Neo-Georgian Fiction

Reimagining the Eighteenth Century in the Contemporary Historical Novel

Jakub Lipski, Joanna Maciulewicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000388596
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book contributes to the development of contemporary historical fiction studies by analysing neo-Georgian fiction, which, unlike neo-Victorian fiction, has so far received little critical attention. The essays included in this collection study the ways in which the selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels recreate the Georgian period in order to view its ideologies through the lens of such modern critical theories as performativity, post-colonialism, feminism or visual theories. They also demonstrate the rich repertoire of subgenres of neo-Georgian fiction, ranging from biographical fiction, epistolary novels to magical realism. The included studies of the diverse novelistic conventions used to re-contextualise the Georgian reality reflect the way we see its relevance and relation to the present and trace the indebtedness of the new forms of the contemporary novel to the traditional novelistic genres.

1Peter Ackroyd’s Neo-Georgian Fiction

Reconstructing “the Age of Disguise”¹

Jakub Lipski

Peter Ackroyd’s (b. 1949) work has invariably manifested a reconciliation of novel writing with popular historiography and cultural studies, a trait that finds it fullest manifestation in the writer’s unwavering interest in the form of the historical novel. Indeed, his literary output is a perfect illustration of a trend defined by George Rousseau as a “crossover of biography, history, and fiction”, which, according to the critic, dominated the English literary scene in the three closing decades of the twentieth century.²

Among Ackroyd’s numerous historical novels, there are three that reconstruct selected events of the Georgian period: Hawksmoor (1985), Chatterton (1987), The Lambs of London (2004).³ These three works display similarities that suggest a coherent vision of the Georgian period, especially as they span almost the whole century. I would like to argue here that Ackroyd’s choices of themes and (real-life) characters reconstruct the Georgian period as “the Age of Disguise”, a concept put forward by Maximillian Novak in 1977.⁴ Needless to say, I will not be trying to prove Ackroyd’s direct indebtedness to Novak; rather a convergence of visions, the writer’s implicit responsiveness to the way the Georgian period has been reconstructed and “post-modernised” in literary criticism since the 1970s and 1980s, when the first major studies of the eighteenth-century masquerade as a far-reaching socio-cultural practice, not just a form of entertainment, were published. The literary metaphor of disguise, as well as the related concepts of mask, theatre and performance, capture the essence of a time when the Delphic precept “know then thyself” acquired a new dimension. The first decades of the century brought about a lively philosophical debate over personal identity, now destabilised by the anti-substantialist approaches of John Locke and David Hume. At the same time, the masked assembly as a form of entertainment enjoyed a growing popularity, to the point where the metaphor of “world as masquerade” started to be used alongside the conventional theatrum mundi metaphor.⁵ When seen in the context of each other, these two phenomena help to understand better the Georgian period and its typical socio-cultural conventions. The Polish critic Janusz Ryba goes as far as to talk about “Enlightenment masquerade-mania”, and puts forward a very broad definition of the masquerade as “a rather extensive sphere of human gestures and behaviours, aiming at changing one’s appearance or identity, pretending and misleading others by means of false ‘creations’”.⁶ Ackroyd’s use of thus broadly understood masquerade in his three neo-Georgian novels cannot surprise in the wider context of his work.

The metaphorical potential of disguise and masquerade is explored throughout Ackroyd’s fiction. One of his earliest books, the 1979 piece of cultural history titled Dressing Up, Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession, is often used as a context for the role of disguise and performance in Ackroyd’s fictional works. For example, David Sexton goes as far as to call it “the key to all Peter Ackroyd’s work”.⁷ I share this view, but it is worth noting that the book prioritises nineteenth-century material, especially late Victorian pantomime and the art of music halls. As this chapter will show, Ackroyd’s neo-Georgian novels do the same cultural work as his neo-Victorian texts, thus providing a wider context for the recurring themes of the writer’s output, and might even be read as a more profound reinterpretation of the historical moment.

