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J.M.R.Bennett, Christ
Church, Oxford reviews a Continuum Books, Series
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, introduced
and selected by Ruth Scurr (Continuum: London and New York, 2010), 195 pp.
ISBN 978 0826440525
J. A. Froude, The Reign
of Mary Tudor, introduced and selected by Eamon Duffy (Continuum: London and New York, 2009), 167 pp.
ISBN 978 1441186850
T. B.
Macaulay, History of England, introduced and selected by John Burrow (Continuum: London and New York, 2009), 174
pp.
ISBN 978 144113748
William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, introduced and selected by J.H. Elliott
(Continuum: London and New York, 2009), 152 pp.
ISBN 9781441146991
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In
the introduction to his Religion, Politics and Society in Britain 1066-1272, Henry Mayr-Harting recalls how a Sunday
broadsheet once declined to publish his review of an edition of analytical essays examining the reign of Richard I, on the
grounds that he had not ‘told the story’. Historians of all periods are today inclined to shy away from bold attempts
at ‘telling the story’, for a host of well-known reasons. Free of the mixed blessings of modern academic conditions,
such reticence did not affect the Victorian historians, some of the greatest of whom are now presented to a new generation
of readers by the Continuum publishing group. Private scholars, they sought, and in these instances deservedly won, fame,
riches and reputation from their magnificent narrative histories. The principal works of Carlyle, Froude, Macaulay and Prescott
are today most likely to be read not by the eagerly receptive publics which first greeted them, but by undergraduates and
their teachers: Macaulay and Carlyle more so than Froude or, in Britain, Prescott. It is regrettable that their principal
audience today should be so narrow. They remain not only classics of English literature: they may also profitably be read
as exhilarating evocations of the subjects they describe and, more indirectly, for what they reveal of the societies in which
they were composed.
Continuum’s new editions will hopefully enlarge the readership of these richly rewarding texts, by
offering short selections from multivolume studies that are today mainly out of print, prefaced by brief introductory essays
and lists of suggested secondary studies. They may be of interest to academics in search of readily-available set texts for
first-year historiography courses, but their chief audience will surely and appropriately be the general readers for whom
they were originally intended. They are inappropriate for higher-level or scholarly use. The editors omit the authors’
footnotes. They have moreover made selections, not reproductions or abridgements: the editors have not each provided a continuous
expanse of the original prose, nor can they, in under two hundred pages, provide balanced samples of all sides of the authors’
narrative interests. To focus attention on the main thrust of the vivid episodes they bring into prominence, they remove detail,
truncate chapters, even merge paragraphs. This is desirable, given the stated purpose of the series, and is usually accomplished
seamlessly. But this additional layer of editorial involvement, made without citations, does mean that readers are not always
hearing the voice of the author in all its fullness (one might uncharitably say verbosity). For that, readers will have to
turn to the original texts.
The historians under discussion belonged to the Romantic age. As the French Revolution did more than any
other political event to foster that new atmosphere, it is appropriate first to consider Ruth Scurr’s edition of its
foremost nineteenth-century Anglophone historian, Thomas Carlyle. Like her fellow editors, Scurr proceeds by choosing narrative
sections which best exemplify the author’s style and philosophy. Helped by the comparatively short chronological range
of Carlyle’s The French Revolution, Scurr impressively sustains a sense of unbroken progression from the convening
of the Estates General in 1789 to the death of Robespierre in 1794, even though her extracts range across three volumes. At
the opening, we see Carlyle assuming his vantage-point at the procession opening the Estates General, fixing his prophetic
eye on a succession of figures whom Time will call forward as major actors in the World-Phoenix of Revolution, one of whom,
Robespierre, will preside over the intensification of the purgative madness during the Terror and perish by the guillotine
to which he devotes himself. Between these two points Scurr presents Carlyle’s dramatic rendering of a series of connecting
events richly amenable to such depictions: the storming of the Bastille, King Louis’ flight to Varennes, the annihilation
of the Swiss guards outside the Tuileries in August 1792. Even if posterity cannot view them as world-historical in the sense
Carlyle believed them to be, there is something about the Revolution’s violent repudiation of a society of orders, its
attempted reconstitution of human political sociability, its paving the way for the transformations of the Napoleonic era,
which make Carlyle’s metaphors – biblical, volcanic, epic - permanently resonant.
