Biography: An Historiography 2022046490, 2022046491, 9781138387232, 9781138387249, 1138387231

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement Page
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Introduction: ‘It’s Just a Biography’: historicising historians’ biographical debates
‘It’s just a biography’: Trevelyan’s formula
Disciplinary diversity: historian’s biography
Disciplinary diversity: putting historians debates into a narrative of biography
Historicising historians’ biographical debates
Conclusion: concentrating on historians’ biographical debates
Notes
Further reading
Chapter 2: Victorians debate over heroism: The role of the significant individual in history
Victorian historians disagreeing over biography: ‘Poets without music’ and ‘perfect owls of Minerva for knowledge’?
Carlyle’s heroic response to the German and British Romantic movements
Spencer’s sociological critique of the ‘Great Men’ Approach
Interactionalists or third wavers
Historians debate biography over the biographical methods taught in universities
Conclusion: Carlyle provokes debate among professionalising biographers and historians
Notes
Further reading
Chapter 3: Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches to biography
Scientific or artful biography? Roger Fry and John Morley and post-Victorian debates
Modernist and Bloomsbury literary critique of historians’ biographical fetish for facts
Some historians put the case for a biographical ‘fetishisation of fact’
Biographers navigate between too much and too little empiricism
Conclusion: historians navigating around Bloomsbury and scientific biography
Notes
Further reading
Chapter 4: Historians and the problem of other minds in biography
Disinclined and disengaged over the psychology debate? Roland H. Bainton takes on Erik Erikson
Psychobiographers try to take hold of biography?
Postwar prescriptions of psychobiography for historians
Historians finally respond: heated debate over psychobiography in the 1970s and 1980s
Historians writing biography and the wider issue of other minds
Conclusion: debate over the problem of other minds; inner and social lives?
Notes
Further reading
Chapter 5: Cold War debates over individuals in history: Counterfactuals, contingency and causation in biography
Cold War Debate between Isaiah Berlin and Issac Deutscher
Myth of a single Cold War biographical debate: contingency, counterfactuals and causation
E. P. Thompson defends non-teleological causation
Conclusion: the biographical debates over human agency, structure and the myths of one
Notes
Further reading
Chapter 6: Postwar debates over atomising lives
A peculiar biographical club and the debate over prosopography
Eighteenth-century political history becomes a battleground of biographical approaches
Pursuit of the individual in prosopography: medievalists’ prosopographical methods and the move towards representative lives
A halfway house: collective biography
Conclusion: the debate’s shared legacy
Notes
Further reading
Chapter 7: Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory and the singularization of history
Trivial and significant microbiography?
Carlo Ginzburg’s attack on Annalistes, armed with a microscope
Linda Colley’s holding a grain of sand in her hand
Conclusion
Notes
Further reading
Chapter 8: Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire
Historian’s egohistoire as historiographical intervention: subjectivity and its critique?
Historians consider clusters, codes and canons in life writing: the breakdown of the symbolic white male hero
Historians’ egohistoire and its enemies
Historians’ egohistoire of particular historiographical significance?
Conclusion: the kaleidoscope of life writing
Notes
Further reading
Chapter 9: Conclusion: Trevelyan’s empiricism and historians’ biographical practices
The biography of the debate: the life and death of debates
Empiricism as the motor to historians’ practices amid debates over biography
Narrating the debates: biographical historiography biographically
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Citation preview

“A hugely enjoyable read, deeply researched and knowledgeable, with an effective mix of structure, theory, and personality, as befits its subject. Very wide-ranging, it’s peppered with names and connections. In  squaring a number of circles, Biography: An Historiography is a single-handed refutation of any misgivings historians may have as to the biographer and their craft.” Dr Martin Farr, Newcastle University, UK “[I]t’s a big, authoritative work with a dazzling range of research and reference, and passionate engagement with ideas and issues. A book to think with!” Professor Richard Holmes, FRSL, FBA, OBE, Hon. Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge “This is a most welcome addition to the literature on biography which will be attractive to readers in several different disciplines. Historians will like its very firm grounding in the development of historical writing since the nineteenth century; students of literature will learn much from its studies of the Bloomsbury biographers and life writing today; while social scientists will find much to explore and applaud in its confident discussion of concepts and methodology. The discussion of biography is integrated with the discussion of general historiography. Our pre-existing historiographical familiarity helps us to appreciate the novelty of the author’s biographical arguments all the more.” Professor Lawrence Goldman, Oxford University, UK “There are numerous monographs on biography as a genre but no single text dealing with historians and biography, and yet historians are a  major producer of biographies. Melanie Nolan’s Biography: An Historiography provides the first systematic and focussed consideration of historians’ biographical approaches and practices. It is a far ranging and much needed work, competently executed and underpinned by an impressive array of research.” Professor Douglas Munro, University of Queensland, Australia

Biography: An Historiography

Biography: An Historiography examines how Western historians have used biography from the nineteenth century to the present – considering the problems and challenges that historians have faced in their biographical practice systematically. This volume analyses the strategies and methods that historians have used in response to seven major issues identified over time to do with evidence, including but not limited to the problem of causation, the problem of fact and fiction, the problem of other minds, the problem of significance or representativeness, the problems of perspective, both macro and micro, and the problem of subjectivity and relative truth. This volume will be essential for both postgraduates and historians studying biography. Melanie Nolan is Professor of History, Director of the National Centre of Biography, and General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, in the School of History, at the Australian National University.

Biography: An Historiography

Melanie Nolan

Designed cover image: Caricature Shop of Piercy Roberts, 28 Middle Row, Holborn MET DP808267 392497 Cultural Archive/ Alamy Stock Photo First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Melanie Nolan The right of Melanie Nolan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nolan, Melanie, author Title: Biography : an historiography / Melanie Nolan. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022046490 (print) | LCCN 2022046491 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138387232 (hbk) | ISBN 9781138387249 (pbk) | ISBN 9780429426391 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Biography--Research--Methodology. | Biography as a literary form. | Biography--Philosophy. | Europe--Biography--History and criticism. | United States--Biography--History and criticism. Classification: LCC CT22 .N65 2023 (print) | LCC CT22 (ebook) | DDC 808.06/692--dc23/eng/20221118 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046490 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046491 ISBN: 978-1-138-38723-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-38724-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-42639-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429426391 Typeset in Times New Roman by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

To Christopher Nolan Arohanui

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: ‘It’s Just a Biography’: historicising historians’ biographical debates

x xiv 1

2 Victorians debate over heroism: the role of the significant individual in history

33

3 Post-Victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches to biography

77

4 Historians and the problem of other minds in biography

122

5 Cold War debates over individuals in history: counterfactuals, contingency and causation in biography

172

6 Postwar debates over atomising lives

220

7 Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory and the singularization of history

265

8 Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire 308 9 Conclusion: Trevelyan’s empiricism and historians’ biographical practices Index

355 369

Figures

1.1 ‘Was biography a new method of history in 1966? ‘New Ways in History’, Cover, TLS, no. 3345 (7 April 1966), p. 273. The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive. Robert Potts (1 April 2022). 2 1.2 After his death, Hester Piozzi, John Courtenay and James Boswell, seen here at work, and other friends and members of his circle wrote literary biographies of Samuel Johnson, making for a crowded and contentious field. Johnson’s bust looking down at his various biographers disapprovingly. ‘The Biographers’, by James Sayers, engraving (June 1786). Alamy. 6 1.3 Most historians were realists who have countered idealists with empiricism. “Battle of the Schools – Idealism against Realism”, ‘Fantasies’, in Charivari, no. 2 (24 April 1855), by Honoré-Victorin Daumier, lithograph (1855). Bridgeman. 12 2.1 Froude’s ‘warts and all’ biography of Thomas Carlyle was highly controversial. ‘James Anthony Froude’, Carlyle’s Speaking Likeness, by E. Linley Sambourne, cartoon from Punch, ‘Punch’s Fancy Portraits no. 16’ (July–December 1882). Look and Learn/George Collection/Bridgman Images. 34 2.2 After writing Sartor Resartus (1831) about clothes as the ‘show of things’, Carlyle determined to ‘ground his history on reality’. ‘The Real and the Ideal’, by Edmund Joseph Sullivan, lithograph book illustration (1898), from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh (London: George Bell, 1898), p. 307. Bridgeman. 36 2.3 Spencer’s view was that ‘Before he can remake his society, his society must make him’, Herbert Spencer holding up a mirror to society, by Joseph Ferdinand Keppler, cartoon from Puck, 12, no. 295 (1 November 1882), p. 136. Paul D. Stewart/Science Photo Library. 47

Figures  xi 2.4 Above all, Carlyle initiated a debate over his biographical theory of the role of the individual in history. Thomas Carlyle gazing at the Cromwell Family Miniatures at the Old Masters Exhibition, 6 February 1895, by Eyre Crowe, lithograph, from The Graphic (6 May 1895). Bridgeman. 57 2.5 The Illustrated London News regarded William Stubbs, S. R. Gardiner, W. E. H. Lecky and John Robert Seeley as the leading living historians at the end of the nineteenth century. They had differing historical views on biography. ‘The Leading Living Historians’, The Illustrated London News (27 October 1894). Bridgeman, Look and Learn/ Illustrations Papers Collection. 65 3.1 Roger Fry inspired Virginia Woolf to experiment with the structure and style of biography. She wrote in her biography of Fry ‘[he] had more knowledge and experience than the rest of us [Bloomsbury] put together’. Fry’s painting of Woolf (1928). Alamy. 77 3.2 Roger Fry championed the European Post-Impressionist movement influencing Bloomsbury artists and writers. ‘Manet and the post Impressionists’, Poster of the First Impressionist Exhibition Grafton Gallery (November 1909 to January 1910). The Courtauld/Bridgeman. 81 3.3 Leslie Stephen’s archivally-based research was premised on history being independent of the author; his daughter, Virginia Woolf, largely abandoned his conventional biographical forms in her fiction. Virginia Woolf and her father Sir Leslie Stephen (c.1903), b/w photo. Bridgeman. 91 4.1 Sigmund Freud wrote the original psychobiography; there were many calls in his wake for historians to adopt psychoanalytical approaches in biography. Sigmund Freud posing for the Sculptor Nemon in the garden (1931). Chronicle/Alamy. 122 4.2 Freud with members of his inner circle of loyal supporters, the Wednesday Psychological Society, Berlin, (1922). Front row (l–r): Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933), Hanns Sachs (1881–1947). Back row (l–r) Otto Rank (1884–1939), Karl Abraham (1887–1925), Max Eitingon (1881–1943), Ernest Jones (1879–1958). Bridgeman. 131 4.3 Not all members of the Bloomsbury group become supporters of psychoanalysis, with Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf using ‘psychological insights’ in their biographies. L to R: James Strachey, Lytton Strachey, Thoby Stephen, Adrian Stephen and Virginia Stephen

xii Figures

4.4

5.1

5.2

5.3

6.1

6.2

6.3

in Fritham, Hampshire (1901), b/w photo. Bridgeman Images, Look and Learn. 136 Martin Luther was caricatured as a seven-headed evil – derived from beasts in the book of Revelation – in a leaflet ‘Martinus Luther Siebenkopff’ against the Reformation (1529). Caricature of Martin Luther (1529), as a sevenheaded evil entitled ‘Martinus Luther Siebenkopff’ from a leaflet against the Reformation, Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Alamy. 152 Historians of ‘Past and Present’ involved both Marxists and non-Marxist historians: Eric Hobsbawm; Rodney Hilton; Lawrence Stone; Keith Thomas; seated: Christopher Hill; John Huxtable Elliott; Joan Thirsk. Historians of ‘Past and Present’, by Stephen Frederick Godrey Farthing, oil on canvas (1999). National Portrait Gallery, London. 172 Dona Torr, a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, was a central figure in encouraging the Communist Party Historians Group to write biography. Dona Torr (1953). Labour History Archive & Study Centre, People’s History Museum, Manchester. 186 E. P. Thompson wanted to rescue people ‘from below’ from being ignored in history, such as the ‘deluded followers’ of the religious prophetess Joanna Southcott and others. Joanna Southcott the Prophetess excommunicating the bishops, by Thomas Rowlandson (1814). Alamy. 204 Lewis Namier famously believed interest and backgrounds mattered more than ideology and ideas in politics and set about compiling a thorough portrait of British politics by researching the lives of every member of the House of Commons. Interior House of Commons, by Benjamin Cole, etching and engraving (1741–1742). British Museum, Rights & Images. 220 In Namier’s wake, historians have increasingly considered the common characteristics of groups of people, by tracing each individual member’s biography and analysing the collective results. A Cabinet Card of Galaxy of Distinguished Colonists in New South Wales, photos, collected and published by W.M. Sargent, Artist, 352 George St, Sydney (1867). Isobel Bowden collection, Local Studies Collection. Blue Mountains Library, PF 1867. 244 Historians have increasingly used collective biography to consider the lives of marginal groups without extensive archives. One group, and their associates, which has been

Figures  xiii

7.1

7.2

7.3

8.1 8.2

8.3

researched is the 151 market women in October 1789 who were regarded as the lynchpin of the people’s uprising. ‘Dames Des Halles’ by S. W. Fores, engraving (5 October 1789). Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images. 252 Napoleon I with George III in a Lilliputian context. ‘George III, and Bonaparte as the King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver’: by James Gillray, engraving (26 June 1803), from Henry de Kock, Histoire des Cocus Célèbres (1871). Alamy. 266 Trial records, especially the confessions of those tortured in the inquisition, have been an important source for microhistorians biographical study. ‘Inquisition in the middle ages’, by Joseph-Nicholas Robert-Fleury, engraving (1841). Bridgeman. 274 The return of Martin Guerre, appearing before his wife, Bertrande de Rols, and the one who had usurped his identity, the impostor Arnaud du Tilh (Thil), has been the basis of a number of microhistories, including Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre (1984). Engraving by Henry de Kock, Histoire Des Cocus Célèbres (1871). Bridgeman. 289 The life writing phenomenon satirised. Michael Leunig ‘Help me doctor. I’ve a book inside me’, cartoon (14 April 2016). Michael Leunig. 308 Writing his memoirs was one of the ways Napoleon fought the battle for posterity. Napoleon I dictating his memorials to General Gourgaud, St Helena, by Charles Auguste Steuben, painting (1820). Bridgeman. 321 The 1950 movie Rashomon gave rise to the ‘Rashomon effect’ whereby the same event is described in significantly different (often contradictory) ways by different people who were involved, suggesting the unreliability and subjectivity of eye-witnesses’ memories. Rashomon directed by Akira Kurosawa, film poster by Toho Tokusatsu Company (1950). Everett Collection Inc/Alamy 335

Acknowledgements

This account of historians’ biographical practices was enabled by my own professional pursuits and I acknowledge a number of circles of my colleagues, friends and family who have supported its production. Many of the research questions that I consider here relate to my being Director of the National Centre of Biography (NCB) and General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) in the School of History at the Australian National University (ANU). A review of the ‘dictionary’, at the time of my appointment in 2008, recommended the establishment of a research centre around the ADB to use the concise lives we create, develop biographical methodologies and build up research capacity. I am fortunate in my colleagues who are in the centre. I am grateful to Malcolm Allbrook, Keira Donnelly, Christine Fernon, Karen Fox, Sam Furphy, Jenny Higgins, Rani Kerin, Nicole McLennan and Stephen Wilks, for the discussions we have had on biographical matters over the years and for their readings of earlier versions of some chapters in the NCB’s writing group, Biography Feedback Merchants. I thank in particular Geoff Hunt for thoughtful and caring editorial advice. In 2008, the NCB was also tasked with developing a comprehensive programme to link our high-quality research with education. As we began teaching courses on biography, we found that there had been few overview texts published that focused on historians’ biographical practices over time. Students wanted to understand how the history discipline had used biography through the centuries. This text developed out of that teaching need. Secondly, then, my students have provided invaluable assistance by asking questions and discussing biography. I acknowledge in particular Jen Bird, Joshua Black, Cath Bishop, Matt Cunneen, Jacqui Donegan, Nichola Garvey, Brett Goodin, Elizabeth Hellwig, Robert Hurley, Shelley Richardson, Sophie Scott-Brown, Christine Wallace and Rhys Williams, some of whom have graduated to become comrade historians working in biography. I thank in particular Josh, Soph, Chris and Rhys for their encouragement. Thirdly, I thank my university, the ANU, which facilitated this project in so many material ways. The NCB was designed to be a focus for biography

Acknowledgements  xv and life writing and to enable biographical research and networks locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Fulfilling this brief has involved interdisciplinary engagement with Visiting Fellows, the hosting of international conferences, the establishment of a biography series, ANU.Lives, and, again in partnership with ANU Press, founding a journal, the Australian Journal of Biography and History. These developments have enriched my understanding of the issues that historians grapple with as they use biography. It has helped me to place this work in broader currents. Specifically, I am grateful to the ANU’s Research School of Social Science’s Visiting Fellows Scheme and its conference funding which has allowed us to attract outstanding visitors from around the world to conferences, for extended scholarly visits and to contribute to a series of subsequent publications. An unintended consequence was that those contacts provided me with a number of readers for this manuscript. Warmly, I thank Lawrence Goldman, Don MacRaild, Doug Munro, Ira Nadel and Hans Renders for their comments on an earlier version of the whole manuscript. I am particularly grateful to Ira for discussing disciplinary maps of biography with me and to Lawrence for drawing out my views on life writing. Necessary, although not sufficient, my then Head of the School of History, Frank Bongiorno, gave me a period of leave from my administrative roles in 2020 and my deputy, Malcolm Allbrook, stood in my stead while I had a sixmonth writing retreat. This is all background contextualisation, however. That this book was written at this time was because Eve Stetch, Publisher (History) at Routledge, perceived a gap in the historiography. Routledge has published excellent introductions to history and biography, including by Catherine Parke and Hans Renders, and there are others on the market, such as Barbara Caine’s. Still there is room for new approaches. Eve invited me to submit a proposal on the basis of my perspective on biography garnered from the roles I hold, as outlined above. Quite simply, this book would not be appearing without Eve’s invitation and the contributions of her team at Routledge. I am especially grateful for the attention Nick Brock gave to the text. Finally, my deepest thanks go to my family circle of support: my partner, Kim Sterelny, our daughter Kate Nolan Sterelny, Nelson Burge, Mia Frewen, Geralyn Nolan, Rachel Nolan, Marcus Nolan and Adam Nolan. I could not have completed this book, let alone other projects and life’s works, without Kim. I have planted trees for those who have died in my family; I also dedicate this book to the memory of my brother, Christopher Nolan (1958–2012), Aotearoa-New Zealand born, who is buried in Australian land where we came to live, in the Kangaroo Ground Cemetery which was once the hunting ground of the Wurundjeri people. Melanie Nolan August 2022

1 Introduction ‘It’s Just a Biography’: historicising historians’ biographical debates

‘It’s just a biography’: Trevelyan’s formula Biography from the nineteenth century has traditionally involved an invisible narrator, a linear chronology. Above all, it involves what one historian, ‘a social historian before [being] a biographer’, recently described as a ‘sober accumulation of information—alleviated with occasional dashes of imagination’.1 Historians accumulate and interpret historical facts based on available sources which are analysed by way of empiricism; that is, they use common-sense assumptions about facts and historical truth. They fit archival evidence to lives and craft a life story. You may have heard this empirical method summed up by the dismissive remark that a piece of work is uncomplicatedly and straightforwardly ‘just a biography’. Surely there is only one way for an historian to write a biography: one that is well researched, imaginative and insightful and well-written? This is G. M. Trevelyan’s formula in his Biography: A Reader’s Guide in 1947. Biography was one ‘method of writing history’, a ‘personal, human and intimate’ approach, which British historians practised more than elsewhere.2 Owing to an underlying sound empiricism, which historians had embraced at the end of the nineteenth century, Trevelyan was unconvinced that biography ‘was getting better’ in the course of the twentieth century. David Cannadine, as Trevelyan’s biographer, analysed his formula in more detail in 1992. It involved three elements: accumulation, selection in aid of interpretation and narrative. Research involved both the gathering of facts and the sorting of evidence after the biographer had ransacked public and private archives. The historian then uses or ‘plays with the facts’ that have been assembled, lays them out and chooses the ones that support her conjectures using ‘imaginative or speculative’ thinking. Finally, systematic explanations are composed, involving both ‘science and imagination’ that had been thrown up by the research and its analysis. Cannadine argued that no major historian has ever produced so many books in an essentially biographical mode as Trevelyan, except perhaps the Harvard maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morison. Both Morison’s biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), and his John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s DOI: 10.4324/9780429426391-1

2 Introduction

Figure 1.1 Was biography a new method of history in 1966? ‘New Ways in History’, Cover, TLS, no. 3345 (7 April 1966), p. 273. The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive. Robert Potts (1 April 2022).

Introduction  3 Biography (1959) were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Trevelyan noted himself that ‘I have myself written a good deal of political history in biographical form, in the Lives of two Lords Grey, of John Bright, and of Garibaldi’. Cannadine lamented that Trevelyan was ‘the most famous, the most honoured, the most influential and the most widely read historian of his generation’ but is now all but forgotten.3 After Trevelyan, however, historians are said to have expressed doubt about biography as a method of writing history.4 At the same time, they are said to have been reluctant to theorise, as Hans Renders and David Veltman have suggested in Fear of Theory (2021) which sets out to provide a new theoretical justification of biography.5 Certainly, there was no prejudice against my writing a biography as an MA (Hons) student at Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand, in the early 1980s. Indeed, there was enthusiasm, as New Zealand historians were being recruited in national collaboration to write for a Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. I was told, however, to wear my theory ‘lightly on my sleeve’, as much as anything for accessibility. Empirical method—bringing together the richest range of sources to sustain a coherent argument—was what was required. There did not seem to be much that one could read about historians’ biographical practices; certainly, I was not directed to any texts that surveyed historians’ changing practices, past or present. Cannadine concluded that there is no evidence that Trevelyan had read Marx or Freud or Max Weber or Durkheim or Pareto. He was not interested in debates about the philosophy of history or historical methodology. He believed that narrative was the ‘bedrock’ of history and he did not set out to look at the past in a self-consciously new and different way in the manner, say of Marc Bloch, R.H. Tawney—or Lewis Namier. In the preface to the first volume of England under Queen Anne, he made it plain that he had reached no novel conclusions: ‘If I have not produced a new and startling theory about the politics and personalities of the Whigs, the High Tories, and the Moderate Tories, about the characters of Anne and Marlborough, I can only plead, to those to whom the plea may seem relevant, that any new and startling theory would have been wrong’.6 Cannadine, noted that, although Trevelyan set great store by scholarship, imagination and narrative, he was not powerfully gifted with insight into human character or motivation. He was empathetic and good at personal relationships, but was less successful in dealing with individual historical personalities. He had no intention of probing the inner recesses of people’s lives and minds. He took for granted the framework in which he wrote. We can point to many contemporary examples of unreflective historians writing biography, some even aggressively so. Acclaimed contemporary biographer Claire Tomalin has stated simply, ‘I have no theory of biography’.7

4 Introduction Biographers have boasted, like one Australian historian, that ‘[d]espite decades of theoretical under-nourishment, and feeling quite healthy nonetheless, I sallied forth remembering the tale of Hilaire Belloc’s water beetle—better just to swim, for to stop and think, would be to sink’.8 It would seem that ‘Trevelyan’s formula’ of just writing a biography has flourished amongst historians. Individuals are born into a specific world and act in a specific context. While this was not denied in Trevelyan’s coda, nor was it explained. That led to little critique, with Trevelyan’s formula the basis of a ‘consensus over good biography’. Indeed, Donald M. MacRaild and Avram Taylor have suggested that a general acceptance over the unexamined centrality of biography endured into the twenty-first century.9 Biography, and this consensus, is at the centre of historians’ practice; historians stress the role of the individual rather than concentrate upon the structures constraining human agency. MacRaild and Taylor have agreed with Murray G. Murphey’s view that historians have an informal agreement to treat historical persons as thinking, feeling human beings to whose thoughts and feelings we have access [; and that] we can understand the culture of the historical person described [and we can], explain in some causal sense why people did what they did and why events turned out in the way that they did.10 Similarly, Christopher Lloyd noted that, ‘[c]oncepts of society as an independent structure with causal power’ are subsidiary to the emphasis on the role of individuals in history. Historians usually hold a loosely holistic understanding of the character of an epoch or spirit of the age, that is its Zeitgeist. They consider a person’s ‘times’ but they put greatest weight to people’s lives.11 Murphey suggested, in his study of the philosophical foundations of historical knowledge, that historians share some ‘basic premises underlying a commonsense notion of human history’.12 Historians believe that human action is explicable: there is a real world of which true knowledge is possible, which consists of other persons who have minds. It is possible for one person to know what another person thinks. A language spoken by one person can be correctly interpreted by someone from outside that linguistic community, and a text on one language can be translated into an approximately equivalent text in another language of comparable resources. Members of one culture can understand members of antecedent states of their own culture. Changing ideas about empirical method seem not have not challenged the consensus over historians’ ‘archival-based’ biography. Empiricism was once regarded as a simple, objective common-sense method whereby knowledge was proven against the archive. Leopold von Ranke is regarded as the earliest exponent of modern source-based history. He was university-trained, advocated more professionalised history, and was

Introduction  5 a history professor at the University of Berlin for half a century from 1825. The biographies of popes and saints, emperors and kings were central to the history he wrote. Since World War One, however, historians have lost the untenable ideals of ‘pure’ empiricism, positivism and the ‘noble dream of objectivity’.13 By the mid-twentieth century, touched by relativism, historians such as Charles A. Beard and E. H. Carr pointed to the importance of selection and subjectivity in history. Even Herbert Butterfield, who coined the term ‘technical history’, which he used interchangeably with the terms ‘academic history’ or ‘scientific history’, and who believed in value-free history, had come to consider the explanatory values involved in selectivity.14 While historians concerned with life and times have not resolved the exact relationship between human agency and social structure, there is agreement over the empirical method whereby knowledge is proven against the archive but which involves selection and subjectivity too, particularly in terms of interpretation. This accounts for it being possible for there to be good biographies of the same person, well-researched, well-analysed and well-written, albeit ­differing in interpretation. In this introduction to historians’ biographical practices, I complicate this account. I begin with a recent standard narrative, which has been revised since Trevelyan’s time: it is the idea that historians first embraced biography, they then abandoned it from the mid-twentieth century, before returning to it of late. I then show the limits of that narrative about a Biographical Turn, together with its accompanying view about an unchanging consensus over biographical methodology. Empiricism itself changed, using research methods, to observe lives and test hypotheses. Trevelyan represents one kind of historian writing biography but not the only kind. Perhaps Trevelyan had no explicit theory, but many other historians have not been afraid of theory. If theory is defined as an abstraction or a general principle to be employed and tested, which is independent of the life which is to be explained and that can be applied to a number of cases, then historians have resorted to a number of theories in their biographies. A series of hypotheses have emerged since Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Great Man’ theory. Historians’ empiricism has led them to test theories pragmatically, experimentally and sometimes to argue about them bitterly. Trevelyan left the academic profession for a number of years (although not the field of biography for he gained an international reputation over his trilogy on Giuseppe Garibaldi) because he disagreed with the rise of a scientific and ‘impartial’ theory of biography which John Bagnell Bury and others advocated.15 In this book, I consider historians’ engagement with biography as a series of debates over theory and method. Indeed, I argue that the debates, clashes and conflicts over biographical approaches were significant in themselves in shaping historians’ biographies. I make the case then for historicising historians’ debates. Some of these individual debates

6 Introduction are well known, but they have not been brought together and considered systematically to provide a narrative and a disciplinary map of biography as an historiography.

Figure 1.2 After his death, Hester Piozzi, John Courtenay and James Boswell, seen here at work, and other friends and members of his circle wrote literary biographies of Samuel Johnson, making for a crowded and contentious field. Johnson’s bust looking down at his various biographers disapprovingly. ‘The Biographers’, by James Sayers, engraving (June 1786). Alamy.

Introduction  7

Disciplinary diversity: historian’s biography Historians’ approaches to biography have tended to be subsumed in broader interdisciplinary accounts, especially the rich work on biography as a literary genre. The biography of biography was initially written by those who were not historians; some even sceptical of historians. Literary biographies are accounts of writers and artists that often concentrate upon the close relationship between writers and their work and which are typically written by those who self-describe as biographers rather than historians.16 The subjects often have extensive archives as well as textual or other creative works. Literary theory, known as critical theory, has developed out of the problems of literary biography in explaining or interpreting literary texts. Michael Benton has suggested that literary biography is the Cinderella of Literary Studies.17 Reflection on literary biography has had a dual nature, in part concerned with re-occurring challenges of biography over time; in part concerned to explain change and variation.18 Much has been published on biography as literature. Juliette Atkinson noted nineteenth-century biographers ‘were preoccupied with at least one of three issues: its claims to being an art or a craft, the didactic potential of biography, and the ethical questions raised by a genre that brought private matters to public light’.19 Likewise Hermione Lee noted from the nineteenth century, ‘continual recurrence, in different contexts, of the same questions of definition, value and purpose’.20 Nigel Hamilton’s Biography: A Brief History both surveyed the evolution of biography from the ancient world to the present, and also considered the obstacles that have lain in the path of biographers in the past and continue to perplex contemporary biographers.21 Similarly, James Atlas’s reading of the biographical canon was to show the lengthy genealogy of the attributes that we associate with contemporary biography.22 Indeed Ray Monk and others have pointed out that the expanding body of academic literature on biography still asks some of the same questions that Samuel Johnson had addressed in the eighteenth century in his two famous essays on biography in the Rambler and Idler: Is biography fiction? Who deserves to have a biography written of them? What details are appropriately included in a biography? Is it possible to know with certainty the inner life of another? What are the moral or ethical responsibilities of biographers towards subjects, social sensitivities and the truth?23 Literary analysis has not presented a single kind of biography or methodology but a raft of diverse classification systems over time. In 1987 Ruth Hoberman argued that these were ‘too arbitrary and too prescriptive to be useful’.24 Among the more frequently cited was Harold Nicolson’s 1928 distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ biography. He was concerned most with ‘pure biography’, which was a distinct branch of creative literature; the biography that historians wrote was recognisable and distinct and, like fiction, was ‘impure’. He sought to untangle ‘pure’ biography from the

8 Introduction cognate practices of history and fiction.25 In his 1957 study of literary biography, Leon Edel identified three categories: the traditional, heavily documented ‘chronicle’ full of the subject’s letters; the ‘pictorial’, based on the subject’s essential traits with less emphasis on chronological development; and the ‘narrative pictorial or novelistic’, in which the biographer served as narrator with access to the subject’s mind, significant in the context perhaps of his own psychoanalysis.26 Then there was James L. Clifford’s 1970 distinction between ‘Objective’, ‘Scholarly-historical’, ‘Artisticscholarly’, ‘Narrative’, ‘Novelistic’ and ‘Miscellaneous’ biographies.27 Ira Nadel developed another system in 1984 suggesting three traditional forms of biography: dramatic/expressive, objective/academic and interpretative/ analytic. He also listed three twentieth-century forms: psychobiography, group biography and contextual biography.28 Hoberman, considering the period 1918–1939, herself argued for three general categories of experimentation—novelistic, mediated and psychosociological: In novelistic biography (Leon Edel’s term), the narrative is virtually omniscient and the subjects’ inner lives are open to scrutiny, their motives depicted and interpreted … In mediated biography, the biographer’s own perceptions are dramatized, the narrator’s insight limited by his own particular viewpoint; influenced by post-Jamesian theory, mediated biographers dramatize their relation to their material, so that the biography unrolls in their perceptions, much as Strether’s experiences in The Ambassadors are depicted through his consciousness of them. Finally, in psychosociobiography, the narrator’s voice is suppressed, and narrative, subject, and environment seem a continuous web of texts, bound less by causal chains than by rhythmic recurrences.29 While there have been a number of typologies, literary accounts of the history of biography have tended to be unilinear and evolutionary: George Saintsbury, Edmund Gosse and Nicolson took a long view and argued that there had been both progressive and regressive periods in biographical practice since Plutarch wrote his Parallel Lives at the beginning of the second century BC, but there was essentially a series of culturally dominant ways of writing biography.30 In a foreword to Ruth Hoberman’s 1987 account of modernist English biography in the interwar period, A.O.J. Cockshut emphasised the all-encompassing impact of modernism on the art of biography and, thus, contributed to the idea of biography’s literary progression.31 Similarly, Catherine Parke argued that psychoanalysis so profoundly influenced biographical practice that biographers came to ‘automatically employ’ Freudian psychology.32 In addition to being unilinear, literary accounts of the biography of biography share a second characteristic: an aloofness towards historians’ disciplinary debates. Richard Bradford mentions Carlyle but not those who debated his Great Man

Introduction  9 theory. As Juliette Atkinson and others have argued, literary biographers set about defining a ‘distinct literary genre of biography’ particularly from the end of the nineteenth century but in the process, they overlooked historians who were engaged in defining a distinct genre of biography too.33 I would make the point that some did not merely fail to see, but were dismissive of, historians’ biographical practices. As intimated, Nicolson was among those who argued that historians from the nineteenth century used biography in a peculiar way. He gave the Hogarth Lectures on Literature, which Leonard and Virginia Woolf published in 1927 in their Hogarth Press series as The Development of English Biography. In these talks Nicolson argued that, while Johnson’s Life of Savage in 1744 was ‘unquestionably [… the] first masterpiece in biography’, with Johnson being ‘the real founder of pure biography, for he was the first to proclaim that biography was a distinct branch of creative literature’, his was a lone voice.34 Nicolson deplored the fact that biography, defined as ‘the history of the lives of individual men as a branch of literature’, continued, even in 1927, to be entangled with history and fiction.35 He distinguished two features of historians’ biographies. First, historians cared less about the study of an individual than a study of history expressed in and through an individual. Secondly, historians might give a truthful record of an individual, but they rarely composed their biographies as a work of art. The assumption was that literary biography was the correct approach to lives. Biography is not just a literary genre; however, it is an history genre too. Historians have begun to challenge the dominance of literary biography in narratives of the history of biography. A number of historians have now written excellent introductory ‘biographies of biography’ from a historian’s point of view.36 Renders, Binne de Haan and Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon have on microhistorical methods. These focus on the single case in history with the aim ‘of isolating ideas, beliefs, practices, and actions that would otherwise remain unknown by means of more conventional historical strategies’.37 Barbara Caine has written an excellent account of the relationship between history and biography.38 Her theme is that there has been a constant debate over the importance and limitations of biography at the metalevel—a debate over the relationship between history and biography. She pits the support of Ludmilla Jordanova and Shirley A. Leckie for historians wholeheartedly embracing biography against the likes of John Tosh who points to the shortcomings of biography as history.39 To some extent these historians’ overviews of biography, however, are substituting one unilinear and evolutionary account for another. Caine’s 2010 Biography and History is typical in telling a linear story in three phases of historians’ biographical practices. She begins with the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. There was a challenge to the classical distinction between history and biography at this time. For instance, Francis Bacon argued that ‘individual lives needed to be seen as part of history, rather than something quite distinct from it’.40 The start of

10 Introduction modern biography is usually taken to be Samuel Johnson’s lives of the poets and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.41 In his 1830 essay On History Thomas Carlyle insisted that ‘history was the essence of innumerable biographies’.42 He imaginatively evoked past events providing often savage judgement of individuals. Caine considered a second phase when biography went out of favour in the twentieth century.43 She argued that there was a weakening of biography’s status amongst historians with the professionalisation of history. This began with the German school and its wider application at the end of the nineteenth century, epitomised in Ranke’s, John Seeley’s and Lord John Acton’s work. The focus came to be a dispassionate recording and documentation of the past emphasising political, religious, institutional and public life. This work was not interested in questions of character and personality. A second nail in biography’s coffin is said to be Marxist and materialist history with its emphasis on social structure. It was premised on Marx’s idea that ‘Men do make their own history, but they do not do it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly given and transmitted in the past.’ Individuals serve great social needs of their time. Similarly, Sabina Loriga, for instance, argued that from the early nineteenth century historians put the actions and suffering of individuals on one side to try to discover the invisible process of universal history, “that evolutionary movement of our genre, which should be considered as its true content, as its centre and its essence”.44 A third factor was the Annales School which tended to consider, as Lucien Febvre suggested, ‘not the man, never the man, human societies, organised groups’.45 Social historians led by the Annales School and cliometricians are said to have ‘further damaged … the image of biographical history’.46 Biography was the ‘missing form in French Historical Studies’.47 A fourth factor was the linguistic turn and the importance of cultural encoding which became influential in the course of the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of poststructuralism. This often involved the death of the author and the retreat of an emphasis on human agency. These were all challenges to the value of biography. They were also challenges to its possibility. Questions have been raised about whether historians could ever make a ‘true’ representation of a life. Accounts were personal, contingent upon new information and never authoritative unlike accounts emphasising economic factors. Famously, E. H. Carr’s What is History? in 1964 argued that a focus on biography tended to exaggerate the significance of individuals and downplay the importance of structures and of ‘people in the mass’.48 Geoffrey Elton’s The Practice of History in 1967 emphasised institutions and argued that if you focused on a biography there was a risk of bringing a literary approach to history which was

Introduction  11 inappropriate.49 The view that structuralism put off historians writing biography is common. During the twentieth century, then, for a wide range of reasons, Caine noted that most historians avoided biography because it involved a neglect of wider processes. Some have argued, moreover, that biographers were shunned in the historical profession. Daniel Meister has suggested that biography was ‘ostracized from the academy’. David Nasaw has argued that biography was the ‘profession’s unloved stepchild’ or, as Steve Weinberg put it, the ‘bastard child of academe’.50 Caine herself suggested that historians have had ‘considerable ambivalence’ to biography.51 Caine noted a recent and new stress on biography, and especially autobiography, which she dated from the 1970s and which constituted a third phase of historians’ biographical practice. Agency was re-emphasized and so also were those outside the elites. She argued that historians turned to biography in an unprecedented fashion and not only has their biography extended beyond powerful elites but it considers agency rather than being preoccupied by structure. They are now ‘endowing ordinary lives with agency, dignity, and texture’, too.52 Mentalities and microhistory viewed history through the frame of biography, exemplified by the work of Carlo Ginzburg’s 1976 The Cheese and the Worms.53 Clifford Geertz’s ethnographic approach was also popular; it concentrated on the ‘[a]nalysis at extremely close range of highly circumscribed phenomena- a village community, a group of families, even an individual person’.54 It was also evident in work on ‘marginal groups who had suffered both oppression and discrimination’, such as Afro-Americans. This new biographical approach was ‘evident most clearly on works on women, their private and familial lives’.55 So historians were said to have now turned to biography.56 Literary biographer Lee has considered standard evolutionary monolithic narratives in some detail. She adds complexity to the narrative, and more emphasis on variation at a time. Caine’s is a classic example in Lee’s sights for it considers the development of biography as a linear sequence from one stage to another. There was Victorian biography then modern biography, then psychobiography then prosopography and so on or, as Lee suggests, an ‘evolution graph’: that goes from exemplary Lives or ‘hagiographies’, through to the vivid realism and intimacy of 18th-century portraits, to the conservative solidity of Victorian ‘Lives and Letters’, to modernist experiments with life-writing as an art form, and then rejoicingly on to the ‘Golden Age’ of long, professional, candid, post-Freudian 20th-century biography.57 Such a view of biography suppresses variation; all Victorian biographies were essentially alike; all Bloomsbury biographies were influenced by modernism and Freudianism, and so on.58 Modernism, for instance, is a

12 Introduction significant turning point in literary biography. During World War One, T. S. Eliot was intrigued by the ‘complex and devious’ relationship of the life of poet, playwright, actor and critic Ben Jonson to his work. Jonson was one of the first playwrights to publish their authorial name beneath the title of their work, radically changing the way that people thought of ‘authorship’. Importantly, Eliot’s interest was in ‘the process of transfusion of the personality, or, in a deeper sense the life’, of ‘the author’ into the dramatic characters he or she created. Eliot proposed a new method of approaching a life by gaining an understanding of his or her ‘living force as a writer’. Authors could really know their subjects through understanding of their works and interiority. Virginia Woolf and others also attempted to find ‘deeper truths’ about lives. She developed her methodology as ‘The New Biography’, seeking to combine ‘granite-like solidity’ of facts with ‘the rainbowlike intangibility’ of personality.59 Woolf was central to the Bloomsbury group of writers, artists and intellectuals who at one time lived and worked in the West End London suburb Bloomsbury and whose lives were entangled.60 Some of these developments passed by historians with little effect.61 Modernism has been important to historians’ biographical practices because modernist writers, especially those of ‘Bloomsbury’, use modernism to

Figure 1.3 Most historians were realists who have countered idealists with empiricism. “Battle of the Schools—Idealism against Realism”, ‘Fantasies’, in Charivari, no. 2 (24 April 1855), by Honoré-Victorin Daumier, lithograph (1855). Bridgeman.

Introduction  13 critique historians. Thus, Harold Nicolson and Lytton Strachey loathed historians’ biographies characterising their Victorian methods, their ‘sullen cloud’, their ‘globs’ of ‘fat volumes […] of undigested’ material.62 Their views were influential among the general public. Ever since, despite the work of those like Caine, biographies of biography have tended to ignore historians’ contribution to biographical practice because it is considered either recent or shallow, and sometimes both, or worse—it was traditional, boring and should be ignored as irrelevant to (literary) biography.

Disciplinary diversity: putting historians debates into a narrative of biography Historians have been written out of much of the literary analysis of the evolution of biography, to the point that it is commonplace to suggest that historians were little interested in biography for most of the twentieth century, before the biographical turn.63 The unilinear evolutionary view of the development of biography has meant historians’ debates about their biographical practices since the nineteenth century have not been considered as a sequence, in detail.64 The widely held assumption - that biography is interdisciplinary and literary biographers are best placed to discuss the methodology - has been an major obstacle to considering biography as a central tool for historians. Instead of adding historians into an interdisciplinary mix, one strategy is to shine the spotlight directly on historians’ biographical practices. This interrogation is premised on biography having been central to historical practice since the nineteenth century, especially during the twentieth century. As I have argued elsewhere, this challenges the idea of a mid-century abandonment of biography by historians.65 In fact, historians’ biographical practices seem to have been sustained. Biography has remained central to professional history. Since the nineteenth century a significant number of professional historians, if not the majority, have written biography. Caine noted that: ‘Many historians have written biography at some point in their careers, including those who have been most critical of it’.66 The list of critics, historians and others, who tried their hand at biography is long: Isaac Deutscher, E. H. Carr, Geoffrey Elton, Roland Barthes, and so on.67 Elton, for instance, was ‘not an admirer of the biographical genre, which he regarded as frivolous’ for it was a ‘branch of literature or literary criticism, rather than as history’.68 In 1967 he argued that The limits of one man’s life rarely have any meaning in the interpretation of history; even if his death marks a period (and how rarely this happens) his birth will not. However, influential he may have been, no individual has ever dominated his age to the point where it becomes sensible to write its history purely around him.69

14 Introduction Elton, Professor of English Constitutional History at Cambridge University, was often asked why he would not write the biography of Thomas Cromwell for which he was eminently qualified; Elton’s reply was that ‘he is not biographable’. Furthermore, Elton believed that the archive in Cromwell’s case would not sustain a biography. Even so he trained and nurtured biographers. Diarmaid MacCulloch acknowledged Elton in his introduction to his biography of Cromwell, in particular his ‘exceptional quality as a graduate supervisor that he formed historians with the independence of mind to take on their Doktorvater’s work and remould it’.70 This included John Guy, Virginia Murphy, Graham Nicholson and David Starkey, and, of course, MacCulloch himself. Elton was not alone. Sir Lewis Namier, noted historian of the British Parliament, is also said to have belittled biography.71 Namier thought that a biography was lightweight. He used all the evidence available, which included lives, but collectively. He developed a prosopography or collective biography of every eighteenth-century member of Parliament and peer who sat in the British Parliament to reveal their local interests and voting patterns. In 1952 Namier argued that biographers preferred the narrow study of a single human life because they lacked the creative imagination and skills to do otherwise.72 As Francis West pointed out in 1973, despite their views in print, both Namier and Elton dealt with the ‘major biographical difficulty of the relationship of a man or woman to their times’—Namier writing the biography of Charles Townsend and Elton writing so much about Thomas Cromwell, if not the full biography. Both Namier and Elton grappled with the relationship between the individual and human nature in history.73 They did not shun biography: they were ambiguous about it, they also explored it and they argued about it. There are other cases of such partial and collective biographies, which likewise explored the reciprocal illumination of life and times. John L. Gignilliat gives one example when discussing Douglas Southall Freeman’s 1942 biography on R. E. Lee’s lieutenants during the American Civil War:74 There is no attempt to portray the complete lives of the lieutenants; essentially the reader encounters them on the field of battle, with a summary paragraph or two to explain their pasts. Supporting characters, such as families or friends who play an active part, enter the picture at the appropriate time. Employed in a narrative of multiple biography, the fog-of-war technique requires continual shifting of focus from one leader to another as the kaleidoscope of combat moves along.75 Even for sceptics about biography, biographical issues are almost inescapable. Robert I. Rotberg has argued that biography and history are inextricably interwoven and indistinguishable: ‘History could hardly exist without biographical insights—without the texture of human endeavour that

Introduction  15 emanates from a full appreciation of human motivation, the real or perceived constraints on human action, and exogenous influences on human behaviour.’76 So it is no surprise that historians were writing biography: full biographies and monographs as well as biographically informed history. The suggestion that biography went out of favour among historians during the twentieth century, moreover, overlooks mid-century family, sports and military biography, often written by those described as ‘amateurs’, a significant proportion of whom were increasingly university-trained.77 It also overlooks the massive national biographical dictionary projects that involved many historians from outside the academy. But I would argue that professional historians wrote biography without much interruption too. Over three-quarters of the historians Clyde N. Wilson identified in his 1983 survey of the ‘greatest’ twentieth-century United States historians wrote at least one identifiable biographical monograph during the time when biography was said to be out of favour.78 Many of those identified by Wilson were authors for the Dictionary of American Biography, or more closely associated with it, such as one of the founders, J. Franklin Jameson, or editors Dumas Malone and John A. Garraty. The latter published the Nature of Biography in 1957.79 Arthur S. Link, usually acknowledged as the most important historian of the twenty-eighth president, edited 69 volumes of Woodrow Wilson’s papers.80 Many published in biographical series designed more for a general public readership: Allan Nevins persuaded Dodd, Mead and Company to launch an American political leaders series in the 1930s which he edited. The long-running Little, Brown ‘Library of American Biography’ published Morison. In Britain, Longmans, later Longmans Green, the world’s oldest commercial imprint, published Trevelyan. Above all, the fact that Marxist and economic historians wrote biography surprises the orthodoxy. These supposedly deny the consequences of the individual’s role by emphasising inevitable historical transformations. C. Vann Woodward was a strong supporter of Charles Beard and Carl Becker’s economic approach; he stressed the influence of unseen economic motivations in politics, yet won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for annotating a planter’s diaries, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (1981). Indeed, a number of those recognised as ‘materialists’, social scientists or progressives such as Forrest McDonald, wrote biographical monographs. Above all, and especially ironic, British Marxists wrote biography, which we consider in a later chapter. So, we can point to historians’ seamless and unbroken biographical writing. Yet they have written biography in a variety of ways, approaching biography from different directions: biography from above; biography from below; and biography from the inside. Historians have continually reassessed the issue of historical distance and perspective.81 Their practice has been dynamic. They reacted to Romanticism, modernism, Freudianism, Marxism, microhistory and life writing. They debated Carlyle’s hero

16 Introduction worship, J. B. Bury’s scientific history, psychobiography, materialism, the singularisation of history and life writing. Few historians followed Carlyle’s hero worship fully (and nor did Carlyle himself). They toyed more with scientific biography than New Biography, and they simply resisted Freudian psychoanalysis. On the other hand, historians have been accused of misapplying Marxism, prosopography, microhistory and egohistoire. British Marxist historians, for instance, resisted studying only structures; they concentrated on biography too. Historians rarely only used prosopography, preferring instead, to study collective biography, critical circles and networks. Jaume Aurell suggests that historians have developed a new egohistoire genre that is both life writing but also a consideration of ‘philosophical and existential systems of thinking held by historians’. Historians’ biographies have become ‘privileged sources for historiographical inquiry and evidence of its evolution’.82 By putting the spotlight on their play with methods, we shall see significant reflection upon biographical methodology and theory. But it has not been aggregated and narrated.

Historicising historians’ biographical debates Instead of a biographical turn or a linear narrative, then, I consider a series of debates among English-speaking historians since the nineteenth century. Let me deal with each of these frames in turn. I refer to biography written in the English-speaking world, mostly Anglo-American.83 As Norman LaPorte has noted, while the social science model of historical causation developed, ‘[t]he historiography never took only one direction, with research in Britain and America tending to maintain a wider interest in biography—usually of a traditional type—than in France and, in particular, Germany’.84 Given this divergence, and despite the fact that debates did cross borders, I focus on the sustained concern over individuals in history among historians writing biography in English.85 An in-depth consideration of one regional kind, that is biography written, published or discussed in English, is viable and coherent. Concentrating on historians is also realistic because historians have asked particular and peculiar questions about biography. The dominant literary tradition, as we have seen asks questions to do with the art and craft of biography, the theoretic meaning of the works people produce and ethical dilemmas in writing lives. By contrast, historians have been concerned about the role of the individual in history and our evidential access to those individuals. What is the nature of the archive and how should we use it, artfully or scientifically, even when faced with a partial archive? How far can we know another’s mind; is what people think more important than what they do? Should we lump lives together or split them up individually? What is the tension between structure and agency and how much free will do people have? What scale should use: micro or macro biography? Should we concentrate on typical, representative or significant

Introduction  17 lives? Should everyone narrate their own lives and is self-reflection a privileged method beyond criticism? I focus on the period from the mid-nineteenth century, not because there were no earlier debates but because professional historians writing biography burgeoned from that time when increasing numbers of people trained for and made their living from the study of history. Historians were appointed to university positions, employed as researchers, taught students, worked in archives, met in conferences, contributed to specialist history journals and ‘cultivated expertise, authority, and status’.86 As part of that process, scholars as a whole began to distance themselves from those they regarded as parochial ‘amateur and unscholarly’—the antiquaries.87 This professionalisation involved ‘[r]edefining of the intellectual boundaries which were so successfully to distinguish the academic and the dilettante, the metropolitan and the provincial, the professional and the amateur [from the Victorian period]’.88 David Amigoni has highlighted the contentious relationship between Victorian biography and history and literature that arose in the nineteenth century. He argued that ‘Victorian biographies were the products of ideologically antagonistic intellectuals with radically different strategies for disordering and ordering cultural discourses’.89 Biography played a central part in a struggle for disciplinary dominance; but biography was also central to the wider development of modern historical practices and that, too, involved a struggle. It is argued here the contention began with Victorian historians over biography both inside and outside academia. So, this is a consideration of historians’ debates over biography published in English from the nineteenth century. Most existing work is on specific debates rather than their sequence and significance.90 A.O.J. Cockshut, Juliette Atkinson and David Amigoni have focused on Victorian biography.91 Others are embedded in biographies of individual historians, such as Trevelyan, Namier, Butterfield, and Manning Clark. Some historians and their biographical concerns have been hardly analysed at all. We do not yet have a biography of Cicely Veronica Wedgwood to help understand her debate with E. H. Carr or biographies of other women historians who are central to the narrative like Dona Torr, Natalie Zemon Davis or Carolyn Steedman. Barbara Caine’s work partially overlaps this project but she was concerned with specific debates too rather than their succession. She considered four main kinds of biographical issues: writing collective biography; auto/biography and life writing; interpreting and constructing lives, especially psychoanalysis; and changing biographical practices (especially integrating new gender, social and contextual approaches).92 She discussed some internal debates amongst historians but not systematically. Above all she concentrated on the wider debate between biography and history. I argue that it is useful to consider the sequence of methodological and theoretical debates among historians because the debates were related.

18 Introduction Each built on its predecessor. The way historians have used biography has advanced by contest. For instance, Acton, in his first professorial lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895, was critical of historians being taught ‘now’ to study ‘problems in preference to periods’, and ‘trends and processes rather than events and individuals’.93 Rather than simply despairing that the Victorian ‘Age of Biography’ was over, Acton revitalised it. This inspired political historians, including Butterfield.94 When Bury and others started arguing for scientific document-centric biography they had Acton in their sights. Similarly, microhistorians reacted to what they regarded as the Annales School’s reductive determinism, especially in its quantitative phase. So, the debates are linked in a sequence. Furthermore, I argue that it is useful to consider the debates in chronological order because it allows the debates to be contextualised. Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders have reprinted key texts about the theory of biography, starting systematically from the eighteenth century with Samuel Johnson and Johann Gottfried Herder. They offer presentist critical commentaries in association with reproducing extracts of classic texts.95 Their text is useful, despite it being more in the nature of an annotated bibliography than an analysis of how historians have practised biography. They offer a mudmap, or sketch of the route of ideas about biography. showing good anchoring spots. They do not attempt, however, to ‘defend any particular theory of biography’ or how historians received new ideas about biography or ignored them.96 They do not distinguish degrees of controversy. I think it is important to follow the main or significant debates rather than survey the whole population of ideas and debates over biography. We need to contextualise and weight intellectual developments, rather than consider each of them as being equally influential. Moreover, we need to bring the debates and theories into conversation with historians’ actual practices. The debates offer a good way into discussing historians’ biographical practices. David Caute, in his account of the feud between Deutscher and Isaiah Berlin over the former’s biographies of Stalin and Trotsky, recommends putting the spotlight on individual historians in debate as a useful way into the wider ‘densely populated controversies’.97 A consideration of the key debates over historians’ use of biography, then, covers both their historical specificity as well as placing them, and historians, in broader intellectual and disciplinary genealogies. I examine seven major debates in this account: the Victorian debate over the role of the heroic individual in history; the post-Victorian debate over artful or scientific approaches to history; the debate over other minds and the role of Freudianism; the Cold War debate over contingency, counterfactuals and causation; the postwar debate over atomising lives or prosopographical systems; the late twentieth-century debate over the singularisation of history; and the current debate over life writing and egohistoire.

Introduction  19 The first debate considered is about the role of the hero or the significant individual in history among Victorians. Thomas Carlyle and Herbert Spencer clashed over the Great Man approach. As David Amigoni has set out, for different reasons, Marxist Georgi Plekhanov and historians who were part of the professionalisation movement, including John R. Seeley, Leslie Stephen, John Morley and Frederic Harrison, also disagreed with Carlyle.98 And yet William James defended a version of ‘Carlyle’s history of heroes’. Carlyle did not believe that heroes inevitably emerged (providence or fate) or appeared accidentally (contingency); rather, were made through individual human agency. Philip Rosenberg and others have shown that Carlyle worked hard to demonstrate that ‘the hero’s actions were shaped and conditioned by the world around him’ and in doing so ‘made sure that his hero theory was at all points compatible with his awareness of the role the masses of anonymous men play in history’.99 Numerous writers have shown, however, that there are problems in Carlyle’s advocacy of these two seemingly contradictory and equally influential positions: that is, his admiration for the ‘superior natures’ of great men, such as Oliver Cromwell and Shakespeare, and his reverence for ‘hidden’ lives or common people. Most importantly, as Atkinson noted, ‘[the] Victorian Age has become so closely associated with hero-worship that it is easy to forget the vigorous opposition with which Carlyle’s ideas were received by so many; rather than an undisputed philosophy, “hero-worship” was a hotly contested notion’.100 James Anthony Froude noted in his 1882 biography on Carlyle that his writings were popular throughout the English-speaking world and that debate over his ideas accompanied this diffusion.101 Froude, together with his brother-in-law Charles Kingsley, took up professional positions and tried to place his work at the centre of emerging academic history. They called for university history students to study and emulate Carlyle’s great man history. Academics did so, albeit adapting Carlyle by taking up modern political history and biography, criticising the hagiographical fashion, and dealing with individuals in history critically. Bloomsbury looms large in our second debate. Most histories of biographical practice highlight Bloomsbury. Modernist biographers’ campaign against historians’ biographies cannot be understated; they were diametrically opposed to historians’ biographical practices, within and outside academe. Their critiques were well written, witty and interesting. Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey are said to have been iconoclastic in their contribution to biographical theory and practice. Indeed, so heterodox, one might wager, that few wrote biographies similar to Woolf’s and Strachey’s, not even they themselves in the end. Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) was followed by the more measured and royally sympathetic Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex (1928). Woolf wrote a more standard biography of Roger Fry (1940) after a series of experimental biographies, Orlando: A Biography (1928) and Flush: A Biography

20 Introduction (1933). As Todd Avery suggested, however, Strachey himself was ambiguous, straddling camps of biographical practice. He was in the literary biography camp but he trained as an historian and accepted ‘as inevitable certain scientific aspects of historiography and also retaining a lifelong respect for science as a way of knowing’.102 Historians were engaged in a more important post-Victorian debate than any debate over Bloomsbury’s modernism. Historians argued over the degree to which biography ought to be literary or artful, concerned with style, or scientific, focusing on empiricism. J. B. Bury and Henry Adams led the charge to base biography closely on documents. Bury, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, argued that historians and biographers were empiricists like scientists. He interpreted Ranke’s aim—wie es eigentlich gewesen—as meaning consideration of the facts as non-interpretative statements.103 Trevelyan protested, however, that historians used a logic of explanation which differed from the physical and life sciences. Historical events were unique and did not sustain covering laws. He and others worried about the ‘fetishisation of fact’, that is the discovery, collection, classification and interpretation of facts. Trevelyan’s views were controversial and put him at the centre of a debate over scientific history which was largely a debate over scientific biography. Bury and Trevelyan waged their debate through inaugural lectures of the Regius Professorship at Cambridge. Historians waged a third debate over the problem of other minds. Bloomsbury is held to be central to the psychoanalytical turn in biography. Lytton Strachey’s brother James and his sister-in-law Alix underwent analysis in Vienna and translated Freud into English. Virginia Woolf’s brother Adrian Stephen was historically trained and with his wife Karin Costelloe were analysed by James Glover. Similarly, Strachey was historically trained and psychoanalytically inclined. Experimenters like Strachey looked to the physical or psychological meaning of lives and, in particular, repression of motivations. Indeed, concerns over the inner life supplanted concerns over literary biography. He set out to enquire into individuals in two regards: ‘the light which his career throws upon the spirit of his age, and the psychological problems suggested by his inner history’.104 And yet psychoanalysis did not really have much effect on historians’ biographies. The underlying commitment to empiricism remained strong. It is true that psychobiographies were published on B. F. Skinner, L. Frank Baum, Vladimir Nabokov; R. G. L. Waite’s 1977 The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler is one of the best  known. Some psychoanalytically trained historians, such as Peter Loewenberg, wrote biographies. Roland Bainton and others, however, attacked the adoption of Freudianism and the ideas of Erik Erikson in biographies, such as those on Luther. Most historians, like Bainton, considered their subject’s childhood, family relationships and internal conflicts but they remained sceptical over whether they could know ‘hidden motives’ and the degree to which historical events were caused or

Introduction  21 influenced by historical actors’ unconscious motives. The debate prompted historians to consider the mind of their subjects and their trauma, but only as far as the empirical evidence allowed. There was a Cold War debate over contingency, counterfactuals and causation. It is often pointed out that British Marxists and French Annalistes’ structuralism downplayed biographical explanations in history and the role of human agency. Imbued with Marxist and social history preoccupations, historians eschewed biography for the preoccupations of studying large groups, inextricable trends and big structures for much of the twentieth century. Despite structuralism ‘being in the air’, I argue that historians left, right and centre reconsidered rather than abandoned their biographical practices. Historians writing biography attended more carefully to putting individuals into their place.105 As E. J. Tapp noted in 1958, in addition to the ‘proliferation of biographies’, historiographical explanation was now taking contingency into account in a way that it had not previously: If we … are more reluctant to attribute the success or failure of a social movement to a single individual, it is because we know now that the ascription of tremendous human achievements to one man is too simple a solution to be the truth of the matter. We know too that the play of the contingent in human affairs may determine whether or not innate capacities for greatness are ever afforded opportunity for their manifestation.106 Some Annalistes and most British Marxist historians wrote biographies in their considerations of causation.107 Carr’s rejection of Wedgwood’s contingency is a case in point. On the other hand, Carr praised Isaac Deutscher’s biographies of Stalin and Trotsky as being outstanding biographical contributions to history. He argued that Wedgwood’s objective that ‘history is concerned to inquire why individuals in their own estimation, acted as they did’ was wrong-headed for she placed too much emphasis on contingency. In the ferment, rather than structuralism sidelining biography in the postwar period it became central to the social history that developed. Debates over the role of collectives were central to historians’ biographical practice in the postwar period.108 On one side of this debate was Namier and his focus on collectives and aggregate phenomena. British historian Namier’s reputation rests on his innovative use of collective biography, what is known as prosopography, in the study of the eighteenth-century parliamentary system. He believed that social facts could only be explained scientifically by exploring the roots of individual behaviour and analysing the patterns in ‘innumerable biographies’. Namier’s particular interpretations of the socio-political structure of England in the eighteenth century have been the subject of debate but do not need to concern us here.109

22 Introduction Butterfield and others had little regard for Namier’s fabulously microscopic examination of the composition of the successive Houses of Commons under George III. He argued that Namier’s method ‘atomized everything’. In other words, it broke down complex historical events to simple social categories. Namier effectively offered structural explanations ignoring, Butterfield argued, the fact that the structure itself is the result of human choices meant that it could be altered by human choices. Secondly, Butterfield argued that human nature and action was inherently more complex than Namier’s view suggested. Namier did not take into account the significance and diversity of history, and the role of individual’s professed ideas, beliefs, and principles.110 His critics accused him of ‘taking the mind of out of history’, owing to his dislike of abstract political theory and his belief that much of human behaviour is ‘senseless and irrational’.111 Should historians classify clusters of lives as being in the same class, that is to lump then together, or break up aggregates into groups or individual lives? Microhistory is committed to the close study of individuals, localities and events, often all three together; a life in a time and place. It shared with the Annales school a critique of the teleology and elitism of traditional political history. The Annales School stressed long-term social history. However, microhistorians reacted to quantitative approaches to history and to the Annales school’s reductive determinism. If one was criticising Annales, biography was obviously an alternative. Annales was about the larger forces of history rather than an individual’s ability to resist and shape history. Biography emphasises human agency, as Linda Colley noted, involving both ‘a human and individual dimension’.112 It brought back ‘the human dramas that make history come alive’ even in global history.113 And secondly it usually presents history in a narrative.114 It allows the subjectivity, and even the interiority, of individual protagonists. So, Carlo Ginzburg attacked Annalistes, armed with a magnifying glass. Microhistory was originally strongly influenced by cultural anthropology, using individual lives to understand the symbol systems of a culture. But as it became a more popular biographical approach, it shed part of its cultural anthropology influences: it was more concerned with thick description and the actions and understandings of individuals. The debate around microhistory has been one of scale. While biography seems to be antithetic to the current dominance of big ‘macro’ global history, historians have written biographies that have considered connections, ranges and ‘global lives’ too. Renders, Istvan M. Szijartö, Siguröur Gylfi Magnusson and others have made the case that microhistory ought to be the theoretical basis for historical biography.115 In 2007, Ray Monk doubted that there could be a single theory of biography: one hears again and again the complaint that, though biography continues to be immensely popular with the book-buying public, it tends

Introduction  23 to be ignored by the academic world and has, compared with other literary genres, inspired very little serious reflection. One also hears repeatedly that the aim of this or that conference is to begin the process of providing biography with the critical reflection with the poetics, or—and this demand gets more strident as time goes by—with the theory that it has up to now been lacking.116 However, while historians have used a range of theories, they have shown little appetite en masse to adopt one theory as the basis of biographical practice. There is a current debate over life writing or a range of personal narratives. A number of historians writing biography, including Nigel Hamilton, de Haan and Renders, are critical of life writing which they argue is ahistorical. Should the role of the biographer be one of observer or participant? Does culture and context—of both biographers and their subjects—profoundly influence biographies that different people embrace as history?117 Jeremy Popkin and Jaume Aurell have argued that historians have adapted egohistoire over the past two decades. Pierre Nora called on historians to write their autobiographies and memoirs as broader reflections on social history and historiography.118 Aurell suggests that historians have created a new kind of egohistoire that is both life writing but is also a consideration of ‘philosophical and existential systems of thinking held by historians’.119 However, their observation that historians’ autobiographies have become ‘privileged sources for historiographical inquiry and evidence of its evolution’ is aspirational rather than description. There are notable exceptions but most historians’ autobiographies, like life writing more generally, are more uncritical hagiography than critical historiography. These debates have not been definitively resolved. Not even the ‘great man’ theory is obsolete. Despite critiques, the Carlyle Studies Annual indicates Carlyle’s continuing reach.120 Many historians, such as Margaret Macmillan, author of History’s people: Personalities in the past (2015) and MacCulloch, biographer of Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, have argued that, while at certain times it did not matter who was the seat of authority, we ‘cannot dismiss the role of individuals, whether thinkers, artists, entrepreneurs, or political leaders’; there are certain people who are just so important that you need to shine the light on them [and …] see them in the context all the time, how they are reacting to other people. That is what biography does.121 This is obviously a descendant of Carlyle’s Great Man view and reveals that some of these debates, while historical and sequential, remain significant concerns for historians writing biography.

24 Introduction

Conclusion: concentrating on historians’ biographical debates One can write biography without analysing its practices and structures. But there is value in analysing historian’s practices. Above all, it helps us understand the pattern of current historians’ biographical practices. While empiricism is historians’ central method, it has taken different forms and involved historians in a range of political, sociological and philosophical contests. This is not a survey of the biographies that historians have written. To modify Donald A. Stauffer who researched early modern biography which he thought had been neglected, ‘[i]t is not the purpose of this survey to present new facts in the lives of individuals’ but a new facet of the history of biography.122 It is a survey and assessment of historians’ debates over biography bringing significant theories into conversation with actual practice. The contests help us explain how some kinds of biography have emerged, faded or flourished. Why is it that biographies concentrate on childhood? Do they take a Freudian approach on the unconscious psychosexual development from infancy or an Eriksonian approach of identity crisis up to old age? Why is collective biography so popular today and why will historians not forsake times for lives? It helps to explain the patterns of how historians have used biography over time and why egohistoire has flourished of late. Historicising the debates allows us, moreover, to show the genealogy of the issues, understand what was contentious and where there has been consensus in the past. It allows us to learn from our own pasts for it reveals where our collective disciplinary ideas and values came from and the debates that have shaped that epistemological inheritance. In one of the most respected biographies, Ian Kershaw makes an elegant case for framing Hitler’s life within the socio-structural forces. But he cites only Karl Marx as a previous deliberator on this matter.123 Similarly, others have defined, for instance, a ‘social biographical approach’ without linking it to others who have developed or used that approach too. In many ways, they are then reinventing approaches already in our toolkit.124 Too often historians writing biography seem unaware that we have rehearsed issues. They create anew and make over something already there. They often do not build on what went before. This book then presents historians’ toolkits analysed chronologically and in context. Putting the spotlight on historians’ debates draws our attention to overly simplistic interpretations about their practices. Carlyle, with whom the Great Man approach is so closely associated, also wrote on nonentities. In his article on Biography (1830) Carlyle opined that the man who first took an army over the Alps was no more momentous to us than ‘the nameless boor who first hammered out an iron spade. When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze’.125 Carlyle wrote about both his friend John Sterling (1851) and his father James Carlyle (1881), neither of whom were

Introduction  25 heroes in any pantheon.126 I give this example to show positions over agency were complex from the outset. To take another example, Kershaw framing Hitler’s life warned that biography is a ‘risky venture’ for an historian because it can downplay context, emphasise empathy with a subject and over-personalise history. Historians had to balance these considerations. However, in the opening of his great biography after speculating whether Hitler was ‘interchangeable’, he argued that if Hitler had not existed, or if he had been stopped at any stage before 1933, subsequent history would have been totally different.127 It is one of the most powerful statements on the importance of the individual in history. But Kershaw also makes the point that Hitler was one of the few individuals that changed the course of history.128 Kershaw, a self-identifying structuralist, attempted to overcome polarization in the debate over Hitler being critical by ‘integrating’ the positions in the historiography which emphasised structure or agency. He attempted to tease out ‘the part played’ by the powerful individual in complex historical processes. Mostly historians attempting to respond to debate attempt balance, and use mixed methods in their biographies. Finally, we have too few meta accounts, critical and self-reflective considerations of historians’ biographical approaches. Keith Jenkins bemoaned the fact that an academic bookshop is crowded with texts on the scope and limits of philosophy. Likewise the shelves of literature are filled with books on literary theory of Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Hayden White. As if theory is only literary theory. There is much less on historical theory.129 There is little on historians’ biographical theory. But historians are not as naïve or as ill-informed or hostile to biographical theory as sometimes claimed. It is the case, however, that there are few accounts about how historians have used and debated biographical theories and methods. We need texts that bring together the controversies and showcase the issues. Above all, while biography is central to historians’ practice, there is too little study of ‘biographical approaches to history in the classroom’.130 History students do not standardly take undergraduate courses in biography.131 There are few courses on biography and biographical research centres in history departments. We need texts that offer overviews to promote conversation and discussion. We study structures and forces much more than how to understand individuals in history. This should change. This book aims to contribute to this happening.

Notes 1 Nadia Wheatley, ‘Author’s Note’, in The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2001). 2 G. M. Trevelyan, Biography: A Reader’s Guide (London: Cambridge University Press for the National Book League, 1947), p. 3. 3 David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan, A Life in History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), pp. 185–194; 31; xii.

26 Introduction 4 Daniel Meister, ‘The Biographical Turn and the Case for Historical Biography’, History Compass, vol. 16, no. 2 (December 2017), e12436, accessed 26 January 2020, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12436 5 Hans Renders and David Veltman (eds.), Fear of Theory: Towards a New Theoretical Justification of Biography (Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2021). 6 Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan, p. 220. 7 Zachary Leader (ed.), On Life-Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 6. 8 Ian Hancock, ‘Biography and the Rehabilitation of the Subject: The Case of John Gorton’, in Australian Political Lives: Chronicling Political Careers and Administrative Histories, ed. Tracey Arklay, John Nethercote and John Wanna (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2006), p. 62. 9 Donald M. MacRaild and Avram Taylor, ‘Social Structure and Human Agency in Historical Explanation’, in Social Theory and Social History (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 80–117. 10 Murray G. Murphey, Philosophical Foundations of Historical Knowledge (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1994), pp. x–xi. 11 Christopher Lloyd, The Structures of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 78. 12 Murray G. Murphey, Philosophical Foundations of Historical Knowledge (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1994), pp. ix–xiv. 13 Keith C. Sewell, Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Peter Novak, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 14 Sewell, Herbert Butterfield, pp. 1–15. 15 Joseph M. Hernon, Jr., ‘The Last Whig and Consensus History: George Macaulay Trevelyan, 1876–1962’, American Historical Review, vol. 81, no. 1 (February 1976), pp. 73–74. 16 Jeffrey Meyers (ed.), The Craft of Literary Biography (London: Macmillan, 1985). 17 Michael Benton, ‘Literary Biography: The Cinderella of Literary Studies’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 39, no. 3 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 44–57. Peter Ngourney, ‘The Basic Assumption of Literary Biography’, Biography, vol. 1, no. 2 (1978), pp. 86–104. 18 Richard Bradford, A Companion to Literary Biography (Chichester: WileyBlackburn, 2019). 19 Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of NineteenthCentury ‘Hidden’ Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 6–7. 20 Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), preliminary pages, n.p. 21 Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2007). 22 James Atlas, The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (London: Corsair, 2017), p. 108. 23 Ray Monk, ‘Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding’, Poetics Today, vol. 28, no. 3 (2007), pp. 527–570; Samuel Johnson, ‘The Dignity and Usefulness of Biography’, The Rambler, no. 60 (13 October 1750); ‘Biography, How Best Performed’, The Idler, no. 84 (24 November 1759); Samuel Johnson’s essays online, accessed 22 November 2020, https://www.johnsonessays.com/1750/10/ 24 Ruth Hoberman, Modernizing Lives: Experiments in Biography 1918–1939 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), p. 207.

