Abstract
Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, in his essay ‘Of History and Romance’, William Godwin distinguishes ‘two principal branches’ of history. The first corresponds with the stadial history of the Scottish Enlightenment, the ‘study of mankind in a mass, of the progress, the fluctuations, the interests and the vices of society’. For Godwin, this has many ‘subordinate’ branches, including ‘the examination of medals and coins’ — in this schema, even the antiquarian impulse has been subsumed under the banner of stadial history.1 The other dominant trend is, however, in implicit competition with such narratives of mass progress. ‘The study of the individual’ not only enables the ‘solemn act of se If-investigation’ and furthers the study of ‘mind’, ‘élucidât [ing]’ ‘science’2 it also allows the ‘contemplation of illustrious men’ under the strain of historical circumstance and is, as such, inspirational.3
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Notes
William Godwin, ‘Of History and Romance’, in William Godwin, Things as They Are; Or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 359–74
RS. Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought, 1580–1640 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962)
Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979).
Daniel R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 7.
Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1996)
Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)
Karen O’ Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 12.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism: New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 5.
E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 11.
Karen O’Brien, ‘The History Market in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays Rivers (London: Continuum, 2001), p. 105.
Vicesimus Knox, ‘Classical Learning Vindicated’, in Essays Moral and Literary (New York: Garland, 1972)
David Hume, ‘Of the Study of History’, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), p. 565.
Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 115.
Horace Walpole, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937–83), vol. 5, p. 148.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the Working Class in England London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 94–6.
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. xiv.
On this issue, see Richard Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe 1650–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Anne H. Stevens, British Historical Fiction before Scott (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
See Mark Salber Phillips, ‘On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life’, History Workshop Journal, 65 (2008), 49–64
Gary Kelly, ‘Feminine Romanticism, Masculine History, and the Founding of the Modem Liberal State’, in Anne Janowitz (ed.), Romanticism and Gender, Essays and Studies Collected on Behalf of the English Association 51 (Cambridge: Brewer-Boydell, 1998), pp. 1–18
Joanna Baillie, A Series of Plays: In which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind. Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy (1798), Revolution and Romanticism, 1789–1834, A Series of Facsimile Reprints (Oxford: Woodstock, 1990), pp. 15–16.
Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 171.
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© 2014 Ben Dew and Fiona Price
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Dew, B., Price, F. (2014). Introduction: Visions of History. In: Dew, B., Price, F. (eds) Historical Writing in Britain, 1688–1830. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332646_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332646_1
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