3

特別寄稿

Ｐ．アンガス・ブキャナン（大川時夫、佐藤健吉訳）『ブルネルの生涯と時代』………………重 富 公 生93

平川祐弘『天ハ自ラ助クルモノヲ助ク』………………荻 野 昌 利

98

THE VICTORIANS AND HISTORY

久木尚志『ウェールズ労働史研究：ペンリン争議における階級・共同体・エスニシティ』
英文レジュメ108
編集委員会よりお知らせ
編集後記
110

Andrew Sanders………………久 保 利永子 103
To many Victorians the past was decidedly not another country. It was an

110

intensely various country, generally European in its constitution, its traditions
and its geography, but it was a familiar country. It appeared to be readily visitable, and it seemed to be self-evidently contiguous with the present. The paststood boldly before readers of history and historical novels and dramas as monitory, for it offered both an example and a warning to the present. Victorian readers knew, of course, that in the past men and women did things differently, butwhat the Ancient Romans, or the Plantagenets, or Renaissance Florentines or
Scottish Covenanters did, and how and why they did it, was a matter both offascination and of vital modern concern. Or so historians, historical novelists
and historical dramatists aspired to believe.
Perhaps the most significant reason behind this fascination with history lay inthe fact that the first Victorian generation had witnessed what many of themrecognised as unprecedented change in the physical and politcial world about
them. This sentiment was famously described by Thackeray in his Roundabout
Paper of October 1860 entitled De Juventute. For Thackeray the coming of therailways in the 1830s seemed to demarcate one age from another and not justhis own youth from his middle-age:
We who have lived before the railways were made, belong to another world.
In how many hours could the Prince of Wales drive from London to
Brighton, with a light carriage builtexpressly, and relays of horses longing to4

THE VICTRIANS AND HISTORY

5

gallop the next stage?

the work of a Frenchman, Augustin Thierry, whose Histoire de la conquête

... It was only yesterday; but what a gulf between now and then! Then it wasd’Angleterre par les Normands, de ses causes, et ses suites was published in

the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses,

Paris in 1825.ii Thierry’s work helped develop the myth, fostered by Sir Walter

highwaymen, knights in armour, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids,

Scott in Ivanhoe, of the Norman influx as the fons et origo of the modern classAncient Britons painted blue, and so forth - all these belong to the old peri-system.iii In their various ways British historians of the nineteenth century wereod. I will concede a halt in the midst of it, and allow that gunpowder andboth to counter old myths and to foster new ones in equal measure.iv Althoughprinting tended to modernise the world. But your railroad starts a new era,an undertow of Protestant nationalism might strike latter-day readers as a con-and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one. We are ofstant feature of British history writing, and although that writing might now be

the time of chivalry as well as the Black Prince or Sir Walter Manny. We areviewed as emphatically ‘eurocentric’ in its world-view, the enterprise of manyof the age of steam.i

prominent and once respected Victorian historians was very far from insular.
Notable British historians of the period were severally to publish substantial

For Thackeray, the railway seems to have accelerated the passage of time evenstudies of Jewish history from Old Testament times to the Napoleonic era

more so than the inventions of gunpowder and the printing press, speeding the(Henry Hart Milman, 1830), of Greece (Connop Thirlwall, 1835-44; George

modern world away from the Prince Regent and his post-chaise as much as

Grote, 1846-56), of Rome (Thomas Arnold, 1838), of Medieval Christianityfrom the Druids and the Ancient Britons. In a sense the Prince Regent can now(Henry Hart Milman, 1840, 1855), of the Papacy (Mandell Creighton, 1882-

be equated both with the Black Prince and, even more abstrusely, a Druid.

1894), of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe (W. E. H. Lecky,1865), of the French Revolution (Thomas Carlyle, 1837), and of the life of

What Thackeray appears to be implying in his De Juventute is that, rather thanFrederick the Great (Thomas Carlyle, 1858-65).v If we add to this list Johnfinding themselves déraciné, his contemporaries felt the need to explore andRuskin’s expansive study of the history, the art and the architecture of Venice,establish roots. Nineteenth-century readers may have spurred an urgency in

The Stones of Venice (1851-53), it can be seen how variously intelligent British

knowing from whence they had come, but the roots examined by Victorian his-readers were drawn into an intellectual participation in a European-wide debate

torians were neither exclusively racial nor national in their pursuit of knowl-

about the unsteady development of Judaeo-Christian civilization. Perhaps moreedge. Patriotism was self-evidently not enough. As a perusal of any of his nov-significantly, these readers were also bidden to respond to the ever present chal-els suggests, Thackeray for one remained fascinated by the history of British

lenges presented to them by the very idea of progressive development. As

influence in the country of his birth, India. The professional historians who were

Jerome H. Buckley has noted of the perception of Time in the Victorian period:

his contemporaries would have readily acknowledged their debts to the recent‘Whatever the historian’s effort to achieve objectivity, public change could sel-German renovators of their discipline, Niebuhr, Müller and Ranke, and to those

dom for long be contemplated with a calm detachment; it called for evaluation

French historians whose analyses of the disjunctures of modern civilisation andas advance or decline, change for the better or change for the worse.’vi

politics were to prove so influential (Michelet, Guizot and Thiers). It should not
be forgotten that the most provocative, but nonetheless seductive, study of the