Introduction  27 25 Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), p. 8. 26 Leon Edel, Literary Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), pp. 82–83. 27 James L. Clifford, From Puzzles to Portraits (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), p. 85. 28 Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 170 & 186. 29 Hoberman, Modernizing Lives, pp. 13–14. 30 George Saintsbury, ‘Some Great Biographies’, Macmillan’s Magazine, no. 66 (June 1892), pp. 97–107. 31 Hoberman, Modernizing Lives. 32 Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 20. 33 Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered, p. 23. 34 Nicolson, The Development of English Biography, p. 79. 35 Nicolson, The Development of English Biography, pp. 7–8 and 139. 36 Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction; Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History. 37 Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014); Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, ‘The Singularization of History: Social History and Microhistory within the Postmodern State of Knowledge’, Journal of Social History, vol. 36, no. 3 (2006), pp. 701–735. 38 Barbara Caine, Biography and History (f.p. 2010; London: Red Globe Press, 2019). Much more commonly, Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (London: Routledge, 2002), describes biography as part history and part literature. 39 Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000), p. 41; Shirley A. Leckie, ‘Biography Matters: Why Historians Need Well-Crafted Biographies More than Ever’, in Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft, ed. Lloyd Ambrosius (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 20; John Tosh with Sean Lang, The Pursuit of History (London: Pearson, 2006), pp. 119–122; Ian Kershaw, ‘Personality and Power’, The Historian, no. 83 (Autumn 2004), pp. 8–20. 40 Caine, Biography and History, p. 9. 41 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81), alternatively known by the shorter title Lives of the Poets. See also Barbara Caine and Peter Mares, Biography and History, The Book Show, Radio segment and transcript, Kate Pearcy, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Radio National, 12 August 2011, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/ programs/bookshow/biography-and-history/2930992, accessed 23 November 2021. 42 Caine, Biography and History, pp. 11, 14. 43 See Sabina Loriga, ‘The Role of the Individual in History: Biographical and Historical Writing in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century’, in Renders and de Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography, p. 79. She argued that the period from the late eighteenth century until the late twentieth-century biographical turn there was a scholarly push for the ‘annihilation of the individual’ and historical biography went out of favour. 44 Loriga, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, p. 75. The quote is from William Dilthey (1910). 45 Caine, Biography and History, p. 21. 46 Loriga, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, pp. 86–87. 47 Josef Konvitz, ‘Biography: The Missing Form in French History Studies’, European Studies Review, vol. 6 (1976), pp. 9–20.

28 Introduction 48 E. H. Carr, What Is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964). 49 G. R. Elton, The Practice of History (London: Fontana Press, 1967). 50 Meister, ‘The Biographical Turn’; David Nasaw, ‘Introduction’, in ‘Historians and Biography’, special issue, American Historical Review, vol. 114, no. 3 (June 2009), p. 573. Steve Weinberg, ‘Biography, the Bastard Child of Academe’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 54, no. 35 (2008), B15–B17. 51 Caine, Biography and History, p. 7. 52 See Mary Lindemann discussing ‘egodocuments’ as ‘Sources for Social History’ in the Encyclopedia of European Social History, vol. 1 (Detroit: Scribner’s Sons, 2001), p. 36. 53 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (London: Routledge, 1976). 54 Clifford Geertz, ‘Form and Variation in Balinese Village Structure’, American Anthropologist, new series 61, no. 6 (December 1959), pp. 991–1012. 55 Caine, Biography and History, p. 24. 56 Jock Phillips, ed., Biography in New Zealand (Wellington: Allen & Unwin/Port Nicholson Press, 1985); Doug Munro, ‘From Reticence to Revelation: Biography in New Zealand’, in Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies, ed. Hans Renders and David Veltman (Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2020), pp. 148–164. 57 Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction, p. xiii. 58 Hans Renders and Nigel Hamilton, The ABC of Modern Biography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). 59 Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), p. 149. 60 See Derek Ryan and Stephen Ross (eds.), The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). For example, see Barbara Caine, From Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 61 Cockshut, foreword to Hoberman, Modernizing Lives, p. x. 62 Nicolson, The Development of English Biography, p. 110; Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto and Windus, 1918); Lytton Strachey, Biographical Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948). 63 Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat and Tom Wengraf (eds.), The Turn to Biographical Methods in the Social Sciences (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000). Nasaw, ‘Introduction’, in ‘Historians and Biography’, pp. 573–578. Barbara Merill and Linden West, Using Biographical Methods in Social Science (London: Sage, 2009), p. 2. Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma (eds.), The Biographical Turn: Lives in History (London: Routledge, 2016). Meister, ‘The Biographical Turn’. 64 For example: A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991); Loriga, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, p. 75. 65 Melanie Nolan, ‘The Great Individual in History: Historians and Their Biographical Practice’, in Renders and Veltman, Fear of Theory, pp. 72–88. 66 Caine, Biography and History, p. 19; Trevelyan, Biography. 67 Roland Barthes, Michelet, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), p. 3. 68 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (1996) won the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Thomas Cromwell: A Life (London: Allen Lane, 2018), see introduction. 69 Elton, The Practice of History, pp. 134–135.

Introduction  29 70 John Guy, My Heart Is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Harper Perennial, 2004) won the 2004 Whitbread Biography Award and was shortlisted for the 2004 Biography/Autobiography of the Year Award (National Books Critics’ Circle). See also his A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Daughter Meg (2009) and Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years (2016). 71 See Linda Colley, Lewis Namier (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), pp. 72–89. 72 L. B. Namier, ‘History: Its Subject Matter and Tasks’, History Today, vol. 2, no. 3 (March 1952), pp. 157–162. 73 Francis West, Biography as History: The Annual Lecture delivered to the Australian Academy of the Humanities at its Fourth Annual General Meeting at Canberra on 15 May 1973 (Sydney: Sydney University Press for the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1973), p. 1. 74 Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942). 75 John L. Gignilliat, ‘Douglas Southall Freeman’, in Twentieth Century American Historians, ed. Clyde N. Wilson (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Company, 1983), p. 164. 76 Robert I. Rotberg, ‘Biography and Historiography: Evidentiary and Interdisciplinary Consideration’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 40, no. 3 (Winter 2010), pp. 305–306. 77 Malcolm Allbrook and Sophie Scott-Brown, Related Histories (London: Routledge, 2021); Doug Munro, ‘From Reticence to Revelation: Biography in New Zealand’, in Renders and Veltman, Different Lives, pp. 148–150. 78 Clyde N. Wilson (ed.), Twentieth-Century American Historians (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1983). Charles Beard, Carl Becker, Frederick Jackson Turner and Eugene D. Genovese were unusual and conspicuous in not having a biographical monograph in their list of publications (albeit Turner’s frontier thesis spawned popular histories of individualism). Peter J. Coleman, ‘Beard, McDonald, and Economic Determinism in American Historiography’, Business History Review, no. 34 (Spring 1960), pp. 113–121. 79 John A Garraty, The Nature of Biography (New York: Knopf, 1957). 80 Arthur S. Link et al. (eds.), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 69 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–1994). 81 B. Mark Salber, ‘Biography and the Question of Historical Distance’, in Rethinking Historical Distance, ed. Mark Salber Phillips, Barbara Caine and Julia Adeney Thomas (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), introduction. 82 Jaume Aurell, ‘Making Intellectual History by Contextualising Oneself’, History and Theory, vol. 54, no. 2 (May 2015), p. 244. 83 Renders and Hamilton, The ABC of Modern Biography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press: 2018); Renders and Veltman, Different Lives. 84 Noman LaPorte, ‘Isaac Deutscher and the Biographer’s Dilemma’, Introduction to ‘Lives on the Left’, special issue, Moving the Social: Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements, vol. 51 (2014), p. 6. 85 Lytton Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912). Hans Renders and David Veltmann have argued that there is a convergence across national experiences in biographical practices: Renders and Veltman (eds.), Different Lives. Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies (Leiden: The Netherlands: Brill & Boston, 2020). 86 Donald Wright, The Professionalisation of History in English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2005), p. 4.

30 Introduction 8 7 Novak, That Noble Dream. 88 Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 6. 89 David Amigoni, Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 2–3. 90 David Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, the Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013); Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 91 Cockshut, Truth to Life; Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered; Amigoni, Victorian Biography. 92 Caine, Biography and History, pp. 122, vii and 1. 93 John Emerich Edward Dalbert Lord Acton, ‘Inaugural Lecture on The Study of History’, in Lectures on Modern History, ed. J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (f.p. 1895; London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 24. The lecture was delivered on 11 June 1895. 94 Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered, p. 14; John Emerich Edward Dalbert, Lord Acton, ‘Inaugural Lecture on The Study of History’, in Lectures on Modern History, ed. J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (f.p. 1895; London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 24. The lecture was delivered on 11 June 1895. G. P. Gooch, ‘The Growth of Historical Science’, in The Cambridge Modern History, Volume XII: ‘The Latest Age’, planned by Lord Acton, ed. A. W. Ward and Stanley Leathes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), pp. 188–230; and History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1913). 95 Wilhelm W. Hemecker and Edward Saunders, Biography in Theory. Key Texts with Commentaries (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (1750) and The Idler (1759); Johann Gottfried Herder, Fifth Letter on the Furtherance of Humanity (1793). 96 Alison Moore, ‘Historicising Historical Theory’s History of Cultural Historiography’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 1 (2016), pp. 257–291. 97 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic, p. xi. 98 Amigoni, Victorian Biography, p. 41. 99 Philip Rosenberg, The Seventh Hero: Thomas Carlyle and the Theory of Radical Activism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 191–193. 100 Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered, pp. 53–54. 101 James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, 1882 and 1884), vol. 1, p. 4. 102 Todd Avery, ‘“The Historian of the Future”: Lytton Strachey and Modernist Historiography between the Two Cultures’, ELH, vol. 77, no. 4 (Winter 2010), p. 843. 103 John B. Bury, The Science of History (New York and London: Longmans, Green, 1903), pp. 18–19. 104 Strachey, Eminent Victorians, p. 9. 105 Philip Pomper, ‘Historians and Individual Agency’, History and Theory, vol. 35, no. 3 (October 1996), pp. 281–308. 106 E. J. Tapp, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, The Australian Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 1 (March 1958), p. 59. 107 Michael Bentley, Modernising England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 190–193.

Introduction  31 108 John Clive, Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989), p. xiii. 109 L. B. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan, 1929). See, for instance, reviews by Richard Lodge, History, vol.  14 (1929–1940), pp. 269–270; and D. A. Winstanley, English Historical Review, vol. 44 (1929), pp. 657–660. 110 Herbert Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London: Collins, 1957), p.  299. See discussion, Kenneth B. McIntyre, Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2014). 111 John Brooke, ‘Namier and Namierism’, History and Theory, vol. 3, no. 3 (1964), pp. 331–347. See also John Brooke, Makers of Modern Culture, ed. Justin Wintle (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 380; Lucy S. Sutherland, ‘Sir Lewis Namier, 1888–1960’, in Proceedings of the British Academy, 1961, 48 (London: British Academy, 1963), pp. 371–385. 112 Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007), p. 300. 113 Tonio Andrade, ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two Black Boys, and a Warlord: Towards a Global Microhistory’, Journal of World History, vol. 21, no. 4 (2011), pp. 573–591. 114 Lawrence Stone, ‘The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History’, Past & Present, vol. 85 (1979), pp. 3–24. 115 Hans Renders, ‘The Limits of Representativeness. Biography, Life Writing and Microhistory’, in Renders and de Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. 129–138. 116 Ray Monk, ‘Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding’, Poetics Today, vol. 28, no. 3 (2007), p. 59. 117 R. Keith Schoppa in Ambrosius, Writing Biography, p. 27. 118 Pierre Nora ‘L’Ego-Histoire est-elle Possible?’, Historein, vol. 3 (2001), pp.  19–26. See also Vanessa Castejon, Anna Cole, Oliver Haag and Karen Hughes (eds.), Ngapartji Ngapartji in Turn in Turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), pp. 3–20. Luisa Passerini and Alexander C.T. Geppert, ‘Historians in Flux: The Concept, Task, and Challenge of Ego- histoire’, Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories, special issue, European Ego-Histoires: Historiography and the self, 1970–2000, vol. 3 (2001), pp. 7–18. 119 Jaume Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 126. 120 See for instance, Alexander Jordan, ‘A Carlylean Secretary of Labour in New Zealand’, Carlyle Studies Annual, no. 33 (2018–2019), pp. 139–148. 121 David Coast interviewing Diarmaid MacCulloch on Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII and the Reformation, YouTube, 11 March 2019, accessed 8 December 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbTfGmVoyZY. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (1996) won the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Thomas Cromwell: A Life (London: Allen Lane, 2018). See also: Margaret MacMillan, History’s People: Personalities and the Past. CBC Massey Lectures (Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press, 2015), pp. 3–4. 122 Schauffer, English Biography, p. v. 123 Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936 (London: Penguin, 1998), p. xxi. 124 See Melanie Nolan, ‘The Politics of the Social Biographical Approach to Working-Class Leaders’, International Review of Social History (IRSH), (2022) https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S0020859022000621, pp. 1–12. 125 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Thoughts on History’, Fraser’s Magazine, no. 2 (1830), p. 415.

32 Introduction 126 Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling (London: Chapman & Hall, 1851); Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. K. J. Fielding and Ian Campbell (f.p. 1881; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 127 Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936, pp. xxvi–xxvii. 128 Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936, pp. xx. 129 Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 10. 130 Daniel R. Meister, ‘Historical Biography in Canada: Historians, Publisher and the Public’, in Renders and Veltman, Different Lives, p. 33; Renders and Veltman, Fear of Biography. 131 Meister, ‘The Biographical Turn’.

Further reading This book is not a systematic consideration of historians’ biographies. Rather than reviewing classical, experimental, path-breaking or interesting biographies, it is a self-referential historiography of historians’ biographical debates. It is a meta-­ biographical reflection of biography in English. There are a number of good surveys of the classics in biography See Carl Rollyson, Biography: A User’s Guide (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008). For a discussion of historians using lives, see Barbara Caine, Biography and History (f.p. 2010; London: Red Globe Press, 2019); and the dated but still useful Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Writing Biography: Historians & Their Craft (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004) and Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), especially for the origins of a widening of subaltern subjects such as women (Alice James) and African-American (Langston Hughes) and collective biography. For a comparison with literary biography, see Richard Bradford (ed.), A Companion to Literary Biography (Chichester: Wiley-Blackburn, 2019). Bradford, an esteemed literary biographer and director of the University of Ulster’s Literary Biography Research Centre, is the series editor of the Wiley/ Blackwell ‘The Life of the Author’, begun in 2020 with over 75 single authored volumes planned in the next decade. For more detailed discussion of historians’ biographical empiricism see Lutz Raphael, ‘The implications of empiricism for history’ in Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory (London: Sage, 2013), pp. 23–40; and Stephen Davies, ‘The Transformation of Biography in Empirical History’ in his Empiricism and History (London: Routledge, 2003). For discussion of historians all too often beginning starting with first premises rather than knowing and using a disciplinary map, Melanie Nolan, ‘The Politics of the Social Biographical Approach to Working-Class Leaders’, International Review of Social History (IRSH), (2022), https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S0020859022000621, pp. 1–12.

2 Victorians debate over heroism The role of the significant individual in history

Victorian historians disagreeing over biography: ‘Poets without music’ and ‘perfect owls of Minerva for knowledge’? Thomas Carlyle and Herbert Spencer met on several occasions in 1851, having been introduced by their mutual friend, George Henry Lewes.1 Lewes shared some interests with Carlyle: over the great German writer Johann von Goethe and transcendentalism, the disbelief in society, its institutions and organisations, and a belief that people should be considered as individuals, independent and self-reliant. Lewes also shared interests with Spencer in positivism, or logical systematic verification of one’s beliefs rather than theist or metaphysical beliefs.2 As William Baker has made clear, however, Carlyle and Spencer ‘were poles apart intellectually, ideologically, and in life style. Both detested each other.’.3 Spencer quoted Lewes’s description of Carlyle as a ‘poet without music’, being appalled by the historian’s passionate prejudices, his dogmatism, and his ‘insensate dislike of science’. He thought Carlyle was an unethical ‘ingrained despot’ who was sympathetic to tyrants and deified ‘brute force’.4 Spencer was bemused by what he thought of as Carlyle’s chaotic and incoherent thought, rejecting orthodox Christianity but opposing evolution. Spencer argued that Carlyle had no notion of reasoning or evidence. Instead he rebuked, denunciated and asserted.5 Most of all, he objected to the way Carlyle dominated conversations, lecturing rather than discussing, a ‘perpetual flood of red-hot conversation’.6 In return, Carlyle was also repulsed, describing Spencer as a ‘perfect owl of Minerva for knowledge’, ‘conceited’ and an ‘immeasurable ass’.7 Spencer’s ‘tirade’ against Carlyle ‘is one of the curiosities of literature’: he wrote disparaging notes about him at the time of Carlyle’s death and he penned censorious opinions in his correspondence; others recorded his judgemental outbursts about the historian in conversations and that he detailed how ‘profoundly adverse’ he was to Carlyle’s ideas in his autobiography.8 Carlyle’s influence rankled with Spencer. One contemporary newspaper even held that Spencer began his autobiography as a response to Carlyle, with James Anthony Froude’s famous and controversial Life of Carlyle (1882–1884) ‘before his mind’.9 DOI: 10.4324/9780429426391-2

34  Victorians’ debate over heroism

Figure 2.1 Froude’s ‘warts and all’ biography of Thomas Carlyle was highly controversial. ‘James Anthony Froude’, Carlyle’s Speaking Likeness, by E. Linley Sambourne, cartoon from Punch, ‘Punch’s Fancy Portraits no. 16’ (July– December 1882). Look and Learn/George Collection/Bridgman Images.

Spencer’s and Carlyle’s opposing views personalise Victorians’ disagreements over how to study individual and social lives. Their autobiographical accounts are remarkably different in structure. Carlyle was concerned with spiritual biography and his literary salon. Spencer was concerned

Victorians’ debate over heroism  35 with a natural history of himself and writing of the limitations of memory. He concentrated on the genesis of his ideas, his social circle, and what he called a mental history, the intellectual and emotional genesis of ideas. Similarly his ordained biographer, David Duncan, was concerned to place Spencer in the history of thought.10 Clearly, Spencer’s positivism was in stark contrast to Carlyle’s anti-positivism. Each had his defenders, but the disagreement and the Victorian debate over biography went deeper than just these two authors and their circles. Together, they inspire the recent questioning of a unified view of Victorian biography.11 Carlyle is famous for the ‘great man’ interpretation of history, that is, the approach that held that the historical process was driven by extraordinary individuals. His first book was fiction, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh, an essay on ‘Clothes: Their Origin and Influence’ (published serially between 1833 and 1834). Ostensibly on the philosophy of clothing, this was a treatise among many things on how greatness was kindled in which he presented a raft of biographical approaches. Carlyle suggested that clothes were a determining social sign, as well as reflecting the materialism of the age, ‘show of things’.12 Carlyle was most famous for his Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), which in he declared that ‘the Great Man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame’.13 Like Spencer, Charles Darwin thought that Carlyle had an extraordinary power of drawing vivid pictures of men and believed that ‘might was right’. However, Darwin went on to remark that, of all the minds that he had known, Carlyle’s was the most ‘ill-adapted’ for scientific enquiry.14 Carlyle thought that both political economy and science were ‘dismal’, preferring to adopt literary approaches. By contrast, Spencer was famous for ‘the development hypothesis’; the notion that the whole world of life, humans and everything else organic, was the product of development rather than creation. Nature guided individuals and societies. The unfolding evolutionary process was natural. As a consequence, politically, Spencer was an non-interventionist, believing that governments should not provide poor relief, public health or education. In terms of social development more generally, he applied his progressive evolutionary views to argue that the principal driver in human society was ‘survival of the fittest’. While Darwin disagreed that evolution had a direction and endpoint, he and Spencer were fellow scientific theorists. Spencer’s first book was Social Statics (1851); four years later, he went on to craft Principles of Sociology (1855), in which he set out to develop a science of social life. Holding psychological or personal factors to be relatively unimportant, Spencer thought that historians’ biographies and narrative histories were superficial, making sense of social change through individual human lives, the antithesis to his evolutionary and developmental ideas and his pursuit of invariant social laws.15

36  Victorians’ debate over heroism

Figure 2.2 After writing Sartor Resartus (1831) about clothes as the ‘show of things’, Carlyle determined to ‘ground his history on reality’. ‘The Real and the Ideal’, by Edmund Joseph Sullivan, lithograph book illustration (1898), from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh (London: George Bell, 1898), p. 307. Bridgeman.

Carlyle was not Spencer’s only target, however. Carlyle was a leading thinker in the cultured class, which believed that a science of history was an ‘impossibility’. This group included, among others, Carlyle, his friend and biographer Froude and his biographer’s brother-in-law Charles Kingsley, Regius Professor at Cambridge University, who was a social reformer, novelist and poet. Kingsley had published on Greek heroes, Hellenes, ‘men who were brave and skilful, and dare do more than other men’.16 It was Spencer’s view that these historians had no conception that ‘there had been going on the evolution of social structures, not made or dreamed of by kings and statesmen, or recognised by historians’. For him, these social structures were more fundamental than individual lives. Spencer likened the differences between history and the science of sociology to ‘that between a man’s biography and the structure of his body’, with the latter being more fundamental.17 Mark Cumming concluded that ‘[i]f Carlyle

Victorians’ debate over heroism  37 regarded Spencer as the epitome of the modern scientific hubris, Spencer saw Carlyle as the antiscientist par excellence’.18 Spencer’s and Carlyle’s ideas were incompatible and irreconcilable, but they were both concerned with the same problem of individualism and constraint. Carlyle, in his Life of Burns (1859), stated that biography’s purpose was to discover what the effect of society was on a given character and then what the character’s effect was upon society: ‘what and how produced was the effect of society on him? what and how produced was his effect on society?’19 Spencer might have thought that Carlyle only concentrated on the latter; the reality was more complicated than that, however, for Carlyle’s work emphasized individuals’ effects on society. Similarly, Spencer’s Principles of Sociology is considered a ‘watershed in the history of ideas about organism–environment interaction’.20 It has been argued that, over time, while Spencer continued to stress external social constraints, he did not entirely eliminate individual autonomy. John Offer argued that Spencer tackled the central ‘sociological challenge over how to conceptualise order, pattern and change in the mutually interdependent lives of social individuals as moral beings’.21 Individuals and diversity contributed to structures’ mutability. However, his Principles of Sociology emphasised, above all else, the role of circumstances, and the rules by which living beings, including people, responded to their environments. There were Napoleons after all, and Spencer had to make sense of them somehow. But individuals were not prominent in his work. The relationship between individual and society and the role of the individual in society was at the heart of the Victorian historians’ debate over biography. Both writers were prolific and popular and, while their fates have fluctuated over time, they continue to be analysed. Carlyle’s works have been collected into 30 volumes22. And there has been a huge concomitant ‘industry’ of critical analysis on this voluminous work.23 Jules Paul Seigel, D. J. Trela and Roger L. Tarr have all reviewed the literary establishment’s reception of Carlyle’s work24. Tarr identified approximately 1,700 nineteenth-century and 1,300 twentieth-century citations in British and American periodicals between 1824 and 1974.25 Carlyle’s annotated edition of the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1866), his Reminisciences (1881), and also Froude’s Life of Carlyle (1882 & 1884) were all controversial; these life stories, warts and all, showed Carlyle to have flourished at his wife’s expense.26 Trela and Tarr also argued that, since Carlyle epitomised some of the excesses of the Victorian age, his reputation also ‘suffered from the general reaction against Victorians in the early decades of the twentieth century’ and a number of modernists refused to acknowledge any debt to Carlyle.27 Nevertheless, Carlylean studies have subsequently flourished. There are more than 800 entries in Trela’s bibliography of studies of Carlyle covering the period just from 1975 to 1995.28 Interest in Spencer’s work has also revived. Spencer’s collected works filled 12 volumes but he is usually credited with being the first philosopher to sell over a million

38  Victorians’ debate over heroism copies of his works in his lifetime.29 Spencer’s span was wide; he published on biology, education, psychology, sociology and government policy; he developed what he called ‘synthetic philosophy’, which was the application of evolutionary theory to philosophy, psychology and the study of society.30 A number of commentators, like Émile Durkheim, queried his view that developing industrial society led to progressive happiness, while G. E. Moore began the critique over his view that morals and ethics could be derived from nature. Nevertheless, Mark Francis’ 2007 biography argued that Spencer’s ideas were systematic, rigorous, complex, misunderstood and still relevant.31 In summary both Carlyle and Spencer were, and remain, controversial. The main point to stress here is that Carlyle’s ideas were contentious contemporarily. American Ralph Waldo Emerson found common cause with Carlyle over great men, meeting in 1831 and maintaining a long correspondence. Emerson went on to give a series of lectures on the subject of great men, and to develop his own theory of great men who rose with ‘labor and difficulty’; they were often pilloried and shunned by their contemporaries.32 His compatriot, William James, the philosopher, historian, and psychologist, especially in his article, ‘Great Men and their Environment’, in 1880, seemed to give some credence to Carlyle’s views about the extent that some great men exerted agency and shaped themselves in the world’s history. To him, great men were seen as path-breakers and independent thinkers.33 By contrast, Marxists, as well as sociologists disagreed with this view. For instance, Georgi Plekhanov’s On the Role of the Individual in History (1898), broadly supported the structural and societal forces highlighted by Spencer, emphasising the social preconditions for the development of great men.34 Plekhanov’s article became famous and the focus for the debate over the role of the individual when it was translated into English for the trade presses in 1940. Spencer and Plekhanov’s opposition to Carlyle and Emerson’s stance begot two traditions on the role of the individual in history. I argue that most historians writing biography took a little from both positions, however; the interaction of lives and times. Historian’s interactionalism, or ‘third way’, considering both structures and agency, biography and circumstances, comes close to the more famous position of contemporaries, such as Lewes, who criticized hero worship as much as agentless change, ‘hard-nosed materialism’, and social science explanations.35 Jack Kaminsky makes the case that Lewes was an interactionalist, trying as a renegade positivist to develop a synthesis he called ‘empirical metaphysics’.36 In practice, most historians were interactionalist in their outlook. Thomas Babington Macaulay, politician and historian, published Biographical Essays (1857) in which he praised ‘minute and accurate researches’.37 He had ‘the ability to portray the characters of individual actors, as well as to describe men in their aggregate capacity’.38 Similarly, W.E.H. Lecky, the author of Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland

Victorians’ debate over heroism  39 (1861), emphasized a few ‘transcendent intellects’, but these he contextualised.39 Likewise, academics such as Samuel Rawson Gardiner and John Robert Seeley regarded biography as the ‘study of a person’s character, brought out by the study of that person’s words and actions, and applying due attention to the historical context of the life’.40 Different styles of writing were also both enduring: Carlyle’s lyricism as well as Spencer’s clinical analysis. There was also a political and institutional stoush over biographical practice as universities employed historians. This was embodied in Carlyle’s biographer, Froude, becoming Regius Professor of History at Oxford in 1892 and calling for more ‘Carlyle’s great man history’ in his inaugural lecture.41 Seeley, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University from 1869, ‘held that biography is the best available medium for popularising history’, but he was vehemently opposed to Carlylean biography in the academe.42 By the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, Carlyle’s ‘literary hero’ biographical approach had also become the subject of debate amongst university-employed historians. I argue that, while sociologists led by Spencer, and also Marxists of Plekhanov’s ilk, attacked Carlyle’s biographical approach on the basis of their theory, Seeley, Gardiner and other historians led a more formidable challenge to Carlylean biographical approaches from within the community of historians in terms of the kinds of rigorous empiricism that should be taught and studied in the growing universities. Seeley believed in empiricism based on archival sources, inductive reasoning, impartiality and peer review.43 He, E. A. Freeman and others held politics to be central. But political heroes needed to be both assessed critically and contextualised.44 In addition to the ‘red-hot’ debates between ‘poets’ and ‘owls’, then, there was also a searing debate among historians.

Carlyle’s heroic response to the German and British Romantic movements The Victorian debate over Carlyle involved significant scholarly developments, including Romanticism, sociology and evolutionary ideas, at the time that history was professionalising as a discipline. David Amigoni has argued that his critics have ‘tended to place Carlyle in a narrative in which he figures as a residual man of letters who produced “artistic” historiography which came to be denigrated by a later generation of “scientific” professionals’.45 That seems to get the chronology out of order: Carlyle was part of a vibrant contemporary debate among historians between artistic and scientific history and biography.46 Biography was an important methodology in Carlyle and other historians’ response to scientific history during the Victorian era. The debate among historians has been obscured by the illusion of a Victorian consensus in support of his ‘great man’ thesis. Carlyle became forever associated with the view of a solitary and superior person causing

40  Victorians’ debate over heroism historical developments after he gave his series of six lectures in 1840 which were published the following year as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.47 He set out to historicise hero worship in six phases from ancient times to the nineteenth century: the hero as divinity, examining Odin, Paganism and Scandinavian mythology; the hero as prophet, examining Mahomet and Islam; the hero as poet, examining Dante and William Shakespeare; the hero as priest, examining Martin Luther and John Knox; the hero as a man of letters, examining Samuel Johnson, JeanJacques Rousseau and Robert Burns; and the hero as king, examining Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon.48 Carlyle argued that hero worship had changed in each age but great men in history had been the ‘living light fountain’ which had ‘enlightened the darkness in the world’, and were responsible for significant historical changes to the world.49 Great men were indispensable saviours of epochs; they did what was required of them in World-History.50 Carlyle chose his examples of heroes strategically: while they were largely dead white men (Mahomet notwithstanding), Carlyle’s own favourite hero was not included because he did not think his British reading public were sufficiently familiar with Johann von Goethe’s work.51 Carlyle’s biographical magnum opus, however, published in 1858, was his 21-volume biography of Frederick the Great, which concentrated upon the ‘Twelve Hercules-labors of this King’. Frederick was a philosopher-ruler whom Carlyle portrayed as a ‘man of peace’ with a commanding intellect who acceded to rule overrun and war-devastated territories and by his military brilliance made Prussia a great European power.52 He visited 12 of Frederick’s battlefields while writing his biography. Carlyle viewed the historical process as one of a conflict, a ‘ceaseless process of action and reaction, through phase after phase spiralling upwards towards a better realisation of man’s latent capabilities’.53 He was interested in what he regarded as the most significant upheavals: the Puritan Revolution, the growth of Prussian power and the French Revolution by way of human personalities. The sequence of ruin and re-creation was not a rational process. Historians like Edward Gibbon, David Hume and William Robertson had thought of history as being capable of rational explanation.54 Instead Man as a force irrationally and subconsciously determined the shape and meaning of history individually, advancing by cultivating higher forms of spiritual wisdom—or not.55 In that process Carlyle did not think that everyone’s latent dynamic powers or realised capabilities were equal. Most people’s lives were inconsequential and passive. The Hero, of course, was conspicuous and active.56 Carlyle’s work centred on why some conspicuous people managed to accomplish so much. He became most interested in the man of action who was also a man of letters. His major biographical works on the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845) and the comprehensive multi-volume biography of the ‘scholar emperor’ Frederick the Great (1858–1865), who ruled for 46 years, personified his heroic argument that the

Victorians’ debate over heroism  41 [H]istory of the world is but the Biography of great men... Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It’s a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment... No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.57 Carlyle wanted to capture what made a genius consequential, that greatness that rose spirit-like; secondly, he wanted his contemporaries to respect heroes, past and present, declaring I am well aware that in these days Hero-worship, the thing I call Heroworship, professes to have gone out, and finally ceased. This … is an age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies the desirableness of great men. Show our critics a great man, a Luther for example, they begin to … ‘account’ for him; not to worship him, but … bring him out to be a little kind of man!58 Carlyle’s work on heroes and hero worship was at odds, however, with some of his other writings. Carlyle suggested that social life was the aggregate of all the individual great men’s lives who constituted society. As Colin Manlove noted, in Sartor Resartus, his previous major work, written in the 1830s, Carlyle was ambivalent about great men with his main subject, Teufelsdröckh, arguing that kings are no more important than carmen, indeed of less value, since they do not understand draught cattle or know how to construct wagons: ‘Whence then, their so unspeakable differences? From Clothes’ … Yet later he can state with equal assurance his belief that kings are chosen for men by heaven, and that obedience to these ‘heaven chosen’ is the sole source of freedom.59 In his article on Biography (1832) Carlyle opined that the man who first took an army over the Alps was no more momentous to us than ‘the nameless boor who first hammered out an iron spade. When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze’.60 Furthermore Carlyle wrote about his friend John Sterling (1851) and his father, James Carlyle, (1881), heroes in no pantheon.61 Taken as a whole, Carlyle was inconsistent in how he applied his theory in practice.62 Juliette Atkinson has shown many Victorian biographers wrote about ‘non-entities’ and eccentrics.63 More broadly, Ruth Hoberman has concluded that nineteenth-century biography was a ‘more varied form than twentieth century critics have allowed’.64 So the nature of the Victorian corpus has been misrepresented by later critics, especially Bloomsbury in the interwar period, by portraying Carlyle’s theory as ubiquitous.

42  Victorians’ debate over heroism In terms of Carlyle’s work, his ‘hero lectures’ need to be considered in relation to contemporary Romantic criticism of realism in science and literature.65 He was responding to the rise of science. He believed that scientists were doing a disservice to society by seeking to understand the workings or laws of the universe and to undermine godliness with their godless theories, by which Carlyle meant they had abandoned wonder. Life was about mystery, wonder and miracles.66 William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), however, famously likened God to a great clock-maker who set the exquisite machinery of nature into action. Instead of viewing nature as a ‘mechanical system’, the Romantic movement regarded it as a ‘living organism’.67 Carlyle opposed the belief that leaders were ‘the creature of the Time […] the Time called him forth, the Time did everything, he nothing’.68 Instead he wanted to put the spotlight on human action, or what later historians call agency. In this and in so many ways Carlyle was a product of German Idealism and Romanticism.69 He never met its leading lights, Friedrich Schiller or Goethe. He delighted in Goethe’s Faust, corresponded with him and was invited to Germany to visit him.70 Carlyle did not manage to travel to Weimar or Jena in Germany where a remarkable intellectual circle had developed around Goethe, Alexander Humboldt, Johann Humboldt and Schiller.71 Like Humboldt, Carlyle was a former ‘Prince of Empiricism’. Carlyle completed his MA in 1813 from the University of Edinburgh but he did not take his degree, having always intended to prepare for the ministry. He abandoned theology, however, for mathematics, becoming for some years a mathematical tutor, first at Annan Academy and then privately: the ‘Carlyle circle’ is a quadratic equation in geometry named for him.72 He then gave up maths for literature and history. He rejected orthodox Christianity but not wonder. Carlyle immersed himself in the German Romantics, publishing a Life of Schiller, serially in the London Magazine (1823–1824) and as a monograph in 1825. In 1834 he translated Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship into English.73 In the process, Carlyle came to adopt many of the same responses Goethe had developed in regard to the Enlightenment thinkers. Like Schiller and Goethe, Carlyle held that both imagination and reason were necessary to innovation.74 As a mathematician turned historian trying to capture the emotional reactions to historical events, Carlyle came to believe that empirical investigation and scientific methods were compatible with subjectivity.75 How a life was presented was critical. He was unembarrassed by writing biography and history lyrically, vividly, using the present tense.76 He was not waylaid by disagreements over interpretations. His footnotes have been described as deceptive: ‘Although he usually consulted from three to a half dozen works for a single chapter, or even for a single paragraph, most paragraphs of The French Revolution (1837) receive only one or two footnote references.’77 For reasons such as these, he has been described as a spore of an amateur in a professionalising world.

Victorians’ debate over heroism  43 Sensibility was at the centre of Carlyle’s method of studying the past and present; ‘[f]or the first time a whole generation became fascinated by the personal experience of men and women, as opposed to the external world composed of the interplay of the lives of whole groups of societies’.78 This was expressed in novelistic methods. Carlyle’s experimental literature needs to be placed in the tradition of Goethe’s autobiographical novel The Sorrows of the Young Werther (1774) and Schiller’s play The Robbers (1781). Carlyle’s own Sartor Resartus was an experimental novel in which he mused about an editor reviewing a fictional book about the changing philosophy of clothes by a fictional philosopher, described as ‘factual and fictional, serious and satirical, speculative and historical’.79 The editor thinks that he will understand the manuscript if he knows the author’s biography, which is presented to him in six bags, but even with all these facts, this proves false. Carlyle first presented his ideas on metaphysical empiricism, ‘science and the poetic’, ‘the natural and magical’, ‘faction and reality’ in a more direct and concentrated form in his 1832 article ‘On Biography’.80 Carlyle believed prose was as important as content in biography with a study of heroes being crucial for they influenced whole epochs of people’s imaginations. He believed in the concept of the Zeitgeist, or the spirit or mood that defined a particular period of history and that could be accessed by considering contemporary ideas and beliefs about heroes. Heroes expressed contemporary ideas: ‘The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual.’81 Carlyle believed, however, that the Romantic movement, while strong on sensibilities, underestimated heroes and obstructed hero worship. Most of his contemporaries, especially those in leadership, were in the throes of ‘an Age of Scepticism’ whereby they sought to explain the world and history scientifically along with the forces that created it. This caused a spiritual paralysis which was accompanied by a loss of mystery, a ‘disbelief in nature’, the demise of wonder, and the abandonment of the hero worship of great men.82 He implored the British reading public in Sartor Resartus to ‘close thy Byron, open thy Goethe’ who was the ‘physician of the Iron Age’.83 Practising what he preached, Carlyle concerned himself about modern heroes. While Carlyle was influenced by Romantic Continental ideas, his work tapped a contemporary English vein, too, which accounts for his being so popular and revered. There was a series of passionate public displays for heroic democratic revolutionaries in England. Many of his contemporaries idolised the lives and doctrines of the great democratic revolutionaries: Mazzini, Kossuth, Garibaldi, Bakunin, Lassalle were admired not only as heroic fighters for freedom, but for their romantic, poetic properties as individuals. Their achievements were looked upon as the expression of profound inner experience, the intensity of which gave their words and gestures a moving personal quality...84

44  Victorians’ debate over heroism British people were said to enjoy sensationalism, demonising as well as idolising prominent figures but rarely revolutionaries.85 Personally, Carlyle became friends with Giuseppe Mazzini and signalled this, defending him publicly in the Times in 1844.86 Of course, there was a significant increase in the number of men enfranchised in Britain between 1867 and 1884, with increasing elite concerns about ‘popularism’, but Britain was politically quiescent at this time. Carlyle’s political biographies spoke to these developments too; he wrote of revolution as a general act of mass insanity, an anarchical outburst against corruption and oppression, a violent ‘repudiation of sham Heroes’.87 At some point, when they achieved power, however, the leaders of the French Revolution, Condorcet, Danton, Hoche, Carnot, and later Mirabeau and Bonaparte, crossed the line to become unwise governors rather than heroes themselves, like their predecessors in the ancien régime had done. Carlyle harnessed his interests in the transcendental novel and contemporary heroic passions to write epic national history about heroes in the past. Nonetheless, Carlyle and Goethe diverged on some issues.88 Carlyle was critical of Goethe’s ideas about the reality of the divine in humanity and that one might scoff at everything high and noble with impunity. Maybe Carlyle overcompensated by emphasising human agency and glorifying heroism in his lectures, On Heroes, in 1840. Carlyle also was influenced by the Georg Wilhelm Frederick Hegel’s critique of Goethe and Schilling and by German historicism. Hegel had transferred the concept of personal character of the individual to the nation, a unitary character of an age which unfolded like a life. Nations had personalities and character with a life of their own. People who lived in a given culture at a particular time shared a spirit which was manifest in all the phenomena of the age. Particular characteristics could be assigned to particular periods and places. Hegel looked for the ‘most vivid expression of the universal in the particular, the concrete, the differentiated, the individual’.89 While one can find aspects of this in Goethe, for instance, Faust sells his soul to the devil for knowledge and power but, in passing, offers a discourse on the philosophy of ‘The Spirit’: What you call the spirit of the age is in reality one’s own spirit, in which the age is mirrored.90 Carlyle was deeply affected by Goethe’s Faust. What Goethe only intimated, however, Hegel developed, particularly in his presentation of an uneven life for nations with the reality and necessity of conflicts, wars and revolutions resulting from tensions and struggles which then led to leaps in development. Influenced, Carlyle’s French Revolution (1837) owed as much to German Romanticism as it did to German historicism. Most surveys of biography suggest that Carlyle successfully propagated hero worship and that Victorian biography followed his lead. Hoberman

Victorians’ debate over heroism  45 cited Walter E. Houghton’s view that the half-decade after 1839 was a period in which ‘the worship of the hero was a major factor in English culture’.91 Carlyle’s work was widely read and influential. Others have attributed this popularity to various contextual causes. Richard Altick argued that ‘the Victorian love of biography—and particularly laudatory, commemorative biography’ such as Carlyle’s—‘was in part a response to the threateningly impersonal natural forces posited by Darwinism’.92 Darwinism belittled human achievement. Houghton himself characterised hero-worshipping biography as a force of escapism engendered by a general spiritual malaise and political uncertainty.93 The popularity of the novel is also identified as a Victorian response to cultural crisis and Carlyle’s vivid style resembled poetic fiction.94 Overviews emphasise hero-worshipping ‘massive’ and ‘adulatory’ tomes as ‘the’ Victorian biographical approach.95 As with other phases in the history of biography, we need to put the spotlight on the ensuing debate. As Atkinson noted, ‘the Victorian Age has become so closely associated with hero-worship that it is easy to forget the vigorous opposition with which Carlyle’s ideas were receive’.96 Of Carlyle’s most public critics, Herbert Spencer was the best known.

Spencer’s sociological critique of the ‘Great Men’ Approach Unlike most of his contemporaries, Spencer did not have a literary or classical education. He exulted in a scientific background which he argued had freed him of biases and passions which the standard literary or classical education imparted. As we have seen, Spencer, philosopher, biologist and sociologist, took particular aim at Carlyle whose great man theory, he thought, left readers with the idea that to understand society and people, one need only read the biographies of their great men and leaders and their deeds.97 Carlyle downplayed context and structures and overlooked the extent to which ‘great men’ were products of their social environment. Social factors played a more significant role in shaping the lives of these influential men than their own individual natural characteristics. In 1859 Spencer complained that is was only recently that historians had started considering in any significant way the only ‘truly valuable information’, which was non-elite people: As in past ages the king was everything and the people nothing, so in past histories, the doings of the king fill the entire picture, to which the national life forms but an obscure background. While only now, when the welfare of nations rather than of rulers is becoming the dominant idea are historians beginning to occupy themselves with the phenomena of social progress.98 In 1873 in The Study of Sociology, he chastised historians in general for filling their pages full of facts which was of no use to science. He blamed

46  Victorians’ debate over heroism ‘Mr Carlyle’ in particular for an antipathy to social science. Historians ought to research, he thought, the ‘natural history of society’: the origin and nature of government, central and local, ecclesiastical and civil; the evolution of religious creeds; social customs; popular superstitions; the history of culture, art and morals. He thought that ‘the only history’ that was ‘of practical value’ was Descriptive Sociology which could furnish materials for a comparative sociology, because [y]ou must admit that the genesis of a great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown … Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.99 An evolutionist, Spencer was a pre-Darwinian believer in the principles of evolution, in particular natural selection, applied to biological species developing over geological time as well as human societies, social classes and individuals. Spencer looked on social institutions as if they were plants or animals which could be observed, classified and explained.100 Spencer’s ‘Development Hypothesis’ (1852) held that men as a group were collectively an organism and any existing species—animal or vegetable—when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certain changes fitting it for the new conditions … in successive generations these changes continue; until, ultimately, the new conditions become the natural ones.101 Above all, Spencer set out to apply scientific method to social organisation. He taught his method of scientific reasoning to Beatrice Potter (later Webb) and inspired her to undertake the analytical analysis of the dynamism, both the growth and decay, of social institutions.102 His was not a linear vision: Evolution does not imply a latent tendency to improve, everywhere in operation. There is no uniform tendency from lower to higher, but only an occasional production of a form which, in virtue of greater fitness for more complex conditions, becomes capable of a longer life of a more varied kind.103 The critique of ‘Mr Carlyle’ and his heroes appeared in a number of Spencer’s works.104 In his view societies were not the result of the individual men’s wills. Spencer believed that great men were natural rather than supernatural and could be understood and explained by general natural

Victorians’ debate over heroism  47 causes. If the great man was ‘natural’ he was a product of his society, as with all others of the time. On average, men behaved within a society’s laws, avoiding sanctions, and on average desired the greatest return for labour and to rise to a higher rank or social status. Along with society’s ‘institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts and appliances, he [the great man] is a resultant of an enormous aggregate of forces that have been co-operating for ages’.105 Spencer’s was a relational model with individuals reacting and adapting to each other and to the society over time, and to external conditions; the changes made, in turn, led to further adaptations. ‘Character’ (or ‘human nature’) was not fixed but was modified as it adjusted to surrounding conditions and these changes formed ‘social evolution’ with descendant generations inheriting certain characteristics. Critically, Spencer argued that great men were constrained by their environment too. They were not average but they were part of the same structural forces. Social science could identify these wider constraints and explain great as well as average men.106 There were always some like ‘the primitive priest or medicine-man’ whose ‘cunning, skill, and acquaintance with the nature of things’ gave them position and influence.107 Rulers in particular, however, were not responsible for change. Society developed from below without anyone designing it.

Figure 2.3 Spencer’s view was that ‘Before he can remake his society, his society must make him’, Herbert Spencer holding up a mirror to society, by Joseph Ferdinand Keppler, cartoon from Puck, 12, no. 295 (1 November 1882), p. 136. Paul D. Stewart/Science Photo Library.

48  Victorians’ debate over heroism Spencer was a Lamarckian evolutionist, who ‘allowed the effects of individual effort and initiative to play a role in evolution’.108 To the extent that an individual was part of the ‘organism’, they could contribute to changing the organism as a whole. Individual organisms could undergo change in response to their environment, and this change could be passed on to successive generations. Lamarck and Spencer were popular because their version of evolution chimed with the popular Victorian ideas around progress resulting from individual effort. It helped, too, that Spencer was avowedly a sociologist rather than a socialist. In 1892, for example, he disengaged from his lifelong family friend Beatrice Potter as his literary executor when she announced she was going to marry Sidney Webb, a leading Fabian Socialist.109 They remained personally close despite their profound political differences. Marxists did not mount a critique of Carlyle in his or Queen Victoria’s lifetime. Plekhanov took a Marxist approach in 1898 when he asserted that individual traits did not randomly occur but were the product of socio-economic trends, and thus the traits that were attributed to individual initiative were really the product of wider developments.110 Plekhanov was responding to the work of the Russian Narodniks, who held that the heroes of history, rather than the masses, were the revolutionaries (and usually armed with a bomb). Plekhanov accused these ‘subjectivists’ of being ‘out to endow the “individual” with the greatest possible role in history [and] have refused to recognise mankind’s historical development as a law-governed process’.111 Plekhanov argued that the role of individuals had been exaggerated because they were visible; while individuals could affect the particularities of events, they could not change the course of history, the productive or objective forces.112 Plekhanov’s essay was not read widely in professional history circles, however, until English editions from 1940.113 Somewhat surprisingly, Carlyle’s Marxist contemporaries had a more ambivalent view of him, without ever embracing the notion of the great man. Before he met Plekhanov in London in 1889 and 1894, Friedrich Engels had developed the idea of ‘necessity abhorring a vacuum’.114 History always found a substitute: ‘If a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled the place, is proved by the fact that the man has always been found as soon as he became necessary’.115 In turn, Engels had taken his cue from Marx’s view, in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), that ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’.116 Engels wrote in January 1894 that ‘Men make their history themselves’, but not as yet with a collective will according to a collective plan or even in a definitely defined, given society. Their aspirations clash, and for that very reason all such societies are governed by necessity, which is supplemented by and appears under the accident. The necessity

Victorians’ debate over heroism  49 which here asserts itself amidst all accident is again ultimately economic necessity. This is where the so-called great men come in for treatment. That such and such a man and precisely that man arises at that particular time in that given country is of course pure accident. But cut him out and there will be a demand for such a substitute, and this substitute will be found, good or bad, but in the long run he will be found.117 Technically, most Marxists argued for historical materialism—that there was a dialectical relationship between individuals and the great forces that governed the movement of society with individuals being significant but they also invoked the ‘causal chain’: no person, no matter how talented, capable or farsighted, can determine the main course of historical development, which is shaped by objective forces. However, under critical circumstances, the role played by individuals can be decisive, the last decisive link in the chain of causality.118 Others accorded individuals free will, but argued primacy, in the aggregate, to social processes which conformed to social laws. Antonio Gramsci later raged against this ‘law of large numbers’.119 But all this was in the future. The Romantic Carlyle and the materialist Engels converged on their views of industrialisation and its consequences. Engels read and reviewed Carlyle’s Past and Present favourably in 1844.120 He focused on Carlyle’s comparison of the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries to show the relative vices and weaknesses of the latter periods of modern society. Engels agreed about ‘the lack of principle, the inner emptiness, the spiritual deadness, the untruthfulness of the age; we are waging a war to the death against all these things, just as Carlyle is’. Similarly, Carlyle portrayed the social conditions in England and the condition of the modern worker as parlous; Engels agreed that ‘Carlyle recognises the inadequacy of ‘competition, demand’ and ‘supply, Mammonism’. By contrast twelfth-century England, the ‘world’ of St Edmundsbury Monastery, had been free of these evils. Of course, Carlyle failed to mention socialism, an omission which did cause Engels concern: ‘In all Carlyle’s rhapsodies, there is not a syllable mentioning the English Socialists.’. Engels’ own book Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasses in England, which was published in Leipzig in 1845, was not available in English until 1892. As others have suggested, Engels treated Past and Present as a social tract, a devastating vision of English society. He simply brushed aside and ignored Carlyle’s wish for an ‘Aristocracy of Talent’ and his hero worship. Engels concluded that ‘Carlyle’s book is ten thousand times more worth translating into German than all the legions of English novels which every day and every hour are imported into Germany’.121

50  Victorians’ debate over heroism Other English socialists regarded Carlyle’s work as less humanistic and rational. Frederic Harrison, for instance, wrote an introduction to the 1897 edition of Carlyle’s Past and Present. A lawyer who was a strong supporter of workers’ rights, Harrison had himself been inspired by the writings of Carlyle (and also Ruskin), despite its faults. He became progressively more critical of Carlyle’s work, complaining, for instance, that Frederick the Great was not a book at all, ‘but an encyclopædia of German biographies in the latter half of the eighteenth century’.122 Harrison was president of the English Positivist Committee from 1880 to 1905, writing widely on the critical positivist exponent, Auguste Comte. Indeed, he edited and was part-author of The New Calendar of Great Men: Biographies of the 558 Worthies of All Ages and Nations in the Positivist Calendar of Auguste Comte (1892). He argued that the biographies of men and women, one for each month, week and day of the year, in historical sequence and connected, illustrated Comte’s theory of human progress. They were not ‘saints or heroes’.123 Harrison published a number of biographies, including on Oliver Cromwell (1888), William the Silent (1897) and Ruskin (1902). Harrison was under no illusions that Carlyle was a socialist or humanist. Harrison rated Carlyle’s work because it was influential; Carlyle had coined a number of phrases that passed into the wider language, including ‘Cash-payment’, ‘Gospel of Mammonism’, and ‘Captains of Industry’, and he also popularised the study of the conditions of the working class. Marxists were not particularly critical of Carlyle’s work, if we consider only the Victorian period for both they and the socialists did see some good in his work. Spencer, then, was Carlyle’s major contemporary theoretical critic, who himself, in turn, was assessed critically.

Interactionalists or third wavers William James, a professor of psychology and philosophy at Harvard University, was famous for his theory of the self and views that beliefs were oriented to conscious actions. In his 1880 lecture to the Harvard Natural History Society on ‘Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment’, published in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1880, he considered the debate over human agency and took aim at Spencer’s ideas advanced in his Study of Sociology. In the process, James gave some support to Carlyle. James argued that individual geniuses were critical as ‘ferments, initiators of movements, setters of precedent or fashion, centres of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another direction’.124 However, he made a case for individual initiative based on social evolution or spontaneous variations of genius. The origins of differences went back to the womb, climate, race and so on. James was interested above all in the relationship between different

Victorians’ debate over heroism  51 environments and their propensity to produce great minds. Rather than Carlyle’s great men cultivating their own raw ability and spiritual worth, James emphasised the relationship between individuals and their environment. Individuals and environments mutually determined each other. Without conditions and opportunities that both required and fostered minds, a genius’ potential is never realised.125 In a second relevant article a decade later, ‘The Importance of Individuals’, he argued that agents of social change, beyond being gifted in some way, tended to take greater advantage of the circumstances in which they found themselves than more ordinary persons did.126 According to James, the ‘invisible and imaginable play of forces of growth within the nervous system’ meant individuals developed independently of society. Emotions, for instance, affected our bodies.127 Moreover, variations of genius, or greatness, occurred spontaneously in biology.128 Significantly, individual initiative meant that individuals influenced their environments which in turn ‘preserve[d] or destroy[ed] the newly encountered variations’ in a form of evolutionary selection. ‘Both factors are essential to change. The community would stagnate without the impulse of the individual, serendipity or luck.’ Impulses, however, died away ‘without the sympathy of the community’.129 He believed that the evolutionary view of history [that of Spencer and his followers], when it denies the vital importance of individual initiative, is then, an utterly vague and unscientific conception, a lapse from modern scientific determinism into the most ancient oriental fatalism … no geographical environment can produce a given type of mind. It can only foster and further certain types fortuitously produced, and thwart and frustrate others.130 Spencer did not answer James directly but two of his main supporters, John Fiske and Grant Allen, argued that James had misinterpreted his position, which was in many ways interactionalist.131 It is salutary to look beyond the metanarratives to see how these views translated into biographical practice. Indeed, as has been suggested above, some regard Carlyle as taking an interactionalist position in the biographies he wrote. In writing of the obscure, Carlyle advocated two seemingly contradictory and equally influential stances in his work. At some points he seems to suggest the hero alone achieved great things. Philip Rosenberg has also shown, however, that Carlyle worked hard to demonstrate that ‘the hero’s actions were shaped and conditioned by the world around him’ and, in doing so ‘made sure that his hero theory was at all points compatible with his awareness of the role the masses of anonymous men play in history’.132 This is close to the position advocated by interactionalism. A close reading of The French Revolution shows that it was not centred on individuals or great men but on collective groups. Carlyle’s French Revolution

52  Victorians’ debate over heroism involved a series of biographies, including of Napoleon. Carlyle was not arguing merely for the significance of individuals—heroes—but for the interconnectedness of individuals and their context, and for the role of the collective will.133 Indeed Herbert Butterfield argued that Carlyle, discussing the responsibility for the condition of France on the eve of the Revolution, tells us that some men blamed Turgot, others said it was Necker, others said it was the queen; they argued ‘it was he, it was she, it was that’. Carlyle caught hold of one side of the truth when he said that every man who had done less than his duty had contributed to the evil—had brought his thread to the production of that piece of historical tapestry. ‘Friends! it was every scoundrel that had lived, and quacklike pretended to be doing, and been only eating and misdoing, in all provinces of life, as Shoeblack or as Sovereign Lord, each in his degree’.134 Louise Young is one of many commentators who believes that the ‘Hero lectures’ have been given uncalled-for emphasis and who point elsewhere in Carlyle’s corpus to places where he discussed economic and social motivation and causation.135 Similarly, if we look at biography which was inspired by Spencer’s views we find it did not really apply the metanarrative thoroughly either. Spencer was influential with a range of writers. For instance, William Graham Sumner, who in 1876 had become the first to teach a course titled ‘Sociology’ in the English-speaking world, wrote biographical accounts of Andrew Jackson, Alexander Hamilton and Robert Morris.136 In the case of Hamilton, Sumner went on to consider ‘how and in what sense he was one of the makers’ of the American state. He concluded that Hamilton’s achievements had been exaggerated in the literature which rarely had looked at his economic and financial work in detail. The literature was heroic and he focused on the defects in administration between 1765 and 1780. Hamilton contributed to the making of the American state, but Sumner deemed him to be a ‘failure’, for ‘when death overtook him, he had no political future’. So while Sumner tended towards emphasising structures he could not but take account of agency. Even Plekhanov hedged his biography. Clearly, he believed that had Robespierre died in January 1793 his place would have been taken by somebody else.137 However, he also argued that Robespierre had a singular twist which ‘he alone could have given, and did give, to the situation’.138 We can show that those propagating metanarratives of heroes did not always apply this to the biographies they wrote. Or, rather, the biographies that they wrote were versions of interactionalism. Meanwhile, despite the complexities and ambiguities of the Carlylean corpus and the critiques of it, a political debate over the metanarratives broke out among historians in the universities.

Victorians’ debate over heroism  53

Historians debate biography over the biographical methods taught in universities Arguably, historians such as John Seeley were a more formidable and immediate challenge to disciples and others emulating Carlyle’s biographical approach than the critical commentary by Herbert Spencer, William James or Georgi Plekhanov. The debate was taken into universities when Carlyle’s associates, led by Kingsley and Froude, were appointed to professorial chairs. At that point a number of historians made a direct challenge to Carlyle’s Romantic and biographical approach. They agreed with the general biographical approach, but they did not support a great man approach. This was critical just as modern history was being established as a discipline in universities. The context then was professional boundary-riding and institution-building. The debate between university scholars was fierce. We can follow the debate by way of a battle over inaugural lectures, remembering that most historians came to a position between the two, however: one of coexistence between ‘Romantic’ and ‘scientific’ approaches to historical biography. Kingsley’s inaugural lecture in 1860 on his appointment as Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge was entitled, ‘The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History’. He was clear that historical methodology was biographical and, wherever possible, should also be autobiographical: Fill your minds with live human figures; men of like passions with yourselves; see how each lived and worked in the time and place in which God put him. Believe me, that when you have thus made a friend of the dead, and brought him to life again, and let him teach you to see with his eyes, and feel with his heart, you will begin to understand.139 Kingsley was critical of two main contemporary developments. First was the spread of evolutionary and inductive ideas, ‘law and action; order and progress’, which were seen as ‘working harmoniously together, and the result [was an understanding of an] inevitable sequence, orderly movement, irresistible growth’. Kingsley challenged these ideas of ‘invariable, continual, immutable, inevitable, irresistible’ determinism. He argued that man was not the puppet of laws of natural selection and the competition of the species. He sought to emphasise agency against structures, or, in his words, ‘free will’ against ‘necessity’. Secondly, he argued that humans were different from things. You could not reduce human phenomena to physical laws. The moral world operated differently from the physical world. Human life was complex: humans could ‘disobey the laws of [their] being’, they were a disturbing or contingent force in human progress.140 He cited Goethe’s reference to the irrational or demonic element in human nature which defied all law and all induction. The French Revolution, for instance, tossed all ‘calculations to the wind’, statistical and moral. Kingsley criticised both the

54  Victorians’ debate over heroism laissez-faire School of Political Economy as well as the French Socialist School view that man was a creature of circumstances. He argued instead that humans could choose to sink or swim in the face of even physical laws. Kingsley, like Carlyle, argued that men were unequal in their abilities: man alone of all species was capable of producing unexpectedly, ‘from time to time, individuals immeasurably superior to the average’, that is, ‘men of genius’ who could change the course of history itself. History was decided not by the ‘average many’ but by the ‘extraordinary few’: Mahomet, Luther, Bacon, Napoleon changed millions of people’s lives. In terms that Carlyle would have agreed with, Kingsley argued that the ‘history of mankind was the history of its great men’ and should focus on great minds rather than the masses. Natural laws and circumstances abounded but still men of genius emerged and took control of the direction of history. Those who offered a science of ‘little men’ could not explain the emergence of ‘exceptional men’ beyond the notion that they were an accident, an assertion that Kingsley refuted. The disturbing force of genius was like the ‘effects of great inventions’: ‘unexpected, complex, subtle, all but miraculous, throwing out alike the path of human history, and the calculations of the student’.141 Unexpected ‘material inventions produce[d] continually the most unexpected spiritual results’. Kingsley wanted to promote inductive thought and exact science but insisted that scientists had to beware that history was not an exact science. While Kingsley resigned his Cambridge position in 1869 for the church, his friend and brother-in-law, Froude, was appointed at 74 years of age in 1892 to the position of Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. Unsurprisingly, the friend and biographer of Carlyle argued for a Romantic and literary approach to biography in his inaugural lecture, one that emphasised the individual over progress and the finding of laws in history. In addition to the issue of human’s free will, Froude added that history involved single cases and could not involve scientific method. Physical scientists did not theorise on the basis of single cases. Historians, however, could not test by experiment and verify their evidence and, therefore, could not develop scientific laws: ‘In history we have a record of things that happened once, or were said to have happened, but, which once passed, are gone forever.’142 The important factors in human history were the individual and particular, ‘persons and personal character’. Froude called for university students of modern history to study ‘Carlyle’s great man history’.143 Froude argued that he could not teach a philosophy of history because he did not have one. He could not teach theory because he was a relativist who thought that theories shifted from generation to generation and that they offered a poor form of history. He did not believe in the laws, evolution or devolution. Moreover, Froude argued that writers were as prejudiced as their readers. All history was mythic, ‘for in every act of perception we contribute something of our own. Not two persons described a scene which both have witnessed’ the same: ‘History consists of the actions of

Victorians’ debate over heroism  55 men. Actions rise from motives and motives from contemporary beliefs and prejudices. Such beliefs and such inclinations change as widely as our social habits.’144 On that basis Froude thought that biography was appropriate for teaching to history students. Froude duly laid out a Carlylean methodology as the way he would teach university history students. Froude, like Carlyle, was not enamoured of the evolutionary idea of progress. Carlyle had argued, in Past and Present, that social and political progress was debatable: similarly, Froude argued that he did not believe medieval Europeans lived in miserable circumstances or that social conditions had improved since the French Revolution. He saw ‘in history only a stage on which the drama of humanity is played by successive actors from age to age’.145 Historians needed to represent history in the same way as dramatists: to present a trustworthy picture faithfully, in terms of the empirical evidence, and ‘let them unfold their characters in their actions with such insight as you can gain into their inner natures. You will forbear to judge.’ Historians needed to go to original authorities, the letters and writings of the historical subjects themselves, in the same way that Carlyle had used Oliver Cromwell’s writing. This methodology involved immense labour. When he was writing his History of England, I must have read, made extracts from, or copied with my own hand tens of thousands of manuscripts, private letters, secret State documents, minutes of secret councils, often in cipher for which a key was not always at hand. I worked long in our own Record Office. I worked in the Archives at Paris, Brussels, Vienna and Simancas. The letters which were of most importance were in half a dozen languages and in the desperate handwriting of the period … I have been turned into rooms piled to the window-sill with bundles of dust-covered despatches, and told to make the best of it.146 In between the appointments of Kingsley and Froude appointments came that of John Robert Seeley, who gave his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge in 1870; indeed, he succeeded Kingsley at Cambridge and he did not resign until 1895, after Froude had retired and died. On a number of issues Seeley overlapped and agreed with Kingsley and Froude. They were all in accord, for example, with regard to empirical methodology. Seeley, following Acton, also adopted Leopold von Ranke’s methods of history which he advocated in respect of the teaching of history at university.147 As others have noted, German historical scholarship led the way in Europe by its great achievements in ancient, medieval, and other fields of history, its mastery of the critical analysis of sources, and its investigations of documents and archives as the necessary foundation of historical knowledge.148

56  Victorians’ debate over heroism These historians were all agreed, secondly, on the value of biography as a way of writing history. Indeed, Seeley believed that biography was the best method for popularising history.149 More than any other university historian of the time, he deliberately advocated biographical approaches in university teaching. Seeley’s biographer, Deborah Wormell, has argued that a careful examination of his publications shows that, rather than laws, he concentrated on particularities; circumstances arose which individuals might or might not capitalise on. He believed history was a serious study ‘concerned with great events’ and a careful analysis, especially comparative, ‘of their causes and results’, in which individuals could play a critical role.150 Thirdly, like Kingsley and Froude, Seeley did not believe in linear progressive history.151 Initially, there was goodwill among these leading British historians. As a young man, Seeley had read Carlyle and Kingsley as well as Dickens and Tennyson; in 1859, he had published Romantic verse and recommended that his sister read Carlyle’s Frederick and French Revolution.152 Later, both Seeley and Froude wrote on imperialism and colonial policies, with their respective books, Expansion of England (1883) and Oceania (1886), becoming best-sellers. They diverged radically in important regards, however. Seeley wrote in a private letter that ‘No one cares less than I do for Froude’.153 One of the matters they disagreed over more than anything else was historians’ biographical practice. Seeley was critical of Froude being ‘tarred with the same brush as his master, Carlyle, and his brother-in-law, Kingsley’.154 Seeley first attacked Kingsley’s view of history: ‘he was “bent on establishing history as a serious [university] discipline and he thought that in order to do so he must discredit the Romantic and biographical approach of which Kingsley’s work was a prime example’.155 Seeley went on to attack Froude and in this was joined by many colleagues. As Ian Hesketh has noted, E. A. Freeman held the view that historians could not countenance Froude ‘as a partner in their labours, as a fellow-worker in the course of historic truth’ because he was literary and, therefore, unscientific.156 Freeman pursued Froude in the Saturday Review for two decades ‘on account of alleged inaccuracies in his work’, which Hesketh has analysed.157 According to Freeman, Froude and his ilk wrote dramatic narrative for a general audience which neither weighed up variant interpretations nor considered historiographical disagreements. More than that, they were passionate subjectivists who did not support disinterested objectivity as the basis of historians’ scholarly professionalisation.158 Frederick York Powell, who succeeded Froude as Regius Professor of Modern History in Oxford, wrote the preface to the English translation of C. V. Langlois and Charles Seignobos’s Introduction to the Study of History (1898), which singled out Froude as one who ‘did not follow proper historical methodology’ and examined in detail what they called ‘Froude’s disease’, his emulating the ‘dangerous example’ set by ‘Mr. Carlyle’.159

Victorians’ debate over heroism  57

Figure 2.4 Above all, Carlyle initiated a debate over his biographical theory of the role of the individual in history. Thomas Carlyle gazing at the Cromwell Family Miniatures at the Old Masters Exhibition, 6 February 1895, by Eyre Crowe, lithograph, from The Graphic (6 May 1895). Bridgeman.

Seeley criticised Kingsley, Froude and, indirectly, Carlyle on a number of grounds. He was a leading educational reformer who sought to professionalise the discipline and objected to ‘amateur historians’, as he regarded Kingsley and Froude. Moreover, Seeley was an advocate of university-based History which had a practical educational value and history schools in universities should be ‘the seminary of politicians’ and

58  Victorians’ debate over heroism citizenship rather than popular, literary, non-scientific pleasure. Scientific History could not be as enjoyable as a novel. Hesketh called this ‘boundary work’ and Seeley was one of the most prominent academic boundary riders.160 He was the author of biographies, including on Jesus, Baron vom Stein, Napoleon and Goethe, and promoted a biographical approach. Seeley, however, came close to a theory of anti-heroism. In the place of Carlyle’s Romantic, heroic biographical approach, Seeley substituted a scientific anti-heroic biographical approach. These differences were important as history was professionalising. Once Regius Professors were amateurs with other careers: [James] Stephen had been a public servant and man of affairs, [Charles] Kingsley a minister of religion, Seeley himself had been trained as a classicist, but in the late I870s men who had taken their degrees in history began to produce works of first-class historical scholarship.161 Donald J. Winslow pointed to a generation which included John Forster, James Parton, Samuel Smiles and Leslie Stephen, who successfully lived by their writing, a great deal of which was biography whose work was highly regarded.162 Views about professional standards, rigour and objectivity spread beyond university historians. A group of biographers continued to ‘treat biography as a second career’ to politics, journalism and writing. Increasingly, they took care over the records, assiduously researched in the archives, and concerned themselves with detail, accuracy and objectivity. They continued to flourish. John Morley, for instance, was a lawyer, journalist and politician. He had been general editor of Macmillan’s ‘English Men of Letters’ before turning to politics later in life. He founded a series on literary biography between 1878 and 1892. The first of 39 biographies in the series was Leslie Stephen’s Samuel Johnson (1878) and the last was John Nichol’s Thomas Carlyle (1892).163 Morley established a subsequent second series from 1902 to 1919. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 11 times.164 Alongside these developments was the rise of the professional biographer, which Ira Nadel has narrated.165 Seeley became a leading educational reformer who aimed to develop collective professionalised university research and teaching, as Sheldon Rothblatt has shown in the Revolution of the Dons.166 Indeed, Seeley’s ‘town and gown’ ambition was for university historians to be the new intellectual elite and for their students to become leading politicians. There were only two teaching appointments in History at Cambridge in 1873. The numbers of university teachers and students rose rapidly over the next few decades. Cambridge created five more university lectureships in History in 1883; there were 16 teaching positions at Oxford in 1884.167 In 1888 there were 115 students in History at Cambridge and double that number at Oxford. The 1880s saw the emergence in both universities of the first generation of scholars who had been trained in historical studies and the emergence of research degrees.168

Victorians’ debate over heroism  59 About the time of Seeley’s appointment to Cambridge in 1869, the Board of Legal and Historical Studies at Cambridge grappled with a number of issues which affected the shape of the professionalising movement. He found himself at the crossroads and immersed in a number of dilemmas. Up until that time Modern History had formed a minor part of the Moral Science Tripos; that is, involving intensive examination. Moral Sciences included English Law, General Jurisprudence and Political Economy and, mostly, Ancient History.169 The University of Oxford had taught some Modern History since 1853 and in 1872 established Modern History as an Honours School separate from Law. The Cambridge University Senate established the History Tripos in February 1873, which covered modern and ancient history.170 At about the same time, in 1870, the ‘History of England’ was announced as a possible subject in the examination for the Civil Service in 1870.171 Should a distinctive written examination of university undergraduates be established, that is a History Tripos, akin to the long-standing Mathematical Tripos to fit these developments? Should examinations or dissertations be the mainstay of historical study? Seeley had come out strongly in support of the study of Modern History in his inaugural lecture but, more distinctly, he had also proclaimed that the main object of history was to study the state, its institutions and the process of nation-building. Everyone ‘who studies political institutions in the past or in the present, studies history’.172 Despite his major scholarly activity to that date being an edition of Livy’s History of Rome for the Clarendon Press, Seeley’s inaugural lecture, published in Macmillan’s Magazine as ‘Teaching of Politics’ (1869), argued for the importance of the study of contemporary politics in particular. He emphasised that History had a practical educational value and that history schools in universities should be ‘the seminary of politicians’ and citizenship: for history encouraged certain moral standards such as the devotion to truth under peculiarly difficult conditions, that it widened and strengthened political principles, that it tempered judgement and heightened impartiality, and that it was a great preparation for politics just because it dealt with probabilities and not with certainties.173 He advocated for a study of history as ‘the school of statesmanship’.174 History could help settle current policy conundrums, and foster national unity. History for Seeley was past politics; ‘politics present history’.175 In the process, statesmanship meant biographical research.176 His father, also named Robert Seeley, was a publisher who had written biographies of M. T. Sadler (1842), William Cowper (1855) and John Wesley (1856), and in his retirement had written on the life and reign of Edward I, The Greatest of All the Plantagenets (1860). Robert Seeley, the younger, wrote a different kind of biography, however, than those of his father, Carlyle, Kingsley or Froude, characterised as scientific rather than Romantic or artistic biography.

