MIRIAM L. WALLACE
‘Doing’ history, or what I learned from
the
1794
London Treason Trials
LITERARY scholars who specialise in the English ‘Jacobin’ novelists1 associated with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft work with writing that generically engages both the ‘literary’ and the ‘historical’. For example, a cryptic reference to the1794London Treason Trials as ‘too well known to need repetition’,2led this literary critic into an explicitly inter-disciplinary project between history, law, and literature. Initially docu-mentation of the Trials seemed significant as background context for the composition and reception of the English ‘Jacobin’ novels of Thomas Holcroft, a proper literary project. But comparing twentieth-century accounts of the trials with primary documents from1794and1795raised interesting questions about the charge of ‘constructive treason’ itself and the powerful rhetorical work accomplished by writings produced on both sides either promoting or attacking the government’s case. Grappling honestly with this kind of material requires that scholars resist falling into either literary formalist or historical contextual approaches.
The British charge of high treason in1794derives from the statute of25
Edward III c.2, defining as treason: ‘When a man doth compass or imagine the death of our lord the king, or our lady the queen, or of their eldestson and heir.’3 The concept of ‘constructive’ treason expands this definition to include acts, which although they may not include the direct murder of the king, queen or heir, can be said to lead ‘constructively’ or by implication to such an event. A plan to imprison the king is held to be treason constructively, even without the intent of murder, because captive
1. The term ‘English Jacobins’ was used in 1790s Britain to discredit radicals and reformers by conflating them with the excesses of the French Revolution. Two pro-governmentperiodicals, theAnti-Jacobinof1797 and theAnti-Jacobin review and magazine
(1798-1821), were particularly significant in popularising the terminology of ‘Jacobinism’ as a catch-all for any person, group, or writing perceived to threaten the British estab-lishment or William Pitt’s government. In fact the targets of theAnti-Jacobinwere so varied in their sympathies that it is difficult to recognise them as a coherent group at all. ‘English Jacobins’ has become a normative term, however, for both historians and literary critics in the twentieth century. Carl B. Cone’s important historical study is titled The English Jacobins: reformers in the late18thcentury(New York1968) and Gary Kelly’s foundational
literary study is entitledThe English Jacobin novel1780-1805(Oxford1976).
2. Allene Gregory, The French Revolution and the English novel (PortWashington, NY
1965), p.57.
kings tend to be short-lived. In the case of the1794trials the real fear was that in pressuring the House of Commons for parliamentary reforms, political societies were threatening the very constitution of English gov-ernment embodied in the conjunction of the two Houses of Parliament and the monarch. The government feared national that ‘conventions’ showing popular support for more frequent parliamentary elections, broader access to representation, and lowering property requirements for parliamentary office could pose a challenge to the British Constitution itself, and so to the king in his role as state figurehead. In May1794, t he governmentbegan rounding up prominentmembers of the London Corresponding Society (LCS) and the Society for Constitutional Infor-mation (SCI). It then convened a grand jury to return a true bill against thirteen men for high treason, and further refined the possibilities of ‘constructive treason’ in Chief Justice James Eyre’s ‘Charge to the Grand Jury’ delivered in October of that year.4
The charge of treason ‘constructively’ implied by other actions and writings, rather than according to the strict definition of ‘treason’ as the act of plotting the king’s death or imprisonment, seemed particularly overdetermined in the case of a man best known as a literary figure, Thomas Holcroft. An autodidact and respected novelist and playwright, Holcroft was among the twelve men actually indicted on a charge of high treason.5 Never brought to trial – after the first three defendants were acquitted the others were dismissed and the charges dropped – Holcroft’s work and life seem to fall at the margins of most historical or literary analysis. For literary critics, Holcroft is usually a minor literary figure, sometimes credited with creating the first English ‘Jacobin’ novel (Anna St.Ives, 1792), sometimes mentioned as the translator of important con-tinental works (including works by Beaumarchais, Lavater, Mme de Genlis, Frederick II of Prussia, and Goethe), sometimes as a minor dra-matist.6 For historians, Holcroft is usually most important for his friendships with other more significant figures and his status as defendant in the 1794 trials.7
4. See AlbertGoodwin,The Friends of liberty: the English democratic movement in the age of the French Revolution(Cambridge, MA1979) p.331-40.
5. The eleven other men indicted were John Horne Tooke, Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall, John Augustus Bonney, Stewart Kyd, Jeremiah Joyce, John Richter, John Baxter, Thomas Wardle, Matthew Moore, and Richard Hodgson.
