Twilight Histories: Nostalgia and the Victorian Historical Novel

Twilight Histories explores the relationship between nostalgia and the Victorian historical novel, arguing that both responded to the turbulence brought by accelerating modernisation. Nostalgia began as a pathological homesickness, its first victims seventeenth-century soldiers serving abroad. Only gradually did it become the sentimental memory we understand it as today. In a striking parallel to nostalgia’s origin, the historical novel emerged in the tumultuous early-years of the nineteenth century, at a time when the Napoleonic Wars once again set troops on the move, creating a new wave of homesick soldiers. In the historical novels of Gaskell, Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy, nostalgia offered a language in which to describe the experience of living through changing times as a homesickness for history.