Project Title: Secrecy, Surveillance and Counterintelligence in the Prose Fiction of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson
What was your research about?
In this thesis, I explore the relationship between domestic secrets and history in the historical novels of Walter Scott (1771–1832) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). I do so by investigating the connections between the historical novel and Secret History, a controversial genre of historical narrative that publicises the secret activities and scandalous private affairs of powerful public figures, most often monarchs, nobles, and statesmen. By looking to Secret History (Anekdota), I closely trace the nuanced relationship between domestic secrecy, surveillance, and intelligence-gathering and the historical and narrative structures of the historical novel from 1814 to 1894. Drawing on the etymology of Anekdota (Greek: ‘previously unpublished’), I consider how the historical novel builds on secret history’s ability to turn ‘unpublished’ into the synonym of ‘secret’, and I examine how secret history helps Scott and Stevenson navigate and explore the benefits and challenges of presenting the public with a historical narrative that publicises intimate, scandalous and salacious secrets and which offers the fruits of eavesdropping and gossip as an important, even revolutionary, piece of social and political intelligence. By examining the similarities between secret history and the historical novel, it allows us to clearly and closely trace the nuanced relationship between domestic secrets, public history, and the historical and narrative structures of the historical novel. I closely investigate how the historical novels of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson triangulate and foster a complicated relationship between history, the publication of domestic secrets, and the nineteenth-century historical novel and, in doing so, I trace secret history’s continued influence on the composition of the nineteenth-century historical novel inherited by Stevenson from Scott.
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In the first half of my thesis, I argue that Scott turns secret history into a literary, historical, and narrative device that is capable of exploring and complicating the relationship between private life and public history in the historical novel, and I conclude by highlighting that Scott contributes to a distinctly nineteenth-century evolution of Secret History (Anekdota): both as its author and as its subject. I then turn to Robert Louis Stevenson to trace this relationship between domestic secrets and historical narrative to the late-nineteenth-century historical novel, and I investigate how and why secret history plays a central role in Stevenson’s definition of literature, history, and journalism. By highlighting the importance of secret history as an integral plot and narrative device deployed by both authors, I begin to outline a space of reconciliation and similarity between Scott’s and Stevenson’s presentations of history. I conclude my analysis by drawing attention to the way that Stevenson’s view of literary history, and Scott’s place within this literary history, brings secret history to bear on the late-nineteenth-century historical novel in complex and nuanced ways.
