Reimagining the Historian in Victorian England: Books, the Literary Marketplace, and the Scholarly Persona

What constitutes a historian? What skills and qualities should a historian cultivate? Who is entitled to define historians physiognomy? Victorians sought to answer these questions as history transformed from a Romantic literary pursuit into a modern discipline during the second half of the nineteenth century. This book offers a novel interpretation of this critical historiographical period by tracing how historians forged themselves a collective scholarly persona that legitimized their new disciplinary status. By combining historiography and book history, Elise Garritzen argues that historians appropriated titles, prefaces, footnotes, and other paratexts as an institutionalized space for fashioning the persona. Yet, historians did not have a monopoly on the persona as readers and reviewers offered their interpretations of the persona, and publishers influenced the paratextual presentation of the persona. By ascribing agency to paratexts and the literary marketplace, Garritzen makes an important shift in the way we perceive the formation of scholarly personae and modern disciplines. The book offers a novel approach to the role which scholarly virtues held in the Victorian society, the formation of scholarly communities, the commodification of knowledge, and the management of scientific reputations. It provides new insights for scholars interested in the history of humanities, science, and knowledge, book history, and Victorian culture.