60  Victorians’ debate over heroism The debate was over positivism as an aspiration and writing style as much as biographical subject matter. After his Cambridge student days and while living and teaching in London (he did not live in Cambridge again until 1880), Seeley moved in Christian Science and Positivist circles. The publication of Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England (1858) had stirred up a debate about the rise and fall of states. Buckle expressly acknowledged his debt to positivist Auguste Comte’s view that society should be studied scientifically, establishing ‘universal laws’ or causal uniformities inductively. Buckle concentrated on the causes of European progress, particularly the intellectual capacity for adaptation. Seeley lauded this universal history of the kind propounded by ‘Vico and Herder to Comte and Buckle’.177 Buckle believed that for history to become a science it needed to consider past events in the same way that astronomical observations had led to laws of planetary motion. By the 1880s, support for Buckle’s methods was overwhelmed by a focus on Ranke’s kind of extensive archival research.178 Froude, like Lord Acton, was critical of the positivists, Comte, Buckle and, in time, Seeley. They were convinced, for instance, that Buckle might have been a positivist but he had not shown that ‘the actions of men, and therefore of societies, are governed by fixed laws, and not by free-will’. However, he did not centre his work on the individual. Instead he was concerned with typicality, the things that humans shared and collective behaviour. He had little interest in contingency and free will. Acton and Froude believed that ‘free-will refuses the inductive process’ and the future could not be predicted because of human misadventure, accidents and wilfulness.179 In turn, Seeley became a loud critic of Froude’s biography for not being sufficiently accurate. He argued that Froude, together with Macaulay, Kingsley and Carlyle, put insufficient emphasis on political ‘estimates of men and events’. They wrote popular history and regarded history as a ‘department of belles lettres’.180 It seems that they were not sufficiently and dully serious with facts. Seeley even criticised Carlyle and Macaulay as charlatans to the latter’s great-nephew, G. M. Trevelyan. On the other hand, Macaulay’s and Carlyle’s sheer success fuelled Seeley’s animosity; ‘[h]e hated the picturesque as being the property of the “stage manager and scene painter’”.181 Seeley argued history had to be rescued from literary biographers who aspired to produce works for pleasure. In a letter to C. E. Maurice, he opined that these historians ‘sinned against the light and so betrayed minds radically unscientific … [T]hey wear it on their sleeves that they are bent upon producing an effect, upon interesting and thrilling the reader.’182 Instead it needed to be placed in the safe hands of the scholarly elite in universities. Unlike Carlyle, Macaulay and Kingsley, Seeley was neither a poet nor a novelist. Seeley took aim at them to discredit their popular Romantic and biographical approach.183 He characterised them as being uncritical. Above

Victorians’ debate over heroism  61 all, they were responsible for a certain kind of ‘popular English historiography’ which he deplored.184 There is indeed for drowsy imaginations a certain charm about the remote past which the present wants. It is so romantic, people say; that is to say, the characters are all in stage-costume, and speak in quaint language; the rhetoric and literary art of succeeding generations have given an artificial dignity to the persons and incidents and all the more prominent personages appear—as they never appeared to their contemporaries—with the halo round their heads of posthumous renown. No doubt, in that peaceful world of the past you escape all that is most uncomfortable in the present—the bustle, the petty detail, the slovenliness, the vulgarity, the hot discomfort, the bewildering hubbub, the humiliating spites and misconstructions, the ceaseless brawl of objuration and recrimination, the painfulness of good men hating each other, the perplexingness of wise men flatly contradicting each other, the perpetual sight of failure, or of success soon regretted, of good things turning out to have a bad side, or new sores breaking out as fast as old ones are healed, the laboriousness and the littleness of all improvement, and in general the commonness and dulness and uneasiness of life.185 Seeley seethed because history was ‘[d]erided by the public as pedants and bores, and without an aristocracy of students to appeal to’.186 It ought not resort to ‘mere literature’; it had to be more than that. In The Life and Times of Stein, Or, Germany and Prussia in the Napoleonic Age,187 Seeley deliberately avoided artistic style writing. It might enliven text but he believed that it distorted the truth. The writing should be unadorned and the author detached. Biography itself was his means of engaging readers. He collaborated on an English version of The Life and Adventures of Ernst Moritz Arndt (1879), arguing that This book … may serve the purpose for which the historical novel was invented, and in a better way … in a candid biography like this of Arndt’s we really do catch in some degree the spirit of the age. Here we see, not what a poet living in some other age fancied may have been the feelings of a German living under Napoleon’s tyranny, but what the feelings of such a German actually were.188 Seeley, and his friend and Cambridge colleague Henry Sidgwick (although they came to disagree over Home Rule for Ireland), shared a selective approach to history. The task of the historian was not to pursue the ‘purely popular, romantic and fantastic views of the subject’. It ought to begin with exact research questions, just as scientific investigation began with hypotheses which were tested. Disproving a view, ‘the negative work of

62  Victorians’ debate over heroism destroying false views’, was almost as important as constructing a positive view.189 History required some effort; scientific biography was more than evidential, telling a good story. It involved both critical research methods engagement with the historiography: History is indeed much more ordinary and monotonous than is commonly supposed. The serious student of history has to submit to a disenchantment like that which the experience of life brings to the imaginative youth. As life is not much like romance, so history when it is studied in original documents looks very unlike the conventional representation of it which historians have accustomed us to. It is much more uniform and ruled by routine; there is less in it both of virtue and vice, of extraordinary wisdom and insane folly than is supposed.190 It was a story of ordinary acts of parliament, tiresome budgets and taxation, currency and labyrinthine details of legislation and administration. Romantic biographies oversimplified history. There were general principles in history which historians needed to identify. While he was committed to a scientific study of the past as the primary purpose of historical study, Seeley understood science and positivism in a particular way. History and politics were a collection of facts from which a science should be built up. Historical facts were used to inductively establish laws, specifically the laws of politics. The ‘historian needed to raise general questions rather than merely narrate events’, especially the political context. Political science was ‘subject to uniformities, divinely ordained, to be discovered by comparative study of history’.191 Laws of political science would be as rigorous as those of any other inductive science. That is he distinguished between deductive and inductive sciences. Contemporary history sheds at once upon the political world, the world of states, nationalities, parliaments, armies, parties, and interest, an illumination like that which natural science sheds upon the world of physical and vital forces, of light and heat, the plant and the animal … If the botanist and geologist cannot walk across the fields or along the high road without being reminded of their favourite studies, neither can the man who studies his age ever be in want of stimulants to reflection.192 Seeley’s concern with heroic biography was that truth was only one of its objects and not even its priority and it thus misconceived the nature of history. Carlyle-style history led both to overlooking general patterns and to over-simplified and romanticised depictions of their subjects. In turn, this led them to failures of moral assessment. Carlyle said of Cromwell, for instance, was that he was ‘well-intentioned’ and so he and his government were ‘morally excusable’. Carlyle was inspired by military imperialism and

Victorians’ debate over heroism  63 described it in emotive language, ‘a flood of rhetoric and of bastard poetry’.193 In response, Seeley came close to a theory of anti-heroism. Seeley argued that Napoleon was amoral and that his political power and his policies were determined by the importance of the army, past policies and the circumstances of his rise to power. The only personal factor which Seeley would admit was his military prowess. He added, however, that this brought about ‘unprecedented bloodshed and ruin’ and that Napoleon had had a vested interest in aggressive policies, since his power rested on ‘a condition of public danger’. The converse of Carlyle’s theory, that great men are anti-heroes, came nearer the mark. Seeley came to the same conclusion concerning Frederick the Great. His ‘heroic form of government’, far from being beneficial to Prussia, had in the long run led to ‘the unparalleled catastrophe of Jena, and after that catastrophe the necessity was forced upon the country of radically destroying his system’.194 Deborah Wormell, in her biography of Seeley, argued that despite his rhetoric or metanarrative, he never put forward universally valid laws of generalisation in the Spencerian or positivist traditions.195 Publicly, Seeley encouraged original research along the German model and presented moral lessons learnt about localised historical phenomenon. Seeley asserted that it was ‘the special mark of the present age to give a historical or inductive basis, in other words, a basis of fact to moral science’.196 He set out to establish spiritual and cultural values to the nation and he did this by way of modern history. As he wrote, history should not merely gratify the reader’s curiosity about the past, but modify his view of the present and his forecast of the future. Now if this maxim is sound, the history of English ought to end with something that might be called a moral. Some large conclusion ought to arise out of it; it ought to exhibit the general tendency of English affairs in such a way as to set us thinking about the future and divining the destiny which is reserved for us.197 Seeley created typologies of states, dividing modern organic and primitive inorganic states which he ranked in evolutionary stages. In his 1878 work on Stein, for instance, he explained how Stein had transformed Prussia into a ‘moral nation’ capable of fighting the ‘immoral’ anti-national Napoleonic empire. In turn, Seeley himself was criticised for being insufficiently tied to the archives. In reviews, Bertha Gardiner, Lord Acton, Oscar Browning and A. V. Dicey all criticised Seeley’s portrayal of Napoleon. Gardiner and Acton pointed to the lack of positive evidence for his theory that Napoleon’s European conquests were subordinate tactics in his English Campaign. In his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor in 1895, Acton argued that the amount of source material in archives made possible entirely new standards of objectivity and accuracy. Seeley’s sister had copied out hundreds of

64  Victorians’ debate over heroism documents in the archives, but his works were based mostly on published works.198 Acton argued, however, that the new approach to history was not simply the accumulation of documents. For our purpose, the main thing to learn is not the art of accumulating material, but the sublimer art of investigating it … It is by solidity of criticism more than by plenitude of erudition, that the study of history strengthens, and straightens and extends the mind.199 Similarly, the Victorian historians Froude, Freeman, Green, Stubbs, Lecky, Maine, Morley, Gardiner, Creighton and Maitland all wrote biographies based on archival research and their histories and biographies were subject to increasing review and critique. They disagreed on a range of issues, but not this one. Increasingly, Carlyle’s historiographical conclusions were subject to criticism and debate too. For example, Morley pointed out that Carlyle’s assessment of Cromwell ignored the restoration which must ‘misjudge the rebellion’.200 Stereotypes about Victorian historians understate the diversity of both scientific and literary historical biographical writing in the nineteenth century. This is Hesketh’s and Amigoni’s main point: there were competing discourses. Amigoni used a re-reading of the writings of Carlyle, particularly Sartor, to argue that historians—including John Morley, Frederic Harrison, Leslie Stephen, John Nicholson and James Cotter Morison— admired and tried to emulate Carlyle’s writing practices, or literary style. They wanted to ‘impose cultural discipline on reading practices’ by first teasing out the ‘literary historical’ discourses and then boundary riding writing that did not accord to the historical discourse. Yet university scholars, then, reacted to Kingsley and Froude trying to influence history teaching in Carlyle’s likeness. Heroic biography remained part of the historians’ toolkit. Take the ‘leading living historians’ identified in 1894: as we have seen, Seeley wrote on Stein and Napoleon. Gardiner’s political history was peopled with political personalities and character being a central factor of his explanation. Similarly, William Stubbs wrote parliamentary history believing that individual character and human nature rendered generalizations useless.201 Lecky wrote on Irish leaders. Empiricism was central. Froude’s research methods were empirical and industrious: he scoured research collections in ‘Brussels, Paris, Vienna and Simancas’. Interests, as well as the methods adopted, varied from writer to writer. Professional historians were increasingly concerned with modern politicians and nation formation and they were influential. Their heroes and interpretations differed from Carlyle’s all ‘powerful figures who laid hold of history’s currents and reshaped them according to their will’ or Emerson’s ‘Representative Men’, ‘individuals who embodied the most progressive forces of their own time’. Moreover, biography written by historians

Victorians’ debate over heroism  65

Figure 2.5 The Illustrated London News regarded William Stubbs, S. R. Gardiner, W. E. H. Lecky and John Robert Seeley as the leading living historians at the end of the nineteenth century. They had differing historical views on biography. Figure 2.5 ‘The Leading Living Historians’, The Illustrated London News (27 October 1894). Bridgeman, Look and Learn/Illustrations Papers Collection.

66  Victorians’ debate over heroism employed in universities by the late nineteenth century was heroic, but it was also increasingly critical, discursive and contested. As Froude’s biographer noted, ‘Consummate villains are as rare in Froude as perfect heroes’.202 He too was blind to Carlyle’s sense of wonder.

Conclusion: Carlyle provokes debate among professionalising biographers and historians Nineteenth-century history has sometimes been divided neatly into three schools: Romantic, idealist, and positivist.203 For instance, Patrick Gardiner suggested heroic, ideological and so-called ‘scientific’ interpretations.204 As Christopher Parker suggested, these divisions are hard to sustain in practice. Moreover, Parker suggested that Victorian historians from the 1850s to the end of the Victorian era ‘were explicitly hostile to positivism and to its chief practitioners, Comte and Buckle’.205 We need to recognise the complexities of Victorian historians’ approaches to biography. As has been argued here, that these approaches were not always mutually exclusive. Carlyle’s heroic view, while it is often held to be ‘the’ Victorian biographical approach, was disputed. And at the same time Carlyle’s work remained in favour by the general public. Harrison noted in 1895 that Carlyle’s work had ‘lived through the Utilitarian and Evolution movements’ and had not ‘been extinguished by them’. Nor did boundary riding succeed.206 Despite variations in aims and methods, as Hesketh suggested, a consensus developed among university historians that good historical biography needed to use, or integrate, both methods: agency and structure both mattered.207 The art of history remained a powerful method as far as the general public was concerned, and the profession of history in Britain would once again, though rather reluctantly, have to make room for artistic and literary methods to exist alongside scientific ones.208 Froude, for example, was not only concerned with the agency and the role of the individual but believed ‘the important question to ask was the role of the environment’.209 He was interested in patterns of interaction between individuals and historical forces. Despite Carlyle’s and Spencer’s impassioned positions and biographical debate, Lewes’ interactionalism, integrating both views of heroic agency and environmental causes, with all the tensions that that entailed, triumphed.

Notes 1 Jack Kaminsky, ‘The Empirical Metaphysics of George Henry Lewes’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 13, no. 3 (June 1952), p. 314. 2 Lewes’s first publications were Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences (1853) and The Life and Works of Goethe (1855).

Victorians’ debate over heroism  67 3 William Baker, ‘Herbert Spencer’s Unpublished Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle: The “Perfect Owl of Minerva for Knowledge” on a “Poet without Music”’, Neophilologus, vol. 60, no. 1 (January 1976), p. 145. 4 Baker, ‘Herbert Spencer’s Unpublished Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle’, pp. 146, 147, 150. 5 Baker, ‘Herbert Spencer’s Unpublished Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle’, p. 148. 6 Lytton Strachey, ‘Carlyle’, in Biographical Essays (f.p. 1922–1933; New York: Harvest/HBJ Book, 1980), p. 250. Strachey’s grandfather was friends with Carlyle. 7 David Duncan, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (f.p. 1908; London: Methuen, 1911), p. 378. 8 Herbert Spencer, Autobiography, vol. 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904), pp. 179–180. See also John Offer (ed.), Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 99. 9 Sheffield Weekly Telegraph, 21 September 1889. 10 Duncan, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, pp. 512–523. 11 Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of NineteenthCentury ‘Hidden’ Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 12 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (f.p. as a serial in Fraser’s Magazine; November 1833–1834. Ralph Waldo Emerson was responsible for it being printed as a book in Boston in 1836. The first English trade edition was Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838). 13 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Lecture II. The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam [8 May 1840]’ in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (f.p. London: James Fraser, 1841; Project Gutenberg, November 1997), accessed 19 January 2021, www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/heros10.txt. 14 Francis Darwin (ed.), The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1887), p. 78. 15 Spencer, Autobiography, vol. 1, pp. 505–506. 16 Charles Kingsley, The Heroes or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children (London: Macmillan, 1889). 17 Duncan, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, p. 567. 18 Mark Cumming (ed.), The Carlyle Encyclopedia (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickson University Press, 2004), p. 438. 19 Thomas Carlyle, Life of Robert Burns (New York: Delisser and Procter, 1859), pp. 71–73. 20 Trevor Pearce, ‘From “Circumstances” to “Environment”: Herbert Spencer and the Origins of the Idea of Organism–Environment Interaction’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 41, no. 3 (2010), pp. 241–252. 21 John Offer, ‘A New Reading of Spencer on “Society”, “Organicism” and “Spontaneous Order”’, Journal of Classical Sociology, vol. 15, no. 4 (2015), pp. 337–360. 22 To put it in perspective, Goethe’s collective works amounted to 143 volumes. 23 See H. D. Traill (ed.), Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: The Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes, Centenary ed. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899; New York: AMS Press, 1969). 24 Jules Paul Seigel (ed.), Thomas Carlyle. The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan and Paul, 1971). D. J. Trela and Roger L. Tarr (eds.), The Critical Response to Thomas Carlyle’s Major Works (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 9. 25 Alexander Jordan, ‘A Carlylean Secretary of Labour in New Zealand’, Carlyle Studies Annual, no. 33 (2018–19), pp. 139–148.

68  Victorians’ debate over heroism 26 James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, 1834–1881, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1882–1884). 27 Marie Laniel, ‘Revisiting a Great Man’s House’, Carlyle Studies Annual, no. 24 (2008), p. 117. 28 D. J. Trela, ‘A Bibliography of Carlyle Studies, 1975–1995’, Carlyle Studies Annual, vol. 21 (2003–2004), pp. 53–99. 29 Michael W. Taylor, The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 4. 30 Gregory Claeys, ‘The “Survival of the Fittest” and the Origins of Social Darwinism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 61, no. 2 (2000), pp. 223–240. 31 Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). 32 R. W. Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1850). 33 William James, ‘Great Men and Their Environment’, Atlantic Monthly, no. 46 (October 1880), p. 227. See Ralph Jessop, ‘Resisting the Enlightenment’s Instrumentalist Legacy: James, Hamilton, and Carlyle on the Mechanisation of the Human Condition’, History of European Ideas, vol. 39, no. 5, (2013), pp. 631–649. 34 Georgii Valnetinovich Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History (f.p. 1898; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940). 35 Adela Pinch, Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 69. E. L. Youmans, ‘Herbert Spencer’s Latest Critic’, The North American Review, vol. 139, no. 336 (November 1884), pp. 472–479. 36 Kaminsky, ‘The Empirical Metaphysics of George Henry Lewes’, p. 314. 37 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Biographical Essays (f.p. 1857; New York: John B Alden, 1886), p. 5. 38 Review of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘The History of England from the Accession of James the Second’, The North American Review, vol. 93, no. 193 (October 1861), p. 420. 39 W.E.H. Lecky, The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland (London: Saunders and Otley, 1861), p. 2. 40 Mark Nixon, ‘Theory and Method in the Work of Samuel Rawson Gardiner’, (PhD thesis, University of Stirling, 2004), p. 240; Donal McCartney, W.E.H. Lecky, Historian and Politician, 1838–1903 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994). 41 Waldo H. Dunn, Froude and Carlyle: A Study of the Froude-Carlyle Controversy (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1969). 42 Deborah Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 82. 43 John L. Herkless, ‘Seeley and Ranke’, The Historian, vol. 43, no. 1 (November 1980), pp. 1–22. 44 Ian Hesketh, ‘Writing History in Macaulay’s Shadow: J.R. Seeley, E.A. Freeman, and the Audience for Scientific History in Late Victorian Britain’, Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada, vol. 22, no. 2 (2011), pp. 30–56. 45 David Amigoni, Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (London: Routledge, 1993). 46 S. Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995); M. S. Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); A. Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); S. Berger, ‘The

Victorians’ debate over heroism  69











Invention of European National Traditions in European Romanticism’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 4: 1800–1945, ed. S. Macintyre, J. Maiguashca and A. Pok (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 47 Carlyle, ‘Lecture 1: The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology [5 May 1840]’ in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. 48 Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. 49 David R. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser (eds.), Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 21. 50 Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, pp. 15–17. 51 Carlyle hardly discusses women. A rare exception, ‘Poor Ill-advised MarieAntoinette; with a Woman’s Vehemence, not with a Sovereign’s Foresight!’ 52 Thomas Carlyle, History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called ‘Frederick the Great’, 21 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872–1873), Project Gutenberg, accessed 26 January 2020, https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/ gutbook/lookup?num=1091 53 Sir Herbert Grierson, ‘The Hero and the Fuhrer’, Aberdeen University Review, vol. 27 (March 1940), p. 100. 54 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788); David Hume, The History of England, 6 vols. (1754–1762); William Robertson, Concilia Ecclesiæ Scoticanæ [Statutes of the Scottish Church, 1225–1559] (1866). 55 Louise Merwin Young, Thomas Carlyle and the Art of History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939) argued that ‘Carlyle’s theory of society is posited on the psychological assumption of irrationalism’. 56 Young, Thomas Carlyle and the Art of History. 57 Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, p. 29 ff. 58 Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, p. 13. 59 Colin N. Manlove, ‘“Perpetual Metamorphoses”: The Refusal of Certainty in Sartor Resartus’, Swansea Review, vol. 2 (November 1986), reproduced in Trela and Tarr (eds.), The Critical Response to Thomas Carlyle’s Major Works, p. 42. 60 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Thoughts on History’, Fraser’s Magazine, no. 2 (1830), p. 415. 61 Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling (London: Chapman & Hall, 1851); Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. K. J. Fielding and Ian Campbell (f.p. 1881; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 62 Colin N. Manlove discusses a range of inconsistencies, Trela and Tarr (eds.), The Critical Response to Thomas Carlyle’s Major Works, pp. 30–44. 63 Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered. 64 Ruth Hoberman, Modernizing Lives: Experiments in English Biography, 1918–1939 (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), p. 29. 65 Others have suggested different major influences: Eric Russell Bentley emphasised psychoanalytically the unhappy family relations and his parents’ Calvinist doctrine of the Elect and the Calvinist belief in theocratic government. Eric Russell Bentley, ‘Modern Hero-Worship: Notes on Carlyle, Nietzsche, and Stefan George’, The Sewanee Review, vol. 52, no. 3 (Summer, 1944), p. 445. 66 Manlove, ‘“Perpetual Metamorphoses”’. 67 Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt. The Lost Hero of Science (London: John Murray, 2015), p. 129. 68 Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History.

70  Victorians’ debate over heroism 69 Charles Frederick Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought, 1819–34 (New Haven, CT: Archon Books, 1934). 70 Sabina Loriga, ‘The Role of the Individual in History: Biographical and Historical Writing in the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Century’ in Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory and Life Writing, ed. Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (Boston: Brill, 2014), p. 75. 71 Wulf, The Invention of Nature, pp. 25–38. 72 E. John Hornby, Jr, ‘Geometrical and Graphical Solutions of Quadratic Equations’, The College Mathematics Journal, vol. 21, no. 5 (November 1990), pp. 362–369. 73 Donald Stone, ‘Goethe and the Victorians’, Carlyle Annual, no. 13 (1992–93), pp. 17–34. 74 Carlyle, On History. 75 Wulf, The Invention of Nature, p. 143. 76 John Morrow, Thomas Carlyle (London: Hambledon-Continuum, 2006), pp. 162 and 166. 77 Charles Frederick Harrold, ‘Carlyle’s General Method in the French Revolution’, PMLA, vol. 43, no. 4 (December 1928), p. 1153. 78 Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), p. 118. 79 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; quote from publisher’s advertisement, https://www. amazon.com.au/History-Friedrich-Prussia-Dodo-Press/dp/1409900835, Accessed 20 January 2020. 80 Thomas Carlyle, ‘On Biography’, Fraser’s Magazine, vol. 5 (May 1832), pp. 353–360. 81 Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, p. 16. 82 Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, Lecture 2. 83 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus. 84 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 151. 85 Diamond, Victorian Sensation. 86 Thomas Carlyle’s letter to The Times defending Mazzini, 19 June 1844. 87 Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, vol. 3 (London: James Fraser, 1837), p. 345. 88 Gregory Maertz, ‘Carlyle’s Critique of Goethe: Literature and the Cult of Personality’, Studies in Scottish Literature, vol. 29 (1996), pp. 205–226; David R. Sorenson, ‘Selective Affinities: Carlyle, Goethe and the French Revolution’, Carlyle Studies Annual, no. 16 (1996), pp. 61–71. 89 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 39. 90 Sometimes translated, ‘The spirit of the ages, that you find,/In the end, is the spirit of Humankind/ mirror where all the ages are revealed’. Faust, Part 1, Scene 1, 577–579, accessed 28 March 2020, https://www.poetryintranslation. com/PITBR/German/FaustIScenesItoIII.php. This translation is from Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 33. 91 Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind: 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 310. 92 Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 86. 93 Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind. 94 Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 95 Hoberman, Modernizing Lives, p. 29. 96 Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered, pp. 53–54. 97 Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1873), p. 33.

Victorians’ debate over heroism  71 98 Herbert Spencer, ‘What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?’, Westminster Review, New Series, no. 16 (July and October 1859), p. 4. See also Herbert Spencer, ‘The Social Organism’, Westminster Review, New Series, no. 17 (January and April 1860), pp. 90–121. 99 Spencer, The Study of Sociology, pp. 37, 386. 100 Spencer, ‘The Social Organism’. 101 Herbert Spencer, ‘The Development Hypothesis’, The Leader (20 March 1852), p. 280. 102 Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1926), p. 27. 103 Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, vol. 3 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1896), p. 599. 104 See, for instance, Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, vol. 3 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1891), pp. 243, 293, 300, 315, 316–317, 485. 105 Spencer, The Study of Sociology, pp. 33–47. 106 M. W. Taylor, Men versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism (New York: Clarendon Press, 1992). 107 Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, vol. 3, p. 184. 108 Sherrin Berezowsky, ‘Biological Inheritance and the Social Order in Late Victorian Fiction and Science’ (PhD diss., University of Western Ontario, 2011), pp. 17–18. 109 Webb, My Apprenticeship, p. 29. 110 Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History, p. x. 111 Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History. 112 Shaw, ‘Plekhanov on the Role of the Individual in History’, pp. 247–265. 113 Plekhanov’s essay was first published under a nom de plume, A. Kirsanov in 1898. It was not widely available for English reading public until G. V. Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1940). 114 David Cawthon, ‘Marx on Leadership’, in Philosophical Foundations of Leadership (New York: Routledge, 2002). See Friedrich Engels on Napoleon, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), pp. 467–468. 115 Friedrich Engels to Heinz Starkenburg [Walther Borgius], 25 January 1894, in Donna Torr, trans., Marx and Engels Correspondence (New York: International Publishers, 1968), pp. 467–468. 116 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (f.p. 1852; Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1934), p. 10. 117 Engels to Starkenburg, 25 January 1894. 118 Rob Sewell, ‘The Decisive Role of the Individual in History’, In Defence of Marxism, 8 December 2005, accessed 25 January 2020, https://www.marxist. com/about-us.htm 119 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 412, 428–429. 120 Frederick Engels, ‘A Review of Past and Present, by Thomas Carlyle, London, 1843’, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, January 1844, accessed 4 February 2021, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/ carlyle.htm 121 G. Robert Strange, ‘Refractions of Past and Present’, in Carlyle Past and Present, ed. J. K. Fielding and Rodger L. Tarr (New York: Barnes and Noble; London: Vision, 1976), pp. 96–111. 122 Frederic Harrison, Studies in Early Victorian Literature, 2nd ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1895).

72  Victorians’ debate over heroism 123 Frederic Harrison, S. H. Swinny and F. S. Marvin (eds.), The New Calendar of Great Men: Biographies of the 559 Worthies of all Ages & Nations in the Positivist Calendar of Auguste Comte (London: MacMillan, 1920, 2nd ed., f.p. 1892), pp. v–ix. 124 James, ‘Great Men and Their Environment’, p. 227. 125 Stephen S. Bush, William James on Democratic Individuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 126 William James, ‘The Importance of Individuals’, The Open Court, vol. 4, no. 154 (August 1890), pp. 24–37, reprinted in William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (f.p. 1897; New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 255–262. 127 William James, ‘What is an Emotion?’ Mind, vol. 9, no. 34 (1 April 1884), pp. 188–205. 128 Susan Haack, ‘The Differences That Make a Difference: William James on the Importance of Individuals’, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, vol. 2, (2010), p. 1. 129 James, ‘Great Men and Their Environment’, p. 227. See also Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacies of William James and John Dewey, ed. David Macarthur (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017). 130 James, ‘Great Men and Their Environment’, p. 445. 131 John Fiske, ‘Sociology and Hero-Worship’, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 47 (January 1881), pp. 75–84; Grant Allen, ‘The Genesis of Genius’, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 47 (January 1881), pp. 371–381. 132 Philip Rosenberg, The Seventh Hero: Thomas Carlyle and the Theory of Radical Activism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 191–193. 133 Trygve Throntveit, ‘William James’s Ethical Republic’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 72, no. 2 (2011), p. 256. 134 Herbert Butterfield, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, History, New Series, 40, no. 138/139 (February and June 1955), p. 5. This was the published address he gave at the Historical Association’s AGM at Cambridge, 31 December 1953. 135 Young, Thomas Carlyle and the Art of History. See Townsend Scudder, review of Louise Merwin Young, Thomas Carlyle and the Art of History’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 12, no. 2 (June 1940), pp. 271–272. 136 William Graham Sumner, Andrew Jackson as a Public Man: What He Was, What Chances He Had, and What He Did with Them (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1882); Alexander Hamilton (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1890); and Robert Morris (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1892). 137 Martyn Lyon, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 4–18. 138 Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History, p. 46. See also Tapp, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, p. 61. 139 Charles Kingsley, The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History: An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1860), pp. 5–6. 140 Kingsley, The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History, pp. 5–6, 14, 30, 42, 33, 51. 141 Kingsley, The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History, pp. 42–44. 142 J. A. Froude, ‘Inaugural Lecture’, Longman’s Magazine, vol. 21, no. 122 (1 December 1892), pp. 144–145. 143 Dunn, Froude and Carlyle; Ian Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011);

Victorians’ debate over heroism  73 Christopher Parker, ‘English Historians and the Opposition to Positivism’, History and Theory, vol. 22, no. 2 (May 1983), pp. 120–145. 144 Froude, ‘Inaugural Lecture’, p. 153. 145 Froude, ‘Inaugural Lecture’, p. 162. 146 Froude, ‘Inaugural Lecture’, p. 161. 147 John L. Herkless, ‘Seeley and Ranke’, Historian, vol. 43, no. 1 (November 1980), pp. 1–22. 148 Perez Zagorin, ‘Lord Acton’s Ordeal: The Historian and Moral Judgment’, The Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 74, no. 1 (Winter 1998), p. 5. 149 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 82. 150 Jean O. McLachlan, ‘The Origin and Early Development of the Cambridge Historical Tripos’, Cambridge Historical Journal, vol. 9, no. 1 (1947), p. 87. 151 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 95. 152 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 127. 153 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 164, quoting Seeley to Oscar Browning, 17 March 18?, [exact year unknown], Browning papers. 154 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 164. 155 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 75. 156 Ian Hesketh, ‘Diagnosing Froude’s Disease: Boundary Work and the Discipline of History in Late-Victorian Britain’, History and Theory, vol. 47 (October 2008), pp. 373–395. 157 Frank Barlow, ‘Freeman, Edward Augustus (1823–1892)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 29 January 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/10146 158 E. A. Freeman, ‘Lecture 111: The Difficulties of Historical Study’, in The Methods of Historical Study (London: Macmillan, 1886), pp. 99–100. 159 [Goldwin Smith], ‘Review of History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, vols. I–IV’, Edinburgh Review, vol. 108 (July 1858), p. 212. 160 Hesketh, ‘Diagnosing Froude’s Disease’, p. 376. 161 McLachlan, ‘The Origin and Early Development of the Cambridge Historical Tripos’, p. 87. 162 Donald J. Winslow, Life Writing: A Glossary of Terms in Biography, Autobiography, and Related Forms, 2nd ed. (f.p. 1980; Honolulu, Hawaii: Biographical Research Center by University of Hawaii Press, 1995), p. 52. 163 John L. Kijinski, ‘John Morley’s “English Men of Letters” Series and the Politics of Reading’, Victorian Studies, vol. 34 (Winter 1991), pp. 205–225; Gillian Fenwick, ‘Nourishing the Curiosity: Leslie Stephen and the English Men of Letters Series’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, vol. 22, no. 2 (1995), pp. 92–114. 164 John Morley, ‘The Man of Letters as Hero’, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 51 (November 1884), pp. 62–70. 165 Ira B. Nadel, ‘Biography as a Profession’, in Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), pp. 67–101. 166 Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (New York: Basic Books, 1968). See also McLachlan, ‘The Origin and Early Development of the Cambridge Historical Tripos’, based her work on L. S. Wood’s Selected Epigraphs: The Inaugural Lectures of the Regius Professors of Modern History at Oxford and Cambridge since 1831 (London: Published for the Historical Association by G. Bell and Sons, 1930); and F. W. Maitland (ed.), Essays on the Teaching of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901). 167 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 112, citing University of Ghent academic Paul Fredericq’s historical survey of England and Scotland universities.

74  Victorians’ debate over heroism 168 T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1982), chap. 5; Doris S. Goldstein, ‘The Professionalization of History in Britain in the Late Eighteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Storia della Storiografia, vol. 3 (1983), pp. 3–27; John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession of History in England since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983); Rosemary Jann, ‘From Amateur to Professional: The Case of the Oxbridge Historians’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 22 (Spring 1983), pp. 122–147; Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), chap. 6; Reba N. Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1994). 169 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 43. 170 Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons. 171 McLachlan, ‘The Origin and Early Development of the Cambridge Historical Tripos’, pp. 78–105. 172 Seeley, ‘The Teaching of Politics’, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 21 (November 1869), p. 438. 173 McLachlan, ‘The Origin and Early Development of the Cambridge Historical Tripos’, p. 87. 174 Seeley, ‘The Teaching of Politics’; ‘The Teaching of History’, Journal of Education, vol. 6 (1884), pp. 332–434. 175 Seeley, ‘The Teaching of Politics’. 176 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 82. 177 Seeley, ‘The Teaching of Politics’, p. 441. 178 Lord Acton, ‘Mr. Buckle’s Thesis and Method (1858)’ and ‘Mr. Buckle’s Philosophy of History (1858)’, in Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History: Selected Papers, ed. William H. McNeill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 3–40. 179 John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, Historical Essays and Studies, ed. J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1906), pp. 305–313, 319–322, 342. 180 This is a quote from Seeley, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 40, p. 292. 181 McLachlan, ‘The Origin and Early Development of the Cambridge Historical Tripos’, p. 86. 182 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 126. 183 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 75. 184 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 11. 185 Seeley, ‘The Teaching of Politics’, pp. 441–442. 186 J. R. Seeley, ‘A Historical Society’, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 45 (1881), p. 47. 187 J. R. Seeley, The Life and Times of Stein, Or, Germany and Prussia in the Napoleonic Age, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1878). 188 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 83. 189 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 89, citing Seeley, ‘Bonaparte’, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 44 (1881), pp. 163–164. 190 J. R. Seeley, ‘History and Politics I’, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 40 (August 1879), p. 199. 191 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 125. 192 Seeley, ‘The Teaching of Politics’, pp. 442–443. 193 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, pp. 126–127. 194 J. R. Seeley, ‘Prussian History’, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 36 (1877), p. 344. 195 Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 109.

Victorians’ debate over heroism  75 196 Quoted by Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 214. Wormell, Seeley and the Uses of History, p. 109. 197 John Robert Seeley, Expansion of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1883), p. 1. 198 Owen Chadwick, ‘Historian of Empire’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 15, no. 4 (1981), pp. 877–880. 199 Lord Acton, ‘Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History’ [Delivered at Cambridge, June 1895] in John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 15. 200 S. R. Gardiner, Cromwell’s Place in History (London: Longmans, Green, 1897). Sir Charles Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of Puritans (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900), p. 255. John Morley, Cromwell, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1904), p. 309 201 J.S.A. Adamson, ‘Eminent Victorians: S. R. Gardiner and the Liberal as Hero’, The Historical Journal, vol. 33, no. 3 (1990) pp. 641–657. 202 Ciaran Brady, James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 225. 203 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 39. 204 Patrick Gardiner, Theories of History (London: Macmillan and Free Press, 1959), p. 167 discussing Tolstoy. 205 Christopher Parker, ‘English Historians and the Opposition to Positivism’, History and Theory, vol. 22, no. 2 (May 1983), p. 121. 206 Hesketh, ‘Diagnosing Froude’s Disease’, p. 375. 207 Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), p. 176. George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 208 Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain, p. 161. 209 Brady, James Anthony Froude, p. 150.

Further reading The two conspicuous Victorian biographies are Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte (London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1857) and James Anthony Froude’s Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London 1834–1881, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1885). For a discussion of Romanticism, see Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: HarperCollins, 2009) and Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt. The Lost Hero of Science (London: John Murray, 2015). For a discussion of German and England Romanticism more generally, see Xiaohu Jiang, The Late EighteenthCentury Confluence of British–German Sentimental Literature (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020) and Benedict Stuchtey and Peter Wende (eds.), British and German Historiography, 1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions and Transfers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Biographical accounts are most useful for Victorian historians: R.B. McDowell, Alice Stopford Green: A Passionate Historian (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1967); Donal McCartney, W.E.H. Lecky,

76  Victorians’ debate over heroism Historian and Politician, 1838–1903 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994); Mark Nixon, Samuel Rawson Gardiner and the Idea of History (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2010); Ciaran Brady, James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). On the study of History and Biography in universities: Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Peter Slee, Learning and a Liberal Education: The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, 1880–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). For more on contemporary discussions of interactionalism, Leo Tolstoy, ‘The Difficulty of Defining the Forces that Move Nations’, an extract from see Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), fp. 1869 and ‘The Problem of Free Will and Necessity’ in Theories of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (London: Macmillan and Free Press, 1959), pp. 168–187. For the wider debate over the role of the individual in history, see Melanie Nolan, ‘The Great Individual in History: Historians and Their Biographical Practice’, in Renders and Veltman, Fear of Theory (Leiden: The Netherlands: Brill & Boston, 2022), pp. 72–88. This takes account of Herbert Butterfield, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, History, New Series, vol. 40, no. 138/139 (February and June 1955), pp. 1–17; Sidney Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (New York: John Day Co. 1943); E. J. Tapp, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, The Australian Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 1 (March 1958), pp. 51–64; Ernest Mandel, ‘The Role of the Individual in History: The Case of World War Two’, New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 157 (1986), pp. 61–77; William H. Shaw, ‘Plekhanov on the Role of the Individual in History’, Studies in Soviet Thought, vol. 35, no. 3 (1988), pp. 247–265; Frank McDonough, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, History Review, no. 24 (March 1996), pp. 40–42; Leonid E. Grinin, ‘The Role of an Individual in History: A Reconsideration’, Social Evolution, vol. 9, no. 2 (September 2010), pp. 95–136; Sabina Loriga, ‘The Role of the Individual in History: Biographical and Historical Writing in the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Century’ in Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory and Life Writing, ed. Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (Boston: Brill, 2014), pp. 75–93. For a recent account of a contemporary historian dealing with the issue of the role of the individual in history, see Ian Kershaw, Personality and Power. Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2022) especially ‘The Individual and Historical Change’, pp. 1–15. He considers factors that frame outstanding political figures that played a decisive role in historical change.

3 Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches to biography

Figure 3.1 Roger Fry inspired Virginia Woolf to experiment with the structure and style of biography. She wrote in her biography of Fry ‘[he] had more knowledge and experience than the rest of us [Bloomsbury] put together’. Fry’s painting of Woolf (1928). Alamy.

Scientific or artful biography? Roger Fry and John Morley and post-Victorian debates Few biographies of biography overlook the contributions of the Bloomsbury Group. It was a loose set of friends and relatives first formed mostly among some undergraduates at Trinity College, Cambridge DOI: 10.4324/9780429426391-3

78  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches University. The group included some members of the secret university society of intellectuals, the Apostles. It shifted shape to those who lived close together in the fashionable central London suburb of Bloomsbury. Members were brought together in association variously from 1905 when Vanessa Bell formed the artists’ Friday Club and Thoby Stephen formed the writer’s Thursday Evenings. It transformed again from 1920 when Molly MacCarthy began the Memoir Club. Bloomsbury matters in any account of the historiography on biography not only because it was part of the retreat from the certainty of the Victorians more generally. More particularly, historians’ response to Bloomsbury is telling. In December 1912 Roger Fry, the art critic and artist, wrote to his mother about a heated debate he had had with John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn, who, among other things, was a Victorian biographer of William Gladstone. They had both been guests at Lord George Nathaniel Curzon’s country house, Kedleston Hall. ‘Lord M. is getting old. He is old for his age’, Fry observed before making disparaging remarks about his intellectual agility.1 Nearly three decades later, in her biography of Fry, Virginia Woolf went on to observe of the exchange, Lord Morley, it is to be inferred, did not ‘tumble to’ [Fry’s] ideas about Post Impressionism. But a surprising number of people passed that test, as it was put to them by Roger Fry.2 In this chapter I argue that, like Morley, most historians writing biography did not tumble to Post-Impressionism. The ‘debate’ was muted, for while there was some aggressive name calling, neither side engaged. Fry had trained as a scientist before deciding to become an artist. He championed the French modernist art movement in England, which was epitomised in the 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibition he staged with Desmond MacCarthy and Clive Bell at London’s Grafton Galleries.3 It was attended by 25,000 visitors in just over two months. Consisting of the works of a range of French artists, including Paul Cézanne, Maurice Denis, Paul Gaugin, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Paul Signac, Léopold Survage and Vincent Van Gogh, it caused an uproar.4 Visitors ‘thrown into paroxysms of rage and laughter’ raging into print.5 The response was extraordinary, Fry writing to his father that he had endured ‘a wild hurricane of newspaper abuse’.6 The ‘Roger Fry rabble’, including his friends Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell, came to his defence; MacCarthy noted that ‘kind people called [Fry] mad’.7 Undeterred, Fry staged a second Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912.8 Artist Vanessa Bell believed that the exhibition provided a ‘sudden liberation and encouragement to feel for oneself’.9 Virginia Woolf (born Virginia Stephen but we will refer to her as Woolf consistently), Vanessa’s sister, married to Leonard Woolf from 1912, was initially a sceptic of artistic creativity, tending to

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  79 disparage painters as a group, calling them ‘an abominable race’ and commonly implying by remarks in her letters and diaries her belief that the painters were the least creative, least literate, and least intelligent people in her Bloomsbury circle. Painting itself she pronounced ‘an inferior art’.10 She later changed her mind, arguing in her 1924 essay exploring modernism, ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’, that a change took place in human character ‘on or about December 1910’; that is, the date the exhibition opened.11 Indeed Fry was able to claim how much of modern literature is approximating to the same kind of relationship of ideas as [Léopold] Survage’s pictures give us … I see, now that I have done it, that it was meant for Mrs. Virginia Woolf— that Survage is almost precisely the same thing in paint that Mrs. Virginia Woolf is in prose.12 Fry saw in these new works evidence that Virginia Woolf was applying his Post-Impressionist ideas on aesthetic principles in art to her writing.13 Others, such as Jonathan Quick, have pointed out that the ideas in Woolf’s modern fiction and ‘even their vocabulary are often quite close’ to Fry’s.14 For our purposes, Woolf’s prose went on to include experimental biography, with its modernist emphasis on boldness and form: first in her early short stories, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917) and ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919)15; and later in Orlando: A Biography (1928), which was loosely based on her lover, the gender-fluid Vita Sackville-West, and Flush: A Biography (1933), an account imagined as being seen through the eyes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, Flush. By 1927, having published five novels—including her masterpieces— she had deliberately set out to mock her more serious preoccupations.16 Fry had been born into a Quaker family; his father was a judge whose passion was science. Fry went up to the University of Cambridge in 1885, encumbered with his family’s high hopes he would become a scientist. He was initiated into the elite secret Cambridge Apostles society in 1887, and increasingly found it had to realise his parents’ aspirations for him.17 His best friends were fellow Apostles: the logician and metaphysician J. M. McTaggart, scientist Lowes Dickinson and the classicist Nathaniel Wedd. These each went on to brilliant careers in their chosen fields. By contrast, Fry attended meetings of the Psychical Research Society and was mentored by John Henry Middleton, Slade Professor of Fine Arts. Fry’s father was horrified when, after taking a first in Cambridge’s Natural Sciences Tripos in 1887 and 1888, Roger decided that ‘his life’s work was ‘among pictures’.18 Fry enrolled at Francis Bate’s art school in the Applegarth Studio at Hammersmith before going to Paris, considered to be the centre of civilisation, attending classes at the Académie Julian, in 1892, then off to study the Old Masters in Italy. He returned to London, sharing a house

80  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches with fellow Apostle and poet R. C. (Bob) Trevelyan who was close to some members of the Bloomsbury circle. In 1893, Fry took evening classes run by Walter Sickert in Chelsea. Clearly his father believed that he had fallen into bad company—Trevelyan, Sickert and their wide artistic circles. This impression of bad company was later magnified, in his father’s eyes, when his son married fellow artist Helen Coombs. Helen became severely mentally ill and was incarcerated permanently from 1910. And, of course, his son had caught a glimpse of Cézanne at the New Gallery’s exhibition in 1906 and went on to stage the Post-Impressionist exhibitions. Fry became associated with the Bloomsbury Group in early 1910.19 Most accounts single out half a dozen key ‘Bloomsberry’ figures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Virginia’s husband Leonard Woolf, Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell, Vanessa’s lovers Roger Fry and Duncan Grant and their friends Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes.20 As already intimated, the circle had several iterations but all the members were related to each other, the Stephens and the Stracheys, or undergraduate friends of those family members at Cambridge. Leslie and Julia Stephen had been members of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy. Leslie Stephen, author, rambler, mountaineer, was general editor of the Dictionary of National Biography; his own father had been colonial undersecretary of state and Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson, then Duckworth) was a model for photographers, including her aunt Julia Cameron who became a significant nineteenth-century portraitist, and also the artists Edward Burne-Jones and George Frederic Watts. Significantly, too, the parents’ deaths (Julia in 1895 and Leslie in 1904) freed their four children to fashion Bloomsbury.21 Thoby and Adrian went up to the University of Cambridge; when they came down to London, they lived with Vanessa and Virginia in Gordon Square in the London suburb of Bloomsbury. Thoby introduced his siblings to his group of friends—Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, David Garnett, Duncan Grant and the latter’s cousin, Lytton Strachey—at his Thursday night salons where literary and artistic matters were discussed. The Stracheys were a well-connected family with a background in the Indian Civil Service and then a tradition of begetting well-educated historical and sociological writers.22 It was a circle of young people, in a particular place, with a new attitude, ‘a certain style in the fine and applied arts, a set of beliefs and priorities, freedom and experimental living, a new way of thinking and existing’.23 Above all, they took up modernist theories. Fry singled out Post-Impressionist art’s pursuit of ‘the visual language of the imagination’ as its main aim.24 He objected to the theory of ‘mere imitation’; that is, the idea that painting was ‘the art of imitating solid objects upon a flat surface by means of pigments’.25 In an essay on aesthetics in 1909, he had argued that ‘man’ had the ‘possibility of a double life; one the actual life, the other imaginative life’.26 He invoked elementary psychology to discuss the emotions involved in perception and imagination

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  81 critical to the arts. The imaginative life operated on ‘very different levels at different times’.27 For instance, dreams and drugs acted upon unconscious perceptions. Art was an important expression of the artists’ conscious emotions. His main point was that artists could not simply represent ‘actual appearance’. Post-Impressionists, he argued, were important because got to the ‘essence of things’, reducing reality to fundamental and essential elements, and consciously adopted new techniques to ‘arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality’.28 They set out to find an equivalent to reality through creating, reproducing and conveying new forms: quin­ tessentially design, texture and rhythm. By that, Fry meant that PostImpressionist artists made images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our practical activities. In fact, they aim not at illusion but at reality.29 Good art aroused essential, supersensual and intense emotions.

Figure 3.2 Roger Fry championed the European Post-Impressionist movement influencing Bloomsbury artists and writers. ‘Manet and the post Impressionists’, Poster of the First Impressionist Exhibition Grafton Gallery (November 1909 to January 1910). The Courtauld/Bridgeman.

82  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches The Post-Impressionist art movement was part of a wider post-Victorian ruffling and re-evaluation of assumptions about reality on a range of fronts. Diaghilev’s ballet group, Ballets Russes, which performed for the first time in London in April 1911, posed a similar modernist innovative confrontation for dancers, musicians and visual designers. Modernist poets including W.B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot started focusing on form and multivocality. Despite his ambitions, however, Fry never seemed to find the time to write up his theory of the influence of Post-Impressionism upon literature, although he discussed these ideas of literary Post-Impressionism at length with his literary friends, the Woolfs and Strachey. Fry believed that post-Victorian literature also needed ‘colour and rhythm’, new designs in lines, mass, space, light and shade, and perspective, rather than being ‘full of dullness and stiffness’.30 It needed new ways of constructing psychological patterns so that readers could ‘hear’ conversations and ‘touch’ characters’ wit and irony. Fry believed that writers should fling representation to the wind, purify its approaches, experiment, take adventures and give over to new enterprises as Post-Impressionist artists were doing. Fry’s sister, prison reformer and former principal of Somerville College, Oxford, Margery Fry, who was on the fringes of Bloomsbury, had overheard those debates around biographical practice and, on their basis, she begged Virginia Woolf to write her brother’s biography in 1934 upon his unexpected death after a fall. Years ago, after one of those discussions upon the methods of the arts, which illuminated his long and happy friendship with you, Roger suggested, half seriously, that you should put into practice your theories of the biographer’s craft in a portrait of himself.31 The subsequent biography was the last book Woolf saw into print before she committed suicide in 1941. At the time, she had been working on her own memoirs. Fry was her one serious full-length biography. ‘I can’t help thinking’, she concluded, in spite of her difficulty in putting her theories of biography into practice, ‘I’ve caught a good deal of that iridescent man in my oh so laborious butterfly net.’32 As Elizabeth Cooley and others have argued, however, ‘she was unable to deny her literary heritage and push biography writing beyond its traditional boundaries’ in the non-fiction form.33 It was not particularly experimental: it followed contemporary biographical practice, being a linear or chronological account. Woolf used family letters and talked to friends, albeit there were no footnotes, and she was not adventurous in her research. Significantly, Woolf decided not to mention Fry’s sexual relationship with her sister Vanessa Bell, or indeed with most of his other lovers. She had concluded earlier that a frank biography of her homosexual friend Lytton Strachey was not an option, showing that her absolute truths were sometimes also filtered by a discretion and reticence.34 Woolf knew her biography of Fry was unsuccessful: she

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  83 said afterwards she would write it again as fiction.35 She thought compromise between fact and fiction was impossible and that it ought to be turn about: every biography should be written twice, once as fact and then as fiction. Despite the rather conventional form of Woolf’s biography on Fry, and her reticence on sexual liaisons, biography was at the centre of Bloomsbury’s supposed assault on the social, moral and evidential certainties of Victorian complacence. In 1909 Strachey had written in a review that the ‘first duty of a great historian is to be an artist’.36 His Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, is said to have launched a new biographical tone and a new psychological insight into the human psyche. Many have cited Eminent Victorians as the point at which the ‘art’ of biography was never ‘quite the same since’.37 It was ‘the Biography that changed biography forever’.38 He ‘refreshingly liberated the artistic form of English biography … encouraged valuable experiments in the structure of biographical narrative, and a much more sophisticated approach to the contradictions of human character’.39 Modernist biographers offered ‘dazzling experimentation, perplexing narrative and poetic form, and often by contradictory aesthetic and ideological tendencies’.40 Strachey’s attitude towards the Victorians, however, was perhaps not as completely reconstructionist as it might seem: ‘Indeed he was very much torn between outrage at their earnestness, hypocrisy and attitude to life in general and a kind of sympathetic deference for their representatives.’41 Ironically, far from condemning his eminent Victorians such as as Florence Nightingale, Major-General Charles George Gordon, Thomas Arnold and Cardinal Henry Edward Manning to the condescension of oblivion, or at least caustic depreciation, Strachey contributed to their fame. He followed Eminent Victorians with biographies of Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex (1928). Those were in many ways reverential. What was the modernists’ influence—represented by Bloomsbury—on historians’ biographical practice and vice versa? In regard to this question, I make three related arguments in this chapter. First, historians’ biographical practices were not directly influenced by  the modernist biographers.42 Second, the focus on Bloomsbury has obscured a more important debate among historians. Third, the actual influence of modernist ideas has been mis-identified. To begin, historians’ biographical practices did not succumb to the Bloomsbury-led biography with the modernist tone of Virginia Woolf and Strachey. Nor did they become Proustian and experimental in terms of time and chronology.43 There were hardly any modernist imitators among historians. Some have argued that Bloomsbury did not revolutionise current biographical practice more generally. I want then, perhaps bravely, to put Bloomsbury biographies in their place, too. Bloomsbury has taken up too much space in our overviews of biographical practice because its subjects are attractive and interesting. Why write on Morley when you could write on Woolf or Strachey? It should not surprise, however, that a recent publication on this

84  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches circle, The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (2018), considers them in relation to sexuality, the arts, Empire, feminism, philosophy, class, Jewishness, nature, politics, war, but not to biography or to historians writing biography.44 Of course, influence is sometimes difficult to fathom. ‘Traditional’ biographical ways continued at the same time: Impressionist art overlapped with Post-Impressionist painting, with ‘no break, only a continuation’, for instance, between Watts and Picasso.45 Moreover, artists, including Fry and Bell, became less experimental and more traditional over time. Secondly, the narrative of uniform biographical progression, with Bloomsbury triumphantly leading, needs to be revisited. A fixation on Bloomsbury has dulled our consideration of other contemporary debates over art and science which were perhaps more significant. In 1913 Morley published his notes on politics and history.46 He went on to write his memoirs, Recollections, in two volumes, published in 1918, completely uninfluenced by Post-Impressionism.47 Morley had been literary adviser to Macmillan, editing its ‘English Men of Letters’ and the ‘Twelve English Statesmen’ series. At the age of 30, he succeeded George Henry Lewes as editor of the Fortnightly, a radical journal, from 1867 to 1882. Contemporary historians such as A. F. Pollard admired Morley’s ‘unrivalled contribution to the Kulturgeschichte of the Victorian age’ and were irritated that the ‘youngest of the youngest’ post-Victorian historians derided the epoch that had produced Darwin and Spencer, Ruskin and Carlyle, Browning and Tennyson, Macaulay and Froude, Newman and Arnold, Thackeray and Dickens, George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, Swinburne, and, presumably, Morley.48 Pollard was Assistant Editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), writing over 500 dictionary entries and specialising in Tudor history and biography.49 Morley kept writing profusely and was read, too. Morley himself was more concerned with the challenge of ‘scientific’ biography than he was with Bloomsbury’s experiments: History has advanced with powerful stride to a commanding place within the last forty or fifty years, and a vigorous contest now stimulates and entertains us as to the true genius of the historic Muse, or whether she be a Muse at all, or only kitchen drudge; whether a Science reducing great bodies of detail to concentrated and illuminating law, or that very different thing, an Epic Art, a source of bright and living popular influence.50 Historians Henry Adams and J. B. Bury argued that history and biography should be viewed as a science rather than an art.51 Pollard, reviewing Morley’s Recollections in 1919, argued by contrast that science and art were both indispensable to history because of the limitations of the empirical record;

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  85 there is all the difference in the world between the way in which things happen and the way in which they are recorded; and when we have all our documents collected, collated, sifted, and arranged, we still need intuition and the imagination to discern behind the parchment the play of human minds. For in all ages the most vital and intimate decisions are reached by unrecorded discussions and conveyed by word of mouth, and even the spoken word often conceal the real intention. The sense of how things happen and what men mean is the supreme qualification for the historian.52 Pollard, G. M. Trevelyan and others described this balance as the historian’s challenge some years before Woolf’s 1927 essay, ‘New Biography’, in which she described trying to balance facts and imagination, the ‘perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow’.53 Scientific historians writing biography were wedded to extreme objectivity.54 Others, including Pollard, argued that relying on the empirical method often entailed illusions—including translators’ errors—but also misinterpretations by people recording events. Even if there were no illusions, three historians with the same empirical record could differ by putting more emphasis on some archives. Pollard wished there had been a record, for instance, of the meeting of three biographers of Oliver Cromwell, ‘that Sunday afternoon in 1900 when Frederic Harrison took Lord Morley to call on Professor Firth at Oxford’.55 At the same time that they generally agreed upon the need to follow the existent empirical record closely, historians began to be influenced by historical relativism, especially in the acknowledgement that subjectivity was involved in historians’ choices of records and interpretations. Thirdly, and perhaps perversely, I argue that in the last analysis, however, Post-Impressionist and Bloomsbury biographers were important for historians’ biography practice, but just not in the way usually supposed. Writing about Bloomsbury has been a major biographical occupation among historians.56 For our purposes, Bloomsbury besmirched historians’ biographies in the minds of those writing the history of biography as conventional, dull and boring. This characterisation has stuck in some quarters. Putting Bloomsbury in its place allows us to see historical biography’s response to it and to its antithesis, scientific biography. On the one hand, Fry, Virginia Woolf and Strachey called for imaginative biography. On the other hand, Bury and Adams argued for biography devoid of anything but the facts. Historians writing biography, like Pollard and Bob Trevelyan’s brother G. M. Trevelyan, tried to steer a course between the two: Bloomsbury and scientific biography. Increasingly, the majority of historians argued that they used scientific method, literary craft and invoked the relativist perspective, all within limits. Christopher Parker has discussed more broadly ‘English’ historians’ hostility to a fetishism of facts and pos-

86  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches itivism.57 Bloomsbury and Idealists exaggerated the extent of postVictorian historians’ fact-oriented positivist biography. As Parker puts it, ‘the defenders were ghosts, the fortress unoccupied’.58 I will deal with each of these biographical debates in turn: Bloomsbury’s attack on historians’ biography; and scientific historians’ attack on artistic biography in professional circles; and, perhaps surprisingly, most historians’ nuanced biographical responses to both.

Modernist and Bloomsbury literary critique of historians’ biographical fetish for facts Fry was intrigued by contemporary modernist French artists, ‘how closely they followed tradition, and how great a familiarity with the Italian primitives was displayed in their work’.59 Bloomsbury biographers, notably Virginia Woolf and Strachey, were intimately familiar with their traditions too, including Victorian biography. They each had impeccable backgrounds nudging them towards writing lives. Bloomsbury’s biographical inheritance was considerable.60 Moreover both Woolf and Strachey had, at one stage, intended to be historians writing biography. At the fin de siècle, these two putative historians were in training to write historical biography. Their flirtation with historians’ approaches to biography was relatively brief but cast a long shadow over analyses of the Victorian biographical tradition. In the end, they each wrote iconoclastic and experimental modern biography: ‘What will happen to us all when we have got rid of every vestige of early Victoria?’, Strachey asked Woolf. The Victorians, he reckoned, ‘seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites’.61 Later he wrote ‘The literature of the future will, I clearly see, be amazing. At last it’ll tell the truth, and be indecent and amusing, and romantic.’62 They struggled to find new affective forms gliding away from their historical ambitions. Like Fry, they also moved away from a rich biographical inheritance, Woolf called it ‘the great Victorian fight … of the daughters against the fathers’, but the intergenerational fight included sons and fathers too.63 Woolf and Strachey chose between being historians and biographers. Both set out to be historians writing biography, before becoming Bloomsbury biographers. Their ambitions were bruised; they had to bend their aspirations in light of experience, what is sometimes described as adaptive preferences. Their views were, in the end, a response to their restricted options; New Biography was not their first choice. It only seems planned in retrospect. They wrote New Biography partly because they were not allowed to write ‘Old Biography’. Leslie Stephen, a Cambridge don who was domineering in private, did not send his fragile daughter Virginia up to his alma mater. He planned to educate her in history and biography at home. She received only episodic formal education in history and biography, but she read widely in these subjects.64 He gave her books: Thomas Carlyle’s Reminiscences and Life of

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  87 Cromwell, Thomas Arnold’s The History of Rome and J. A. Froude’s Life of Carlyle and History of England. On her birthday in 1897, her father gave her John Gibson Lockhart’s celebrated biography of his father-in-law, Sir Walter Scott (10 volumes, 1839), Pepys and Macaulay. He also gave her access to his library.65 Woolf attended Latin, Greek and History lectures at the Ladies’ Department at King’s College, London from 1897 to 1901. She was neither uneducated nor only self-taught.66 Woolf began a fledgling journalistic career as a reviewer at the same time that she began lecturing (as a volunteer) once a week from 1905 to 1907 in literature and history at Morley College for Working Men and Women.67 Her siblings all also taught for a time at Morley.68 Woolf confided to her diary Ella [Crum] asks me to meet Mr Buxton the Principal of Morley: so I am rising in philanthropic circles, as I sink in literary ones. No books whatever to review, and I grind at my history with a sense of utterly unrequited energy.69 Morley College was temperance-inspired and funded by philanthropist Samuel Morley.70 Woolf was told in July 1905 that history ‘was the least popular subject in the college’; she told those in authority ‘that it was also one of the most important’.71 Indeed Clara Jones argued that ‘her authorial ambition’ at this time was ‘to write history’. Woolf wrote to Violet Dickinson By the way, I am going to write history one of these days. I always did love it; if I could find the bit I want. I have got a ticket for Dr Williams Library across the square, and describe myself as a ‘journalist who wants to read history’ and so I do feel a professional Lady.72 Teaching history, however, saw her class numbers halved from eight to four women students. Her authorities were E. A. Freeman and J. R. Green, but she tried and struggled to make her students ‘feel the flesh and blood’ of past phantoms.73 She worried about her students’ ‘uncultivated intelligence’ and how useless her teaching was for them.74 Alice Fox argued that when she turned from history and biography to her lifelong love, literature, she brought her profound learning and biographical frames with her. Indeed, Woolf was well-read in R. G. Collingwood’s idealism and familiar with the distinction he made between perceiving things contemporarily and knowing history.75 Historians needed to have historical imagination to ‘re-enact the past’. His critique of naïve realism involved aspects of what we would now describe as postmodernist history.76 Sabine Hotho-Jackson has argued that running alongside Woolf’s reading of the modern developments in historiography, however, ‘was a much simpler streak in her thinking about history’ and an allegiance to ‘a traditional concept of history as a story’.77

88  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches On her first day at Morley College, Woolf encountered the historian G.  M. Trevelyan, former fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Apostle and grand-nephew of Thomas Babington Macaulay. Trevelyan had come down from university to be a full-time historian, something to which Woolf aspired (he later became Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge). There was no ‘psychical connection’ between the two, however. His lectures on the French Revolution meant that her lectures had to finish before that period. Jones argued that she was piqued at this prioritising. She wrote that his lectures were pointless, ‘dropped into [the students’] minds like meteors from another sphere impinging on this planet, & dissolving into dust again’.78 Woolf was greatly influenced by G. E. Moore’s notions of friendship that she imbibed from the Cambridge men in Bloomsbury, that the ‘pleasure of human intercourse’ is among ‘the most valuable things, which we can know or imagine’.79 Trevelyan had been a friend of a friend; he was once close with Strachey but they became estranged.80 While Trevelyan and Woolf shared an interest in Whiggish history and writing literature, they never shared personal relations and their circles were separate.81 Woolf herself held great store in unfinished and unpublished work; it was not polished and therefore she considered it to be more authentic. It is useful, then, to consider her own unpublished early oeuvre. In 1985 Susan Dick edited the short stories Woolf wrote from 1906 to 1941, most of which were not published in her lifetime. Her earlier fiction in 1906–1907 shows that ‘she was continually experimenting with narrative form’ to do with life writing.82 The theme of much of this work was biography: what it would be like to be an historian writing women’s biography, the conventions of research, the role of a biographer and how to write a life. Woolf had only written essays and book reviews before penning a group of short stories, including ‘Phyllis and Rosamond’ (1906), about sisters destined to marry and be wives despairing about their lack of vocation for a destiny they could not avoid; ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ (1909) about Miss Linsett’s biography of her fiction writer friend, Miss Willatt and, interestingly, ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906) about a keen historian, Miss Rosamond Merridew, who gets her hands on a diary of a fifteenth-century ancestor, Joan Martyn, of the inhabitants of a manor house.83 In ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906), Virginia Woolf’s protagonist is Miss Rosamond Merridew, a 45-year-old historian who has ‘exchanged a husband and a family and a house in which I may grow old’ for her studies on the system of land tenure in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Her interests were experiential—that is, she was interested in what it was like to live in period: A sudden light upon the legs of Dame Elizabeth Partridge sends its beams over the whole state of England, to the King upon his throne;

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  89 she wanted stockings! and no other need impresses you in quite the same way with the reality of medieval legs; and therefore, with the reality of medieval bodies, and so on, proceeding upward step by step, with the reality of medieval brains, and there you stand at the centre of all ages: middle beginning or end … I have borne in mind that the intricacies of the land tenure were not always the most important facts in the lives of men and women and children; I have often made so bold as to hint that the subtleties which delight us so keenly were more a proof of our ancestors’ negligence than a proof of their astonishing painstaking. For what sane man, I have had the audacity to remark, could have spent his time in complicating his laws for the benefit of half a dozen antiquaries who were to be born five centuries after he was in the grave?84 She was often told that she did not have the records to support the kind of history she wanted to write. Merridew scoured the ‘old farm houses, decayed halls, parsonages, church vestries’ for records for her history. Passing a ‘humble little old hall’ in Norfolk she called in on impulse to find out if they had any records. The farmer, Jasper Martyn, has a room full of account and estate books and papers revealing much about his grandfathers, horse breeding and farming. Merridew chooses to read first the fifteenth-century journal of his grandmother, Mistress Joan Martyn (1455–1485). Martyn indulges her: ‘I don’t think you’ll find anything out of the way in her; she was very much the same as the rest of us—as far as I can see, not remarkable’, with the diary then revealing the life of a 25-yearold woman in medieval Norfolk.85 At this time, Woolf was reviewing historians’ biography. The Times sent her Edith Sichel’s biography of Catherine de’ Medici in 1905 to review; however, she confided to her diary that ‘it is hard work reviewing when you don’t know the subject’.86 Indeed her review was rejected: ‘a professed historian is needed’.87 Increasingly, she despaired of reviewing ‘bland and boring books’.88 Alice Fox marked Woolf’s turning conclusively towards the direction of fiction owing to a number of such rebuffs.89 Her lecturing at Morley College ended in 1907 and in 1908 Woolf started her first novel, The Voyage Out, which was published in 1915. Concerned with art and craft, later Woolf famously wrote of what she believed to be the fiction or impossibility of writing narrative biography, even though her younger self once aspired to do so. Now, Woolf attempted to find ‘deeper truths’ about lives. Her methodology ‘The New Biography’ famously sought to combine ‘granite-like solidity’ of facts with ‘the rainbow-like intangibility’ of personality.90 Her own practice while mostly literary was multivocal with her explanations being cultural and contingent. Woolf wrote biographical portraits of women such as ‘Old Mrs Grey’ and ‘Eleanor Ormerod’. In her ‘Lives of the Obscure’, published in

90  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches The Common Reader (1925), Woolf wrote essays on forgotten characters, disturbing the sleep, mainly of women, in ‘nameless tombstones’. Canadian academic, Clare Battershill, who has made a detailed study of the Hogarth Press, which Virginia co-founded with her husband in 1917 and which was her publisher, argued that Woolf was an experimenter who deliberately sought range, which is why she agreed to write Roger Fry: A Biography (1940) at his family’s request.91 In her novel Orlando, Woolf had criticised the methods and the preoccupation of traditional historical biography. Indeed, Woolf pointedly commented late in the book that ‘the true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute’.92 For, in addition to experimenting or suggesting the impossibility of biography, Woolf’s main point was the incompleteness of versions and the importance of fragments. In an anonymous review of Gorky’s Tolstoi, which Battershill identified as by Woolf, she discussed how Maxim Gorky conveyed Tolstoi’s sense of power even at the same time showing that he was sometimes ‘conceited, intolerant insincere … vindictive in his judgements [such as being] unspeakably “vulgar”’ about women. Gorky’s biography was not ‘right’, for a life ‘cannot be finished’; But Gorky’s picture comes nearer than the others to completeness, because he makes no attempt to include everything, to explain everything, or to sum up all in one consistent whole. Here there is a very bright light, here darkness and emptiness. And perhaps this is the way in which we see people in reality.93 Woolf occasionally gave lectures, such as ‘A Room of One’s Own’ at Cambridge in 1928, at the invitation of Lytton’s sister Pernel Strachey, principal of Newnham College.94 In 1932, when she was offered the Cambridge Clark lectureship, she was flattered ‘the first time a woman has been asked [and an] uneducated child’ at that. Nevertheless, again daunted by the historical scholarship she would need to do, she refused the invitation, noting with filial affection that her father had accepted the self-same chair in 1883: ‘father would have blushed with pleasure could I have told him 30 years ago that his daughter—my poor little Ginny—was to be asked to succeed him: the sort of compliment he would have liked’.95 She had long given up being a historian. Historians’ biographical practices assumed critical research methods. Leslie Stephen argued that the difference between fiction and a­ rchivally-based research was that history is independent of the author who can access and use lives in writing; his daughter, Virginia Woolf, and other modernists who were invigorated by Roger Fry’s modernist exhibitions in London argued that biography ought to be based on other principles.

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  91

Figure 3.3  Leslie Stephen’s archivally-based research was premised on history being independent of the author; his daughter, Virginia Woolf, largely abandoned his conventional biographical forms in her fiction. Virginia Woolf and her father Sir Leslie Stephen (c.1903), b/w photo. Bridgeman.

