Fragments of History and The Man of Feeling: From Richard Bentley to Walter Scott

Abstract

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION conventionally claims a relationship with history. Defoe, Fielding, and Sterne, for example, adopt the role of historian while writing fiction. Although these writers' references to history are sometimes regarded merely as question-begging claims to verisimilitude, their books also form a consequential commentary on issues related to the writing of history. They explore the basis of narrative authority, raising questions about the evaluation of evidence contained in writing.' Two views of history collided in the eighteenth century. The more established view regarded history as a coherent narrative that separated the important from the trivial. Its function was to produce a reader who was enabled to understand the public world. But another kind of historicism was developing, one represented by the pursuits of philology and antiquarianism. The exact, detailed knowledge sought by the antiquaries and textual critics was often not important in itself nor did it lend itself to the extended narrative development that would provide a coherent linking of detail to overarching concept. In nei-