6. See Joseph Rosenblum,Thomas Holcroft: literature and politics in England in the age of the French Revolution(Lewiston, NY1995); Rodney Baine,Thomas Holcroft and the revolutionary novel (Athens, GA1965); Gregory Maertz, ‘Transmission of German literature and dis-senting voices in British culture: Thomas Holcroft and the Godwin circle’, in1650-1850; Ideas, aesthetics, and inquiries in the early modern era, ed. Kevin Cope and Laura Morrow (New York1997), p.271-300; Gregory,French Revolution and the English novel, and Kelly,English Jacobin novel.
7. See Cone,English Jacobins; Goodwin,Friends of liberty; Emma McLeod,The War of ideas: British attitudes to the wars and against revolutionary France,1792-1802(Brookfield, VT
The fact that, for literary scholars, the Treason Trials and the public and written debate that they produced are usually ‘context’ or ‘back-ground’ to the analysis of ‘proper’ literature such as novels, plays, poems, or translations of literary works, diminishes the potential for literary-trained critics to engage with this fascinating bit of writingaswriting. But if for historians the Trials are a matter of historical record, while the novels produced by Godwin and Holcroftduring and following the public event of the trials are merely biographical and contextual documents, the larger picture of how public debate and ideology were promulgated in various written forms to a broad audience of literate British readers is falsified. The work of radicals like Godwin and Holcroftspanned multiple genres of writing, from original fiction and drama through memoirs and histories to polemical essays, and it engaged many aspects of British culture, from political reformist societies to London literati, from gov-ernmental reforms to domestic arrangements. Consequently, their importance cannot be ascertained by studying a single genre of their writing, nor their significance by examining an isolated avenue of influ-ence. Also, the documents surrounding the Treason Trial are themselves complicated representations. Some were quasi-official legal documents, such as the record of the Trials themselves and the Charge to the Grand Jury that returned the bill for the arrest of twelve men on the charge of high treason.8Others were publicly distributed and polemical writings on the significance of the trials and the charges, part of the larger 1790s discursive field on the foundation of nation, the rights and meaning of citizenship, and the interpretation of English history and tradition. None of these documents is simply factual. Thus, some consideration of the representational status of these documents is essential, rendering an empirical historical approach of limited value; yet although a form of persuasive rhetorical writing, these documents are not generically ‘literary’.
i. Historians and historiography
Some historians have been asking how approaches associated with literary theory impact a sense of what history is and what historiography does or ought to do. These concerns are usually presumed to have been initiated by Hayden White’s Metahistory in 1973, and to have become more
8. For an insightful discussion of the kinds of legal documents represented by James Eyre in ‘Charge to the grand jury’, inThe Trial of Thomas Hardy for high treason, at the sessions house in the Old Bailey(London1794) and the record ofThe Trial of Thomas Hardy, see Alexander Welsh, Strong representations: narrative and circumstantial evidence in England(Baltimore, MD
pressing with the advent of ‘cultural history’ in the1980s.9 Historians of historiography such as Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra have turned to approaches considered more ‘literary’, in the case of White emphasising the full range of tropes and narrative forms upon which much writing of history depends, and in the case of LaCapra examining the limitations of an empirical, scientific-objectivist mode of historio-graphy in favour of more fluid, potentially carnivalesque, or psycholo-gically-engaged modes.10 Some historians have reacted with hostility, confusion, or enthusiasm to such challenges. While cultural historians such as Lynn Hunt have reacted with enthusiasm, still others suspected that such approaches were, in Nancy Partner’s words, ‘smuggled out of linguistics and philosophy departments by literary critics and free-ranging or metacritics, and lobbed like grenades into unsuspecting history departments’.11Complete neglect on the part of mainstream historians is documented by Richard Vann, who argues that except for the 1973 Metahistory, the work of Hayden White has gone largely unread by his-torians and philosophers for a number of formal and disciplinary reasons.12
On the other side, some literary critics have welcomed the infiltration of history by literary-influenced theories, seeing a challenge to the empirical truth-claims of historiography as strengthening the prominence of their own fields or legitimating their transgression of disciplinary boundaries. Still others, particularly eighteenth-century scholars, prefer to maintain history as a base on which to build claims, the empirical grounding of the humanities disciplines. Both reactions are territorial, emphasising dis-ciplinary authority and potentially delimiting valuable scholarly work. This second response presents a particular danger for literary-trained critics, who may exhibit an overabundance of respect for history and historical truth, treating the work of historians as not a different epis-temological method of dealing with mediated information, but as more
9. See theNorton anthology of theory and criticismentry ‘Hayden White’, ed. Vincent Leitch (New York2001), p.1709-12(p.1710), andThe New cultural history, ed. Aletta Biersack and Lynn Hunt(Berkeley, CA1989), especially Lynn Hunt’s ‘Introduction: history, culture, and text’ (p.1-22). See also Peter De Bolla, ‘Disfiguring history’,Diacritics 16.4 (1986), p.49-60; Chris Lorenz, ‘Can histories be true? Narrativism, positivism, and the ‘‘meta-phorical turn’’ ’,History and theory37.3(1998), p.309-29; John E. Toews, ‘Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner’sA New philosophy of history’,History and theory36.2(1997), p.235-48, and Carol E. Quillen, ‘Crossing the line: limits and desire in historical interpretation’,History and theory37.1(1998), p.40-68. Examples of historical work engaging such approaches can be found in the special issue ofHistory and theoryon ‘Producing the past: making histories inside and outside the academy’, ed. Ann Shapiro,36.4(December1997).
