Louisa Stuart Costello and Novels

Abstract

As Hawes notes, “In Britain the eighteenth-century novel and eighteenth-century history-writing shared the same intellectual universe. Only in the nineteenth-century would Leopold von Ranke’s emphasis on primary sources, critically used, and ‘facts alone’ become the basis of professional training for historians.”¹ The eighteenth-century novel’s affinity with history, during Hume’s “historical age” is therefore unsurprising. In the late eighteenth century, some of the most-celebrated historiographic works of all times were produced, such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Hume’s own History of England. New historical institutions and antiquarian societies proliferated; the British Museum was founded in 1753; and the Gothic revival was thriving. Horace Walpole’s Gothic revival home, Strawberry Hill, became a tourist attraction, his novel The Castle of Otranto arguably spawned the genre of Gothic literature, and Walpole himself, antiquarian and historian as well as novelist, embodied the fusion of history and novels. This historical age also saw acceleration in the rise of the novel and its popularity, buoyed by increased production and lower prices for new novels. The expansion of the circulating-library system, developed in Britain in the early eighteenth century in response to a rise in middle-class readership, made novels more accessible to a wider range of readers.