There was, however, a great deal of contemporary stress laid on the special

racial, social and cultural consequences of the Norman invasion of England wasconditions which had given rise to the constitutional distinction of Britain and to6

THE VICTRIANS AND HISTORY

7

the social and geographical circumstances which were deemed to have given
Britons an advantageous edge in developing their Empire, their Commerce, andIt will be my endeavour to relate the history of the people as well as the his-their Industry. No Victorian historian was more influential, or persuasive about

tory of the government, to trace the progress of useful and ornamental arts,

the nature of Britian’s mission civilisatrice than Thomas Babington Macaulay

to describe the rise of religious sects and the changes of literary taste, to por-

(1800-1859, created first Baron Macaulay in 1857). Macaulay’s biographer, histray the manners of successive generations, and not to pass by with neglect

nephew the historian Sir George Otto Trevelyan, recognized the breadth of hiseven the revolutions which have taken place in dress, furniture, repasts, anduncle’s achievement as ‘a man of letters ... a statesman, a jurist and a brilliant

public amusements. I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended

ornament of society’ but he added that there were also tens of thousands of read-

below the dignity of history, if I can succeed in placing before the English ofers ‘whose interest in history and literature he has awakened and informed by his

the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.

pen.’vii In his own day Macaulay was perhaps best known for his enduringly popular poems The Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) and for his much reprinted Essays

Macaulay conspicuously, and very effectively, drew on sources and influences,(written for the Edinburgh Review from 1825 and first collected in 1843). Given

notably literary sources, which lay beyond the customary archival or documen-

his insistent reiterations of Protestant England’s providential progress it istary domain of historians. ix Macaulay had in one of his earlier essays accredited

strange to recall that in his review of Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes

his innovatory method to the influence of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Despite(1840) Macaulay archly prophesied that the Papacy might ‘still exist in undimin-

his evident admiration of the Waverley Novels, Macaulay the historian seems toished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of vast

take brief exception to Scott’s act of intelligent trespass:solitude, take his stand of [sic] a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch theruins of St Paul’s.’ It was an apocalytic idea, not of Papal durability, but of

To make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the society

viii

British vulnerability, which appears to have haunted the Victorian imagination.

of a great man or on the eminence which overlooks the field of a mighty bat-

The suggestion that London might one day share the fate of ancient Rome andtle ... to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of lan-become a curiosity in the eyes of its former colonials does not, however, form

guage, manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their

the keynote of Macaulay’s masterpiece, The History of England (five vols. 1848-

tables, to rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of61). The book is centred instead on the idea of progressive political development.

their ponderous furniture, these parts of the duty which properly belongs to

Macaulay’s title is effectively a misnomer, for he was determined to focus his

the historian have been appropriated by the historical novelist.x

historical attention on the late seventeenth-century ‘Glorious Revolution’ and todescribe not just the complex fortunes of England in the period, but also those of

Macaulay was, in fact, re-appropriating what he felt properly belonged to the

Scotland, Ireland and, by extension, the American colonies as each is shown tohistorian, but he was doing so by adopting something of the method and the nar-be vitally bound up with the burgeoning prosperity and constitutional develop-

rative technique of Scott and his imitators. Where he differed was in his deter-

ment of the United Kingdom. Macaulay’s great innovation as a writer of history

mination to ‘draw from the occurrences of former times general lessons of

was to describe social patterns which lay beyond political and military ones. He

moral and political wisdom.’ Where, in telling a story, the novelist merely

stated his intention with an opening declaration:‘showed’, the scrupulous historian was obliged to pause to analyse, to interpret

8

THE VICTRIANS AND HISTORY

and to teach.xi

9

Anticant’, was an historian of a very different stamp to Macaulay. For Carlyle
the observation of contemporary society suggested far less evidence of happy

Macaulay’s great ‘set pieces’ (his analysis of the condition of England inand enlightened progress; the study of history too demanded not so much a con-1685, say, or his accounts of the landing of William of Orange or the Battle ofsideration of the State of England in 1685 as a desperate attempt to diagnose thethe Boyne) are therefore integrally linked to his grand intellectual theme, again

ills of England in the mid-nineteenth century by placing those ills in an unflat-first expressed in the Essays, that ‘the history of England is emphatically thetering perspective. Where Macaulay sought to congratulate the English on their

history of progress’. It was ‘the history of a constant movement of the publicpolitical achievement, Carlyle took pleasure in disconcerting them. There wasThis insistentlittle love lost between the two men, Carlyle glibly dismissing his rival as ‘theargument, articulated with the recent passage of the Reform Bill in 1832 and thesublime of commonplace’.xv Seemingly appropriately, Macaulay the man struck

reforming zeal of the post-Reform Whig government in mind, stands as one of

him as having little of the physically heroic about him, largely because

the central pillars of Macaulay’s own political agenda. The study of the past,

Macaulay the historian had failed to recognize what Carlyle saw as the dynamic

and the analytical interpretation of selected data, provide the present with a firmof history: heroism itself.

mind, of a constant change in the institutions of a great society.’xii

justification for its espousal of gradual development. The struggles between
Crown and Parliament in the middle of the seventeenth century, and the effec-

