ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2 I argued that the social identities on which historians base their accounts of mid-Victorian consensus and stability are theoretical categories, the historicity of which is not adequately examined or acknowledged. Those categories, I suggested, operate as a priori foundations which naturalize and validate particular conceptions of the past, subserving a practice in which representation stands for explanation. I then considered some of the literature which historians have adduced to demonstrate the contemporary currency of the proposed identities, stressing the ambiguity of the literature itself – its capacity to sustain a range of meanings – and the manipulative processes through which it is transformed into evidence. My discussion embodied two kinds of criticism. One spoke to the narrative strategies employed in history writing and will be resumed in Chapter 4. The other addressed the works under review on their own terms, engaging with their explanatory categories on the ontological level to which they are raised and evaluating their treatment of ‘evidence’, content and context. With reference to a small autobiographical sample, I speculated that the social identities to which explanations of stability are articulated are not (and perhaps cannot be) convincingly illustrated. I also disputed the representative status of the autobiographers themselves, noting their apparent predisposition to take hierarchy for granted, to prize individual success, to disdain less competitive types, and to define themselves against the mass of ordinary workers. In short, I described attitudes which tell against the cohesive, integrated social visions of class and populist constructions.
