{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0363890832750175, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004198740377886634, 'mean_word_length': 5.111111111111111, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
George Eliot and Victorian Historiography: Imagining the National Past by Neil McCaw (review)

Were it not for tip-off provided by the word "historiography" in the tide of Neil McCaw's recent book, George Eliot and Victorian Historiography, a reader might be daunted by its apparent vastness of focus, as presented in the table of contents. Indeed, with such chapter tides as "A Natural History of English Life" and "Theodicy and History," the book seems to aim to cover an impossibly large field of study and might initially be thought to take all such complex and variegated subjects into its single and necessarily limited ken. However, as the word "historiography" indicates, McCaw's topic is not so much "theodicy" nor "natural history" proper as the historical writing about these topics, the way in which they are represented and interpolated by writers of history. His work is concerned with what is now called metahistory, as he puts it: "that which deals often, though not exclusively, with the rhetorical or structural premises on which historiography is founded" (147). As such, McCaw distinguishes diroughout his work between "History," the signifier or writing about past events, and the signified "history," the past events themselves (147). In particular, McCaw studies George Eliot as a writer of History, and not just as a writer of fiction who heavily researched historical sources to construct her narratives.