Like his rival, Carlyle had first established his reputation, and had first out-

tive triumph of Parliament over a reassertive, and potentially tyrannical, Crown

lined the principles on which he was to work, in a series of essays in contempo-

in the reign of James II, had set an agenda for the steady and ‘constant’ change

rary journals. Amongst the most influential of these are ‘Signs of the Times’

in the political and social institutions of Great Britain. Macaulay’s articulation(Edinburgh Magazine, June 1829) and ‘On History’ (Fraser’s Magazine, 1830).

of the idea of the organic development of the constititution and of society alike

The former, with its self-consciously apocalyptic title, reflects on a then current

was the founding principle of what was subsequently dubbed the ‘ Whigfascination with millenariansim before crucially defining the modern age asInterpretation of History’. Macaulay, raised to the peerage by a grateful Lord

‘The Mechanical Age’ and ‘The Age of Machinery’. Carlyle sees this defining

Palmerston and buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey after his untime-mechanical principle as evident in all aspects of national life from its economics

ly death, did not live to finish his History as he had initially aspired to do. He

to its theology, from its aesthetics and its literature to its politics and its morals:xiii

was unable to extend his survey of the consequences of what victorious Whigs
had styled the ‘Glorious Revolution’ into the eighteenth century and to observe

Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They

its impact on such phenomena as the Act of Union with Scotland, on Jacobitism

have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not

and on the American Revolution. Significantly enough it was yet another novel-for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, forist, Thackeray, the author of Henry Esmond and The Virginians, who at his pub-institutions, constitutions, ― for Mechanism of one sort or another, do theylisher’s suggestion, toyed with the idea of assuming Macaulay’s historical man-hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on

tle until he too was defeated by death.

mechanism, and are of a mechanical character. xvi

xiv

Thomas Carlyle, caricatured by Anthony Trollope as ‘ Dr. Pessimist

Carlyle is not dispraising either science or technology, but he is observing a

10THE VICTRIANS AND HISTORY

society losing its old bearings and failing to embrace the moral and intellectual

11‘ Condition of England ’ . The work is divided into four parts: a singularly

consequences of the new. To balance this dystopian vision of the present heprovocative ‘Proem’ which attacks modern economic and social complacency;

suggests in the essay ‘On History’ that the study of the past may offer bothan extended study of the twelfth-century ‘ heroic ’ Abbot Samson of St

examples and lessons. ‘Before Philosophy can teach by Experience’, he argues,

Edmundsbury; a various view of work and the ‘modern worker’ and, finally, a‘the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and‘Horoscope’ which attempts to disturb the present-day with dire warnings of aintelligibly recorded. ’ What he means here by ‘experience’ is History andcollapse into moral anarchy. In one sense Past and Present seeks to challenge

History he insists is ‘the essence of innumerable Biographies’.

those amongst Carlyle’s contemporaries (such as the Catholic architect and cul-xvii

This ‘biograph-ical’ bias was to shape all of Carlyle’s historical enterprise.

tural polemicist, A. W. N. Pugin) who sought to portray the state of art and society in the Middle Ages as infinitely tidier and happier than in the Godless present.

The significance of biography as a means of exploring historical experience is

For Carlyle, the past is neither a lost Golden Age nor a monitory prologue; it isvery much evident in Carlyle’s series of public lectures, delivered in May1840

simply history, vivid, resonant but essentially irretrievable. Having rejected any

and published in the following year under the title On Heroes, Hero-Worshipnostalgia for the past, the book consistently sets out to disconcert the present by

and the Heroic in History. The lectures deal with male heroism as a variously

offering a series of pithy diagnoses of its multiple social ills and shortcomings.

historical, religious, aesthetic and social phenomenon (gods, prophets, poets,
priests, writers and leaders). His ‘heroes’ have all ‘shaped themselves in the

Carlyle’s historical method is essentially that of a zealous preacher obsessedworld’s history’ as ‘the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, orwith failed vocations in the past, present woes and a pending Armageddon. His

whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain’. xviii Carlyle’s

complex, often extremely experimental language echoes that of the Old

last two lectures (‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ and ‘The Hero as King’) most

Testament prophets, the Reformation divines and Roman orators. He does notdirectly address the social and political issues of his own day. His men of lettersrant (though some readers find him repugnant), but he calls steadily and aggres-(Dr. Johnson, Jean-Jacques Roussseau and Robert Burns) are all ‘new’ men, all

sively for repentance, renewal and a restored sense of mission. His complexof them of humble origin who rose to eminence through intellectual effort andmasterpiece, The French Revolution (1837) had a considerable impact on his

without the benefit of patronage. His ‘kings’ (Cromwell and Napoleon) aretimes (Charles Dickens, for one, rashly claimed in 1851 to have read it five hun-equally self-made breakers of moulds. A king, for Carlyle, is the Ableman, adred times!)xx Something of that impact was undoubtedly the consequence of the

proto-Nietzschean Übermensch, who sweeps away tired conventions by dint of

nineteenth-century’s troubled fascination with the events of the Revolution, its

his inspired will. Thus the taciturn Cromwell ‘drives towards the practical andpolitical innovation as much as its prolific blood-letting, but Carlyle offeredpracticable ... a man with his whole soul seeing, and struggling to see’ while thatmuch more than an account of those events: his narrative is at once compelling-‘far inferior sort’, Napoleon, is possessed of ‘a certain instinctive ineradicablely dramatic, intricately detailed and decidedly epic in its sweep. xxi In an impor-feeling for reality’ until an equally instinctive ‘fatal-charlatan element’ got thetant way The French Revolution is the true fulfilment of what Carlyle had earli-