The strangeness of Carlyle’s prose
and historical judgements demand an editor’s introduction which will explain something of their intellectual origins
to the non-specialist audience at whom the volume is aimed. Scurr describes the fraught process of composition and summarises
the events Carlyle goes on to evoke; she also explains his desire to recreate action rather than indulge in complacently detached
analysis, and his related contempt for Rousseau. But the reader stands in need of further illumination.
How are we to understand Carlyle’s belief that the principles underlying ‘battles and bloodshed, September Massacres,
Bridges of Lodi’ are still two centuries from burning out (p. 28); that ‘in this Time-World of ours there is properly
nothing else but revolution and mutation’ (p. 61); that religion has died, and yet the revolutionary
wars generate the first show of faith since the last of the Cameronians, Renwick, was shot in Edinburgh (pp.65,141)? Scurr’s
introduction leaves some of the roots of these and related claims unexposed. John Burrow has connected Carlyle’s cyclical
metaphors, and his relish for fire and volcanism as agents of renewal, to the Huttonian geology he encountered at Edinburgh
University. His biblical allusions and sermonising vehemence are remnants of his upbringing in the valleys of fundamentalist
Dumfriesshire: although the unquestioning Calvinism of his parents drained away from him, sapped especially by Gibbon, Carlyle
(with the aid of an idiosyncratic reading of German transcendentalism) retained a keen faith in a divine reality that convulsively
destroyed the unreal worldly semblances and forms which periodically overgrew it. He came to look beyond the Scriptures, to
the course of modern and contemporary history, as a prophetic manuscript containing evidence of ongoing divine operation:
hence, in part, his use of the present tense in The French Revolution, and his invocation of parallels with modern
Britain. Perhaps limited by available space, Scurr does not make these contexts explicit.
Religious crisis also shaped
the historical vision of James Anthony Froude, a great admirer of Carlyle and, eventually, his biographer. As Duffy observes
in his excellent introduction to his selections from Froude’s History of England , Carlylean dispositions –
suspicion of the masses, racialism, and others - surface in Froude’s understanding of the sixteenth century. And, like
Carlyle, Froude suffered from that very nineteenth-century affliction, an agonised loss of simple childhood faith. Froude
arrived at Oxford as an undergraduate in the shadow of his bullying and by-then consumptive elder brother, Hurrell, and like
him fell under the spell of Newman and the Oxford Movement. The giddiness did not last: after his election as a fellow of
Exeter College he read, on the one hand, Goethe, Carlyle, Lessing, Neander; on the other, fabulous source materials for a
Life of St Neot requested by Newman. His religious doubts grew, encouraged – as had Carlyle’s –
by historical reading. Repulsed by Tractarianism, and soon forced out of Exeter, Froude settled into a theistic low-churchism
uninterested in dogma but firmly committed to practical, Protestant religion, contemptuous of sacerdotal presumption and the
constraints it imposed on human intellectual freedom. As Duffy remarks, Froude accordingly wrote his History of England
as a distinctive and somewhat truculent defence of the Reformation against its recent assailants, most notably John Lingard.
Duffy satisfyingly brings Froude’s personal dispositions into focus, without revealing his own very different religious
assumptions. He also recognises Froude’s great scholarship: his extensive use of manuscript sources, in five languages,
in an age before calendars and catalogues, point to the enormous industry which helped to make his work so enduring.
Duffy faces an unenviable
task in selecting extracts from Froude’s ‘loose and baggy monster’ (p.10), which fills twelve substantial
volumes. Covering English history from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Armada, its chronological range is too large
for Duffy to attempt something like a ‘summary’ in the way Scurr accomplishes for Carlyle. Froude’s conception
of history, as Burrow once observed, is moreover ‘essentially spasmodic’ (A Liberal Descent, p.251),
without the continuous, unifying protagonist of Parliament and constitution found in Macaulay and other Whigs. Duffy is therefore
right to prioritise an individual episode: Froude’s account of Mary Tudor, Duffy’s co-religionist and subject
of his acclaimed and decidedly un-Froudian recent study, Fires of Faith. Duffy thankfully minimises Froude’s
less-than-captivating accounts of Mary’s parliaments, in favour of showcasing his facility for characterisation and
the dramatic incident. In these pages, Froude ranges from the death of Edward VI to an indignant concluding apostrophe on
Marian tyranny. We see Froude’s disgust at the rapacity of the Edwardian protectorate, which, he says, succeeded Henry’s
deliverance of the English from bondage in Egypt only for its grandees to steal their manna in the wilderness. The great hopes
which greeted Mary’s accession were to be disappointed, first by her marriage to a Spaniard, then by her allegedly savage
enforcement by fire of the return to Romanist superstition. Mary herself appears pitiably and, in the end, dangerously deluded
rather than actively evil, unsuccessful in marriage and her attempts at motherhood, seeking comfort in ‘the false roof
of her creed painted to imitate and shut out the sky’ (p.87) and angling for divine favour by destroying Protestants,
those latter-day Amalekites whom Saul had unwisely spared. Greater guilt seems to lie with the architect of her policy, Cardinal
Pole, who played on Mary’s fantasies to intensify the drive to bring heretics to the stake.
