This amazing book shows how seemingly trivial things - title pages, prefaces, and footnotes in Victorian history books - can become fascinating source material in the hands of a talented scholar. With a characteristic mix of erudition and elegance, Elise Garritzen makes a case for paratexts serving as arenas for historians' collective self-fashioning in a culture where only few could derive scholarly authority from institutional affiliation. No one before has shown so convincingly that book history and the history of historiography have much to offer to each other. - Herman Paul, Leiden University This book traces the transformation of history from a Romantic literary pursuit into a modern academic discipline during the second half of the nineteenth century, and shows how this change inspired Victorians to reconsider what it meant to be a historian. This reconceptualization of the 'historian' lies at the heart of this book as it explores how historians strove to forge themselves a collective scholarly persona that reflected and legitimised their new disciplinary status and gave them authority to speak on behalf of the past. The author argues that historians used the persona as a replacement for missing institutional structures, and converted book parts to a sphere where they could mould and perform their persona. By ascribing agency to titles, footnotes, running heads, typography, cover design, size, and other paratexts, the book makes an important shift in the way we perceive the formation of modern disciplines. By combining the persona and paratexts, it offers a novel approach to themes that have enjoyed great interest in the history of science.

It examines, for example, the role which epistemic and moral virtues held in the Victorian society and scholarly culture, the social organization and hierarchies of scholarly communities, the management of scholarly reputations, the commercialization of knowledge, and the relationship between the persona and the underpinning social, political, economic, and cultural structures and hierarchies. Making a significant contribution to persona studies, this interdisciplinary book provides new insights for scholars interested in the history of science and knowledge, historiography, book history and Victorian culture. Elise Garritzen is an Academy of Finland researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Her research and teaching revolves around European historiography, the history of science, cultural history, and book history. Elise has published peer-reviewed articles in, for example, the Journal of Victorian Studies , History of Humanities , Women's History Review , and Clio . She writes a blog entitled Clio's footnotes , which introduces historiography, paratexts, and book history to a broad audience.