10. See Lloyd Kramer, ‘Literature, criticism, and historical imagination: the literary challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra’, inNew cultural history, p.98-128.
11. See ‘Making up lost time: writing on the writing of history’, Speculum 61(1986), p.90-117(p.95).
absolutely true. As Suzanne Gearhart warns both literary and historical scholars:
Literary theory and the philosophy of history – indeed, any theory that is con-cerned with ‘marking off’ the fundamental boundaries of a given field – fre-quently imply or state a theory concerning the ‘other’ discipline. But with almost equal frequency, that ‘background’ theory idealises the ‘other’ discipline in a variety of ways in order to permit the theorist to set the boundaries of his ‘own’ discipline, and these boundaries already contain in themselves the most basic assumptions governing the discipline. Thus the most fervent believers in an ideal history are often literary critics and philosophers. The most fervent believers in an ideal of literature are frequently historians, philosophers, and scientists. This idealisation of the ‘other’ discipline is just one side of a coin whose reverse is the view that that ‘other’ discipline is unimportant, or lacking in rigor, or excessively logical or dogmatic.13
Some literary criticism has tended to an instrumentalist use of historical work as the factual base on which to rest properly literary arguments, without always adequate recognition of the interpretive and theoretical elements of historical writing or the complexities of historical research. Hayden White, in ‘The historical text as literary artifact’, argues that not only historians, but scientists and literary scholars have a vested interest in imagining historical accounts as determining a mid-point between the truth claims of the physical sciences and of literary texts. White explains that, ‘literary theorists, when they are speaking about the ‘‘context’’ of a literary work [...] suppose that this context – the ‘‘historical milieu’’ – has a concreteness and an accessibility that the work itself can never have’. On the contrary, White claims that:
historical documents are not less opaque than the texts studied by the literary critic. Nor is the world those documents figure more accessible [...] In fact, the opaqueness of the world figured in historical documents is, if anything, increased by the production of historical narratives. Each new historical work only adds to the number of possible texts that have to be interpreted if a full and accurate picture of a given historical milieu is to be faithfully drawn. The relationship between the past to be analysed and historical works produced by analysis of the documents is paradoxical; themorewe know about the past, the more difficult it is to generalise about it (Norton anthology of theory and criticism, p.1719).
White’s acknowledgement of the opacity of ‘historical’ documents and the layered effect of historical work is a welcome reminder that historians do more than simply ‘tell it like it is’. As critical historiographies have noted, historical scholarship itself is writing that is largely based upon written sources, and so would seem obliged to engage with serious questions about the status of writing itself. Since post-structuralism it is difficult to accept written documents of any kind as simply a matter of transparent record,
without recognising that the effect of transparent recounting is itself a kind of writing practice. In the ‘documentary or self-sufficient research model’, according to Dominick LaCapra:
there is a sense in which writing is not a problem. Writing is subordinated to content in the form of facts, their narration, or their analysis. It is thus reduced to writing up the results of research, and style is limited to a restricted notion of mellifluous, immediately readable or accessible, well-crafted prose [...] in which form ideally has no significant effect on content.14
LaCapra and White explicitly contest such a version of historical writing as adequate or even achievable. Further, as scholars have noted, the documents of ‘historical record’ are not uniformly transparent themselves, but rather plagued by differences in evidentiary quality, rhetorical style, social status, and provenance. It is precisely these complexities that demand the analytical and interpretive work of the historian.
