Abstract
The final chapter surveys the volume’s overall conclusions, and draws out key issues in contemporary history writing that the Victorian writers examined here were unable to solve. Although all of these historians and novelists sought to represent the whole social spectrum within narratives of the recent past, none fully achieved their promised revisionist focus on “unhistoric” individuals. Kingstone summarizes this monograph’s contribution to ongoing debates in social history and women’s studies about how best to recover hidden lives, and outlines the different capabilities of the history, novel, and utopian genres. The chapter closes with reflections on our twenty-first-century relationship with the Victorian era, and with our own troubled contemporary history. We can thus learn a lot from the competing and complementary voices of these Victorian narratives.
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Notes
- 1.
Helen Kingstone, “Imaginary Hindsight: Contemporary History in William Morris and H. G. Wells,” in Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris: Landscape and Space, ed. Emelyne Godfrey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 43–56.
- 2.
Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History, 9.
- 3.
Helen Kingstone, “A Leap of Faith: Abbott, Bellamy, Morris, Wells and the Fin-de-Siècle Route to Utopia,” English Literature in Transition (1880–1920) 60, no. 1 (January 2017): 58–77.
- 4.
Alice Stopford Green, Town Life of the Fifteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1894); Power, Medieval People; Carolyn Steedman and John Pearman, The Radical Soldier’s Tale: John Pearman, 1819–1908, History Workshop Series (London ; New York: Routledge, 1988); Steedman, Dust; Carolyn Steedman, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- 5.
Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered. See also, on the debates surrounding the publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in 2004, Alison Booth, “Fighting for Lives in the ODNB, or Taking Prosopography Personally,” Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 2 (2005): 267–79; David Amigoni, “Distinctively Queer Little Morsels: Imagining Distinction, Groups, and Difference in the DNB and the ODNB,” Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 2 (2005): 279–88.
- 6.
Helen Rogers, “Writing Lives and the Burnett Collection of Working-Class Autobiography,” Writing Lives, March 17, 2013, http://www.writinglives.org/about/writing-lives-and-the-burnett-archive (accessed July 29, 2016).
- 7.
Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice; Tuchman and Fortin, Edging Women Out; Thirsk, “The History Women,” 2.
- 8.
Clare Pettitt, Distant Contemporaries: The Invention of a Shared Present (forthcoming, n.d.).
- 9.
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians [1918], ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5.
- 10.
Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26 (Special Issue: Memory and Counter Memory) (Spring 1989): 8.
- 11.
See Bloomsbury.com, “Cranford,” Bloomsbury Publishing, http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cranford-9780747594468/ (accessed August 30, 2016).
- 12.
Theresa May, “Theresa May’s Conference Speech in Full,” Telegraph, October 5, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/05/theresa-mays-conference-speech-in-full/
- 13.
Simon Goodley, “Mike Ashley Running Sports Direct like ‘Victorian Workhouse,’” Guardian, July 22, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/22/mike-ashley-running-sports-direct-like-victorian-workhouse; “House of Commons - Employment Practices at Sports Direct - Business, Innovation and Skills Committee,” http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmbis/219/21902.htm (accessed August 30, 2016).
- 14.
“24 Hours in the Past - BBC One,” BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05t5l7t (accessed August 30, 2016).
- 15.
“Victorian Bakers - BBC Two,” BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06vn7sj (accessed August 30, 2016).
- 16.
“Who Do You Think You Are? – BBC One,” BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007t575 (accessed August 30, 2016).
- 17.
“The National Curriculum in England: Framework Document” (Department for Education, July 2013), https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/210969/NC_framework_document_-_FINAL.pdf.
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Kingstone, H. (2017). Conclusions. 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_9
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