Telling Lives to Children

We are all historicists now, aren’t we? Even “the end of history” is history, and “the millennium” certainly did not stop the clocks. On the TV, one can hardly escape from popular history, fronted by the likes of Simon Schama or David Starkey, and the longue durée of the comparable preoccupation within literary studies has resulted in New Historicism showing more than a few grey hairs. These greying temples look quite distingué, but historicism came a surprisingly long way, given its almost ubiquitous sway and its encyclopaedic proclivity, before showing a sustained interest in its own origins, cherishing instead a convenient parentage in Foucault and Greenblatt. James Chandler’s England in 1819 has, of course, done a good deal to redress this omission by reconstructing a specifically Romantic historicism in “the Romantic era” and beyond. ¹ This chapter is designed to extend this reconstruction into this beyond.