Maybe, but those conditions certainly aren’t explicit. I suppose what I’m getting at is that in this novel there are hidden rules that limit the action, and that our assumed familiarity with the period makes us almost oblivious to them.

Jason – sure, for the purposes of this essay, 1800 is maybe a too-convenient marker. When I read Aries (more than 10 years ago, so am a bit fuzzy), I do remember being absolutely struck and convinced by his history of the idea of childhood. But I do find that so many key ways of modern thinking (what a novel is, what trade is for, the idea that a nation as we know it could even exist, nevertheless be a defining political force) – all these intellectual tools, and more, date roughly from 10 years on either side of 1800. It really was a special date.

Rich – absolutely, but our dissatisfaction with the conclusions of these novels is precisely what makes them interesting! In a way, they’re both about individuals acting with/against the forces of history and the limits of political action.

Thanks for your comments and apols for late responses – have been somewhat tied up.

Maybe magic is not as reliable and predictable as technology. Maybe Brussels can be moved, but Paris can’t, and the reasons are as hidden to Strange as strange quarks were to natural philosophers. So putting magic at the center of his strategy would be as foolish for Wellington as it would be for an admiral to base his whole strategy on the winds blowing from a certain direction at a certain strength for a certain duration—months in advance.

I hate to disagree, but… Before 1800 there was the Enlightenment, which gave us most of this stuff, whether it did so intentionally or not. With just Adam Smith, Voltaire, and Samuel Richardson, we’re already well on our way to having everything in your list. Medieval and early modern historians (Barbara Hanawalt and Philippe Aries respectively) also push back the sentimentalization of childhood by centuries depending on how far you want to take their arguments.

Still, I know what you mean about when “we” could live. As a historian of the 18th century, I’d give anything to visit the place, but I doubt I could live there for long.

Yes, or shortly before. For me it happened when Strange started permanently moving localities from one place to another, including (in one case) to America. Why didn’t he just move Paris to America and cause the instant surrender of the French? He could move it back afterwards.

Well, he couldn’t because one of the rules of the novel was clearly that no great deviation from tone, style, and history was possible. Great changes could be immanent, in the background, but would never affect society except in the gradual ways that please the modern reader at the end of the novel (c.f. Belle’s fantasy about the lady magician with red hair). It’s an interesting contrast to China Mieville, the last CT seminar SF author. Mieville’s characters work towards revolutionary change but it can’t actually happen because he couldn’t describe what society would be like afterwards. Clarke gives her characters powers that would inevitably cause revolutionary change, but can’t have it change anything until the liminal moment just before the end of the book, because it would spoil the book’s style. Both, I think, unsatisfying.

It relies on a kind of wishful thinking that makes about as much sense as believing Monty Python’s Holy Grail tells the real story of the Crusades.

A complete sidenote: this movie’s treatment of medievalia, in such items as costume and set dressing, much as Life of Brian’s treatment of turn-of-the-calendar Jerusalem, tends to be far more historically accurate—and vivid—than most filmic treatments.

I would have to push that back another 50 years anyway (powdered wigs notwithstanding). Comparing the apparent static world of an Austen novel to the real world portrayed in Jenny Uglow’s Lunar Men makes it clear how truly fictional Austen’s universe is. One is tempted to suspect it appealed to readers of the day precisely because it felt so safely, predictably static to readers who’d been living with the revolutionary changes of the Enlightenment for more than a generation. The real world of ‘Lunar Men’, in fact, feels much more modern to me than Austen’s fictional universe—great entreprenurial energy (who can read of the canal building boom and not think of the dot-com mania), the rise of industry, the popular fascination with science and technology—all this predates Austen by a considerable length of time.

In Austen, by way of comparison, we have not a world of entreprenurial risk-taking, but a world in which an income of 5,000 pounds a year is a fixed characteristic like height or eye color—money is not made or lost but is only combined and divided through marriage and inheritance. This is not a modern universe.