In contrast to Woolf, Strachey never gave up his historian’s aspirations. He was awarded a second class in the History Tripos from the University of Cambridge in 1903. His standard dissertation on Warren Hastings, the eighteenth-century Indian imperialist, did not win for him the teaching fellowship he was seeking. Strachey’s first professional occupation was writing reviews and critical articles for the Spectator and other periodicals. In 1912 he published Landmarks in French Literature. He came to believe that The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had, it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great biographical tradition; we have no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable éloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men.96 In addition to ‘Gallic’ biographical concision, Strachey was also enamoured of French writer Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s view of the social role of the critic. Strachey wanted to write a masterpiece. His evolving theory of biography, especially psychological interest, was influenced by Fyodor Dost­oyevsky,

92  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches whose novels he had been reading when they appeared in Constance Garnett’s translation, especially his exploration of ‘man’s soul’.97 Woolf wrote that ‘Life dominates Tolstoi as the soul dominates Dostoevsky’.98 Tolstoy gave realistic representation and, following modernism, what was needed was Dostoyevsky’s artistry. Strachey was attracted to fascinating spectacles and representing them. A flamboyant homosexual, ‘a queen, writing about queens’, his choice of Victoria and Elizabeth as subjects reveal peculiar views on these women. He wanted, as he wrote about Elizabeth, ‘to undress her’, opining that ‘we shall do no wrong now to that Majesty, if we look below the robes’.99 She lived in a period of inconsistencies, with her favourites, including Essex, conspicuously mercurial: ‘Perhaps: yet the flaunting man of fashion, whose codpiece proclaimed an astonishing virility, was he not also, with his flowing hair and his jewelled ears, effeminate?’100 Strachey characterised Elizabeth herself as a combination of male and female traits, of drive and energy as well as dilly-dallying. Only a woman could have shuffled so shamelessly, only a woman could have abandoned with such unscrupulous completeness the last shreds not only of consistency, but of dignity, honour and common decency, in order to escape the appalling necessity of having, really and truly, to make up her mind.101 The standard historian’s complaint with Elizabeth and Essex, however, has been that Strachey used only secondary sources, consulted no unpublished sources and gave no references.102 Strachey did no original research for his acclaimed life of Queen Victoria either. He used published works including the Dictionary of National Biography, Sidney Lee’s Queen Victoria (1902) and Jerrold Early Court’s Queen Victoria (1916), along with various bio­ graphies of other key figures, including Morley’s biography of Gladstone.103 Of course, the Queen published extracts from her journals in 1868: Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands and More Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. She also sanctioned extracts being used in Theodore Martin’s five-volume biography of Prince Albert from 1865. Strachey did not have access to the complete set of 141 volumes of Queen Victoria’s private diaries, albeit that they had been censored by her daughter Beatrice.104 Victoria told Beatrice to take out anything embarrassing about the family. He characterised how she poured her feelings ‘out in her journal in a torrential flood’; unintellectual, she poured out her emotions throughout her life. His aim in any biography was to lay bare his subjects’ motives and psychology. Reviewing Strachey’s portrait of Victoria, Woolf argued that Strachey’s work is pure art. The elementary ingredients—voluminous state papers, memoirs, biographies, journals, articles—never obtrude. They are all distilled, by the skilful alchemy of the spirit, into a

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  93 narrative as fresh and distinctive as some delicious perfume, with no trace of the odor of coal tar, acids, or the heavy atmosphere of the laboratory.105 Strachey was a partial biographer, both in that he made no effort whatsoever to hide his evident bias in dealing with his subjects and that he concentrated on parts of lives. There were a limited number of subjects for which this kind of biography was possible.106 He did not strive for impartiality in his biographies. He adopted an irreverent attitude to the monumental ‘life-and-letters’ volumes of Victorian biography. His lives were written with ‘a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant’, as shown in his 1931 collection, Portraits in Miniature. As he made clear in his Preface to Eminent Victorians, truth was only fragmentary. The historian should only illustrate and expose lives rather than imposing explanation on them. And he was not interested in agency, Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes—which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.107 As a student of history at Cambridge, and as first a sensitive observer and then a leading innovator in the practice of biography from his undergraduate years until his death in 1932, Strachey was also keenly attuned to contemporary theoretical debates in historiography. Just as Strachey would satirise the imperial values of his father’s thirty-year career in Indian administration, so too would he take sides, though not altogether unambiguously, in defence of ‘art’ in one of the major debates in British historiography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One deflationary view of these Bloomsbury adventures in biography is to see them as nothing but resentment towards and rejection of their parents, as indicated above. This seems to be at least one factor at play. Todd Avery has referred to these ‘modernist parricidal tendencies’.108 Bloomsbury’s familial tensions were numerous. Richard Altick argued that Strachey’s work, such as Eminent Victorians, was ‘on one level … a covert attack on [Strachey’s] own family’.109 His family prided itself on its military tradition and imperial distinction.110 Virginia Woolf, in her room below her father’s study, said she developed a headache as a consequence, literally and figuratively, of her father Leslie Stephen’s dropping of biographical tomes onto his study floor after having used them for an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, of which he was the editor. And the Nicolson family’s relationships also had biographical consequences. One of those was at the end of her affair with Violet Trefusis in 1920, when Vita Nicolson (SackvilleWest’s married name) wrote a 40,000-word account of it which she kept in a ‘Gladstone bag, stamped with the gold letters V.N.’ When Vita died in 1962,

94  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches her son Nigel Nicolson found it in its hiding place, read it and in 1973, after both his parents’ deaths, worked it into his Portrait of a Marriage (1973). When his son, Adam, subsequently went through Nigel’s papers after his death, he discovered the extent that his father felt guilty over it.111 Vita may have countenanced the publication of her and Harold’s open marriage involving same-sex affairs, but his father, Harold, would not have. Nigel argued that it was a confession which only a son could handle with delicacy and love, but this was an excuse. I wasn’t doing it out of love, but to set a new style of biography, of total honesty, to make a stir, earn me money, show that I was capable of taking a risk,—not only with my reputation but with Vita’s.112 The issue is raised: was it simply a matter of familial and generational revisionism, or was there more at stake in the modernist critique of Victorian biography than matters of provocation and style?113 Style was certainly significant. Bloomsbury involved liberalisation and modernism but it was above all an expression of a ‘new style’, the ‘keynote of which was an outward projection of the personal register of conscience’.114 Selling copies was also a consideration. The larger and more consequential debate centred on the question, ‘Is history an art, or is it a science?’ As Todd Avery noted, Strachey never published a sustained argument detailing his position on biography as art or science. Yet that exercised the minds of many of his prominent historian contemporaries—most notably, given Strachey’s Cambridge ties, Bury and Strachey’s fellow Apostle G. M. Trevelyan.115 Nevertheless, it was implicit in his endeavours.116 He argued that the greatest historians were invariably artists.117 Strachey summed up his views in his miniature portrait of Edward Gibbon (1928). That the question has ever been not only asked but seriously debated, whether History was an art, is certainly one of the curiosities of human ineptitude. What else could it possibly be? It is obvious that History is not a science: it is obvious that History is not the accumulation of facts, but the relation of them. Only the pedantry of incomplete academic persons could have given birth to such a monstrous supposition. Facts relating to the past, when they are collected without art, are compilations; and compilations, no doubt, may be useful; but they are no more History than butter, eggs, salt and herbs are an omelette. That Gibbon was a great artist, therefore, is implied in the statement that he was a great historian.118 Lytton Strachey believed Bury’s thesis was the result of a society that had come to devalue history as a type of art.119 His Eminent Victorians (1918)

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  95 had been a response to them. So too was his rejection of monumental Victorian biographies. While they disagreed over technical issues, Bloomsbury agreed over their characterisation of Victorian biography, with its fetishisation of fact. Woolf’s belief in the ‘Art of Biography’, that Strachey’s picture of Queen Victoria would become the accepted one, and that both Victoria and Victorianism were already sliding precipitately from grace, however, was premature.120 The biography was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Strachey’s contribution has sometimes been summarised as having ‘succeeded in reabsorbing English biography into the realm of literature’, although it was a collective Bloomsbury effort.121 Nevertheless, as Battershill and others have noted, few historians emulated the modernists’ literary biographical practices either contemporarily or subsequently.122 Bloomsbury’s contribution to New Biography cannot be simply measured by the biographies written by Strachey and Woolf and their impact. Collectively, Bloomsbury also sustained the Memoir Club and the Hogarth Press. The latter propagated their views on New Biography about historians writing biography and the former unintentionally influenced the writing of autobiography of the whole group.123 They both sustained the view that Bloomsbury revolutionised biography. As we will see, despite having their own propaganda arm, this much overstates their impact on professional historian’s biographical practices. Mollie MacCarthy organised the first meeting of the Memoir Club in 1920. Whatever its origins, the club encouraged Bloomsbury to write subjectively. S. P. Rosenbaum’s account of the Bloomsbury Group’s Memoir Club found that ‘approximately 60 meetings took place during the 45 years of the Club’s existence and some 125 memoirs were read’.124 There was nothing particularly original in writing memoirs; he shows a complex continuity of English autobiography that transcended the Memoir Club. Rosenbaum emphasised Bloomsbury’s indebtedness to family traditions of domestic life writing with a theme of human affection among ‘Stephens, Ritchies, Thorntons, Frys, Stracheys, Grants … in which the voices of woman are at least as memorable as those of men’.125 Above all, they were all familiar with Leslie Stephen’s life writing, especially his four volumes of Studies of a Biographer (1898–1902), five men-of-letters volumes, two fulllength biographies (of his brother and Henry Fawcett), hundreds of Dictionary of National Biography articles, and, above all, his Mausoleum Book. Bloomsbury, however, ‘inherited and transmuted’ this broad tradition of ancestral life writing which ‘expressed evangelical, utilitarian, liberal, and aesthetic values’.126 Bloomsbury said of their own partial memoirs that they were written ‘without reserve or veils’, with truth and wit.127 They focused on Proust’s theme of involuntary memory. These works were modernist in their selectiveness, with an absence of concern about agency and, altogether, they were the antithesis of professional historical evidence and narration.128

96  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches Bloomsbury’s other collective biographical effort was its publishing arm. As already indicated, by 1917 Virginia and Leonard Woolf were publishers. Battershill argued in her analysis of the Hogarth Press, the ‘Woolfs’ press’, which concentrated on the biographical and autobiographical oeuvre, that their publications were diverse and experimental, but not all literary works. Similarly, Helen Southworth found that close to half of over 500 works Hogarth Press published between 1917 and 1946, when it was taken over by Chatto & Windus, were not literary or modernist biography.129 Nor, as both Southworth and Battershill pointed out, did ‘Bloomsbury Group’ authors dominate its list. It published what others refused. Battershill estimated that biography and autobiography made up about 10 per cent of Hogarth’s output.130 The Woolfs ‘especially liked biography and were convinced that it had special status in the book world of their historical moment’.131 They were all too aware of biography’s popularity.132 According to Leonard’s account books, it helped their profit line.133 Sometimes overlooked is that Leonard also had a passion for biography: he was a constant reader and reviewer and later wrote five volumes of autobiography.134 The Hogarth Press grew into a large international operation with titles selling tens of thousands of copies, and it also became culturally influential. It is held to have ushered in theoretical debates over the New Biography. The view that its experimental volumes supplanted the traditional Victorian celebration of the ‘great men of letters’ and biographical tomes is, however, debatable. As Battershill has shown, it published a great deal on celebrities—in its case, great people of letters. The press invested in biography early with its first biographical publications a set of ‘Books on Tolstoi’: four different brief accounts of the same life in four years, ‘each of which employs a distinct narrative method, allows for a contradictory versions of a life story to exist alongside one another’.135 Vita Sackville-West reviewed the set of publications in an essay in the journal Leonard Woolf edited, the Nation and the Athenaeum (a common ‘incestuous’ reviewing occurrence for Bloomsbury publications, hidden since contemporary reviews were often anonymous), ‘applauding the contradiction, embracing the incongruity and portrayal of the instability of character’.136 The press commissioned two albeit short-lived biographical series in the 1930s: ‘Biographies Through the Eyes of Contemporaries’ presented great writers in their historical context; while ‘World-Makers and World-Shakers’ presented short, readable lives of famous historical figures targeted at children. Most importantly for our purposes, Leonard Woolf also commissioned Harold Nicolson’s Development of English Biography (1927). The Woolfs decided in 1924, in discussions at their country retreat, Monk’s House, to spend part of the year in London, and it was there that Virginia met Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson.137 The two men became friends; the two women became lovers, with Vita being the muse for Virginia’s Orlando. Leonard noted in 1927 that ‘biographical books are becoming serious rival to novels, and it must be

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  97 assumed that many get the same, and something more, out of the story of real people’s lives as they get out imaginary tales about imaginary people’.138 Nicolson, a graduate of Balliol College Oxford, had had a career as a diplomat, writing literary biographies as a hobby from the 1920s: Verlaine (1921), Tennyson (1923) and Byron (1924) with Constable; and Swinburne (1926) with Macmillan. He resigned from the Diplomatic Service in 1929 and later entered parliament. He seemed the ideal author to defend literary biography. When he published a semi-autobiographical novel, Some People (1927), Virginia Woolf wrote to him: ‘I must scribble a line in haste to say how absolutely delightful I think it—how I laughed out loud to myself again and again’. She praised Nicolson’s combination of autobiographical and fictional material: ‘I can’t make out how you combine the advantages of fact and fiction as you do. I am also jealous—I can’t help it—that all these things should have happened to you, not me’.139 As we have seen in the introduction, in his Development of English Biography Nicolson had dismissed historians’ biographical practices. His was not a progressive story. It was critical of Victorian historians’ biography. Virginia Woolf scoffed at their ‘baggy monsters’, Strachey scorned their ‘sullen cloud’, their ‘fat volumes … of undigested’ material. Atkinson, Max Saunders and Battershill have all argued that Bloomsbury misrepresented Victorian biography, however. Katherine Hill, Simon Joyce and S. P. Rosenbaum have noted that Bloomsbury’s relationship to Victorians and historians’ biographies was at least ‘complex and often contradictory’.140 While Bloomsbury may have imagined some of Victorian historians’ literary sins, it was not reticent in its critique. The disdain was mutual: historians did not engage with modernist biography until relatively recently, and mainly in the context of writing biographies of the Bloomsbury as subjects. Twentieth-century historians were focused on their own innovations in the context of a debate over science and art that was largely separate from that of the modernists, despite Strachey on Gibbon.

Some historians put the case for a biographical ‘fetishisation of fact’ On 26 January 1903, John Bagnell Bury, an Irish-born Hellenic historian who succeeded Lord Acton as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, gave his Inaugural Lecture on ‘The Science of History’. Bury argued that ‘history is a science, no less and no more’.141 History had to distance itself from ‘her time-honoured associated with literature, and other circumstances [… which] have acted as a sort of vague cloud, half concealing from men’s eyes her new position in the heavens’.142 By science he meant truth, accuracy and objectivity.143 Unscientific history was subjective and literary.144 ‘Proper’ truth was attained ‘only through the discovery, collection, classification, and interpretation of facts—through scientific research’.145 History had previously accepted ‘a laxity in representing facts [which was now] branded as criminal’.146 The German historians Bartold

98  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches Georg Niebuhr and Leopold von Ranke had developed a scientific method which elevated ‘the standard of truth … [to] a scrupulous exact conformity to facts’. History consisted of the accurate reporting of facts; ‘all truths … require the most exact methods’. Friedrich August Wolf had further developed techniques ‘of a systematic and minute method of analysing … sources, which soon developed into the microscopic criticism’.147 As Regius Professor, Bury was determined to promote the discipline’s newly ‘enthroned and ensphered’ place amongst the sciences.148 To ensure this, some academic historians sought to ‘deliver history from the indiscriminate enthusiasms of the man of letters, to departmentalise [history] within the university’ as an objective science.149 Bury went so far as to characterise the end goal of higher education: to ‘train … the mind to look at experience objectively, without immediate relation to one’s own time and place’.150 Time and place were relevant to these developments.151 Bury believed that history’s moment had arrived: resurgent nationalism resulted in a strong impetus to history; ‘[s]cientific method controlled, while the national spirit quickened, the work of historical research’.152 He called on his fellow historians to seek the ‘key of their national development not in the immediate but in the remoter past’. This resulted in a ‘doctrine of developement’ (with an ‘e’).153 Scientific method emphasised unity and continuity and the ‘repudiation of eclecticism’. Historians such as E. A. Freeman, William Stubbs and John Richard Green pursued empirical history and the ‘right use’ of primary sources. Above all, however, Bury admired Freeman for his views on the ‘unity of history’ which was neither divided ‘by a middle wall of partition’ into ancient and modern, nor broken into national fragments. Freeman, who had been both a politician and from 1884 Regius Professor at Oxford, had declared history a science, ‘the science of man in his political character’. As Reba Soffer noted, Freeman himself rarely visited archives and did not practise critical document methods.154 In contrast, Bury was brilliant and an original researcher. His scholarship was remarkably wide, ranging from Greek, Roman and Byzantine history, to the theory and philosophy of history as well as biography. He saw the past as a narrative of man’s rational struggles and progress, or, as his 1913 book summarised it, A History of the Freedom of Thought. Ironically, Hilaire Belloc, one of the great post-Victorian biographers, whose vast historical repertoire featured a long series of contentious biographies of historical figures, including Danton, Robespierre, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon, criticised Bury for his ‘undeniable errors of fact’.155 Homeric nods aside, Bury’s scientific method attracted most criticism. As Michael Tierney noted in 1929, Bury did not account for the interpretive phase in historical narratives: this very emphasis on the scientific aspect of History was one of the causes that determined his own relative limitations as a historian. It is

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  99 precisely when most severely confined to the analysis and comparison of documents and the establishment of a chain of evidence that the work of the historian is most ‘scientific’ in the sense that his results are most capable of being clearly demonstrated; whereas it is in the exercise of judgment upon the results themselves that he must needs depart from ‘science’ and become a literary artist, a philosopher, or both at once.156 Bury was absorbed by details, concentrating on the ‘laboratory work’ of an ‘acute analysis’ of documents, philologically, their authenticity and their original forms. His biographical work did not focus on personality or the cultural context. Furthermore, he married his ideas about ‘developement’ with the doctrine of rational progress, published as The Idea of Progress: An Enquiry into Its Origins and Growth (1920). On various occasions, he used the idea that ‘humanity is advancing in a definite and desirable direction, and that a condition of general happiness will ultimately be enjoyed’, as the philosophical justification for the study of history. ‘We must see our petty periods’, he had declared in his inaugural lecture, in a wider perspective, ‘sub specie perennitatis’ (that is, what is universally and eternally true, without any reference to or dependence upon the temporal portions of reality). Tierney argued that Bury’s belief in progress and universals was ‘an act of faith … in an irrational Religion of Progress’. One might suggest that Bury’s view was remarkable in the wake of World War One which is said to have shattered the general belief in human progress.157 Bury was but one of a number of historians identifying as scientific historians.158 Henry Adams took a more extreme view, that facts were objective and absolute; that they were certainties ‘existing outside the mind of the historian’.159 Like Bury, Adams accepted that he might have to arrange these facts to form a coherent study, but ‘his presence should be minimal and only to provide basic information about the correlation between data’.160 His determination to remain almost undetectable even resulted in histories that offered no conclusions at all; like other scientific historians of his time, these studies meandered and ultimately seemed to offer ‘no real termination’.161 Such a dogmatic approach to ‘scientific’ historical practice clearly limited his ability to determine human actions, discern agency and the significance of motivations, with implications for writing biography. If history could unfold without the presence of the historian, reliant on objective, reportable data, the subject is reduced to only the speech and thought through diaries, letters and accounts which have been recorded and archived. This was a serious limitation for biography, given the frequency with which historians had only fragmentary evidence.162 Bloomsbury had been concerned with biography as an impossible art.163 If historians were concerned with only documenting a life, the biography of many lives became an impossible science. The issue of truth or invention was irrelevant if there was little or fragmentary evidence.

100  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches W. Stull Holt and William H. Jordy have considered the kinds of scientific historians in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century who rallied against history as storytelling. Their targets were historians who wrote with a ‘literary attitude’; that is, historians such as the British Carlyle and Thomas Babington Macaulay, the French Jules Michelet and the Americans William Hickling Prescott,164 John Lothrop Motley, George Bancroft and Francis Parkman. Literary historians’ writing was ‘romantic, dramatic and heroic’, invariably vivid narratives with literary ‘momentum and colour’ and to be avoided.165 Adams was even more fervent in his opposition to considering history a branch of literature. At the time he was appointed professor of medieval history at Harvard in 1870, a position he held until 1877, he had been converted to the scientific or ‘German’ approach to history; not just the seminar method but the ‘objective-facts theory of scientific history’.166 Historians critically studied sources and used facts they discerned objectively, which would ‘speak for themselves’. He later regretted promulgating what he considered the limited German scientific method alone. He subsequently spent a decade researching his nine-volume account of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, published between 1889 and 1891, which considered the governing of an egalitarian society amid the political tendency to aggrandise power.167 By this stage Adams was a more committed ‘Comteist’. He was concerned with the evolution of institutions, ideas and broad concepts of nationalisation and democratisation.168 In his presidential letter to the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1894, ‘The Tendency of History’, he went further. Adams said that Henry Buckle’s first volume of his History of Civilization in England (1857) and Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) had ignited the tendency for historians to create a science of history.169 Buckle’s history began with an essay on historical method which involved wide reading and induction. It rested on Auguste Comte’s view that sciences evolved towards positivism; that is, knowledge was based on natural phenomena and the accumulated experience of its properties and relations. Buckle argued that the physical laws—climate, food, soil, nature—were not as important as ‘mental phenomenon, the movements of the human mind’. Like scientists of natural phenomena, historians needed to consider patterns in history and underlying generalisations. His new history raised questions about what it might mean for the traditionally accepted invisible hand of divine provenance.170 Adams argued that vested interests in contemporary social organisations of church, state or property were keen for everyone to continue to regard history as entertaining or educational and to support the idea of a personal or active providence. Most, some four-fifths, of genuine history students, however, he argued, ‘felt that they stood on the brink of a great generalization that would reduce all history under a law as clear as the laws which govern the material world’.171 There were powerful social laws of historical evolution, which could be regarded as analogous to the laws of

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  101 chemistry or physics. University resources should be devoted to the pursuit of elucidating social laws, the analogy being evolutionary biology, and its rendering history as a science. Certainly, the language of science was appropriated; James Ford Rhodes in his address as AHA President in 1899 said ‘Even as the chemist and physicist, we talk of practice in the laboratory’.172 Similarly, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor W. P. Atkinson hoped, he wrote, to establish a sort of working historical laboratory for students, that shall correspond to chemical and physical laboratories, and where the process of learning shall be much the same,—not memorizing a text-book, but, so to speak, manipulating literary, political, and historical apparatus.173 Adams spent the rest of his life attempting to articulate how history would be fitted to developing laws in the same way as in the physical sciences, culminating in his speculative 1910 A letter to American Teachers of History.174 He became concerned that history was ‘a hundred years behind the experimental sciences’; his ‘mention of the experimental sciences suggested that history had meaning and validity only if it provided generalizations so comprehensive as to apply to more than a particular sequence of events’.175 His last words on the subject were pessimistic. His autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (1918) centred around his failure to understand the forces of contemporary society, especially the exploding world of science; it was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1919.176 Jordy argued that, while ‘scientific’ was mostly associated in the nineteenth century with objectivity, it also implied ‘standardization, institutionalisation and cooperation’.177 Similarly W. H. G. Armytage placed Adams in the wider context of the rise of science and of technocrats.178 Adams’ cosmos was ‘scientific’, writing to his brother, for instance, in 1862: I tell you these are great times. Man has mounted science and is now run away with I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world. Not only shall we be able to cruize in space, but I see no reason why some future generation shouldn’t walk off like a beetle with the world on its back, or give it another rotary motion so that every zone should receive in turn its due portion of heat and light.179 The scientific movement aimed to professionalise history and biography. The Morrill Land-Grant Acts (1862 and 1890) provided for the establishment of US colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts

102  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches (that is, science), using the proceeds of federal land sales. Sixty-nine universities were established, including Cornell University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The number of professors and postgraduates of history also expanded rapidly; the American Historical Association was founded in 1884, and in turn it established the American Historical Review as the journal of record for the United States historical profession in 1895. In his 1952 study of Adams’ theory and practice of historical writing, Jordy discerned three kinds of scientific historians; there was no battle as such, but there were a number of ‘skirmishes’ among the three groups of individuals.180 One group were Comteists who believed that historians could discover laws under which society operated. Like Comte, they approached history with some notion of reform. Jordy’s second group not only thought history ought to approximate to science by providing generalisations but also sought their generalisations in the natural and physical sciences. This kind of scientific history involved ‘a method, a subject matter and a purpose’.181 The theory and practice of science would lead to the production and deployment of timeless and universal ‘laws of nature’. Thinkers taking this third view included causal laws in history that approximate scientific laws and which explain historical subject’s behaviour but they would not be the same laws as those identified in the physical sciences: C. G. Hempel,182 Patrick Gardiner (1952),183 Maurice Mandelbaum (1961)184 and A. J. Ayer (1967).185 Adams was a practising biographer who belonged to this group. Despite his commitments, scientific history did not seem to affect Adams’s biographising. He continued to write biographies on specific individuals and episodes.186 But Adams scorned heroes. His monumental History of the Jefferson and Madison Administrations (9 volumes between 1889 and 1891) presented Jefferson and Madison as ‘types of character, if not as sources of power’. Indeed before Strachey wrote his Eminent Victorians Adams focused on human weakness, corruption and anti-heroes. However few, mostly scholars, read Adams’ nine volumes of the History. It sold 3,000 sets in the decade after its publication.187 Eminent Victorians, a ‘Partisan, often inaccurate but brilliant’ book sold 9,000 copies in less than two years of its publication and in 1921 Chatto brought out a second edition with a print-run of 5,000. It was translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish and continued to sell, mostly to the more general public. The success of Strachey’s Queen Victoria meant he was able to leave journalism and write full time. Elizabeth and Essex, published in 1930, sold 40,000 copies in the United Kingdom alone, and went on to become America’s biggest-selling non-fiction book to date. Luckily for him, Harvard educated Adams’ paternal relatives included two US presidents and his maternal relatives were wealthy merchants. Howard Munford argued that Adams’ ideas about scientific history as a whole was an exercise in taking an argument to the extreme, reductio ad

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  103 absurdum.188 Similarly, Jordy argued that Adams based his analytical work on a simple dichotomy between scientific and romantic history which vanished in complications in his own biographical work and more widely.189 Most ‘scientific historians’, following Leopold von Ranke, adopted the empirical method of presenting objective data, and thus history ‘as it actually happened’, which they interpreted as simply source-based history. The idea of science-like laws or generalisations dropped away. As Jordy noted, Adams was conspicuous with his invocation of natural sciences and scientific history later came to be based on an association of history with social sciences, historiographical paradigms and theories: ‘By 1910 the so-called scientific method was firmly established in history, while the impact of the social sciences on history had just begun to be felt.’190 It was half a century before British Marxists replaced divine provenance with their own covering law. There was a range of ‘scientific historians’ in Britain, too. P. B. M. Blaas noted that a number of historians echoed Bury’s clarion call to professionalise history and to emphasise its factual nature, including A.F. Pollard, Thomas Tout and C. H. Firth, friends and colleagues who were involved in the formation of the Historical Association in 1906.191 Tudor biography specialist and Dictionary of National Biography contributor Pollard was later involved in the founding of the periodical History and the Institute of Historical Research. He flew his flag with his three-volume Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary Sources (1913– 1914).192 Tout worked to ensure undergraduates in history used original sources at the University of Manchester and aspired to write research theses. When Firth, whose biographies included Oliver Cromwell, tried to do the same at Oxford, however, college fellows who were not actively researching themselves bitterly protested at this training in what they considered arcane artisan ‘skills’.193 These dons who were adamant that history was both a science and a branch of literature were the very targets that Bury had in mind when he argued that the facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of a human society in a literary dress is no more the part of the historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.194 Those arguing biography was based on meticulous source-based history were in the majority. Christopher Parker has rightly argued that British historians’ historical works rarely, if ever, were positivist—that is, confined to the data and excluding a priori or metaphysical speculations.195 Historians writing biography, like Pollard, Tout and Firth, however, were also at odds with modernist literary biographers.196

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Biographers navigate between too much and too little empiricism Sitting in the audience listening to Bury’s inaugural lecture in 1903, and ‘bristling’, was George Macaulay Trevelyan (and probably Lytton Strachey was there too).197 Trevelyan’s great work was a Garibaldi trilogy (1907– 1911), in which he depicted Garibaldi as a Carlylean hero—poet, patriot, and man of action—whose inspired leadership created the Italian nation. This work marked him as the outstanding literary historian of his generation. His biographer, David Cannadine, argued that Trevelyan became ‘the most famous, the most honoured, the most influential and the most widely read historian of his generation’.198 He had studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, alma mater of his great uncle, historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, and his father, statesman and biographer Sir Otto George Trevelyan.199 In turn, he succeeded Bury as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1927. He was, however, in two minds about academic history for he had always wanted to be a literary historian, ‘to draw outsiders into his view of the past, rather than to exclude the uninitiated’.200 Trevelyan’s passion was to write biographies. The protocol is that speakers take no questions after their inaugural lectures, so Trevelyan made his objections to Bury known in writing thereafter.201 Trevelyan challenged Bury’s pious devotion to ‘facts’.202 It was a symptom of the scientisation of British culture to which he objected. History was a science insofar as it involved the collection and critical use of evidence. The ‘collection of facts, the weighing of evidence as to what events happened, are in some sense scientific’, and that ‘“Scientific” treatment of the evidence … can establish with reasonable certainty that such and such events occurred, that one man did this and another said that’.203 Unlike the natural sciences, however, historical endeavour did not result in the discovery of general casual laws. Moreover, the ‘verdict of history’ was elastic and changed with the times; furthermore, a final scientific verdict would always be impossible, now widely believed to be true in science, too.204 However, if one accepted scientific history meant empirical history, then Trevelyan replied with the plea that history be recognised as an art as well as science. He also pointedly drew attention to Bury’s continual use of religious allusions in his writing. Trevelyan argued that the knowledge of human action could not simply be constructed through the ‘ever-increasing mass of facts that [historians] accumulate with such admirable zeal and skill’.205 It is through thinking about these facts that knowledge can be constructed; ‘imagination and art’ make clear its significance.206 He believed that only history written with style would be read and respected. Only by means of literary art could the facts amassed by research reach and engage a wide audience. The point of history, though, was not to simply increase factual knowledge but to tell stories. ‘Th[e] presentation of ideals and heroes from other ages’, he wrote in ‘Clio, a Muse’, ‘is perhaps the most important among the educative

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  105 functions of history’. Indeed, the ultimate value of history ‘is not scientific but educational’. Scientism was resulting in a mistrust of literature as a valid way of knowing. It was damaging history’s ‘humanizing power’ by ‘the substitution of a pseudo-scientific for a literary atmosphere in historical circles’.207 In 1903 Trevelyan had barely begun his productivity, an output which his biographer described: Indeed, no major historian has ever produced so many books in an essentially biographical mode. Unlike Carlyle’s, Trevelyan’s heroes were on the side of liberty and freedom rather than tyranny and despotism, but they were heroes, nonetheless. He wrote to praise great men not to bury them. That was quintessentially true of Garibaldi, whom Trevelyan depicted as part, and part man of action, and also of Marlborough, who dominates the volumes of England under Queen Anne. But it was also the case with the biographies of John Bright, of Lord Grey, of the Reform Bill, of Grey of Fallodon, and of the study of Manin in 1848. And in many of his books of English history, Trevelyan’s prose took wing when describing the imperishable achievements of great men and women: King Alfred, William of Wykeham, the Black Prince, Queen Elizabeth I, William III and the Elder Pitt. As Sir George Clark perceptively remarked, Trevelyan ‘lived by admiration’, and there can be no doubt that that was, in many ways, a Carlylean legacy.208 In his biography of Trevelyan Jack Plumb points to the power of his artistry by citing his description of the experience of a walk in the gardens of St John’s College, Oxford, which had been Charles 1’s court at the beginning of the Civil War and being drawn into the experience by him: ‘The sound of the Roundhead cannon has long died away, but still the silence of the garden is heavy with unalterable fate, brooding over besiegers and besieged.’209 Trevelyan was not the only historian to take issue with Bury’s inaugural lecture; so too did Morley, H. M. Gwatkin and S. H. Butcher.210 This criticism by his contemporaries led Bury to make immediate clarifications. At the time that he gave his lecture, Bury was working on the life of St Patrick. Doubtful about ‘every fact connected with Patrick’s life’, even to the point of wondering ‘if he did exist’ and, if he did, questioning whether he was not unimportant and unsuccessful, Bury set out to establish the life and work. He published a series of articles which culminated in the full biography The Life of St Patrick and his Place in History (1905). The scholarship supported ‘the traditional’ Roman Catholic view rather than the ‘anti-­ Papal divines’: Patrick was not fictional, but rather a significant missionary whose conversions compared to those of Wulfilas, Augustine, Otto of Bamberg, Columba and especially Boniface and partly explained the

106  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches subsequent European religious map.211 Patrick’s life and work illustrated the diffusion of Christianity and Ireland’s ‘spiritual federation’ with the Roman Empire.212 Bury justified his biography in the interests of methodology. First, Bury criticised those who had approached Patrick with ‘unmistakable ecclesiastical bias’ and preference for certain views. He was unequivocal: ‘[t]he business of a historian is to ascertain facts’. Bury argued for an objective and methodical examination of the sources. Of course, some of the documents were, in part, ‘legendary’, ‘supernatural’ and some were ‘miraculous’.213 Much was in Latin and Irish. The material was ‘fragmentary’. He was happy for his hypotheses to collapse; the point was that he claimed to be as scientific as in the physical sciences, testing hypotheses empirically. He picked his way through legends using those that were ‘more contemporary’,214 after a consideration of the motives for the fakes, when their distortion could be distinguished from historical fact,215 but above all, those which a ‘critical examination of evidence’ could substantiate, such as an inscription on a tomb or a contemporary record.216 Secondly, Bury had a ‘theory of historical narrative’. The body of the work was a literary biography and the critical and technical discussions were consigned to an appendix which made up over 40 per cent of the book.217 He argued that the ‘appendices represent the work which belongs to the science of history; the text is an effort in the in the art of historiography’.218 Despite his inaugural lecture, which is much cited, then, Bury used mixed methods, history as both ‘science’ and ‘art’. Indeed, he claimed that he had been ‘misapprehended’ in his 1903 Inaugural Lecture: [i]n vindicating the claims of history to be regarded as a science or Wissenschaft, I never meant to suggest a proposition so indefensible as that the presentation of the results of historical research is not an art, requiring the tact and skill in selection and arrangement which belong to the literary faculty.219 In making this clarification he admitted publicly that his colleagues’ criticisms were significant.220 Moreover, Bury clarified his position on methodological ‘Quellenkritik’, that is the verification of sources; source criticism has its limits. Critical methods only went so far; the facts sometimes could not support any interpretation. In 1923 Bury insisted on the importance of ‘a sequence of [particular] contingencies, in producing the barbarian conquest of the western provinces of the Roman Empire ‘which cannot be explained by any general considerations’. He gave a careful and exhaustive explanation of the general relation of contingency to determinism in the Idea of Progress.221 Furthermore in a 1926 letter to the Editor, which was cited by his obituarist J. P. Whitney, Bury also clarified his position on ‘intellectual disinterest’ or objectivity:

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  107 It seems to be always assumed as self-evident and universally admitted that impartiality and freedom from bias are indispensable qualifications in every historian’s ideal of how history should be written. Here I totally disagree, I do not think that freedom from bias is possible, and I do not think it is desirable. Whoever writes completely free from bias will produce a colourless and dull work … No history can be instructive if the personality of the writer is entirely suppressed; it will be dead and colourless and inhuman, however faultless it may be in detail, however carefully the rules of historical method may be applied.222 In practice, Bury’s position was similar to Trevelyan’s, so in many ways this debate is one that was resolved.223 In theory, historians took extreme and vehement positions on either side of the ‘two temperaments in history: scientific and literary’.224 In practice, however, most historians writing biography in English held the view that it was both a science and an art. By the 1930s, historians came closer to the view that this distinction between scientific and artistic was arbitrary and exaggerated.225 Scientific historians like Adams and Bury believed that facts were certainties ‘existing outside the mind of the historian’.226 They viewed facts as objective and absolute. They believed that the historian ought to present the facts unadorned and therefore their biographies, like Bury’s of St Patrick, had large appendices of documents. Other historians began to take such ideas to task, as Peter Novak has considered in detail.227 In December 1926 Carl Becker read at the 41st annual meeting of the American Historical Association at Rochester, New York entitled ‘What are historical facts?’, arguing that cold hard facts were not like bricks; they not simple but they were more like symbols, illusive and intangible when analysed. He elaborated on his point that historical facts were ‘present, imaginatively, in someone’s mind, then it is now, a part of the present’ in 1931.228 Facts were presentist and they were constructed: there were two histories: what happened and what was written about what happened. The second was not certain and did not exist outside the mind of the historian. An event happened but as an actual event it has now disappeared. All historians have left is usually a written document. They inferred the event from documents and memories: The first is absolute and unchanged—it was what it was whatever we do or say about it; the second is relative, always changing in response to the increase or refinement of knowledge. The two series correspond more or less, it is our aim to make the correspondence as exact as possible.229 Becker took his relativism further to argue that all kinds of prejudices and biases led historians to select and emphasise certain aspects and to

108  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches interpret facts, usually in keeping with ‘present concerns’. David Hull and others argued have argued subsequently that it was impossible for historians not to be presentist, albeit degrees of presentism were significant and historians should try to be one-eyed, rather than two-eyed, presentists.230 Becker was critical of scientific history, of the idea that the historian could collect all the facts ‘without injecting any extraneous meaning into them’ and ‘let them speak for themselves’.231 Such a view was ‘an illusion’: History … can not be reduced to a verifiable set of statistics or formulated in terms of universally valid mathematical formulas. It is rather an imaginative creation … fashion[ed] out of individual experience, adapt[ed] to practical or emotional needs, and adorn[ed] as well as may be to suit … aesthetic tastes.232 Instead, historians imaginatively reconstruct vanished events. Becker argued that professional historians did not ‘impose’ their version of the human story on their communities. Rather communities ‘took up’ histories that conformed to contemporary tempers and the context was significant and changing. History was not stable and would not always prevail. Neither the value nor the dignity of history need suffer by regarding it as a foreshortened and incomplete representation of the reality that once was, an unstable pattern of remembered things redesigned and newly colored to suit the convenience of those who make use of it. Nor need our labors be the less highly prized because our task is limited, our contributions of incidental and temporary significance … Regarded historically, as a process of becoming, man and his world can obviously be understood only tentatively, since it is by definition something still in the making, something as yet unfinished.233 Becker proposed a vision of history that was both more relativistic and more populist, as in his the ‘Art of writing’.234 There would be, and should be, a series of biographies on the same person that had different perspectives, subject to the authoring historian’s textual and political concerns. In his own work, Becker moved from relativism. His major biographical work was The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1932) in which he argued that the Enlightenment was a continuation of the Christian intellectual tradition, rather than the radical break that many assumed it to be.235 The power of reason was akin to religious virtue and they were both held between the forces of light and darkness.236 Be that as it may, Becker’s biographical method was not to emphasise individual human agency but the Enlightenment world. Rather than establish what ‘actually happened at certain times and places’, he developed a theory to fit a historical problem.

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  109 Becker believed that human behaviour was fundamentally different from the natural processes which natural scientists studied. Historical biography was not scientific in nature because of its narrative and literary character. Subjects in history, whose decisions had a profound and direct influence on the course of history, acted or did what they did because of their own volition. Historical subjects act according to their understanding of the facts of their situation, including the likely results of taking various courses of action considered open to them and their aims. In Becker’s wake, Collingwood (1946),237 William Dray (1957, 1963),238 and Wilhelm Dilthey (1961)239 have argued for versions of this position: historical explanation does not involve any causal laws. Rather, the reasons why key figures in history—whose decisions have had a profound and direct influence on the course of history—acted as they did need not be reducible to causes. Dray, for example, wrote: The function of an explanation is to resolve puzzlement of some kind. When a historian sets out to explain a historical action, his problem is usually that he does not know what reason the agent had for doing it. To achieve understanding, what he seeks is information about what the agent believes to be the facts of his situation, including the likely results of taking various courses of action considered open to him, and what he wanted to accomplish … For explanations of the kind just illustrated, I should argue, the establishment of a deductive logical connection between explanans and explanandum, based on the inclusion of suitable empirical laws in the former, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of explaining.240 Becker was thoroughly opposed to those who argued that historians could explain historical actions as a subset of scientific explanations; that human behaviour was the same as other processes in nature and could be accounted for by laws relating physical events. He was opposed to the view that there were causal laws in history which were like scientific laws and explain historical subject’s behaviour.241 Hempel’s, Gardiner’s, Mandelbaum’s and Ayer’s work in this regard, however, were in the future. Becker wrote biography, as we have seen following up early work such as The Beginnings of the American People (1915) with an account of eighteenth-century philosophers (1932). He was increasingly interested in intellectual biography.242 It is sometimes suggested that Becker pioneered collective biography with his The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. The same suggestion has been made of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians.243 However, the lag between their work in 1918 and 1932 and the genre of emergence of the genre collective biography was considerable. Strachey and Bury, each in their own ways, cast doubt on biography that was fact challenged as well as fact-fetishising. Research was to be based on the ‘discovery, collection, classification and interpretation of the facts’.244

110  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches In their wake historians continued to write biographies profusely—increasingly aware, however, of the constructivism of facts, interpretations and good writing. It is one thing to aspire to objectivity—to an exact match of the facts as they happened and the facts as they are represented. It is another to assume you have it.

Conclusion: historians navigating around Bloomsbury and scientific biography The alleged influence of the modernists has dominated general accounts of the biography of biography for this period. In her 2005 collective biography of the Strachey family, Barbara Caine is typical in her emphasis on the importance of Woolf and Strachey in the development of modern biography: Between them, they transformed the writing of biography as well as bringing to the fore major discussions about the literary problems of biography, the question of how to relate public and private life, and the importance of evaluation and impression in biographical writing.245 I have argued that it had little direct impact on historians’ biographical practices, although it has become the subject of vast historical enterprise in itself subsequently: studying Bloomsbury biography is an immense industry. Their negative characterisation of historians’ biography, however, left a lasting impression. In her account of Biography and History (2010 and 2019), however, Caine does not give such prominence to the modernists. While accepting that ‘Woolf continues to be a very influential figure for those engaged in writing biography’, she argued ‘In the decades since she wrote, however, many other biographers, literary theorists, psychoanalysts and historians have also published their reflections and ideas on the nature of biography and on how best to research, interpret and write a life’.246 Perhaps Caine is distinguishing here between non-historian and historians’ biographical practices. She might have added too that a variety of influences were at play within Woolf’s lifetime. Moreover contemporary historians refitted their own biography in the early twentieth century from within the profession too. Historians writing biography reacted to the ‘fact-fetish’ excesses of scientific biographers like Bury and Adams. They were part of the provocation for Becker to develop his ideas on relativism and subjectivity. Becker, Dilthey and Collingwood suggested to historians that human behaviour differed from the processes studied by natural scientists. They argued over the extent to which historians could ascertain patterns of human motivation and behaviour. Biography was at the centre of a range of post-Victorian debates over whether history was a science or an art which intensified from the turn of

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  111 the twentieth century. These debates involved history dons and historians writing biography outside the academy, including historians Bury, Adams, Strachey, G. M. Trevelyan and Becker. The main point here is that, despite all this sound and fury, most historians did not see a binary relationship between historical biography as a science or an art, and nor between a literary or an empirical craft. Their historical empiricism, as it had developed, held them back from both positions.247

Notes 1 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (f.p. 1940; London: Vintage, 2003), p. 183. 2 Woolf, Roger Fry, pp. 183–184. 3 Officially it was ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionist’ exhibition and ran from 8 November 1910 to 15 January 1911. 4 Woolf, Roger Fry, pp. 155–162. 5 The quote is from art critic Charles Ricketts, ‘Post-Impressionism’, Morning Post (9 November 1910), p. 6; Woolf, Roger Fry, p. 153. See also Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1979). 6 Christopher Reed, ‘Forming Formalism: The Post-Impressionist Exhibitions’, A Roger Fry Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 4. 7 See also Editorial, ‘The Shock of the Old: “Manet and the PostImpressionists”, 1910’, reprinted in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 152, no. 1293 (2010), p. 779; Desmond MacCarthy, ‘The Post-Impressionists. Introduction to the Exhibition Catalogue of Manet and the Post-Impressionists (London: Ballantyne, 1910), p. 7; and later ‘The Art-Quake of 1910’, Listener, no. 30 (1 February 1945), pp. 123–124. Roger Fry discussed the range of responses in a lecture near the end of the exhibition, 9 January 1911, the text appeared as ‘Post-Impressionism at the Grafton Galleries’, The Fortnightly Review (1 May 1911), pp. 856–867. 8 J. B. Bullen, Post-Impressionists in England (London: Routledge, 1988); Clive Bell, Art (f.p. 1914; London: Chatto and Windus, 1947), p. ix. 9 Vanessa Bell, ‘Memoirs of Roger Fry’, October 1934, typescript, Tate Archive TGA 20096/1/8–9, p. 9, cited by Woolf, Roger Fry. 10 Jonathan R. Quick, ‘Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and Post-Impressionism’, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 26, no. 4 (Winter 1985), p. 554. 11 Virginia Woolf, ‘“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, A Paper Read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on May 18th, 1924’, in Collected Essays, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), pp. 319–337. See Jonathan R. Quick, ‘Virginia Woolf, ‘Roger Fry and Post-Impressionism’, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 26, no. 4 (Winter, 1985), pp. 547–570; Peter Stansky, On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1997). 12 Quick, ‘Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and Post-Impressionism’, p. 557. 13 Quick, ‘Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and Post-Impressionism’, p. 556. 14 Quick, ‘Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and Post-Impressionism’, p. 556. 15 Karina Jakubowicz, ‘“Scarcely a Brick to Be Seen”: Breaking Boundaries in “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall”, in Virginia Woolf and the World of Books: Selected Papers from the Twenty-seventh Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Nicole Wilson and Claire Battershill (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), pp. 56—61.

112  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches 16 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1925–1930 (New York: Harcourt, 1982), p. 161. 17 Woolf, Roger Fry, p. 55. 18 Woolf, Roger Fry, p. 76. 19 Frances Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life (Oakland: University of California Press, 1980), p. 124. 20 Derek Ryan and Stephen Ross, ‘Introduction’, in The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group, ed. Derek Ryan and Stephen Ross (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp. 3–4. Amy Licence, Living in Squares, Loving in Triangles: The Lives and Loves of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group (The Hill, Stroud, Gloucester, UK: Amberley, 2015), pp. 9–10; S. P. Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club, ed. James M. Haule (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 3. 21 Hermione Lee emphasises the importance of Woolf’s mother’s death, and memories of her mother, which haunted Woolf throughout her life, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996). See also Woolf, ‘Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Sussex: University of Sussex Press, 1976), pp. 80–81. By contrast she noted in her diary that ‘His life would have entirely ended mine’, Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, p. 208. 22 Barbara Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 23 Licence, Living in Squares, p. 16. 24 Roger Fry, ‘Post Impressionism’, The Fortnightly Review, (1 May 1911), pp. 856–857. 25 Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, New Quarterly, no. 2 (April 1909), pp. 171–190 reprinted in Roger Fry, Vision and Design (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1920), pp. 22–40. 26 Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, p. 24. 27 Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, p. 32. 28 Roger Fry, Vision and Design (London: Chatto and Windus, 1920), p. 167. 29 Woolf, Roger Fry, p. 178. 30 Woolf, Roger Fry, pp. 194–195; Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, pp. 36–37. 31 Margery Fry, ‘Foreword’, Woolf, Roger Fry, p. 5. 32 Virginia Woolf, A Writers’ Diary (London: Hogarth’s Press, 1954), p. 326. 33 Elizabeth Cooley, ‘Revolutionizing Biography: “Orlando”, “Roger Fry”, and the Tradition’, South Atlantic Review, vol. 55, no. 2 (May 1990), p. 72. 34 As Leonard Woolf noted, ‘in our reminiscences what we said was absolutely true, but absolute truth was sometimes filtered through some discretion and reticence’, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (London: Hogarth, 1967), p. 114. 35 Amber K. Regis, ‘“But something betwixt and between”: Roger Fry and the Contradictions of Biography’, in Contradictory Woolf, ed. Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki (Liverpool University Press, 2012), pp. 82–87. 36 Lytton Strachey, ‘A New History of Rome’, in Spectatorial Essays, preface James Strachey (New York: Harcourt, 1964), p. 13. 37 Andrew Sanders (ed.), ‘Bloomsbury and Beyond: Strachey, Woolf, and Mansfield’, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. x. 38 Michael Dirda, ‘The Biography that Changed Biography Forever’, Book Review, The Washington Post (31 January 2018), accessed 7 June 2021, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-biography-that-changedbiography-forever/2018/01/30/9a7e042c-0509-11e8-94e8-e8b8600ade23_story. html

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  113 39 Margaret Drabble (ed.), Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th ed. (f.p. 1932; Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 118–119. 40 Ulrika Maude, ‘Experimentation and Form’, in The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature, ed. Ulrika Maude and Mark Nixon (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 1. 41 Floriane Reviron-Piégay, ‘Eminent Victorians: Outrageous Strachey? The Indecent Exposure of Victorian Characters and Mores’, Études britanniques contemporaines, vol. 45 (September 2013), accessed 15 May 2021, http://ebc. revues.org/577 42 Quick, ‘Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and Post-Impressionism’, p. 559. 43 Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Sanford Schwartz, A Matrix of Modernism Pound, Eliot and Early Twentieth Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 44 Ryan and Ross, The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group. 45 Woolf, Roger Fry, p. 152. 46 John, Viscount Morley, Notes on Politics and History (London: Macmillan, 1913). 47 John, Viscount Morley, O. M. Recollections, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1918). 48 A. F. Pollard, ‘Lord Morley on History’, History, new series, vol. 3, no. 12 (January 1919), pp. 210–221. 49 Pollard was appointed to the Dictionary of National Biography in 1893; his political biography monographs included England under Protector Somerset (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1900) and Henry VIII (London: Goupil, 1902), Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation (London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), The Elizabethans and the Empire (London: Humphrey Milford, 1921), and Wolsey (London: Longmans Green, 1929). 50 Morley, Recollections, vol. 1, p. 95. 51 W. Stull Holt, ‘The Idea of Scientific History in America’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1940), pp. 352–362. 52 Pollard, ‘Lord Morley on History’, p. 217. 53 Virginia Woolf, ‘The New Biography’, The New York Herald Tribune (30 October 1927). 54 Peter Novak, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 55 Pollard, ‘Lord Morley on History’, p. 220. 56 Derek Ryan and Stephen Ross (eds.), The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 57 Christopher Parker discusses the wider historiographical debate, ‘English Historians and the Opposition to Positivism’, History and Theory, vol. 22, no. 2 (May 1983), pp. 120–145. 58 Parker ‘English Historians and the Opposition to Positivism’, p. 141. 59 Woolf, Roger Fry, p. 160. 60 Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club. 61 Paul Levy (ed.), The Letters of Lytton Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 2005). 62 Levy (ed.), The Letters of Lytton Strachey. 63 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938), p. 61. 64 Louise A. DeSalvo, Alice Fox and Katherine C. Hill, ‘Forum on Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen’, PMLA, vol. 97, no. 1 (January 1982), pp. 103–106. 65 Katherine C. Hill, ‘Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution’, PMLA, vol. 96, no. 3 (1981), pp. 351–362.

114  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches 66 Anna Snaith and Christine Kenyon-Jones, ‘Tilting at Universities: Woolf at King’s College London’, Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 16 (2010), pp. 1–44. 67 Clara Jones, Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), chapter 1, ‘Virginia Stephen and Morley College, 1905–7’. 68 Andrea Geddes Poole, ‘The Citizens of Morley College’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 50, no. 4 (October 2011), pp. 853–854; Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), Appendix B, ‘Teaching at Morley’, pp. 202–204. 69 Jones, Virginia Woolf, p. 21. 70 Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 222. 71 Jones, Virginia Woolf, Appendix 1, The ‘Morley Sketch’, p. 210. 72 Jones, Virginia Woolf, p. 28, quoting Stephen to Violet Dickinson. 73 Jones, Virginia Woolf, Appendix 1, The ‘Morley Sketch’, p. 212. 74 Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf: The Intellectual and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1972–1973). 75 R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). 76 Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere, pp. 146– 167; Beth Carole Rosenberg, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Postmodern Literary History’, MLN, vol. 115, no. 5 (2000), p. 1115. 77 Jones, Virginia Woolf, p. 29; Sabine Hotho-Jackson, ‘Virginia Woolf on History: Between Tradition and Modernity’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 27, no. 4 (1991), p. 296. 78 Bell, Virginia Woolf, p. 203. 79 Llana Carroll, ‘Notions of Friendship in the Bloomsbury Group: G. E. Moore, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf’ (PhD thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2009), https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/12209387.pdf, accessed 13 June 2020; G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903), accessed 26 June 2020, https:// www.gutenberg.org/files/53430/53430-h/53430-h.htm, pp. 188–189. 80 Alastair MacLachlan, ‘Intersecting and Contrasting Lives: G. M. Trevelyan and Lytton Strachey’, in Clio’s Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians, ed. Doug Munro and John G. Reid (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017), pp. 137–171. 81 Jones, Virginia Woolf, pp. 56–57, citing 3 May 1907 Lambeth Archives, Minet Library, Morley College Executive Committee Minutes, vol. 3, 1901–1912. 82 Susan Dick, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1985), p. 1. 83 Heather Levy, The Servants of Desire in Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 15–76. 84 Dick, Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, p. 34. 85 Dick, Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, p. 45. 86 Virginia Woolf, Diary (16 March 1905). 87 Virginia Woolf, Diary (25 April 1905). 88 Jones, Virginia Woolf, p. 27. 89 Alice Fox, Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 90 Julia Briggs, Reading Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 162–163. 91 Claire Battershill, Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). 92 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York: Harcourt, 1956), pp. 305–306. 93 Virginia Woolf, ‘Gorky on Tolstoy’, New Statesman (7 August 1920), p. 506.

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  115 94 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), the lecture she delivered in 1928 at Cambridge was expanded and published. 95 Hill, ‘Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen’, p. 351. 96 Giles Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918), p. viii. 97 Lytton Strachey, ‘Dostoievsky’, in Spectatorial Essays, ed. James Strachey (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), pp. 174–179; fp. Spectator (28 September 1912). Garnett translated seven volumes of Dostoyevsky into English during the First World War. See Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey. The New Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), quoting from a letter by Lytton Strachey to Ottoline Morrell (27 March 1914). 98 Virginia Woolf, Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, 1925), p. 186; Roberta Rubenstein, Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 99 Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928), p. 11. 100 Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex, p. 12. 101 Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex, p. 13. 102 Richard Altick, ‘Eminent Victorianism: What Lytton Strachey Hath Wrought’, American Scholar, vol. 64, no. 1 (1995), p. 85. 103 Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria. A Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1921). 104 Queen Victoria’s diaries were digitised in 2012 as a joint project between the Royal Archives, Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University and the online publisher, ProQuest. 105 David S. Muzzey, ‘Review of Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 1 (March 1922), p. 123. 106 Leonard Woolf, ‘The Science and Art of Biography’, The World of Books, The Nation and the Athenaeum (13 March 1929), p. 882. 107 Strachey, Eminent Victorians, p. 5. 108 Todd Avery, ‘“The Historian of the Future”: Lytton Strachey and Modernist Historiography between the Two Cultures’, ELH, vol. 77, no. 4 (Winter 2010), pp. 841–866. 109 Altick, ‘Eminent Victorianism: What Lytton Strachey Hath Wrought’, p. 85. 110 Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury, p. 266. 111 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf/Random House, 1987). 112 Adam Nicolson, Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History (London: Harper Press, 2008), p. 263. 113 Raymond Williams has argued Bloomsbury involved liberalisation and ­modernism but it was above all an expression of a ‘new style’, the keynote of which was an outward projection of the personal register of conscience, ‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’, in The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins (f.p. 1978; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), ch. 13. 114 Raymond Williams, ‘The Significance of “Bloomsbury” as a Social and Cultural Group’, in Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group, ed. D. Crabtree and A. P. Thirlwall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1980). 115 Todd Avery, ‘“The Historian of the Future”: Lytton Strachey and Modernist Historiography between the Two Cultures’, ELH, vol. 77, no. 4 (Winter 2010), p. 846. 116 Avery, ‘“The Historian of the Future”’, pp. 842–843. 117 Strachey, Eminent Victorians, p. 3. 118 Lytton Strachey, ‘Gibbon’, in Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1931), p. 158. 119 Avery, ‘“The Historian of the Future”’, p. 854.

116  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches 120 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Art of Biography’, in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: Hogarth, 1947), published posthumously. 121 Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (New York: Persea Books, 1983), p. 47. 122 Battershill, Modernist Lives. 123 Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club, p. 78. 124 Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club, pp. 15, 18 and Appendix 2: A List of Memoir Club Papers. 125 Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club, p. 44, and chapter 2 ‘Ancestral Voices, Cambridge Conversations’, pp. 27–53. 126 Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club, p. 28. 127 John Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs. Dr Melchior: A Defeated Enemy; and My Early Beliefs (New York: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949). 128 Clive Bell, Proust (London: Hogarth Press, 1928). Marcel Proust, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913–1927) which was translated into English as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past (1922–1931). 129 Helen Southworth (ed.), Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 130 Battershill, Modernist Lives, pp. 25–28. 131 Lee, Virginia Woolf. 132 Battershill, Modernist Lives, p. 8. 133 Battershill, Modernist Lives, pp. 8–9. 134 Woolf, ‘The Science and Art of Biography’, p. 882. 135 Battershill, Modernist Lives, p. 38. 136 Victoria Sackville-West, ‘Tolstoy’, The Nation and the Athenaeum (11 August 1928), p. 769. See Virginia Woolf’s suggestion that Tolstoy biographers should embrace contradictory elements of his personality, rather than offering a single, finished portrait, ‘Gorky on Tolstoy’, New Statesman, August 1921, pp. 505–506. 137 Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Biography (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006), pp. 231–232. 138 Leonard Woolf, ‘The Autumn Crop’ (1927). 139 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 392. 140 Hill, ‘Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen’, pp. 351–362; Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), p. 17. 141 Bury, The Science of History, p. 7. 142 Bury, The Science of History, p. 9. 143 Bury, An Inaugural Lecture, p. 12. 144 Bury, An Inaugural Lecture, p. 26. 145 Bury, An Inaugural Lecture, p. 24. 146 Bury, An Inaugural Lecture, p. 12. 147 Bury, An Inaugural Lecture, p. 11. 148 Bury, An Inaugural Lecture, p. 9. 149 William H. Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 3, see the chapter, ‘Two Temperaments in History: Scientific and Literary’, pp. 1–22. 150 Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, p. 30. 151 David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan, A Life in History (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), pp. 213–214. 152 Bury, An Inaugural Lecture, p. 14. 153 Bury, An Inaugural Lecture, p. 23. 154 Reba Soffer, ‘Nation, Duty, Character and Confidence: History at Oxford, 1850–1914’, Historical Journal, vol. 30, no. 1 (1987), p. 92. 155 Hilaire Belloc, review of ‘Professor Bury’s History of Freedom of Thought’, The Dublin Review, vol. 154, nos. 308–309 (January/April 1914).

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  117 156 Michael Tierney, ‘J. B. Bury: Hellenist and Historian’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 18, no. 72 (December 1929), p. 600. 157 Tierney, ‘J. B. Bury: Hellenist and Historian’, p. 606; for the idea that Bury’s belief in progress was an act of faith, see Norman H. Baynes’s Bibliography compiled with a memoir, A Bibliography of the Works of J. B. Bury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929). 158 Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, pp. 1–22, ‘Two Temperaments in History: Scientific and Literary’. 159 Jordy, Henry Adam: Scientific Historian, p. 13. 160 Jordy, Henry Adam: Scientific Historian, p. 13. 161 Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, p. 15. 162 Miles Fairburn, ‘The Problem of Generalising from Fragmentary Evidence’, in Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 39–57. 163 Elena Gualtieri, ‘The Impossible Art: Virginia Woolf on Modern Biography,’ The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 29, no.4 (Literary Biographical Special Issue) 2000, pp. 349–361. 164 Prescott is said to have gradually changed the focus of his work over time from biography to narrative history, although in his early work he is said to have subscribed to the ‘Great Man theory’. George Ticknor, Life of William Hickling Prescott (Boston MA: Publisher, 1864), p. 347; Henry Steele Commager, ‘William Hickling Prescott’ in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (London: Macmillan, 1930), p. 324. 165 For another critique, see James Harvey Robinson, The New History (New York: Macmillan, 1912), p. 24. 166 Howard M. Munford, ‘Henry Adams and the Tendency of History’, The New England Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 1 (March 1959), pp. 79–90. 167 The nine-volume History of the United States of America: Henry Adams, History of the United States of American during the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson, 2 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1889); History … during the Second Administration, 2 vols. and History … during the First Administration of James Madison, 2 vols. (1890); and History … During the Second Administration of James Madison, 3 vols. (1891). 168 He wrote a novel, Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel (New York: Holt, 1880). 169 Henry Adams, ‘The Tendency of History’, letter to the American Historical Association, 12 December 1894, published in the AHA 1894 Annual Report, p. 17, https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/ahahistory-and-archives/presidential-addresses/henry-adams, accessed 25 May 2020. 170 Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Volume 1 (London: W. Parker and Son, 1857). 171 Adams, ‘The Tendency of History’, p. 18. 172 James Ford Rhodes, ‘History’, Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1899, pp. 56–63, https://www.historians.org/about-aha-andmembership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential-addresses/james-fordrhodes, accessed 2 April 2020. 173 Holt, ‘The Idea of Scientific History in America’, p. 353. 174 Henry Adams, ‘Rule of Phase Applied to History’ (1909) and A Letter to American Teachers of History (1910). 175 Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, p. 1. 176 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, an Autobiography (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918). 177 Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, p. 3.

118  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches 178 W. H. G. Armytage, The Rise of the Technocrats: A Social History (London and New York: Routledge, 1965), p. 162. 179 Henry Adams to Charles Adams (11 April 1862), in Louis P. Masur (ed.), ‘… The Real War Will Never Get in the Books’: Selections from Writers During the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 6–7. See similar epistolary sentiments, W. C. Ford (ed.), Letters of Henry Adams (1892–1918) (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), p. 332. 180 Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, pp. 305–307. 181 Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, p. 7. 182 C. G. Hempel, ‘The Function of General Laws in History’, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 39 (1942); and ‘Reasons and Covering Laws in Historical Explanation’, in Philosophy and History: A Symposium, ed. Sydney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1963), pp. 143–163. 183 P. Gardiner (ed.), The Philosophy of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). 184 M. Mandelbaum, ‘The Problem of “Covering Laws”’, originally published under the title ‘Historical Explanation: The Problem of “Covering Laws”’ in History and Theory, vol. 1, no. 3 (1961), reprinted in Gardiner, The Philosophy of History, pp. 51–65. 185 A. J. Ayer, ‘Man as a Subject for Science’, in The Philosophy of History Philosophy, Politics, and Society, Series III, ed. P. Laslett and W.G. Runciman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). 186 Henry Adams’s biographies include The Life of Albert Gallatin (Philadelphia and London: Lippincott, 1897); John Randolph (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883); Mont-Saint Michel and Chartres (1904, 1913); and The Life of George Cabot Lodge (1911). 187 Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, p. 50. 188 Munford, ‘Henry Adams and the Tendency of History’, p. 79. 189 Carl Becker, ‘Labelling the Historians’, in Everyman His Own Historian (New York: Crofts, 1935), pp. 132–142. 190 Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, p. 5. 191 P. B. M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction 1890 and 1930 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 1–2, 5; C. H. Firth, ‘A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History’, Inaugural address at University of Oxford and ‘The Study of Modern History in Great Britain’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 6 (1913); A. F. Pollard, ‘The Study of History’ [1904] in A. F. Pollard, Factors in Modern History (f.p. 1907, London: Knopf, 1948), pp. 234–254. 192 Matthew A. Fitzsimons, Alfred G. Pundit, and Charles É. Nowell (eds.), The Development of Historiography (Harrison, Pennsylvania: Stockpole, 1954). 193 Soffer, ‘Nation, Duty, Character and Confidence’, pp. 94–96. 194 Bury, An Inaugural Lecture, pp. 16–17. 195 Christopher Parker, ‘English Historians and the Opposition to Positivism’, History and Theory, vol. 22, no. 2 (May 1983), pp. 120–145. 196 James Harvey Robinson, The New History (New York: Macmillan, 1912), p. 24. 197 Laura Trevelyan, A Very British Family: The Trevelyans and Their World (f.p. 2006; London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012). 198 Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan, A Life in History, p. xii. 199 George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1876). 200 Trevelyan, A Very British Family, p. 157.

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  119 201 George Macaulay Trevelyan, Clio, A Muse, and Other Essay, Literary and Pedestrian (London: Longmans, Green, 1913). 202 ‘The Latest View of History’, Independent Review, 1903/1904, renamed as the title essay in his Clio, A Muse and Other Essays (1913). 203 Rebecca Goldstein, review of John Clive, ‘Not by Fact Alone’, History and Theory, no. 30 (1991), p. 109. 204 G. M. Trevelyan, ‘Clio, A Muse’, in Clio, a Muse, and Other Essays (London: Longmans Green: 1930), pp. 179–180. 205 Trevelyan, ‘Clio’, p. 189. 206 Trevelyan, ‘Clio’, pp. 191, 196. 207 Trevelyan, ‘Clio’, pp. 191, 196. 208 Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History, p. 31. 209 J. H. Plumb, G.M. Trevelyan (Harlow: Longmans Green, 1971), p. 9; Trevelyan, Clio, pp. 26–27. 210 John Morley, Nineteenth Century and After [Oct. 1904]; G. M. Trevelyan in the Independent Review [1903], p. v.; H. M. Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God (1906), 11, 21, 282; S. H. Butcher, Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects [1904], Lecture VI. 211 T. Ó. Raifeartaigh, ‘The Life of St Patrick: A New Approach’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 16, no. 62 (September 1968), pp. 119–137; also pp. ix and 215–216. 212 J. B. Bury, Life of St Patrick and His Place in History (f.p. 1905; New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008). 213 Bury, Life of St Patrick, p. 82. 214 Bury, Life of St Patrick, p. 11. 215 Bury, Life of St Patrick, pp. 141 & p. 82. 216 Bury, Life of St Patrick, pp. 113, 141, 154. 217 Bury, Life of St Patrick, p. ix; Appendices, pp. 225–391. 218 Bury, Life of St Patrick, p. xii. 219 Bury, Life of St Patrick, p. xii. 220 Bury, Life of St Patrick, p. xii. 221 J. P. Whitney and J. B. Bury, ‘The Late Professor J. B. Bury’, The Cambridge Historical Journal, vol. 2, no. 2 (1927), pp. 191–197. 222 Morning Post (30 November 1926), cited by Whitney, ‘The Late Professor J. B. Bury’, pp. 196–197. 223 Doris Goldstein, ‘J. B. Bury’s Philosophy of History: A Reappraisal’, American Historical Review, vol. 82 (1977), pp. 896–919. 224 W. Stull Holt, ‘The Idea of Scientific History in America’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1940), pp. 352–362. 225 Trevelyan, ‘Clio, A Muse’; Becker, ‘Labelling as Historians’, pp. 132–142. This was Becker’s presidential address to the American Historical Association at Minneapolis, 29 December 1931, which was first published in the American Historical Review, vol. 37, no. 2 (January 1932), pp. 221–236. 226 Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, p. 13. 227 Novak, That Noble Dream. 228 Carl Becker, ‘What Are Historical Facts?’ in The Philosophy of History in Our Time, ed. Hans Meyerhoff (New York: Doubleday, 1959, a paper read at the 41st annual meeting of the American Historical Association at Rochester, New York, in December, 1926), p. 120. 229 Carl L. Becker, ‘Everyman His Own Historian’, American Historical Review, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 221–36l, based on Annual address of the president of the American Historical Association, delivered at Minneapolis, 29 December 1931, p. 222. 230 David L. Hull, ‘In Defense of Presentism’, History and Theory, vol. 18, no. 1 (February 1979), pp. 1–15.

120  Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches 2 31 232 233 234

Becker, ‘What Are Historical Facts?’, p. 120. Becker, ‘Everyman His Own Historian’, p. 228. Becker, ‘Everyman His Own Historian’, pp. 235–236. Carl Becker, ‘The Art of Writing’, cited by Charlotte Watkins Smith, ‘Carl Becker: The Historian as a Literary Craftsman’, The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 3 (July 1952), p. 292. 235 Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932). 236 Burleigh Wilkins Taylor, Carl Becker: A Biographical Study in American Intellectual History (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1961). 237 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). 238 W. Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957). 239 W. Dilthey, Meaning in History, ed. H. P. Rickman (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961); and ‘The Historical Explanations of Actions Reconsidered’, in Philosophy and History: A Symposium, ed. Sydney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1963), pp. 105–135, reprinted in Gardiner, The Philosophy of History, pp. 66–89, to which all page references refer. 240 William Dray, cited in ‘The nature of human self-understanding’, by John Kekes, Pluralism in Philosophy: Changing the Subject (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 178. 241 I. Berlin, ‘The Concept of Scientific History’, History and Theory, vol. 1, no. 1 (1960), pp. 1–31. 242 Becker wrote an institutional history, Cornell University: Founders and the Founding (1943) but his intellectual history was peopled: See Carl L. Becker, ‘Frederick Jackson Turner’, in Everyman His Own Historian, pp. 191–232. 243 For example, see Lara Kriegel, ‘Eminent Victorians at One Hundred: Introduction’, Victorian Studies, vol. 61, no. 1 (Autumn 2018), p. 83. 244 Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History, p. 4; Lara Kriegel, ‘Eminent Victorians at One Hundred: Introduction’, Victorian Studies, vol. 61, no. 1 (Autumn 2018), p. 83; Margarita Jolley (ed.), Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, vol. 1 (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2013); Reviron-Piégay, ‘Eminent Victorians: Outrageous Strachey? The Indecent Exposure of Victorian Characters and Mores’, Études britanniques contemporaines, vol. 45 (September 2013). 245 Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury, p. 16. 246 Barbara Caine, Biography and History, 2nd ed. (f.p. 2010; London: Red Globe Press, Macmillan, 2019), p. 83. 247 Robert Alexander Hurley, ‘The Science of Stories: Human History and the Narrative Philosophy of Science’ (PhD dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, 2012), p. 7; Peter Turchin, ‘Arise “Cliodynamics”’, Nature, vol. 454 (3 July 2008), p. 35.

Further reading The two conspicuous post-Victorian experimental biographies by historians are J. B. Bury, Life of St Patrick and His Place in History (f.p. 1905; New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008); and Giles Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918). For the transition from Victorian to modernist biography, Joe Law and Linda K. Hughes (eds.), Biographical Passages: Essays on Victorian and Modernist Biography (f.p. 1984; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). For a good summary introduction to the Bloomsbury group and their biogra­ phical practices: Derek Ryan and Stephen Ross (eds.), The Handbook to the

Post-victorian debates over artistic and scientific approaches  121 Bloomsbury Group (f.p. 2018; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); Maryam Thirriard’s 2019 PhD thesis was on ‘Crafting the New Biography: Virginia Woolf, Harold Nicolson and Lytton Strachey’. A few articles in English have appeared from her research, including ‘Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Harold Nicolson and the Aesthetics of the Subject in the New Biography’, Paru dans Études britanniques contemporaines, vol. 60 (2021), https://journals.openedition. org/ebc/10373, accessed 1 March 2022. For the relationship between modernists and historians more generally, see also Hayden White, ‘Modernism and the Sense of History’, Journal of Art Historiography, vol. 15 (December 2016), pp. 1–15; and Michael Saler, ‘Modern History, Historiography and Aesthetic Modernism’ in Modernism and the Social Sciences: Anglo-American Exchanges, c1918–1980, ed. Mark Bevir (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 202–230. For a discussion on the ways that turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries positivism consolidated ‘the national sciences’ including history, see Christopher Parker, ‘English Historians and the Opposition to Positivism’, History and Theory, vol. 22, no. 2 (May 1983), pp. 120–145; and Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janowski, Monika Baár, Maria Falina and Michal Kopeček, A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: vol. 1: Negotiating Modernity in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), ‘The Political Implications of Positivism’, ch 8, pp. 318–355. For positivism more generally, see Johannes Feichtinger, Franz L. Fillafer and Jan Surman, The Worlds of Positivism: A Global Intellectual History, 1770–1930 (New York: Palgrave, 2018).

4 Historians and the problem of other minds in biography

Figure 4.1 Sigmund Freud wrote the original psychobiography; there were many calls in his wake for historians to adopt psychoanalytical approaches in biography. Sigmund Freud posing for the Sculptor Nemon in the garden (1931). Chronicle/Alamy.

Disinclined and disengaged over the psychology debate? Roland H. Bainton takes on Erik Erikson Roland Bainton, the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Yale Divinity School, took a stand against psychobiography after reading Erik Erikson’s 1958 biography of Martin Luther (1483–1546).1 Donald Capps, later a psychobiographer himself,2 remembered, DOI: 10.4324/9780429426391-4

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  123 [i]n the required church history course at Yale Divinity School in which I enrolled in 1960–1961, Roland Bainton had entered the classroom one morning in what seemed to be a rather combative mood. He held up a copy of Erikson’s Young Man Luther, and said that it was the worst book on Luther he had come across.3 There were, and there continue to be, many biographies of Martin Luther written by Lutherans, Roman Catholics and Marxists, with much of it in German and some of it mediocre, but Capps noted that Bainton singled out Erikson’s account of the seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation.4 Luther nailed his 95 theses, which attacked what he regarded as the corrupt religious practices enshrined in the Catholic Church system of indulgences, to the door of the Schloßkirche in Wittenberg in 1517. Luther’s second book, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), attacked the sacramental system more broadly, including the Sacrifice of the Mass, ultimately giving rise to the Lutheran movement. Bainton objected to Erikson’s psychoanalytical approach, that is, his basing of the biography on the theory and therapeutic techniques psychiatrists used to understand the unconscious mind and to treat mental disorders. Bainton felt that he needed to respond to Erikson’s psychobiography because it was a popular bestseller in his own specialist research area.5 He had largely ignored psychobiography movement but Erikson’s Luther provoked him into commentary because it was a rare full-scale biography.6 Regarded as an American intellectual hero, Erikson went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his later psychobiography, Gandhi’s Truth (1969), and he was later featured on the cover of Time Magazine (1970). Earlier psychobiographies of Luther, such as that of Preserved Smith, were partial accounts while Erikson’s was a sustained analysis.7 As William Todd Schultz noted, psychobiography most often targets one facet of a life at a time, a more or less discrete episode or event or action, not ‘the’ life in all its yawning immensity (unless, as in rare cases, such as Erikson’s books on Luther and Gandhi, one attempts a full-scale assessment of a life).8 Bainton was not alone among historians in his diffidence to engage with Erickson: Richard Marius has argued that historians become ‘edgy’ whenever Erikson’s book is mentioned,9 [b]ut since Erikson has been so influential in the general populace, historians and biographers feel an obligation to declare that they think Erikson is wrong … they do so with a certain faint distaste, as though they were changing an academic diaper on their beloved baby, the Reformation.10

124  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography Bainton believed that Erikson was ‘better equipped than any other psychoanalyst to write good psychobiography, as a “trained psychiatrist with clinical experience”’. He had picked a good subject—the ‘inner history of Luther’, who was a remarkable subject comparable to ‘Darwin, Freud and Shaw’ and worthy of analysis. Erikson was not ‘narrowly addicted to his own discipline’; rather, he recognised ‘the soundness with limits of several approaches’.11 For all these reasons, ‘Erikson’s Luther’ called ‘attention to possible ways of understanding Luther which’, Bainton believed, ‘deserv[ed] to be considered’ seriously.12 He credited Erikson with some valid insights. For instance, Erikson interrogated Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, arguing that it amounted to a turning away from the notion of God as a father-judge to seeing God as a nursing mother who suckles her child, without any reference to worthiness, and, in turn, the child in perfect trust simply receives the nursing.13 Bainton also granted Erikson ‘sound sense’ in his ‘treatment of Luther’s view of sex and his use of scatology’. To take another example, he thought the view Erikson took of Luther’s attitude in the Peasants’ War was also ‘thoroughly fair and sound’.14 German-born and of Danish ancestry, Erikson (1902–1992) had trained in Vienna with Sigmund Freud and his daughter, Anna Freud, becoming a  full member of both the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association. He had then migrated to the United States in 1933, where he practised as a psychoanalyst.15 He joined academia initially at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, before joining, in turn, Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. As a developmental psychoanalyst, Erikson is usually associated with his theory on the psychological development of human beings which differed from Freud’s. Freud had identified five stages of psychosexual development, from infancy up to the teenage years. Erikson extended his view of identity formation well beyond this range. His clinical work included youths and young adults who struggled to become an independent person in their own right. Erikson disputed that people were psychologically stable as adults, positing, eventually, the ‘life cycle’ of eight ‘psychosocial’ stages from birth to old age and involving seven crises. He weighted these stages, however, stressing the importance of the identity crisis that strikes people in late adolescence and early adulthood, and which, in particular gifted and disturbed individuals, such as Luther, could continue into their thirties. Erikson used historical biography, and, in the first instance, Luther’s ‘identity crisis’, to make his points about identity crises in human beings.16 In this sense, the individual was representative of the many.17 He argued that Luther was alienated from his brutal father and the career path he had intended for his son. Luther also rejected his mother. He joined a monastery and had a late-­ onset identity crisis which, ultimately, led to his becoming a leader in the Reformation. Bainton thought Erikson was weak on research and a poor historian and he could not subscribe to his conclusions.18 Erikson, in turn, thought Bainton was ‘totally unenlightened’ about psychoanalysis.

