Conserving Histories: Chivalry, Science and Liberty

Chapter Four explores how, in the years leading up to the publication of Waverley, historical novelists recuperate the radical and reformist readings of history that had emerged during the post-French Revolution debate. Two overlapping strategies of reclamation emerge. First, as in the works of Anna Maria Porter, Jane Porter and Sarah Green, the radical emphasis on (non-chivalric) sensibility becomes an emphasis on chivalric morality. Second, the radical emphasis on rational historiography is co-opted, as seen, for all their differences in political perspective, in works by Elizabeth Hamilton and Jane West, which gesture towards scientific history. This absorption of reformist and radical energies into more conservative or cautious historical fictions facilitated a myth of modern gradualism against a background of secure commerciality; this myth would be problematized by Walter Scott.