The Uses of History: The Historical Novel in the Post-French Revolution Debate and Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Marcus Flaminius (1792)

Abstract

In the ‘General Preface to the Waverley Novels’ Sir Walter Scott shows the generosity Andrew Lang associates with him by stating that, along with the editorship of Queenhoo-Hall (1808), it was ‘the extended and well-merited fame of Miss Edgeworth’ that led him to recollect the unfinished manuscript that became Waverley (1814).1 Given Scott’s close association with the genre of the historical novel, his remarks might suggest that the ‘national element’ (as Georg Lukacs describes it) in historical fiction stems largely from the national tale — a genre ‘developed in Ireland, primarily by women writers’ which addressed ‘the major issues of cultural distinctiveness, national policy and political separatism’ (Lukacs 1969, 23; Trumpener 1993, 689). However, the picture appears different when the historical novel before Scott is taken into account. Even before the publication of Waverley, historical fiction was engaging with the form of history writing in order to re-imagine the nation. The historical novel became a vehicle for such national re-imagining because, in the decades before Waverley, attempts to explain the French Revolution often relied on historical analogues, or invoked history as the major interpretative framework. This tendency led to a struggle over how history should be written and understood. Writers of historical fiction in this period reflect on and contribute to this element of historiographic dispute and the political and national anxieties that accompanied it.