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  125 So, while described as a psychoanalytic biography, Erikson’s approach departed from Freudian psychoanalytic orthodoxy in a number of ways. Both Freud and Erikson were concerned with individuals’ struggle to achieve independence and become a person in their own right. Freud had argued that the human personality is complex and made up of three components: the id was present from birth and was an infantile and primal force; the ego began to develop during the first three years of a child’s life; finally, the superego emerged at around age five. The ego and superego were counter forces that controlled instinct and allowed people to behave in socially acceptable ways. The fundamental components of personality were established by maturity. On the basis of years of clinical experience, Freud developed a number of theories with which to understand the behaviour of historical and contemporary subjects. The experiences of infancy and childhood had primacy in determining the shape of adult behaviour. Furthermore, human behaviour resulting from the interactions of three component parts of the mind or psyche— id, ego, superego—related to three levels of human consciousness: the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. Adult behaviour was largely determined by the unconscious. Sexual desire was the primary motivational energy of human life and was directed towards a wide variety of objects. Psychological development during childhood took place during five psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. The Oedipus complex, for instance, was related to a child’s unconscious desire for the opposite-sex parent and hatred for the same-sex parent. Children desire incest but had to repress that desire. That is, a conflictual process operated which led to psychic conflict which needed therapy to resolve.19 Erikson counselled avoiding what he called ‘originology’, however; that is, focusing only on childhood sources of adult personality without recognising the contributions of later developmental stages. He emphasised that social circumstances were no less important than the inner psyche in determining human personality; and this continued to develop throughout a life. Another key element in Erikson’s theory of successive changes in personality and modification of the ego was that the dynamics of the society in which a person lived determined the extent of the resolution of the changes. By placing the individual firmly in a societal milieu, Erikson suggested the degree to which exterior forces, such as political, economic and social systems, influenced a person’s interior emotional life. Furthermore, while Freud had concentrated on his patient’s psychopathology, distress or ‘flaws’, Erikson urged biography instead to seek the sources of their subject’s psychological strengths. Freud sought to decipher meanings from his patients’ unconscious; Erikson suggested biographers concentrate instead on the opaqueness in subjects’ recitation of their life’s records: to pay attention to obvious, conscious and deliberate gaps in their biographical record. In Luther’s case, Erikson focused on the absence of discussion of

126  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography his mother and looked for evidence that might productively bridge that ‘gap’. By comparison to Freud, Erikson was sophisticated. In his forensic review of Erikson’s work, Bainton found problems in both the book itself and its methodology as a model for historians writing biography, even though it was regarded as the best of its kind.20 In 1950, Bainton had written his own biography of Martin Luther, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (1950).21 A British-born American historian, Bainton (1894–1984) had emigrated with his family, first to Canada in 1898 and then, four years later, to the United States. He was educated at Yale University before taking up his role at Yale’s Divinity School in 1920 and serving on the faculty for 42 years (1920–1962). He was ordained as a Congregationalist minister in 1927.22 His biography of Luther was his most influential work; it won the Abingdon-Cokesbury Award for 1952 and at the time of his death it was still in print, having sold more than 1.2 million copies. Bainton wrote 30 books in his career and his contemporaries generally considered him to be the expert on the Reformation and Luther. His critique made clear he thought that the shortcomings outweighed any insights Erikson provided.23 First Bainton questioned whether the sources could sustain a psychoanalysis in Luther’s case: The attempt is worth making but exceedingly difficult. The dead cannot be interviewed. We are compelled to rely only on literary sources, and since the men of the past did not employ our categories and vocabulary, we have to scrutinize their asides and translate their terminology. To do this with any measure of success requires a through acquaintance with the man’s entire output. In the case of Luther the material for his later life is overwhelmingly abundant; for the earlier, disconcertingly slight.24 Erikson’s book, after all, was entitled ‘Young Man Luther’. His evidence for the early period, however, was ‘scant and late, and flimsy’. It relied on Luther’s Table Talk, which students transcribed from his verbal presentations when he was 50 years old.25 It was not corroborated by first-hand evidence and it is unclear that it was an exact transcription. An empiricist scrutinizing her sources would be suspicious of material with that kind of provenance. Secondly, and related to this, Bainton was scathing of Erikson’s historical understanding of the general historical context: Acquaintance with the man does not alone suffice. Granted that human nature is essentially unchanged over the centuries, human behaviour is drastically conditioned by environmental factors. Consequently one must master the milieu of the subject of the biography. Nor does the milieu suffice. One must be familial also with what

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  127 preceded. Out of his own past what did the man select? How did he combine and rework what went before? When it comes to Luther one must be thoroughly familiar with the Bible.26 In terms of the interpretation, Bainton questioned many points in detail. For instance, Erikson based Luther’s image of God on his childhood experiences of his own father, a ‘choleric, impulsive, irascible’ force. Bainton argued that contemporary scholastic theologians debated a number of views of God, with which Luther was familiar. Some argued that the nature of God was largely driven by impulse or whim, sometimes involving grace; others—predestinarians—believed that God made deliberate decisions of individual destiny without consideration of merit; others, especially in the Augustinian tradition, believed that God would bestow mercy on the elect. Still others thought that God’s ways were simply beyond interpretation by human’s rational capacities. Bainton argued that Luther tended first to the Augustinian view and later towards a new view of grace, thereby changing his views. Indeed, Luther’s development into maturity was part of a contemporary debate. It did not lie in his childhood and it definitely was not about solving his own later identity issues. Bainton noted that Erikson did not claim to have theological training and it showed; he reviewed ‘the history of Christian thought from the New Testament to Luther in about three pages’ and was obviously unfamiliar with the contemporary church developments.27 Moreover, Bainton disputed Erikson’s translations of the German because of his lack of church history. Worse, he was wedded to his human developmental theory sticking to his psychoanalytic interpretation without reference to context.28 Erikson concentrated on a psychobiographical interpretation, for instance, of Luther’s time in Erfurt as a student in the choir, when the future Reformer fell to the ground proclaiming ‘It isn’t me!’ (Ich bin’s nit!), which was cited as evidence of an identity crisis. Bainton argued it meant no such thing. There have been other interpretations: a direct revelation from God; a psychotic episode; even the loss of his battle with masturbation. He believed that Erikson retrospectively considered Luther’s life and thought in terms of identity theory rather than in the wider context of the sixteenth century.29 Banton argued wider issues were at play and Luther had to be contextualised. In addition to poor evidence and the neglect of context, Bainton was furthermore outraged at Erikson’s resort to speculation to fill out the gaps in his evidence. He complained ‘when all of the material is amassed and critically sifted lacunae appear’, which was common in history and biography, but Erikson’s huge gaps ‘can be bridged only by conjecture’.30 Moreover, he argued that psychoanalysis itself, the whole methodology, was uniformed conjecture. At one point Bainton suggested that ‘Luther’s theological development might have been just the same if he been left an orphan in infancy’.31 He argued that the ‘psychiatry may well contribute to

128  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography understanding by conjecture but a surmise is not to be treated as a fact and used as the basis for another surmise’. He alleged that Erikson drew projections from childhood to adolescence and maturity which were ‘sometimes false, sometimes unnecessary, and sometimes implausible’.32 For instance, Erikson argued Luther loved his mother because, Bainton quoting Erikson, ‘nobody would speak and sing as Luther did if his mother’s voice had not sung to him of some heaven’.33 Luther drew comfort and emotional nourishment from his mother but he was soon dominated by his ambitious father, Hans Luther, became distanced from his mother and dethroned the Virgin Mary (and all women) as a consequence.34 Luther then sought to escape his father, who was a brutal alcoholic tyrant with a red-hot temper. His father wanted him to graduate in law from the university at Erfurt, and prosper; instead, at the age of 21 in the summer of 1505, as he later said, he was hit by a bolt of lightning, Luther entered the Augustinian monastic order, and Erikson presumed, thereby rejected his father. Bainton argued that Luther’s relationship with his parents was strained, however, but not broken by his career decisions; Luther rejected the orthodox church rather than his parents. Luther, of course, became a doctor of theology, left the cloister, avoided martyrdom, married, translated the Bible into German and prospered; he did not need to be reconciled to his parents for he had never rejected them. Moreover, Bainton’s textual analysis of Luther’s Nativity sermons revealed a ‘reverence to the Virgin Mary’, rather than a hostility.35 In Bainton’s view, Luther’s theology was not a reaction to a brutal and alcoholic father, but more a response to the abuses he and others identified in the church and the terrifying theology of war.36 Instead of having the church mediate between you and God, Luther argued individuals needed to have a direct personal relationship to God. In summary, Bainton argued that Luther found the point where he found everything else, ‘in the Bible’. Indeed, Bainton intended in his own biography, above all, ‘to understand the man’, noting at the outset that One will not move far in this direction unless one recognises at the outset that Luther was above all else a man of religion. The great outward crises of his life which bedazzle the eyes of dramatic biographers were to Luther himself trivial in comparison with the inner upheavals of his questing after God. For that reason this study may appropriately begin with his first acute religious crisis in 1505 rather than with his birth in 1483. Childhood and youth will be drawn upon only to explain the entry into the monastery.37 At heart was the problem of historically accessing other minds. To be fair, however, Bainton believed Erikson had improved upon the methodology he inherited from Freud.38 Freud’s da Vinci was not the first psychobiography, but it was the most significant to that date.39 Historians ignored

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  129 Freud’s biographical work at the time, but by the 1950s were pointing to errors of fact, foremost among them a mistranslation in the study’s signature childhood memory upon which the psychobiography revolved.40 Bainton duly published his own biography in which he skimmed over Luther’s childhood and youth, concentrating in psychological terms on Luther’s struggle with despair, sometimes described as trials, tribulations, doubts or afflictions, all of which he defended with archival evidence. Luther referred to his crises as Anfechtung ‘the boundary line between faith and unbelief, between God’s kingdom and Satan’, an uncomfortable place which a sixteenth-century Christian inhabited.41 Christians could and should reach the state of mind of Jesus on the cross, no longer struggling to fight and commending their spirits into the hands of God. Meanwhile, fight, hope, fear, and debate were part of the human condition. Luther was ‘bold enough to say that the greater the Christian’s faith the greater the crisis of faith’.42 The disagreement between Bainton and Erikson raged on for several decades.43 Their debate is significant because Bainton and Erikson personify the wider debate. Bainton regarded the late 1950s as a turning point with a rise the popularity of psychobiography. He felt bound to take a stand against psychobiography, for about the same time as Erikson’s account of Luther in which he applied psychiatry to historical biography was published, Professor William Langer of Harvard in his presidential address to the American Historical Association declared that psychiatry was the next frontier of history.44 As Marius noted: The psychologist begins with the faith that certain things in human nature are always the same. People who experience roughly similar things (for example brutal fathers [or as Erikson would have had it, ‘post-adolescent identity in relationship to ideology’]), in any age will react in roughly similar ways (silence for years and then explosion) that will be translated into forms (theology, for example) appropriate to the culture. The historian, on the other hand, is persuaded that peculiar cultures create peculiar people and that analogies between past and present are dangerous.45 Some have argued that historians writing biography and psychoanalysts were approaching the same problem, testing ‘the statistically significant against the personally significant’.46 Marius thought that both were in error: many psychobiographers ‘treated evidence like a valet’ while many historians failed to be critical of their subjects, were too understanding and ‘excusing and explaining away … wrath, vulgarity and hatreds’.47 In particular, Bainton and his associates like Lewis W. Spitz and Roger A. Johnson were not prepared to accept shortcomings in Luther. They could learn from each other. Erikson himself was disinclined to directly debate with historians. He sought a union between psychoanalysis and the social sciences, but he

130  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography refused to respond to historians’ critiques. He continued to research and write psychobiographies and encouraged others to do so. Together with Robert Lifton, a psychiatrist, Bruce Mazlish, a historian at the Massachusetts Institution of Technology and Kenneth Keniston, author and psychiatrist, Erikson formed the Group for the Study of Psycho­ historical Processes in 1965. Commentators later excoriated Erikson for ‘failing to go public with his complaints against his critics because this precluded a sustained public dialogue’.48 Erikson was defensive about his psychobiographies with psychology colleagues as well as with historians. There were at least three waves of psychobiography in the twentieth century (interwar, postwar and the 1970s) with the psychobiographical approach peaking in the late 1970s. Over time Bainton refined the kind of collaboration he thought possible between historians writing biography and psychiatrists. He favoured behaviourist theories that individuals learned from interaction with their environments alongside humanist theories that regarded individuals capable of change if they so chose. Bainton was typical in excluding psychodynamic theories such as psychoanalysis however. He suggested a number of points at which a psychiatrist could at least tell us whether the inner torments of a man of the sixteenth century belong only to him and his period or to all of mankind.49 This issue of the relationship between the individual and the wider ‘mental world’ or ‘mentalités’ came to predominate in historians’ discussions of the problem of other minds. In this chapter I consider this debate over the inner mind of subjects and the specific problem in biography for historians to understand other minds, collectively as well as individually. I argue that, as empiricists, it is unsurprising that historians writing biography have not been enthusiastic about hidden motives and invariant development.

Psychobiographers try to take hold of biography? In October 1909 Freud wrote to his friend Carl Gustav Jung that it was time for psychologists to ‘take hold of biography’. He had just presented a paper on biography to his colleagues in the Wednesday evening seminar series of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. They began meeting from 1908, sometimes to analyse the biographies of famous writers and ‘great men’ because of concerns over the ethics of discussing patients’ cases in the group.50 Freud had decided to develop his recent paper as a psychoanalytic psychobiography, enthusing to Jung about his even more ambitious project: We must … also take hold of biography. I have had an inspiration since my return. The riddle of Leonardo da Vinci’s character has suddenly

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  131

Figure 4.2  Freud with members of his inner circle of loyal supporters, the Wednesday Psychological Society, Berlin, (1922). Front row (l–r): Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933), Hanns Sachs (1881–1947). Back row (l–r) Otto Rank (1884–1939), Karl Abraham (1887–1925), Max Eitingon (1881–1943), Ernest Jones (1879–1958). Bridgeman.

become clear to me. That would be a first step in the realm of biography. But the material concerning L. is so sparse that I despair of demonstrating my conviction intelligibly to others … I have ordered an Italian work on his youth and am now waiting eagerly for it.51 Freud was close to the ‘youth of psychology’. His historical interests were anticipated by Wilhelm Wundt, regarded as the first psychologist, who had established the Institute for Experimental Psychology at Leipzig in 1879. Wundt warned about Freud’s ‘clinical tack’, believing instead that cultural historical study, Völkerpsychologie, ‘should be studied separately from experimentation and clinical work’. Freud often quoted Wundt, despite the latter’s scepticism about his project and belief that research into the ‘unconscious’ was merely speculative. Freud became most attracted to the ‘unconscious’ and related it to his clinical work. He believed that his new theory, ‘psychoanalysis’, would explain both psychopathology and also the creation of the great intellectual and cultural works in history.

132  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography As is well known, Freud formulated psychoanalysis as a clinical method in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explain and unravel the complexities of human motivation through a concentration on the unconscious aspects of the human mind. He came to believe that the working of the adult mind was unconsciously predetermined by childhood experiences and that these unconscious feelings manifest themselves through recognisable pathological symptoms in later life. Trained psychoanalysts could identify these symptoms through interview techniques with a prolonged series of meetings between the analyst and the patient, or analysand. This ‘sophisticated and scientific’ method fruitfully opened up patterns of memories and causes of emotions that common sense would have difficulty in discovering because psychoanalysis broke down patients’ repressions. Humans deceived themselves by rarely giving a true account of their motivations. They needed help to recognise the patterns and discern the causes of their behaviours. Freud’s approach teased out the processes of personality and the hidden mental structures of the unconscious mind through a sustained study of dreams, infantile sexuality, libido, delusions and so on. Freud described dreams, for instance, as the ‘royal road to the unconscious’; at the same time their ‘logic’ was different from the logic of conscious thought.52 Freud held that historical events were caused by the decisions of individual actors which could be understood. Similarly, geniuses and the creative were the result of individual psychological struggles. The unconscious and irrational motives or ‘complexes’ of human agents determined their decisions, and the patterns and their causes could, and should, be fathomed. Originally, it was believed that psychotherapy would result in the persistence of conflicts, or that therapy would suggest new ones, so many psychoanalysts did not aim for behavioural change. Over time, followers of Freud modified or extended his theories with the primary use of psychoanalysis lying in developing insight as well as treating psychiatric disorders and psychopathologies. This was coupled to a belief in agency rather than structural determinants. The therapeutic relationship could have a clinical impact.53 This was for the future, however. Intent on analysis, Freud duly received the material on da Vinci mentioned in his letter to Jung and, as stated earlier, he published the first psychobiography in 1910, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood.54 Freud’s interpretation was centred around da Vinci’s 1510 oil painting of The Virgin and Child with St Anne—that is, Anne with her daughter the Virgin Mary and her grandson, Jesus. Freud believed that Mary’s garment was in the shape of a vulture. This becomes significant because da Vinci had written about being attacked as an infant in his crib by a vulture. Freud interpreted this as a memory of his mother breastfeeding him. Egyptian hieroglyphs represented the mother as a vulture for ancient Egyptians believed they were impregnated by the wind because there were no male vultures. This then constituted a ‘passive homosexual’

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  133 childhood fantasy and helps us explain da Vinci, who was illegitimate and after infancy was brought up by his father’s wife, thus having two mothers.55 It has been argued that this whole schema was based on a mistranslation and a misunderstanding about his birthmother’s role in his life: it was Freud’s rather than da Vinci’s fantasy.56 While Freud’s da Vinci was not translated into English until 1954, a number of non-German-speaking psychoanalysts and biographers were acquainted with and propagated its ideas.57 Three Viennese schools of psychotherapy developed, each named after its founder: Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Viktor Frankl. Others built onto Freud’s thinking. For example, between 1941 and 1946 Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and a group of British analysts in the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) debated child development and the psychoanalytical techniques to treat children and adults.58 In the 1940s, the BPAS split into three separate training divisions: Kleinian, Anna Freudian, and independent. Despite the development of non-Freudian approaches to psychology, psychoanalysis most inspired biographies, and a series of psychoanalysts, most of whom were psychiatrists, wrote a number of psychobiographies in Freud’s wake.59 These became psychohistorical classics. The Welsh medical practitioner Ernest Jones, a neurologist, was attracted to psychopathology after reading Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case: Hysteria’ (1905), a case study analysis of ‘Dora’ Bauer (a pseudonym Freud gave a patient he treated for 11 weeks in 1900). Jones learnt German in order to read more of Freud’s works. Together with Jung, he organised the inaugural psychoanalytical conference in Austria in 1908 where he first met Freud. While living in North America, he established the American Psychoanalytic Association (1911). He has been described as ‘Freud’s wizard’, sometimes Rottweiler, for popularising psychoanalysis in Britain where he returned before the outbreak of World War One. Jones wrote an essay explaining William Shakespeare’s character Hamlet in terms of the Oedipus complex (1910), which was later published as Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). He went on to found and edit the International Journal of Psychoanalysis from 1920 to 1939.60 Max Graf, again, a close associate of Freud, whose wife was probably one of his patients, wrote on Richard Wagner in 1911. Karl Abraham, an influential German psychoanalyst, and a collaborator of Freud, wrote a psychobiography of the Italian painter Giovanni Segantini in terms of the mother complex (1912). As discussed, in 1913, the analyst Preserved Smith published ‘Luther’s Early Development in the Light of Psychoanalysis’, which is described as a classic Freudian ‘Primer’ with ‘an alcoholic father, oedipal rage, obsession with the demonic, repressed elementary sexual life, harsh home discipline, preoccupation with concupiscence and depression’.61 These foundational texts were followed up by many others in a similar vein. Anthony wrote on Margaret Fuller (1920), Harlow on Samuel Adams (1923), Krutch on Edgar Allan Poe (1926) and Clark on Abraham Lincoln (1923). Psychobiographies also appeared on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Molière,

134  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography Sand (the first woman subject), Goethe, Coleridge, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander the Great and so on. At the same time, there were a small number of historically-trained biographers clustered around the Bloomsbury group who also wrote psychobiography and who had a more immediate impact on historians’ biographical practices. Lytton Strachey did not believe in archival research; his originality lay in new ideas while using extant biographies and histories. E. M. Forster wrote of Strachey, a fellow ‘Bloomsberries’ and a friend, that he had done ‘what no biographer had done before: he managed to get inside his subject … Lytton Strachey makes his people move; they are alive; like characters in a novel; he constructs them or rather reconstructs them from within’.62 Strachey began rallying against Victorian prudery and self-complacency from at least 1904.63 He began to search for the secret motives of his subjects. He only came across Freudian ideas after he had settled on his approach. In the preface to his famous Eminent Victorians, in 1918, Strachey wrote of biography ‘attacking its subject in unexpected places’ and shooting ‘a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undefined’.64 Martin Kallich has carefully analysed Strachey’s personality and publications and shows that, initially, he was not motivated by studies in psychology more generally: rather ‘Civilization was Strachey’s religion, Voltaire was his God’.65 His views on sex, censorship and freedom of speech owed much to his studies in French literature and the spirit of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.66 While Freud’s ideas had begun to be circulated in Britain in the late nineteenth century and a first translation appeared in 1909, biographers in the English-speaking world had not yet applied them.67 Through a consideration of Strachey’s writings over time, Kallich shows that, while Strachey set out to enquire into individuals in the way that ‘the light which his career throws upon the spirit of his age’, he was also interested in ‘the psychological problems suggested by his inner history’, and that his work increasingly reveals Freudian sources.68 There are glimpses in his Queen Victoria (1921), but it was his 1928 Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History in which he most noticeably ‘rides a Freudian thesis’.69 More generally, however, Strachey was drawn to human complexity rather than to Freudian psychopathology. And while he gradually took up the ideas of the new psychology which were ‘in the air’, he never used the psychoanalytical technical jargon.70 Bloomsbury’s connection with Freud can be described as ‘overdetermined’. In 1912, Lytton’s brother, James Strachey, reviewed the activities of the Society for Psychical Research for the Spectator as a journalist. His reading started with Freud’s paper ‘A Note on the Unconscious in PsychoAnalysis’, published in the society’s journal in 1912. In 1914 Leonard Woolf reviewed a translation of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) for the New Weekly. He had read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in preparation. He noted that

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  135 Whether one believes in his theories or not, one is forced to admit that he writes with great subtlety of mind, a broad and sweeping imagination more characteristic of a poet than the scientist or medical practitioner [… his work] was often a series of brilliant and suggestive hints …. There can be no doubt that there is a substantial amount of truth in the main thesis of Freud’s book, and that truth is of great value.71 In 1917 Lytton Strachey reviewed Freud’s Jokes and the Unconscious, in the New Statesman. Other ‘Bloomsberries’ took it up much more strenuously. Suffering postnatal depression, Karin Costelloe, Virginia Woolf’s sister-inlaw, had ‘a long talk about psychoanalysis’ with James Strachey and his future wife, Alix Sargant, in Florence; she also began reading Freud.72 By June 1919, James and Alix (they married in 1920) and Adrian and Karin Stephen had all decided to become psychoanalysts. Leonard Woolf noted in his autobiography, which was as much about Virginia and Bloomsbury as himself, that Adrian, ‘who worked with Sir Paul Vinogradoff on medieval law, suddenly threw the Middle Ages and law out of the window’ for psychoanalysis.73 As Virginia noted in her diary, ‘Adrian and Karin had given up philosophy, social reform, law, and all the rest of it; they’re going into practice together as Psycho-analysts’.74 First, they made arrangements to be analysed, which was a training requirement for analysts. Jones, who had been president of the BPAS since 1913, recommended that the Stephens become medically qualified as well as receive training in psychoanalysis. James Glover analysed the Stephens. In 1921 when Glover had travelled to Berlin to undergo analysis himself with Karl Abraham, Adrian and Karin followed him. Returning to Britain, Adrian proselytised for Freud, reviewing his works and giving talks on his approach. For instance, he gave a talk on ‘the possibilities of psycho-analysis’ to Virginia Woolf’s branch of the Women’s Cooperative Guild which sought to provide social and other services to its members.75 The Stephens qualified as medical doctors in 1926. They worked at Glover’s London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis, which had opened in January 1926. Glover had been medical director of the Brunswick Square Medico-Psychological Clinic but died shortly after opening his new clinic; Ella Sharpe taking over Adrian’s analysis and Sylvia Payne took over Karin’s.76 Adrian Stephen argued that the main aim of psychoanalysis was to enable the patient’s mind freedom and liberty to freely associate, ‘to allow fresh phantasies and memories to come into his consciousness, and to trace down to their origin as many as possible of his stereotyped reactions’.77 Adrian qualified as a psychoanalyst in July 1930, with his election that day to full membership of the BPAS, Karin following in 1931. They became prominent in the British psychoanalysis movement. Meanwhile James and Alix Strachey had also travelled to Berlin on Jones’ advice where Freud analysed James and, for some time, Alix.78 In January 1920 Freud invited the Stracheys to translate several of his works

136  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography

Figure 4.3 Not all members of the Bloomsbury group become supporters of psychoanalysis, with Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf using ‘psychological insights’ in their biographies. L to R: James Strachey, Lytton Strachey, Thoby Stephen, Adrian Stephen and Virginia Stephen in Fritham, Hampshire (1901), b/w photo. Bridgeman Images, Look and Learn.

into English. Beginning with Freud’s Collected Papers in four volumes in 1924 and 1925, it became their life’s work. James Strachey worked in collaboration with Freud’s daughter, Anna, assisted by Alix Strachey. Later Alan Tyson saw the project to a conclusion. Not all of the Bloomsbury circle was equally enamoured of psychoanalysis. Virginia Woolf, for example, was often critical of psychoanalysis. When Adrian had a nervous breakdown under analysis, she noted in her diary, ‘For my part, I doubt if family life has all the power of evil attributed to it, or psycho-analysis of good’.79 Nevertheless, in one of those other Bloomsbury circle entanglements, Leonard Woolf was instrumental in publicising Freud’s work in Britain. Always mindful of Virginia’s mental fragility, as we have learnt earlier, Leonard wished to create a therapeutic distraction for her from the intellectual intensity of writing. In 1924, James Strachey approached Leonard Woolf with the idea that the small, albeit rapidly growing Hogarth Press should become the official English publishers of the International Psychoanalytischer Library. The Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag had published the Gesammelte Schriften of

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  137 Freud in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (and the complete works in German were to be published in London in 1942) but the idea was that James and Alix would also translate Freud’s works into English. Some time early in 1924 James asked me whether I thought the Hogarth Press could publish for the London Institute. The Institute, he said, had begun the publication of the International PsychoAnalytical Library in 1921 and had already published six volumes, which included two of Freud’s works, Beyond Pleasure Principle and Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego … The Institute had hitherto been their own publisher, printing and binging their books in Vienna and having them ‘distributed’ by a large London publishing firm.80 The Institute found this unsatisfactory and at this point Jones asked James Strachey to sound out Leonard Woolf.81 Leonard was enthusiastic despite the risks: ‘for a fledgling inexperienced publisher this was a bold undertaking’.82 Freud had given the American copyright to his friend and translator Dr A.A. Brill, but a deal was done with his son. After buying the various rights for £800, publishing Freud proved to be profitable and the Hogarth Press began to pay Sigmund Freud a royalty. The press published nearly 70 volumes for the Pyschoanalytical Library, the English translation of every book Freud wrote from 1924 until his death in 1939 and his complete works in 24 volumes, between 1953 and 1964. James and Alix Strachey’s translation became standard; they are responsible for much of the Freudian terminology in English. The Woolfs did not meet Freud until January 1939, not long before his death; ‘almost ceremoniously he presented Virginia with a flower’.83 Virginia first began to read Freud after that encounter, while she was writing her biography on Roger Fry. Before then Virginia claimed that ‘I have not studied Dr Freud or any psychoanalyst—indeed I think I have never read any of their books: my knowledge is merely from superficial talk. Therefore, any use of their methods must be instinctive’.84 She was referring here to such matters as the tensions between parents and children. Similarly, Leonard later considered that she had been ‘interested in psychoanalysis in a vague and general way’.85 Fictional though her biographies Orlando and Flush are, and sceptical though she was, Virginia Woolf understood Freudian concepts because they permeated Bloomsbury, although, as with many other feminists, she was especially aware of his gendered blind spots.86 Meanwhile Lytton Strachey did not read German and it was only in discussions with James, and especially Alix as Barbara Caine has shown, when he was writing Elizabeth and Essex (1928), that he studied Freudianism.87 Indeed, Lytton dedicated Elizabeth and Essex to

138  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography Alix and James Strachey.88 Clearly ‘Freudian’ ideas were in the Bloomsbury ‘air’ at this time. Bloomsbury’s familiarity with Freudian ideas was facilitated institutionally in the Bloomsbury Group’s Memoir Club, however, which Molly MacCarthy established in 1920 allegedly to encourage her husband, Desmond to write his memoirs. The Memoir Club replaced the Novel Club which had been founded in 1913 and faded away, with shades, of course, of the Cambridge Apostles (to which Strachey and his fellow Bloomsberries, John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf, had all been elected). The Memoir Club endured until 1964, producing an estimated 125 memoirs— book-length and self-contained essays of self-analysis, many revealing their Freudian inspiration.89 It was to this forum that Virginia Woolf revealed the sexual abuse she had experienced at the hands of her stepbrothers as a young girl.90 Bloomsbury’s Memoir Club members ‘took up’ and popularised Freudian insights to varying degrees. The group was more unanimous and consistent over their view that Victorian and Edwardian biography was psychologically challenged than in propagating a united position on what psychological theory they ought to have adopted. Carlyle and G.M. Trevelyan were in their sights, quite literally.91 In 1928 Strachey argued that the shortcomings of Trevelyan’s uncle, Thomas Babington Macaulay, were a result of his profound neurosis, his sexlessness. He asserted this on the basis of Macaulay’s never having been in love or marrying. Strachey suggested Carlyle, for instance, wanted to clean the dirt from his subjects and put them on a pedestal. One can imagine what he would have made of Thomas’s relationship with his wife, Jane Carlyle, if he had turned his sights on that.92 The Bloomsbury group is implicated in popularising Freudian analysis among biographers more widely. The so-called ‘New Biography’ was characterised as psychological, if not psychoanalytical.93 Bloomsbury sought out literary truth, vivid detail and psychological insight. Harold Nicolson, in his Hogarth Lectures on Literature, which Leonard and Virginia Woolf published in 1927 as The Development of English Biography, argued that historians cared less about the study of an individual than about a study of history expressed in and through an individual.94 The real problem of biography was personality, something to which historians did not pay sufficient attention. As a consequence, biography written by historians was useless. As has been discussed already, in many ways Bloomsbury unfairly characterised ‘all historians writing biography’. They overlooked historians’ increasing concern with the problem of other minds developing at the same time as Bloomsbury’s curiosity over psychology. A number of historians underwent analysis, but to a large extent most historians avoided psychobiography professionally before World War Two. That changed after 1945, often in connection with historians who had direct experience with psychoanalysis.

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  139

Postwar prescriptions of psychobiography for historians A second postwar wave of psychobiography was signalled when psychology became the subject of Harvard History Professor William L. Langer’s presidential address to the American Historical Association (AHA). In December 1957, he counselled fellow historians to use ‘modern psychology’.95 Langer, a leading American historian of European diplomacy, had been an intelligence expert in Washington during World War Two and was involved in contemplating fascist psychology. Daniel Pick has argued that Western intelligence used psychoanalytical ideas, such as the superego, to understand fascism.96 After the war Langer accused his fellow historians of timid conservatism and urged them to boldly emulate the ‘speculative audacity’ of the natural scientists.97 He exhorted AHA members to examine and analyse the unconscious foundations of the social life of the past. By that he meant using psychoanalytical methods. Langer was fully aware that ‘despite the ‘prodigious impact’ of psychoanalysis on many, perhaps even most, fields of knowledge, historians had ‘maintained an almost completely negative attitude’ towards Freud and the teachings of psychoanalysis.98 His impatience was related to the fact that psychoanalysis was probably more widely accepted in the USA than in any other country.99 Langer suggested that the development of a new and separate discipline of psychology at the end of the nineteenth century put an end to the uncritical ‘commonsense’ on the subject, or rather it should do so. Despite their long-held interest in other minds, however, historians in the British world were generally antagonistic to the new science of psychology, which German academics had pioneered in the nineteenth century. Psychologists were appointed to chairs in Germany from the turn of the century.100 The first professors of psychology, however, were not appointed to Cambridge until 1931 and Oxford in 1947. Henry Tasman Lovell became the first Professor of Psychology in Australia in 1929, based at the University of Sydney. Similarly, while there were mental and moral philosophers, Ernest Beaglehole was the first Professor of Psychology to be appointed in New Zealand, in 1948. Secondly, while Europe had been the ideological centre of psychological study, the rise of fascism resulted in a diaspora. As indicated, many of the widely known psychoanalytical theorists, Sigmund Freud, Erik H. Erikson, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Erich Fromm, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Adolf Meyer and Karen Horney, were Swiss-, Austrian- or German-born. Indeed, Freud had finally been persuaded to flee to England in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution. The war was a third major stimulus for psychology. There was extensive mental ill-health in the wake of World War One among returned soldiers who were ‘shell-shocked’ and traumatised. Government agencies supported the development of clinical responses to soldier’s mental problems.101 In the USA, for instance, the number of members of the American

140  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography Psychological Association between the turn of the century and 1929 grew nearly eightfold, from 129 to over 1,000 members; it had risen further, to 2,376, by 1960.102 Military authorities also began screening recruits.103 The events of World War Two dwarfed these earlier developments, resulting in a massive expansion of clinical psychology, with mental health treatment extending out of state hospitals, and asylums and a wider spread of psychological medicine in the community.104 While the American Psychiatric Association had 2,295 members in 1940, the military had 2,400 physicians assigned to therapeutic duties, administering psychoanalytical interventions in field hospitals and psychiatric facilities for soldiers on active service by1945.105 In the wake of World War Two, mental ill-health was normalised: Jacob W. Klapman argued that many ‘normal’ people were ‘eccentric, unhappy, and ill-adjusted’ and in need of therapy.106 The number of psychiatrists in private practice in the USA was 1,500 in 1938, 8,000 by 1948 and 11,000 by 1959.107 In proportion, two-thirds of American psychiatrists worked in hospitals in 1940 but by 1956 only 17 per cent did. Psychology was once available only to the elite who paid for it or those incarcerated who were given it; by the 1950s, it was extensively available.108 At a peak, 12.5 percent of American medical students chose psychiatry as a profession in 1954. By 1957 Life magazine had proclaimed ‘The Age of Psychology in the United States’.109 Steven Ward argued that psychological knowledge helped to remake society.110 Similarly, Joy Damousi argued that psychoanalysis was linked with modernity and it remade Australia.111 In 1978 Saul Friedlander had suggested that ‘in order to understand psychoanalysis, one must have been psychoanalyzed’.112 Lytton Strachey’s and Virginia Woolf’s relations, rather than they themselves, had of course been psychoanalysed. It is unsurprising, perhaps, to discover that Langer’s younger brother, Walter Charles, was a psychoanalyst.113 In Vienna in the 1930s, Walter Langer studied with and was analysed by Anna Freud. Walter also saw Freud frequently and accompanied him on his trip into exile in 1938. And he had written on historical subjects: for instance, his assessment of Hitler’s mentality made use of Freudian technique. This point is historically significant. As H. Stuart Hughes suggested, I hope that in the coming years a significant minority of young historians, particularly those most concerned with the psychological aspects of historical interpretation, will be going through personal analysis under the guidance of experience clinicians. For the others, it may be possible to work out a shorter program in consultation with the Psychoanalytic Institutes established near some of our major universities.114 A number of those entreating historians to adopt psychoanalysis were European and American biographers intimately acquainted with psychoanalysis. They called for collaboration between history and psychoanalysis.

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  141 German-born Peter Gay, a professor of history at Yale University, was also a research (non-medical) candidate in psychoanalytic training at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis in the 1970s. He published Freud for Historians (1985).115 German-born Peter Loewenberg was another who wrote biographies and made the case for historians taking up psychoanalysis.116 He was instrumental in establishing research training fellowships in psychoanalysis in conjunction with the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute.117 In 1993, together with Nancy Chodorow and Ben Nemiroff, colleagues from University of California campuses, he founded the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium. His view was that psychoanalysis allowed the historian ‘to more effectively move back and forth across the internal boundaries between conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious processes’.118 In 1983 he published Decoding the Past: The Psychoanalytic Approach.119 He was joined by an increasing number of fellow travellers. Hans Meyerhoff suggested that, at base, psychoanalysis was historical—‘[p]sychoanalysis and history have a great deal in common’.120 Friedlander noted that of all the fields of historical research, biography was best suited to psychoanalysts because both groups of scholars were concerned with discovering human motivations, specifically and diachronically.121 Some historians, such as T. G. Ashplant, continue to note that while ‘[t]he central concerns of psychoanalysis are at first sight considerably removed from those of most historical writing’, a dialogue was mutually useful.122 Like many of those advocating psychobiography, Gay and Loewenberg had themselves been analysed, as Hughes, and Langer before him, had advocated.123 Above all, the wave of psychobiographies in the postwar period written by historians grew, particularly those by political historians and biographers.124 This choice of subjects seemed to echo Carlyle’s interests.125 Erikson had written on major religious figures such as Luther and Gandhi.126 Others wrote on creative and literary artists: Humberto Nagera wrote on Vincent Van Gogh (1967), John Cody wrote on the inner life of Emily Dickinson (1971); Mazlish chose father, James, and son, John Stuart Mill as his subjects (1975) while Walter Jackson Bate considered Samuel Johnson (1977).127 Political leaders were the most popular: Freud and William Bullitt had written on Woodrow Wilson, which was finally translated in 1967, Mazlish on Nixon (1972) and Robert Waite on Adolf Hitler (1977).128 There was also institutionalisation: an increasing number of historians published with The History of Childhood Quarterly between 1973 and 1976. Its editor, Lloyd deMause, changed its name to the Journal of Psychohistory in 1976. Some historians, like Langer, began publishing prescriptive instructions to their colleagues. Friedlander did not write a psychobiography but he did write a conditional prescription for it. Gay was a cultural historian of ideas. Among his publications was Freud, Jews and Other Germans (1978), an examination of the impact of Freudian ideas on German culture, as

142  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography well as a best-seller, Freud: A Life for Our Times (1988).129 Most of his work was concerned about the socio-cultural impact of psychoanalysis.130 His Freud for Historians focused on ‘six concentric rings of intellectual fortification mobilized against the Freudian assault’.131 Gay offered a spirited defence to ‘anti-Freudians’, concentrating upon the more sophisticated practitioners, as indeed he himself was. Historians were now being directed by some of their peers who were not psychoanalysts.

Historians finally respond: heated debate over psychobiography in the 1970s and 1980s The third wave of psychobiography elicited a response from historians writing biography and became a significant controversy.132 It coincided with the peak in psychobiographies. Zoltán Kőváry suggested that there were 300 psychobiographic analyses published up to 1960. William McKinley Runyan surveyed psychobiographical publications in English up to 1980: he identified 617 publications, with the peak of 212 being written between 1975 and 1979.133 The debate over this literature, and the prescriptive entreaties for more, did not include historians alone. As indicated above, there was a third front: many empiricist psychologists opposed psychoanalytical approaches too.134 By the 1970s the American Psychiatric Association considered the issue in a special taskforce report, published in 1976. Their findings joined in that criticism, especially the view that colleagues were untrained in history and naive about sources. The report found frequent reliance upon secondary or even tertiary sources instead of primary sources, resulting in an inadequate perception and presentation of the socio-cultural matrix in which the subjects functioned. A well-known example is afforded by Freud’s mistakes, in his study of Leonardo, of accepting it as a given fact that Leonardo had an early memory of a vulture, when it was, in fact, of a kite, and of his attaching special and personal significance to certain features of Leonardo’s paintings which are, in all probability, the result of a mere acquiescence in conventional modes of representation. This error—inadequate attention to primary sources, and, more especially, to primary sources other than the material emanating from the subject or subjects—is one to which the psychiatrist is especially prone, not merely because of insufficient training in historiography, but because, in his own discipline, he has learned to place very heavy emphasis upon ‘psychic reality,’ with some consequent neglect of ‘external’ or ‘objective’ reality.135 James W. Anderson’s 1981 survey of the debate is a good summary ‘on the six principal difficulties that critics have identified as inhering in the

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  143 psychobiographical approach’: that of reductionalism, inflated expectations, disparagement, applying contemporary psychology to another era, the inadequacies in psychological theory and analysing an absent subject.136 Psychoanalysis reduced complex human psychology to a one-dimensional notion of psychopathology, based on childhood conflicts, applying fixed psychological formulas.137 Character was complex while psychoanalysis was a fixed-trait psychological approach, often honing in on a single psychological cause to personality development.138 David Stannard declared that History was quite literary ‘shrinking’ under psychoanalytical work.139 He was sceptical of its determinism: under psychobiography, individuals and events lost their autonomy. Even structuralists raised some issues. Hans-Ulrich Wehler complained that psychoanalysis failed to consider the wider social causes of psychology, even when it adopted more complex developmental schemas other than Freud’s childhood psychosexualities or considered group psychohistory.140 Second, and related to this, Anderson noted the criticism that psychobiographers’ explanations suffered from inflated expectations. They needed to be contextualised. Psychoanalysis was not a covering law which alone explained history; rather, it was one of a number of explanations. More broadly, Anderson agreed with Lawrence Stone that events mostly resulted from ‘multiple historical causes’, psychology vying with sociological, cultural and other historical and external factors.141 Anderson argued, however, that those factors did not compete; they were critical for ‘coexisting or corresponding processes’.142 He conceded, however, that reductionism, putting the spotlight on one factor, was not necessarily methodologically poor. Thirdly, psychobiographers tended to either ‘idealise’ (or more often ‘disparage’) their subjects.143 Certainly, Trevelyan levelled that accusation at Strachey, pointing out to the latter that his book on Elizabeth I and Essex was so much more empathetic than his Eminent Victorians or Queen Victoria, because he actually liked the subjects and was not so disapproving about them.144 In general, Anderson, and many others, thought psychobiographers concentrated on psychopathology, and therefore tended to portray subjects as deviant,145 something Richard Ellmann described as ‘biographies without heroes’.146 Anderson thought that good psychobiography need not do that: that it could consider both normality and creativity, but that it rarely did.147 Fourthly, some historians have been critical of the idea that humans have a fixed and unchanging psyche with similar psychological development in various cultures across time. Psychobiography’s transhistoricalism and cross-cultural generality was a problem. Even if one accepted that a person’s human nature was based on childhood conflicts and psychopathology, historians tended to argue that the nature and content of these conflicts and concern were contingent and exhibited cross-cultural variation. Jacques Barzun complained that psychoanalysis emphasis on an invariable human

144  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography nature undermined agency and individuality.148 Similarly, Robert Coles and Kenneth Lynn argued that psychobiography was ahistorical.149 Fifthly, a number of historians pointed to the inadequacies of evidence to support psychobiographical theory.150 There was often little evidence for unconscious motivation.151 What about issues which were subclinical? The evidence tendered was often speculative and unvalidated. It could hardly sustain psychological theory. Stannard argued that psychoanalysis had a ‘cavalier attitude toward fact, a contorted attitude toward logic, an irresponsible attitude towards theory validation [as well as …] a myopic attitude toward cultural difference and anachronism’.152 Finally, there was the clinical limitations; that psychoanalytical therapeutic techniques could not be ‘properly’ applied to historical figures. Psychobiography all too often analysed an absent subject and involved postdictive reconstructions, that is explaining things after the fact.153 The psychobiographer could not directly analyse the subject using the central clinical tool of free association.154 Most psychobiographers did not have sufficiently rich sources on the inner lives of their subjects.155 Anderson did not accept Barzun’s view that the shortage of material, what are known as egodocuments or ‘dream-material’, meant that the subject could not ‘be put on the couch’ and, therefore, psychoanalysis was simply impossible. Rather, Anderson argued that psychobiographers had advantages over analysts. There were ways to compensate for any shortcomings. For instance, ‘distorted’ views might be corrected by history and perspective. They could rely on multiple informants and non-therapeutic considerations to develop a ‘balanced, well-rounded portrait of his subject’.156 Indeed we have one example of a historical biographer who was able to put her subject on the couch, but to no real avail. Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography of Anne Sexton (1991) used psychoanalytical notes and therapy tapes. Anne Sexton had begun writing poetry at the age of 29 to keep from killing herself. She held on to language for dear life and somehow—in spite of alcoholism and the mental illness that ultimately led her to suicide— managed to create a body of work that won a Pulitzer Prize. Sexton taped interviews herself because she could not remember what she confessed in her therapy sessions to her analyst owing to her drinking and drug taking habits. When Sexton died, Middlebrook requested the tapes from the analyst, who saw no ethical reason to withhold them. While the biography was nominated for the National Book Award, most reviewers noted its quality was not as a result of the advantage the author had in terms of sources. Anderson argued for sophisticated psychobiography. He promoted strategies for minimizing the difficulties in writing psychobiography [so rather than clashing…] they fit together into a coherent approach. This approach requires the psychobiographer to do thorough research and immerse himself in the source material; to develop an empathic relationship

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  145 with his subject, a relationship which aids him in ‘listening’ to the material through his model of the subject’s personality; to eschew dogmatic personality theories; and, by continually going back and forth between hypotheses and the data, gradually to build a portrait of the subject.157 Psychobiographers such as Frank Manuel and Leon Edel advocated omitting the psychological terminology.158 Stannard argued, however, that ‘[w] hile certain some works of psychohistory are vastly superior to others, little, if any, psychohistory is good history’.159 The intense debate over psychobiography petered out after the 1980s.160 While the ‘negativism of historians and social scientists in general toward psychoanalysis has changed relatively after the 1980s’, and psychobiographies have continued to be written, work diversified and the heat of the debate dissipated.161 Historians began to consider diverse theories with which to consider mental worlds.

Historians writing biography and the wider issue of other minds Up until the peak of the debate over psychoanalysis, most historians had relied on the commonsensical ‘intuitive psychological method’.162 The idea that a good historian would be able to recognise, connect with and recreate the emotions of their subjects was a view attributed to Carlyle. David Cannadine ruminated on the ‘most famous, the most honoured, the most influential and the most widely read historians’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century, that is Carlyle and G. M. Trevelyan. He argued that their ‘capacity to write history from the inside of actors was unsurpassed’.163 Carlyle set out to consider men’s ‘innermost instincts’. He and other Victorians thought that historical portraiture could be perfect. Trevelyan admired Carlyle and similarly thought coherent portraiture possible.164 The dominant view of historians for many years, then, was that of ‘commonsense’: as he makes clear in his 1832 essay on biography, in principle Carlyle saw no obstacle in understanding another life.165 Support for the intuitive psychological method has continued, albeit fading during the twentieth century. I argue that psychology, and in particular the attempt to ‘sell’ psychobiography to historians, provoked the discipline into ruminating on the problem of other minds and mental and emotional history. It drew attention to the irrational unconscious and fantasy but, more often, to the conscious dreams and the importance of a subject’s childhood more generally, and their experience of trauma. R. G. Collingwood held that it was the historian’s task to re-enact past thoughts. He concentrated on the idea of history and founded an intellectualist analysis which he applied to his autobiography.166 Collingwood had been psychoanalysed by one of Freud’s pupils, but turned to other ways of understanding other minds. Many historians

146  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography were more detached than Collingwood. Lyndal Roper drew on the theories by Klein and Freud to understand obsessions in her research finding them useful. Annales historians were increasingly concerned with non-Freudian collective psychology, mentalité, with Lucien Febvre applying it to his biography of Luther (1928). Febvre famously went on to call for a history of emotions in 1941, seeing a pathway from emotions more generally to motivation. He was inspired by the psychological theories of his friend Henri Wallon.167 Peter Stearns and his psychiatrist/historian wife Carol Stearns took up the call for a history of emotions, publishing an ‘emotionology’ manifesto in the America Historical Review in 1985.168 We will deal with these developments in terms of biography in turn: re-enactment, mentalité and the increasing attention given to complex, diverse and contradictory psychological and emotional states of subjects historians are researching. A range of historians, then, reached for psychological explanations of historical subjects biographies beyond psychoanalysis. The issue of ‘inner thoughts’ was something idealist historical philosophers considered in the interwar period. Can we think the thoughts of others, and, if so, how do we do that? Most of these philosophers were antipathetic towards psychobiography. It is well known that Collingwood, archaeologist, practising historian and philosopher of history at Oxford University, shared in print the general scepticism amongst British historians over psychology as a discipline and the most important theories to do with psychobiography, and Freud’s psychoanalysis in particular.169 Collingwood’s An Essay on Metaphysics (1940) argued that modern psychology was supporting irrationalism. Psychology involved observing and describing a subject externally and inductively. Psychology treated its subject-matter as something to be contemplated from without, something external to the thinker, something that is not himself but something else […]. The psychologists also stand committed to the method of naturalistic science; in their case the gulf is that which separates the psychologist himself from the person whose mind he is studying, a gulf which with Freud is widened into that between the sane and scientific psychiatrist and the neurotic and deluded patient.170 Psychology, conventional empirical psychology, transformed humans and their psyche into something flat, mechanistic, determinist and external; it needed to consider interiority dynamically. Worse, under Freud psychology concentrated on psychic malfunctioning: stymied and damaged personalities’ chaos, conflicts, fragmented compulsions, transitory urges, contradictory traits and inclinations.171 So what did Collingwood believe? Collingwood argued that to inter­ pret a person, her or his life in the social world, required a particular

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  147 epistemological and methodological humanism. He drew on German thinker Wilhelm Dilthey, who had wanted to establish history as a science, but not a science in the positivists’ image.172 He sought to establish historical science. History was a series of worldviews. These were not what most people thought and felt, nor popular movements, but the ‘deep’ individualism of an intellectual elite, men of creative and charismatic power, ‘who were able to forge a new belief system’: Every life can be described, the insignificant as well as the powerful, the everyday as well as the exceptional … But the historical individual whose existence leaves a permanent mark is worthy, in a higher sense, to live on in the art of biography. Among these individuals, those whose actions have arisen from the depths of human existence particularly difficult to grasp will especially draw the attention of the biographer. They allow us a deeper insight into human life and its individual forms.173 The ‘significant individual’ was most revealing. This position has also been defended on the basis that these ideas then ‘had a life of their own’ with wider social consequences.174 Thought was embedded in history with understanding emerging from the relationship between the ‘implicit and the explicit, the particular and the whole’, a ‘systematic relation between life, expression, and understanding’, which Dilthey called the hermeneutic circle.175 Similarly, Collingwood thought that history was the result of the relationship between the past and what historians thought about it.176 Historical science established knowledge about the past indirectly while natural science established knowledge about the past directly. Collingwood argued that history was essentially a study of the mind, as elaborated in his posthumously published The Idea of History (1946).177 ‘To find the truth about himself’, an historian ‘must look not around him, but within him, and what he finds when he looks within him is his own history’. Similarly, you had to penetrate your historical subject’s ‘thoughts and [re-enact] those thoughts for oneself’ as best you could.178 A good historian could not think the thoughts of past actors. He or she could, however, ‘reconstruct’ history by using ‘historical imagination’ and empathy to ‘re-enact’ the thought processes of historical persons based on information and evidence from historical sources.179 As Dilthey wrote of Luther: The course of every person’s life is a process of continuous determination in which the possibilities inherent in him are narrowed down. The crystallization of his nature always determines his future development … But understanding lays open for him a wide range of possibilities that are not present in the determination of his actual life. For me as for most people today, the possibility of experiencing (erleben) religious states of mind in my personal existence are sharply circumscribed.

148  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography However, when I go through the letters and writings of Luther, the accounts of his contemporaries, the records of the religious conferences and councils, and the reports of his official contacts, I encounter a religious phenomenon of such eruptive power, of such energy, in which the issue is one of life or death, that it lies beyond the experiential possibilities in a person of our time. But I can re-live (nacherleben) all of this. … And thereby this process opens up for us a religious world in Luther and in his contemporaries in the early Reformation that enlarges our horizon by including possibilities that are available to us only in this way. Thus man, who is determined from within, can experience many other existences in imagination. Although he is limited by his circumstances, foreign beauties of the world and regions of life that he could never reach himself are laid open to him.180 Best known for his philosophical works, Collingwood never wrote a biography. He thought that biography was intrusive and, referring particularly to literary biography, peddled the illusion that the life explained the work. Most details in biographies were selected on the basis of ‘gossip-value’. In a memorable phrase he wrote that historical currents pass through biography ‘like seawater through a stranded wreck’.181 He applied his hermeneutic ideas to write his autobiography in 1939 which told the story of his thought, not a cradle-to-grave memoir.182 James Connelly and Alan Costall have argued that, despite his public position, however, Collingwood was more personally ambivalent towards historical psychology than previously thought: He showed a keen interest in developments in the new science, regarded Freud as one of the greatest living scientists, and indeed himself pursued a full course of analysis,183 that is fifty sessions. Collingwood believed that minds were ‘culturally and temporally mediated’, thoughts were context-specific and contingent.184 He thereby rejected the idea that historical subjects were transhistorical or that there could be transcultural universals. The thoughts in the past may have seemed irrational but historians had to understand that rational humans produced them. He objected, for instance, to Freud’s comparison of ‘savage beliefs and customs to those of his own neurotic patients’.185 Collingwood resisted the label of a relativist because he believed that there were some fundamental commonalities of human thought which permitted ‘re-enactment’.186 And that undermined his idealism and tilted the discussion towards realism. Most historians have been realists seeking evidence for their beliefs of a world that existed in the past. At the same time and independently, Febvre approached his biography of Luther in 1928 as an exercise in mentalité, or placing Luther in the ideas,

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  149 values, and beliefs, or worldview, he shared with his community. This approach ‘gained a great part of its impact from the deafness of the French intellectual milieu to the works of Freud and Marx’.187 Deafness perhaps underestimates an antipathy. In terms of the latter, both Febvre and fellow Annaliste Marc Bloch refused to see people as bound by forces beyond their control. They defended human agency in the face of historical inevitability. In terms of Freud, critics like André Burguière argued that this group were ignorant of Freud. He characterised German thought as heavily informed by Freud’s work, while French thought ‘was loftily unaware of Freud’.188 Indeed Febvre raved against psychoanalysis for it involved reading theories backwards: ‘the science of contemporary psychologists can have no possible application to the past’. He argued it was ‘the worse sort of anachronism and the most insidious and harmful of all’.189 He singled out the possibility of a Freudian Luther: It is better even to hold out against the seductions of the psychoanalysts for whose taste no theory is too facile … A Freudian Luther is so easy to imagine that one feels not the least curiosity or wish to prosecute the acquaintance when an investigator undertakes to delineate him. For, in fact, might one not with an equal facility conjure up a Lutheran Freud, and observe how completely the illustrious father of psychoanalysis exemplifies permanent traits of the German national genius, of which Luther in his day was so notable an exponent?190 Michel Foucault agreed that Freudianism was moralistic, authoritarian and predictable; we can imagine in advance [Luther would …] look like. And if an unshockable Luther-researcher were actually to produce such a depiction, one wouldn’t be curious to make its closer acquaintance.191 Certainly Febvre came to consider psychology and emotions from a different tradition. French historical studies were preoccupied with the debate over whether or not history was a science. Annales historians were influenced by Émile Durkheim, François Simiand and Maurice Halbwachs, who were convinced that sociology was a science, the science of society. Durkheim wanted to push history out of scientific contention; it was relevant only when it involved comparisons, or, as Simiand suggested, when historians set out ‘to abstract, to extract similarities and generalizations and relate one to the other’.192 That is, when historians were like sociologists. Durkheim himself refused to centre research on the individual; he wanted the ‘[e]limination of studies in which the role of the historical individual is the principal or exclusive subject of research’.193 The Annales School is usually associated with social and economic history; the Annales journal which Bloch and Febvre established in 1929 was entitled, Annales

150  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography d’histoire économique et sociale, thereby signalling its promotion of the study of social and economic matters. Different varieties of Annales approaches, nonetheless, can be traced over generations.194 Febvre’s more ethnographic interest in mentalités led him to consider the emotions and mindsets of past generations.195 From the 1920s to his death in 1956, then, Febvre considered quite a bit of the territory that French sociologists had mapped out for their discipline, but he was also interested in biography.196 Annales had set itself up against the ‘history of great men’, of battles and treaties, and primacy of political, military and diplomatic history. But it was concerned with total history or ‘histoire totale’, which sought to uncover all levels of human historical experience, including psychological and cultural history and that of the individual. So Febvre was interested in what held past societies together, that is, religion, collective representations, collective beliefs and norms. Unlike sociologists, he was interested in individual beliefs as well as collective ones, or rather the relationship between these two phenomena: individuals in relation to the collective, unconscious representations and conscious knowledge. At the same time, he was interested in ‘the disjunctions in the equilibrium between mental representations and feelings in the psychology of the subject’.197 Febvre considered a number of individuals, starting with Martin Luther: A Destiny in 1928. As he stated in the opening of his Luther, ‘the underlying preoccupation of his study was the relationship between the individual and the mass, between personal initiative and public necessity’. By his own admission, Febvre was influenced by Heinrich Denifle’s Luther and Lutheranism published in 1904. Denifle rejected ‘in toto the whole religious development of Luther as understood by Protestants for three hundred years’.198 Rather than struggling with his religion in the cloister from 1505 to 1520, Denifle argued that he ‘never had any struggles in his days as a monk … never had any difficulty with Catholic teaching’. He broke from the church, he repudiated his vows as a monk, he made up this doctrine of salvation in order to transgress: ‘to lust … sin … and indulge himself’. The story of struggles was an ‘invention of Luther in his later life’.199 This might be described as ‘biography in the style of Lytton Strachey’.200 Febvre’s response was not a traditional biography of Luther. It was an attempt at understanding why Luther became the key pioneer of religious Reformation and why Protestant reforms spread in Germany. Four-fifths of the work is devoted to Luther’s adult career up to 1525. He ‘flatly refused to engage with what he dismissed as the hypothetical Luther of the youthful period’.201 Febvre based his analysis on socio-economic factors. Social and economic changes led to and enabled the development of Lutheranism. Rather than concentrating on Luther, he put Luther in his place amidst the ‘common element … collective spirit … common set of beliefs, concepts, wills, which manifested and expressed itself in and through them’. He sought to explain why Luther’s protest had resonance. Febvre argued

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  151 On the one side there was a church crumbling away under long-continued abuses, dominated by an immoral and unbelieving clergy, and so sunk in corruption as to have forgotten its mission to preach divine truth: on the other side there was a fear-ridden friar, obsessed with thoughts of sin and salvation, working out his difficult way to salvation by acquiring, through slow processes, a new doctrine of justification by faith … Without his own contriving he became the leader of all those who desired an end to papal privilege and aggressions and the removal of ecclesiastical corruption and irregularities. Thus was born the Reformation.202 Febvre’s book on Luther was the only one of his works translated immediately into English. In his work on French Renaissance physician and monk, François Rabelais, he also argued his unique approaches to religion can only be understood if put into the social and political context of the time; that is, the relationship between the individual and her or his milieu. Luther and Rabelais were eloquent models for Febvre’s historical psychology. Rather than concentrating on the actions of these men he was more concerned with their contexts. They were ‘constantly governed, prepared, and directed by some common element, by a collective spirit, by a common set of beliefs, concepts, wills, which manifested and expressed itself in and through them’.203 Above all, Febvre wanted to capture the unique sensibility of a past age. ‘It is true that to presume to reconstitute the emotive life of a given epoch is a task at once extraordinarily seductive and terrifyingly difficult. But what of it? The historian does not have the right to desert’.204 Febvre concentrated on the ‘mental equipment’ available to sixteenth-century man—environmental, institutional and linguistic forms—which set conceptual limits upon his mental universe. This led some reviewers to fume that Febvre made Luther ‘appear as the predestined, but heroic, agent or instrument for the regeneration and salvation of Deutschthum, carried on to his fore-ordained goal by blind forces or fate’.205 In the debate over whether Luther actually initiated the Reformation, or whether he was merely a part of it, Febvre tended towards a structural or hermeneutic view: the context changed.206 It is hard to understand how change occurred, or indeed the role of the individual in such change. Free thought seems to lie outside the system. As well as reactions to psychoanalysis and alternative approaches to the challenge of other minds, some historians’ biographical approaches are ‘touched’ by Freudianism, too. Undeterred by the opposition to psychoanalysis among historians, Roper argued that she had written a ‘psychoanalytically influenced biography’ of Luther in 2016.207 Why did she resort to psychobiography? She had used psychohistory, fantasies, dreams and fears in her work on the sixteenth-century ‘witch craze’ when she set out to explain why older menopausal widows, especially in southern Germany, confessed to being witches, under torture.208 A narrative template emerged

152  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography

Figure 4.4 Martin Luther was caricatured as a seven-headed evil—derived from beasts in the book of Revelation—in a leaflet ‘Martinus Luther Siebenkopff’ against the Reformation (1529). Caricature of Martin Luther (1529), as a seven-headed evil entitled ‘Martinus Luther Siebenkopff’ from a leaflet against the Reformation, Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Alamy.

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  153 which suited the psychic and social needs of the community. She was able to do that too in terms of Luther because of the wealth of extant material, so much so that ‘we probably know more about his inner life than about that of any other sixteenth-century individual’.209 There are 120 volumes of Luther’s collected works, allowing even his dreams to be analysed. Secondly, it suited the nature of her historical task, to consider the development of Luther’s inner life. Roper concentrated on his continual psychological conflicts, for, she argued, they were littered throughout his letters, sermons, treatises, renditions of his conversations and his theological publications. She was able to follow his theological development as he was ‘radicalised by the opposition he encountered’.210 In her acknowledgments Roper thanks her colleague Daniel Pick, a psychoanalyst and a fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, who helped her ‘think psychoanalytically about Luther’s character’.211 Pick and Roper had co-edited a collection on interpreting dreams in 2002.212 However, Roper uses the theory critically. Roper’s approach differs greatly from Erikson’s or from that of Erich Fromm and other classic psychoanalysis in a number of ways.213 First, she argued that Luther’s childhood was not a crucial influence on his later religious life. As a number of commentators have noted, ‘Roper is especially good on Luther’s unusual upbringing’.214 His was a mining family, which prospered, albeit they were ‘always one bad business decision away from disaster’. The family invested in Martin’s education expecting him to become a successful lawyer dealing with the legal contracts associated with the mining leases which underwrote the prosperity of the family. His decision to abandon his legal studies in favour of the church was upsetting. Roper uses his upbringing to understand his character. The religion of the adult was critical. Roper argued, for instance, that ‘any breach between’ Luther and his father healed as Luther rose steadily through the ranks of the Augustinian order, was awarded a doctorate in theology, married, had children and prospered: Although Luther had rejected his father’s plans for him, he had never relinquished his obligations to protect the family business and he had travelled to Eisleben, the place of his birth, in early 1546 to deal with a disagreement when he died.215 However, ‘the drama of his relations with his own father’ led him to a ‘most profound understanding of God’.216 Moreover, the struggle with his father helps us understand his character; it ‘prepared Luther to attack the Pope with such enormous energy’.217 These were unconscious developments. She does not jettison Freud’s Oedipus struggle; but she noted how Luther’s adult struggles were ‘put to the service of his theology’.218 Secondly, then, ‘Although Luther’s relationship to his father was fundamental to his personality and his religiosity and although his understanding

154  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography of paternal relations pervades his theology, father figures were only a part of what shaped him’.219 For instance, Roper seemed influenced by mentalité when she focused, in the manner of Robert Darnton, on the aspect of Luther that modern Protestants would find ‘most alien’, which was transubstantiation or the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Luther believed in it. Moreover, the founder of the Reformation argued that the divine was made manifest in ritual.220 Furthermore, Roper warned modern readers about Luther’s ‘disturbing obsession with Devil, virulent AntiSemitism and crude polemic’.221 He was not modern: he had a personal direct relationship with God and in some ways he also had an intense relationship with the Devil. He believed that the Devil was always contriving to ‘destroy or hinder’ him. Psychohistory allowed her to delve into Luther’s irrational pre-modern ideas. It is this acceptance and reality of the irrational that makes psychohistory attractive to some. In this regard, Joan Scott has argued that while psychoanalysis is unsettling it draws historians to consider ‘unconscious motivation and the effects of fantasy’, and so is useful.222 Thirdly, Roper did not want to overestimate individual agency. Sixteenthcentury Lutheran hagiography had overachieved in that direction. Luck, management, context and, above all else, the patronage of Elector of Saxony Frederick the Wise meant Luther avoided becoming a martyr. Having lived, Luther was not bound by existing social mentalité, however: many of his ideas were creative and new. For example, Luther did not believe that an individual’s agency and good works would ensure their salvation. He clung to the traditional Augustine idea that a belief in God’s grace was necessary, but even that was not sufficient to ensure salvation. However, his insistence on the ‘real Present of Christ in the Eucharist’ was much more conspicuous. On the other hand, it was in keeping with his ‘striking ease with physicality, a trait which modern biographies find hard to come to terms with’.223 Roper argued that she was able to draw on the insights of psychoanalysis not only to obtain ‘a richer understanding’ of Luther the revolutionary and reformer but also to understand also the ‘irrationality’ of some premodern ‘religious principles to which he dedicated his life’.224 Fourthly, Roper succeeds in revealing more of Luther’s warts common to his times. Luther was significant ‘for good and ill’.225 She wanted neither to ‘idolise’ nor to ‘denigrate’ Luther; she wanted to explain him and his psychology.226 A number of feminists have found psychohistory useful, especially in considering personality.227 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl reassessed the conflicted relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis. Freud wrote in 1925 that ‘Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own’.228 He was opposed to the women’s emancipation movement and believed that women’s lives were dominated by their sexual reproductive functions. Some have rearticulated Freud’s work to develop, for instance, the Electra complex, whereby a girl’s sense of competition

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  155 with her mother for the affections of her father is comparable to the Oedipus complex in boys.229 Young-Bruehl argued that Freud was wrong on masochism, superego development, narcissism and inadequate sublimation in female development and that ‘not all stories of female development were pathological’.230 She considered Freud’s work was valuable, however, on the theory of character and her biographical studies include psychoanalytical biographies of Anna Freud and Hannah Arendt.231 Misogyny, patriarchy and sexism were central to women’s position and needed to be explained through sexual development theory.232 As a feminist historian of religion, Roper was most interested in Luther’s social and cultural context and found it useful to use psychohistorical approaches to writing the biography more generally. Roper noted that most biographies of Luther were written by church historians. She put herself in the tradition of historians of religion like Heinz Schilling. She teased out Luther’s anti-Semitism as well as his opposition to political and sexual egalitarianism. He did not support evangelicalism or people’s uprisings, such as the Peasants’ War, 1524–1525. She also dwelt on the fact that he also made ‘some of the most misogynistic remarks of any thinker’.233 In relation to his view that good works did not matter for salvation, for instance, Luther once likened ‘good works’ to the ‘filth’ that pours out of women’s bodies; menstrual blood being, as Roper says, ‘the most shocking and revolting comparison he could think of’. In most of his works, ‘he combined deft argument with vicious ridicule and rant’. His language was scatological and sexualised. Rome was the latrine ‘where all the Devils shit’. And as much as psychosexual reasons, Roper also contextualises his view to place: there was a strict gendered division of labour in the household in his upbringing in a mining town, which she noted ‘may help to explain why Luther’s later ideas about gender roles exaggerate the differences between the sexes’.234 His whole thinking was physicalised: bishops were sodomites; reason was a whore. And yet he also believed in ‘giving bodily pleasure to both women and men’ within marital sex. Roper was attracted to the sheer complexity of the man and psychohistory allowed her to consider these contradictions and to contemplate their causes. Roper follows the development of the Reformation movement closely through Luther’s eyes and his ‘inner development’: I want to understand Luther himself. I want to know how a sixteenth-century individual perceived the world around him, and why he viewed it in this way. I want to explore his inner landscapes so as to better understand his ideas about flesh and spirit, formed in a time before our modern separation of mind and body.235 She sought to understand Luther through his relationships, ‘and not as the lone hero of the Reformation myth’. She held that the social history of Lutheranism is still undeveloped. In particular, she considered Luther’s

156  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography German translation of the Bible, pointing out how well he used Gutenberg’s printing machine to spread his reformist message. Luther’s publications were Europe’s best-sellers between 1518 and 1525. Roper read his letters forensically because they ‘conveyed his emotions and illuminated his relations with others’.236 They were his ‘intellectual tools’, which revealed his state of mind: he envied, hated, loved, manipulated through them, or, as Roper would describe it, he ‘demonised’ others. Luther was convinced that he was right, which was a ‘psychological dynamic that stored up future trouble for the movement’ as he denounced the Pope as an Antichrist and also strongly criticised other Protestant tribes. He ‘split the church and ushered in the denomination era’.237 Commentators like Andrew Pettegrew have argued that Roper followed Luther too closely. She showed little concern with the movement that developed in the wake of Luther’s actions. Roper warned her readers that this was so: ‘this book is not a general history of the Reformation, or even the Reformation of Wittenberg, still less can it provide an overall interpretation of what became Lutheranism’.238 She noted that, as a leader, Luther would brook no opposition, demanding of his associates, ‘complete intellectual and spiritual submission’. Certainly, Roper failed to realise Graham Little’s view of the critical relationship between a leader and her or his followers. Of course there has been some criticism of the biography. For instance her concentration on Luther in Wittenberg deprives us of any real explanation for why so many beyond Saxony took up his cause: why priests mounted their own pulpits and risked their livelihoods to preach in his name; why ordinary citizens agitated for Gospel preaching; why princes fell under the spell of this turbulent priest.239 Roper’s focus on Luther’s inner life leaves us with an incomplete sense of how the man became a movement. Ironically, too, Lutherans’ views about fate and salvation depending entirely on the grace of God undermines biography, for it comes so close to predestination. Above all, Roper made biographical decisions: she wanted to ‘avoid a development account of collective subjectivities [mentalités] which turns individual acts into mere exemplars of a narrative of collective historical progression’; but, as a result, that does not address how change occurs.240 Perhaps a little ironically, albeit fittingly, Roper, with her biographical approach of taking psychoanalysis ‘only’ seriously, was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Prize in 2005.

Conclusion: debate over the problem of other minds; inner and social lives? Psychobiographers sought ‘clarity’ about a subject’s interior world. Some political scientists and feminists are to be found among historians who

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  157 have found psychoanalysis most useful. It seems particularly relevant for certain biographies, on the one hand of leaders and, on the other, when highlighting a subject’s emotions and fantasies. There continue to be clusters of historians using psychoanalytical approaches in these areas of research significance. Where historians of all kinds have evidence, they examine inner lives. A number of historians interested in political leadership, for instance, have employed psychobiographical perspectives. Graham Little’s studies, Politics and Personal Style (1973), Political Ensembles (1985) and Strong Leadership (1988), focused on the background and psychology of leaders.241 He led a group at the University of Melbourne writing political biography. He and his friend Ian ‘Foo’ Davies founded the Melbourne Psychosocial Group. Historians in the group, such as Judith Brett and James Walter, tended to write ‘psychosocial’ political analysis of individuals and societies,.242 Similarly, Luther has had his fair share of psychoanalytical studies but historians have tended towards psychosocial analysis, of individuals and societies, understanding the individual’s mental world in its wider social sphere, as exemplified by Lyndal Roper. Historians have come to agree that biographies would be improved by having a richer understanding of human nature and behaviour.243 Most historians, while having been influenced by psychology, have regarded psychoanalytical theories as only one of a number of useful psychological tools.244 As Thomas A. Kohut suggested in 1986, while psychohistory was a ‘brief and not altogether happy’ controversy, there was a considerable psychoanalytic legacy in historians’ biographical practices.245 Increasingly few biographies would omit a consideration of childhood. Furthermore, they set out to solve ‘the first step in biography’ what he called the ‘riddle’ of character.246 In 1968, a group of 20 historians began work on a history of the role of children through the ages. Their work culminated in the book entitled The History of Childhood and a journal, The History of Childhood Quarterly, they founded in 1973 to continue their research: subsequently, this became the Journal of Psychohistory. In 1971, three conferences were held on the uses of psychology in history and Arthur Schlessinger lent his considerable prestige to one at the City University of New York. But, as they have shown, one can study the role of childhood experience without relying only on psychodynamic theories.247 While psychobiography has peaked and was not particularly popular amongst historians at the crest of the wave, I argue that it is useful to examine the debate because it reveals the extent to which, in the process of pushing back against it, historians writing biography became interested with interiority: ‘the play of personality, the texture of a life, psychic interiority in all its contradictions’.248 The pursuit of inner minds by biographers continues to inform historians’ curiosity in individual, collective and social minds.

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Notes 1 Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1958). 2 Donald A. Capps was unmoved by Bainton’s critique and became a psychologist of religion, See his Jesus: A Psychological Biography (St Louis: Chalice, 2000). See also his Men, Religion and Melancholia: James, Otto, Jung, and Erikson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Allan Hugh Cole Jr, Converging Horizons: Essays in Religion, Psychology and Caregiving (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015) cites examples of Capps interpretations of Freud. 3 Donald Capps, ‘The Path of Least Resistance’, in Psychology of Religion: Autobiographical Accounts, ed. Jacob A. Belzen (New York: Springer, 2011), p. 45. 4 Franz Posset, ‘Martin Luther Biographies’, Biography, vol. 8, no. 4 (Fall 1985), pp. 356–365. Thirty biographies were published in German alone on the eve of the 500th anniversary of Luther’s birth in 1983. Lyndal Roper surveys Luther biographies as part of her ‘Martin Luther’s Body: The “Stout Doctor” and His Biographers’, American Historical Review, vol. 115, no. 2 (April 2010), pp. 351–384. 5 Although some Luther scholars have criticised Erikson’s analysis of Luther, others have praised his book as insightful and as stimulating further scholarship. (See the volume edited by Donald Capps, Walter Capps, and Gerald Bradford, Encounter with Erikson: Historical Interpretation and Religious Biography (Missoula, MT: Published by Scholars Press for the American Academy of Religion and the Institute of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1977), for several perspectives.) His methodological suggestions have also been seen as advancing psychobiography significantly beyond Freud’s initial contributions to the field. 6 William Todd Schutz, ed., Handbook of Psychobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 9. 7 Preserved Smith, ‘Luther’s Early Development in Light of Psycho-Analysis’, American Journal of Psychology, vol. 24 (1913), p. 363, found Luther to be ‘a thoroughly typical example of a neurotic, quasi-hysterical sequence of an infantile sex-complex: so much so, indeed, that Sigmund Freud and his school could hardly have found a better example to illustrate the sounder part of their theory than him’. 8 William Todd Schultz, ed., Handbook of Psychobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 9. 9 Jacques Barzun, ‘History: The Muse and Her Doctors’, American Historical Review, vol. 77 (1972), pp. 36–64; Bernard De Voto, ‘The Skeptical Biographer’, Harper’s, January 1933; Ernst Van Den Haag, ‘Psychoanalysis and Its Discontents’, in Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Philosophy, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1959), pp. 113–114. 10 Richard Marius, review of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), Church History, vol. 67, no. 1 (March 1998), p. 147. 11 Roland H. Bainton, ‘Luther: A Psychiatric Portrait’, Yale Review, vol. 48 (1959), pp. 405–410. 12 Bainton, ‘Luther: A Psychiatric Portrait’, p. 406. 13 Roland H. Bainton, ‘Psychiatry and History: An Examination of Erikson’s “Young Man Luther”’, Religion in Life, no. 40 (Winter 1971), p. 450. 14 Bainton, ‘Luther: A Psychiatric Portrait’, p. 410.

