The historical novels of six Victorian writers: Thackeray, Dickens, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, Meredith and Walter Pater

Abstract

A survey of the historical novels of Thackeray, Dickens, Kingsley, George Eliot, Meredith and Pater leads one to realise the diversity possible within the departments of historical fiction. These differ in important respects from each other and from their predecessors in this genre. Unfortunately none of them has left set prefaces, like those of Scott and Lytton, discussing his views on the blending of history and fiction and his aims. We have to infer from incidental remarks and their finished works what their various conceptions of historical fiction were.

When they sat down to write historical novels, it is certain that they were faced with the same problems as exercised the minds of Scott and Lytton, namely the rel ^.tion of the historical and the fictitious, and the means of suggesting the historical background; but these problems must have appeared in a different form for them. They had behind them a large body of historical fiction, and if there were not fairly definite conventions that could be followed easily, and if an historical novel could not exactly be written to prescription, there were at least enough examples produced to make the general pattern of the historical novel pretty familiar. Victorian novelists had not like Scott to decide what an historical novel should be.