A strong anti-democratic, or at least anti-populist, bias runs

er aspired to: history as the ‘essence of innumerable Biographies’ built as it isthrough the lectures as it does through Past and Present (1843), a work veryaround a series of portraits of major Revolutionary figures and drawing on frag-much directed at the problems besetting what Carlyle himself termed thements of eye-witness accounts, letters, journals, pamphlets, memoirs and auto-

upper hand.

xix

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THE VICTRIANS AND HISTORY

13

biographies. But what tends to stick in the memory are its great set-pieces, theVenice and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory

accounts of the fall of the Bastille, the Royal Family’s enforced journey to Paris

remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if

in 1789, the Flight to Varennes, the storming of the Tuileries in 1792, the exe-

it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied

cution of Louis XVI or the demise of Robespierre (whom Carlyle had famously

destruction.xxiv

dubbed the ‘sea-green incorruptible’). Nothing in Carlyle’s later achievement as
an historian, whether as editor of Cromwell ’s letters and speeches or as theThis is as much Jonah preaching to Nineveh as a future New Zealander seeking

biographer of Frederick the Great, really rivals the innovative narrative genius

out the evidence of Venetian decay in London rather than broken Roman arch-of The French Revolution.

es. Ruskin insistently aspires to read buildings as the truest indicators of thequality of a civilisation. As an interpreter he variously interweaves history andCarlyle’s often pessimistic prognostications about the decline and fall ofpolitics, aesthetics and economics, theology and geology. His stylistic effects

civilisations are to some degree echoed in John Ruskin’s superbly and elegantly

can be both disconcerting and dazzling, for as one early reader, Charlotte

digressive The Stones of Venice (3 vols. 1851-53). Ruskin was inclined to refer

Brontë, found there is an earnestness in The Stones of Venice which was likely

to Carlyle simply as his ‘master’, remarking to J. A. Froude on one occasion

to make Utilitarians (and, we presume, some historians) ‘fume and fret over histhat he felt that this ‘master’ had, like some classical god, been ‘born in thedeep, serious, and (they will think) fanatical reverence for art. ’ xxv This

clouds and struck by the lightning’.xxii The Stones of Venice is a study not simply‘reverence’ may lead Ruskin into inflating certain idées fixes into universalof the surviving monuments of painting, sculpture, architecture and design cre-truths (he is insistent, for example, that the inception of Venice’s moral andated by Venice at the height of its power, but of its steady decline (Ruskin firstimperial decay coincides with its first flirtation with the Renaissance). As thesaw the city nearly forty years after it had lost its independence and when its

shrewd George Eliot remarked, despite the ‘stupendous specimens of arrogant

decayed buildings were languishing under Austrian rule). Ruskin’s extended

absurdity’in his work Ruskin’s ‘grand doctrines of truth and sincerity in art, and‘essay’, as he modestly describes it, is neither pure history nor pure art history

the nobleness and solemnity of our human life, which he teaches with the inspi-(though the latter discipline barely existed in his time). It is a novel form ofration of a Hebrew prophet, must be stirring up young minds in a promisingsocial and cultural archaeology assembled by scrupulous and meditative obser-

way.’xxvi The very intensity of his vision was to inspire generations of thesevation. As Ruskin insists in his Preface, when it came to studying the architec-

young minds to use their eyes, as much as their intellects, in articulating theirture of Venice ‘every date in question was determinable only by internal evi-

relationship to the past.

dence’, obliging him to examine not just ‘every one of the older palaces, stone
by stone, but every fragment throughout the city which afforded any clue to the

Ruskin’s work obliged his vast number of Victorian disciples to respond to a

Its celebrated opening paragraph, however, discon-semi-exotic aesthetic and to a faded imperial dream both of which lay beyond

formation of its styles.’xxiii

certingly inter-relates past, present and future and links history to prophecy:

their immediate and insular experience. To many responsive readers, however,it was the national past which impinged most readily and vividly on their per-Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones,

ception of their present condition and on their future destinies. For J. A. Burrowof mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre,

the thirty years between 1848 and 1878 were marked by ‘a remarkable flower-

14

THE VICTRIANS AND HISTORY

15

ing of English narrative history’ and by an ‘elaboration in the interpretation ofHistory seemed to be the proper province of novelists determined to show off

what arguably had been the three great crises in the history of the English as atheir intellectual credentials. Historical fiction was, as one critic remarked, capa-

nation.’ These three crises were the Norman Conquest, the Reformation and theble of uniting ‘the learning of the historian with the fancy of the poet’, but,

In relation to these critical periods Burrow discusses

equally persausively, it could judiciously edit, discarding ‘from human annals

Revolution of 1688.

xxvii

Macaulay’s History, William Stubbs’s The Constitutional History of Englandtheir years of tedium ’ while bringing prominently forward ‘ their eras of

in its Origin and Development (3 vols. 1873-1878), Edward Augustus

interest’.xxix It was not therefore only the modern poet-dramatist who could

Freeman’s The History of the Norman Conquest (4 vols. 1867-1879) and Jamesaspire to inherit Shakespeare’s mantle as the imaginative delineator of national

