How the Victorians Invented the Regency: Historicizing the Recent Past.

Abstract

How the Victorians Invented the Regency: Historicizing the Recent Past argues that Victorian literary responses to the Napoleonic Wars and Regency period (1800-1820) generated non-deterministic, non-teleological theories of history. As both a foil against which writers could crudely delimit a materialistic, oversexed past from a staid, moral present, and a persistent challenge to totalizing visions of History on a grand scale, the Napoleonic Wars and Regency raised questions about historical causality and experience that are played out in Victorian literary texts. My project examines refigurations of this period in four groups of Victorian texts: historical fiction, namely William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) and Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet-Major (1880); women's life-writing, including Harriette Wilson's Memoirs (1825), the Countess of Blessington's Conversations of Lord Byron (1832-33), and Elizabeth Abell's Recollections of Napoleon (1844); texts by and about the John Murray publishing house circle, including Samuel Smiles's A Publisher and His Friends (1891) and Benjamin Disraeli's Vivian Grey (1826); and textual representations of Napoleon memorabilia and effigies in William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Adventure of the Six Napoleons' (1905), and Hardy's The Dynasts (1903-1908), among other texts. Using new materialist methodologies and drawing upon theories of temporality, I illuminate how literary texts and material culture offer complementary and competing historical narratives. As scholars question the meaningfulness of the period term Victorian for literary-historical study, my project analyzes the way Victorian literature itself narrated the transition from past to present.