摘要：Twelve years ago I was chatting to an ancient historian over lunch. He asked what I had been working on. When I told him about my approach to Victorian poetry he remarked that, like most literature academics these days, I was really a historian myself. At the time I felt quite self-satisfied. My first ambition had been to become a historian, and a historian's approval still seemed the mark of proper scholarly rigour. Nowadays I am not so sure. Literature and science scholars routinely and rightly draw on work in History of Science to build up their understanding of the state of scientific knowledge and the concerns of scientific debates within the periods they are studying. Even so, we should be cautious about deferring too readily to the authority of History of Science, in case we allow its priorities, assumptions and methodologies to circumscribe the work that we can do in our own field. Historicist literary criticism does not need to be held to account according to the standards of what is after all a different discipline. We have our own approaches to the past, which need to be as rigorous as we can make them, but we should not be bound by the methodology of historians of science, nor to their findings if the past we discover through our research does not look quite the same as theirs. We should not even feel compelled to foreground historical context at all, so long as we are aware of it and do not dismiss it in ignorance