Anthony Froude’s The History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat

history: so too might the nineteenth-century novelist. The Victorian sense ofof the Spanish Armada (12 vols. 1856-1870). Burrow is well aware that his

intimacy with the past was in part the result of a sentiment that readers of histor-

chosen historians have distinctive historical, philosophical and, to some degree,

ical fiction were able to participate imaginatively in the experience of theirreligious (i.e. liberal Protestant) agendas. All four were also determined to cor-ancestors.

rect popular misconceptions (Freeman, for example, set out to undermine
Augustin Thierry’s idea of a continuing class conflict between aristocratic

The work of Burrow’s mid-century historians can be readily paralleled inNormans and plebeian Saxons). All also sought to re-map and re-colonise terri-that of their novelist and dramatist contemporaries. The Norman Conquest wastory which had all too often been occupied by ill-informed, romantically-variously dealt with in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, the Last of the Saxon

inclined poets or unscholarly writers of literary fiction. For Macaulay, as we

Kings (1848), in Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake (1866), in Tennyson’s

have seen, the prime villain remained the enduringly popular Sir Walter Scottverse-drama Harold (1876), and, somewhat less memorably, in General Sir

and the ‘Wizard of the North’ had fostered a remarkable literary progeny. As

Charles Napier’s historical romance, William the Conqueror (published posthu-

one Victorian critic remarked, Scott’s work began ‘from the full light of his own

mously in 1858 in an edition by the military historian Sir William Napier).

days’ and had gone back ‘century after century ... [and] had, in all, a range ofWilliam Harrison Ainsworth’s sensationalist Gothic dabblings in Reformation

about eight centuries through which he roamed, as in his proper domain...’.xxviii

history (such as The Tower of London of 1841 and Windsor Castle of 1843)

Scott had dealt with issues pertaining to the Norman Conquest (in Ivanhoe ofwere to be outclassed in terms of verisimilitude by two works notably influ-

1820 and Count Robert of Paris of 1832), with Reformation Scotland (in The

enced by J. A. Froude, Kingsley ’ s swashbucklingly Protestant diatribe

Monastery and The Abbot both 1820), Elizabethan England (in Kenilworth ofWestward Ho! (1855) and Tennyson’s drama Queen Mary (1875). The conti-1821) and Puritan England (in Woodstock of 1826) and with the prelude to andnental origins of Reformation thought were also explored in Charles Reade’s

the consequences of the Glorious Revolution in Scotland and England in a

fictional study of Erasmus’s immediate forebears, The Cloister and the Hearth

whole succession of novels (Waverley of 1814, Old Mortality of 1816, Rob Roy(1861) while the intrigues related to the captivity of Mary, Queen of Scots (andof 1817, Peveril of the Peak of 1823).

to the Queen’s ‘unknown’ daughter) figure in the prolific Charlotte M. Yonge’s
Unknown to History (1882). Although the Glorious Revolution itself proved

Scott’s Victorian successors and imitators maintained the rivalry with the his-less of a draw to English novelists, events anterior to it figure in R. D.

torians knowing that there was a ready and receptive audience for their work.

Blackmore’s Lorna Doone (1869) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Micah Clarke

16

THE VICTRIANS AND HISTORY

17(1887) (both set at the time of the Monmouth rebellion) and its immediate con-with a Benthamite panopticon workhouse. Another shows two ‘contrasted’ pic-

sequences are explored in Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. A

tures of towns. The ‘Catholic’ town of 1440 is a model of piety, the towers andColonel in the service of Her Majesty Queen Anne (1852).xxx

spires of its parish churches and monasteries piercing the sky; the same blighted
town in 1840 has broken spires, the neglected ruins of an abbey and a skyline

It would be wrong, however, to suppose that these were the only critical

now dominated by factory chimneys; where there was once an open space there

moments in national history to have inspired Victorian writers. For many poets

is now a penitentiary, where there was once a stone bridge and a chapel, there ishistory did not even have to be real history. Tennyson ’ s epic re-cycling

now an iron toll-bridge. The decay of the happy old order is meant to be self-

Arthurian legend in his Idylls of the King (1842-1891) may have become theevident. A similar nostalgia for a lost age also informs Benjamin Disraeli’s oth-most ambitious literary reconstruction of the world of Camelot, but its subject

erwise forward-looking political novels of the 1840s. In Sybil of 1845, formatter was far from unique. Matthew Arnold’s ‘Tristram and Iseult’ appeared inexample, the ruins of Marney Abbey proclaim ‘a place where all the rights of

the Poems of 1852, William Morris’s The Defence of Guinevere and Other

hospitality were practised; where the traveller, from the proud baron to the lone-

Poems was published in 1858 and Robert Stephen Hawker’s extraordinary

ly pilgrim, asked the shelter and the succour that were never denied, and atblank verse Quest of the Sangraal in 1864. Tennyson was to turn to documented

whose gate, called the Portal of the Poor, the peasants on the Abbey lands, if in

history in his second, and, in its time, most popular historical drama Becket

want, might appeal each morn and night for raiment and for food.’ No need,(1884), the martyred Archbishop proving to be one of Sir Henry Irving’s mosttherefore, for grudgingly given poor relief and for Union Workhouses. For someadmired roles. The spiritual certainties, and the rich architectural and visual cul-

