This book, first published in 2000, uses interpretations of the French Revolution as a model to ask what history meant to Victorian Britain, how events became enshrined with the authority of history, and how such cultural assumptions might help us to read nineteenth-century British literature. By examining reactions to French revolution in a broad selection of texts, this book explores how the Victorians responded to developments in France in historical terms, repeatedly comparing new events to the touchstone of the first French Revolution, yet always with the goal of finding ways to understand Britain's own past, present and future.