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Introduction: How Far, How Near: Distance and Proximity in the Historical Imagination

Merely consorting with Clio can never satisfy James’s protagonist; he must relive the past, ‘feel the stopped pulse’ for himself; and so – enjoying the advantages of a fictional historian over an actual one – is whisked by James back from his time, 1910, to 1820, to regain the world he has lost.1 In his posthumously-published The Idea of History (1946), R. G. Collingwood similarly evoked the fantasy of a ‘Wellsian machine for travelling backwards through time’, only to insist that even were such historical tourism possible, its results would not be historical knowledge. Historical consciousness, Collingwood argued, is never passive awareness of the immediate – of those ‘unimaginable accidents’, ‘little notes of truth’ desired