Ackroyd’s historical fiction should also be seen against the background of contemporaneous literary theories. The novelist began his writing career in the 1970s, when New Historicism problematised traditional ways of understanding history and historiography, pointing out their affinities with the genre of the historical novel. The concepts of masquerade, theatre and performance are then used as an interpretative prism through which Ackroyd revisions the Georgian period, very much in line with the fundamental assumption of new-historical studies that every historical writing is an individualised interpretative narrative. Importantly, this idea is also reflected at the intradiegetic level of the novels, with the protagonists both exploring the potential and struggling with the limits of historical reconstruction. Thus, Ackroyd’s historical writing oscillates between two categories distinguished by Ansgar Nünning: metahistorical fiction and historiographic metafiction. The former, Nünning points out, features contemporary characters trying to reconstruct the past, thus putting emphasis on the nature of historical reconstruction itself – indicating its relativity, arbitrariness and inherent limits resulting from the fact that the process depends on a subjective interpretation of accessible sources.⁸ Historiographic metafiction is a term that Nünning borrows from Linda Hutcheon’s groundbreaking A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988). This type of fiction is also reflective of the postmodern trend to undermine positivist historiography by highlighting “epistemological problems attached to the mediation of historical events”.⁹ It foregrounds metafictionality by featuring a narrator or characters who explicitly ponder the nature of any textual mediation, including historiography. In Ackroyd’s works, metafiction thus understood characterises both his third-person narrators and the characters struggling to reconstruct the past.

The Georgian period is then interpreted, rather than faithfully reconstructed, both by Ackroyd – the extra diegetic author – and by the characters within the fictional framework. My argument about the central role of the metaphor of disguise in the offered interpretation will be corroborated by the following readings of the plot, recurring images, motifs and themes, as well as the discourse of identity underpinning the narratives.

Stories of Frauds

The three novels tell stories of eighteenth-century frauds and forgers. The plots are convoluted, dissolving the binaries of past and present, as well as juxtaposing different historical moments. Hawksmoor offers two intertwined narratives: six odd-numbered chapters make up an archaically stylised first-person confession narrative of Nicholas Dyer, a fictional architect responsible for the realisation of a historical urban project in the years 1711–1715: the building of six Anglican churches meant to define the London cityscape after the fire of 1666. The six evenly-numbered chapters, in turn, constitute a modern crime story, featuring Detective Nicholas Hawksmoor trying to solve the case of mysterious murders uncannily connected with the six eighteenth-century churches. The two storylines permeate each other by way of troubling repetitions and structural parallels, thus creating an impression of circularity and atemporality. The interpretative possibilities of the novel have been largely explored in criticism, perhaps most fully by Susana Onega and David Malcolm,¹⁰ so I will concentrate on the “masquerading” nature of Dyer’s narrative.

The name itself is a mask, or “false creation”, hiding the true name of the architect responsible for the six churches – Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661–1736), first an assistant to Sir Christopher Wren (who is also represented in Ackroyd’s novel), and then an independent architect. The idea to use the real name for the contemporary detective, rather than the eighteenth-century architect, adds to the theme of uncanny doubling and serves as further complication to the temporal dimension of the narrative. Be that as it may, disguise is what already determines Dyer’s narrative at this most basic level.

Hawksmoor-Dyer in Ackroyd’s novel is a crypto-Satanist who uses church architecture as a vehicle for his occult messages. In Dyer’s own words: “my Churches are the Vesture of other active Powers” (H, 180). The metaphor of vesture does not seem to be accidental here; rather, it situates Dyer’s fraudulent design in the context of eighteenth-century masquerades, in particular, the so-called “architectural masquerades” as defined by Janusz Ryba. Writing about late eighteenth-century Poland, Ryba discusses the fashion for peasant cottages with lavish interiors among the nobility and relates it to the carnivalesque rituals at masked assemblies: aristocrats dressing up as peasants.¹¹ Even if Ryba analyses the phenomenon in the Polish context, it exemplifies a universal pattern of what might be termed antithetical masking; in Hawksmoor, this pattern underpins Dyer’s idea to use sacred form to disguise diabolical content, while other popular manifestations of antithetical masking at eighteenth-century masquerades featured ladies of the night dressed up as nuns or clergymen as grotesque devils.

