"Distant Reading": Victorian Investments in History And the Novel

"Distant reading," according to Audrey Jaffe, is the visual metaphor used by Franco Moretti "to describe a literary analysis that relies on data rather than the close reading of texts" (102). Such distance can be either spatial or temporal.

Although Moretti's version of distance seems to be mainly temporal, Jaffe's version seems largely spatial. As a historian I can relate particularly to Moretti's version of the metaphor, which evokes the losses and gains temporal distance gives to the study of any past, where gains from knowing large outcomes are balanced by loss of fine detail. While we are all of necessity "distant readers" of Victorian Britain, literature scholars are perhaps more comfortable with the gains, the privileged position of knowing what the Victorians did not—"how it all turned out"- than are historians. Distant reading facilitates the finding of patterns and making of generalizations essential to theorization. Here too historians, members of a profession notoriously suspicious of theorizing, tend to be less at ease than literature scholars. Conscious of the inevitability of presentism—we cannot renounce our temporal privilege—historians worry about its cost, the danger of reading the past as if its known outcome were the only one possible, and losing the sense of what it was like for the Victorians to live with complex contingencies and an open future—the human condition—that only the fading details can give us. And we may be tempted to supply our own details to make up the loss, thus overfamiliarizing the past. That temptation is particularly strong in teaching undergraduates to help them relate to the past.

The best way of resisting presentism, history students are assured, is to get into the sources, the documents created by those we are studying. What better source, then, for understanding Victorian Britain than the novels it produced in profusion, particularly those novels that subscribed to the dominant literary ideology of realism, those novels whose purpose was to accurately represent the world in which they were set? Now that students, in North America at least, are more likely to get their British history from literature than from history classes, it is all the more important to think about the complex relationship between the novel and history, their longstanding rivalry as claimants to the terrain of the real, and how we read and teach them. The three books reviewed here make valuable contributions to our understanding of that relationship. Audrey Jaffe's and Tamara Wagner's are the work of literary scholars. Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt's is a collection in which literary scholars and historians are equally represented.

The current hegemony of the novel as history is strengthened by changes in the historical profession. Forty years ago social history was at high tide, strongly driven by a left-leaning desire to recover the lost history of the working class, and scornful of its oppressors, a middle class whose shameful history was unworthy of the social historian's attention. The history of the bourgeoisie was best left to that bourgeois institution, the novel, and to its custodians in English departments. The latter were not entirely comfortable with their charges, and directed almost all their attention to a select few novels that met the requirements of a canon defined by purposefully nonhistorical criteria. How different things are now. The middle class occupy stage center in Victorian history, the working class have faded as its privileged subject, and English departments have largely abandoned the canon, their members lavishing attention on novels whose lack of literary merit is compensated for by their historical interest. Historians themselves have recovered interest...