Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-Century Britain (review)

One of the problems of looking into the generic divide between literature and history is that any borderline strictly separating the two eventually proves uncertain and diffuse. The formal realism of the early novel stakes a claim to historical veri-similitude; belletristic late-century historiography adapts the narrative technique of the novelist—and both domains are meanwhile subdivided into such subgenres as gothic novel and modern period history, each with its own generic slant on the adjacent territories. The contemporary terminology is often unhelpful since, as Ms. Mack points out, it is either entirely too inclusive, as when nearly everything falls under the heading of literature, or points mystifyingly toward far distant lands as if they lie just offshore. “It is striking,” she remarks, “that nearly every writer in this study compares his or her work to poetry, no matter whether it is an encyclopedia, a work of prose fiction, or a narrative history.”

Accepting the suggestive rather than definitive status of the comparison, Ms. Mack builds on the contemporary philosophy of history to uncover an implicit discourse about historical consciousness from a variety of literary texts. Key to her search is Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and Use of History, a work that forges an early distinction between the exemplary history of the classical past and the economic history of the present. Having determined what the separate domains of literature and both modes of history have in common—a shared concern with the consciousness of lived experience—she draws lessons of affinity and difference in five separate chapters: (1) Johnson’s Preface to the Dictionary and the Lives of the Poets; the fictions of (2) Fielding; (3) Charlotte Lennox; and (4) Walpole and Sterne; and—before turning back to historiography proper—(5) Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

The variety of the archive assumes a wide range of approach. Ms. Mack carefully considers authorial voice, the mediation of character by cultural circumstance, and the way outdated forms of historiography gave way to others more hospitable to evolving versions of the self. Fielding emerges as a sophisticated student of the uses of the exemplary life as derived from ancient and modern historiography for fictive characterization. For Joseph Andrews the argument is that the central character is a bad imitation of his sister who calls into question both mimesis and the value of exemplary moralizing for modernism. The proposition is valuable for drawing attention to the modernist bustle of a novel more often linked to epic precedent and biblical allusiveness. In taking up Tom Jones, Ms. Mack argues that the universal probability of ancient epic is superseded by two forms of expectation implicit in the early modern novel, one derived from Lockean perceptualism, the other from Clarendon’s concept of present history. Their interplay is foregrounded in the Man of the Hill episode as the old man and Tom each address their respective moments of rebellion, Monmouth and 1685 for the old man, the ’45 for Tom. The absorption of the former and the disengagement of the latter are symptoms of the way in which, as Ms. Mack puts it, Fielding “offers us a world concerned with the experience of the past as it becomes past,” an observation that allows her to endorse a qualified view of Tom Jones as an historical novel.

Similarly, Lennox asks us to differentiate between two historical forms of empiricism at the level of characterization. The contrast between what the antiquated conventions of romance have misled the female Quixote Arabella to expect from her entrance into society, on one hand, and what those around her are already experiencing as modernist culture, on the other, opens onto a point of view that looks surprisingly forward to anthropology.

Another comparison finds in the antiquarianism of Walpole and Sterne—one reliquary and Gothic in the original sense of medieval, the other comically fixated on the physical artifact as an impediment to understanding—related ways of thinking through the material object...