History and India

Abstract

Historical allusion in The Newcomes is a significant part of the general and important subject of Thackeray and history. His novels form social and historical surveys of English life almost generation by generation from the early eighteenth-century to his own day. In Henry Esmond, he contributed significantly to the genre of the historical novel. His lectures on The Four Georges, as Robert Colby notes, were attended by Carlyle, Macaulay, Prescott, Hallam, and Motley, and the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica invited him to contribute an article on the Age of Anne.1 In his novels, just as he deliberately oscillates between romance and reality, so he frequently calls in doubt the boundaries between fiction and history; both phenomena are parts of the same outlook. He sees fiction as communicating information and truth that histories ignore or conceal. At the beginning of his lecture on Steele in The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, brooding on the subject of truth in history, autobiography and fiction, he concludes: ‘Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life of the time; of the manners, of the movement, the dress, the pleasures, the laughter, the ridicules of society — the old times live again, and I travel in the old country of England. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?’ (p. 543).KeywordsAgency HouseEast India CompanyIndian ServiceIndian BankFictitious BookThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.