.
[R. H. Hutton], “Mr Charles Reade’s Novels: ‘The Cloister and the Hearth,’” The National Review 14, no. 27 (January 1862): 135.
- 20.
[R. H. Hutton], “Mr Charles Reade’s Novels,” 136.
- 21.
[R. H. Hutton], “Mr Charles Reade’s Novels,” 137.
- 22.
Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 135.
- 23.
Winifred Hughes, “The Sensation Novel,” in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 272.
- 24.
George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 2:34–35. Qtd. Elton E. Smith, Charles Reade (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976), 105.
- 25.
Mary Poovey, “Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field,” ELH 71 (2004): 433–53.
- 26.
[Margaret Oliphant], “New Books,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 108 (August 1870): 185.
- 27.
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath, part 5.5 (London: Penguin, 1996), 16.
- 28.
Catherine Gallagher, “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian,” Representations 90, no. 1 (2005): 62.
- 29.
Gallagher, “George Eliot,” 65, 66.
- 30.
Archibald Alison, “The Historical Romance,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 58 (September 1845): 345. Also reprinted in J. C. Olmsted, ed., A Victorian Art of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in British Periodicals, 1850–1870 (New York: Garland, 1979).
- 31.
Alison, “The Historical Romance,” 347.
- 32.
James C. Simmons, The Novelist as Historian: Essays on the Victorian Historical Novel (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 240.
- 33.
Simmons, Novelist as Historian, 240.
- 34.
Seeley, “History and Politics,” 295.
- 35.
Seeley, “History and Politics,” 295.
- 36.
J. R. Seeley to C. E. Maurice, April 8, 1880. Qtd. Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History, 126.
- 37.
Seeley, “History and Politics,” 295.
- 38.
Smith, The Gender of History.
- 39.
Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon, 2004); Levine, The Amateur and the Professional, 9.
- 40.
Levine, The Amateur and the Professional; Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz, eds., Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice, 1700–1850 (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1999).
- 41.
Anonymous, “Arnold’s Lectures on History,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 53, no. 328 (February 1843): 146.
- 42.
Mark Salber Phillips, “Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57, no. 2 (April 1996): 298.
- 43.
Levine, The Amateur and the Professional, 9.
- 44.
Stephen Bann, “Preface,” in Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice, 1700–1850, ed. Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1999), xviii.
- 45.
Montagu Burrows, Antiquarianism and History. A Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford, May 26, 1884 (Oxford, 1885), 7.
- 46.
See Levine, The Amateur and the Professional; Mike Goode, Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- 47.
Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, 6.
- 48.
Joan Thirsk, “The History Women,” in Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State and Society, ed. Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen’s University of Belfast, 1995), 2; Gaye Tuchman and Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1989), 46.
- 49.
Helen Kingstone, “Feminism, Nationalism, Separatism? The Case of Alice Stopford Green,” Journal of Victorian Culture 19, no. 4 (October 2, 2014): 447.
- 50.
Smith, The Gender of History, 132.
Bibliography
Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley [1849]. Edited by Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
———. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life [1871–1872]. Edited by W. J. Harvey. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
[Eliot, George]. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Westminster Review 66 (October 1856): 442–61.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. My Lady Ludlow and Other Tales. Vol. 5 of The Works of Mrs. Gaskell (The Knutsford Edition) [1858–1859]. London: John Murray, 1925.
Reade, Charles. The Cloister and the Hearth [1861]. London: Ward, Lock & Tyler, 1882.
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Kingstone, H. (2017). Gendered Genres: Professional History Versus Antiquarianism and the Historical Novel. 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_4
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