The problem of generic complexity is particularly heightened for scholarship on the English Jacobins, who were writing in the turmoil of
1790s London where the written records are so rich and diffuse, and who were themselves so involved in the conflict about the powers of imagin-ation and the grounds for rimagin-ational knowledge. The peculiarity of the documents produced around the 1794 Treason Trails is how self-con-sciously written they are, while their actual or quasi-legal status places particular significance on their rhetorical strategies and particular kinds of truth claims. One significant document, Lord Chief Justice James Eyre’s ‘Charge to the Grand Jury’, was printed and distributed publicly at the request of members of the jury who were impressed with his exposition of the charge of constructive treason.15The ‘Charge’ was also reprinted by publishers who were sympathetic to the reform societies, and who rendered into capital letters those passages that they found most objectionable. While both documents are (to the best of my knowledge) accurate copies in content, the form of each encourages a particular interpretive reading which impacts upon the reception of that content. Another important document, William Godwin’s ‘Cursory Strictures on the Charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice James Eyre to the Grand Jury, October 2, 1794’, was firstpublished in the Morning Chronicle and later reprinted as a pamphlet. In it Godwin delineated objectionable legal extrapolations in the published ‘Charge’, thereby offering a competing reading of English law on treason.16 Finally, in early 1795, Holcroft’s pamphlet, A Narrative of the facts, relating to a prosecution for high treason; including the address to the jury which the court refused to hear: with letters to the
14. Dominick LaCapra, ‘Writing history, writing trauma’, in Writing history, writing trauma(Baltimore, MD2001) ch.1, p.2-3.
15. Eyre, ‘Charge to the grand jury’ i.3-15.
16. W. Godwin, ‘Cursory strictures’, inUncollected writings1785-1822: articles in periodicals and six pamphlets, ed. J. W. Marken and B. R. Pollin (1794; Gainesville, FL1968), p.145-76
attorney general, Lord Chief Justice Eyre, Mr Serjeant Adams, the Honourable Thomas Erskine and Vicary Gibbs, Esq.: and the defence the author had prepared, if he had been brought to trial, appeared, painting a powerful picture of the impact of the trial, despite his dismissal, on Holcroft’s financial and social standing.17 A Narrative of the facts attacks a justice system that accuses a man, then refuses to hear his defence, and leaves him tainted with the shadow of a felony againstwhich he is unable to defend himself. Holcroft aligns himself with literary victims such as Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and seeks to create through writing the public hearing he was denied at the trial. He documents his own correspondence with supporters and antagonists and even reiterates the Judge’s warning that he keep his complaints about the trial’s effects to himself lest he suffer a less fortuitous future trial. Each of these documents uses the particular persuasive power and public reach of the written, casting itself as an ‘authentic’ and ‘true’ account in contention with other documents and with the event of the trial itself. Thus, the problem of how writing and written representation refer to material experience and abstract truth-claims, and even more problematically, how such writing was received and read, are central concerns of any analysis of the written debates surrounding the Treason Trials of 1794. Obsessive retelling and rewriting of events and their significance is particularly marked in the swirling representations of the Trials.
This problem of representation makes the event of the Trials and their public documents fertile ground for historically-minded literary critics, and several important works have already engaged the Trials. John Barrell’s magisterial Imagining the king’s death deals extensively with the Trials, their published accounts, and the complexities of charging men with imagining the death of the king in a historical moment when imagination was particularly contested and expansive.18 Judith Pascoe has examined the spectacle of the Trials themselves in Romantic theatri-cality, noting that late-century courtroom trials became a popular enter-tainment drawing significant numbers of female spectators, and exploring how the form of the legal trial played to those viewers.19 Thus, my own interest in the ways in which a concept of constructive, extrapolative treason intersected with the larger Jacobin project to use popular written forms to effect a larger change in public opinion, is set within a larger context of literary critics working with historical materials in a mode that is both historicist and informed by literary sensitivity toward the functions of representation and figuration.
