Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 by Mike Goode (review)

In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke informs his readers that, in the years preceding the revolution, Marie Antoinette’s beauty and passivity would have inspired the protection of every armed man; now, he laments, “the age of chivalry is gone” (84). This hyperbolic exclamation, along with ones like it, made twentieth-century Burke scholars blush. Mike Goode, however, suggests that Burke’s sentimentality ought not to make readers blush or cringe, as it marks a properly masculine attitude to history in the seventy-five years before the Victorians refashioned the study of history as an objective and emotionless science. Goode aims to recover sentimental narrative history. He takes the teleological presentation of scientific history in R.G. Collingwood’s canonical text The Idea of History as a provocation to explore heterogeneous history, best embodied by the historical novel—a form that Collingwood ignored almost completely. Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 recovers the role of sentimentality in the production of history, arguing that prior to the mid-nineteenth century, sentimentality was the manly way to engage historical subjects.

Taking Burke’s Reflections and Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels as the ground for his study, Goode traces the role of feeling, interest, sentiment, and embodiment in the production of historical fiction. After introducing the role of sentiment in Burke’s historical writing, he turns to the sentimental understanding of history in Scott’s Ivanhoe, The Antiquary, Rob Roy, The Life of Napoleon, and The History of Scotland, whose content and reception provide the foundation for his work on the changing nature of historical writing across the nineteenth century. Goode enlists Jane Austen and Charles Dickens as examples of sentimental historical novel writers and claims Thomas Carlyle, T.B. Macaulay, and Charles Kingsley as Romantic historians whose narrative histories were at odds with those of E.A. Freeman, Leslie Stephen, and Goldwin Smith, the scholars responsible for framing history as an objective science. Scientific historians worked, Goode shows, to infantilize and feminize Romantic history and its literary correlate, the historical novel.

Goode skilfully recuperates the national importance of feeling by historicizing historiography. Scott’s antiquarian endorses Burke’s perspective, Goode argues, “namely, that Britain’s most manly and prudent historical subjects are those men whose teary eyes and tradition-based social ties not only strengthen [Britain] directly but also enable them to recognize and prompt them to act when its waters need defending” (100). Drawing on Scott, Goode validates the sentimentality deployed by twenty-first-century museums, re-enactments, and historical novels by revealing their historical precedence. His concluding chapter focuses on the endurance of historical fiction outside the academy, making a convincing case for the value of the public’s abiding fascination with sentimental embodied history.

The shortcomings of Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 are few. Chapter 5 plumbs Rob Roy and Northanger Abbey for instances of the word interest to show that historical novels provided an antidote to Scott’s and Austen’s readers’ boredom with their lives; however, this chapter would benefit from consideration of examples of interest or engagement in the novels that do not rely on the term interest alone. Additionally, Goode never distinguishes between masculinity and the male body. Although his subjects might not have thought of the two as divisible, Goode misses an opportunity to consider the two separately, particularly in chapter 6, where he illustrates rather deftly how historical thought was uncoupled from both sentiment and embodied experience in the second half of the nineteenth century. Finally, there is room to expand on scientific naturalism’s eclipse of natural theology in the same period and to further explain why scientific history in particular replaced historical fiction, since the institutionalization of modern rather than classical history at Oxford and Cambridge by the end of the 1860s fits with the general institutionalization of scientific naturalism (and the exclusion of natural...