SOURCE: "Defences against Irony: Barham, Ruskin, Fox Talbot," in The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 112-23.

In the following excerpt, Bann traces the evolution of literary irony by comparing the works of Barham and Sir Walter Scott.

In 1856 the child Henry James was 'thrilled' by the French painter Delaroche's 'reconstitution of far-off history', which his elder brother William regarded as being of little interest. The anecdote reminds us that by this stage (and for a decade or so before that date), the freshness and evocative power of the historical recreations of the 1820s and 1830s were tempered by familiarity. As the novel and popular works of the earlier period progressively lost favour with the sophisticated, they were in the same process reclassified as appropriate material for the entertainment of the immature, the young and...