Victorian(ist) “Whiles” and the Tenses of Historicism

This essay is a response to three events in my professional life that unfolded together in 2003 and 2004: finishing my first archivally based book; planning and facilitating a conference called “Disciplinary Flashpoints” that was built around conversations between literary scholars and historians about the emotionally charged boundaries of their disciplines; and teaching an English department writing workshop for third-year graduate students who were all, in their various ways, absorbing the pressure—perhaps even the imperative—to “historicize” their work. All three of these activities involved becoming familiar with what might be called interdisciplinary—but what might more simply be called disciplinary—debates about the imaginary but institutionally powerful line that divides “literature” from “history.” Some of the flashpoints along that line have been addressed for at least twenty years by scholars working in both disciplines: the nature and sufficiency of evidence, the role of language and metaphor, the power of narrative, the relation between truth and fiction, the validity of casual explanations, and the possibilities and limitations of the archive.

My project in this essay remains in touch with all of these flashpoints, and with the rich tradition of rhetorical analysis within the theory and philosophy of history, but with its own particular emphases. I am interested, first, in how people who study literature write about history and, second, in the rhetorical gestures that accommodate, submit to, resist, and self-authorize in relation to something called the historical. More specifically, I am interested in how relations to and expectations about history get registered in the shape and structure of sentences: in choices of tense and voice, in the construction of parallel clauses, and in the many small but persistent ways in which grammar expresses and creates notions of time.

I have noticed through reading and listening to historically inflected work in Victorian studies the ubiquity of a particular type of sentence, of which the sentence that opens this essay is—in its shape, length, position, and awkwardness—an example. Like many instances of what I will be calling “historicizing sentences,” mine struggles to express, in this case in the idiom of simultaneity, the relations among various moments in the form of a list brought together, authorized, and kept at a distance by a colon and a date. While different from sentences that explicitly invoke public history, it shares with other historicizing sentences its prominent position at the beginning of a work or section, its attempt to express in syntactical sequence two or more simultaneous events, and its outward movement from individual to context. Its somewhat clumsy use of dates and tenses might or might not have been visible at first reading: this is in part because we are used to such sentences and the professional, emotional, and temporal work they do, often as introductions or transitions into the real matter of a piece of writing.

While this essay by necessity focuses on the versions of these sentences that have already been written, my investment in professional writing dictates an attention to process and to thinking of sentences, even after they are written (and published), as being in an ongoing conversation with other syntactical choices. We might always have written—might always in the future, write—differently. Historicizing sentences are not bad (or good), although their ambition puts pressure on syntax, particularly on tense and on parallelism. Their predictable awkwardnesses call attention, perhaps in useful ways, to the challenges of suturing literature and history through words and to describing and embodying in linear form the idea of simultaneity on which many of these sentences are based.

So far I have spoken as if historicizing sentences are exclusively the province of literary critics working in a discipline currently marked by the turn to history. But these sentences have, I would like to argue, their own history, at least in Victorian studies, whose relatively recent historicizing mission provides the impetus and the background for this project. I find it useful to juxtapose with sentences from literary criticism sentences from (pick the generic name) realist, social-problem, industrial, or “Condition of England” novels that share with literary criticism...