Victorian writers the England of the later Plantagenets, as much as the Englandture of the later Middle Ages had, since the late eighteenth-century increasinglyof Arthur, was a dreamy land of chivalric gestures, noble piety and knightly

assumed the character of a lost golden age. To some nineteenth-century com-

bounty; for others, more crucially, pre-Reformation England was a land blessed-

mentators, notably William Cobbett and A. W. N. Pugin, the Reformation rup-

ly free of machines and applied Utilitarianism.xxxii William Morris, who began

tured more than religious continuities: it marked a watershed which was at once

his artistic career dreaming Medieval dreams, was never to lose his vision of asocial and aesthetic. As Pugin wrote in the preface to the expanded second edi-

pre-industrial Earthly Paradise. When this vision was shot through with thetion of his Contrasts in 1842 ‘the real origin of both the revived Pagan andSocialist principles he had imbibed from reading Marx, as it is in News From

Protestant principles is to be traced to the decayed state of faith throughout

Nowhere of 1891, Morris lovingly explores a post-industrial future in which

Europe in the fifteenth century which led men to dislike, and ultimately forsake,society has been transformed by a return to self-sufficient artistic communities

the principles and architecture which originated in the self-denying Catholic

in which swords have been beaten into beautifully crafted ploughshares.

principle, and admire and adopt the luxurious styles of ancient Paganism.’
Paganism and Protestantism, Renaissance and Reformation were all of them

Certain raw national wounds of the more recent past had an evident currency‘monsters’. xxxi Pugin brought his point home through a series of devastatingin the social and constitutional debates associated with the Reform Acts ofsatirical plates contrasting sturdy medieval churches with paltry, gimcrack mod-

1832, 1867 and 1884. The political and religious divisions the English Civil

ern ones. One of his most bitingly successful plates shows a great, but idealised

War were, for example, to figure significantly in C.W. Cope’s murals in thefifteenth-century almshouse (based on St Cross near Winchester) juxtaposed

Peers’ Corridor in the newly completed Palace of Westminster (commissioned

18

THE VICTRIANS AND HISTORY

1853 and completed 1867). The period of the ‘English Revolution’ was to prove

19

Walter Pater’s infinitely more ambiguous philosophical romance Marius the

In the reformist 1830s Robert Browning felt

Epicurean (1885). The national aspirations and the anti-Papal struggles of thethat the subject of his historical tragedy Strafford (1837), the struggle between

Italian Risorgimento were to inspire both Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi: The Last of

autocracy and representative government, was very much ‘in the air’.xxxiv An

the Tribunes (1835) and George Eliot’s intensely scholarly Romola (1863). The

alternative, and partisan, picture of loyalty to Church and King is explored inlatter story, set in the politically tangled Florence of Savonarola, has a Positivist

Frederick Marryat’s The Children of the New Forest of 1847, while writers

historical perspective which allowed Eliot to express a greater frankness about

influenced by the Oxford Movement, such as J. H. Shorthouse in his Johnthe loss of religious faith and the independence of a central woman character

Inglesant (1880), were drawn to a period in which the soul and the culture of thethan she felt able to do in her novels set in the nineteenth century.xxxv To the cha-

Church of England were tested to the extreme. For the greatest Scottish writer

grin of some latter-day historians and of twentieth-century Marxian critics theof the last third of the nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson, three great

most enduringly popular, and influential, of Victorian historical novels remains

adventure stories, Kidnapped (1886), its sequel Catriona (1893) and The

Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Dickens’s debt to Carlyle is evident

Master of Ballantrae (1889) reveal a deep fascination with the fissures in Scots

throughout the narrative, but the distinctiveness of the novel lies largely in theequally stimulating to writers.

xxxiiiculture produced by the extended period of Jacobite unrest that had earlier sofact that the few real historical personalities who appear in the novel figure only

preoccupied Sir Walter Scott.

glancingly. What Dickens seeks to represent is not Revolution as a creative act
but as a supremely disruptive element in the experience of fictional characters

The influence of contemporary historiography on the historical novel was

who are caught up in an intensely plotted moral drama. These characters are

not, of course, confined to fiction that dealt exclusively with ‘the matter ofalso haunted, even more weightily than Scrooge is, by the ghosts of the past, theBritain’. The long shadow of Edward Gibbon ’s provocative and often con-present and the yet-to-come. Public and private histories are interlinked. Timetentious The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire falls over the work ofdoes not necessarily heal: it catches characters out and it is they who are obliged

Victorian sceptics and Christian apologists alike. The history of the declining

to work out a process of reconciliation for themselves.

