Between 1818 and 1888 historical study and the writing of realist fiction are in the ascendancy. The novel becomes respectable and its claim to respectability rests on its proximity to history, its likeness to life: as Henry James says, ''In proportion as in what [fiction] offers we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching truth.'' At the same time, the study of history becomes self-conscious, reflective, and increasingly concerned with the lives of common people; this growth of modern historicism owes much to its competitive proximity to the novel. Each discourse is implicated in the other. In terms which could apply equally to the realist-historical novel, outgrowing its Gothic and picaresque ancestry, Thomas Carlyle noted a new era for historians as early as 1830: whereas history was once concerned to gratify ''our common appetite for the wonderful, for the unknown,'' modern history is now no longer to do with battlefields, senate houses, and kings' antechambers but with ''the dark untenanted places of the Past, where, in formless oblivion, our chief benefactors . . . lie entombed.'' Social life, he writes, ''is the aggregate of all the individual men's lives . . . History is the essence of innumerable Biographies.''