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For some time now, the study of Victorian literature in the United States has been dominated by various strains of historicist scholarship. In few fields has Frederic Jameson's famous injunction to ‘always historicize’ (Jameson, 1981, p. 9) been taken up with such seriousness as it has in Victorian studies. Yet while many of the most brilliant and startling analyses of nineteenth-century culture have come out of Marxist-materialist and new historicist traditions over the past quarter of a century or so, the notion of ‘history’ that typically informs recent scholarship is surprisingly limited - and limiting. Even though new historicist work claims to recognize the problematic nature of the relationship between narrative and ‘reality,’ it is frequently beset by a literal-mindedness that seeks to authenticate texts by retrieving their referents in nonliterary, and hence ‘realer,’ contexts. Thus conceived (and in spite of the precautions taken by such precursors to the new historicism as Michel Foucault), ‘history’ tends to authorize new and rigid narratives of truth and causality. Not surprisingly, typically excluded in Victorian studies are views of history that emphasize ambivalence, irrationality and the impossibility of getting an ultimate handle on the real.
In his bold and original study, Jason B. Jones argues that Victorian writers had, ironically, a much more nuanced conception of history than historicist scholars today appreciate or have access to themselves. The texts he reads - principally, Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution, Dickens's Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, Charlotte Brontë's Shirley and George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical and Middlemarch - understand historical causes as ultimately unknowable (or ‘lost’) and resistant to single meanings. Not content to choose between the fantasy that humans author their own identities and the fantasy that they are authored by forces beyond their control, the nineteenth-century writers Jones studies i