ABSTRACT
It is hardly surprising that soon after its publication in 1969 John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Fowles 1969) provoked a round-table debate between three distinguished academics in the leading scholarly journal devoted to interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies (Adam et al. 1972). Beyond its central interest in the philosophical conundrum of living with an existential consciousness in a repressive Victorian culture where choice was largely subordinated to manners and socially learnt behaviour, Fowles’s novel was profoundly indebted to what might be called the ‘moment’ of Victorian studies as a broad scholarly interest. The ‘moment’ of Victorian studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s in fact comprised the intersection of a number of complex recognitions about the nature of the remains and records of Victorian society and the interpretative issues that these historical traces posed. Central to such changes of focus was the idea of ‘history from below’ – a widespread shift of attention from the grand historical narratives of wars, prime ministers, governments and economic change to the confusing variety of counternarratives provided by piecing together the fragmentary records of ‘ordinary’ individuals and their ‘experience’ of historical change. Fowles’s repeated references to and quotations from Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution (Royston Pike 1966) is entirely characteristic of the extent and importance of this shift, but it was of course manifested widely in both academic and popular historiography, and driven on by the appointment of young Marxist scholars to the emergent ‘new’ universities and polytechnics. Institutionally it revealed itself in Victorian Studies itself, in the foundation of academic institutions aimed at fostering research into the new historical micronarratives crucial to interdisciplinary Victorian studies (such as the Victorian Studies Centres at Leicester and the University of Indiana), and in academic interest groups such as the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.
