Historical Novels, 1784–1813

Abstract

In the last chapter, I looked at the increase in novelistic production of the last decades of the eighteenth century and the importance of novelistic subgenres to this increase, particularly as regards the circulating library. In this chapter, I will examine the historical novels of this era as a genre, describing both the features they share and some of the more notable variations from the pattern. As I discussed at the end of Chapter 2, the series of imitations of Walpole, Leland, and company eventually splits into two separate but related generic cycles: the historical novel and the gothic. As these traditions diverge, each develops its own set of (related) generic features, such that readers begin to develop expectations for the genre: readers of the gothic come to expect sensations of terror and horror produced by supernatural occurrences, while readers of historical novels get increasingly detailed depictions of historical settings and personages.