Tangible Pasts recasts our understanding of the historical imagination of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by revealing the foundational role that antiquarian practices played in the evolution of the novel—an emerging literary genre that was popular, experimental, and keenly attuned to the historicity of the past and present.

The book restores to view an alternative genealogy of the historical novel by assembling a diverse group of writers not often read together—including Laurence Sterne, William Stukeley, Charlotte Lennox, William Borlase, Sarah Scott, Horace Walpole, Walter Scott, Joseph Strutt, Thomas Pownall, and Ann Radcliffe—who shared an interest in conjectural practices and concepts such as fictionality, probability, and verisimilitude that were central both to the antiquaries' speculative reconstruction of the past and to the early development of the novel. The writers featured in Tangible Pasts did not seek to exorcize, but rather took inspiration from antiquarianism's disordered, additive, conjectural, and centrifugal impulses. They contemplated their works' ability to mediate, store, and transmit the past by placing the novel in relation to the techniques of material modelling central to antiquarian conjecturing, including reconstructive visual representations, mapmaking, early forms of reenactment, and three-dimensional mock-ups. Novelists found in these antiquarian media experiments not so much a way of conjuring reality effects, but a new way to understand their genre's ability to entertain plural pasts that were still in the making.