17. Holcroft,A Narrative of the facts(London1794).
18. John Barrell,Imagining the king’s death: figurative treason, fantasies of regicide1793-1796 (Oxford2000).
ii. Interdisciplinarity and English Jacobinism
Narrow disciplinary boundaries are particularly problematic for work on English Jacobin writers like Godwin, Holcroft, and their colleagues. They were themselves working across areas of knowledge production and use of language which functioned differently in their day; in the case of the Treason Trials, educated readings of English law and representations of ‘justice’ and ‘rights’ in popular print media were particularly in conten-tion. The trial itself both put into question and solidified the developing boundaries between the highly figurative, emotional language associated with sentimental novels and some barristers’ pleas on one side, and the rational discourse presumed by the ‘rule of law’ and Godwinian ‘truth’ on the other. Godwin, Holcroft, and their compatriots asserted a claim to authentic, masculine, and rational truth, the ‘language of impressive sincerity’,20in the context of the trials, while at the same time their star council, Thomas Erskine, was known for his dramatic and emotionally compelling courtroom style.21
English Jacobinism was concerned with the complex differences and connections between historical and fiction writing, prefiguring con-temporary interest in the relationship of fiction and history. Viewing novels most often as a site for individual growth and education, the English Jacobins combined writing popular fiction with the production of biography, history, memoir, educational tracts, and political history. Fiction reading led, some of them argued, to an interest in biography, and biography of real people to an interest in history in a logical trajectory from the more personal and affective, to the more general and informa-tive. For example, Godwin’s preface to his novel of systemic injustice, Things as they are or the adventures of Caleb Williams, represents the novel as an effort to teach a broader public that ‘the spirit and character of government intrudes itself into every rank of society’.22 In addition, Godwin famously dated his preface to correspond to the day of Thomas Hardy’s arrest as the first victim of the1794Trials, seeking to tighten the connections between fiction and historical event. Even more explicitly, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays both argue that reading fiction serves usefully as a first step to developing an interest in history, arguing that self-educated readers can be coaxed from the particular and affective to the general and rational.23These writers, then, saw a linear connection between genres of fiction and history, mirrored by individual readers’
20. See Maurice Hindle’s note to ‘Godwin’s letter to Joseph Gerrald’ in William Godwin,Things as they are, or the adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. M. Hindle (1794; New York
1988), p.355-58(p.355).
21. See Cone,English Jacobins, p.137-38, and Katherine Binhammer, ‘The sex panic of the1790s’,Journal of the history of sexuality6.3(1996), p.409-34(p.428).
22. Godwin,Things as they are, p.3.
intellectual and political development. Such intellectual growth through reading is imagined as particularly pressing and pertinent for female and labouring readers, and as an alternative to the conventional classical education common to university men. This significant aspect of English Jacobinism cannot be appreciated by scholarship that restricts the proper objects of its study to novels and plays on the one hand, or to political treatises on the other. Such strictly delineated scholarship risks replicating as disciplinary the civic distinctions which Godwin and Holcroft ques-tioned.
But the project of Godwin’s and Holcroft’s fiction, to reach a larger audience by means of an affective and popular genre, and to induce those readers to expand their reading matter to include history, biography, and political philosophy, was at odds with Godwin’s argument in ‘Cursory strictures’ that ‘truth’ was endangered by the emotive and figurative language of the Chief Justice’s version of the law. Most political historians agree that the effective disjunction Godwin made between the language of law and that of fiction contributed to saving Holcroft and his colleagues from conviction. Carl Cone argues that: ‘When laid open by Godwin’s indignant analysis this charge [of constructive treason] had implications not foreseen by Justice Eyre or by the ministers. Readers of Godwin’s pamphlet Cursory strictures saw that ministers did not have ‘‘clear and undoubted grounds’’ for establishing treason’ (English Jacobins, p.203). But Godwin’s and Holcroft’s strict separation in this case between an authentic truth of intent and an illicitly imaginative charge undercut their future projects, making their literary work politically suspect because its rhetorical power and designs on its readers were evident to a post-trial readership. Ironically, by overly delimiting the territory proper to figuration and that of empirical truth, they undermined their own powerful project of using popular, figurative, and affective writing to impact and shape public reception of national, discursive, and political ideas.
The complexity of writing produced by the English Jacobins, especially Godwin and Holcroft, in terms of genre, argument, and ‘tendency’ (or ideological implication)24 makes either a purely ‘literary’ or a purely ‘historical’ approach equally inadequate. My project of examining the trial and its public print representations in1794and1795depended upon materials that are not ostensibly literary or aesthetic documents, but those usually classified as historical documents. Attempting to claim Eyre’s ‘Charge’, ‘Cursory strictures’, orA Narrative of the facts as literary writing in the modern sense was not the point; the issue is not whether these texts are aesthetically complex or unfairly neglected rhetorical masterpieces.
Wollstonecraft,A Vindication of the rights of man with a vindication of the rights of woman and hints, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (1792; Cambridge1995), p.283-84.
