ABSTRACT
It is not possible to write a paper on historicism without first invoking the spirit of Nietzsche who, in his untimely essay On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History, asserted that 'every past is worth condemning'. Though surely not possessed of a Nietzschean historical forgetfulness, the Victorians had this much in common with the German philosopher: an ambivalence toward history. For no other society had so rapidly and completely embraced technological innovation, and yet sought so desperately to reanimate its past. No people since the Renaissance combined such confidence in their own powers with so much antiquarian retrospection. But the Victorians' aggressive identification with both the past and the future betrayed, not surprisingly, a profound discontent with an unstable and ever-changing present. As Matthew Arnold recognized, the nineteenth century was an age of self-conscious transition, 'Wandering between two worlds, one dead, I The other powerless to be born' .1 The Victorians' fear of being lost within history-and of being dernernorialized in their own time - impelled their return to the past. Far from being passively picturesque or merely nostalgic, nineteenth-century historical rnindedness was an urgent defence against the combined shocks and dislocations of mechanization, political economy and continental revolution.
