A deepening interest in both social and interior experience was a distinguishing feature of the cultural life of eighteenth-century Britain, influencing writers in all genres from fiction to philosophy. Focusing on this interplay of ideas and genres, Mark Phillips explores the ways in which writers and readers of history, memoir, biography and related literatures responded to the social and sentimental concerns of a modern, commercial society. He shows that the writing of history, which once concentrated exclusively on political events, widened its horizons in ways that often paralleled better-known developments in the contemporary novel. Ultimately, Phillips proposes a new model for the study of historiographical narrative. Countering tropological readings identified with Hayden White, he offers a more historically nuanced approach that stresses questions of genre and reception as a guide to understanding how narratives were reshaped by new audiences and new social needs. Drawing inspiration from both the social analysis of the Scottish Enlightenment and the sentimental aesthetics of the contemporary novel, historical writing began to explore the areas of social experience and private life for which there was no place in classical historiography. The consequence, Phillips argues, was a significant reframing of historical thought that expressed itself through new themes, including the histories of commerce, manners, literature, and women, and through some lively experiments in narrative form. This book offers a rich picture of historiography that will interest students of history and fiction alike.

Preface ixList of Abbreviations xix
Introduction: "The More Permanent and Peaceful Scenes of Social Life" 3
THE ENGLISH PARNASSUS 31
1. David Hume and the Vocabularies of British Historiography 33
2. Hume and the Politics and Poetics of Historical Distance 60
NARRATIVES AND READERS 79
3. Tensions and Accommodations: Varieties of Structure in Eighteenth-Century Narrative 81
4. History, the Novel, and the Sentimental Reader 103
LIVES, MANNERS, AND "THE HISTORY OF MAN" 129
5. Biography and the History of Private Life 131
6. Manners and the Many Histories of Everyday Life: Custom, Commerce, Women, and Literature 147
7. Conjectural History: A History of Manners and of Mind 171
CONTINUITIES 191
8. James Mackintosh: The Historian as Reader 193
9. Burke, Mackintosh, and the Idea of Tradition 220
LITERARY HISTORY, MEMOIR, AND THE IDEA OF COMMEMORATION IN EARLY-NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN 257
10. "The Comedy of Middle Life": Francis Jeffrey and Literary History 259
11. "The Living Character of Bygone Ages": Memoir and the Historicization of Everyday Life 295
12. William Godwin and the Idea of Commemoration 322
Conclusion: Historical Distance and the Reception of Eighteenth-Century Historical Writing 342
Bibliography 351
Index 367