Roman Empire was read both in terms of loss and gain, of ends and beginnings.
It is the small body of fleeing Christians who represent the emergent future at

In Waverley Scott had famously presented his readers with a story set ‘sixty

the end of Bulwer-Lytton’s widely admired The Last Days of Pompeii (1834)

years since’. His perspective remained (and remains) useful in the sense that thewhile the persecution of the early Church forms the subject of Cardinal

gap of two generations allows for some detachment from disruptive historical

Wiseman’s Fabiola: A Tale of the Catacombs (1854) and of John Henry (later

experience. Some Victorian writers (George Eliot in Adam Bede of 1859, for

Cardinal) Newman’s Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century (1856). Wilkie

example, or Elizabeth Gaskell in Sylvia’s Lovers of 1863) readily adopted

Collins’s first published novel, Antonina, Or the Fall of Rome (1850), has a

Scott’s perspective. Others, particularly those who explored aspects of their own

Christian heroine beset by pagan Romans and pagan Goths alike. Far less sym-

lives in fiction, found themselves obliged to cross back from the railway era inpathetic pictures of primitive Christianity are offered in Kingsley’s assertively

which trhey were writing to that ‘other world’ ― the age of the stage-coach. In

Protestant Hypatia, Or Old Foes with a New Face (1853: the new faces of thethese latter cases, however, a private history (such as David Copperfield ’s)‘old foes’ being those of Victorian Catholics and Tractarian divines) and inrarely seems to take on the weight of ‘History’ proper. When Thackeray spoke

20

THE VICTRIANS AND HISTORY

in 1860 of the ‘gulf between now and then’, his readers would still primarily
have celebrated him as the author of Vanity Fair of 1847-48. Vanity Fair is not
autobiographical but its setting in the raffish England of George IV does, almost
dangerously, impinge on the early Victorian decades. Much of what Thackeray
describes was still living memory to readers of the generation of the novelist’s
own parents. There is certainly a good deal of detachment in the narrative, anachievement enhanced by the novel’s narrator’s decidedly quizzical irony, but
the ‘then’ and the ‘now’ are in fact far less distinguished from one another thanthey are, say, in Esmond or The Virginians. Nevertheless, Vanity Fair seems
emphatically to be set in another world. It seems to deny the continuities which
many of its first readers must readily have recognized (an aspect of the novel
reinforced by the fact that Thackeray’s illustrations show his characters in earlyVictorian rather than Regency dress). The advances of the railway age may haveappeared to accelerate the passage of time but Thackeray was also well aware of
the fact that he was animating what the writer Alan Bennett has almost disarmingly described as ‘that remotest of periods, the recent past.’xxxvi

Notes
i W. M Thackeray, De Juventute (Cornhill Magazine, October 1860). Reprinted in
The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (Centenary Biographical Edition).
London. John Murray, 1911. Vol. XX, p. 72. Sir Walter Manny (d. 1372) established the London Charterhouse for Carthusian monks in 1371 and thus, indirectly, proved to be the originator of the school at which Thackeray was educated.
ii Translated into English by William Hazlitt as the History of the Conquest of
England by the Normans (2. vols., London 1847).
iii For a further discussion of this issue see Andrew Sanders, ‘“Utter Indifference”? :the Anglo Saxons in the nineteenth-centruy novel’ in eds. Donald Scragg andCarole Weinberg, Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from theThirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge Studies in Anglo Saxon England
29).Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2000. pp. 157-173.
iv For general discussions of historical myth-making and the ‘invention of tradition’see eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition .
Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1983 and J. B. Bullen, The Myth of theRenaissance in Nineteenth-century Writing. Oxford. The Clarendon Press. 1994.

21v For what remains the most useful general survey of nineteenth century historians see
G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. London.
Longmans, Green & Co. 1913.
vi Jerome H. Buckley, ‘The Four Faces of Victorian Time’ in ed. C. A. Patrides,
Aspects of Time. Manchester. Manchester University Press. 1976. p.64.
vii Sir George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (1876) (Popular
Edition). London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1893. p.2.
viii Anthony Trollope was to give the title The New Zealander to a collection of
essays written in 1855-56 (but not published until 1972) and the last plate ofGustave Doré’s London (1872) shows the New Zealander at work amid the ruins.
ix One subsequent historian who took issue with Macaulay’s method is Hugh TrevorRoper who complained that ‘some of his most entertaining and most damaging
passages can be discredited as resting not on historical evidence but on literary
exaggeration.’ Introduction to Lord Macaulay, The History of England (Penguin
English Library). Harmondsworth, Penguin Books. 1979. p.39.
x Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Hallam’ (September 1828), Critical and Historical
Essays (Eighth Edition). 3 vols. London, Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans.
1864. Vol. 1 pp.113-14.
xi Ibid. p.114.
xii ‘Sir James Mackintosh’ (July 1835). Ibid. Vol. 2 p. 226.
xiii For a general summary of this ‘ Whig Interpretation ’ see Trevor-Roper ’ s
Introduction to the History of England. See also J. W. Burrow’s fine account of
Macaulay’s influence in his A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and theEnglish Past. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1981.
xiv See Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom 1847-1863. London. Oxford
University Press. 1958. p. 372.
xv See Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography. Cambridge. Cambridge University
Press. 1983. p. 382. Carlyle was prepared to admit that Macaulay had a ‘truly
wonderful historical memory’ but he added that he had ‘not ... the least tincture ofgreatness or originality or any kind of superior merit except neatness of expression.’ J. A. Froude records Carlyle as describing the ‘irremediable, commonplacenature of the man ... a squat, thickset, low-browed, short, grizzled little man offifty’. He then added: ‘These be thy gods, O Israel!’. James Anthony Froude,
Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London 1834-1881. 1834-1881. 2 Vols.
London. Longmans, Green & Co. 1891. Vol.1, p.465.
xvi Thomas Carlyle, ‘ Signs of the Times ’ , reprinted in Scottish and other
Miscellanies (Everyman’s Library) . London. Dent. 1967. pp.228-29.
xvii ‘ On History ’ , reprinted in English and other Critical Essays (Everyman ’ s
Library). London. Dent. 1964. p. 82.
xviii On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (Everyman’s Library)
London. Dent. 1956. p. 239.
xix Ibid. pp. 440, 442, 463, 464.
xx Letter to John Forster, Summer 1851. The Letters of Charles Dickens (The Pilgrim
Edition) Vol. 6 1850-1852 eds. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson & Nina

