Terms of succession: Ordering the past in Enlightenment Britain, 1650-1800

In An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke claimed that "the constant and regular succession of ideas in a waking man is, as it were, the measure and standard for all other successions." Printed the same year that the Revolution of 1688 was completed, Locke's Essay theorized a standard of temporal order beyond the legal mechanisms (such as divine right and reason of state) that the Revolution abandoned. Scholars have not linked moral philosophical theories of mental succession to the succession crises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, my dissertation, "Terms of Succession: Ordering the Past in Enlightenment Britain, 1650-1800," demonstrates that the "succession of ideas" and other forms of successive arrangement engaged questions of continuity raised by recurrent constitutional crises by locating principles of order beyond political disputes. I introduce the term the "succession concept" to bring together a wide range of genres that used the language and figures of succession to convey continuity despite change across scales and domains of temporality--such as personal identity, narrative, and historical progress. In particular, I read texts positioned between our modern categories of history, fiction, and philosophy--including secret histories, encyclopedias, conjectural histories, and Gothic novels--all of which were new genres in the period that featured tropes of succession and paratextual ordering devices (keys, indexes, and epigraphs) supported by moral philosophical principles, rather than absolutist ones. "Terms of Succession" thus recovers the political stakes of innovative narrative and ordering techniques that were underwritten by the burgeoning discipline of moral philosophy in the eighteenth century.