The Formation of a Genre

Abstract

David Hume had sound reason to assert, as he wrote in 1770, that he lived in ‘the historical age.’ In Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century some of the most celebrated historiographic works of all time appeared: Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the works of William Robertson, and of course Hume’s own History of Great Britain. British historiography was moving beyond the Whig and Tory partisanship that had plagued it earlier in the century, and new areas of historical investigation were opening up, reflected in such achievements as Thomas Warton’s groundbreaking literary history, William Blackstone’s investigations into law, and the works of the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, to name just a few. New institutions related to the study of history proliferated: antiquarian societies began in London and Edinburgh and the British Museum was founded in 1753. In the realm of popular culture history was all the rage: David Garrick helped to popularize more historically accurate costumes on the stage, Horace Walpole’s gothic revival home at Strawberry Hill became a tourist attraction, and ‘modern antique’ poets like James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton inspired controversy.¹