Eyes Across the Channel

Using interpretations of the French Revolution as a model, Eyes Across the Channel asks what history meant to Victorian Britain, how events became enshrined with the authority of history and how such cultural assumptions might help us to read nineteenth-century British literature. Britain and France are now joined by a tunnel, yet the narrow stretch of sea that divides the two countries has for centuries represented both closeness and difference. Eyes Across the Channel argues that between the July Revolution of 1830 and the actual beginning of the construction of a Channel Tunnel in 1882, Britons more frequently interpreted France's role as their closest continental neighbour historically and politically than geographically.