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  159 15 Irving Alexander, ‘Erikson and Psychobiography, Psychobiography and Erikson’, in Handbook of Psychobiography, ed. William Todd Schultz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 265–284. 16 Erikson, Young Man Luther. 17 New York Times, 14 February 1984. 18 Bainton, ‘Luther: A Psychiatric Portrait’, p. 410. 19 Anna Green and Kathleen Troup (eds.), The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 60–61. 20 John A. Garraty, ‘The Interrelations of Psychology and Biography’, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 51, no. 6 (1954), pp. 560–582; Fritz Schmidl, ‘Psychoanalysis and History’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4 (1962), pp. 1532–1548; Cushing Strout, ‘Ego Psychology and the Historians’, History and Theory, vol. 7, no. 3 (1968), pp. 279–297. 21 Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: Abindon Press, 1950). Interestingly Scott Hendrix begins his Martin Luther: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) with Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Hendrix echoes the consensus of contemporary scholarship when he suspects that the words ‘Here I stand’, which inspired the title of Bainton’s biography, were not actually uttered by Luther. 22 Robert Benedetto and Donald K. McKim, Historical Dictionary of the Reformed Churches, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), p. 29. 23 Roland H. Bainton, ‘Psychiatry and History’, in Psychohistory and Religion: The Case of Young Man Luther, ed. Roger A. Johnson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977). See also chapters by Lewis Spitz and Roger A. Johnson. 24 Bainton, ‘Psychiatry and History’, p. 450. 25 Bainton, ‘Psychiatry and History’, p. 453. 26 Bainton, ‘Psychiatry and History’, p. 450. 27 Bainton, ‘Psychiatry and History’, p. 469. 28 Bainton, ‘Psychiatry and History’, p. 469. 29 Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (f.p. 1977; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), dedicated to Roland Bainton, seeks to place Luther’s life and thought within the context of the sixteenth century, as opposed to Erikson’s retrospective treatment. 30 Bainton, ‘Psychiatry and History’, p. 450. 31 Bainton, ‘Luther: A Psychoanalytical Portrait’, p. 410. 32 Bainton, ‘Luther: A Psychoanalytical Portrait’, p. 410 33 Bainton, ‘Psychiatry and History’, p. 454 34 Bainton, ‘Psychiatry and History’, p. 459. 35 Bainton, ‘Luther: A Psychoanalytical Portrait’, p. 408. 36 Bainton, ‘Luther: A Psychoanalytical Portrait’, pp. 408–409; Bainton, ‘Psychiatry and History’, p. 463. 37 Bainton, Here I Stand, p. 22. 38 Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910). See Alan C. Alms, ‘Freud as Leonardo: Why the First Psychobiography Went Wrong’, Journal of Personality, vol. 56, no. 1 (March 1988), pp. 19–40. 39 Lewis W. Spitz, ‘Psychohistory and History: The Case of Young Man Luther’, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 56, no. 2 (Summer 1973), pp. 182–209. 40 Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (Oxford: The Orwell Press, 2005), pp. 5 and 555; Alan C. Elms, ‘Freud as Leonardo: Why the First Psychobiography Went Wrong’, in Handbook of Psychobiography, ed. William Todd Schultz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 210–221.

160  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography 41 David P. Scaer, ‘The Concept of Anfechtung in Luther’s Thought’, Concordia Theological Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 1 (January 1983), p. 19. 42 Scaer, ‘The Concept of Anfechtung in Luther’s Thought’, p. 27. 43 Roger A. Johnson, ‘Psychology as Religious Narrative: The Demonic Role of Hans Luther in Erikson’s Saga of Human Evolution’, in Psychology and Religion: The Case of Young Man Luther, ed. Roger A. Johnson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977). 44 William L. Langer, ‘The Next Assignment’, American Historical Review, vol. 63, no. 2 (1958), pp. 283–304; Fritz Wittels, ‘Economic and Psychological Historiography’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 51 (1946), pp. 527–532; Richard L. Schoenwald, ‘Historians and the Challenge of Freud’, Western Humanities Review, vol. 10, no. 2 (1946), pp. 99–108; Sidney Ratner, ‘The Historian’s Approach to Psychology’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 2, no. 1 (1941), pp. 95–109. 45 Richard Marius, review of Psychology and Religion, by Roger A. Johnson, American Historical Review, vol. 83, no. 2 (April 1978), p. 463. 46 A. C. Elms, Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psy­ chology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 12. 47 Marius, review of Johnson, Psychology and Religion, p. 463. 48 Johnson, Psychology and Religion, p. 4, cited by Lawrence J. Freedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik. H. Erikson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 49 Bainton, ‘Psychiatry and History’, p. 476. 50 Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn (eds.), Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, vol. 4, 1912–1918, trans. by M. Nunberg in collaboration with Harold Collins (New York: International Universities Press, 1975); Alan C. Elms, ‘Sigmund Freud, Psychohistorian’, Annual of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jerome A. Winer, James W. Anderson, vol. 31, Psychoanalysis and History (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2003), pp. 65–78. 51 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Freud: In His Time and Ours, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 159; Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003). 52 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill (f.p. 1899; Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 1997). 53 Fredric N. Busch, Psychodynamic Approaches to Behavior Change (Washington, DC: APA Publishing, 2019). 54 Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (f.p. 1910; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). 55 Elms, ‘Freud as Leonardo: Why the First Psychobiography Went Wrong’. 56 Raluca Soreanu, ‘Speaking of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mother: A Critique of Freud’s Notion of Identification’, Studies in the Maternal, vol. 10, no, 1 (2108), p.2. 57 Freud, Leonardo da Vinci. 58 Melanie Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1932); Melanie Klein, P. Heimann and R. E. Money-Kyrle (eds.), New Directions in Psycho-analysis: The Significance of Infant Conflict in the Pattern of Adult Behaviour (London: Tavistock Pubs., 1955); Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (f.p. 1936; London: Kernac Books, 1992); Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner (eds.), The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–45 (London: Routledge, 1992). 59 George M. Kren and Leon H. Rappoport (eds.), Varieties of Psychohistory (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1950).Harry Elmer Barnes, ‘Psychology and History’, American Journal of Psychology, vol. 30, no. 4 (October 1919), pp. 337–376; Ratner, ‘The Historian’s Approach to

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  161 Psychology’; John A. Garraty, ‘Preserved Smith, Ralph Volney Harlow, and Psychology’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 15, no. 3 (1954), pp. 456–465; Dorothy Ross, ‘The “New History” and the “New Psychology”: An Early Attempt at Psychohistory’, in The Hofstadter Aegis, ed. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 207–244 60 Brenda Maddox, Freud’s Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones (London: John Murray, 2006). Ernest Jones also wrote a biography of Freud: The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1953–1957). 61 Preserved Smith, ‘Luther’s Early Development in the Light of Psychoanalysis’, American Journal of Psychology, vol. 24 (1913), pp. 360–377; Lewis W. Spitz, ‘Psychohistory and History: The Case of Young Man Luther’, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 56, no. 2 (Summer 1973), pp. 182–209. 62 E. M. Foster, Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), pp. 281 and 283, ‘English Prose between 1918 and 1939’. 63 Martin Kallich, ‘Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Lytton Strachey’s Theory of Biography’, American Imago; A Psychoanalytic Journal for the Arts and Sciences, vol. 15, no. 4 (Winter 1958), p. 340. 64 Lytton Strachey, preface to Eminent Victorians (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1918). 65 Kallich, ‘Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Lytton Strachey’s Theory of Biography’, pp. 255–257. 66 Michael Holroyd, ed., Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self-portrait (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). 67 Sally Alexander, ‘Psychoanalysis in Britain in the Early Twentieth Century: An Introductory’, History Workshop Journal, no. 45 (Spring 1998), pp. 135–143. 68 Martin Kallich, The Psychological Milieu of Lytton Strachey (New York: Bookman, 1961). 69 Kallich, ‘Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Lytton Strachey’s Theory of Biography’, p. 336; Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (f.p. 1928; London: Harvest); Martin Kallich, ‘Elizabeth and Essex (1928): Hysteria’, in Kallich, The Psychological Milieu of Lytton Strachey, pp. 102–132. 70 Kallich, ‘Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Lytton Strachey’s Theory of Biography’, p. 346. 71 Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Biography (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006), pp. 169–170. 72 Janet Sayers, ‘Rebel Psychoanalyst Adrian Stephen: Brother of Virginia Woolf’, British Journal of Psychotherapy, vol. 34, no. 3 (August 2018), p. 486, quoting from J. MacGibbon, There’s the Lighthouse (London: James & James, 1997), pp. 103, 110. 73 Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way. An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (New York and London: Harvest Books, 1967), p. 165. 74 Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, 18 June 1919 in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 1912–1922, ed. N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), p. 369. 75 Sayers, ‘Rebel Psychoanalyst Adrian Stephen’, p. 489; A. Stephen, ‘PsychoAnalysis’, New Statesman, 3 June 1922, pp. 241–242; Virginia Woolf to Will Arnold-Forster, 7 November 1922, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, ed. N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), p. 582. 76 E. Jones, ‘James Glover 1882–1926’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 8 (1927), pp. 1–9. 77 Adrian Stephen, ‘On Defining Psycho-analysis’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, vol. 11 (1931), pp. 112–113, 115.

162  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography 78 King and Steiner, The Freud–Klein Controversies (2005). 79 V. Woolf to Vanessa Bell, 24 May 1923, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1923–1928, ed. N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 42. 80 Woolf, Downhill All the Way, p. 164. 81 Woolf, Downhill All the Way, p. 164. 82 Woolf, Downhill All the Way, p. 164. 83 Woolf, Downhill All the Way, p. 169. 84 N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann (eds.), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5, 1932–1935 (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), p. 36. 85 Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf. A Biography (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006), pp. 312 and 377. 86 Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Maxwell Bennett, ‘Freud, the Subconscious and Virginia Woolf’, in Virginia Woolf and Neuropsychiatry (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013). 87 Barbara Caine, ‘The Stracheys and Psychoanalysis’, History Workshop Journal, no. 45 (Spring 1998), pp. 144–169. 88 Murray H. Sherman, ‘Lytton and James Strachey: Biography and Psychoanalysis’, in Blood Brothers, ed. Norman Kiell (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), pp. 329–364. See James Strachey to Martin Kallich, 2 October 1956, reproduced in Kallich, ‘Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Lytton Strachey’s Theory of Biography’, pp. 359–360. 89 S. P. Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 54–55. The club consisted of 11 ‘original and continuing’ members in the first instance: Vanessa and Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, Lytton Strachey, Virginia and Leonard Woolf. David Garnett, Quentin Bell, and Lydia Keynes joined later while Vita SackvilleWest and Harold Nicolson and T. S. Elliot were associated but not formal members. 90 Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Gillian Gill, Virginia Woolf and the Women Who Shaped her World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). 91 David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London: Harper Collins, 1992), p. 8. 92 Kallich, ‘Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Lytton Strachey’s Theory of Biography’, p. 355. 93 Andre Maurois, ‘The Modern Biographer’, Yale Review, vol. 17 (January 1928), p. 233; George A. Johnston. ‘The New Biography’, Atlantic, vol. 143 (March 1929), p. 337; H. M. Jones, ‘Contemporary Methods in Biography’, English Journal, vol. 21 (February 1932), pp. 113–122. 94 Nicolson, The Development of English Biography, p. 140. 95 Langer, Presidential address delivered at the annual dinner of the American Historical Association, the Statler Hotel, New York City, 20 December 1957, and published in the American Historical Review, vol. 63, no. 2 (January 1958), pp. 283–304, accessed 1 October 2019, https://www.historians.org/about-ahaand-membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential-addresses/williaml-langer 96 Daniel Pick, ‘“In Pursuit of the Nazi Mind?” The Deployment of Psychoanalysis in the Allied Struggle against Germany’, Psychoanalytical History, vol. 11, no. 2 (2009), pp. 137–157.

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  163 97 For an overview, see Ratner, ‘The Historian’s Approach to Psychology’. See also Alan. C. Elms, Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 98 Arnold A. Rogow, ‘The World on a Couch’, New York Times, 8 September 1985, accessed 28 September 2019, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/ 98/10/25/specials/gay-historians.html 99 Lloyd de Mausse, ed., The New Psychohistory (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974). 100 Ward, Modernizing the Mind, p. 138. 101 Ludy T. Benjamin, ‘A History of Clinical Psychology as a Profession in America (and a Glimpse at its Future)’, Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, vol. 1 (2005), p. 6. 102 William Claire Menninger, Psychiatry in a Troubled World; Yesterday’s War and Today’s Challenge (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 7. Menninger was cofounder of the Menninger Psychiatry Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and was appointed the US Army’s Director of Psychiatry during World War Two. See also Frank Summers, ‘Making Sense of the APA: A History of the Relationship between Psychology and the Military’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 18, no. 5 (September 2008), pp. 614–637. 103 Edgar Jones, Kenneth C. Hyams, and Simon Wessely, ‘Screening for Vulnerability to Psychological Disorders in the Military: A Historical Survey’, Journal of Medical Screening, vol. 10, no. 1 (2003), p. 42; Andrew Scull, ‘The Mental Health Sector and the Social Sciences in Post-World War II USA. Part I: Total War and its Aftermath’, History of Psychiatry, vol. 22, no. 85 Pt 1 (March 2011), p. 6. 104 Jonathan Engel, American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States (New York: Gotham Books, 2008), p. 43; James H. Capshew, Psycho­ logists on the March (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 6. 105 Menninger, Psychiatry in a Troubled World, p. 10. 106 Jacob W. Klapman, Group Psychotherapy: Theory and Practice (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1959), p. 23. 107 Capshew, Psychologists on the March, p. 159. See also Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), http://ark.cdlib.org/ ark:/13030/ft696nb3n8/, accessed 19 June 2021. 108 Maurice Levine, Psychotherapy in Medical Practice (New York: Macmillan Co., 1947), p. 9. 109 Ernest Havemann, ‘The Age of Psychology in the United States’, Life, 1 January 1957, p. 73; Nevitt Sanford, ‘Psychotherapy and the American Public’, in Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Public Interest, ed. Maurice H. Krout (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), p. 6. 110 Steven C. Ward, Modernizing the Mind: Psychological knowledge and the Remaking of Society (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). 111 Joy Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes. A Cultural Analysis of Psychoanalysis in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005). See also, Joy Damousi and Robert Reynolds (eds.), History on the Couch: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2003). 112 Saul Friedlander, History and Psychoanalysis: An Inquiry into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory, trans. Susan Suleiman (f.p. 1975; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), p. 124. 113 Peter Loewenberg, ‘The Psychobiographical Background to Psychohistory: The Langer Family and the Dynamics of Shame and Success’, in Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 81.

164  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography 114 H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science (New York: Harper, 1964), p. 65. 115 Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); and see review by T. S. Sarbin in History and Theory, vol. 26 (1987), pp. 352–364; Peter Gay, ‘On the Bourgeoisie: A Psychological Interpretation’, in Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth Century Europe, ed. J. M. Merriman (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979). 116 Peter Loewenberg, ‘Psychoanalysis, the Social Scientist and the Historian’, in Psych/History: Readings in the Method of Psychology, Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Geoffrey Cocks and Travis L. Crosby (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); and Loewenberg, Decoding the Past. 117 Peter Loewenberg, ‘Psychoanalytic Research Training: A California Success Story’, American Psychoanalyst, vol. 27, no. 2 (1973), pp. 11–12. 118 Peter Loewenberg, ‘Professional and Personal Insights’, Clio’s Psyche, vol. 4, no. 2 (September 1997), pp. 33–36. See also Peter Loewenberg, Fantasy and Reality in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 119 Loewenberg, Decoding the Past. 120 Hans Meyerhoff, ‘On Psychoanalysis as History’, Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 49 (1962), p. 320. 121 Friedlander, History and Psychoanalysis, pp. 11 and 94. 122 T. G. Ashplant, ‘Psychoanalysis in Historical Writing’, History Workshop Journal, no. 26 (Autumn 1988), pp. 102–103. 123 H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science (New York: Harper, 1964), p. 65. Peter Gay underwent analysis and wrote Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988). Peter Loewenberg, professor emeritus of history and psychology at the University of California, was also a training and supervising analyst at the Los Angeles New Center for Psychoanalysis. Langer, ‘The Next Assignment’, p. 283. 124 Faye Sinofsky, John J. Fitzpatrick, Louis W. Potts, and Lloyd deMause, ‘A Bibliography of Psychohistory’, History of Childhood Quarterly, vol. 2 (1975), pp. 517–562. 125 Edward Hitschmann, Great Men: Psychoanalytic Studies (New York: International Universities Press, 1956); E. Victor Wolfenstein, The Revolut­ ionary Personality: Lenin, Trotsky and Gandhi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). 126 Erik H. Erikson, ‘On the Nature of Psycho-Historical Evidence: In Search of Gandhi’, in A Source Book for the Study of Personality and Politics, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Michael Lerner (Chicago: Markham Pub, 1971); Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969), p. 99. 127 Humberto Nagera, Vincent Van Gogh (New York: Basic Books, 1967); J. Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 352–354; Bruce Mazlish, James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 434. 128 Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967); Bruce Mazlish, In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry (New York: Basic Books, 1972); Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 129 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). 130 Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). 131 Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 4.

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  165 132 See William McKinley Runyan, Life Histories and Psychobiography. Explorations in Theory and Method (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 192–241, ‘The Psychobiography Debate’. 133 William McKinley Runyan, ‘Progress in Psychobiography’, Journal of Personality, vol. 56, no. 1 (March 1988), pp. 300 and 302; and see also, William McKinley Runyan, ‘From the Study of Lives and Psychohistory to Historicizing Psychology: A Conceptual Journey’, Annual Review of Psychoanalysis, vol. 31 (2003), pp. 119–134. 134 See for instance, J. E. Mack, ‘Psychoanalysis and Historical Biography’, Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 19 (1971), p. 156; C. K. Hoffling, ‘Current Problems in Psychohistory’, Comprehensive Psychiatry, vol. 17, no. 1 (1976), pp. 227–239; W. Gilmore, ‘Paths Recently Crossed: Alternatives to Psychoanalytic Psychohistory’, Psychology Review, vol. 7, no. 4 (1979), pp. 26–42. 135 American Psychiatric Association, The Psychiatrist as Psychohistorian (Washington: APA, 1976), pp. 15–16. Zoltán Kőváry, ‘Psychobiography as a Method. The Revival of Studying Lives: New Perspectives in Personality and Creativity Research’, Europe’s Journal of Psychology, vol. 7, no. 4 (2011), pp. 739–777, suggests that there were about 300 psychobiographic analyses published until 1960. 136 James William Anderson, ‘The Methodology of Psychological Biography’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 11, no. 3 (Winter 1981), pp. 455–475. See also David Hackett Fisher, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970), pp. 464– 465; David E. Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) who suggest that there are four main issues: the problem of therapy; the problem of logic; the problem of theory; and the problem of culture. 137 Bernard C. Meyer, ‘Some Reflections on the Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Biography’, in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science, ed. Robert R. Holt and Emmanuel Peterfreund (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 374. 138 Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Gerald Izenberg, ‘Psychohistory and Intellectual History’, History and Theory, vol. 14, no. 2 (1975), pp. 139–155. 139 Stannard, Shrinking History. 140 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘Psychoanalysis and History’, Social Research, vol. 47, no. 3 (1980), pp. 519–536. 141 Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 220–221; Anderson, ‘The Methodology of Psychological Biography’, p. 455. 142 Anderson, ‘The Methodology of Psychological Biography’, p. 465. 143 Anderson, ‘The Methodology of Psychological Biography’, p. 465. 144 Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan. 145 E. J. Hundert, ‘History, Psychology and the Study of Deviant Behaviour’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 2, no. 4 (1972), pp. 453–472. 146 Richard Ellmann, ‘Freud and Literary Biography’, in Freud and the Humanities, ed. Peregrine Horden (London: Duckworth, 1985), p. 58. 147 B. C. Myer, ‘Some Reflections on the Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Biography’, in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science, vol. 1, ed. R. Holt and E. Peterfreund (New York: International Universities Press, 1972). 148 Barzun, Clio and the Doctors. 149 Robert Coles, ‘Shrinking History’, New York Review of Books, 23 February 1973, pp. 15–21 and 8 March 1973, pp. 25–29; Kenneth Lynn, ‘History’s Reckless Psychologizing’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 January 1978, p. 48.

166  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography 150 T. H. Anderson, ‘Becoming Sane with Psychohistory’, Historian, vol. 41, no. 1 (1978), p. 11; Leon Edel, ‘The Figure under the Carpet’, in Telling Lives: The Biographers Art, ed. Marc Pachter (Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1979), p. 1. 151 Barzun, Clio and the Doctors; and Izenberg, ‘Psychohistory and Intellectual History’, 139–155; Paul F. Cronefield, ‘Some Problems in Writing the History of Psychoanalysis’, in Psychiatry and Its History, ed. George Mora and Jeanne L. Brand (Springfield: Thomas Publishers, 1970), pp. 49–50. 152 Stannard, Shrinking History, p. 147. 153 Friedlander, History and Psychoanalysis, p. 27. 154 H. Kohut, ‘Beyond the Bounds of the Basic Rule: Some Recent Contributions to Applied Psychoanalysis’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, vol. 8, no. 3 (1960), p. 571. 155 Barzun, Clio and the Doctors. 156 Anderson, ‘The Methodology of Psychological Biography’, p. 471. 157 Anderson, ‘The Methodology of Psychological Biography’, p. 474. 158 Frank E. Manuel, ‘The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History’, Daedalus, vol. 100, no. 1 (Winter 1971), p. 207; Frank E. Manuel, ‘The Biographer and Psychoanalysis’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 42, nos. 4/5 (1961), pp. 458–466. Leon Edel argued for the judicious use of psychoanalytic theory in the 1980s: Writing Lives: Principia Biographia (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984) and ‘Biography and the Science of Man’, in New Directions in Biography, ed. Anthony M. Friedson (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1981), pp. 1–11. See also Leon Edel, ‘The Biographer and Psychoanalysis’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 42, no. 4/5 (1961), pp. 458–466. 159 Stannard, Shrinking History, p. xiii. 160 Friedlander, History and Psychoanalysis; Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Alexander L. George, ‘Some Uses of Dynamic Psychology in Political Biography: Materials on Woodrow Wilson’, in Greenstein and Lerner, A Source Book, p. 88; Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York: John Day Company, 1956). 161 Barbara Taylor, AHR Roundtable ‘Separations of Soul: Solitude, Biography History’, American Historical Review, vol. 114, no. 3 (June 2009), p. 641. 162 George Levine, The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968) considers Carlyle’s approach in On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), pp. 19–78. Similarly, Louise E. Hoffman, ‘Early Psychobiography, 1900–1930’, Biography, vol. 7, no. 4 (1984), p. 342. 163 Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan, pp. xii and 30–31. 164 G. M. Trevelyan, ‘Carlyle as an Historian’, Nineteenth Century, vol. 46 (1899), pp. 493–503. See also Macaulay’s and Carlyle’s separate essays on Samuel Johnson: William Strunk, Jr, ed., Macaulay’s and Carlyle’s Essays on Samuel Johnson (New York: Henry Holt, 1895), https://archive.org/details/macaulay scarlyle00maca/page/n6, accessed 20 September 2019. 165 George Macaulay Trevelyan, ‘The Two Carlyles in the Recreations of an Historian (London and New York: Thomas Nelson, 1919). 166 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939); and The Idea of History (f.p. 1946; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 167 Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 137, 149. Lucien Febvre, ‘Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past’, in A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca (London, 1973, f.p. 1941), pp. 12–26.

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  167 168 Peter N. Stearns with Carol Z. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, AHR, vol. 90 (October 1985), pp. 813–836. 169 Louise E. Hoffman, ‘Early Psychobiography, 1900–1930: Some Recon­ siderations’, Biography, vol. 7, no. 4 (Fall 1984), pp. 341–351. 170 R. G. Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktales, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology, ed. David Boucher, Wendy James and Philip Smallwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 181. 171 R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940). New Zealand-born L. S. Hearnshaw was moved to defend psychology from such attack by philosophers of history like Collingwood: L. S. Hearnshaw, ‘A Reply to Professor Collingwood’s attack on Psychology’, Mind, vol. 51, no. 202 (April 1942), pp. 160–169. See also Jay Newman, ‘Collingwood’s Attack on Psychology’, International Studies in Philosophy, vol. 23, no. 3 (1991), pp. 63–73. 172 Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences’, in Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume I, ed. Wilhelm Dilthey, Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 16–17 and 38–39. 173 Dilthey quoted by Jacques Kornberg, ‘Wilhelm Dilthey on the Self and History: Some Theoretical Roots of Geistesgeschichte’, Central European History, vol. 5, no. 4 (December 1972), pp. 299–300. 174 Kornberg, ‘Wilhelm Dilthey on the Self and History’, p. 298. 175 Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), pp. 117–118; Frederick C. Beiser, After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 49; Peter Koslowski, ed., The Discovery of Historicity in German Idealism and Historism (Berlin: Springer, 2005), p. 4; Hans Peter Rickman, Wilhelm Dilthey, Pioneer of the Human Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 53. 176 This is to be distinguished from presentism, David L. Hull, ‘In Defense of Presentism’, History and Theory, vol. 18, no. 1 (February 1979), pp. 1–15. 177 R. G. Collingwood, ‘History as Re-enactment of Past Experience’, in Theories of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 249–265. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (f.p. 1946; Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962). 178 Collinwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, p. 153. 179 William H. Dray, History as Re-enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 180 Theodore Plantinga, Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 23. 181 Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 304. 182 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (f.p. 1939; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1944). See Fred Inglis, History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 183 James Connelly and Alan Costall, ‘R. G. Collingwood and the Idea of a Historical Psychology’, Theory and Psychology, vol. 10, no. 2 (2000), p. 147. 184 Connelly and Costall, ‘R.G. Collingwood and the Idea of a Historical Psychology’, p. 159. 185 Connelly and Costall, citing Collingwood, ‘The Historical Method’, unpublished paper, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1936–1937, p. 3. 186 Thomas. A. Kohut, ‘Psychohistory as History’, American Historical Review, vol. 91, no. 2 (1986), pp. 336–354.

168  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography 187 André Burguière, ‘The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 24, no. 3 (July 1982), p. 435. 188 Burguière, ‘The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales’, p. 436. 189 Lucien Febvre, ‘History and Psychology’, in A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, trans. K. Folca, ed. Paul Burke (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, f.p. 1938), p. 5. 190 Lucien Paul Victor Febvre, Un destin: Martin Luther (Paris: Rieder, 1928); quotation is from Martin Luther: A Destiny, trans. Robert Tapley (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929), pp. 33, 35, cited by Frank E. Manuel, ‘The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History’, Daedalus, vol. 100, no. 1 (Winter 1971), p. 194. 191 Febvre, Martin Luther, p. 46. 192 Quote from Burguière, ‘The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales’, p. 425. 193 Emile Durkheim, preface to the first issue of the Année Sociologique (1896– 1897), cited by Burguière, ‘The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales’, p. 428. 194 Peter Burke, ‘The Annales in Global Context’, International Review of Social History, vol. 35, no. 3 (1990), pp. 421–432. 195 Lucien Febvre, ‘Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past’, in Burke, A New Kind of History, pp. 12–26. 196 Febvre, Martin Luther; The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais. trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1982). French edition: Le problème de l’incroyance au 16e siècle: la religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1937). 197 Burguière, ‘The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales’, p. 437. 198 John Alfred Faulkner, ‘Review of Luther and Lutherthum in der ersten Entwicklung, Vol. 1 by Heinrich Denifle’, American Journal of Theology, vol. 9, no. 2 (April 1905), pp. 359–373. 199 Faulkner, ‘Review of Luther and Lutherthum’, p. 364. 200 Patrick J. Healy described Febvre’s book in this way, but it is more appropriate to Denifle. Patrick J. Healy, Review of Martin Luther: A Destiny by Lucien Lefebvre, trans. Robert Tapley, Catholic Historical Review, vol. 16, no. 4 (January 1931), p. 475. 201 Quote from Burguière, ‘The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales’, p. 408. 202 Healy, ‘Review of Martin Luther’, 474. 203 Quote from Burguière, ‘The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales’, p. 408. 204 Burguière, ‘The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales’, p. 409. 205 Healy, ‘Review of Martin Luther’, p. 474. 206 Stone, The Past and the Present, p. 40. 207 Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (London: Vintage, 2016). 208 Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Periods of economic depression were psychologically emotionally tense. Non-mothering women were held responsible for a dead child or a blighted flock: ‘Witchcraft accusations were a hall of mirrors where neighbours saw their own fear and greed in the shape of the witch’ (p. 63). There was a template used by skilled inquisitors leading the women to admit to ‘supping with the devil’. 209 Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, p. 10. 210 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 6. 211 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 42.

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  169 212 Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper (eds.), Dreams and History: The Interpretation of Dreams from Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2004). 213 Lyndal Roper, ‘Martin Luther’s Body: The “Stout Doctor” and His Biographers’, American Historical Review, vol. 115, no. 2 (April 2010), pp. 351–384. See Erikson, Young Man Luther; Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1942). 214 Andrew Pettegrew, ‘A New Biography of Martin Luther Reveals the Life Beyond the Theses’, a review of Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, New York Times, 14 April 2017, accessed 2 August 2021, https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/books/review/martin-luther/renegade-and-prophetlyndal-roper.html?partner=bloomberg 215 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 397. 216 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 206. 217 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 207. 218 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 206. 219 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 206. 220 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 15. 221 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 16. 222 Joan W. Scott, ‘The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History’, History and Theory, vol. 51, no. 1 (February 2012), p. 63. See also Scott’s discussion of ‘post-Freudian Freud’ in ‘Psychoanalysis and the Indeterminacy of History’, in The Ethos of History, Time and Responsibility, ed. Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), p. 98. 223 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 15. 224 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 11. 225 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 9. 226 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 13. 227 Sally Alexander, ‘Feminist History and Psychoanalysis’, History Workshop Journal, no. 32 (Autumn 1991), pp. 128–133. 228 Freud, ‘The Psychical Consequences of the Anatomic Distinction between the Sexes’, 1925. 229 Helene Deutsch and Sabrina Spielrein developed Freud’s ideas while Karen Horney was critical of Freud’s views on feminine psychology. 230 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Writing Women’s Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 51. 231 Young-Bruehl, Subject to Biography. 232 Joel Whitebook, Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 233 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 11. 234 Roper, Martin Luther, pp. 23–24. 235 Roper, Martin Luther, pp. 10–11. 236 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 14. 237 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 9. 238 Roper, Martin Luther, pp. 11, 423. 239 Pettegrew, ‘A New Biography of Martin Luther Reveals the Life Beyond the Theses’. 240 Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religious in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 13. 241 Graham Little, Politics and Personal Style (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1973); Political Ensembles: A Psychosocial Approach to Politics and Leadership

170  Historians and the problem of other minds in biography (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Strong Leadership: Thatcher, Reagan and an Eminent Person (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988). 242 James Walter, The Leader: A Political Biography of Gough Whitlam (St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1980); at the time, Walter was director of the Institute for Modern Biography at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. James Walter, ‘Biography, Psychobiography and Cultural Space’, in Shaping Lives; Reflections on Biography, ed. Ian Donaldson (Canberra: Australia National University, Humanities Research Centre, 1992), pp. 260– 288; Judith Brett (ed.), Political Lives (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997); and Judith Brett, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin (Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2018). 243 G. M. Trevelyan, Biography, A Reader’s Guide (London: Published for the National Book League by the Cambridge University Press, 1947). 244 Meyer, ‘Some Reflections on the Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Biography’, pp. 373–391. Friedlander, History and Psychoanalysis, p. 9. 245 Kohut, ‘Psychohistory as History’, p. 353. 246 Leonard Cassuto, ‘The Silhouette and the Secret Self: Theorizing Biography in Our Times’, a review of four biographies by John D’Emilio, Elizabeth Faue, Joseph R. McElrath and Jesse P. Crisler, American Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 4 (January 2006), pp. 1249–1261. 247 Philippe Ariès argued that the concept of childhood was a relatively recent cultural development, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962, f.p. 1960). He was suspicious of psychoanalysis, see Patrick H. Hutton, ‘Philippe Ariès and the Secrets of the History of Mentalities’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring 2002), p. 2. 248 MacLachlan, ‘Intersecting and Contrasting Lives’, p. 168.

Further reading The classic psychobiographies are of significant political leaders or creative artistic geniuses: Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957, f.p. 1910); Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967); Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1958); Walter C. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (New York: Basic Books, 1972 [1943]); Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolph Hitler (New York: First DaCapo Press, 1993, f.p. 1977). For an overview of psychobiography: William Todd Schultz (ed.), The Handbook of Psychobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Claude-Hélène Mayer and Zoltan Kovary (eds.), New Trends in Psychobiography (Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Springer, 2019); and Special Issue of Europe’s Journal of Psychology, vol 17, no. 3, (August 2021) on ‘Creating a Meaningful Life: Psychobiographical Investigations’. For a favourable view of psychoanalysis, psychobiography and historians: Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor (eds.), History and Psyche. Culture, Psychoanalysis and the Past (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012); and Michael Roper, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Making of History’ in The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory, ed. Sarah Foot and Nancy Partner (Sage, 2013), pp. 311–325. Psychoanalysis and History, is a journal established in 1999 devoted to ‘both to the study of the history of psychoanalysis and the application of psychoanalytic

Historians and the problem of other minds in biography  171 ideas to historiography, thus forming a bridge between the academic study of history and psychoanalysis’. Scepticism over psychoanalysis and psychobiography has risen since, the British Journal of Psychiatry published a debate about whether the journal should accept psychoanalytic case reports in 2009: L. Wolpert and P. Fonagy, ‘There is No Place for the Psychoanalytic Case Report in the British Journal of Psychiatry’, British Journal of Psychiatry. vol. 195, no. 6 (December 2009), pp. 483–487; Rachel B. Blass and Zvi Carmeli, ‘Further Evidence for the Case against Neuropsychoanalysis’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 96, no. 6 (December 2015), pp. 6–12. Historians using non-psychoanalytical psychological theories, see Michael J. A. Howe, ‘Beyond Psychobiography: Towards more Effective Syntheses of Psychology and Biography’, British Journal of Psychology, vol. 88, no. 2 (May 1997), pp. 235–248.

5 Cold War debates over individuals in history Counterfactuals, contingency and causation in biography

Figure 5.1  Historians of ‘Past and Present’ involved both Marxists and nonMarxist historians: Eric Hobsbawm; Rodney Hilton; Lawrence Stone; Keith Thomas; seated: Christopher Hill; John Huxtable Elliott; Joan Thirsk. Historians of ‘Past and Present’, by Stephen Frederick Godrey Farthing, oil on canvas (1999). National Portrait Gallery, London.

Cold War Debate between Isaiah Berlin and Issac Deutscher In October 1954 Isaiah Berlin and E. H. (‘Ted’) Carr organised a seminar at Balliol College, Oxford. They had invited Issac Deutscher to be a guest speaker to their Modern History Group. Five years earlier, Deutscher had DOI: 10.4324/9780429426391-5

Cold War debates over individuals in history  173 published a biography of Joseph Stalin and his first volume of a trilogy on Leon Trotsky had appeared earlier in the year of his invitation. At the meeting, Deutscher presented a paper on ‘Trotsky at Alma Ata and the Party Opposition’. In question time, Berlin ventured that Karl Marx and Trotsky were both ‘victims of a false historical theory’.1 Deutscher reacted sharply to this criticism. Worse was to come. Berlin also took exception to the ‘awful jargon used by Soviet Marxists’ and historians of Soviet history. At that point Deutscher ‘literally rose to his feet and answered that Einstein and Freud were allowed to use scientific terminology not easily intelligible to the layman’. Deutscher pointed to the global reach of Marxism to indicate its significance and reach; Berlin’s response was that ‘one would surely not defend medieval beliefs by counting the heads that were “stuffed” with them’. Carr’s biographer, Jonathon Haslam, noted that ‘Blood was drawn and no quarter spared … The spectacle of the two in battle must have been unforgettable’.2 David Caute, the recorder of the debate, provided Berlin’s version of the seminar by way of varied accounts the latter wrote in correspondence afterwards.3 Hermione Lee has described Berlin as a political philosopher, a historian of ideas and, in his own way, a biographer, a narrator of lives. He believed in genius and in the power of individuals to change and influence history. He wanted to understand and describe how exceptional people behaved, thought and affected the world.4 Having written on Marx’s ‘Life and Environment’ (1939), he published a range of biographical portraits subsequently.5 Berlin’s intellectual biography on Marx began with his childhood and adolescence and ended with his last years, but it was no cradle-to-grave account. He concentrated upon the political and intellectual environment out of which Marx’s ideas emerged and their power and influence, ‘the most powerful’ among contemporary intellectual forces.6 Berlin set out the socio-political context and also noted historical materialism’s debt to movements such as French materialism, German idealism, and classical economists: that is, the ideas of Baruch Spinoza, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. SimonNicholas Henri Linguet and Henri de Saint-Simon had viewed human history as a war between social classes and Marx’s liberal contemporaries, Augustin Thierry, François Mignet and François Guizot, had developed this idea. Simonde de Sismondi had worked on the scientific theory of the inevitability of regular socio-economic crises of unchecked capitalism. Lorenz von Stein and Moses Hess focused on the proletariat the propertyless. Max Stirner had been concerned with social alienation.7 Berlin mapped out how Marx modified a range of earlier ideas and combined them to come up with historical materialism, which was a collective

174  Cold War debates over individuals in history construction of ideas. Berlin set out to historicise collective thought in Marx, which derived its structure and basic concepts from Hegel and the Young Hegelians, its dynamic principles from Saint-Simon, its belief in the primacy of matter from Feuerbach, and its view of the proletariat from the French communist tradition.8 Nevertheless, he emphasised Marx’s originality: not indeed in the sense in which works of art are original when they embody some hitherto unexpressed individual experience, but as scientific theories are said to be original, where they provide a new solution to a hitherto unsolved, or even unformulated, problem, which they may do by modifying and combining existing views to form a new hypothesis.9 For instance, Marx had ‘borrowed’ Guizot’s ideas about individuals’ ability to intensify or slow down historical forces in developing his own ideas about agency amid social and historical inevitability. Marx was convinced that general laws governed human history with a ‘iron necessity’. The progress of history was inevitable, but because the process was dialectical there could be setbacks.10 Production was not the mere sum of individual aims or interest of the human beings involved. Rather, it was a social cooperative endeavour involving division of labour with the sum being greater than the individual contributions. The forces of production were unstoppable. Individuals motivated by ‘this or that ideal’ could not change the direction of human history. At most, individuals could either slow down or accelerate the process of human history; that is, they could ‘shorten or lessen the birth-pangs’ of struggle: And while history is determined—and the victory will, therefore, be won by the rising class whether any given individual wills it or not— how rapidly this will occur, how effectively or painlessly, how far in accordance with the conscious popular will depends on human initiative, on the degree of understanding of their task by the masses, and the courage and efficiency of their leaders.11 Marx argued that the support of crypto-individualists and utopians, like his contemporary Pierre Joseph Proudhon, of syndicalist strategies, or worse reformers, merely prolonged the proletariat’s agony. The first duty of a revolutionary leader was ‘to disseminate among the masses the consciousness of their destiny and their task’.12 So Berlin presented a Marx who believed individuals made a difference within parameters. He quoted Marx, ‘The laws of history are not

Cold War debates over individuals in history  175 mechanical: history has been made by men, even if not “out of the whole cloth”, [“just as they please”] but conditioned by the social situation in which they found themselves.’13 The twist in all this was that, in the last analysis, Berlin thought that Marx’s theory was unconvincing. Compared to previous biographies and other contemporary accounts, especially those by the ‘orthodox disciples—Friedrich Engels, Georgi Plekhanov, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky—Berlin lingered on the logical tensions and inconsistencies in Marx’s ideas.14 He was particularly critical of commentators who did not acknowledge subtleties; arguing that Engel’s version of historical materialism was ‘more mechanistic and crudely determinist’ than Marx’s writings.15 Others, later Marx commentators, like Gerald Cohen, have attempted to iron out all the contradictions and variations.16 Berlin believed that there were tensions in Marx’s thinking for which there was no final reconciliation. Part of this was because Marx did not maintain the same views throughout the course of his life. Berlin thought this was ‘normal’; one would struggle to think of an intellectual whose thoughts were seamless over time. Berlin showed the difference between the ‘young’ and the ‘mature’ Marx; at the same time, however, some of his ambivalences and contradictions were constant.17 For instance, could Marx reconcile the existence of free will on the one hand with complete determination by class character and environment on the other? Did he believe in free choice or evolutionary determinism? Berlin noted that ‘Marx’s own utterances can be quoted in support of either of these alternatives’.18 More recently, Terrell Carver argued that Marx was lucky when Berlin was sent his way, because after Berlin he became less doctrinaire and dogmatic, more open to multiple interpretations, and a more protean and stimulating intellectual for enquiring minds to engage with.19 Moreover, Berlin admired Marx’s achievement, that he had developed a single integrated account of the process and the laws of social development, containing a complete economic theory treated historically, and less explicitly, a theory of history and society as determined by economic factors.20 Berlin himself was never a Marxist, which makes his 1939 biography all the more interesting. Henry Harding referred to Berlin’s ‘celebrated genius for empathising with those whose views he does not share’ as ‘a ventriloquistic gift’ in which it is sometimes unclear ‘where exactly the boundary lay between the exposition of his subject’s views and his expression of his own’.21 Hardy cited Berlin’s friend Mary Fisher, writing in correspondence that Isaiah’s mother ‘confessed’ that when Berlin read his manuscript on Marx out aloud to her, she regularly had to interrupt to ask if it was Marx’s or Isaiah’s ideas? Isaiah always reassured her that it was Marx’s ideas.

176  Cold War debates over individuals in history Berlin was a liberal. He was against any attempt to make the study of history ‘scientific’ by absolving historians of the need to consider moral and political concerns. His intellectual debts were to the liberalism represented by Alexandre Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky and Ivan Turgenev, rather than to Marx’s historical materialism. He did not believe in Marx’s view that ultimately there would be a struggle between just two classes; he argued that Marx’s predictions had not eventuated and stressed that he had foreseen neither the rise of Fascism nor the welfare state which had both changed human history in Berlin’s lifetime.22 In Caute’s detailed account, Issac and Isaiah, he considered the subsequent bitter feud between Berlin and Deutscher which began with their clash at Balliol College in 1954. Berlin had presented on the shortcomings of historical materialism at the inaugural August Comte Memorial Trust Lecture at the London School of Economics in May 1953, later published as Historical Inevitability (1955).23 He described historical materialism as Marxist’s main approach: it was deterministic, which eliminated ‘“the notion of individual responsibility” and of ontological freedom—and therefore destroys the historian’s quest for empathy and impartiality’.24 Vast impersonal forces provided moral alibis to historical actors. Marxists welcomed violent revolution and Marxist historians regarded cataclysms as historical necessity. Berlin’s main point was that deterministic approaches were not empirical theories, but were rather widespread metaphysical attitudes.25 Berlin set out to convince people that they should not suspend moral judgements over individual’s actions because, within varying limits, people made choices for which they were responsible. Historians, Berlin thought, should also make moral judgements. Secondly, not only did all forms of determinism eliminate individual responsibility, but it also presumed an inevitable ‘physical, psychical, or psychophysical causal chain of events’. Instead, Berlin argued that cause needed to be assessed carefully: … the very meaning of such terms as ‘cause’ and ‘inevitable’ depends on the possibility of contrasting them with at least their imaginary opposites.26 Historians needed to assess degrees of the historical individual’s responsibility and accept that history might have developed in a number of different directions. This is known as counterfactual possibilities.27 Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Attila the Hun, Muhammad, Oliver Cromwell and Adolf Hitler were not like ‘floods, and earthquakes, sunsets, oceans mountains’.28 Impersonal deterministic interpretations, whether spiritual in nature (as in Hegel) or material (as in Marx), had a common characteristic in the notion that human beings could not have chosen otherwise than they did. All too often historical agents were characterised as ‘mere segments’ in a causal chain of events.29 To know all was to forgive all: ‘To understand is to explain and to explain is to justify. The notion of

Cold War debates over individuals in history  177 individual freedom is a delusion.’30 Marxism was ‘much the boldest and the most intelligent of the varieties of historical determinism which excluded the notion of personal responsibility’.31 Even so, Berlin believed in both moral choice and responsibility. Berlin laid some of the blame for a widespread interest in historical inevitability and a lack of interest in personal choices at the feet of Auguste Comte and sociologists. They had fermented an infatuation with the natural sciences. But he also singled out ‘a teleological outlook whose roots reach back to the beginnings of human thought’ where ‘every entity has a “nature” and pursues a specific goal which is “natural” to it’. Perfection involved fulfilling its nature. On the one hand, determinists emphasized underlying cosmic patterns; history had a direction and was guided by laws.32 Marxist determinists regarded historical materialism as a specification of the laws determining the general trajectory of historical change. Berlin found the common attitude that past events determined history and the idea of an inevitable ‘march of history’ to be ‘profoundly anti-empirical’.33 He was particularly aware of the language used colloquially— ordinary speech and metaphors—for super-personal spirits or ‘forces’. The basic rhythms of history rendered people its puppets and marionettes. Many determinists, and others including Thomas Carlyle, used ‘abstract nouns’ upon which they bestowed capital letters: Tradition or History (or ‘the Past’, or the Species, or the ‘Masses’). Berlin had used a pocket edition of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus to learn English when he arrived from Riga in London aged 12, and was referring to him when he discussed historians’ view that individuals belonged to larger Spirits or Unities ‘with the “deepest” and perhaps [with their] least conscious parts’.34 Berlin believed that all versions of determinism shared the view that people deluded themselves about the lack of control that they had. Berlin was especially critical of the Marxist concept of false consciousness, and the inability of the oppressed to recognise exploitation and oppression because it had been normalised. Berlin understood the temptation to adopt determinism or historical inevitability: it was a naïve craving for unity and simplicity. It allowed you to overlook stupidity, vice, injustice, unhappiness and bad luck. Many wished to escape from an untidy, cruel and above all seemingly purposeless world, into a realm where all is harmonious, clear, intelligible, mounting towards some perfect culmination which satisfies the demands of ‘reason’, or an aesthetic feeling, or a metaphysical impulse or religious craving; above all, where nothing can be the object of criticism or complaint or condemnation or despair.35 Deutscher did not record his side of the encounter with Berlin at the 1954 Oxford Seminar, but in 1955 he published a savage review of Berlin’s

178  Cold War debates over individuals in history Historical Inevitability. He agreed with Berlin that historians should not press history ‘into all sorts of elaborate and unreal “systems”, “categories” and generalizations’.36 He seemed also to agree that individuals were morally responsible. Marx was an anti-determinist because he argued that intellectuals should not simply observe the world but they needed to, and could, change it. In this respect, Deutscher thought Berlin seemed to confuse determinism with fatalism. In focusing on this debate, Caute began his account with the role Berlin played in denying Deutscher a university position in the early 1960s. When Berlin had the opportunity, he ensured that Deutscher was overlooked for an academic chair. Caute opened his account with a conversation on this matter which he himself had had with Berlin in All Souls College, Oxford, in 1963. Berlin believed Deutscher was so much under the influence of Marxist ideology that he could not write history truthfully. There was an ‘ugly gap between what Deutscher wrote and what he knew’.37 Berlin reckoned Deutscher deliberately falsified evidence; he calculatingly swept evidence of the inhumanity of the Soviet regime and its leadership’s moral choices from his work because he thought that its measures were necessary. He was enamoured of the Russian Revolution and dazzled by the subsequent Soviet leadership’s achievement in the collectivisation and industrialisation of the Soviet Union. The social benefits outweighed any political shortcomings. Caute puts the record straight by defending both men in turn and showing how each exaggerated the arguments of the other. He counselled against seeing them, however, as merely having ‘diametrically opposed ideological positions’: taking a biographical perspective, he argued that ‘[t]he further one looked into it, the more apparent become sources of friction rooted in personal history and psychology. In terms of identity, this was a civil war, a fratricidal rivalry’.38 Born two years apart, both of these high-voltage scholars had arrived in England as immigrants: Polish-born Marxist historical biographer Deutscher and a Latvian-born historian of ideas Berlin. Deutscher had been expelled from the Polish Communist Party and was lucky to live to emigrate. Berlin’s own biography ensured that he was never a supporter of the Soviet regimes. Born in Riga in 1909, he was a young child in Petrograd in 1917 to 1919 during the Democratic and Bolshevik revolutions. After returning to Riga, his family managed to emigrate to England in 1921. These experiences, not least of them the fear of the Cheka (secret police) knocking on the family’s door to imprison them before they managed to flee, were significant. The Soviets had ‘burnt his cradle’.39 Berlin’s views had been reinforced by his 1945 visit to the Soviet Union and his meeting with Russian writers, Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, who had suffered repression and coercion in the post-revolutionary years. The Soviet regime had imprisoned those close to them as part of a strategy to hobble their creativity. As a liberal, Berlin abhorred tyranny. He was sensitive to liberty’s enemies.40

Cold War debates over individuals in history  179 Caute argued that ‘For two decades [Berlin and Deutscher] stood, heavily armed, on opposite banks of the Rubicon coloured red by deposits of mud and blood’.41 ‘Their mutual antipathy was intense and in Berlin’s case without parallel’.42 But Deutscher was not alone in suffering professional consequences for his Marxism. During the Cold War, the ideo-political struggle between Eastern and Western Blocs which formed at the end of World War Two, a number of Marxist historians or fellow travellers failed to obtain academic positions on account of their ideology. Russell Ward in Australia was denied positions owing to his membership of the Australian Communist Party from 1940.43 There was opposition to George Rudé’s university appointment in Australia on the basis of his political views.44 In New Zealand quiet words were had and jobs were lost on the mere suspicion that J. C. Beaglehole was a Communist.45 Eric Hobsbawm reckoned that ‘To the best of my knowledge no known communists were appointed to [UK] university positions for the ten years or so from 1948, nor if already in teaching posts, were they promoted.’46 Some Communist academics and social activists were sacked in the United States, although the ‘symptoms of the Cold War University [including] political interference in faculty appointments, predated the Cold War’.47 The difference in the case of the feud between Deutscher and Berlin was that they left a huge archive of their enmity. Caute used this trove and transformed this relatively ‘minor academic squabble … into a wide-ranging discussion of some of the major ideological disputes of the twentieth century—Marxism, Zionism, liberalism and the significance of the Russian revolution’.48 The context to their fiery clash was the confrontation between Soviet and social democratic regimes and the confrontation between American and Soviet systems. Caute used the postwar debate between Berlin and Deutscher to embody the clash of values at the heart of the Cold War; as he suggested it was a valuable ‘path into the densely populated controversies between historians and political theorists during these years when the American and Soviet systems confronted one another in naked rivalry’.49 Ironically, given ambiguities about the importance of individual agency for Marxists, biography was central to both Berlin’s and Deutscher’s respective historical practices.50 Marxism infected professional modernism after 1963, as Michael Bentley suggested, but it was based on modernist ideas of the individual. And yet, for Berlin, the great sin of Marx’s method was to obliterate the individual, his conscience, his capacity to choose, by reducing his consciousness to a mere mechanical function of his class position. In so doing, Marx subscribed to an intolerably dogmatic, deterministic vision of human history.51 Even though Deutscher was a Marxist, believing that it was ‘scientifically inevitable’ that socialism would triumph, in practice, like many Marxists,

180  Cold War debates over individuals in history he also wrote on occasion on the importance of individuals as if there were limits on determinism. He is primarily remembered for his biographies: Stalin, a Political Biography (1949), his trilogy on Trotsky—the Prophet Armed (1954) The Prophet Unarmed (1959) and The Prophet Outcast (1963), and ‘The Young Lenin’, the first part of a biography on Lenin, which Isaac was working at that time of his death in late 1967, and which was subsequently edited and published by his widow and collaborator, Tamara Deutscher.52 There were ambiguities in Berlin’s position too. He insisted ‘that the individual is the primary unit of human thought and action, or morality and responsibility’ and, therefore, downplayed collective class consciousness, and yet Caute shows his discussions about the limits of agency and reveals him as ‘[s]omewhat inconsistently lauding the collective awareness that results in nationalism, not least in its Jewish form’.53 Berlin and Deutscher were merely two players in a long-running debate over the role of the individual in history, episodes of which have appeared earlier in this text. Marxism, one of the few examples of ‘covering laws’ in history, was the basis of a major postwar debate. Unlike the earlier debates, the fiery debate between Berlin and Deutscher over these issues were in person in real time, however. The debate is conspicuous because, at the very time that biography was said to be losing traction to structuralism, we find historians not only debating the role of the individual in history, but also writing about those individuals. Significantly these biographers included Marxist historians.54 A boom period of biographical writing from the 1930s included determinists, progressives, as well as Liberals. The interest in Marxist and Soviet history saw publishers push authors into contracts. Both Berlin’s and Deutscher’s first biographies were commissioned. Dan Davin, and Oxford University Press, pursued Deutscher to write a biography of Stalin as the Soviet leader neared his 70th birthday.55 When Thornton Butterworth publishers decided to commission a biography of Marx in its Home University Library series, Herbert Fisher was instructed to find an author. Berlin was not Fisher’s first choice, and he was approached only after having been turned down by ‘Harold Laski, A. L. Rowse, Frank Pakenham, Richard Crossman, Sidney Webb (aka Lord Passfield), and perhaps even [G.D.H.] Cole’.56 E. H. Carr’s Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism (1934) was militantly anti-Marxist and Thornton Butterworth wanted a less polemical work.57 Berlin’s became a best-seller, was published in four editions and translated into many languages. Ironically one might think, the rise of Marxism proved to be a spur for historians to write biography, which, as we shall see, intensified in the postwar period. Many philosophers of history, as Leonid Grinin noted, followed in Berlin’s wake to consider the individual’s role as part of a general theory of driving forces of history. As with the Berlin and Deutscher debate, however, in these general theories of history ‘the discussion did not go beyond

Cold War debates over individuals in history  181 the determinist and anti-determinist frame’.58 Those attempting this balancing act included E. Nagel (1961), M. Mandelbaum (1963), W. H. Dray (1963), C. G. Hempel (1963), F. Stern (1964), Karl Popper (1966), and W. H. Walsh (1992).59 Biography poses the general problem in a concrete and particular way. This has received less attention, even as biographical historians reflected on the problem of the individual’s role in history in their historiography, taking up a problem implicit in Deutscher’s biographies. Jim Smyth points to an ‘empirical spirit’ descending upon British socialism in the Cold War. Citing Anthony Crosland, he argued that the debate was not ‘conducted in terms of fundamental first principles, but an empirical one’.60 I would argue that the development was wider with historians weighing variables and ranking specific examples of individuals in various situations, through biography teasing out the idea that the historical role of an individual may vary from the most obscure to the most colossal depending on various conditions and circumstances, and also on the peculiarities of historical place and time and personal qualities of an individual […].61 Through their case studies, historians writing biography began to consider the general conditions and circumstances in which an individual might ‘change’ the course of history. Some emphasised counterfactuals. Imagining the consequences if events had happened in a different way was necessary for good biographical practice. This involved thinking about possibilities if factors were changed.62 On both sides of the Atlantic, biographers discussed contingency, the idea that outcomes depended on certain specific circumstances, which could change. Professor of History at Columbia University, Robert Livingston Schulyer’s address to the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association (AHA) in December 1958 was on ‘contingency in history’.63 His 1952 address to the AHA had been on F.W. Maitland, the nineteenth-century medieval English legal historian whom Schulyer argued had ‘superb historical sense’ and was sane and ‘balanced’: he did not favour ‘historical laws, universal determinism of any variety (providential, economic, racial, geographical, or other), controlling social forces, or Zeitgeister’, but who knew that ‘causation in history is always multiple and complex’. He was prepared to use ‘conjectures’ or counterfactuals, such as ‘if William the Conqueror had left only one son instead of three’ would a charter of liberties have been granted in England?64 Contingency and counterfactual considerations made for complex consideration of motivation and achievement. British Marxist biographers like E.P. Thompson were concerned, above all, about teleological causation, the idea of something’s being for the sake of a goal, with that goal or end monopolising consideration and forgetting that it was not preordained. All three approaches—contingency, counterfactuals and non-teleological causation—raised questions about methodological issues which were only

182  Cold War debates over individuals in history implicit in Deutscher’s practice. During the Cold War, then, below the ‘meta’ debate between Deutscher and Berlin over Marxist, there were empirically informed methodological and theoretical debates among historians. In this chapter I concentrate on these debates on contingency, counterfactuals, and causation which were waged through historians’ biographical practices.

Myth of a single Cold War biographical debate: contingency, counterfactuals and causation Contingency, counterfactuals and causation concerned historians writing about individuals in the postwar Anglo Saxon world. Herbert Butterfield argued, in his 1955 article ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, that ‘those who stress the role of the individual in history are ipso facto committed to recognizing the importance of contingency’.65 He built his argument on insights from two philosophers: Dorothy Walsh and Henri Bergson. Bryn Mawr College philosopher Dorothy Walsh’s 1937 work on ‘the Philosophical Implications of the historical enterprise’ was concerned with individual choices.66 Butterfield agreed with her about the importance of human beings’ wills and choices: Since individuals are presumed to have a region within which they make choices, their decision can never be merely inferred any more than it could have been predicted; it can only be discovered empirically. It is in keeping with this fact, I think, that the genuine historical mind hankers after concreteness and particularity.67 Butterfield also emphasised Henri Bergson’s earlier views on contingency: fate had been exaggerated in history, while ‘the very great very small, accidental circumstances’ of ‘some microscopic circumstance that initially might have seemed irrelevant’ had been overlooked.68 Butterfield developed Bergson’s argument that ‘It follows from this that men of action can greatly affect events’.69 Butterfield criticised his historical colleagues for not giving sufficient emphasis to contingency: When the narrative is allowed to present itself in hard lines, giving an impression of rigid inevitability, such an effect is calculated to make us sceptical of the possibility of altering the world by any action of ours.70 His point was that there no such thing as ‘grand causes’. The state was made up of people, just as ‘live human beings’ made up grand causes. History pivoted on biography and individual choice. Butterfield noted, for instance, that the French Revolution was not a ‘thing’, it was a not a ‘self-acting agent’, for ‘it is men who make history’, and one needed to name names, consider motivation and causation.71

Cold War debates over individuals in history  183 Part of the reason for this ‘seismic’ shift in consideration of contingency can be related to the rise of totalitarian leaders, which has been discussed above, and part can be attributed to Marxist biography, which we discuss next.72 Michael Bentley pointed to 1938 in the United Kingdom as a turning point for the popularity of Marxist history: But despite the immensity of 1931 as an economic threshold and its suggestion that the end of capitalism beckoned, even a parti pris witness such as Christopher Hill testifies that no compelling historical work containing Marxist analysis appeared before 1938—again the fateful year—when his own reporting of the work of Soviet historians began to appear in the Economic History Review and when Morton’s People’s history enjoyed wide distribution under the aegis of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club.73 The anniversary of the ‘English revolution’ saw English historians distilling Marxist ideas in their histories but writing of it as a bourgeois revolution.74 Despite Berlin’s sophisticated biography of Marx being published in 1939, historians tended to report the ‘crudest distillation of the Marxist message’, at least up to 1950s. Even when there was no change in methodology, there was a move towards social history, new historical subjects, and new concerns. In Britain, the development of the Communist Party Historians’ Group (CPHG) was a crucial development; for this group wrote biography and championed its method. This was a cluster of British Marxist historians and Communist Party members who were formally associated from 1946 until 1956 and included, at various times, Maurice Dobb, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Charles Hobday, Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, Stephen Finney Mason, A. L. Morton, George Rudé, Raphael Samuel, John Saville, Dorothy Thompson, E. P. Thompson and Dona Torr.75 Torr was critical in personifying the Communist Party Historians’ Group’s heritage studies. In 1957 James Klugmann had noted that she applied her theory to British working-class heritage: Very often the teaching of Marxism-Leninism in Britain has been weakened by the lack of knowledge of the British heritage of working class and democratic struggle, and conversely the teaching of British Labour History has more than often been weakened by the absence of a Marxist, a scientific approach.76 A founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), Torr set herself the task of promoting historical study in the party.77 A daughter of the Anglican manse, she had been sent to a German finishing school.78 University-educated in English literature, a linguist rather than an historian to begin with, she became a librarian on George Lansbury’s

184  Cold War debates over individuals in history Daily Herald, a first clerk on its national journalist union chapel, before radicalising, becoming a foundation member of the Communist Party and marrying a fellow communist. She translated between German and English at the Fifth World Congress of the Communist International in 1924. Subsequently, she was invited to translate Marx and Engels’ Selected Correspondence working in Moscow at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. She went on to translate and edit a number of Marxist classics.79 While working for the Communist-associated publishing company Lawrence & Wishart, she also began work on a biography of Karl’s daughter, Eleanor Marx, but was waylaid from that task by the party to write on Tom Mann.80 She published an interim Communist Party booklet in 1936 for his 80th birthday celebrations.81 Torr had known Mann personally, he too was a long-term member of the CPGB, describing him as a supreme agitator: shaking, stirring, breaking up, fertilising, rallying, organising for new phases of the struggle which is life itself … More dangerous to the old order of darkness, unreason and war, more dangerous as socialist, trade unionist and international man … His sense of the power of the organisation of the people, of the fruits within the people’s grasp if only these organisations were rightly used—his broad constructive approach to existing organisation—these were things which many a ‘strict socialist’, proud of his superior knowledge, did not yet begin to understand.82 Antony Howe argued that in many ways Mann was used for party political purposes.83 By this stage, however, the party had become politically invested in Mann’s biography, hoping he would take on a leadership role. Howe pointed to the Comintern’s Seventh World Congress in July–August 1935, which directed member parties to celebrate their national pasts.84 The CPGB executive member and theoretician R. Palme Dutt urged that ‘history requires that [Mann’s] biography should reach completion’ to coincide with his joining the CPGB’s central committee.85 With the need to promote suitable local heroes, more planning went into preparing the biographical propaganda for Mann’s eightieth birthday in 1936, this time going into more detail than ever before to utilise his image to boost the party. Responsibility for a special biographical booklet was given by [Stalinist CPGB, Harry] Pollitt to his friend Dona Torr; and despite Pollitt’s misgivings, at the next opportunity, in 1937, Mann was duly raised to the party leadership [and the] following year, in 1938, he chaired the national party congress.86 Torr and other members of her historians’ circle used the Mann booklet as a key text in the party classes on the history of the British labour

Cold War debates over individuals in history  185 movement at Marx House in London. On Mann’s death in 1941, the party asked Torr to write his full biography. She began working on a multi-volume account; volume one was not completed, however, when she became ill, dying in 1957. Christopher Hill completed a version of her draft for publication: Tom Mann and his Times (1956) of Mann’s life up to 1889, which became Torr’s best-known work. Torr’s activism in forming a ‘Marxist Historians’ Group’ in 1938, together with Robin Page Arnott and Douglas Garman, and the later Communist Party Historians’ Group in 1946 were her most critical contributions to Marxist biography.87 She wrote to the party ideologue, Palme Dutt, that she saw the need to ‘breed new historians, awaken and train them’. He saw the usefulness of biography, having written Lenin (1933) in the series ‘Makers of the New World’.88 Using Mann’s biography to re-brand the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) as genuinely British had unintended consequences, however.89 As Howe noted, Mann’s ‘rhetoric was full of loose references to class struggle, his theoretical positions were often vague, incorporated numerous strands, changed repeatedly, and were seldom marked by subtle analysis along Marxist-Leninist lines’.90 Despite doubts and debates about Mann’s status, through Torr, he helped to lead British Marxist biography in particular directions.91 Within the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group, a number wrote ‘British’ biography under Torr’s influence.92 Even Hobsbawm, who conspicuously did not write a biography, although he wrote his autobiography, described her and appreciated her as ‘a benevolent abbess’, keeping a watchful eye over the group.93 Another noted, ‘She was universally admired by the younger historians who gathered round her. It is rare to find a single text coming out of the 1940s without some note of appreciation for her’.94 Indeed Thompson spent many years working closely with her on his biography of William Morris which was published by the party. In the preface to the book he paid tribute to her repeatedly laying aside her own work in order to answer my enquiries or to read drafts of my material, until I felt that parts of the book were less my own than a collaboration in which her guiding ideas have the main part. It has been a privilege to be associated with a Communist scholar so versatile, so distinguished, and so generous with her gifts.95 Christopher Hill and John Saville published a collection of essays in her honour, Democracy and the Labour Movement and in that preface reflected that Torr made us feel history on our pulses. History was not words on a page, not the goings-on of kings and prime ministers, not mere events. History was the sweat, blood, tears and triumphs of the common

186  Cold War debates over individuals in history

Figure 5.2 Dona Torr, a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, was a central figure in encouraging the Communist Party Historians Group to write biography. Dona Torr (1953). Labour History Archive & Study Centre, People’s History Museum, Manchester.

