Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890

Tracing the debate over what counted as history in nineteenth-century Britain, Mike Goode uncovers a Romantic literary and political tradition which held that historians must be manly and sentimental to understand history properly. Victorian academics successfully countered this tradition by asserting the superior importance of an unfeeling science of history.

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Mike Goode challenges received accounts of the development of modern historical thought, arguing that, in Romantic and Victorian Britain, struggles over historical authority were as much disputes over the nature of proper masculinity as they were contests over ideas and interpretations. Drawing on primary materials from such diverse fields as political economy, moral philosophy, medicine, antiquarian study, and visual satire, Goode uncovers a Romantic historical tradition - one most influentially realized by historical novels - which held that historians must be manly and sentimental in order to understand history properly. Goode further shows how and why, by later in the nineteenth century, the bodies and feelings - but not the gender - of historians came to be regarded as irrelevant to their scholarly projects. The result is an unconventional account of the rise of history, one that focuses more on novelists, political philosophers, and caricaturists than on historians.