Duffy
includes a number of Froude’s vivid descriptions of these burnings, including the martyrdoms of Ridley, Latimer and
Cranmer in Oxford, where Froude had himself once been persecuted, albeit less fatally, for his own religious opinions. Froude’s
heavy reliance on the recent Cattley and Townsend edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments for these descriptions
is noted only incidentally in Duffy’s introduction, while the original footnotes revealing this are removed. Foxe’s
great composition, and its reception in later ages, has recently attracted significant historical interest in the work of
Patrick Collinson and others; and one of the aims of Continuum’s series is to introduce today’s readers to the
significance of how one age engages with another. Froude’s use of Foxe surely merits greater emphasis than Duffy accords
it.
Froude’s relative unconcern for constitutional details, and anxious preoccupation with religion, set
him apart from that great, unspiritual panegyrist of Parliament and suburban ease, Thomas Babington Macaulay. As Hugh Trevor-Roper
argued, Macaulay’s place today as the quintessential ‘Whig’ historian obscures the novelty his History
once represented. He departed from the older Whig historiographical tradition, overthrown by Hume, of a static, ‘free’
constitution, inherited from the barbarian conquerors of Rome and encroached upon by the Stuarts, whom the Whig patriots finally
repulsed. Accepting that history is essentially the history of progress, the lesson of eighteenth-century Scottish sociology,
Macaulay fastened this forwards advance to the Whig party as its guarantor down the ages to the present day; a party whose
victory in 1688, much more than any medieval event, finally secured England’s political freedoms and economic advance.
John Burrow’s edition accordingly presents the undoubted Schwerpunkt of Macaulay’s extraordinarily popular
History of England: the overthrow of the tyrannical James II and his replacement, by the Convention, with William
and Mary of Orange. Burrow successfully condenses a substantial section of Macaulay’s narrative into almost-continuous
prose. James’ Declaration of Indulgence, leading to the sensational prosecution and acquittal of several Anglican bishops
who refused to publicise it, encourages a group of conspirators to seek the nation’s deliverance by William of Orange;
his arrival causes James II to flee, and William is installed to popular acclaim. This occasions Macaulay’s famous aside
on the ‘peculiar character of the English Revolution’, coloured by his own triumph in 1832 and the disturbing
spectacle of political instability across Europe in 1848.
Burrow’s introduction is a marvel of brevity. It raises most of the biographical and contextual
points necessary for an informed understanding of the text that follows; though he could have said more of Macaulay’s
contact with Romanticism, especially the novels of Sir Walter Scott. He rightly observes that Whiggism
was more important to Macaulay as a label for a perennial force in English political life than as a narrow party label. Macaulay
dims his partisanship at points where he wishes to celebrate moments where Tories and Whigs come together to oppose arbitrariness:
‘not a few of William’s followers,’ Macaulay reports, ‘were zealous Tories’ (p.105). Macaulay’s
political career, oratorical prowess and training as a barrister shape the historical judgements he delivers and reveal themselves
in the kind of event he delights most in describing. He enjoys the dynamics of high politics and takes sides at set-piece
parliamentary occasions, interposing his own strident views to demolish the opposing side and thoroughly remove its foundation-stones;
the public are there somewhat passively, to admire and applaud. Macaulay directly connected the triumph of constitutional
politics to the material wealth of nineteenth-century Britain, pausing in his description of William’s landing at Torbay
to imagine the contrast between the scrawny Stuart settlement and modern Torbay, decked out in ‘crowded marts’,
‘luxurious pavilions’ and ‘gay villas’ (pp.89-90). This is the clearest instance in the edition of
Macaulay’s recurrent interest in processes of material sophistication, revealing the obligations to the Scottish Enlightenment
most obviously on show in the third chapter of his History. Macaulay was very much the modern Whig here; but his
formation owed just as much to the classics. His third chapter, as Burrow suggests, has the character of a Herodotean digression;
his reports of speeches recall Thucydides, and his occasional roll-calls of participants and spectators, Homer.