Cold War debates over individuals in history  187 people, our people … So fertile has she been of ideas that a whole school of Marxist historians has grown up around her, fostered by her unfailing interest and aid.96 The members of this school were prolific biographers. Hill wrote on Lenin (1947) and A. L. Morton wrote on Robert Owen (1962).97 Furthermore, Bridget and Christopher Hill co-authored a paper about the early female historian Catherine Macaulay and the Seventeenth Century in 1967 and Bridget Hill, a biography, The Republican Virago in 1992. George Rudé wrote on Robespierre: Portrait of a Revolutionary Democrat (1975) and on Wilkes and Liberty (1983) and he also contributed ten biographical essays on convicts transported for their radicalism for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Saville went much further into national biography, with Ernest Jones, Chartist (1952) and, in co-authorship with Joyce M. Bellamy and David E. Martin, he also edited ten volumes of the Dictionary of Labour Biography from 1972. Charles Hobday later wrote on Edgell Rickword (1989), Victor Kiernan on Shakespeare, Poet and Citizen (1993) and Horace: Poetics and Politics (1999). Dorothy Thompson even wrote a biography of Queen Victoria: Gender and Power (1990). The Communist Party Historians’ Group broke up in 1956, as a result of what Dennis Dworkin has described as long-standing tensions.98 For instance, the 1954 Summer School on the Development of British Capitalism at Netherwood had tried to contain Maurice Dobb’s insistence to focus on the rise of capitalism production and E.P. Thompson’s equal insistence on the role of common people in determining and shaping history.99 Raphael Samuel argued that group members were juggling two discourses: of economics and of working-class life, culture and politics. Dworkin noted that the latter became increasingly predominant: one [discourse was] determinist and functionalist, based on a Marxist macro view of historical development, and founded on a belief in the inevitable triumph of socialism; another emphasizing the class struggle and recognizing the significance of culture, ideas and human agency. This latter view was rooted in the voluntarism of the Popular Front. It became ultimately predominant because of the changing political and intellectual climate of the 1960s and 1970s.100 Thompson came to champion the latter view, developing his biographical interests in two directions beyond Torr’s direction. First, influenced by ‘history from below’, he drew Marxist attention to more common biography with his clarion call in 1963 ‘to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity’.101 His biographical work on the portraits and lives of the radical leaders of popular experience in his The Making of the English

188  Cold War debates over individuals in history Working Class (1963) was seminal. A range of Marxists wrote on representative or common people, saving them from the ‘sheer oblivion’ of time.102 As we shall see, Thompson also developed an anti-teleological approach, also using biography to popularise his points. Meanwhile United States’ historians, many of them former Marxists, were also interrogating biography. When Sidney Hook came to discuss historians’ writings on great individuals in his 1943 The Hero in History; A Study in Limitation and Possibility, he found it difficult, however, to find examples of extreme or pure ‘Carlylean’ biographical or ‘Plekhanovian’ structural history.103 Practising biographical historians almost all conceded something to both agency and structure, rightly. A communist in his youth, he had become critical of all forms of social determinism, whether inspired by Spencer, Hegel or orthodox Marxists. Hook commented on the earlier versions of the debate over the individual in history from Carlyle but his main concern, however, was over contemporary historical practice at a time that Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Churchill ignited interest in leaders’ biographies and the role of the great individual in history. Along with interactionalists like William James who has been discussed earlier, Hook sought a reasonable reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory positions, between groups of thinkers holding different points of view on heroes: those who emphasized ‘man’s agency’ over the importance of structures. Rather than good examples of historians’ balanced accounts, however, he chose two problematic and dated biographical accounts: Frederick Adams Wood, The Influence of Monarchs (1913) and Leon Trotsky’s Russian Revolution (1930).104 He did this because they vindicated his interactionalism: ‘Sometimes what counts most is the situation, sometimes it is the man’ and counterfactuals and contingency were tools for determining in any given case. Hook wrote amid a huge flourishing of historians’ biography on ‘great individuals’, but this work during the Cold War did not simply repeat the nineteenth-century debate over the role of the individual in history. He despaired that historians too rarely considered ‘scientifically meaningful’ issues such as counterfactuals, contingency and causation. In this view, for instance, he was inspired by J. C. Squire’s idea of counterfactual history, as reflected in his 1931 If, or History Rewritten. Hook argued, however, that Squire’s was mostly poorly executed and lapsed into imaginary history.105 Hook lingered over Eduard Meyer’s consideration of a Persian victory at the Battle of Marathon,106 Carola Oman’s Napoleon successfully crossing the English Channel,107 and Winston Churchill’s alternative history of a Confederate victory at Gettysburg, considering possibilities which were plausible alternatives.108 Clearly, Hook had Marxist historians, however, in his sights. His chapter on Trotsky is his most critical. While a determinist, Hook argued Trotsky was also a good researcher and empiricist, so had concluded that in 1930 that, if Lenin had not been present, the Bolshevik Revolution might not have happened for many years. Hook forensically

Cold War debates over individuals in history  189 re-examined the issue and argued too that, without Lenin, it would not have occurred at all. In many ways Caute’s take on the Deutscher and Berlin debate over Marxist biography is the less interesting of the Cold War debates because it generated very little interest in the methodology itself. There were a range of ‘lesser’ skirmishes which concentrated directly on historians’ biographical practices more directly; contingency, which involved thinking about luck; unintended consequences, indicating historical events are not predetermined; counterfactuals, imagining hypothetic alternatives; and causation more generally, considering how change occurs. Depicting alternative scenarios, for instance, helped to clarify an actor’s roles and potential generalisations.109 Not all of those emphasizing structure and downplaying contingency were Marxists. One historian in particular was at the centre of the British debates about the nature of history and the role of biography. E. H. Carr had begun his career writing accounts of Dostoevsky (1931), Herzen (1933), Romantic Exiles (1933) and Michael Bakunin (1937), as well as his 1934 monograph Karl Marx.110 He had held posts in the Foreign Office and Foreign Division of the Ministry of Information in the interwar period, as a journalist during World War Two, before committing to academia. During the Cold War, from 1951 to 1978 Carr wrote 14 volumes of A History of Soviet Russia, which focused on the period between 1917 and 1929. He rejected the new approach to history, with its central role of contingency. Butterfield and Popper were developing these ideas and Berlin related them to biography.111 Carr clashed with others, as Caute, Michael Cox, Richard J. Evans and Haslam have considered in detail, over whether a historian ought to study ‘the behaviour of individuals or the action of social forces’.112 One can follow his debate with Berlin, with whom Carr shared cricket metaphors in support of historical debates in their correspondence.113 Both stepped back from the pugnaciousness of their public writing in private conversations and their differences did not result in the bitterness of the Deutscher and Berlin debate. Carr was particularly strident in his public lectures. According to his biographer, former student Jonathon Haslam, Carr ‘always had a tendency to lurch between his “needlework” (detailed empirical research and writing) and grand, irresponsible generalizations’, which the lectures exemplified.114 He characterised Carr’s writing as between writing as a measured diplomatic bureaucrat and expressing himself more like a strident political journalist. Indeed, it is obvious that the shrill, at times simplistic, relativism of his Trevelyan Lectures in 1961 (published later that year as What is History?), was at odds with detached detailed scholarship Carr himself produced. Evans, in the introduction to a new edition of What is History? (2002), described the 14 volumes of A History of Soviet Russia (published from 1951 to 1976) as ‘dull, fact-laden and generally heavy going’.115

190  Cold War debates over individuals in history And its extreme lack of interest in failed alternatives to the Bolshevik Revolution seems to derive from the civil ‘servant’s lack of interest in anything which does not impinge directly on the formulation of policy. This lack of interest, in turn, is one of the things that makes the History so tedious for so much of the time: it’s a history without drama, without the sense of openness and contingency that are the essential elements in an exciting historical narrative.116 Evans claims to have managed to read only the first five volumes before giving up. Carr’s What Is History? (1961), however, was a popular best-seller with, to date, over a quarter of a million copies sold. In this work he mocked the ‘Bad King John’ and ‘Good Queen Bess’ mode of history, a mode decreeing that the character of individuals should be historians’ object of inquiry. With tongue in cheek, he claimed that such a study of individual genius was ‘characteristic of the primitive stages of historical consciousness’.117 He argued that this study of individual genius, quite rightly, was dying out, albeit with a few prehistoric laggards lurking, such as A. L. Rowse, and his outstanding Oxford student, ‘Miss C. V Wedgewood’.118 Carr railed initially about Berlin, but since his friend was not a historian writing biography, he moved on to Rowse, an author who specialized in Elizabethan England; just under half of the 80 books he wrote were biographical. Eventually, however, he concentrated on Veronica Wedgwood, whom he held as the epitome of those writing biographical history. Wedgwood had begun a PhD at the London School of Economics 1932 under R. H. Tawney’s supervision on seventeenth-century parliamentary history before rejigging her topic to ‘The Central Organisation of the Civil Service under James I and Charles I’. At the same time, she was researching a biography of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford.119 When that was published, with the help of J. E. Neale, she allowed her ‘dry as dust’ economic study with Tawney to lapse, worked as an editor with Jonathan Cape but her main employment was as a journalist on Time and Tide.120 For some years, she remained a member of Tawney’s economic history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research. She was both well-connected and successful: G. M. Trevelyan was a Wedgwood family friend and supporter and her biography of William the Silent had won the 1944 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her biographies of Oliver Cromwell, a two-volume account of the reign of Charles I, The King’s Peace (1955) and The King’s War (1958), were popular, and her The Trial of Charles 1 was a best-seller in both America and Britain on its publication in 1964.121 The Economist praised her ‘novelist’s talent for entering into the character of the giants of history’, such as the royalists and Cromwell’s roundheads. She managed this by working ‘out the battles on paper, then put her imagination to work as she tramped around the battlefields, if possible in the season when a battle took place’.122

Cold War debates over individuals in history  191 Wedgwood, discussing her methodology in Velvet Studies: Essays on Historical and Other Essays (1946), described human life and history as essentially dramatic; it is born and exists in conflict, conflict between men, conflict between men and circumstances, or conflict within the confines of a single human skull. This conflict is the core of every development in time … In the individual conflict lies the first reason for those mysterious abstracts, economic trends and social movements, which in our textbooks are apt to become disembodied concepts—is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things … I prefer this overestimate [of agency] to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of inhuman sea or pulverised the fallible surviving records of human life into the great dust of statistics.123 Biography for Wedgwood provided insights that are unavailable to a quantitative sociological approach to the past.124 Above all, she relished historical analysis because it was contingent: [T]he whole value of the study of history is for me its delightful undermining of certainty, its cumulative insistence of the differences of point of view […] it is not lack of prejudice which makes for dull history, but lack of passion.125 In Wedgwood’s view, the province for historians was strangeness, variety and contradiction in historical subjects.126 Carr attacked Wedgwood’s approach, and above all her view that it was the historian’s responsibility to do more than analyse or describe. Rather than posing as a disinterested observer, she personified Berlin’s axiom that: ‘Historians should always draw morals’, for If they did not, if they claimed that history should be written ‘without prejudice’, a villain would use the history to delude the public.127 Carr regarded the historians’ role as being that of a detective, rather than a judge. He also objected to Wedgwood’s view that the behaviour of men as individuals is distinct from their behaviour as members of groups or classes, and that the historian may legitimately choose to dwell on the one rather than the other; [and secondly…] that the study of the behaviour of men as individuals consists of the study of their conscious motives of their actions.128 Carr believed that History was a process; you could not isolate a bit of process and study it on its own because ‘everything is completely

192  Cold War debates over individuals in history interconnected’, subjects and wider context. Of course, if that were true, you could not write the history of anything without writing the history of everything. In practice, he regarded class and collective consciousness as the matters of most significance in history. His was a social view: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’.129 Carr boldly declared that History should be about numbers, ‘millions of discontented peasants in thousands of villages’. They might be nameless but they were a factor that no historian ‘could ignore’.130 Furthermore, History could not be written on the basis of ‘explanations in terms of human intentions’ or of accounts of their motives given by the actors themselves. Society was full of conflict and unintended consequences. History was not about intentions, as R. G. Collingwood had suggested and Wedgwood had narrated. The story of history was not one of contingency or individuals’ agency but it was about social forces, not about actions of individuals performed in isolation, and not about motives, real or imaginary [… but] facts about the relations of individuals to one another in society and about the social forces which produce from the actions of individuals results often at variance with and sometimes opposite to, the results which they themselves intended.131 Carr claimed to be a Hegelian in this regard: The great man of the age is one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age when its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and essence of his age; he actualises his age.132 Carr’s interpretation of Hegel has been questioned; social conditions are often ambiguous or in tension and great men do a great deal of interpreting.133 Carr paid attention to the interpretative aspect of historians as both agents and products of the historical process: they were part of that context. The first part of his chapter in What Is History? on ‘Society and the Individual’ labours this point. Carr praised Deutscher’s biographies of Stalin and Trotsky as being outstanding biographical contributions to history. He argued that Wedgwood’s objective that ‘history is concerned to inquire why individuals “in their own estimation, acted as they did” was “odd”’. He supposed she ‘did not practice what she preached’ and, showing a lack of familiarity with her writing, he opined, ‘If she does, she must write some very queer history’.134 And Carr was not referring here to the lesbian life that Wedgwood shared with Jacqueline Hope-Wallace. Warming up, he pronounced her views simplistic and unsophisticated, and stated that they failed to take into account unconscious processes and vested interests.135 The criticism in Carr’s What Is History did not deter Wedgwood: this is evidenced by the publication of a number of later titles: The Trial of

Cold War debates over individuals in history  193 Charles I (1964), Richelieu and the French Monarchy (1962), Montrose (1966) and The World of Rubens (1973). As importantly, she published her metabiographical views: her Cambridge lectures as Truth and Opinion (1960), an introduction to Rose Macaulay, They Were Defeated (1960), and The Sense of the Past: Thirteen Studies in the Theory and Practice of History (1967). History and Hope: The Collected Essays of C.V. Wedgwood (1987) republished some of essays in Velvet Studies (1946) and Truth and Opinion (1960).136 She was a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton from 1953 to 1968. Continuing ‘to give full importance and value to the admitted motives and the illusions of the men of the seventeenth century’, Wedgwood aimed ‘to restore their immediacy of experience’.137 She did not respond directly but defended her methodology generally: she was aware that empiricism had limitations but she argued, so too did the methods of her critics: Before history can be put into a coherent perspective it is often necessary to clear away the misinterpretations and the half-knowledge by which contemporaries lived. But the application of modern methods of research, together with modern knowledge and prejudice, can make the past merely the subject of our own analytical ingenuity or our own illusions. With scholarly precision we can build up theories as to why and how things happened which are convincing to us, which may even be true, but which those who lived through the epoch would neither recognise nor accept. It is legitimate for the historian to pierce the surface and bring to light motives and influences not known at the time; but it is equally legitimate to accept the motives and explanations which satisfied contemporaries. The two methods produce different results, but each result may be a fair answer to the particular question that has been asked. They become misleading only if either is accepted as the whole truth.138 Hill was one of those who contributed to her festschrift in 1986. Like others, he held the view that Carr had misrepresented Wedgwood.139 For instance, she wrote on numerous occasions that, while interested in leadership, she was equally concerned about the fate of ‘little’ people: As a moralist, Miss Wedgwood inclined to the ‘great men’ approach, but she was equally concerned about the fate of ‘little’ people. Whatever the gains of the civil war, she wrote, they were a disaster for those ‘who had worked and saved to maintain their small property’ and were plundered by the opposing armies.140 Carr overstated his view that history should be politically relevant and that it should concentrate on the political history of the historical establishment and in causes of historical events insofar as their explanation served

194  Cold War debates over individuals in history the making of policy in the future. As Holland Hunter noted in a review on the final volume of Carr’s Soviet history that ‘hindsight makes the choice among alternative policies seem deceptively obvious, and one must acknowledge the analytical plausibility of several policy directions that were competing for acceptance in Comintern circles’ in the 1920s.141 Carr did not and he also dismissed the validity of accidents.142 Evans noted that Carr’s were popular views, but they also brought problems, especially in its linkage with the idea that the vast majority of human beings in the past were of no interest to the historian because they had made no contribution to political change. It was precisely this idea that the social historians of the 1960s set out to challenge.143 Evans and Alun Munslow have argued that Carr’s What Is History? ‘played a central role in the historiographical revolution in Britain in the 1960s’: a revolution that rejected the view that history is concerned with the political elite, theoretically bereft, ‘entirely innocent of any consciousness that it might be serving some kind of ideological or political purpose’ and that it ‘rationalised epistemologically conservative historical thinking’, leading to a reaction.144 In 1966, the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) published three manifestos on ‘New Ways in History’ in three numbers.145 It was a clarion call to a younger generation dissatisfied with the concentration on political history by the historical establishment. Carr himself, for all his dissident views in some respects, represented that establishment. The medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough argued that historians should replace their stout boots with computers and econometric history. The classicist M. I. Finley thought historians should adopt sociological perspectives and move away from grubbing empiricism. Finally, the Marxist Thompson, attacked ‘the established constitutional and parliamentary-political Thing’, in the name of history from below. Keith Thomas has argued that this all heralded a largely non-Marxist social history.146 The non-Marxist public had been primed for biographies from below, by the time Thompson published his manifesto in the TLS.147 To some extent Marxists and fellow travellers writing biography found historians such as Wedgwood’s biographical practices easy targets. They regarded most biographers as atheoretical and insubstantial empiricists. Philosophers of history and left-wing historians who studied great men who had ‘higher degrees of creativity’ like Lenin, and the forces which carried them to greatness, were trickier. Raymond Aron, a theorist, was a case in point. He argued that Deutscher and other Marxists undermined Soviet leaders’ agency in history and this seemed to be taken more seriously. Aron’s work was both ‘empirically orientated and philosophically and historically rooted’.148 He had written about historical methodology, the comparative sociology of Western and Eastern industrial and political systems,

Cold War debates over individuals in history  195 as well as writing weekly journalism. He appeared regularly for Le Figaro from 1947 to 1977. He had begun studying Marxism as a student and had written an Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1938).149 His work on capitalism and communist systems later inspired some studies of convergence, but he himself was mindful of the differences between the two regimes. Aron reviewed Deutscher’s work in the Congress for Cultural Freedoms’ Paris journal Preuves. When Stalin died in 1953, Deutscher envisaged a relatively democratic evolution of communism in the Soviet Union. Aron disagreed strongly; and Deutscher responded.150 The Liberal Aron and the Marxist Deutscher disagreed generally but, for our purposes, they clashed over biographical approaches, contingency and counterfactuals.151 Aron objected to what he described as left-wing historians’ ‘blind faith in Marxist myths’. He complained about the attempted marxification of universities, social sciences and public discussion. Michael A. Ledeen described Aron as a sceptical intellectual, someone who applied his critical judgement to every view, whether fascist, communist or fellow traveller like Jean-Paul Sartre.152 Aron followed French historiographical traditions by searching out for the ‘proper method’ before he attempted to recreate the past and reconstruct events in a history. Method really mattered to Aron; he ‘demanded that analysis begin with evidence not theory’. He complained that Marxists, like Deutscher, did the opposite. Aron’s historical method was contingent, flexible and open-ended.153 He argued for the consideration of plausible choices when analysing contemporary policy-making and historical agents. He sought to marry contingent and necessary forces and avoid determinism. Maria Bernheim Conant, who collected Aron’s writings, described his method as involving looking back, to see in past events a logical development yet we must also be aware of how everything could have been different. Napoleon could have decided not to attack Russia. So could Hitler. Likewise, although we can confidently expect the industrial order to develop in a certain direction with a focus on efficiency and production there is no certainty that it will. According to Aron, in looking back and in looking ahead a probabilistic outlook is both intellectually sound and politically progressive.154 Aron himself suggested this in the late 1930s: Just as the statesman, depending on the possibilities that he can foresee, designs the contours of the world in which he acts, so the historian, by a retrospective analysis of possibilities, reveals the articulations of the historical process.155 Aron argued, however, that the exercise of power was a problem ‘whether one turns over the earth with a pickaxe or with a bulldozer’. Similarly,

196  Cold War debates over individuals in history political order involved ‘authority granted to some or only one over the conduct of all’, which was an eternal problem.156 War and international competition meant that ‘politics will rule and individuals act’. Meanwhile one could not ‘ignore the heroes who made history in the time of Lenin, Stalin, Church and Hitler.’157 Aron, writing about the Athenian historian Thucydides in 1960, compared the fifth-century BC and twentieth-century political narratives, especially World War One, and concluded that modern historical thought underplayed the roles of great historical figures.158 Under the influence of Marxism and sociology, modern narratives involved ‘deindividualisation’ and ‘depersonalization’ by involving a multitude of actors within narratives with responsibility rarely allocated to one person: Events that can be imputed to the decisions of one man or several produce consequences as far as the eye can reach … The Russian Revolution, as it actually happened, at the time and in the manner it did, is inconceivable without Lenin. It is easy to show … [this]. All these connections are intelligible; as all real in the sense that subsequent events have confirmed them; but none of them is thereby necessitated; none is strictly foreseeable. It is absurd to say that the progression of events could not have been other than it was since no one could have grasped it in advance.159 He was wary of modern narratives advocating instead work based around counterfactuals.160 Aron was a sworn critic of Deutscher with the two disagreeing over accidents, contingency and counterfactual methodologies.161 Deutscher complained that My French critic [that is Aron] seems flabbergasted at my suggestion that the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 could perhaps have taken place even without Lenin.162 Deutscher argued that the impact of economic processes, unprecedented in scope and momentum, was decisive for the political, cultural and moral future of the Soviet Union. Individuals were relatively unimportant. He rejected the view that any individual could play a decisive role.163 Impersonal forces had transformed one of the most industrially backward nations into the world’s second industrial power. And with this development in mind, Deutscher argued that the history could not have developed in any other way but would change in the future after Stalin’s death, because of the changed conditions rather than the power of the individual: ‘Stalinist terror and primitive magic’ had outlived their day. Aron thought Stalin was more important than in history than did Deutscher.

Cold War debates over individuals in history  197 Deutscher thought that his critics, especially Aron, were Cold War propagandists who based their ‘arguments and slogans of an unchangeable and irredeemable evil in Stalinism and communism at large’.164 Deutscher argued that Aron saw the whole of the Russian Revolution in terms of the bad faith or evil ambition, or ‘Manichean-like’ moods of a few Bolshevik leaders, plots and conspiracies: How was it that Stalin first imposed upon his party, by fire and sword, the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, that he compelled the whole of international communism to accept this doctrine …?165 Deutscher believed that half a century of Russian and even world history could not just simply spring from Lenin’s head, from a single idea in his brain. In Deutscher’s view, Aron’s contempt for ‘materialist determinism’ and his prejudice against Bolshevism in all its phases, pre-Stalinist, Stalinist, and post-Stalinist, led him to make absurd claims. That was the only explanation for others not envisaging, as he did, the democratic evolution of communism in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death. Aron was somewhat taken aback, given his commitment to counterfactuals in history. He did believe in accidents and he also believed in historical processes: The course of international relations remains supremely historical in all the meanings of this term: there are unceasing changes, the systems, which are multiple and fragile, suffer the effects of all the transformations, decisions taken by one man or a few set into motion millions of people and provoke irreversible mutations.166 He could envisage democratic communism, just as he could earlier envisage the Mensheviks containing the Bolsheviks. He argued that, if the sealed train which carried Lenin across Germany had crashed, or if a foreign country had detained Trotsky or if the ‘Spirit of the times to have expressed itself differently’, then Russian history would have been different. He argued that politics was never reducible to economics even though the struggle for the possession of sovereign power may in many ways be linked to the mode of production and the distribution of wealth.167 Aron pointed out that there can be patterns in history, even when taking into account accident, contingency and the role of the individual. He was interested in both politics and the nature of political systems which made some historical options more likely than others. He considered the kinds of patterns to political revolutions, agreeing with Deutscher that,

198  Cold War debates over individuals in history The fact is that nearly all modern revolutions (the Paris Commune, the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the Central European revolutions of 1918, the Chinese revolution of 1948–9) and even most democratic reforms, have come in the wake of war and military defeat, not as a result of purely internal developments; and this has been so even in non-totalitarian regimes.168 Above all, unlike Deutscher, he thought democratic communism in the Soviet Union was unlikely. The differences in views between Aron and Deutscher were significant. Even so, if we examine Deutscher’s work carefully, we find that he grappled with the issues of contingency and counterfactual in his biographical work, more than he would admit in debate. Deutscher addressed the role of contingency in his 1949 political biography of Stalin. In his introduction to the 1961 edition, he defended his account against the ‘undertone of inevitability that runs through the book’ by differentiating between the partisan and the historian. He argued that the partisan could not be deterministic, ‘if only because some of the elements of that situation and some of the changes, are as yet unknown and even undetermined; and because he can never be quite sure what will be the impact of his own action’.169 In contrast, the historian cannot help being a determinist, or behaving as one if he is not; he has not done his job fully unless he has shown causes and effects so closely and naturally interwoven in the texture of events that no goal is left, unless, that is, he has demonstrated the inevitability of the historical process with which he is concerned.170 The historian had hindsight, ‘fixed and irreversible patterns of events: all weapons have already been fired, all wills have already been spent; all decision shave been achieved; and what is irreversible has assumed the aspect of the inevitable’.171 And this led, however, to a tension in his account, with contingency being his greatest dilemma as a biographer. Deutscher deals with this dilemma by writing of Stalin in two parts which can be measured by the presence or absence of a vocabulary of contingency. The rise of Stalin is accidental but, once he is in power, the terror seems inevitable. Indeed he refers to the ‘metamorphosis of triumphant Bolshevism, and Stalin’s own fortunes’172 and the ‘consolidation’ of Soviet power changing the balance173 with its leaders now being ‘firmly in the saddle’.174 The development of the totalitarian state was reached ‘gropingly’ and politically ‘the implications of which were hardly clear to its authors’.175 The ‘trend of events did not very rapidly become apparent. It developed gradually, in contradictory zigzags, always at odds with the inertia of earlier habits’.176 The turning point came in 1929. Stalin reached his view of socialism in one country ‘gropingly’,177 he started the second

Cold War debates over individuals in history  199 revolution ‘gropingly, and despite his own fears’, initially shrinking from the upheaval and ‘having no idea of the scope and violence which it was to assume’.178 Then he carried on by the force of his own doings, he walked the giant’s causeway. Almost without halt or rest’.179 In the first part of the biography, then, Deutscher used the language of leaders or heroes being mistaken, events happening ‘unexpectedly’ to them and consequences being unintended and ‘largely accidental’,180 the ‘accidental arithmetic of a single ballot’,181 or leaders simply ‘not noticing’,182 of ‘missed opportunities’183 of ‘groping and befogged men’.184 You do not find events being subject midway to change or the epic heroes’ indecision in the index. For instance, the vote which saw Lenin’s candidates elected in July 1903 was ‘accidental’,185 as was the Tsarist guards firing on the peaceful Petersburg procession to the Winter Palace in 1905.186 Lenin was in error for not returning to Russia from Geneva earlier in 1905: ‘Lenin was still experimenting in the laboratory of revolutionary politics which the revolution, not waiting for the results of his work, knocked on the door’.187 Stalin (or Koba, as he was then known) himself navigated through the ‘confused and shifting array of factions and sub-factions.188 He ‘overrated the strength of the movement in 1905,189 including ‘the extent to which Tsardom contended with adversities.190 Stalin thought the revolution would be two-phased, with the second not happening until the working class was the majority of the nation: Bolshevism was a ‘complex evolution’ and the ‘groping manner’ of Stalin and other leaders ‘driven by events’ changed ‘their revolutionary journey’.191 He was far from second in command to Lenin by 1912: ‘The galaxy of satellites around Lenin revolved capriciously and erratically, perpetually losing old stars and gaining new ones’. Others fell into oblivion; it ‘is only in the light of his subsequent carer that his promotion in 1912 appears so significant. Unlike others, he came to stay’.192 By contrast, in the second half of Stalin’s biography, Deutscher abandons the vocabulary of contingency and groping for one of success and inevitability. The Central Committee’s decision in May 1924 not to publicise Lenin’s criticism of Stalin in his will meant ‘[h]e was back in the saddle, firmly and for good’.193 In the five years after Lenin’s fatal third stroke, General Secretary Stalin’s power became ‘formidable’. A massive political machine had been built up.194 By 1929 ‘as a body, the party lay supine under the knife of its implacable surgeon, the General Secretary’.195 Stalin did not always succeed and occasionally miscalculated but only about minor and unimportant matters196: he ‘led’ successfully and his role was publicly acknowledged.197 In June 1945 he was proclaimed ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’.198 Deutscher analysed Stalin in terms of the dialectics of victory: paradoxically Stalin’s past was reassessed: Since nothing succeeds like success, even his errors and miscalculations, including those of 1939–41, now looked to many like acts of

200  Cold War debates over individuals in history prudent statesmanship. Even the cruelties of the thirties appeared in a new light, a salutary operation to which the peoples of the Soviet Union owed their survival.199 The ‘iron curtain shielded Stalin’s autocracy, his uncanny despotism, his legends and deceptions’.200 Deutscher compared Stalin to Bonaparte, Bismarck and Hitler and cited the comparative comments that others made;201 but he ended by comparing Stalin to ‘the great revolutionary despots, to which Cromwell, Robespierre and Napoleon belonged’.202 Deutscher’s work raised the possibility of the meaningfulness of a life, even one ‘struggling against’ inevitability among Marxists and more significantly among the growing number of social and labour historians.203 In 1955 Aron was at All Souls visiting with Isaiah Berlin and they discussed the first volume of Deutscher’s Trotsky biographical trilogy, The Prophet Armed (1954). Aron observed that if one wrote history as biography, it was an implicit recognition that there are indeed ‘heroes in history’. Furthermore, the hesitations and splits within the Bolshevik leadership on the eve of the insurrection made it virtually certain that Lenin’s influence was decisive.204 Caute recorded Aron reciting from Deutscher’s The Prophet Armed. Trotsky 1879–1921: Trotsky had more than any single man moulded the mind of the broad mass of workers and soldiers … But the active insurgents had come from the cadres and ranks of the Bolshevik party; and on their minds, Lenin the founder and unrivalled leader of the party, had even from his hiding place [in the Vyborg suburb] exercised by far the greater influence.205 In his History of the Russian Revolution Trotsky asked what would have happened if Lenin had not managed to return to Russia in April 1917, Is it possible … to say confidently that the party without him would have found its road? We would by no means make bold to say that […] a disorientated and split party might have let slip the revolutionary opportunity for many years.206 Caute also cited Trotsky in a letter of Perobrazhensky from Alma-Ata in which Trotsky had written ‘You know better than I do that had Lenin not managed to come to Petrograd in April 1917, the October Revolution would not have taken place’.207 Germany not only gave Lenin’s carriage safe passage; they also supplied the Bolsheviks with financial backing. And they might not have. Certainly, in a later interview Berlin touched on the subject of the irreplaceable leader: I believe that there are moments in history when individuals or groups can freely alter the direction of things … The limits exist, but … there

Cold War debates over individuals in history  201 is space for choice … If Lenin had died of become debilitated in April 1917, there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution; possible a civil war, Liberals and Socialists versus monarchist, but the Bolshevik regime could not have been constructed by anyone but Lenin.208 A firm counterfactual and a firm student of contingency. As Caute noted In short, Deutscher, much as he admired Lenin, wanted to present the October 1917 Revolution as historically determined beyond individual influence. Berlin believed that the event would not have taken place, or in the form it did, without Lenin’s German train ticket.209 Here, remarkably, Trotsky agreed with Berlin, not Deutscher. Yet Deutscher’s biographies acknowledged contingency in practice and were held in esteem because of the quality of the research rather than the author’s Trotskyism and his professed refusal to countenance counterfactuals. Moreover, Deutscher’s Trotskyism gave him some critical purchase on Stalin. Ironically, despite Aron’s criticism, the sheer individualism of his accounts attracted readers. In summary, then, while there were many different views, postwar historians’ biographies were more reflective than earlier. Fewer historians regarded biography innocently. E. H. Carr famously observed that ‘The facts… are like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home and cooks and serves them’.210 A number of dishes were possible. Marxist historians in the postwar period were all too aware of the historiographical implications of biography. They wrote to their social context. The biographical debates they engendered were critical historiography. A biographical revolution began to emerge from this ferment.

E. P. Thompson defends non-teleological causation During the Cold War one biographer was particularly influential in the English writing world: E. P. Thompson.211 Biography was central to Thompson’s historical practice: his first publication was a study of William Morris in 1955, while his biography of William Blake was published posthumously in 1993 following the fall of the Berlin Wall.212 Thompson emphasised Morris’ ‘intellectual isolation at the dawn of Modern Socialism’, how his communism developed from the English Romantic tradition.213 Morris was a poet who worked in decorative arts, although he was a failed political organiser. He did not ‘construct a consistent system’ as a theorist of arts and muddled his way around central problems. His influence was as a moral realist: He was brought to Socialism by his conscious revolt against that mechanical materialism which reduced the story of mankind to an

202  Cold War debates over individuals in history objectless record of struggle for the survival of the ‘fittest’, and which, in his own time, under whatever high-sounding phrases, put profit and not ‘free and full life’ as the touchstone of value.214 Morris was indignant at the impoverishment of life and its possibilities in ‘civilised’ capitalist society’.215 Above all, moral consciousness for him ‘was a vital agency of social change’. Moreover, Morris was independent and English. Morris had not read Friedrich Engels’ Anti-Duhring (1878), The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State (1884) or Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886). AntiDuhring was not translated into English until 1907. In a section in his biography entitled ‘necessity and desire’, Thompson compared the theme of Morris’ novel about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, A Dream of John Ball, to Engels’ writings. Morris had pondered … how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.216 Morris was concerned about whether John Ball’s struggle and death was in vain. Had radicalism been to no avail? Thompson compared Morris’ views to those of Marx via Engels: … accident apparently reigns on the surface. That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realization, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. Thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature. The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended. Historical events thus appear on the whole to be likewise governed by chance. But where on the surface accident holds sway, there actually it is always governed by inner, hidden laws, and it is only a matter of discovering these laws. Men make their own history, whatever its outcome may be, in that each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the resultant of these many wills operating in different directions, and of their manifold effects upon the outer world, that constitutes history.217 Engels believed in laws while Morris believed in an ethical basis of Marxism. Morris might not have read Engels but he had read Ernest

Cold War debates over individuals in history  203 Belfort Bax, an idealist who studied music in Germany, was familiar with Marxism, published the first articles on Marx in the journal, Modern Thought, in 1881 and sought to develop a philosophical and ethical basis to Marxism. In turn, Morris is important because he was influential on the making of Thompson as a Marxist historian and biographer. Thompson valued Morris as peculiarly English who drew upon local intellectual traditions, the Romantic critique of industrial capitalism of John Ruskin and Carlyle.218 Above all Morris’ views on individuals, change and causation was evolutionary: The society of the future he saw not as a rupture of all continuities but as a resolution of past contradictions: it must grow out of older positives in human labour, art and sociability.219 Morris laid the greatest emphasis on the workers’ agency. No amount of preaching or ‘mere abstract propositions’, however, would induce workers ‘with whom the world’s future lies’ to act and struggle. They had power if organised, they had radical social theory but they also needed moral courage.220 Action and struggle without morality was not noble. Socialism was not economic change pure and simple. The perception of the artist, the moral criticism of socialist artist, was central to ‘scientific socialism’. Thompson argued, moreover, that Morris meant John Ball to be a ‘symbol of the oppressed struggling for objectives unattainable within the determined course of history’.221 Ball achieved dignity in rebellion, even when he fails. Thompson reported Morris as being adamant that even if ‘university professors’ showed that Marx’s theories were wrong, Morris would not change his socialist opinions.222 Morris believed that, ultimately, his socialist aspirations would be fulfilled. Or would they? This is where Thompson parted company with his biographical subject. The biography on Morris was not a best-seller, indeed it was met with indifference at the time, but it was important to Thompson’s trajectory. Just after he published the biography of Morris, Thompson wrote two articles in which he discussed his own beliefs his views about agency and the role of the individual in history more directly: History never happens as the actors plan or expect. It is the record of unintended consequences. Revolutions are made, manifestos are issued, battles are won: but the outcome, twenty or thirty years on, is always something that no-one willed and no-one expected.223 Thompson was equally flexible in his view of the role of structures: productve relations would result in revolutionary struggle but ‘we cannot predicate any law’.224 Thompson’s was, above all, a ‘human model’ concerned with ‘Man’s creative agency’.225 He argued that Marx had, unfortunately, ‘reduced his

204  Cold War debates over individuals in history concept of process to a clumsy static model’; the ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ was a metaphor, which Stalinists applied simply and crudely. Thompson quoted Marx but criticised crude Marxist historians. Marx is not often associated with biographical practices, but he put the position as succinctly as any—if we interpret him at his most humanistic position in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)—that ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’, a version of which Thompson championed in his The Making of the English Working Class (1963).226 Thompson railed against Stalinists for their ‘belittling of conscious human agency in the making of history’.227 He was keen to reassert dynamism into interpretations of Marxism and socialism: ‘circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances’.228 People were partly agents in history, just as they were partly victims of their environment. Thompson wanted ‘a return to man: from abstractions and scholastic formulations to real men: from deceptions and myths to honest history’ what he termed ‘socialist humanism’.229 Class was a contingent relationship that changed over time; it was defined by men as they lived their own history. Ellen Kay

Figure 5.3 E. P. Thompson wanted to rescue people ‘from below’ from being ignored in history, such as the ‘deluded followers’ of the religious prophetess Joanna Southcott and others. Joanna Southcott the Prophetess excommunicating the bishops, by Thomas Rowlandson (1814). Alamy.

Cold War debates over individuals in history  205 Trimberger has characterised Thompson’s position as an ‘unique contribution to historical sociological and theoretical method intended to capture historical process and to integrate an analysis of cultural and human agency into a microstructural analysis of social change’ and of ‘real people in a real context’.230 Most importantly, while Thompson wrote the biography of critical English figures such as Morris, he was also most interested with history from below. In his The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson set out to take issue with standard views or the ‘prevailing orthodoxies’ of the Fabians, the economic historians and the ‘pilgrim’s progress’ canon. Commissioned as ‘Working-Class Politics, 1790–1921’, it became a ‘biography’ of the working class, 1790–1832, and was much more explicitly polemical than his earlier work.231 The Fabians had suggested that most working people were passive victims; there were a few leaders amongst them exercising agency. Economic historians were not interested in narratives of working-class people; they viewed the working class in the aggregate as data. The pilgrim’s progress canon was all about the present, with the past stepping towards it. It read history in the light of subsequent preoccupations, and not as in fact it occurred … Only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten.232 Thompson instead wanted to show ‘the agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed, by conscious efforts, to the making of history’. He concentrated on using ‘theoretical ideas in dialogue with the evidence’ of working-class experience by way of telling a narrative of inter-relationships, cultural and material, which had causal significance.233 He advocated this more directly in an essay ‘History from Below’ rather than top down in the form of aggregate data in 1966 in the TLS.234 The Annaliste Lucien Febvre had first used the term history seen from below and not from above (histoire vue d’en bas et non d’en haut) in 1932 in reference to a history of the masses and not only the major figures. Torr’s first meeting of the CPHG in 1946 discussed a new edition of its chair, A. L. Morton’s A People’s History of England, first published in 1938 which developed this idea of history from below. Thompson had of course expressed his gratitude to Torr in the forward of his biography of Morris in 1954. Thompson exhorted historians to be as concerned with ‘dead ends’ as they were with the victors of historical processes. Thompson came to have teleology, above all, in his sights. There were accidents, unintended consequences, as well as design in nature and agency and, thereby, range. Evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould went further make the same point that the focus should be on variation itself:

206  Cold War debates over individuals in history I therefore submit that the history of any entity (a group, an institution, an evolutionary lineage) must be tracked by changes in the variation of all components—the full house of their entirety—and not falsely epitomised as a single item (either an abstract mean value, or a supposedly typical example) moving on a linear pathway.235 Gould and others have pointed to the ‘tendency to abstract a single ideal or average as the “essence” of a system, and to devalue or ignore variation among the individuals that constitute the full population’ and the possibilities of change.236 Gould suggested in his book, Full House, that one ought to view natural reality as composed of varying individuals in populations—that is, to understand variation itself as irreducible, as ‘real’ in the sense of ‘what the world is made of’. To do this, we must abandon a habit of thought as old as Plato and recognise the central fallacy in our tendency to depict populations either as average values (usually conceived as ‘typical’ and therefore representing the abstract essence or type of system) or as extreme examples. Thompson offered the same argument earlier for historians. In doing so, he took a different way out of the relationship between structure and agency than most contemporary Marxists adopted. Rather than arguing that an individual understands the course of history and jumps on it, he believed that individuals perceived a plausible possibility and worked to realise it, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding. Thompson was more Darwinian in his evolutionary thinking, whereas Marx inclined towards Lamarck, with Darwin making more room for contingency. Darwin believed in evolution that was based on populations with varied traits and social evolution involved random variation based on nature of the populations and its contingent environmental circumstances. In social terms, Thompson argued for the continuity of cultural traditions and that individuals could influence contingency. He argued in the Making of the English Working Class that it was a tragedy that the romantics and the rationals did not come together. This was a lost opportunity, a ‘lost historical possibility’ not simply a delaying or acceleration of inevitable developments.237 History, within limits is ‘open and contingent […] the determining factors might have been different’.238 When Thompson and Perry Anderson debated in the New Left Review in the 1960s and 1970s, he defended a less theoretical and structural approach and a fuller definition of human agency based on a view of the world as fundamentally contingent.239 In biographical terms, Thompson also considered the relationship between people and leaders. Before Thompson, much writing by Marxists was not about ‘those below’, not about the ‘poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott’ who was rescued ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’.240 Still less did it recognise their agency. Torr had edited Our History journal, and the History in the Making

Cold War debates over individuals in history  207 series. It was concerned with Chartist and other Labour movement leaders like Mann, who were far from ‘ordinary’ but rather part of the dominant socialist tradition.241 Labour historians increasingly considered rank-andfile subjects. Thompson and others drew attention to popular culture as a part of intellectual history. In his last book, Thompson attempted to place the poet and radical William Blake ‘in the intellectual and social life of London between 1780 and 1820’ and identified ‘what particular traditions were at work in his mind’.242 Thompson showed that Blake was influenced by the Muggletonians, an obscure Protestant sect originating with London tailor Ludowick Muggleton, which rejected the laws of the Church and the State. We only know about them because the last Muggletonian saved 80 apple boxes full of the sect’s records dating from the seventeenth century and was able to give them to Thompson in 1975. The Muggletonians were not among history’s winners, but they were an important part of the world of radicalism that Thompson researched in order to understand Blake, a lifelong radical who never turned to conservatism and Toryism after radicalism was rebuffed. While Thompson’s practice was a cornerstone for intellectual and cultural history, his political message was that there is hope for dissenters by keeping alive alternatives amid religious and political conformity. Unintentionally, Thompson inspired biographical history and particularly labour biography from below and that flowed into social history.243 The biographies of the Joanna Southcotts have now joined the symbolic white male heroes on the bookshelves.

Conclusion: the biographical debates over human agency, structure and the myths of one It is certainly true that Marxist history, socio-economic history and especially the Annales movement meant there was a new general and urgent concern with structure but, ironically, it was not at the cost of consideration of agency and biography. As a measure of the impact of the Annales school on biographical practice, Alain Corbin estimated that the proportion of articles on biography in the Revue Historique from its establishment in 1876 to 1972 dropped by nearly ninety per cent and those on political history fell by over thirty per cent. Correspondingly, the number of articles on economic history quadruped and those on social history nearly doubled. Political history remained the largest single category, but by 1972 economic and social history had replaced biography and religious history as the next largest.244 However, by 1978 Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly journal had been founded in association with the University of Hawaii’s Center for

208  Cold War debates over individuals in history Biographical Research, so the general environment was changing. Moreover, the Annales School was not as popular in Britain or America, however, as it was in Europe. Hobsbawm was one of the few British historians, along with E. P. Thompson and Dorothy Thompson, who in the 1970s met annually met with Annales historians such as Ferdinand Braudel in Paris in order to discuss labour and social history.245 Historical demography was popular, and in Britain led by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population. A British tradition developed which acknowledged that quantifiable—‘cliometrics’ or ‘serial history’—yielded valuable results, but, as Alistair MacLachlan suggested, did not depreciate the study of ‘historical phenomenon which cannot be precisely measured’.246 There was a backlash against the Annales school’s relegation of traditional political narrative to an inferior category of histoire événementielle, or short-term eventual history. For instance, Derek Beales in his 1981 inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, ‘History and Biography’, critiqued the critique of histoire biographique. Beales argued that biography had been ‘too much disparaged’.247 He took aim at Braudel and others in the Annales School whose view of structures, expanses and profound tendencies was, he argued, ‘pure moonshine’. When a great historian can mistake a person for a trend, when it is thought more important to analyse social backgrounds than opinions, then the time has come for a reaction.248 In this, Beales followed earlier critiques from Geoffrey Elton and others who defended narrative political history and biographies of great individuals.249 In turn, increasingly women’s and indigenous biographers criticised both traditional political biography and the sheer masculinism of Marxist biography.250 In the postwar period, then, historians left, right and centre wrote biography which put individuals more carefully into their place.251 As E. J. Tapp noted in 1958, in addition to the ‘proliferation of biographies’, historiographical explanation was now taking contingency into account in a way that it had not previously: If we … are more reluctant to attribute the success or failure of a social movement to a single individual, it is because we know now that the ascription of tremendous human achievements to one man is too simple a solution to be the truth of the matter. We know too that the play of the contingent in human affairs may determine whether or not innate capacities for greatness are ever afforded opportunity for their manifestation.252 Drawing from social sciences such as sociology, psychology, anthropology and economics, as well as philosophy, historians writing biography sought

Cold War debates over individuals in history  209 to be more precise about the part played by an individual in a given situation. The major task now was to assess how and to what extent certain individuals affected the course of history.253 Philip Pomper was clear that historians did not agree about the agential power of individuals in history, even the most powerful of leaders. Pomper argued that a whole range of tendencies in the twentieth century had moved historians away from the Great Man approach. Historians tended to be skeptical of theories in which ‘great men’ or ‘heroes’ figure as significant causes. Even psychohistorians, who were suspected of reviving the Great Man approach, connected their subjects to larger contexts and historical trends, generally by way of a species of structural theory. The Marxist revival of the 1960s and 1970s, the commitment of a fresh cohort of historians to history ‘from below’, the proliferation of variations within the Annales school, and postmodernism—which shifted focus from people to texts and discourse and challenged traditional notions of causation—strengthened the tendency to reject or minimize individual agency in history.254 Through all this debate, historians tended towards an ‘integrationist position’: Alan Bullock, in his comparative biography of Hitler and Stalin, concluded that After the pendulum has swung between exaggerating and underestimating their roles, the longer perspective suggests that in both cases neither the historical circumstances nor the individual personality is sufficient explanation by itself without the other.255 Pomper argued that historians have not agreed on agential power or a theory about the interaction of structure and agency.256 Their view about the interaction of agency and structure, and their interpretations would surely differ, ‘the pendulum would continue to swing to and fro’. In the absence of agreement the safest method is the plain historical one, in which investigators establish the precise historical circumstances in which individuals actually acquire and sustain an exceptional degree of authority and power. The most recent work [supports a view of the] interpenetration of structure and agency, but there is quite wide latitude in such approaches.257 In matters of inspiration, unintentionally, British Marxist historians inspired labour biography with their history from below; but by the 1960s, it was primed too, by non-Marxist historians such as Wedgwood’s interest in ‘real’ and ‘little people’, to which the general public was receptive.

210  Cold War debates over individuals in history

Notes 1 Isaac Deutscher, Stalin. A Political Biography (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1949); The Prophet Armed, Trotsky 1879–1921, vol. 1 (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1954). 2 Jonathon Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892–1982 (London and New York: Verso, 2000), p. 170. 3 David Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013). 4 Hermione Lee ‘Foreword’ in Henry Hardy (ed.), Personal Impressions. Isaiah Berlin (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014, fp. 1980), p. xv. 5 Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013, fp. 1939). Hardy (ed.), Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin. 6 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 266. See Alan Ryan’s forward to the 2013 publication. 7 Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, ed. Henry Hardy, 5th ed. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press/Oxford University Press, 2013, fp. 1939), pp. 12–16. 8 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 146. 9 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 12. 10 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 201. 11 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 143. 12 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 175. 13 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 130. 14 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 145. 15 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 250. 16 G. A Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 17 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 121. 18 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 132. 19 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 269. 20 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 20. 21 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. xi. 22 Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 222. 23 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, in Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, fp. London: Oxford University Press, 1954). 24 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, pp. 62–63. 25 Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, p. 130. 26 Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, p. 147. 27 Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, p. 142. 28 Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, p. 141. 29 Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, p. 147. 30 Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, p. 133. 31 Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, p. 182. 32 Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, pp. 129–130 & 139. 33 Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, p. 126. 34 Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, p. 125. 35 Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, p. 182. 36 Issac Deutscher, ‘Determinists All’, review of Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability (Oxford University Press, 1954), Observer (16 January 1955), p. 8. 37 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, p. 2.

Cold War debates over individuals in history  211 38 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, p. xii. 39 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, pp. 53 & 57. 40 Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London and New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). 41 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, p. 37. 42 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, p. xi. 43 Russel Ward, A Radical Life. The Autobiography of Russel Ward (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1988). 44 Nicholas Rogers, ‘George Rudé (1910–1993)’, Labour/Le Travail, vol. 33 (Spring, 1994), p. 9. 45 T. H. Beaglehole, A Life of J. C. Beaglehole: New Zealand Scholar (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006). 46 E.J. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Pantheon Books, 2002) p. 182. 47 See David Engerman, ‘Rethinking Cold War Universities’, Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (Summer 2003), p. 81. 48 Economist review, David Caute, Isaac and Isaiah (7 December 2013). 49 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, p. xi. 50 Michael Bentley, Modernising England’s Past. English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 190–193. 51 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, p. 48. 52 Isaac Deutscher, Lenin’s Childhood (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 53 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, p. 50. 54 Ernest Mandel, ‘The Role of the Individual in History: The Case of World War Two’, New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 157 (May–June 1986), pp. 61–77. 55 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, p. 26. 56 Arie M. Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin. The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 127. 57 E.H. Carr, Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1934). 58 E. Grinin, ‘The Role of an Individual in History: A Reconsideration’, Social Evolution, vol. 9, no. 2 (September 2010), p, 110. 59 E. Nagel, The Structure of Science. Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961). M. Mandelbaum, ‘Objectivism in History’, in Philosophy and History. A Symposium, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1963), pp. 43–56. W. H. Dray, ‘The Historical Explanation of Actions Reconsidered’, in Hook, Philosophy and History, pp. 105–135. C. G. Hempel, ‘Reasons and Covering Law in Historical Explanation’, in Hook, Philosophy and History, pp. 143–163. F. Stern, (ed.), The Varieties of History. From Voltaire to the Present (Cleveland, OH: World, Meridian Books, 1964). K. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1992). 60 Jim Smyth, Cold War Culture. Intellectuals, the Media and the Practice of History (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016), pp. 18–19; Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London: Cape, 1956), p. 498. 61 Grinin, ‘The Role of an Individual in History: A Reconsideration’, p. 110. 62 Sidney Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (New York: John Day Co., 1943). 63 Livingston Schuyler, ‘Contingency in History’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 74, no. 3 (September 1959), pp. 321–333.

212  Cold War debates over individuals in history 64 Robert Livingston Schuyler, ‘The Historical Spirit Incarnate: Frederic William Maitland’, American Historical Review, vol. 57, no. 2 (January 1952), pp. 303–322; Presidential address read at the annual dinner of the American Historical Association, New York 29 December 1951. 65 For a discussion of Butterfield’s influence, see G. R. Elton, ‘Herbert Butterfield and the Study of History’, The Historical Journal, vol. 27, no. 3 (September 1984), pp. 729–743. 66 Dorothy Walsh, ‘Philosophical Implications of the Historical Enterprise’, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 34, no. 3 (February, 1937), pp. 57–64. 67 Herbert Butterfield, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, History, New Series, vol. 40, no. 138/139 (February and June 1955), p. 4. 68 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1911) pp. 220–226. 69 Translated and quoted in Eugen Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), p. 160. 70 Butterfield, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, p. 3. 71 Butterfield, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, p. 3. 72 Sidney Hook, 1955, p. 3; Grinin, 2010, p. 110. 73 Michael Bentley, Modernising England’s Past. English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 181. Christopher Hill, ‘Soviet Interpretations of the English Interregnum’, Economic History Review, vol. 8 (1937–1938), pp. 159–167. 74 Christopher Hill (ed.), The English Revolution, 1640: Three Essays (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940). 75 Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984). 76 James Klugmann, ‘A Tribute to Dona Torr’, Obituary, World News, vol. 4, no. 4 (26 January 1957), p. 55. 77 Joseph White, Tom Mann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. viii–ix and ch 7. See also Kevin Morgan, Labour Legends and Russian Gold: Bolshevism & the British Left, part 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006), pp. 222–223. 78 Allen Hutt, ‘Dona Torr’, The Labour Monthly (March 1957), p. 133. 79 The Selected Correspondence of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1846–1895 with Explanatory Notes [Marxist Library Volume XXIX], trans. Dona Torr (1934 and 1942). Torr wrote supplementary notes for a new edition of Marx’s Capital: Volume One (1938). She also translated Engels’ The Origins of the Family, Private Property and The State (1940) and Marx’s articles On China (1951). D. Renton, ‘Opening the Books: The Personal Papers of Dona Torr’, History Workshop, no. 52 (2001), pp. 236–245. 80 Dave Renton, ‘The Historian and Her Group: Dona Torr and Marxist History’, British Online Archives (29 March 2021), https://microform.digital/ boa/posts/category/contextual-essays/410/the-historian-and-her-group-donatorr-and-marxist-history, accessed 28 September 2021. She supported the publication of Hill’s The English Revolution: 1640 (1940). 81 Dona Torr, Tom Mann (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1936). CPGB archives, Torr papers, CP/Ind/Torr/1/3, Torr to Pollitt, 19 December 1954, cited by Antony Howe, ‘Our Only Ornament’: Tom Mann and British Communist’s Hagiography’, Twentieth Century Communism, vol. 1 (Summer 2009), pp. 91–109. 82 Dave Renton, ‘The History Woman’, Socialist Review, no. 224 (November 1998), p. 88. 83 Antony Howe, ‘“The Past is Ours”: The Political Usage of English History by the British Communist Party, and the Role of Dona Torr in the Creation of its Historians’ Group, 1930–56’ (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2004), p. 4.

Cold War debates over individuals in history  213 I thank Dr Howe for providing a copy of his thesis to me and discussing the issues involved. See also: Antony Howe, ‘Dona Torr’, in Dictionary of Labour Biography, vol. 12, ed. Keith Gildart and David Howell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 279; V.G. Kiernan, ‘Torr, Dona Ruth Anne (1883–1957)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 48–9; David Renton, ‘Studying their own nation without insularity? The British Marxist historians reconsidered’, Science & Society, vol. 69, no. 4 (October 2004), pp. 559–579; and Andrea Bonfanti, ‘History as a Weapon: Betty Grant and the Local History Section of the CBGB Historians’ Club’, Socialist History, vol. 56 (2019), pp. 69–102. 84 Daily Worker, 15 April 1935. 85 R. Palme Dutt to Harry Pollitt, 4 January 1935, cited by Kevin Morgan, Harry Pollitt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 13. 86 Howe, ‘Our only ornament’, p. 96. 87 Renton, ‘The Historian and Her Group: Dona Torr and Marxist History’. 88 R. Palme Dutt, Lenin (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1933) in the series Makers of the New World. 89 Howe, ‘Our only ornament’. 90 Howe, ‘Our only ornament’, p. 91. 91 For tensions within the British Communist Party over empirical data, see John Mcllroy, ‘The Establishment of Intellectual Orthodoxy and the Stalinization of British Communism 1928–1933’, Past and Present, vol. 192, no. 1 (August 2006), pp. 187–230. See also David Parker (ed.), Ideology, Absolutism and the English Revolution: Debates of the British Communist Historians, 1940–1956 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2008). 92 Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995); Bill Schwarz, ‘“The People” in History: The Communist Party Historians’ Group, 1946–56’, in Making Histories: Studies in HistoryWriting and Politics, ed. Richard Johnson et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1982) pp. 44–95. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party’, in Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A.L. Morton, ed. Maurice Cornforth (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), p. 40. 93 Cited by Dave Renton, ‘The History Woman’, Socialist Review, no. 224 (November 1998), p. 88. 94 Cited by Renton, ‘The History Woman’. 95 E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955, p. 8. For further discussion, see Renton, ‘Opening the Books’, p. 239. 96 G. Thomson, M. Dobb, C. Hill and J. Saville, ‘Foreword’, in J. Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour Movement: Essays in Honour of Dona Torr (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), pp. 7–9. 97 Christopher Hill, Lenin and the Russian Revolution (London: English Libraries, 1947). 98 Raphael Samuel, People’s History and Socialist Theory (f.p. 1981 London: Routledge, 2018). 99 E. P. Thompson, ‘Tom Mann and His Times’, Our History, nos. 26–27 (1962), p. 38. 100 Dennis Dworkin, ‘Review of David Parker (ed.), Ideology, Absolutism and the English Revolution: Debates of the British Communist Historians, 1940– 1956 (2008)’, Social History, vol. 35, no. 1 (February 2010), p. 92. Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC, 1997). 101 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), preface.

214  Cold War debates over individuals in history 102 Alison Light, Common People: The History of an English Family (London: Fig Tree, 2014), p. xxvii ff. 103 Sidney Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (New York: John Day Co. 1943). 104 Frederick Adams Wood, The Influence of Monarchs (London: Macmillan, 1913). Leon Trotsky, trans. Max Eastman, The History of the Russian Revolution, 3 vols. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009, fp. 1930). 105 In J. C. Squire (ed.), If or History Rewritten (New York: The Viking Press, 1931), was reissued as If it Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginary History (London: Longmans, 1932). 106 Hook cited Weber’s response to Weber by attempting to judge between possibilities, ‘Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Studies’, (1906) in The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber, ed. Edith Hanke et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. xxxiii. 107 Carola Oman, Napoleon at the Channel (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1942). 108 Winston Churchill, ‘If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg’, in Squire, If or History Rewritten, pp. 62–63. 109 Grinin, ‘The Role of an Individual in History’, p. 112. 110 Dostoevsky (1821–1881): A New Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931). Herzen (1933). The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933). Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism (London: Dent, 1934). Michael Bakunin (London: Macmillan, 1937). 111 James Cracraft, ‘A Berlin for Historians’, History and Theory. Studies in the Philosophy of History, vol. 41, no. 3 (October 2002), pp. 277–300. 112 Michael Cox, ‘Review: Will the Real E. H. Carr Please Stand up?’, International Affairs, vol. 75, no. 3 (July 1999), pp. 643–653. Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E H Carr, ch on What Is History? Richard J. Evans, ‘Prologue: What Is History?—Now’, in What Is History Now? ed. David Cannadine (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 1–18. E.H. Carr, What Is History? (40th anniversary edition, with a new Introduction by Richard J. Evans) (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 5–6, 22–24; quote from p. 44. 113 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, p. 53. 114 Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, p. 193. 115 Richard J. Evans, introduction to E. H. Carr, What Is History? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). See also Norman Stone’s infamous review of E H Carr’s The Twilight of the Comintern 1930–1935, ‘Grim Eminence’, London Book of Reviews, vol. 5, no.1 (10 January 1983); and David Pryce-Jones’ review of The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr 1892–1982 by Jonathan Haslam, ‘Unlimited Nastiness’, The New Criterion ( December 1999). 116 Evans, introduction to E. H. Carr, What Is History?. 117 Carr, What Is History?, p. 45. 118 Carr, What Is History?, pp. 45–46. 119 A. L. Rowse, ‘Obituary: Dame Veronica Wedgwood’, Independent, 23 October 2011. She published The Thirty Years’ War (1938), and Oliver Cromwell (1939). See also Elizabeth, Countess of Longford, ‘Obituary: Dame Veronica Wedgwood (20 July 1910–1919 March 1997)’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 143, no. 2 (June 1999), pp. 352–356; and Austin Woolrych, ‘Cicely Veronica Wedgwood 1910–1997’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 97 (1998), pp. 521–534. 120 C.V. Wedgwood, Strafford, 1593–1641, 1935. See Sue Donnelly, ‘A PhD Student at LSE- Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910–1997)’, https:// blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2020/02/27/a-phd-student-at-lse-dame-cicelyveronica-wedgwood-1910-1997/, accessed 26 June 2021.

Cold War debates over individuals in history  215 1 21 Longford, ‘Obituary: Dame Veronica Wedgwood’, p. 355. 122 ‘Obituary: C.V. Wedgwood’, The Economist (London), vol. 342, no. 8009 (22 March 1997), p. 107. 123 C.V. Wedgwood, Velvet Studies: Essays on Historical and Other Essays (London: Jonathon Cape, 1946), p. 12. 124 Kelly Boyd (ed.), Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, vol. 2. (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), p. 1288. 125 Wedgwood, Velvet Studies, p. 11. 126 Wedgwood, Velvet Studies, p. 13. 127 ‘Obituary: C.V. Wedgwood’, The Economist. 128 Carr, What Is History?, p. 57. 129 Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 130 Carr, What Is History?, p. 50. 131 Carr, What Is History?, p. 52. 132 Carr, What Is History?, p. 54. 133 Nathan Rotenstreich, ‘Individuals, Great Men and Historical Determination’, Social Research, vol. 38, no. 1 (Spring 1971), p. 151. 134 Carr, What Is History?, p. 48. 135 Carr, What Is History?, p. 49. 136 Truth and Opinion (1960) an introduction to Rose Macaulay, They Were Defeated (London: Collins, 1960); The Sense of the Past: Thirteen Studies in the Theory and Practice of History (Collier Books, 1967). History and Hope: The Collected Essays of C.V. Wedgwood (1987) was really a republication of her Velvet Studies (1946) and Truth and Opinion (1960). 137 C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s Peace 1637–1641 (London: Collins, 1955), p. 16. 138 Wedgwood, The King’s Peace 1637–1641, p. 16. 139 Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (eds.), For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth- Century History (London: Collins, 1986). 140 ‘Obituary: C.V. Wedgwood’, The Economist (20 March 1997). 141 Holland Hunter review of Edward Hallett Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929 in Slavic Review, vol. 28, no. 3 (September 1979), p. 484. 142 Ann Talbot, ‘Chance and Necessity in History: E. H. Carr and Leon Trotsky Compared’, Roland Wenzlhuemer (ed.), Counterfactual Thinking as a Scientific Method: Kontrafaktisches Denken als wissenschaftliche Methode in Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, vol. 34, no. 2 (January 2009), p. 128; see also 88–96. 143 Richard J. Evans, ‘The Two Faces of E.H. Carr’, History in Focus https:// archives.history.ac.uk/history-in-focus/Whatishistory/evans10.html. 144 Alun Munslow, review of What Is History?, (review no. 41a) https://reviews. history.ac.uk/review/41a, date both accessed 28 September, 2020. 145 ‘Keith Thomas: TLS Revisits History 40 Years After Ground-Breaking Series’, Times Literary Supplement (10 November 2006). 146 Incensed, G. R. Elton, wrote The Practice of History (f.p.1967; Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 1991). 147 E. P. Thompson, ‘History From Below’, Times Literary Supplement (7 April 1966). 148 Raymond Aron, Politics and History, trans. Miriam Bernheim Conant (f.p. 1978; London and New York: Routledge, 2017), see Conant’s description, p. xix. 149 It was first published in English as Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity, trans. George J. Irwin (Boston: Beacon, 1961). 150 Issac Deutscher, ‘A Reply to Critics’, Esprit (March 1954), https://www. marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1954/reply.htm, accessed 1 September 2021.

216  Cold War debates over individuals in history 151 Iain Stewart (ed.), Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 152 Aron, Politics and History, p. viii. 153 Nicolas Baverez, ‘Life and Works, Raymond Aron, Philosopher and Freedom Fighter’, in The Companion to Raymond Aron, ed. José Colen and Elisabeth Dutartre-Michault (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 9–10. 154 Conant in Aron, Politics and History, p. xxi. 155 Conant translating Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History in Aron, Politics and History, p. xxi. 156 Aron, Politics and History, p. 42. 157 Aron, Politics and History, p. 46. 158 Raymond Aron, ‘Thucydides and the Historical Narrative’, Politics and History, pp. 20–46. 159 Aron, Politics and History, p. 38. 160 Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 161 Deutscher, ‘A Reply to Critics’. 162 Deutscher, ‘A Reply to Critics’. 163 Deutscher, ‘A Reply to Critics’. 164 Deutscher, ‘A Reply to Critics’. 165 Deutscher, ‘A Reply to Critics’. 166 Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Raymond Aron and the Theory of International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1 (March 1985), p. 16, quoting from Aron, Etudes politiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 379–380. 167 Aron, Politics and History, p. 43. 168 Deutscher, ‘A Reply to Critics’. 169 Deutscher, Stalin, (1961), p. 13. 170 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 13. 171 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 13. 172 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 182. 173 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 221. 174 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 222. 175 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 226. 176 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 231. 177 Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 284–285. 178 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 319. 179 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 297. 180 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 71. 181 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 71. 182 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 81. 183 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 82. 184 Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 96 & 149. 185 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 69. 186 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 80. 187 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 82. 188 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 76. 189 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 84. 190 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 85. 191 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 96. 192 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 122. 193 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 275. 194 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 263. 195 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 307. 196 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 432. 197 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 451.

Cold War debates over individuals in history  217 1 98 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 534. 199 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 534. 200 Deutscher, Stalin, p. 544. 201 Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 243, 484, 539–540. 202 Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 550–555. 203 Deutscher, Stalin (1949); and the Trotsky trilogy (1954–1963): The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954); The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); and The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). Geoff Robinson, ‘Biography and the Project of Labour History: Marxist Anticipations and Australian Examples’, Eras, no. 5 (2003), pp. 1–19. 204 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, pp. 83–84. Aron was friends with Berlin and Caute was a participant in their discussion of this issue in Deutscher’s work. 205 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, p. 84. 206 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, 241–242, 251. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957); see discussion Amy Muldoon, Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution (part 1) https://isreview.org/issue/58/leon-trotskys-history-russian-revolutionpart-1/index.html, accessed 26 June 2021. 207 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, p. 84. 208 Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Berlin (London: Halban, 1992). 209 Caute, Isaac and Isaiah, p. 85. 210 Carr, What Is History, p. 9. 211 Schwarz, ‘The People’ in History’. 212 Thompson, William Morris, p. 307. E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 213 Thompson, William Morris, p. 715. 214 Thompson, William Morris, p. 717. 215 Thompson, William Morris, p. 718. 216 William Morris, ‘The Voice of John Bull’, in A Dream of John Ball (Portland, Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1908, fp.1888), p. 32. It was published serially in Commonweal between 13 November 1886 and 22 January 1887. 217 Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (f.p. 1886; Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950), Part 4, Marx. 218 Thompson, William Morris, p. 728. 219 Thompson, William Morris, p. 729. 220 Thompson, William Morris, p. 729. 221 Owen Carroll, ‘William Morris’, Everyman (3 September 1933). 222 Thompson, William Morris, p. 727. 223 E. P. Thompson, ‘Agency and Choice’, The New Reasoner, vol. 1, no. 5 (Summer 1959), pp. 89–106. 224 E. P. Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines’, The New Reasoner, no. 1 (Summer, 1957), p. 105. 225 Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism’, 105. 226 Preface, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. 227 Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism’, 113. 228 Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism’, 114. 229 Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism’, 109. 230 Ellen Kay Trimberger, ‘E.P. Thompson: Understanding the Process of History’, in Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, ed. Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 228–229. 231 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Preface.

218  Cold War debates over individuals in history 2 32 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Preface, p. 12. 233 Trimberger, ‘E.P. Thompson: Understanding the Process of History’, pp. 226–227. 234 E. P. Thompson, ‘History from Below’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 3345 (7 April 1966), pp. 279–280. 235 Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony, 1996), pp. 72–73. 236 Gould, Full House, p. 40. 237 Trimberger, ‘E.P. Thompson: Understanding the Process of History’, p. 226. 238 Trimberger, ‘E.P. Thompson: Understanding the Process of History’, p. 226. 239 Trimberger, ‘E.P. Thompson: Understanding the Process of History’, pp. 216–218. I thank Sophie Scott-Brown for discussing these issues with me. 240 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, preface. 241 James Bavington Jefferys, edited a collection of documents, Extracts from contemporary sources entitled Labour’s Formative Years: Nineteenth Century, 1849–1879; and Eric Hosbawm edited Labour’s Turning Point, 1880–1900 both in 1948, both in the series under Torr’s general editorship. 242 Thompson, Witness against the Beast, p. xvi. 243 Geoff Robinson, ‘Biography and the Project of Labour History: Marxist Anticipations and Australian Examples’, Eras, vol. 5 (2003), pp. 1–19, argued that a split remained between those who argued that individuals could make a difference (Evatt and Childe) and those who did not. H. Knowles, ‘Labour History and the Biographical Dimension’, in Comparative Labour Biography (PhD: University of Sydney, 2003), pp. 43–69, argues that the latter predominate. 244 Lynn Hunt, ‘French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 21, no. 2 (April 1986), pp. 212–213. Stuart Clark, The Annales School. Critical Assessments, vol. 1, Histories and Overviews (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 27. 245 Richard J. Evans, Eric Hosbawm. A Life (London: Little Brown, 2019), pp. 500–503. 246 Alastair MacLachlan, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). 247 Derek Beales, ‘History and Biography, An Inaugural Lecture’, in History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales, ed. T. C. W. Blanning and David Cannadine (f.p. 1981; New York: Cambridge University, 1996), p. 269. 248 Beales, ‘History and Biography’, p. 282. 249 G. R. Elton, Political History: Principles and Practice (London: Penguin Press/New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 101–102. Joseph Tendler, Opponents of the Annales School (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 250 Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, Los Angelos and London: University of California Press, 1997) p. 2, is premised on Thompson’s marginalising women. Similarly, Caroline Steedman, Labour’s Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 8–9, 16–17 positions itself in relation to Thompson’s neglect of domestic servants as a section of the working class. 251 E. J. Tapp, ‘Some Aspects of Causation in History’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 49, no. 3 (January 1952), pp. 51–64. 252 Tapp, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, p. 51. 253 Tapp, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, pp. 67–79. 254 Philip Pomper, ‘Historians and Individual Agency’, History and Theory, vol. 35, no. 3 (October 1996), p. 282.

Cold War debates over individuals in history  219 255 Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 973. 256 For an approach treating structure in terms of system, see Christopher Lloyd, The Structures of History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 257 Pomper, ‘Historians and Individual Agency’, p. 307.

Further reading The classic Marxist biographies are Issac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy; Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921–1929 and The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954 1959 and 1963 respectively). British Marxist historians: We await a biography of E. P. Thompson, whose archives are closed until 2043. He did not write a memoir. Recent biographical work on the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain includes Gregory Elliott, Hobsbawm: History and Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2010); Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory. EP Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); and David Howell, Dianne Kirby and Kevin Morgan (eds.), John Saville. Commitment and History. Themes from the Life and Work of a Socialist Historian (London: Lawrence & Wishart and Socialist History Society, 2011). David Renton has written on his great aunt, Dona Torr, and, more broadly, ‘Studying Their Own Nation without Insularity? The British Marxist Historians Reconsidered’, Science & Society, vol. 69, no. 4 (October 2005) pp. 559–579, as has Adrià Llacuna, ‘British Marxist Historians and Socialist Strategy: Within, Beyond and After the Communist Party’, Twentieth Century Communism: A Journal of International History, vol. 9 (2015), pp. 148–156. Biography and contingency, counterfactuals and causation: John Lewis Gaddis, ‘Causation, Contingency and Counterfactuals’, in The Landscape of History How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 91–110; John Collins, Ned Hall and L. A. Paul (eds.), Causation and Counterfactuals (Cambridge, MA, 2004). Erik Weber and Bert Leuridan, ‘Counterfactual Causality, Empirical Research and the Role of Theory in the Social Sciences’, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, vol. 41, no. 4 (2008), pp. 197–201. Anton Froeyman, ‘Concepts of Causation in Historiography’, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, vol. 42, no. 3 (2009), pp. 116–128. Richard Evans, Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (London, Little Brown: 2014). Kim Sterelny, ‘Contingency and History’, Philosophy of Science, vol. 83, no. 4 (October 2016), pp. 521–539.

6 Postwar debates over atomising lives

Figure 6.1 Lewis Namier famously believed interest and backgrounds mattered more than ideology and ideas in politics and set about compiling a thorough portrait of British politics by researching the lives of every member of the House of Commons. Interior House of Commons, by Benjamin Cole, and engraving (1741–1742). British Museum, Rights & Images.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429426391-6

Postwar debates over atomising lives  221

A peculiar biographical club and the debate over prosopography In the 1950s a debate broke out amongst historians over the ‘Namier School’, or, as John Raymond characterised it in a spoof, ‘Namier Inc’ or ‘L.B. Namier Ltd’.1 This group, led by Lewis Namier and including R. R. (Romney) Sedgwick, Lucy Sutherland, John Beresford Owen, Richard Pares, John Brooke, Betty Kemp and an associated group of graduate thesis students, was said to be responsible for a large research industry focused on the ‘biographical structure’ of the House of Commons during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 It was a historical school of biography. Namier’s aim was ‘to press-gang as many history research scholars as he can muster for this cause’, assembling as much detail as it could about individuals. Once the biographical material was compiled, it needed to be analysed to establish patterns and conclusions. The historical quest was morphological, for it involved, as Namier himself described it, underneath, a discreet, tentative search for the typical and recurrent in the psyche and actions of man (even in his unreason), and a search for a morphology of human affairs, curbed though that search be by the recognition that absent from the life of communities is the integration peculiar to living organisms: ‘fifty men do not make a centipede’.3 Raymond suggested that Namier’s ‘peculiar club’ boasted large ambitions to write the ‘social history of England’ biographically but, while doing so, it derided others for merely ‘microscopic intentions’.4 Despite the three-decade rise of this biographical club, Raymond noted a welcome growing opposition to it, led by Herbert Butterfield, which was scathing about this historical method or ‘technique of compiling and analysing group biographies and then applying the ‘methods of structure’ to general narrative’.5 As Butterfield noted, It is not permissible to imagine that the England of 1760 is unique in the sense that just here the study of ‘structure’ must replace other forms of history—just here the ‘narrative’ method has been rendered o ­ bsolete … We are given a story which becomes silent or curiously neglectful as it touches the very things that governments and parliaments exist to do. The work of ministers in their departments, the springs of office policy, the overt controversies, the stuff of actual political debate—it is just these that are being elbowed out of the picture … It would seem that the new form of structural analysis is capable of producing in the practitioners of the craft its own kind of occupational disease.6 One of Butterfield’s main complaints was that the exponents of this morphological method, known as prosopography, were messianic about their new method. The debate was aired in journals such as the Listener, the

222  Postwar debates over atomising lives TLS and History Today with the attacks culminating in Butterfield’s 1957 book, George III and the Historians. To some extent this debate about personalities should be viewed as a storm in a high table teacup. Keith C. Sewell noted, however, that there were serious differences between Namier and Butterfield that lay at the epicentre of their interactions: ‘Technical history notwithstanding, Butterfield’s view of history was based on his view of Providence and Augustinian anthropology … Namier was influenced by Freud’s view of rationalisation and the unconscious’.7 History was at times absurd, irrational, and directed by structures, including the unconscious.8 Butterfield’s Christian view of history was that it was tragic, perpetuated by flawed and sinful human beings. As a consequence, one needed to concentrate on individual personalities, their beliefs, principles, purposes and conscious thought. Given these differences, consequently, their views on how historians ought to write biography differed too. Michael Bentley has argued that Namier and Butterfield were both critical of contemporary biographical practices.9 Butterfield believed that historians should create dynamic narratives while Namier advocated a static structural analysis.10 One wonders what it would have been like to be a fly on the wall when Namier and Butterfield met in London in 1936. Someone in the Cambridge history faculty with a ‘sense of humour’, as Bentley has subsequently described it, appointed Namier to ‘examine Butterfield’s new special subject course on George III and the Constitution’.11 The debate between Namier and Butterfield and their respective supporters, like Sedgwick and Brooke on the one hand and Alan Taylor and Raymond on the other, was all too public; it was as much as over the use of prosopography rather than narrative biography, as it was over wider worldviews.12 Lawrence Stone defined prosopography in Namier’s wake as multiple-career analysis of the common characteristics of individual biographies of a historical group of people.13 It involved structuring biographical data, usually by way of a ‘two-part process’: the compilation of lives, or the lexicon, as well as its analysis.14 Biographical lexicons have a long history with no single origin. There are a number of traditions—from ancient China to the Muslim world. Sima Qian succeeded his father as Han dynasty Grand Historian in the first century BC and went on to write ‘ranked biographies’ of ancient Chinese men on bamboo slips. Unrelated, biographical dictionaries flourished in ninth-century Iraq.15 Nevertheless, the most cited, despite its fragmentary state, is Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Bioi parallēloi) written at the beginning of the second century AD in which he compared famous Romans and Greeks—soldiers, legislators, orators and statesmen. Much historical energy has been, and continues to be, devoted to compiling collections of biographies, the lexical building blocks of prosopography, with various different groupings. The genealogy of analytical prosopography, as opposed to collections of biographies of subjects with some common characteristics, is shorter. The lineage is usually traced to German classical

Postwar debates over atomising lives  223 scholars in the nineteenth century: Theodor Mommsen founded the world’s oldest and longest-running prosopographical project, the Prosopographia Imperii Romani, in 1898, and its descendants continue to this day.16 Other classical projects include that by Frederick Münzer, who began writing 5,000 individual biographies for the Real-Encyclopaedie der Klassichen Alterntumswissenschaft in 1893; using names, he established familial, marriage, adoption and patronage alliances and clusters amongst the Roman political elite. He published his Roman Aristocratic Parties and Families in 1920. This work is usually described as ‘politico-prosopographical’ in nature, with its concentration upon politics, economics and power.17 There was little debate over this biographical work before the middle of the twentieth century; rather, there was simple awe and respect for the prodigious scholarship it entailed. Namier’s work on the eighteenth-century parliamentarians The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) was generally well received. A year earlier, he published an article calling for a parliamentary history of Britain based on the biographies of the ‘ordinary’ members of the House of Commons.18 This became the History of Parliament project from 1951, which attracted more researchers and much more heated debate.19 Namier’s morphological approach involved a close analysis of the economic and social connections of the men concerned with the business of government, and bringing together evidence of their shared vested interests and demonstrating their collective manipulation of politics. It did not take parliamentarians’ statements or debates at face value, but considered instead their private advantages, social prestige, sectional and petty interests, as well as a ‘vague impulse for public service’.20 Despite others’ claims, the prosopographical study of politics is closely associated with Namier. Indeed, John Neale considered himself the ‘pre-eminent exponent of parliamentary prosopography’ with his biography of Queen Elizabeth (1934), the Elizabethan Political Scene (1948), the Elizabethan House of Commons (1949), and Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments (1953 and 1957). The English-speaking profession and the public identified Namier, however, ‘as the progenitor of the structural analysis of political history’ based on parliamentarians’ biography.21 As his biographer David Hayton recently noted, Namier ‘gave a new word to the English language: to Namierise, usually defined as the study of institutions through collective biography—or prosopography—of their members’.22 Jack Plumb argued that ‘to Namierise’ became part of historians’ professional jargon by the 1950s.23 I argue that Butterfield’s critique of Namier’s prosopographical approach goes to the heart of one of the major issues historians face when using lives to write biography: whether to atomise lives or to put them in their collective place. Should historians classify clusters of lives as being in the same class, that is to lump them together, or should they break up aggregates into groups or individual lives? Should biography be idiosyncratic and concerned with peculiarities associated with an individual or should lives

224  Postwar debates over atomising lives be placed in wider structural and general contexts?24 There are echoes here of the structure and agency debate and of course, as with other debates, these need not be mutually exclusive. The debate between Namier and Butterfield spoke to the more general historiographical problem of lumping or splitting, but it was a specific biographical debate at a particular time. In the 1940s and 1950s, increasing attention was given to the study of social groupings and political parties, motivation, patterns of behaviour and psychological methods in politics.25 There were increasing numbers of both university and public biographical research projects related to this issue in the postwar period. New techniques promised great capacity for empirical verification. Namier’s technique was constructed around a particular worldview which is usually characterised as a belief that the things that matter in society are the thoughts and actions of elites rather than the views of the population at large, and a view of politics in which issues are essentially unimportant, principles for a cloak for self-interest, and those who enter public life do so in pursuit of personal and material advantage.26 The two classic pioneering prosopographical works by historians from the 1930s were British historian Namier’s eighteenth-century research and the studies of the classicist Ronald Syme. There was a lag between this pioneering work and its wider popularity. This was related to the fact that it can be data- and search-intensive, so developments in computing proved to be critical to the dissemination of the methodology.27 Later publications by the French classicists Claude Nicolet and Andre Chastognol, and the English historians of early modern Britain, such as Lawrence Stone in 1970–1971, signalled greater numbers of historians using prosopography.28 Medievalist historians championed prosopography in the 1970s to such an extent that dedicated journals were established, including Medieval Prosopography, which the American medievalists George Beech, Bernard Bachrach and Joel T. Rosenthal established in 1980. However, medievalists, as we shall discuss, were attracted to proposographical work because of a paucity of individualised biographical material. The lack of material prevented effective reconstructions of whole lives or rich biographies as such, with work emphasising the characteristics and relationship patterns of groups gleaned from myriad traces in the archival record. More recently, some massive databases have been established requiring large scholarly collaborations. ‘Namier’s’ History of Parliament project has developed into a comprehensive online database of British parliamentary politics in Britain from the thirteenth century, which is considered ‘unparalleled in the comprehensiveness of its treatment’ and ‘generally regarded as one of the most ambitious, authoritative and well-researched projects in British history’.29 It begun in earnest in 1951, manually rather than digitally.

