Mnemosyne's heirs: The changing ground of historical knowledge in the novels of George Eliot and Wilhelm Raabe

Although George Eliot and Wilhelm Raabe never read each other's work, both explore how nineteenth-century science impacts historical understanding. In images from the popular press, manuscripts, and literary classics, their novels show the forces shaping characters' senses of history. Researchers in the natural or historical sciences plumb their relation to the historical past in each novelist's work, but scientific inquiry has a vexed role in altering historical understanding.;Drawing on the radical changes in the understanding of natural history from 1800 to 1860, The Mill on the Floss charts human histories, individual and social. The conflicting discourses of and within biology, geology, and social evolution in the novel foreground the gaps in scientific explanation. The novel challenges the scientific bases of social histories like Spencerian evolutionism that gloss over such gaps. The second chapter explores George Eliot's casting historical understanding as authentic in Romola but unwieldy in Middlemarch. This displacement dramatizes how advances in science and technology affect nineteenth-century historical understanding. George Eliot emphasizes research in both the composition and characters of Romola and extends this thematic to Middlemarch which quietly documents the expansion and ordering of knowledge within unified systems. As models of historical understanding, Raabe's wildly allusive Odfeld diverges from the magical simplicity of Hastenbeck. Buchius and Wackerhahn are not only interpreter-guides through the epoch-making violence in the respective novels; both are also archaeologists fostering the transmission of historical understanding between generations. Each of Raabe's narrators is a methodical, if explicitly subjective, historian who foregrounds the laborious empirical research upholding his account.;George Eliot and Wilhelm Raabe document and reflect on the dawn of the information age. They share a fascination with the materials that justify claims about the historical past. They thematize characters who scrutinize history. They mock elaborately researched histories yet cannot resist subtly creating such histories themselves. These novelists do not blindly fetishize research or historical subjects but show science changing the bases of historical knowledge in the nineteenth century.