Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past

Helen Kingstone is Lecturer in Victorian Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research addresses the relationship between memory and history in the nineteenth century, focusing on how writers in different genres and forms approached contemporary history. Other publications include a chapter in Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris, ed. Emelyne Godfrey (Palgrave, 2016), and work on scientific ideas of progress in Nineteenth-Century Contexts and in Historicising Humans ed. Efram Sera-Shriar (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).

“Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past is a fine, detailed study of a fascinating topic. The book is scholarly and ranges with ease between overviews of social and academic attitudes and trends to very specific and nuanced readings of texts. … It is also written in a style perfectly accessible to anyone interested in nineteenth-century history, literary criticism and gender studies. There is a good deal to learn from what is a very welcome addition to nineteenth-century studies.” (A. G. van den Broek, The George Eliot Review, Issue 48, September, 2017)

• Introduction: Who’s afraid of contemporary history?.- Part I: A conceptual framework.- Chapter 2. History as a temporal continuum: from Walter Scott to William Stubbs.- Chapter 3. The social continuum: history without heroes from William Hazlitt to J. R. Seeley.- Chapter 4. Gendered Genres: professional history vs. antiquarianism and the historical novel.- Part II: Victorian historians and the recent past: Harriet Martineau, J. R. Green, Spencer Walpole and Charlotte M. Yonge.- Chapter 5. Immersion and overview in histories without hindsight.- Chapter 6. Power to the people? Proto-social history.- Part III: Victorian novelists and the recent past: Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot.- Chapter 7. In defence of living memory: “sixty years since” or less.- Chapter 8. “Unhistoric” individuals in the provincial novel.- Conclusions.-