routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

280 The nineteenth century
income as a writer; and Dickens could not quite match him in producing
novels for the market. Ainsworth’s history brought together elements of
the Gothic, the adventure story, and the detailed ‘archaeological’ sense
which the mid-nineteenth century took as authenticity. In fact, his history
is fanciful rather than factual; early pulp-fiction rather than wellresearched
history, transformed into fiction. His subjects are often figures
who are partly historical and partly mythical: Dick Turpin (in Rookwood,
1834), Guy Fawkes (1841) and Jack Sheppard (1839) in the novels which
bear their names are good examples. Later, Ainsworth used places with
historical associations as his background: the Tower of London, Old St
Paul’s and Windsor Castle give their names to three of Ainsworth’s
novels of the 1840s. Later still, The Lancashire Witches (1848) took a
well-known and much mythologised series of events as the basis for a
popular novel, which led to many more with similar settings.
Harrison Ainsworth was an entertainer first, a historian much later.
He cashes in on the early/mid-Victorian taste for historical fantasy, making
little use of the kind of serious social observation of the past, in relation
to the present, which characterises the best of Scott’s works. The nearest
twentieth-century equivalent is the Hollywood historical epic: research
is taken over by the glamour of the hero and the pace of the action.
This can be seen as escapist use of history, rather than well-researched
authenticity. Ainsworth writes swashbuckling page-turners with few
pretensions to offering more than that. For today’s readers there is the
added attraction of the ‘Victorian hero’ bestseller ethos, anticipating H.
Rider Haggard and Anthony Hope (see page 318). Instead of far-off
colonies, or Ruritania, Ainsworth’s romanticisation of history is always
set solidly in English history and myth, and with a lovable rogue at its
heart rather than a stiff-upper-lipped gentleman hero.
As in the eighteenth century, creative writers came under the influence
of philosophers of a wide spectrum of different opinions. Dickens, for
example, was greatly affected by the writings of Thomas Carlyle. Translator
of the German national poet Goethe, and historian of the French
Revolution, in the 1840s Carlyle became occupied with ‘the Condition-of-
England question’, anticipating in many of his ideas the social novels of
Gaskell, Dickens, and others. His views on strong leadership (in On
Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, 1841) have been criticised