Historians and the Victorian Studies Question: Response

My central question is this: Why—if we can all agree with Amanda Anderson and Catherine Gallagher that history and literature were the founding "interdisciplinary dyad" of Victorian studies—are historians so overwhelmingly outnumbered at NAVSA conferences? Why, indeed, have they become an endangered species in the pages of Victorian Studies, at least outside of the book review section? Is Gallagher right to suggest that we historians have been driven away from Victorian studies by the theoretically minded questions of our colleagues in literature departments? And what does it matter anyway if Anderson is right that other disciplines like political theory may now provide a more compelling "angle of illumination" for the study of Victorian literature? It is telling that the papers of Anderson, Gallagher, and Matthew Rowlinson were delivered at a session on the "Theory of Victorian Studies" at which no historian spoke, presumably because they should have been occupied at the parallel session on "Histories and Historiographies." At the risk of reinforcing this tired and unhelpful opposition between history and theory I want to begin by redirecting the various historicizing moves of Anderson, Gallagher, and Rowlinson away from the field of literary criticism to the historiography of the "Victorian age." Asking when and how historians became invested in the field of Victorian studies, as well as why they believed that this period demanded a new form of interdisciplinary inquiry, might help us imagine how that interest and interdisciplinary exchange could be reanimated.

Rather than provide a historiographical synopsis of the period I want more modestly to ponder whether historians' interest in, and treatment of, the Victorians helps illuminate different concerns and trajectories in the project of Victorian Studies than those characterized by Anderson, Gallagher, and Rowlinson. Conventionally it is G. M. Young's Victorian England (1936) that is credited with rescuing the period from its savaging by Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918), when for many the culmination of the Great War seemed at last to have brought down the final curtain on the Victorian age. Of course, Strachey, no less than Young, actually helped constitute the field: both imagined the period as a discrete "age," with its own distinctive personality or mind-set—Strachey captured this biographically, Young, by way of a historical portrait. While Strachey longed to escape its stultifying and illiberal moralism, Young mourned the waning of a great liberal civilization whose disinterested and rational public served as a bulwark against barbarism—an account that dovetailed well with George Dangerfield's elegy for the disintegration of Victorian civility in The Strange Death of Liberal England published the previous year.¹ Not surprisingly, Young's portrait, which drew on Elie Halevy's account of Britain's evasion of revolution in The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1928), had a certain resonance in the late 1930s.

Yet arguably the Victorian history evoked by Halevy, Dangerfield, and Young was at its most influential in the decades following the Second World War when modernization theory became enchanted by what it saw as the Victorian achievement: the peaceful transition to an industrialized market economy, the formation of a democratic civil society, and the largely voluntary origins of the welfare state—all achievements predicated on a new ethics of individualism.² The first prefatory note of Victorian Studies is clearly informed by this historiographical moment:

Although the division of history into periods is an artificial procedure, certain times may have their own complex and individual characters; the Victorian period has such a character, and its importance can be clearly seen now that the inevitable antipathies are passing. Victorian Studies hopes to capture something of the life of that era, to discuss its events and personalities, and to interpret and appraise its achievement..

(1 [1957]: 3)

In the American academy of the Cold War era, the questions of relevance asked of those who studied other parts of the world were not asked of those who worked on Victorian England. The field of Victorian...