Nor, on the other hand, was my work claiming to make significant historical discoveries that shed light on previously obscure events and motives. Rather, my essay was concerned with the implications of an extended public debate on the kind of language that could be used in legal charges and how it reflected on Godwin and Holcroft’s theories about didactic fiction. The charge of constructive treason, asserting that the accused had ‘imagined or compassed the death of the king’ by his actions, including the act of writing, seemed peculiarly unstable when applied to a writer of fictions and dramas that overtly theorised an intentional political effect on their audiences. The charge itself appeared to blur, rather than distinguish, fiction and law. It was precisely the imaginative speculativeness of the charge as delivered by Eyre that Godwin attacked in ‘Cursory strictures’, just as it was the figurative dimension of the ‘Charge’ that seemed appropriate for examination by a literary critic.
iii. Situating/situated disciplines
The historical shift in the US from a mid-twentieth-century conception of literary study as properly concerned with a deracinated aesthetics to a renewed interest in historical contexts and historicising conceptions of authorship, literariness, subjectivity, institutionalisation, and print culture has been extensively discussed.25 On the other side, the discipline of history has been challenged not only by the advent of post-structural challenges to empiricism, objectivity, and discursive transparency, but even more recently by the concept of ‘trauma’ as a site where the historical and the personal, the factual and the affective conjoin. Because ‘trauma’ recognises the continuing impact of historical event and personal experience, it has impacted both literary and historical disciplinary work, and so represents one possible model for working productively across disciplinary and generic boundaries. Dominick LaCapra’s recentwork on traumatic history, for example, draws upon concepts traditionally understood as improper to history, such as the psychoanalytic concept of transference to understand the particular relation of historiographer to his or her subject, and trauma to recognise the importance of writing history which acknowledges the affective dimension of historical accounts and their significance and yet renders them in written analytical form (p.1-42). This approach allows LaCapra to claim both the possibility of objective historical research and a connection to the past which is affective and engaged. He argues for ‘a conception of history as tensely
involving both an objective (not objectivist) reconstruction of the past and a dialogic exchange with it and other inquirers into it wherein knowledge involves not only the processing of information but also affect, empathy, and questions of value’ (‘Writing history’, p.35). Similarly stressing that affective knowledge and scholarly empathy should inform good scholarship, Janet Walker has argued that:
empirically based realist historiography may not be the most appropriate mode for certain historical representations because it may not take into sufficient account the vicissitudes of historical representation and memory. We have an ethical and political obligation to remember, acknowledge constantly, and deal with traumatic events of the past. But, at the same time, we must acknowledge that these events are subject to interpretation as they are remembered, spoken of, written down, or visually communicated. In other words, precisely because the past is open to partisan rereadings, there is a dire need to develop ways to understand representations of the past in texts that adhere nevertheless to historical reality.26
The 1794 Treason Trials are, as evidenced by the partisan tone of modern scholarship on the Trials, the real threat posed by the English political societies, and the French Revolution itself, a kind of traumatic site where accounts and analysis of documentary evidence are strongly influenced by transferential identification. Scholarship that attends to the complexities of reading the past, not simply as a mimetic mirror, but rather as a ‘situated’ interpretation, imagines a specifically historical yet not exclusively empirical mode of analysis. That is, rather than claiming absolute ‘truth’ for a particular version of events, we might build on the concept of ‘situated knowledges’, or knowledge which makes provisional truth claims based on the analyst’s location, methodology and informa-tional base, and which acknowledges the limitations posed by these spe-cifics.27 Famously theorised by Donna Haraway in the context of a critique of radical constructivism and scientific truth, the concept of situated knowledges enables scholars to make claims for objective provi-sional truth without claiming that those truths must therefore stand for all places and all times, and to incorporate affective and experiential infor-mation. This comes close to a rapprochement with the methods of some literary critics without eliding differences in the evidentiary status of documentary accounts, trial records, polemical essays, and narrative fiction. The richness of this way of thinking about historical work shows the impact of thinking across disciplinary boundaries, and seems prom-ising for scholarship on events like the Treason Trials.
26. ‘The traumatic paradox: documentary films, historical fictions, and cataclysmic past events’,Signs22:4(1997), p.803-25(p.806).
My essay on the1794 London Treason Trials ended by arguing that significant and traumatic events like the Trials need to be investigated explicitly by those trained asliterarycritics for the special concern with the material impact of figurative representations which they bring. This call assumes that literary critics have a viable and necessary interest in historical events and evidence (rather than attending to aesthetic textual production in only tangential connection with the more factual world of historical and legal detail). But, ironically, the address to ‘literary critics’ seemingly undercuts the interdisciplinary implications of the call itself: literary scholars were called to expand their field of inquiry (moving into interdisciplinary waters), but in issuing such a call, the essay also expli-citly suggested that a particular disciplinary group, literary critics, needed to move into these areas bearing their particular disciplinary expertise.
