Historical Style, Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830

The jacket of Campbell’s book displays two versions of the same man wearing a different set of clothes. The figure labeled “a beau 1700” is bedecked in a towering wig and high heels. He reappears on the reader’s right as “a beau 1791,” attired in his own cropped hair and flat shoes.¹ The juxtaposed figures capture the narrative arc of the book, which examines how British conceptions of historical representation between 1740 and 1830 were shaped by pictures staging fashionable figures from one era confronting equally fashionable figures from another era. Clearly, ideas about “datedness,” periodicity, and novelty affecting human behavior are posed and incarnated in such printed images. Conceptualizing fashion’s “serial alterations” as history’s “building blocks” (27), Campbell claims that “after the eighteenth century, an unprecedentedly influential and conceptually sophisticated historiography was an effect (author’s emphasis) of commercial culture and of the audiences and outlooks that commerce shaped”...