The British Enlightenment grappled with the concept of “modern history”: what it should contain and what kind of guide to the world it should be. This chapter examines the decline of neoclassical assumptions about history writing in the context of Britain’s rapid social transformation and the emergence of its robust commercial society. A new pressure for historiography to acknowledge this modern world led historians to profound questions about the relation between present and past. How was the eighteenth-century world different from what came before it? When and where did its modernity begin? Asking and answering these questions produced not only new kinds of history writing but also new readers and writers of history. Setting aside the history of great men, new kinds of histories made clear that everyone is a historical actor, opening the door for women and men who would never be statesmen to tell their stories. New histories took many forms, and the chapter’s sections focus on the different answers to questions about the past—and how to represent it-- provided by philosophical history writing, antiquarianism, and the novel.

This chapter focuses on an often overlooked aspect of the history of Gothic writing: the important works that appeared between the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764–5 and that of Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne in 1789. These decades saw the publication of a rich and diverse range of Gothic-marked texts. Novels by Sophia Lee, Clara Reeve, Charlotte Smith and James White are considered in relation to the writing of less well-known authors such as Anne Fuller, Martha Harley, Harriet Meziere, Mr Nicholson and Thomas Sedgwick Whalley, as well as anonymously published work. While acknowledging the variety of approaches, styles and attitudes encompassed by such writing, the chapter demonstrates that, in the 1770s and 1780s, the Gothic is overwhelmingly associated with domestic, British settings. Such domestic Gothic writing also parallels the home and the nation, so that the stories of individuals reflect on national character. This first wave of Gothic texts aims to supplement and interrogate non-imaginative approaches to the nation’s past, participating in a sustained re-examination of British history and identity.