The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Representations of Reality in History and Fiction by Brian Hamnett (review)

Brian Hamnett’s The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe is a significant addition to the existing treatments of historical fiction. Its principal strength lies in the breadth of coverage it achieves. Among the novelists treated are Walter Scott and George Eliot, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Novalis, Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, Benito Pérez Galdós and Leo Tolstoy, and some minor figures as well. Hamnett does not limit himself to authors of fiction, but includes nineteenth-century historians and essayists. In addition he examines theoretical works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that the discussions of “the character and purpose of the historical novel” that began in the 1820s often anticipate more recent debates held under the signs of structuralism and poststructuralism (305). Undergirding Hamnett’s book is a belief in the important role historical narratives can play for cultures. He values “the moral purpose … in Scott’s Scottish novels, in Balzac and Manzoni, and in Eliot and Flaubert” (304). In Old Mortality (1816) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Scott’s handling of religion “revealed his understanding of the moral purpose of the serious historical novel. … The author is telling his public what shaped the modern Scottish nation, what distinguishes it from the English experience, and where the roots of its future survival or, indeed, regeneration, may lie” (92).

Hamnett considers a number of well-known historical novels defective. It is hard to find fault with his view that Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) “uses an historical time as a back-drop to a drama of persecution and mass hysteria” (122). A trip to the pharmacy or wherever else works of fiction are sold from revolving metal racks will serve to remind us that historical fiction of a sensationalistic and stereotypical nature still abounds, and that flashy and vapid historical novels have a history as long as that of the more serious examples of the genre. Anyone who wishes to make positive claims for historical fiction will need clear ways of separating the chaff from the corn. This may explain some odd moments, as when Hamnett (who, with György Lukács, is rightly suspicious of the influence of Romanticism on historical fiction) identifies Scott’s intellectual inheritance as a gift from the Enlightenment alone, and not at all from Romanticism. At least since the publication of Duncan Forbes’s seminal article on the subject, the role which the Edinburgh Enlightenment played in Scott’s art has been recognized, but few have identified him entirely with non-Romantic influences. Forbes himself ends his article with the words, “He is too big for any single label” (“The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott,” The Cambridge Journal 7 [1953], 35).

Early on, Hamnett considers issues about history writing associated with the work of Hayden White. Part of White’s argument (to simplify a much more complex vision) is that historical narratives must be given a plot, and different kinds of plots tend to produce their own meanings. But this would appear to rob historical narratives of the ability to represent reality objectively. Following Paul Ricoeur, Hamnett argues that such an account overlooks the dialogue and argument by multiple scholars likely to surround any historical topic, a process which promotes ever greater accuracy.

Hamnett also discovers in the history of historiography and historical fiction a continuing pattern of mutually determined influence and change. One important turning point in this history occurs at the middle of the nineteenth century, when the writing of history becomes professionalized to an extent that leaves little room for historical novelists to claim an equal fidelity in their depiction of the past. Eliot in Romola (1863) and Flaubert in Salammbô (1862) meet this crisis by turning to symbolism. In Hamnett’s view, Flaubert rises to the occasion more fully than does Eliot. Romola the novel and...