Where an earlier tradition of literary scholarship once tended to dismiss the realities of the book trade as a distraction that needed to be brushed aside in order to engage more directly with weightier historical contexts like French Revolution, a new generation has emphasized the influential nature of the connections between Britain's developing sense of commercial modernity and debates about literature and the visual arts. Timothy Campbell's Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830 is an important addition to this growing collection of books that explore the material and intellectual connections between the various forces that we understand today as print culture and the protean world of commerce. As Campbell argues, these debates were shaped by an “emergent historicism” when “ordinary Britons for the first time began to recognize and to care about the precise ways in which their culture had changed over time” (11).

The spirit of ceaseless change that defined fashion's power epitomized the instabilities of a transactional world driven by credit where inherited notions of value had come untethered from the reassuring promise of the foundational models that had characterized earlier ages, but its iterative nature also allowed for new forms of historical specificity. Where fashions had once been associated with particular epochs, critics had, by the mid-eighteenth century, grown used to associating them with specific decades or years or even seasons. It was hard to imagine any phenomenon that more perfectly epitomized the sense of acceleration that critics have identified as a hallmark of modernity. If, as Campbell suggests, this was an era when Britons “began to see how they themselves, in their subjective and social being, were present-day products of contingent historical circumstances,” the idea of fashion, in all its various forms, offered them a compelling lens through which to understand this sense of contingency (11–12). It had become enmeshed with the most exciting and unsettling intellectual and artistic currents, a form of “shadow play” that simultaneously fueled and troubled the historicist impulses of the day (23).

Campbell's book is organized into two sections. Beginning with a focus on Anna Barbauld, the first section explores these earlier critics’ struggle to understand British history in ways that acknowledged their implication within the empire of fashion. Campbell reads Barbauld's deeply ambivalent meditation on the fate of the nation in her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) alongside her ongoing analysis of fashionable life in essays such as “Comparison of Manners in Two Centuries” (Athenaeum 1, no. 1 [January 1807]: 1–10; Athenaeum 1, no. 2 [February 1807]:111–21), which has been attributed to her, but also in the context of a rich visual-cultural archive. Reading Barbauld's work alongside “the rise of the regularly issued fashion plate and the iconic genre of the ‘dress of the year’ in women's pocketbooks” (36–37), as well in relation to texts such as Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (first drafted in the 1790s but published in 1817), Campbell reminds us of both the force and the complexity of this burgeoning visual culture which forced onlookers to come to terms with Britain's commercial realities. Campbell then proceeds to a more direct focus on the ways that conversations about art constituted a powerful arena for debates over commercial culture. As critics such as David Solkin and Mark Hallet have argued, the densely social and (despite many of its practitioners’ protests) unavoidably commercial nature of the world of painting ensured that it functioned as a key battleground on which many of these debates were waged, ground zero in the struggles between ideas about fashion and an emerging aesthetic ideology that was bolstered by its appeal to classical forms of citizenship whose growing irrelevance only made them more appealing.

After a chapter on David Hume's sometimes frustrating efforts to popularize Jean-Jacques Rousseau in England, which forms a kind of theoretical bridge between the two sections, Campbell shifts focus in the book's second section to a set of novelists whose incorporation of historical fashions influenced ideas about the kinds of knowledge that literature could offer. Campbell makes an important case for the ambitious and highly self-reflexive ways that Sophia Lee's novel The Recess; or a Tale of Other Times (1783–85) takes up the fashion logic of history. For Campbell, Lee's highly self-aware understanding of the tensions between her skepticism about commerce and her appreciation of the material reality of the novel's own status as a commercial object constitutes “a productive dissonance that is the starting point for a different way of relating to history” (165). Having traced this “productive dissonance” through the novel's inclusion in The Ladies Daily Companion for 1789, where it featured as both excerpt and illustration, and reading it alongside work by such authors as William Cowper and Maria Edgeworth, Campbell turns his focus to Walter Scott, an author who understood, more keenly than any of his contemporaries, both the usefulness of fashionable detail and the fashionable allure of serialized fiction. Where Campbell finds in Scott's use of fashion a more adroit understanding of history than many critics were prepared to attribute to Scott's “commercializing pastiche” (222), his final chapter foregrounds William Godwin's struggle to reconcile his skepticism about the ethical pitfalls of commerce with his appreciation of the role of fashion as a basis for new forms of historical consciousness in novels such as Mandeville (1817) and St. Leon (1799). Weaving together a rich array of textual readings, biographical details, and broader cultural analyses, Historical Fiction makes a suggestive contribution to a critical discussion that has radically altered our understanding, not just of the historical conditions of literature in this period, but of the possibilities of literary history generally.