This double bind, both calling upon scholars to expand beyond the traditional boundaries of their terrain of expertise and at the same time suggesting that particular scholars are the ones who ought to be moving into these areas, typifies debates, both contentious and friendly, about interdisciplinary work – scholarly and pedagogical – over the last several years. As Vincent Leitch has argued, ‘Most interdisciplinary work sup-ports or modifies but does not transform [...] existing disciplines’.28 The seeming threat of interdisciplinary work to the ‘disciplines’ (however conceived), is much less than would be imagined because, as Leitch put it, ‘the origin and end of interdisciplines is the discipline’ (p.126). In other words, the researcher comes to interdisciplinary work with disciplinary allegiances and affiliations intact, and tends to conceive interdisciplinary work as adding something or working in between something in ways which actually reinscribe the existing disciplinary distinctions. Challen-ging disciplinary boundaries with work that aims to transcend them ironically also marks disciplinary boundaries and thus reifies them. The trick is not so much to supersede or abolish the parameters of disciplinary expertise as institutionally constituted, nor to merge fields so that history, law, and literature become indistinguishable, but to facilitate a relationship based on true dialogue between them. Under such a rubric, the borders of any discipline may be contested, but the value of particular approaches and those trained in them are exemplified as they stretch to analyse material formerly considered off-limits, and converse with scho-lars whose training bore a different emphasis.
John Bender argues that recent critical approaches (such as feminism, new historicism, and cultural materialism) which appear to reinvent the interdisciplinarity preceding the ‘Enlightenment invention of the aesthetic
as an autonomous discursive realm’,29actually suggestyetanother way of thinking beyond the constitution of modern disciplinarity specialisation. Like Leitch, Bender argues that the term interdisciplinary ‘implies the preservation of traditional disciplinary boundaries and provokes one to think of the critic either as a fugitive living dangerously in limbo between nations or operating as a kind of extraordinary ambassador [...] Inter-disciplinarity in itself does nothing to denaturalise the category of the aesthetic’ (p.87). On the other hand, what Bender names ‘transdisci-plinary’ work is truly threatening; by claiming not merely to expand the sorts of materials that might be considered by literary critics, but to reconfigure the ways in which those materials are interpreted and thus transform the assumptions on which interpretive disciplinary norms are based, scholars really do begin reconfiguring particular disciplines (p.87-88).
Bender further suggests that some of the most impressive critical work in the field of eighteenth-century studies has come from scholars with strong allegiances to other periods or regions (such as Jerome Christensen, Nancy Armstrong, Cathy Davidson, Allon White and Peter Stallybrass). Because the eighteenth century was the period of ‘Enlightenment’ and the parameters of academic fields of knowledge derive in large measure from the same period that scholars of the Enlightenment study, we, even more than other period scholars, have a tendency to replicate in our scholarship the epistemological assumptions of our objects of study (p.88). Greg Clingham would appear to agree that there is a serious tendency for eighteenth-century scholarship to repeat the terms of its subject of study. In his introduction to Making history, Clingham notes the problem of policing the boundaries between eighteenth-century historiography and literature. Discussing the advent of ‘pseudohistorical’ documents such as the works of Ossian and of Thomas Chatterton, works that expressly used the concepts of historical authenticity and the vogue for the antique, as themselves helping to create an Enlightenment sense of the historical, Clingham points out that:
[The] gap [between the true and the false, between the historical event and the psuedohistorical event ...] and attempts to police or to bridge it – is particularly problematic [in the eighteenth century] for a variety of reasons. Because the Enlightenment has been identified in postmodern culture as the origin of mod-ernity itself [...], we have much invested in maintaining a rigid concept of Enlightenment institutions and practices. But even as we have recognised and explored the linguistic sophistication and self-consciousness of the eighteenth-century texts, and positioned them more thoroughly within the contexts of postmodern and new historical readings of eighteenth-century culture, our con-ception of the historiography of eighteenth-century culture has not kept pace. To recognise, in eighteenth-century texts, the performativity of language in the
29. ‘Eighteenth-century studies’, Redrawing the boundaries (New York 1992), p.79-99
production of historical knowledge – whatever the generic form that knowledge might take – is to blur the boundaries between genres, to pose fundamental questions about the nature of the personal and social identities, and to undermine the notion of the eighteenth century as an origin for anything modern.30 Eighteenth-century writing itself then, whether categorised in retrospect as literary or historical, is both performative and constitutive, and so begs the questions which strict disciplinarity takes as given. Clingham is particularly interested here in the ways in which overtly literary or per-formative writing is not only part of historical record, but actually functions to create the historical it assumes. Our very location as post-moderns, invested in locating the roots of modernism in our period of study, potentially betrays our project and leads to overly rigid generic and disciplinary boundaries.
