Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America

304 Pages·2017·3.768 MB·English

by  Ben Carver (auth.)

Alternate Histories and
Nineteenth-Century Literature
Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America
Ben Carver
Palgrave Studies in
Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
General Editor: Joseph Bristow
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century
Writing and Culture
Series Editor
Joseph Bristow
Department of English
University of California
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new
monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on
literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from
the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siécle. Attentive to the
historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series
will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these
terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political
movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influ-
ence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and
genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has
affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the
discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh
critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-
canonical writings of this era.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14607
Ben Carver
Alternate Histories
and Nineteenth-
Century Literature
Untimely Meditations in Britain,
France, and America
Ben Carver
Department of English
Falmouth University
Penryn, UK
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
ISBN 978-1-137-57333-9 ISBN 978-1-137-57334-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57334-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937711
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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Image credit: © Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
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To speak truthfully, one must talk of the impossibility, not simply the difficul-
ties, of a satisfactory portrayal, if one reflects on the tangled hypotheses that press
upon the steps of the alternate historian.
—Charles Renouvier, Uchronie (l’utopie dans l’histoire)
(Bureau de la Critique Philosophique, 1876), p. 408.
For my family
P a
reface and cknowledgements
Alternate history is a topic which encourages enthusiastic recommenda-
tions of further reading, and I am profoundly thankful for the many sug-
gestions received and conversations about imaginary worlds that have
taken place in and outside scholarly settings. It is also a subject which
appeals to several types of specialist reader—of utopian, science, and
other fields of speculative fiction. The many insights and suggestions I
have received from these experts have been influential on the finished
work. Many goose chases have been the result of these conversations,
some wild but in many cases to works of prose and poetry that have
become integral to the book. My thanks to all my interlocutors.
This work began as a doctoral thesis, and I am indebted to my Ph.D.
supervisors, Alex Murray and Regenia Gagnier, for their advice and sup-
port; I am likewise grateful for the constructive feedback from the mem-
bers of the assessment panel, Matthew Beaumont and Paul Young. These
readers clarified the project’s potential, and showed me what needed to be
worked on in the passage from the thesis to a monograph that was ready
to present to a wider audience. A large amount of theoretical elaboration
has gone, and the chapters on lost worlds and American alternate history
have been added. Chapter four is a development of ideas originally pub-
lished in the Journal of Victorian Culture 18.4 (December 2013).
The support for the project at Palgrave has been constant, and the
editorial guidance and efficiency have meant that the journey from pro-
posal to completion has been as smooth as it could have been. Joseph
Bristow’s scrupulous attention to the submitted manuscript revealed the
ix
x PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
imprecision and inconsistencies than I was blind to. The final version, I
hope, rewards the reader’s kind attention with sufficient clarity of expres-
sion.
The wonderful image of Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting of Sappho
and Alcaeus is reproduced here with the permission of the Walters Art
Museum in Baltimore. The painting was in my thoughts long before I
chose it for the cover illustration, and their generous cooperation has
meant that the book has the best image I could wish for it. William
West’s illustration of the divergence of species (the only illustration in
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) is reproduced with permis-
sion of John van Wyhe ed. 2002–, of The Complete Work of Charles
Darwin Online (http://darwin-online.org.uk/). A number of images
have been digitized by Edinburgh University, Main Library, and I am
grateful for their assistance; these are the plates from the first edition of
James Nasmyth and James Carpenter’s work, The Moon Considered as a
Planet, a World, and a Satellite (John Murray, 1874), William Herschel’s
engraving of the Nebula of Orion as it appeared in John Pringle Nichol’s
Thoughts on Some Important Points Related to the System of the World
(William Tait, 1846), and a figure from Alfred Russel Wallace’s The
Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise,
a Narrative of Travel with Studies of Man and Nature (Macmillan &
Co., 1869). The providers of the other images are Alamy image service
(Napoleon Crossing the Alps), University of Michigan Library (digitized
image of Renouvier’s untitled illustration of divergence), the Arthur
Conan Doyle encyclopedia (www.arthur-conan-doyle.com) and Arthur
Conan Doyle Trademarks (the illustrations which appeared in the Strand
Magazine’s serial publication of The Lost World (1912)), and the anon-
ymous provider of the open-source digital image of the frontispiece to
Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Charles L.
Webster & Company, 1889). I am grateful for all for their assistance and
permissions to reproduce.
Several of the French-language sources have not been translated into
English, and where not otherwise noted, I have produced my own trans-
lations to the best of my ability.
My family have lived with this project as long as I have, so my wife,
daughter, mother, and father are now fellow travellers in the realms of
what-if. Their love and patience during long periods of solitary study
have kept me going; they have also been here to welcome me back into
the lands of things-as-they-are, and I would not choose to live anywhere
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi
else. My father deserves special thanks for the enormous task of proof-
reading the work before submission. His attention and suggestions for
revision have made this a better book. The remaining errors are my own.
Penryn, UK Ben Carver