By ‘sovereignty’, I mean the tendency to see the irruption of magic onto a realistic world as involving a repeal or regression of modernity. The presence of magic does not augur magical sovereignty. It looks at a wide range of English society, across class, racial, gender, corporeal, and temporal boundaries, and therefore its magics are varied as well: mendacious and forceful, nostalgic and prophetic, professorial and charismatic. Yet there is much that is radical and little that is reassuring in the novel.

Clarke’s novel is set during and after the defeat of Napoleon, so there is a tendency to assume its ostentatious parading of English gentility is intended as a triumphant rebuke to the overweening aspirations of the French Imperial arriviste.

By this, I do not mean that it is historical as such but rather that it is set in a certain period best known for reaction to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. There is a lot of evidence in her text that her intentions are highly radical, but the book’s historical setting has tended to mask this. The first section of the essay will be devoted to Clarke as radical fantasist. I wish to take a different tack, celebrating the novel’s fantastic vision but aligning it with a vision that is contemporary and provocatively anti-hegemonic. Most academic commentary on the novel either praises its resurrection of magic or excoriates what is seen as its nostalgic pastiche. By taking the reading of Clarke’s novel beyond nostalgic sovereignty, one can understand how it participates in the twenty-first century revaluation of fantasy as politically progressive and epistemically radical. The book’s plural magical modernity’s counter any atavistic sovereignty. Examining the sociable magician Norrell, the questionably resurgent medieval king John Uskglass and the African-descended manservant Stephen Black provide different models of what the interrelationship between magic and reality can be and serve to destabilize any sense of a sovereign past in the book.

I argue Clarke is looking to the early nineteenth century as the earliest possible modernity, a time in which magic is intertwined with the world much as it would be today if magic arose now. This article argues that much of this neglect proceeds from assumptions that the book is nostalgic for a sovereign magic, when in fact its historicity is a way of shaking up time itself. Despite huge sales and publicity on its issuance in 2004, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has received comparatively little sustained critical attention.

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