‘Drowned Lands’ 79
ism and the clans are destroyed as political and social realities, civil society can
reclaim them as a form of aesthetic and sentimental capital’.^23 Kingsley, in turn,
co-opts Scott’s once-Jacobite romantic aestheticism for his medieval narrative.
Any political exceptionality evaporates and Herbert Butterfi eld’s belief that his-
torical novels have ‘something more fi rm about them than is found in the more
vague and dreamy products of romanticism’ seems hopelessly idealistic.^24
Recent commentators have been slow in recognizing Kingsley’s literary prag-
matism. Billie Melman, in her essay ‘Claiming the Nation’s Past: Th e Invention
of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition’, makes a key division between the Celtic/Gaelic
thrust of early historical fi ction – one tied variously to Whig historiography,
Tory sentiment and romanticism’s interest in the geographical margins – and
the subsequent emergence of England and Anglo-Saxonism at the centre of
British national identity and the new conservatism. Melman views Hereward the
Wa k e as the conservative antithesis of Scott’s poetic sentimentality but she fails
to acknowledge – in describing Kingsley’s ‘unromantic ruralism’ – the distinc-
tion Kingsley makes between the medieval and Victorian Fens.^25 Th e historical
ruralism of the novel is romantic, even if Kingsley notes its subsequent dissolu-
tion. Th e poetic disparity between Kingsley and Scott does not stand up to close
scrutiny. Melman fails also to note the distance between Kingsley’s stated inten-
tion to challenge Scott’s hegemony and the ultimate conformism of the novel to
Scott’s model of historical writing. Th e following passage from Kingsley’s Pref-
ace to Hereward the Wake reveals some of the tensions and contradictions caused
by this gap between intention and reality:
Another reason why lowland heroes carent vate sacro, is that the lowlands and those
who live in them are wanting in the poetic and romantic elements. Th ere is in the
lowland none of that background of the unknown, fantastic, magical, terrible, per-
petually feeding curiosity and wonder, which still remains in the Scottish highlands;
and which, when it disappears from thence, will remain embalmed for ever in the
pages of Walter Scott. Against that half-magical background his heroes stand out in
vivid relief; and justly so. It was not put there by him for stage purposes – it was there
as a fact; and the men of whom he wrote were conscious of it, were moulded by it,
were not ashamed of its infl uence.^26Kingsley again stresses the unromantic nature of the Fenland landscape, an
environment contrasted with the magic of the Scottish highlands. Scott’s
achievement in inscribing this mountainous region in print is singled out for
special praise by Kingsley and yet the English novelist describes this ‘half-mag-
ical background’ as a statement of fact rather than a literary accomplishment.
Lowland heroism, by contrast, requires poetic elaboration. Th e Fens may lack a
sacred bard but, in establishing a prosaic geography ‘wanting in the poetic and
romantic elements’, Kingsley puts himself forward as East Anglia’s literary sav-
iour. Later in the novel, Kingsley suggests that the Fenland terrain is one that