Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past

1. Introduction: Who’s Afraid of Contemporary History?
Helen Kingstone

Part I. A Conceptual Framework

2. History as a Temporal Continuum: From Walter Scott to William Stubbs
Helen Kingstone

3. The Social Continuum: History without Heroes from William Hazlitt to J. R. Seeley
Helen Kingstone

4. Gendered Genres: Professional History Versus Antiquarianism and the Historical Novel
Helen Kingstone

Part II. Victorian Historians and the Recent Past: Harriet Martineau, J. R. Green, Spencer Walpole, and Charlotte M. Yonge

5. Immersion and Overview in Histories without Hindsight
Helen Kingstone

6. Power to the People? Proto-Social History
Helen Kingstone

Part III. Victorian Novelists and the Recent Past: Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot

7. In Defence of Living Memory: “Sixty Years Since” or Less
Helen Kingstone

8. “Unhistoric” Individuals in the Provincial Novel
Helen Kingstone

9. Conclusions
Helen Kingstone

Keywords: Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literary History, Intellectual Studies