The rise and fall of the historical novel? A study of nineteenth-century periodical reviews

Abstract

As historical novelist Hilary Mantel acknowledged, “ some readers are deeply suspicious of historical fi ction. They say that by its nature it ’ s misleading ” (Mantel 2017, 5). The sus-picion largely stems from the genre ’ s hybrid of factual and fi ctional components, fi rst sys-tematically theorised by Alessandro Manzoni in the 1820s. 1 However, the genre keeps being written and enjoyed, both in its nineteenth-century heyday and in a current revival epitomised in Mantel ’ s own work. What is more, since history ’ s “ linguistic turn ” (White 1973; White 2014), and the rise of historiographic meta fi ction (Hutcheon 1995) leading to a revival in the literary status of (certain scions of) the genre, scholars have had to re-evaluate the terms of this critique. This article investigates how the historical novel was received during the nineteenth century, and what reviewers expected or required of it at di ff erent times. We combine quantitative and qualitative techniques, examining a dataset of reviews of the genre from nineteenth-century British periodicals, to investigate the grounds on which reviewers evaluated historical novels, and how its reception in periodicals changed, or stayed the same, across the century. This study, focused on genre rather than on any single author, contributes not only to our understanding of the history of literary tastes and practices, but also to the study of nineteenth-century periodicals more generally. Our analysis shows that longstanding questions in literary history – about the kinds of truth that fi ction and history each could o ff er – took new forms in the nineteenth century due to the signi fi cance of this particular novelistic sub-genre. What makes a “ successful ” historical novel has been under debate throughout the genre ’ s lifespan. György Lukács argued that the historical novel in a particular Marxist sense – a novel that reveals the structural changes taking place in a past society, typically through the sort of “ mediocre hero ” that Walter Scott creates in Waverley (1814) – ground to a halt after the failure of the 1848 Revolutions