Victorian poetry and historicismways that were distinct from earlier forms of historicism - including that so
wickedly satirized by Peacock. This chapter explores the range and eclecti-
cism of Victorian historicism, the cultural and ideological uses to which
history was put, and the representational forms that it assumed in the
poetry and poetics of the period. My discussion concentrates on the most
popular touchstones for the nineteenth century: Ancient Greece, the Middle
Ages, and the Renaissance. Yet I do not wish to suggest too fixed and over-
schematized a picture of Victorian attitudes to - as well as reconstructions
of - the past. Tastes and enthusiasms were constantly undergoing revalua-
tion. We need to recognize that historicism itself was subject to the move-
ment of history. The literary production of Hellenism, medievalism, and the
idea of the Renaissance in Victorian England was based on dynamic and
contested, and in some respects competing, cultural concepts.
History was ubiquitous in Victorian cultural and intellectual life. It did
not confine itself to the museum or the chronicle but found expression in
the art, architecture, and literature of the period, just as it did in the
political treatise and the religious tract. As A. Dwight Culler has demon-
strated: "the great Victorian debate about science, religion, art, and culture
always had a historical dimension, always was concerned with the relation
of the present to the past." 2 While the study of history became increasingly
professionalized during the Victorian era, 3 instilling a new respect for the
integrity - indeed, the difference - of the past, there was nevertheless a
strong sense of the connections between antiquity and modernity. Victorian
intellectuals viewed history as a continuum. They researched the suggestive
significance of past events and past cultures to understand the most pressing
intellectual and personal concerns of the present. In 1831 John Stuart Mill
observed in the "Spirit of the Age" that the Victorians' desire to locate
themselves in history was a novel phenomenon: "The idea of comparing
one's own age with former ages, or with our notion of those which are to
come, had occurred to philosophers; but it never before was itself the
dominant idea of any age." 4 Similarly, in 1843 the influential historian and
cultural critic Thomas Carlyle claimed that the purpose and value of
writing about the past was to "illustrate the Present and the Future." 5
Comparisons between past and present could reflect well on a modern
world seen, according to the Whig view of history, to have progressed
toward a more advanced state of civilization. But the Victorians by no
means always felt that their contemporary age was superior to that of
previous generations.
Certainly, the imagined pre-industrial past evident in some Victorian
writing provides escape from the ugliness of modern life. Take, for
example, how William Morris begins the prologue to The Earthly Paradise