- On Being Modern and Other Things
We grow old writing academic books. We spend years (even decades) figuring it out, doing research, grinding out the prose, talking through and testing the arguments with friends and colleagues. Then we wait patiently for more years as the process of peer review and revision slowly gives way to production, the anti-climax of publication, and the long, dreaded wait for reviews. It is thus a real thrill and honor to have three terrific scholars engage with one’s work in Victorian Studies. Thanks to the editors and the respondents for this opportunity. It reminds me why I write books and that growing old with them is not so bad.
It is a particular pleasure that Distant Strangers has been recognized in this way by Victorian Studies. A decade ago I wrote in these pages about the implosion of Victorian studies as an interdisciplinary project and discussed why historians of Britain—especially those less interested in the then still reasonably new imperial history—had relocated their interests to the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.1 The following year, Martin Hewitt wrote a spirited but somewhat contradictory defense of the coherence of the Victorian age as an “assemblage” of diverse and not necessarily related processes with “fuzzy” chronological and geographical boundaries (397, 396). The recent “Manifesto of the V21 Collective,” and Hewitt’s “10 Alternative Theses,” only serve to dramatize the deepening impasse in the understanding of what the field of enquiry is, how it is to be understood, and for what purposes.2 In some measure, Distant Strangers was for me a way of thinking through why the nineteenth century should still matter for historians, how it is still foundational for the broader field of British history, and whether it may still be useful for historians of other parts of the world to think with. [End Page 521]
The purpose of the book was to explore how and when Britain became modern. I wanted to do so without rehabilitating the long-discredited theories of modernization—of both right and left—that had first energized Victorian studies. Neither did it seem to me that the new cultural and imperial histories that subsequently animated the field were sufficient for an explanation of the timing or nature of Britain’s modernity. Instead, I sought an account grounded in material and social change—but one that did not repeat past errors by being overdeter-mined by histories of industrialization or class formation.
I did not expect historians who are invested in the explanatory logic of capitalism (and its structures of social difference), such as Keith McClelland and Emma Griffin, to be convinced. All of my work has been a critical engagement with Marxist historiography. And that engagement has been shaped by my sense of the inadequacies of its historical explanations and its utility for theorizing our present and the conditions of possibility for a politics of the (clearly post-Marxist) left. It seems obvious to say, and yet it particularly needs to be said now, that debates about the past and how we comprehend it are always about the politics of our present.
The present intellectual and political conjuncture is a difficult one. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the critiques of essentialism and meta-narratives mobilized by the cultural turn were forcefully met by a positivist historicism. Historians like myself involved in those critiques, invariably intending to reimagine a left or radical politics in the Age of Reagan and Thatcher, were accused of heresy and of abandoning the conventions of history as a discipline. And yet over the past twenty years cultural history has been shorn of its radical, critical edge, and fortified by a new empiricism that looks very much like the positivist historicism from which it once revolted.3 This domesticated version of cultural history is the air that most Departments of History in the United States now breathe; even in Britain it has become commonplace, bolted on to previously dominant forms of social and political history.
In the wake of the Great Recession, the adequacy of cultural history for historicizing the past and present is again in question. A renewed...