22

Burgis. Oxford. The Clarendon Press. 1988. p.452.
xxi For a fine analysis of Carlyle’s achievement see John Clubbe, ‘Carlyle as Epic
Historian’ in eds. James R. Kincaid & Albert J. Kuhn, Victorian Literature andSociety: Essays Presented to Richard D. Altick. Ohio State University Press.
1994. pp119-145.
xxii E.T. Cook, The Life of John Ruskin (2 vols). London. George Allen & Company,
Ltd. 1911. Vol. 1. p. 475-6. See also Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years
1819-1859. New Haven and London. Yale University Press. 1985. pp. 150-51.
xxiii John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (3 vols). London. Smith, Elder and Co. 185153. Vol. 1 ‘The Foundations’. Preface pp. v-vi.
xxiv Ibid. p. 1.
xxv Quoted by Hilton, op. cit. p. 149.
xxvi George Eliot was initially addressing her comments about Ruskin’s ‘absurdity’ tohis Political Economy of Art. See J. W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life as Related in
her Letters and Journals. New Edition. Edinburgh and London. William
Blackwood & Sons. ND. p. 239.
xxvii J. A. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past.
Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Paperback edn. 1983. p. 1.
xxviii David Masson, British Novelists and their Styles: Being a Critical Sketch of theHistory of British Prose Fiction. Cambridge. Macmillan & Co.. 1859. p. 167.
xxix Archibald Allison, ‘The Historical Romance’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.
Vol. LVIII (September 1845) p.341.
xxx For these and other historical novels of the period see, Andrew Sanders,The
Victorian Historical Novel 1840-1880 . London. Macmillan. 1978. See also
Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf.
Baltimore and London. The Johns Hopkins Press. 1971. For fiction dealing with
the Norman Conquest see also Andrew Sanders, ‘Some Aspects of the Use of
Anglo-Saxon subject matter in Victorian Literature’ (unpublished Cambridge M.
Litt. Thesis, 1975).
xxxi A.W. Pugin, Contrasts: or A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle
Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; shewing the presnt decayof Taste. London. Charles Dolman. 1841. p. iii.
xxxii For general studies of Victorian Medievalism see Alice Chandler, A Dream ofOrder: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-century Literature. London. Routledge& Kegan Paul. 1971 and Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry andthe English Gentleman. New Haven and London. Yale University Press. 1981.
xxxiii For these murals see ed. Maurice Bond, Works of Art in the House of Lords.
London. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. 1980. pp.92- 101.
xxxiv Mrs Sutherland Orr, Life and Letters of Robert Browning. London, Smith, Elder& Co.. 1891. p.88.
xxxv For Romola see eds. Caroline Levine and Mark Turner, From Author to Text: ReReading George Eliot’s Romola. Aldershot. Ashgate. 1998.
xxxvi Alan Bennett, ‘Bad John’ reprinted in Writing Home (Paperback edn.) London.
Faber & Faber. 1998. p. 497.

23

論

文

歴史記述のフィクション性と狂人――『ミドロージァンの心臓』と『バーナビー・ラッジ』――

矢次 綾
はじめに
1970 年代から 80 年代にかけてポストモダンの歴史学者が歴史記述のフィ
クション性を提唱した。その中心的な役割を果たしたヘイドン・ホワイト
は、歴史として伝えられるものが現実の物語ではなく、「言語に依拠した実在であり、言語の秩序に属する」(White 37）と主張している。彼らによれば、歴史記述は資料解釈の産物であって、発見するものではなく、言語を用いて創造するものである。この見解は歴史家のみならず文学者を巻き込んだ論争を招いたが、その渦中にあったＡ・Ｓ・バイアットは、19 世紀のフィクティヴ有識者が既に歴史記述は作り事だと認識していたことをブラウニング論の中で指摘した。その証左としてバイアットは歴史家のルナン（Ernest Renan）
を挙げている。ルナンは『キリストの生涯』（Vie de Jésus, 1863）においてラザロの奇跡をベタニヤの家族によって創り上げられた宗教的な方便と見なしているが、『キリストの生涯』を読んだブラウニングは、ルナンが公平
無私の視点からキリストの生涯を再構築していないと批判した（ Byatt 25-27）。そして、「霊媒・スラッジ氏」（“Mr Sludge: The Medium,” 1864）の中で、歴史記述一般の持つ恣意性を以下のように指摘している。1

Each states the law and fact and face o’ the thing
Just as he’d have them, finds what he thinks fit,
Is blind to what missuits him, just records
What makes his case out, quite ignores the rest.