Following Bender’s and Clingham’s warnings about the tendency for work on the eighteenth century to replicate its own terms, we might recognise a particular potential for situated criticism of the Enlight-enment. Precisely because modern institutions are founded on the epis-temological assumptions of the ‘Age of Reason’, this period, during which the forms of history, law, and literature were created, presents a particularly appropriate place for transdisciplinary scholarly investi-gation. Bender suggests that scholars trained in other periods, like Arm-strong, Christensen, Stallybrass and White, may be better able to read ‘genealogically’ (Foucault) because of a ‘certain cognitive dissonance’ between their method and their subject (p.85-86):
the whole institution of criticism has been built on Enlightenment foundations; at least critics of the Renaissance or the Romantic period could benefit from a certain cognitive dissonance that provided openings for genuine analysis. In eighteenth-century studies, however, the institution of criticism and the object of study are far more congruent. The field’s often remarkable conservatism reappears, in this light, as a historically determined systemic function.
Bender is suggesting that despite a certain lip service to interdisciplinary work, the field of eighteenth-century studies tends to value highly work that replicates the terms of its subject, work that reasserts Enlightenment values of humanism, rationality, individuality, and rational discourse. Thus, scholars situated with deep roots in periods with differing epis-temological assumptions have been able to function something like the other sex in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of one’s own, with the power of revealing to the one its own blindspot rather than acting as mirrors: ‘It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex – to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head.’31 While Bender con-centrates on the differences among literary critics because of their
30. ‘Introduction’, Making history: textuality and the forms of eighteenth-century culture
(Lewisburg, PA1998), p.9-15(p.10).
different period expertise, his point about the advantages of another perspective can be extended fruitfully to include other significant differ-ences in stand-point, from sex/gender/sexuality, to disciplinary training, to the type of institution with which scholars are affiliated or the kinds of research which their institutional resources make possible. Even genera-tional differences among scholars can contribute usefully to that ability to show each other the ‘spot the size of a shilling’. It is surely no accident that among the approaches Bender labels truly ‘transdisciplinary’ are feminism, new historicism in the US, and cultural materialism in the UK, all practices that invoke the writer’s own position and which were strongly influenced by voices from outside conventional academic dis-ciplines.
The epistemological moves familiar to those who work in the same fields, defined by period or by discipline, tend to produce the same – over and over. Likewise, those who work at similar institutions may run the risk of taking their particular institutionalised and disciplinary divergences and intersections as typical, rather than specific. The view from an institution like mine – very small, public, American, solely undergraduate and teaching-centred – is necessarily different from that of a large private research university, with an extensive library of primary materials and a highly specialised and research-oriented faculty. Taking note of these differences as potential strengths implies that scholars ought at least to talk across disciplines, institutions, and even positions within institutions, if they really care to interrogate the foundations of our own claims to knowledge. As Annette Kolodny put it many years ago, what one learns to read in graduate school are ‘not texts, but paradigms’.32While she was speaking specifically of literary study, Kolodny’s point bears repetition. One learns to read disciplinary paradigms as well, within one’s larger disciplines depending on theoretical and ideological allegiances, and within the larger institutional construction of disciplines, which varies to some degree from institution to institution.
Returning to Holcroft’s trial, in shoring up and even constructing stronger barriers between the power of emotional rhetoric and the appropriate and rational language of public accounts, the English Jaco-bins unwittingly undercut their own project of using the effect upon the reader as an epistemological tool and recognising ‘romance’ and ‘fiction’ as allied with material conditions and political consciousness. Likewise, protecting disciplinary domains may limit the forms of knowledge which can be produced, or even recognised as knowledge. If the conversations are heated, those trained under different epistemological paradigms or disciplines can nevertheless offer each other a valuable service, and it pays
32. ‘Dancing through the minefield: some observations on the theory, practice, and politics of a feminist literary criticism’, inNorton anthology of theory and criticism, p.2146-65