The narrative structure of Chatterton is even more complex, constituted, as it is, by three intertwined storylines taking place at three different historical moments: the story of Thomas Chatterton set forth in his first-person diary stylised in a manner reminiscent of Dyer’s and in a third-person narrative from a twentieth-century perspective; the story of painter Henry Wallis (1830–1916), focusing on his work on the best-known painting representing dead Chatterton; finally, the twentieth-century story of Charles Wychwood, an unfulfilled poet in possession of hitherto unknown texts by Chatterton, who carries out his amateur investigation into the mysterious death of the eighteenth-century poet. These three levels are united not only by the figure of Chatterton but also by reflection upon art, creativity and originality provoked by the life of the famous forger.

Thomas Chatterton’s (1752–1770) claim for fame was a series of forged publications that responded to the so-called Ossianic craze in the 1760s. Chatterton put on the mask of one Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk from Bristol, and specialised in narrative poems stylised as medieval ballads:

I invented my self as a monk of the fifteenth century, Thomas Rowley; I dressed him in Raggs, I made him Blind and then I made him Sing. […] Knowing my own Skill in the Art of Personation […] I was a very Proteus to those who read my Works.

(Ch, 87, 89)

Chatterton, however, had difficulty finding a publisher, and this, along with gradually more frequent accusations of forgery and critical voices, including such authorities as Horace Walpole, drove the young author to commit suicide, as was commonly believed. This, eventually, contributed to the formation of the myth of the doomed poet and gained Chatterton post-mortem fame among the Romantics and the Victorians.¹²

Chatterton’s death is what unites the three narrative levels of Ackroyd’s novel, which re-visions the event. The Henry Wallis story centres on his painterly representation of the poet’s death – “The Death of Chatterton” (1856) – and his relationship with the model, the Victorian author George Meredith. The twentieth-century investigation into the death conducted by Charles Wychwood, in turn, ends with the amateur detective concluding that the suicidal death was a masquerade. The decisive piece of evidence is a newly found signed manuscript with a later date. Wychwood’s documents also include Chatterton’s poems and aphorisms, one of which is especially telling: “my Eyes are always upon thee, O lovely Delusion” (Ch, 60). After Wychwood’s death, the investigation is continued by his friend Philip Slack, who finds out that Chatterton did commit suicide, and the newly discovered documents were forged by an eighteenth-century publisher. As if that were not enough, the third-person narrative to follow, possibly authored by Slack (who at one point ponders the idea of writing a novel about Chatterton), suggests that the death was an accident resulting from an unintentional overdose of arsenic and laudanum. This version has its supporters todays; it is offered as a “likely explanation” on the website of the Thomas Chatterton Society.¹³

The most recent of Ackroyd’s neo-Georgian novels – The Lambs of London (2004) – shows a more unified narrative structure. It focuses on an episode in the lives of Charles Lamb (1775–1834), his sister Mary (1764–1847) and William Ireland (1775–1835), all important figures in the literary panorama of late-eighteenth-century London. Ackroyd returns to the theme of literary hoax and offers further reflection on the issues of authenticity and originality, which – after the success of Chatterton – appeared in some of his other novels as well (most notably, perhaps, in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem from 1994). Despite the tit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Delineating the Neo-Georgian
• 1 Peter Ackroyd’s Neo-Georgian Fiction: Reconstructing “the Age of Disguise”
• 2 Defoe’s Foes: The Author As Character
• 3 Beyond Terracentric History: The Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade in Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger
• 4 “Whose Pictur’d Morals Charm the Mind / And Through the Eye Correct the Heart”1: Rewriting the Pictorial Narrative of A Harlot’s Progress
• 5 The Blind Man and the Rainbow: Vicarious Experience and Libertinism in The Skull and the Nightingale
• 6 Renarrating Women’s Stories: Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock
• Bibliography
• Index