Epic qualities, and the afterlife of eighteenth-century
philosophic history, may also be discerned in the work least likely to be familiar to British readers, William H. Prescott’s
History of the Conquest of Mexico. Hernán Cortés is the hero of the work and his exploits give it a
dramatic unity. Sir John Elliott accordingly presents to us his the first, ill-starred expedition to Tenochtitlan in 1519-20:
surely among the most mesmerising subject matter ever available to a historian. Although full of western condescension towards
the Aztecs, the weak spirit of Montezuma acting as a kind of extended metaphor for the inferiority of the society he ruled,
Prescott emerges an even-handed judge by nineteenth-century standards. His treatment of the Catholic Spaniards is not vitiated
by what John Burrow has called the Protestant ‘provincialism’ displayed by the slightly younger Boston historian,
John Lothrop Motley, author of The Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic. And Prescott, speaking for Cortés,
grants to the Aztecs a measure of the ‘intellectual progress, mechanical skill, and enlarged resources of an old and
opulent community’ (p.44).
Behind Prescott’s history lies a fascinating intellectual biography, which Elliott’s introduction
brings out well with the aid of the author’s unusually full Literary Memoranda. He came from the same Bostonian
milieu that sustained the other great American historians of his time, Motley and Parkman. Prescott’s prose is shaped
by the epic poetry in which he read deeply, and by Romantic-era interest in the heroic and colourful depiction. In this he
bears a similarity to Macaulay, still more noticeable in their shared debts to Enlightenment sociological categories: in Macaulay’s
essay on Milton (1825), and Prescott’s on ‘Scottish song’ (1826), both advanced remarkably similar theories
of poetry which connected its most natural expression to primitive stages of society. This Enlightenment heritage, to which
Elliott draws attention, deeply colours Prescott’s History. It is perhaps most visible in Book I, absent from
this edition, where Prescott surveys the state of Aztec civilisation; but it also surfaces in the extracts
Elliott has selected chiefly for their literary merit rather than ‘philosophical’ character. We read of the ‘slavish
forms of Oriental adulation’ paid by the Aztecs to Montezuma (p.31), and the ‘superstition’ allegedly inherent
in ‘savage’ man (p.134). After noting the historical context for these views, Elliott explains how the scholarship
of recent decades has dispensed with them. No longer do historians gloss over the brutality of Cortés and imperial
Spain; they also aim to evaluate Mexican society on its own terms, and to reconstruct how natives came to terms with the rapid
shattering of an assumedly permanent world.
Continuum’s series will hopefully broaden public interest in the great historical literature
of the past. The editors introduce the works judiciously. Handling the texts themselves, the editors successfully trim back
the authors’ elaboration of detail which, though necessary, even enjoyable in works of the original size and scope,
may have appeared cumbersome in these slimmer, deliberately fast-paced volumes. Sometimes this topiary is undertaken rather
too vigorously. It seems a pity that Elliott should have removed a paragraph where Prescott meditates on the dauntless spirit
of Cortés, after his withdrawal from Tenochtitlan (p.150). Burrow’s sharp curtailment of one of Macaulay’s
cherished lists – this time of notables publicly siding with William of Orange after his landing – makes the cumulative
collapse of James II’s support seem rather less crushing than Macaulay had intended it to appear (p.104). Despite these
occasional problems, the literary merits of these works remain plainly in view. But should the historian, rather than just
the lover of literature, still take them seriously? The editors, all with special interests in the writers or the periods
they describe, appear to think as much. The historical explanations offered by Carlyle, Froude, Macaulay and Prescott have
variously lost their force. Their texts stand, however, as fascinating documents of the ages in which they were written. More
than this, they supply what the growing complication and fragmentation of academic history has tended to diminish; an idea
of history, as Sir Steven Runciman expressed it, as attempting ‘to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events
and movements that have swayed the destinies of man.’ It is, one hopes, an ideal that will never completely lose its
attractions.
J.M.R.Bennett
Christ Church, Oxford
J.M.R.Bennett is the author of: The Victorian High Church
and the Era of the Great Rebellion
Davenant Press, 2011 www.davenantpress.co.ukThe History House is a resources site. It provides information, including
links to websites, on a range of historical matters - books, people, places to visit, conferences to attend, societies to
join, anniversaries to celebrate and invites visitors to the site to send in information.
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