Postwar debates over atomising lives  225 Perhaps ironically, in the long run neither Namier—whose legacy was digital prosopography—nor Butterfield won the debate. However, Butterfield’s views did not change the biographical landscape in the long run, whereas historians continue to build upon certain aspects of Namier’s prosopography.30 Many historians, however, continue writing individualist and agent-centred biography, without Butterfield’s Christian spirituality.31 One important legacy of the 1950s debate, however, is that a halfway house between Namier and Butterfield has come to flourish in the late twentieth century. Many historians writing biography have done so by way of collective or group biography. This can be seen as a hybrid of both Namier’s and Butterfield’s approaches, deeply concerned with narrating unique and contingent lives as well as vested interests and structures. Collective biography as a methodology focuses on lives as individuals while also considering the biography of a group.32 As Barbara Caine observed, group biography ‘has been particularly attractive to those concerned to link life stories with wider historical processes, and to use them to illustrate particular historical developments or patterns’.33 I argue that the public and prominent biographical debate between Namier and Butterfield was a pivotal proxy for historians’ divergent approaches to using lives in the second half of the twentieth century. Contemporary collective biography has attracted little critique. The earlier debate rehearsed the issues between prospographical and individualistic biography. This chapter, then, considers the debate which heated up in the postwar period, historian’s subsequent ‘pursuit of the individual in prosopography’ and the emergence of current practices of collective biography.34

Eighteenth-century political history becomes a battleground of biographical approaches Bentley was working on a biography of Butterfield when the Wiles Trust invited him to give the annual series of Wiles Lectures at Queen’s College University, Belfast, in 2003 to mark the 50th anniversary of Butterfield’s inaugural lecture oration on ‘Man on His Past’. Bentley chose as his topic, ‘English Historiography in the Age of Butterfield and Namier’. When he wrote up the lectures, he regarded Butterfield and Namier as ‘icons or symbols of opposed modes of thought’ for the historical profession from the interwar period through to the 1960s and hence widened his preview to consider the more general ‘modernising of English historiography’.35 His account involved ‘innumerable’ biographies of a whole range of historians, which he drew into a narrative of an age of modernism from 1870 to 1970. He contrasted Namier’s setting out to modernise history with Butterfield seeking to ‘reinstate an idea of history as a narrative art concerned with the lives and souls of humanity’.36

226  Postwar debates over atomising lives If they disagreed over how to study biography, they generally agreed over who to study. A cluster of twentieth-century British historians were greatly attracted to the eighteenth century because it was considered pivotal for British constitutional history. The American War of Independence had always put the spotlight on King George III (1783– 1820). Debates over the developing role of parliament raised questions about whether George III attempted to re-establish personal rule in the face of the constitutional constraint of the Crown. Much of the study of the eighteenth century was by way of the biography of major actors, such as Lewis Benjamin’s Farmer George (1907) and G. M. Trevelyan’s George the Third and Charles Fox (1912). Resources were rich for this period. For instance, his contemporary, Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, constructed detailed archives which were held at the British Museum.37 Historians such as Romney Sedgwick (1903) had begun publishing documents.38 The historiography and the archives drew attention to parliamentarians, such as William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, Britain’s political leader during the Seven Years’ War who was mostly an opponent of British government policies outside wartime.39 Both Namier and Butterfield sought a better version of the history on the eighteenth century.40 Both voiced disquiet with contemporary historians’ biographical practices more generally. Neither liked the practice of abstracting a single individual or a movement from the complex mass of historical interaction, but they came to different views on human nature and biographical methods nonetheless: [w]hen Namier was expressing his disgust with biographers such as Philip Guedalla [a popular prolific English political biographer of the  nineteenth-century Duke of Wellington, Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III who believed in narrative biography41] with their ‘carriages clattering over cobbles & music drifting into the summer night”, Butterfield was learning to ride off in the opposite direction. ‘Nay I should not myself shut out Philip Guedalla even from the tribe of biographers, nor Emil Ludwig, nor [French-born] Andre Maurois, though these be of the more tedious sort’, because they dealt in the common currency of envisioning. Less like [German historian Leopold von] Ranke than pointilliste impressionalists, biographers brought to the canvas something broader than technique or ambitions of verisimilitude: they entered their subject through human sympathy.42 In the late 1950s Butterfield famously led a campaign of criticism against Namier and his method. David Hayton, Namier’s biographer, regarded ‘The Butterfield affair’ as a small, albeit damaging episode at the end of Namier’s life.43 For his part, Butterfield’s biographer, Bentley, also downplayed their differences.44 He has suggested that for two decades Butterfield

Postwar debates over atomising lives  227 and Namier ‘stood on different sides of the same ship, scanning different sectors of the horizon but sailing in a common direction’.45 He argued that Butterfield was responding to Namier, elaborating rather than cutting down.46 I would argue, as Sewell does, that by the late 1950s Butterfield and Namier were on different boats representing two kinds of historians’ biographical practices. This was significant for the profession, if not for their own lives. Butterfield believed that historians could not achieve a complete picture of history, so they abridged. This incompleteness meant that history was different from both science and social science. Namier believed that the history need not be limited by this problem of incompleteness. Historians could know enough, especially by narrowing their focus.47 Coming from a commercial background to history, Namier regarded politics as a world of connection, intrigue and self-interest. As he wrote in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1934, he despaired that ‘[t]oo much history is written by don-bred dons with no knowledge or understanding of the practical problems of statecraft’.48 Jacob Price has shown the diversity of Namier’s career before assuming his chair at Manchester from 1931 to 1953. Having joined the British Army in the first part of World War One, Namier was recruited to the Foreign Office from 1915 to 1920. Before and after he worked in business and then as the secretary of the Jewish Agency for Palestine from 1929 to 1931. Price concluded that he had a much wider experience of men, of power, of human behavior and motivation and decision-making than that to be found in the careers of most academics. One of the most striking qualities in his work is the utter realism of the world he evokes.49 Namier was concerned with ‘locus, structure and transmission of power in politics’. Departing from traditional political narrative biography, Namier resorted to meticulous analysis, or prosopography, based on biographies of the parliamentarians’ ‘real’ lives. In 1929, when he became a member of the Committee of Records of Past Members of the House of Commons, he began collecting eighteenth-century parliamentary documents directly from country houses to compile biographical information, in what he described as ‘paper chases’.50 His interest was in the history of the House of Commons, ‘[a]s a corporate entity whose character was best revealed through detailed examination of its members’ lives and interests. He insisted that their grass roots and their financial interest should never be lost sight of’.51 In the process, Namier placed little weight on beliefs, principles and ideas, nor on religious, party or cultural networks. He argued that political ideologies, especially the two-party system, had been imposed on eighteenth-century parliamentarians with disastrous effects. For him, the parliament in Westminster was unique because it had been ‘organically’ generated on the people’s part. Parliamentary government had failed in a  number of European states because it was borrowed and was alien:

228  Postwar debates over atomising lives ‘Counterfeits of organic creation do not work’.52 The British House of Commons attempted to supersede aggression by debate, drawing in men from small boroughs. A study of detailed records of those individual members’ lives and the circles they belonged to was an ‘invaluable microscopic picture of England’ as a political nation. The parliamentarians’ motivations lay in crude self-interest.53 The main point was their non-alignment to parties which historians had hitherto concentrated upon in the historiography. Indeed Julia Namier’s biography of her husband concluded that ‘his main discovery had been, so far, the ‘independence’ of his members after they were elected’.54 Namier applied prosopography, then, to test a well-developed historical interpretation in English history. Thomas Babington Macaulay, W. E. H. Lecky, G. O. Trevelyan and G. M. Trevelyan all contributed to the ‘Whig interpretation’ of British political history.55 This dominant interpretation of eighteenth-century politics under the Hanoverian monarchy portrayed two rival parties, the Whigs and the Tories, vying for party majorities in the House of Commons and this party system sustained the modern Cabinet and the constitutional monarchy. Deeds of great political men and office holders were expressed through parties. Namier instead used the techniques of prosopography, his much-publicised ‘paper-chases’, to find family manuscripts and study the social and family connections and the motivations which they illuminated. He set out to use biography to answer research questions: Why did men stand for election? What benefit were they pursuing? Once elected, what determined their allegiance? On the basis of his empirical research he argued that there was no such thing as the two-party system. His study of the behaviour of ordinary members of Parliament showed that there were two attitudes: politicians sought favours and also professed their independence and this tension was the motor for politics rather than party conflict. Politicians formed alignments and loose groupings around ‘Court’ and ‘Country’, acting independently, based on their self-interests. By 1931, Namier was professor of Modern History at the University of Manchester supervising research students on his special topic on George III and working towards funding his prosopographical project. In the process his main rival in this endeavour was Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, a Labour member of Parliament he had met while in the Fabian Society before World War One. As honorary secretary of the county antiquarian society (1909–1919), he published in the Collections of the History of Staffordshire, including A Biographical and Political Account of All the MPs for Staffordshire from 1258 to 1832 (1914). Wedgwood then began writing a history of Parliament and by 1929 had become chairman of the House of Commons Records Committee. By this stage, he [h]ad grown so apprehensive of the threat coming from communism and fascism to democracy and individual freedom, that he wished the

Postwar debates over atomising lives  229 many-volume History [which was projected] to be a pageant of the striving by the English political nation, through the centuries, to establish, maintain and even extend the freedom of individuals.56 Wedgwood was well-connected, being related to Trevelyan and his niece was Veronica Wedgwood who have featured in earlier chapters. Originally seeking Treasury funding, he managed to establish a private foundation in the 1930s, the History of Parliament Trust, which aimed to compile a multi-volume biographical dictionary of every person who had sat in the Commons since the Middle Ages.57 He and Namier agreed on the biographical project, but on little else. Namier was apprehensive of Wedgewood’s aim to write a progressive or whiggish narrative—that is, writing history as if it was an inevitable ratification of the present.58 Namier’s vision was much more complex; he was concerned, in particular, with the issue of the leadership and relations between king, prime minister and parliamentarians. Wedgwood wanted a traditional lexicon which confirmed the constitutional journey to the present, while Namier wanted to use prosopography to consider the character of the corporate entities. In evaluating Namier’s influence, we need to distinguish between Namierism (or the Namier School’s concentration on a quantifiable structural analysis of political parliamentary history), Namier’s historical method (disaggregating complex historical events to their ‘atoms’), and Namier’s techniques (prosopography).59 The method was not original to Namier; and while Namier expounded on his techniques, he never realised them in full. First the focus of Namier’s method was finding the basis for the political behaviour of a collective group. He had spent time in the United States of America on business in 1913–1914, but pursued his historical studies at night in public libraries. While Namier was in America, Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) had a great influence on his thinking.60 As Lawrence Stone suggested, Beard ‘offered an explanation of the establishment of the American Federal Constitution by a close analysis of the economic and class interests of the Founding Fathers’.61 At the book’s core was an exercise in prosopography: a long central chapter built around brief biographies of the 55 members of the Philadelphia convention of 1787. The concluding analysis which summarised the evidence considered only the members’ income, but the biographies, based on documentary sources and the publications of local history societies, were broader in conception, providing details of family background and career. This was precisely the method Namier would use a decade later in his researches into the members of the Westminster Parliament.62

230  Postwar debates over atomising lives Beard’s method was taken up by a few others, but it was not adopted as a general framework for writing history: A. P. Newton’s study of English Puritans appeared in 1914, followed by R. K. Merton’s in 1938.63 Namier not only discussed his use of prosopography as the central methodology of history, teaching it to his students, and seeking funding for a systematic study; he also related this biographical approach to his own understanding of human nature. This is clear from what Namier said to Isaiah Berlin, when he called in to see him after his election as a Fellow of All Souls in 1932; the latter has left us with a telling biographical portrait of the former. Berlin was working on a biography of Karl Marx at the time, which bewildered Namier: Marx appeared to him unworthy of such attention: he was a poor historian and a poor economist, blinded by hatred. Why was I not writing about Freud? Freud’s importance for historical and biographical science had still be insufficiently appreciated … Besides which, Freud was still alive and could be interviewed. Marx, fortunately, was not.64 Berlin put Namier into a wider context of the Vienna centre of the new anti-metaphysical and anti-impressionist positivism, not just of Freud but also of Ernest Mach and Adolph Loos and his disciples. This world was reacting to German metaphysics and sympathising with British empiricism.65 Berlin regarded Namier as ‘a child of a positivistic, deflationary, anti-romantic age’.66 First, he ‘loathed abstract principles and general theories’. What was required was dispassionate scientific examination. Namier ‘studied every detail in the life of the English governing class, just as Marx studied the proletariat, not as an end not as an end in itself, as an object of fascinated observations, but as a social formation’. He believed that men went into politics in the eighteenth century persuading themselves that they were there to labour for the Empire, for the King, and no doubt for the salvation of the souls of the subject population. Namier thought he knew what they actually desired as a group or social formation. He believed that the motor of all human behaviour was ‘basic drives, permanent human cravings for food, shelter, power, sexual satisfaction, social recognition, and so on’. Humans were self-seeking animals.67 Politicians, as a group, pursued personal and material advantage. He thought it was absurd to invoke the influence of ideas. Indeed, famously he referred to any reference to ideas in political discourse as nothing more than ‘flapdoodle’.68 Related to this, that given the importance to history of the individual and her basic desires, both conscious and unconscious, ‘individual psychology, not sociology was the key’.69 Namier was a troubled man. His East European childhood had not been a happy one. He was resentful of his parents, especially his father, not least because he did not learn of his Jewish ancestry until he was nine years old. It also did not help their relationship that he was disinherited by his father’s

Postwar debates over atomising lives  231 will in 1922. His first unhappy marriage failed after a number of years. He underwent repeated psychoanalysis with one of Freud’s students in Vienna in 1921 after his mother and his sister ‘drove him to the psychoanalyst’s couch’, declaring he was incapable of having ‘satisfactory human relations’. Linda Colley, his biographer, has described him as ‘something of a psychoanalysts’ groupie’.70 Despite the expense, he underwent psychoanalysis from 1921 until his second marriage in 1947. He had hoped it would cure his insomnia, deal with his hypochondria and a creeping paralysis in his right hand.71 He applied psychoanalysis to his historical studies to some degree, consulting graphologists about the handwriting of an obscure eighteenth-century squire and discussing the utterances, the lapses and the style of a Hanoverian politician with a psychoanalyst. While psychoanalysis informed his views of human nature, Namier’s research was meticulous and his use of psychology was subservient to his prosopographical method and structural analysis.72 Namier had joined the Oxford University branch of the Fabian Society as a student and he attended the Fabian summer school in 1910. By 1914, he was a Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) lecturer and his research increasingly focused on economic explanations for historical events. Yet he was neither a socialist nor a Marxist, any more than he was a standard psychobiographer. Possessing some wealth and power, nonetheless, Namier was touched by both the Marxist and Freudian moments. His main concern was to uncover unconscious interest in political lives rather than the dominance of class consciousness or the unconscious more generally.73 And in uncovering that unconscious, he focused on family relationships and childhood experiences in his own and his historical subjects’ lives. Namier’s technique involved the minute and meticulous examination of members of several British parliaments. He argued that a series of small and fluid groups organised around self-interest dictated political allegiance. He thought that traditional literary sources, even voluminous collections of letters or diaries, were inadequate as records in themselves. Politicians did not draw attention to their self-interest; indeed, some were unwitting about, or unconscious of, their self-interest. Namier believed that grassroots records about families and their financial interests provided more authentic information about politics at the accession of George III than epistolary documents.74 By the term ‘authentic’, Namier meant revealing as scholarly traces of self-interest. Prosopography addressed the problem of bias of source material which relied on individual cases or a handful of persuasive, exceptional or ‘eloquent’ examples. The response to this perceived shortcoming of exceptional sampling, with accidents and anomalies accounting for records existent in the archives, was to survey the entire population: ‘Prosopography is not interested in the unique but in the average, the general and the

232  Postwar debates over atomising lives ‘­commonness’ in the life histories of more or less large numbers of individuals’.75 Rather than the historian constructing the sample from imperfect records, Namier was attracted to the ‘organic’ nature of parliaments; it had ‘selected itself’ with many ‘ordinary’ and obscure members. In adolescence he had been trained to use statistics wherever possible and appropriate; the analysis of parliaments which he made in the 1920s stirred up an interest in their ‘average’ Members—elusive, pale, public figures yet often rugged or flamboyant men, more enigmatic, and so more attractive to him than those with a well-defined (almost obvious) public image.76 In 1951 Neale described the method as ‘the biographical approach to history’. He had read Beard but it was Namier who inspired his work, with its emphasis on comprehensive empirical facts and taking psychology seriously. As Neale summarised, ‘[A.F.] Pollard’s Evolution of Parliament stimulated a remarkable amount of research’, but Namier’s book began a new historical method.77 Neale argued that ‘[b]etween the two world-wars, biography had a remarkable vogue’, but Namier’s biographical method was not designed to cater to those popular tastes.78 It comprised three factors. First, it consisted of series of biographies which revealed personal interests arising from environmental context and individual qualities. Prosopographical biographies were quite a different proposition from writing ordinary biographical narratives. They revolved around financial and genealogical research identifying family and financial interests. Secondly, it involved data collection, such as the ‘arithmetical sum’ of individual wills ‘with research results summarized and given in tabular form as statistics’. In terms of Elizabethan parliamentary history, the social class to which members belonged was determined from research into a person’s occupation—for example central or local officials, lawyers, etc; their education; their age; their religious affinities, if ascertainable; their previous and subsequent parliamentary experience; their family relationships; the location of their residence or estates in relation to the constituency.79 And thirdly was the phenomenon of group behaviour: The underlying facts are that men have friends and enemies, and that their activities, in one way or another, are so often related to those of a group. Biographical studies of a man’s acquaintances may shed invaluable light on the life of the individual; or it may prove profitable to study someone as a member of a group rather than in isolation.80

Postwar debates over atomising lives  233 Neale referred to A. W. Reed’s Early Tudor Drama, which dealt with a group around Sir Thomas More, and Leslie Hotson’s work on the group around Shakespeare and Zeeveld, a group study of a number of humanists which shed light on Henry VIII as well as other leading figures such as Wolsey, Pole and Cromwell. A historian could not ‘understand the nature and functioning of any human group without knowing about the individuals who compose it’: ‘The essence of the game—if I may use its jargon—is to ‘biograph’ everyone, ask the right questions, and assemble the facts in tables where their significance may be readily grasped.’81 This kind of work was best done collaboratively, such as the co-operative work of the kind achieved when the [Dictionary of National Biography (D.N.B.)] was being written; and I well remember how often A. F. Pollard used to talk of the skill so gained and preserved in the D.N.B. office and of the loss to scholarship when that organization was dispersed. Since 1945 I have secured this continuity in the study of Elizabethan members of parliament. There have been two or more students at work each year, overlapping one another.82 So Neale saw the method as twofold: historical questions are always concerned with individuals—with individuals in groups and secondly, with individuals and broader tendencies. Neale said that he asked himself constantly ‘how far a Hitler or a Stalin is master of his political system or becomes merely another victim of inherent, unplanned, and perhaps unforeseen tendencies in it’? He did not argue that ‘all history is biography. Some history—very fruitful history—is biography’.83 Namier believed that the House of Commons was a ‘microcosm of the British political nation’ which would show ‘the rise and decline of classes and interests’; the way in which men became members with their political birth revealing social and economic history of the nation and ‘inner structure of British politics’.84 As Plumb and others observed, however, ‘the political nation even in the eighteenth century was not co-extensive with the House of Commons or the electors to it’.85 Namier resisted the view that the History of Parliament was not representative for the research questions in which he was interested. Moreover, he emphasized his point about ‘organic sampling’: the ‘great representative value of the sample’ was that it was ‘not the researcher who [had] selected it; it [had] selected itself’.86 After Wedgwood’s death and at the end of World War Two, Namier lobbied for government funding for the History of Parliament Trust. In 1951, the British government provided funding for twenty years for the History of Parliament; in the first instance, for five historians to oversee the writing of mini-biographies of every member of parliament, followed by an analysis: S. T. Bindoff on the Tudor volume; Neale for 1558–1603; Namier for 1754–1790; Romney Sedgwick for 1714–1754; and Arthur Aspinall for 1790–1820.

234  Postwar debates over atomising lives Namier’s was a fabulously microscopic examination of the composition of the successive Houses of Commons under George III: where did the M.P.’s [Members of Parliament] come from, what was their family background, into what families did they marry, what and how much did they own, what was their education, what schools had they attended, who were their friends, what prompted one or the other to take up politics and stand for Parliament, in what ways did each one get elected?87 As Berlin noted, He did indeed split his material and reduce it to tiny fragments, which he then reintegrated with a marvellous power of imaginative generalisation as great as that of any other historian of his time […] Materialism, excessive determinism, were criticisms levelled against him, but they fit better those historians who, using the method without the genius, tend towards pedantry and timidity, where he was boldly constructive, intuitive and untrammelled.88 Like Berlin, Linda Colley makes clear in her 1989 biography that Namier was committed both to the ‘intensely detailed’ and also to ‘penetrating analysis’.89 He really did not do as much as he meant to on the latter, however. He spent the last decade of his life producing three volumes of the History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790, which was made up of nearly 2,000 biographies that he wrote himself by working nine hours a day in the basement of London’s Institute of Historical Research, with three full-time assistants, and volunteers.90 By July 1960, most of the biographies for Namier’s period were complete, and he began to plan a magisterial survey of his investigations in which he would set down his final version of eighteenth-century Britain.91 When he died just one month later, 1,700 out of the 1,966 biographies and 200 or the 314 constituency accounts had been completed, but not a word of the analysis, the Introductory Survey, had been written.92 John Brooke, his former PhD student, completed the biographical task a year later in 1961.93 Whatever its conclusions, Namier’s experience, which Bentley suggested ‘killed him’, was typical of the group.94 It required a great deal of time and stamina for an individual to both assemble and analyse such a trove of data by themselves. Tim Bindoff’s (1908–1980) biographies for the parliaments of 1509–1558 were also published posthumously in ‘three stout volumes’ in 1982.95 Patrick Collinson noted that the History of Parliament project dominated Bindoff’s life:

Postwar debates over atomising lives  235 He wrote no general introduction, and while his personal input to all of the biographical essays was considerable (and one of the last things he did was to read the proofs), he appended his initials to only nine of the 2263.96 Similarly, the biographical approach to history, Collinson suggested, was the ‘tragedy of Neale’s career’.97 Neale did not write an introduction either to the three Elizabethan volumes of the History of Parliament that appeared in 1981, six years after his death under Peter Hasler’s editorship. Arthur Aspinall willingly gave up the History of Parliament for the period 1790–1820 when he retired in 1965, and R. G. Thorne completed the task in 1986. Only Sedgwick completed his task by publishing two volumes of the History of Parliament for the period 1715–1754 in 1970. As indicated, the project continues to develop to this day. Throughout the 1950s, Namier faced criticism of his method from Butterfield whose life’s work as professor of modern history at Cambridge was foregrounded in The Whig Interpretation of History, a short volume which he published in 1931 (and his 1945 restatement, The Study of Modern History).98 Butterfield made three main points in six short chapters to do with presentism, the process of history and judgements. These came to the fore in his campaign against the Namier School. Anticipating E.P. Thompson, the youthful Butterfield chastised historians for considering the past in terms of the present. The nineteenth century was not studied for its own sake; the twentieth century was its natural successor and the things that mattered to twentieth-century historians—their presentist concerns and values—warped an understanding of what went before. Historians studied the nineteenth century with twentieth-century minds and twentieth-­ century outcomes. In the process, they lost their concern with agency, free will and historical contingency.99 Butterfield argued that ‘[h]istoriography, if we survey it as a whole, is weak in its analysis of people and in its handling of human personality’.100 He was antipathetic towards abstract theory, believing that historians’ task was to concentrate on the ‘particularity and concreteness of the human past’ and to concentrate on human being’s principles, beliefs and intentions and their networks of interaction.101 When Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History was published in 1931, G. M. Trevelyan, Regius Professor of Cambridge, was aghast, believing that Butterfield was criticising the way he wrote history. Trevelyan (along with Keith Feilding) had been panned for arguing that the political landscape under Queen Anne’s early eighteenth-century rule had been dominated by two parties, the Whigs and the Tories. Trevelyan decided that Butterfield should test his ideas by writing biography himself, and he had just the right subject for him, Charles James Fox. As the custodian of Fox’s papers, he passed them onto Butterfield. Butterfield did publish biographies on cases such as Napoleon (1939) and the Statecraft of Machiavelli (1940), but he never wrote the biography of Fox. However, Trevelyan drew

236  Postwar debates over atomising lives him into studies on the eighteenth century, and thus into Namier’s orbit. And his biographical research led him to take aim at Namier.102 Namier was against the view that there was a continuing and inevitable victory of progress over reaction—that is, his was an anti-Whig interpretation of history—and, on that basis, one might assume that he was in agreement with Butterfield whose The Whig Interpretation of History had railed against history concentrating on progression, regarding the past as a precursor to the present. Similarly, Butterfield condemned the strategy of abridging complexity. He believed ‘history cannot be truly abridged, any more than a symphony by Beethoven can’.103 It was a matter of balance, writing good history involved a particular kind of abridgement and attitude: genuine historical study was bound to be intensive, taking historians away from abridgements, not upwards to vague speculation but downwards to concrete detail. So, there were issues on which they agreed. Nonetheless, Butterfield became the leading critic of Namier’s historical method and school.104 He argued, firstly, that Namier offered structural explanations ignoring, Butterfield argued, human choices, which were informed and inspired by ideas over time. Secondly, Butterfield argued that human action was inherently more complex than Namier’s view suggested, for he did not take into account the significance and diversity of history, and the role of individual’s professed ideas, beliefs and principles.105 Butterfield argued that Namier’s method ‘atomized everything’. In other words, it broke down complex historical events to simple social categories. Other critics accused Namier of ‘taking the mind of out of history’, owing to his dislike of abstract political theory and his belief that much of human behaviour is ‘senseless and irrational’.106 Thirdly, the method was developed by men who, from either conservative disdain or Marxist conviction, held a deeply pessimistic view of human nature.107 The nature of the surviving evidence, what the archives held, had led medievalists to accept this materialistic orientation, to which Butterfield thought prosopography was inherently prone. Fourthly, Butterfield believed Namierism not only lacked ‘Imaginative Sympathy’ but worse it was not balanced: History would be forever unsatisfying if it did not cast a wider net for the truth; for in one aspect, it is the study of change, in another aspect it is the study of diversity. The historian, like the novelist, is bound to be glad that it takes all sorts of men to make the world.108 Butterfield believed that Namier and his supporters were reductionalists: [T]he method of analysis, seeks to reduce everything to its lowest terms and takes us away from the wholeness of a thing, in order to study the parts, the laws, the relations … It assumes that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that when you analyse you analyse the essence of a thing away.109

Postwar debates over atomising lives  237 In summary, Butterfield complained that Namier’s method was ultimately both anti-biographical and unhistorical: the variety of the past was sacrificed in the name of regularities, data and statistics. Butterfield and Namier had different views on human nature, and their own natures also differed. Butterfield was a working-class scholarship undergraduate who became a research student at Peterhouse, Cambridge, supervised by diplomatic historian Harold Temperley. He had been brought up Methodist and attended Wesley Methodist Chapel into his middle ages. As a youth, Butterfield had literary ambitions but he attended Keighley Trade and Grammar School, which specialised in mathematics and the natural sciences. History was a compromise subject. Butterfield’s first publication was about the historical novel in which he ruminated on the limits of evidence preventing historians from entering the inner mind.110 Novelists did not need evidence; historians managed to convey experiential understanding by using their evidence-informed historical imaginations. As a tutor, Butterfield would challenge students by deliberately picking up what he called not the wrong end of the stick, ‘but the other end of the stick’.111 He believed only unhistorical minds laughed at the silliness of people in the past and their ideas.112 Butterfield tried to understand Nazi Germany rather than cast Actonian moral judgements.113 He visited Germany in 1938 and argued for British historians to embrace German colleagues as soon as the war ended. Indeed, Butterfield’s ‘understanding’ attitude towards Germany was a particular sore spot with Namier, whose family had been a victim of it and who held German militarism to be a national trait as well as a moral failing. Butterfield was concerned that his colleagues refused to make the effort to understand parties in history which seemed reactionary or were historical ‘losers’, another echo of Thompson. He tried to practise what he preached about presentism, that is, using present-day ideas, perspectives and knowledge about how history turned out.114 Butterfield’s Christianity led him to believe that lives were lived by luck and chance, albeit guided, ultimately, in the last instance, by Providence. In this, as in many ways, he followed Ranke. Free will meant that humans were agents constrained by circumstances. They could choose how they responded to these circumstances but their responses often involved unexpected and unintended consequences. Of course, there were tensions between Providence and his belief in human agency, although he wrote biography without any deliberation over this problem. He did so by developing a view of three levels of history. The first was empiricist and technical; that is, the archivally retrieved history of people and events. Second, regularities emerged from the technical history; historians could discern patterns and principles and write what Butterfield described as expository history. Third was the providential order arising from his fundamental religious belief. Sewell has argued there were major contradictions in Butterfield’s interpretation of history; over time, Butterfield seemed to

238  Postwar debates over atomising lives realise value-free ‘technical’ history was impossible and values—such as a belief in Providence—could not be divorced from ‘hard facts’. Values determined the selection of facts, the choice of how and what to describe.115 Butterfield increasingly wrote more than historical narratives about personality ‘based on hard facts’; he began to develop general propositions. Meanwhile, however, given his view that historical subjects were not quite in control of the history they were making, most of his work was biographical, concentrating on the particular, concrete and individual. He believed Namier started with sociological ideas and structural interpretations, rather than hard facts. Namier wandered around draughty country houses in search of pieces of paper as pieces of evidence towards a preconceived interpretation about people’s material aspirations and structural prosopography. Namier simply overlooked Butterfield when organising conferences on parliamentary history. Butterfield, however, increasingly came to publicly attack Namier’s method. In 1949, Butterfield published George III, Lord North and the People, 1779–80, in which he argued for the role of public opinion in the late eighteenth-century political system. In 1957 Butterfield published George III and the Historians which was about historical writing in nineteenth-century Britain but also a ‘full-dress’ attack on the Namierites.116 As Hayton has shown, other historians, including Alan Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Maurice Ashley, became increasingly critical of Namier’s methods.117 Some attacked Namierites rather than Namier himself.118 G. V. Bennett argued about Walcott’s ‘Namierisation’ of Queen Anne’s reign. While the researcher may not have selected the parliamentary sample, the survey was a construction and ‘the methodology was patently at fault. Having created a card-index of biographical material for individual M.P.s, he attempted on this basis to allot them to the different political groups of his own theory’.119 In 1957, Butterfield went further and publicised the historiographical debate in an article in Encounter in which he directly attacked the ‘Namier School’. He argued that Namier’s interpretation was not innovative and provided little more than the research results of earlier constitutional historians.120 Butterfield was particularly brutal to an early career academic and Namier’s student, the ‘Namierite’ John Brooke.121 Namier invited Butterfield to visit the offices of the History of Parliament in the Historical Institute to see for himself the ‘supposedly mighty empire’ and to discuss their differences. They met in 1958 to discuss the issues directly and seem to have reached a rapprochement. Namier thought it was too late, for the damage had been done to the project and constraints placed on its funding.122 Moreover, Namier died in 1960. Much of Namier’s historical theses and those of his ‘school’ were rejected in the years after his death. Scholars have shown ‘that the most significant determinant of parliamentary allegiance in the period 1701–14 was party’ rather than family-based connections. Hayton pointed to the work of Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, and J.  H.  Plumb,

Postwar debates over atomising lives  239 The Growth of Political Stability on England 1675–1725, which were both published in 1967. They demonstrated the importance of ideas and principles as eighteenth-century politicians’ motivations replacing Namier’s ‘cynically materialist or psychological determinist, interpretation of human behaviour’.123 Moreover, they widened the understanding of the political nation. George Rudé’s Wilkes and Liberty (1962) showed the ‘value of excavating the lives and experiences of those beneath the propertied elite’.124 John Brewer’s Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (1976) went lower, showing the role of cheap print pamphlets and street theatre in influencing working-class public opinion. Nevertheless, as Hayton pointed out, Holmes still regarded the biographical method as ‘an indispensable aid to the study of politics’. He argued that Namier remained influential, nonetheless, even going so far as to suggest that ‘we are all Namierites’ today.125 Cynicism about human motivation has come full circle but Hayton was referring to Namier’s relational approach, with its emphasis on connections—family, friendship and patronage. Namier himself knew there were other ways of doing history. He preferred his way. In her biography of her husband, Julia Namier noted, When in the last decade of his life, L’s [Namier’s] work was being derided and his wasted years and energies were being deplored, he often dwelt on two courses open to a historian. The one he likened to following a stream as a diarist on the move might, noting day by day its twists and turns from the source, say in the hills, through barely billowing land to the delta that fans out to the sea. The other was to build across the river’s course two dams and settle down to study that section’s significant detail; which study should include analysis of the water and the river bed. Such was his choice in 1924. One dam he built in 1740 (‘My own research only starts about 1740’), the other in 1783; and steeped himself there in the concerns of the British ‘political nation’.126 Regardless of this debate, prosopography developed, especially in regard to periods before the eighteenth century.127 Medievalist historians in particular adopted prosopographical methods during the 1950s. Having said that, the issues in the earlier debate became more relevant after the 1950s: some of Butterfield’s criticisms were astute.

Pursuit of the individual in prosopography: medievalists’ prosopographical methods and the move towards representative lives Medieval studies, characterised by lexicons of the lives of emperors, politicians and saints, flourished alongside Namier’s work. Pre-eminent was New Zealand-born Oxford classicist Ronald Syme, whose The Roman Revolution (1939) involved his tracing the linkages or kinship, marriage

240  Postwar debates over atomising lives and shared interests among the various leading families of republican and imperial Rome.128 Like Namier’s The Structure of English Politics at the Accession of George III (1930), Syme considered ideas as merely ‘political catchwords’ and stressed self-interest and connections as politicians’ main motivations and rationales for coalition. Like Namier, he too published a systematic compendium of biographical information, in his case on Roman emperors of the third century.129 As we shall see, there has been an enormous expansion of prosopography-guided data bases, subsequently. Even so, some of Butterfield’s worries remain pertinent. This first wave of twentieth-century prosopographical research was elitist.130 Its foundations are to be found in the study of ‘political power relationships, especially in republican and imperial Rome, with its cursus honorum and its trinomial system of personal nomenclature, which have greatly facilitated the identification of political groupings and patterns of patronage’.131 An impetus towards different groups and their interaction was associated with the rise of social history after the mid-century with the concomitant growing diversity of biographical subjects, but it was also a matter of necessity for ancient and early modern historians. Medievalists had struggled to find sufficient personal data about individuals to enable the effective reconstruction of medieval lives and, moving away from elite studies, they were drawn to a pointilliste methodology of biographies of ‘ordinary people’. Important articles by Romanists Claude Nicolet and Andre Chastagnol in 1970 reflected the developing interest in a prosopography of lesser or non-elite groups.132 Using computer databases, Medievalists were able to compile ‘for each element in an historical study the same body of information … (lineage, occupation of parents, family income, educational background, etc.) for each member’.133 To begin with, numerically coded databases were developed using material extracted from biographical dictionaries to statistically analyse ‘significant’ people for whom a biography could be written.134 Such information seemed well suited for conversion to computer format. Databases quickly developed more directly from archives’ fragmentary and incomplete data including people whose names were unknown and unnamed ‘in order to study a part of the social body’.135 This meant drawing on new kinds of records: archaeological, numismatic and textual sources which provided a great number of names—‘saint or sinner, slave or scholar, sheriff or serving-maid’—which were gradually also collated and related on ever-growing databases allowing for the characteristics of a collective to be drawn. Prosopography became an essential tool for medieval studies. A series of international interdisciplinary conferences in Rome (1975), Paris (1978) and Tubingen (1979) were concerned with prosopographical approaches publicised developments. Medievalist and early modern historians’ systematic interest in prosopography in the 1970s and 1980s is evidenced in the establishment of dedicated journals, Medieval Prosopography (founded in

Postwar debates over atomising lives  241 1980) and Prosopon: The Journal of Prosopography (founded in 1994). The former, for instance, set out to to explore and explicate the lives of people who, when treated as individuals, often remain obscure. Because relatively few sources were ­created by or about individuals during the Middle Ages the prosopographical method of analysis of groups of people has lent itself especially well to medieval history.136 It encouraged papers from scholars who analysed a group or ‘relationships between individuals to restore to view the lives of those who would otherwise remain unexamined or to yield new insight into the medieval past’.137 The First International Interdisciplinary Conference on Medieval Proso­ pography was held at the University of Bielefeld, German Federal Republic, in December 1982 and the organisers published the proceedings, Medieval Lives and the Historians (1982). Medievalist historians were not the only historians to realise the advantages of computer use and to use ‘electronic data processing’ to process large volumes of records from the 1960s and 1970s.138 French social historian of the Ancien Régime, the period from the Late Middle Ages until the French Revolution in 1789, and a member of the Annales School, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie opined in 1967 that the historian of tomorrow will be a computer programmer or nothing at all (‘L’historien de demain sera programmeur ou ne sera plus’).139 Similarly, Peter Laslett and demographers later involved in the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure believed that ‘numerical study must soon become important to everyone seriously interested in social change’.140 Stone developed the method qualitatively too. He began his career as a medievalist, worked on early modern gentry, became the founding director of the Davis Center for Historical Studies in 1968, which was established to promote innovative methods of historical research, and by the 1970s was researching the internal structures of early modern families.141 He suggested that the methodology, that of establishing a database or name list, linking records, adding biographical data and analysing the accumulated data, could be applied to any social group for which there were records.142 Stone became a leading exponent of prosopography, or group biography. While biography considered the individual, historical demographers tended to consider collectives in a statistical, anonymous manner, prosopographers sought to place the individual in the group. Massive large-scale databases began to be developed for a range of groups over time. Katharine Keats-Rohan was appointed as inaugural Director of the Prosopography Project (Linacre Unit for Prosopographical Research) which the Faculty of History, Oxford, had established in 2004. A priority for the project was to generate material for graduate students,

242  Postwar debates over atomising lives specifically, about ‘prosopography as used by historians’.143 In the process, they discovered that the Ghent University had published a Short Manual to the Art of Prosopography in Dutch. They decided to translate this into English but the response to a conference in 2005 on Prosopography Approaches and Applications led to a larger project.144 Keats-Rohan went on to develop a database project, Continental Origins of English Landholders 1066–1166 (COEL). Her unit then turned to the great Domesday Book, the record of the 1086 ‘Great Survey’ of England and Wales. Earlier projects had not correlated other documents.145 KeatsRohan’s publications included a book on Domesday names and places and then related, by record linkage, to other manuscripts.146 A second major British prosopography database initiated about the same time was the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE), based at King’s College London and the University of Cambridge, and supported by Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London. It aimed to assemble in database form the information that survives about named persons who lived a millennium or more ago in Anglo-Saxon England or who had ties with that country. It concentrated on three entities: persons who were the dramatis personae, the source providing the evidence and the event which linked the person and the source. PASE now comprises a massive prosopographical project with the addition of the Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCED), and the Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire (PBE).147 Most recently, American and British versions of massive databases on the Legacies of Slavery, have been developed. When the British government abolished slavery in 1833 it compensated slave owners and the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at the University College London aims to produce a comprehensive Encyclopedia of British SlaveOwners.148 Similarly, states have generated massive longitudinal data on convicts with Clare Anderson using this ‘big data’ to publish A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (2018).149 Despite all this work, some of the matters which Butterfield and others raised about Namier’s manual prosopographical project remain. First, as David Peleteret noted, The sad reality is, however, that most people who have lived during the few thousand years of recorded human history have died unknown to those living in later centuries—and are likely to remain that way unless dug up by inquisitive archaeologists …. Even then their names in most cases will never be known.150 These data bases are sometimes more gap than data, and sometimes consist of flawed data. More recent interdisciplinary historical projects for the modern period share this problem. Among data-mining projects, the Dutch BiographyNet, for instance, consists of a middling number of

Postwar debates over atomising lives  243 125,000 ‘Biographies’. This has been achieved by data mining historical biographical compendia and Who’s Who and the like. But data mining often creates huge databases which are full of gaps. Of the Dutch BiographyNet only the names of subjects are known 100 per cent; only 80 per cent of gender and less than 60 per cent of dates and places of birth, deaths and marriages and a minority of occupations, let alone life narratives. This constrains the preparation of the biographical dossiers (biograms) which Keats-Rohan and others argue is required by prosopography.151 Smaller projects, such as the Australian Dictionary of Biography, are naming the relations between subjects for whom edited biographies have been compiled. These are constructing rich data from below, echoing at least one aspect of Namier’s method.152 Secondly, Robin Fleming, a late Roman and early medieval British historian, discussed the implications of strategies medievalists and early modern historians adopted, given their often having few written records. Many prosopographers ‘in the tradition of the Annales School prefer the study of obscure groups to that of their better-known counterparts’ collecting as much circumstantial evidence as possible.153 While sometimes there is but a single reference to an individual, for most people, a ‘surprising’ number; historians can ferret out information from a scattering of sources, which range from chronicles to saints’ lives to administrative documents. From these we can go on to make inferences about the geographical scope of our protagonists’ actions, alliances, and landholdings, as well as their particular devotions to saints’ cults and monastic communities. Sometimes we can even cobble together partial genealogies, although we rarely recover the names of our subjects’ spouses, mothers, siblings, and younger children. With our hard-won facts, we can go on to construct chronologies and stitch together narratives, and in them we not only identify important events and crucial meetings, but make arguments about individuals’ strategies, policies, and motives.154 Fleshing out bones and ‘landscape biography’ has also become possible.155 Even early modernists have problems of ‘writing biography from bones’, as Ian Donaldson’s biography of English playwright and poet Ben Jonson (1572–1637) shows.156 Rarely can medievalists piece together subjects’ private lives, ‘to say nothing of their inner thoughts, hopes, or anxieties’.157 Fleming argued that in 2009 there were only four individuals who lived in Britain between the fifth century and 1066 who had ‘sustained, scholarly, book-length biographies’: Alfred the Great, Edward the Confessor and Queens Emma and Edith.158 As indicated, Medievalists turned early to prosopography to overcome this.159 Unable to constitute a single life in detail, they considered generalised patterns by analysing many lives and these ‘allowed us to populate our period with thousands of connected

244  Postwar debates over atomising lives

Figure 6.2 In Namier’s wake, historians have increasingly considered the common characteristics of groups of people, by tracing each individual member’s biography and analysing the collective results. A Cabinet Card of Galaxy of Distinguished Colonists in New South Wales, photos, collected and published by W.M. Sargent, Artist, 352 George St, Sydney (1867). Isobel Bowden collection, Local Studies Collection. Blue Mountains Library, PF 1867.

Postwar debates over atomising lives  245 historical actors’.160 ‘The individuals who emerge from such studies are often, in the end, not much more than the sum of their charter attestations’.161 Moreover, the subjects tended to be gender and class specific: males of various elites who make up the dominant classes of a specific societies. Thirdly, and above all, disquiet has emerged about prosopography being an end in itself rather than answering questions to do with historical problems: Prosopographers, in their relentless pursuit of the identities and relationships of the leading characters in the human drama, frequently neglect broader historiographical questions to which Personen­ forschung [person research] ought to be able to make significant contributions.162 That is, the individual biographies are not sufficiently rich in aggregate to supply patterns of social and economic history.

A halfway house: collective biography Increasingly, historians in the wake of prosopographical developments and their critique have resorted to another strategy, a biographical hybrid between prosopography and individualist and nominalist biography, somewhere between Namier’s and Butterfield’s methodologies that utilises both biographical and prosopographical approaches. Namier had an unconstrained passion for research and wanted all that was interesting and remarkable about lives based on archival records. His own determination to find out everything about his subjects, paying particular attention to character and motivation, has been transferred to the smaller canvas of collective biography. Over Butterfield’s objections, prosopography has become a central part of historians’ biographical practice. In Namier’s wake, however, there has been a rescaling of ‘prosopography’ to consider not simply politics nor to dissect 2,000 politicians or 5,000 political citizens but detailed analysis of small groups of lives: dual, triple, quadruple clusters. At the same time, Butterfield’s call for narrative biography that concentrates on ‘human purposes, ideas and ideals’ has also taken into account by way of this biographical strategy. In many ways historians have mostly found a middle ground in the late twentieth century between Butterfield’s empathetic narrative and Namier’s minute prosopography by focusing on collective biography.163 Biographies continue to be published but there has been flourishing of collective biographies of small groups of families, friends, clubs. While large prosopographical collaborations continue, collective biography contextualising the networks around historical subjects is often achieved in a traditional single author fashion.

246  Postwar debates over atomising lives Studies of the complex and tangled lives or biographies of smaller sets of people abound.164 As Krista Cowman has explained it, this often involves ‘an interest in how the group impacted on certain things—­systems, organizations, institutions—rather than a more subjective concern about how engagement with these things affected the individuals of whom the group was comprised’, requiring fine-grained analysis of small groups.165 Keats-Rohan has described this ‘more structured approach based on smaller-scale material’ as ‘new prosopography’, involving a smaller perspective, focus on mass as well as elite subjects, using quantifiable and non-quantifiable sources, and ‘thick description’. It is hard to distinguish from ‘new collective biography’. Nevertheless, she has made a useful distinction: ‘Biography concerns the life of a single person’. It is focused upon an individual and all the details of their life. ‘If two or more persons are the subject, then the work is a collective biography’, while prosopography ‘produces [impersonal] dossiers, [or biograms], not biographies’.166 Historians can, and do, use all these methods simultaneously. One of the most common of collective biographies have been thematic accounts of the family.167 The tradition of family biography dates from Henry Granville Fitzalon’s The Lives of Phillip Howard, Earl of Arundel and of Anne Davies His Wife (1857).168 They have commonly ranged over whole families or groups of families, sometimes as many as sixty.169 To begin with, these family biographies were of elites in the manner of much of prosopography and biography. Stella Tillyard published on the aristocratic Lennox sisters; Anne De Courcy on the Curzon sisters; James Fox on the Langhornes of Virginia, which included Nancy Astor; Elisabeth Kehoe on the Jerome sisters, including Jennie Churchill; and Mary Lovell on the Mitford sisters.170 Many collective biographies consider families in their entirety: Barbara Caine has written a biography of the famous Anglo-Indian Strachey family; Martin Pugh on the suffragist Pankhurst family; John Rickard on the Deakin family of Australian liberals.171 And, increasingly, collective biographies of families have moved down the social scale.  Emma Rothschild has written about families in the Scottish Enlightenment.172 Stephen Foster published on generations within a family whose branches have risen and fallen.173 This author ‘s collective biography of a New Zealand working-class family was published in 2005.174 I set out deliberately to consider the likenesses and the disparities of a group through a fine-grained study and to use collective biography as a vehicle to re-interpret Antipodean labour history.175 In a nod to Namier, some collective biography has built a picture of the intellectual and associational networks of groups and, thereby, explored the motivations and agendas of groups in history.176 But equally it can concentrate upon a disparate group brought together for a single event. Julie Greer made a prosopographical analysis of 212 guests at the Silver Jubilee dinner for the British Psychoanalytical Society at The Savoy,

Postwar debates over atomising lives  247 London, on 8 March 1939. She explored the shared cultural and symbolic capital that linked their lives by developing a database of individual detail, originating from the seating plan for the dinner and then evolving ‘one story from many’. Guests included significant figures from psychoanalysis, Bloomsbury, politics and publishing, such as Anna Freud, Ernest Jones (President of the British Psychoanalytic Society—BPAS), H. G. Wells, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf.177 Increasingly, groups in focus have become less elite and more representative of their social context. One of the early classic collective biographies was Daniel Lerner’s on the Nazi elite, while more recently Josie Abbott has considered office secretaries in Victorian and Edwardian times.178 Much of this work considers the degree to which agency and experience depends on complex networks of interaction. Many artists, writers and other creative people do their best work when collaborating within a circle of like-minded friends. This kind of collective biography focuses on embodiment and sociality as crucial dimensions of collective experience. Out of their discussions they can develop a new, shared vision that guides their work even when they work alone. Experimenting together and challenging one another, individuals can develop the courage to rebel against the established traditions in their field. Michael P. Farrell looks at the group dynamics in six collaborative circles: the French Impressionists; Sigmund Freud and his friends; C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Inklings; the social reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; the Fugitive poets; and the writers Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford. He demonstrated how the unusual interactions in these collaborative circles drew out the creativity in each member.179 Farrell also presented vivid narrative accounts of the roles played by the members of each circle. He considered how working in such circles sustains the motivation of each member; how collaborative circles shape the individual styles of the persons within them; how leadership roles and interpersonal relationships change as circles develop; and why some circles flourish while others flounder.180 While Namier was working on his History of Parliament biographies and Butterfield was researching George III, other historians were developing collective biography. Robert E. Schofield began researching the Lunar society in the 1950s, culminating in a collective biography in 1962.181 Subsequently, Jenny Uglow has revisited the topic emphasising ‘friends who made the future’. Rather than an alphabetical list of individuals, she made connections through a discursive story. She traced the ‘lives of the Lunar men [which] crossed like cotton threaded between pins on a map’.182 The Lunar Society of Birmingham was an informal group of people who lived in the towns of Birmingham, Lichfield, Derby and surrounds who met ‘at each other’s houses on the Monday nearest to the Full moon, to have light to ride home’.183 It was a formalised club from New Year’s Eve of 1775 until about 1794, but it built up over many years. It began with a country doctor, poet and botanist, Erasmus Darwin, and

248  Postwar debates over atomising lives ‘toy’ manufacturer (that is, someone who made small metal objects such as buckles and candlesticks) Matthew Boulton, who built factories, canals, suspension bridges and steam engines, quite literally making their mark upon the land. Uglow follows the ever-increasing interactions around eight men by 1770 (Darwin, Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, William Small, James Keir, John Whitehurst, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Thomas Day). Later, four other principals joined—Joseph Priestley, James Watt, William Withering, and Samuel Galton—with minor fellows too.184 The circles of friends spread: ‘circles of inventors … of commerce also spun out from the Midlands to the wider world’.185 Together they engineered the Industrial Revolution.186 Uglow portrays these inventing men as Namier did eighteenth-century parliamentarians, but with a twist. Until relatively recently, the Lunar men were a less well-known group than eighteenth-century parliamentarians. They were solidly middle-class and also entirely self-interested. These curious merchant princes had ‘iron in their blood’.187 They bought good minds cheaply. Boulton was prepared to ‘rob the poor’ of their common land in order to build his workshops, warehouse and manufactory. A canal to the Birmingham collieries was funded by raising shares at the same time that  the campaign for a new infirmary funded by subscriptions stalled. Sometimes their industrial developments were unintended. Boulton started with outworkers, which was typical of Birmingham employers at the time, but gradually brought all production and workers under one roof. Not everything was a success. Some discoveries were before their time and others were failures. Political swings affected their lives. The excise laws might have inflamed the American colonies but it also affected their livelihood as did those on patents. The times were propitious with growing local markets and a burgeoning colonial economy. James Boswell recorded a conversation he had when he visited Matthew Boulton’s home, Soho House, and its adjacent factor in 1776: “I shall never forget Mr Bolton’s expression to me. ‘I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have—Power” figuratively as well as literary’.188 But they were friends too, as Boulton revealed in a letter to Watt.189 Uglow also considered the complex interrelationships between science, technology, society and culture as Butterfield did, especially in his work on the origin of science.190 She argued that science was not a pure enterprise but a reflection of society’s values and its patterns of trade, labour and social class. It involved agency and luck. These men were inventors, were ‘electrical brothers’ who joined together in lifelong friendships which were important to their fate. There was only one Lunar woman in Uglow’s account but family relations are at its centre.191 The Lunar men did not leave official society records. But when not together talking they wrote each other letters; Boulton kept a notebook; Wedgwood and his partner Thomas Bentley wrote business correspondence. They sent each other samples and specimens and encouragement. These men shared contacts,

Postwar debates over atomising lives  249 pursued income (‘money-getting’) and discussed new ideas. They learned most through their friendships; their ‘innovation depended on exchange’.192As a number of reviewers noted, the collective biography reveals much about the structure of English society in the eighteenth century. The merchants of London and Bristol, in alliance with the dominant rural society, controlled Parliament. But England’s northern towns around Birmingham and Liverpool were the source of a new and vigorous industrial society. It did not have political power; indeed, many of the Lunar society were dissenters. Britain ‘was not one nation but two’.193 These themes concerning individual personality, the uniqueness of episodes, about networks of interactions and unintended consequences accord with Butterfield’s methodology. Similarly, a second recent collective biography of the eighteenth century is Leo Damrosch’s The Club—a dining society, he argued, which shaped the age.194 Samuel Johnson defined a ‘club’ in his lexicon, Dictionary of the English Language, in 1755 as ‘an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions’.195 Clubs were hubs of debate, creativity, controversy and gossip and seem particularly good and entertaining subjects for collective biographies.196 For 20 years from 1764, Johnson, Edmund Burke and others met regularly at the Turk’s Head tavern in London for conversation and conviviality. They met originally to help Johnson get over his depression. They exchanged, but, most of all, debated ideas. And this is perhaps the major point—the support of creativity by friendship, associated with a group- and disputation. Significantly, in an age supposedly dominated by the traditional elite, one is struck by the vibrancy of the intellectual culture of those of more modest means. The group included ‘the greatest British critic, biographer, political philosopher, historian and economist of all time’.197 Other members included the era’s most famous painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and its most celebrated actor, David Garrick, as well as the multi-talented playwright Oliver Goldsmith. There were nearly all self-made men, although Damrosch adds to their number a ‘shadow club’ of intellectual women—Frances Burney, Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More—presided over by Hester Thrale at Streatham, where Johnson spent much of the latter part of his life. She writes about the talented wives and female relatives of Club members who might have achieved fame of their own had they not been overshadowed by the men. Like the Lunar Society, there are no records of the Club’s meetings. Of course, most of the major players have already been subjects of biographies. Boswell’s own Life of Johnson is a major source with the new Boswellian method of participant observer: writing down conversations he overhears and in which he plays a part.198 One shortcoming of this source is that it took a decade before Boswell was elected to join the Club, at the same time as Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith. These groups had views of their own on biography in times long before professional history. Priestley, for instance, had views on biography,

250  Postwar debates over atomising lives experimenting and classifying biography anathema to Johnson and Boswell. Johnson believed that ‘they only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination’.199 Nevertheless in 1756 Priestley had published a timeline, the Chart of Biography. He was inspired by Thomas Jefferys’ 1753 model for a historical chart, A Chart of Universal History. Priestley presented time horizontally and emphasised the continuous flow of historical time. He followed it up with a chart of history but in terms of biographies envisaging 2,000 significant individuals who were famous as much as meritorious, dividing them into six  kinds: Statesmen and Warriors; Divines and Metaphysicians; Mathematicians and Physicians; Poets and Artists; Orators and Critics; Historians, Antiquarians, and Lawyers.200 Certainly in Priestley’s view, politicians’ biography could not in themselves be a proxy for British history. Damrosch’s method is most relevant to this discussion, a clear combination of the collective and individual. He offered incisive portraits of individual members, highlighting their relationships and interactions with one another. His stated aim was to reveal ‘the teeming, noisy, contradictory, and often violent world’ they inhabited.201 It was a world confronting upheaval: noisy agitation in Britain’s American colonies, bloody rebellion in France, debate over slavery, and domestic economic stress. Between 1739 and 1783, Damrosch noted, Britain was at war for 24 years, at peace for 20. The theme here, however, is culture rather than politics. As Lyndall Gordon noted, the historian Gibbon broke with ‘tedious chronicles of fact’, maintaining a ‘storytelling momentum’ that was ‘constantly enlivened by memorable incidents and characterizations … [The best historians, he goes on, invite readers to accompany them] behind the scenes’.202 She might have noted that this was Butterfield’s method too. And to come full circle, with Uglow reviewing Damrosch, she noted that in the Club, as the actors appear one by one, surrounding Johnson and Boswell on Damrosch’s stage, readers are transported back to a world of ‘conversations, arguments, ideas and writing’. He paints the nuances of character and also the ‘big picture’, a precarious, exciting and often brutal eighteenth century.203 But more than that: Damrosch’s approach is to show that what makes the Club’s members worth revisiting is the fact that they weren’t always the ‘great men’ we picture them as being. In several cases they were dogged by anxieties or neuroses; often their cultivation of the intellect went hand in hand with an indulgence of powerful physical appetites.204 Barbara Caine suggested that prosopography should be viewed quite separately from biography as ‘its aim is not in any way to create or establish a  better understanding of individuals and their motives or their life

Postwar debates over atomising lives  251 experiences’.205 This takes up the classic Butterfield objection to prosopography, which I would question. Collective biography is a hybrid between biography and prosopography. Keats-Rohan and Cowman have argued that, while collective biography is a separate entity which should no longer be confused with prosopography, prosopography and collective biography can be complementary methods. It is not ‘uncommon’ to find the same historians utilising both traditional biographical and prosopographical methodologies.206 Collective biography could be seen by historians at least as a response to the limitations of both biography and prosopography, adapting and developing elements of each. As William Bruneau noted, the ‘new collective biography’ which emerged from the 1990s, like the prosopographical work before it, relied on a range of sources merging quantifiable and non-quantifiable records: The interest of a complete prosopography lies partly in linking quantifiable and non-quantifiable aspects of records, and thus of people’s lives. These links are hard to detect and to prove. The main difficulty is the linkage of records collected about whole populations but by different institutions for different purposes … Faced with these impediments, collective biographers must be satisfied with partial record sets, partial linkages, and statistically modest generalisations. The statistical modesty of those conclusions does not deny their historical values.207 The classical, traditional or old prosopographical approach largely examined the common characteristics of a historical group systematically.208 Much of the new collective biography is as concerned with differences as well as similarities; the things that bind people together as biographical subjects can outweigh their differences, but need not.209 Stephen Jay Gould has advocated that not only should we put the spotlight on variation, but we should focus on variation itself.210 In particular, some feminist historians and historians of race have been interested in diverse subjectivities and power relationships within groups.211 This has led feminist accounts, in the case of Sybil Oldfield and Alison Booth, to recognise common gendered experience but, often too, to emphasise intersectionality and complexity.212 Similarly, Ian Kershaw has noted, any individual actions can only be understood within the framework of the structures which conditioned them, considering, as Butterworth did, the constraints on human agency. ‘Restricting analysis to one or the other offers a seriously diminished explanation’.213 Some of the collective biographies are as narrow as the prosopographical lexicons that preceded them. In so many ways, however, the best of this blossoming work is effectively a response to critiques of earlier prosopography and even sometimes in conversation directly with the historiography.

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Figure 6.3 Historians have increasingly used collective biography to consider the lives of marginal groups without extensive archives. One group, and their associates, which has been researched is the 151 market women in October 1789 who were regarded as the lynchpin of the people’s uprising. ‘Dames Des Halles’ by S. W. Fores, engraving (5 October 1789). Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images.

Conclusion: the debate’s shared legacy Historians confront lumping and splitting as a standard methodological problem.214 In 1975 J. H. Hexter, reviewing Christopher Hill’s work Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England,215 criticised it for adopting Max Weber’s argument that Calvinistic Puritanism facilitated capitalism.216 Hexter argued that Hill was overlooking differences and overemphasising similarities. Hill had adopted evidence that supported his argument without considering the range of views. Hill was a ‘lumper’. Hexter defined these terms: lumpers tried to elicit coherent patterns ‘[i]nstead of noting differences, lumpers note likenesses; instead of separateness, connection’. Lumpers take a gestalt view (looking at the whole rather than the parts). Splitters ‘like to point out divergences, to perceive differences, to draw distinctions’ between tight groups of interrelationships and ‘do not mind untidiness and accident in the past’.217 Butterfield had made similar accusations against Namier that Hexter made of Hill’s work: having a preconceived model, being unable to recognise or deal with contradictory evidence (such as Charles Fox’s idealism) and failing in the historian’s duty to recognise the limits of his thesis. Most importantly, this historical debate over lumping biographies was not contained to the eighteenth century or earlier. Indeed, historians came to disagree over how to approach biography in this regard in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries too.218 Namier and Butterfield’s biographical debate in the 1950s was a public event and publicised the issues. The issues remain relevant. Namier’s thorough, indeed massive, research techniques called for co-operative work on a bigger scale than he managed. He never completed his magnum opus. Biographers debate whether to follow the

Postwar debates over atomising lives  253 river or to build two dams across the river’s course to study it intimately; however, increasing numbers of collective biographers have decided not to choose between these biographical methods but to do both. Butterfield and Namier’s legacy, then, is biographical and prosopographical but it is also shared in contemporary collective biography.

Notes 1 John Raymond, ‘Namier Inc’, New Statesman, 19 October 1957, pp. 499–500. 2 Keith C. Sewell noted that Butterfield never named the members of the ‘Namier School’ but it included ‘Romney Sedgwick and John Brooke, probably also Lucy Sutherland and Betty Kemp, and possibly Ian R. Christie’ in Keith C. Sewell, Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 219. 3 Lewis B. Namier, ‘History—Its Subject-Matter and Tasks’, History Today, vol. 2, no. 3 (1952), p. 157. 4 Raymond, ‘Namier Inc’, p. 499. 5 Herbert Butterfield, ‘George III and the Constitution’, History, vol. 43, no. 147 (February 1958), pp. 14–33. 6 Herbert Butterfield, ‘George III and the Namier School’, Encounter (April 1957), p. 72. 7 Sewell, ‘Butterfield’s Critique of Namier’, in Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History, p. 181. 8 John Brooke, ‘Namier and His Critics’, Encounter, vol. 24 (February 1965), p. 49. 9 Michael Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 10 A. J. P. Taylor, ‘The Namier View of History’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 August 1953, pp. xxii–xxiii. 11 Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 114. 12 A.J. P. Taylor, review of Avenues of History by L.B. Namier, The Manchester Guardian, 20 May 1952, p. 4; J. B. Owen, ‘Professor Butterfield and the Namier School’, The Cambridge Review, vol. 79 (10 May 1958), pp. 528–531. 13 Lawrence Stone, ‘Prosopography’, Daedalus, vol. 100, no. 1 (1971), p. 46. 14 K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, ‘Biography, Identity and Names: Understanding the Pursuit of the Individual in Prosopography’, in Prosopography Approaches and Applications: A Handbook, ed. Katherine S. B. Keats-Rohan (Oxford: Linacre College Unit for Prosopography Research, 2007). 15 Richard W. Bulliet, ‘A Quantitative Approach to Medieval Muslim Biographical Dictionaries’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 13, no. 2 (April 1970), pp. 195–211; Khalidi Tarif, ‘Islamic Biographical Dictionaries; A Preliminary Assessment’, The Muslim World, vol. 63, no. 1 (January 1973), pp. 53–65. 16 Stefan Rebenich, ‘Mommsen, Harnack and the Prosopography of Late Antiquity’, Medieval Prosopography, vol. 17, no. 1 (1996), pp. 149–167; Timothy Barnes, ‘Prosopography Modern and Ancient’, in Keats-Rohan, Prosopography Approaches and Applications, pp. 71–82. 17 Karl-J. Hölkeskamp, ‘Fact(ions) or Fiction? Friedrich Münzer and the Aristocracy of the Roman Republic: A Review of Roman Aristocratic Parties and Families by Friedrich Münzer and Thérèse Ridley’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol. 8, no. 1 (Summer, 2001), pp. 92–105. 18 L. B. Namier, ‘The Biography of Ordinary Men’, The Nation and the Athenaeum, 14 July 1928, reprinted in L. B. Namier, Skyscrapers and Other Essays (London: Macmillan and Company, 1931), pp. 44–53.

254  Postwar debates over atomising lives 19 D. W. Hayton, ‘Sir Lewis Namier, Sir John Neale and the Shaping of the History of Parliament’, Parliamentary History, vol. 32, no. 1 (February 2013), pp. 187–219. 20 Sewell, ‘Butterfield’s Critique of Namier’, p. 181. 21 D. W. Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary. The Lives of Lewis Namier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. 321–322. 22 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, pp. 1, 154. 23 J. H. Plumb, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, The Spectator, 11 October 1957, p. 484. 24 Miles Fairburn, ‘The Problem of Establishing Similarities and Differences—of Lumping and Splitting’, in Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 112–144. 25 See Charles E. Lindblom, ‘Political Science in the 1940s and 1950s’, Daedalus, vol. 126, no. 1 (Winter 1997), special number on American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines, pp. 225–252. 26 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, p. 1. 27 Neithard Bulst, ‘Prosopography and the Computer: Problems and Possibilities’, in History and Computing, ed. P. Denley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 12; Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1925); Ronald Syme, Roman Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939). 28 C. Nicolet, ‘Prosopographie et histoire sociale: Rome et l’Italie a l’epoque republicaine’, Annales. ESC, vol. 25 (1970), pp. 1209–1228; Stone, ‘Prosopography’. 29 See ‘History of Parliament Online’, accessed 5 January 2021, https://www. historyofparliamentonline.org/about 30 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, p. 3. 31 C. T. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004). 32 Krista Cowman, ‘Collective Biography’, in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 83–100. 33 Caine, Biography and History (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 61. 34 Keats-Rohan, ‘Biography, Identity and Names’. 35 Michael Bentley, Modernising England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 1. 36 Bentley, Modernising England’s Past, p. 11. 37 Bentley, Modernising England’s Past, p. 147. 38 Lewis Saul Benjamin, Farmer George (London: Pitman and Sons, 1907); Romney Sedgwick (ed.), Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–1766 (London: Macmillan, 1903); George Trevelyan, George the Third and Charles Fox: The Concluding Part of the American Revolution (New York: Longmans, Green, 1912). See Stephen E. Koss, ‘British Political Biography as History’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 4 (December 1973), pp. 713–724. 39 Bentley, Modernising England’s Past, p. 147. 40 Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 112. 41 Philip Guedalla, Supers and Supermen: Studies in Politics, History and Letters (London: Fisher Unwin, 1920). Other prolific and popular biographers: Emil Ludwig’s biography of J. W. von Goethe (1920) emphasised personality and was regarded as ‘New Biography’; Andre Maurois’ biographies which included Shelley (1924) Byron (1925) and Disraeli (1927) as subjects, which were translated into English. 42 Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 112, quoting from Namier’s letter to Liddell Hart, 19 January 1952 and Butterfield’s fragment notes.

Postwar debates over atomising lives  255 4 3 Hayton, ‘The Butterfield Affair’, in Conservative Revolutionary, pp. 366–375. 44 Sewell, ‘Butterfield’s Critique of Namier’, p. 181. 45 Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 246. 46 Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, pp. 194–218. 47 Sewell, Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History, pp. 7–8. More generally Sewell shows that their debate was not between positivism and idealism, although there were aspects of this: Namier was positivist, emphasised some universal structural aspects, while Butterfield emphasised an empathetic identification with the past experientially and focused on the individual, particular and concrete in history. 48 Lewis Namier to Winston Churchill, 14 February 1934, reproduced in Julia Namier, Lewis Namier: A Biography (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 230. 49 Jacob M. Price, ‘Party, Purpose, and Pattern: Sir Lewis Namier and his Critics’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (November 1961), p. 73. 50 Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, pp. 188, 277; Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, p. 218. 51 Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, pp. 199–200. 52 Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, pp. 186–187. 53 Linda Colley, Namier (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989); L. B. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (f.p. 1929; London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), p. 135. 54 Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p. 315. 55 See, for instance, George Macaulay Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1930–1934). 56 Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p. 200. 57 Interim report of the Committee on House of Commons Personnel and Politics, 1254–1832, Cmd.4130, HMSO, July 1932. 58 Paul Mulvey, The Political Life of Josiah C. Wedgwood: Land, Liberty and Empire, 1872–1943 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Royal Historical Society, 2010), pp. 164–177. 59 John Brooke, ‘Namier and Namierism’, History and Theory, vol. 3, no. 3 (1964), pp. 331–347, doi.org/10.2307/2504236; John Cannon, ‘Namier, Sir Lewis Bernstein (1888–1960)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed. 23 September 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/35183 60 Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, pp. 107–114. 61 Stone, ‘Prosopography’. See also Charles Beard, Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan Company, 1913); A P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans (New Haven: Yale University, 1914). 62 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, p. 65. 63 R. K. Merton, ‘Science, Technology, and Puritanism in Seventeenth Century England’, Osiris, vol. 4 (1938), pp. 360–632; Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans. 64 Isaiah Berlin, ‘L.B. Namier’, in Personal Impressions: Isaiah Berlin, ed. Henry Hardy (f.p. 1980; Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 124. 65 Berlin, ‘L.B. Namier’, pp. 144–145. 66 Berlin, ‘L.B. Namier’, p. 146. See also J. H. Plumb, ‘Sir Lewis Namier’, in The  Making of an Historian: Collected Essays, 3 vols. (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), p. 19. 67 L. B. Namier, ‘Human Nature in Politics’, in Personalities and Powers (London: Hamilton, 1955), pp. 1–7.

256  Postwar debates over atomising lives 68 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary. 69 Berlin, ‘L.B. Namier’, pp. 126–127. 70 Colley, Lewis Namier, p. 27. 71 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, pp. 146, 377. 72 Namier, ‘Human Nature in Politics’, p. 7. J. L. Talmon, ‘The Ordeal of Sir Lewis Namier: The Man, the Historian, the Jew’, Commentary, no. 33 (March 1962), p. 237, accessed 30 July 2018, www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/ the-ordeal-of-sir-lewis-namier-the-man-the-historian-the-jew/ 73 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, pp. 138, 143. 74 Namier, The Structure of Politics. See also Richard Pares, Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier (London: Macmillan, 1956). 75 Koenraad Verboven, Myriam Carlier and Jan Dumolyn, ‘A Short Manual to the Art of Prosopography’, in Keats-Rohan, Prosopography Approaches and Applications, pp. 35–69. 76 Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p. 291. 77 J. E. Neale, ‘The Biographical Approach to History’, History, n.s., 36, no. 129 (October 1951), pp. 193–203. 78 Neale, ‘The Biographical Approach to History’, p. 193. 79 Neale, ‘The Biographical Approach to History’, p. 196. 80 Neale, ‘The Biographical Approach to History’, p. 199. 81 Neale, ‘The Biographical Approach to History’, pp. 195 and 199. 82 Neale, ‘The Biographical Approach to History’, p. 201. 83 Neale, ‘The Biographical Approach to History’, pp. 195 and 199. 84 Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p. 290. 85 Plumb, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, p. 484. 86 Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p. 290. 87 Talmon, ‘The Ordeal of Sir Lewis Namier’, p. 241. 88 Berlin, ‘L.B. Namier’, pp. 146–147. Bentley points to the role of a ‘second generation of pupils’ exaggerating the differences between Namier and Butterfield, Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, p. 154. 89 Colley, Lewis Namier. 90 David Cannadine, ‘The History of Parliament: Past, Present—and Future?’, Parliamentary History, vol. 26, no. 3 (2007), pp. 366–386. 91 The three volumes of the History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790 were published posthumously in 1964. 92 Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p. 326; Colley, Lewis Namier, p. 72. 93 Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, pp. 159–160. Robert Walcott, ‘English Party Politics, 1688–1714’, in Essays in Modern English History in Honor of W. C. Abbott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941); and English Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). 94 Bentley, Modernising England’s Past, p. 160. 95 S. T. Bindoff (ed.), The House of Commons, 1509–1558 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982). 96 Patrick Collinson, ‘Bindoff, Stanley Thomas [Tim] 1908–1908’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed. 22 September 2005), https://doi-org.virtual.anu.edu.au/10.1093/ref:odnb/58737 97 Patrick Collinson, ‘Neale, Sir John Ernest (1890–1975)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed. 23 September 2004), https://doi-org.virtual.anu.edu.au/10.1093/ref:odnb/31487 98 H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (f.p. 1931; New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1965). 99 Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 172. 100 Herbert Butterfield, The Study of Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), p. 18.

Postwar debates over atomising lives  257 1 01 Sewell, ‘Butterfield’s Critique of Namier’, pp. 181–197. 102 Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machiavelli, pp. 15–16; Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 151. 103 Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 99. 104 Price, ‘Party, Purpose, and Pattern’. 105 Herbert Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London: Collins, 1957), p. 299. See discussion, McIntyre, Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2014); Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 92. 106 Unsigned (A. J. P. Taylor), ‘The Namier View of History’, TLS, 28 August 1953, pp. 22–23; Brooke, ‘Namier and Namierism’. See also John Brooke, ‘Namier, Lewis Bernstein, Sir, 1888–1960’, in Makers of Modern Culture, ed. Justin Wintle (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 380; and Lucy S. Sutherland, ‘Sir Lewis Namier, 1888–1960’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 1961 (London: British Academy, 1963), pp. 371–385. 107 Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. viii. 108 Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, p. 95. 109 Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 186. 110 Herbert Butterfield, Romantic Imagination in the Historical Novel: An Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924). 111 Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 97. 112 Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 187. 113 Herbert Butterfield, Lord Acton (London: Historical Association, 1948). 114 Sewell, Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History, p. 33. 115 Sewell, Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History, pp. 13–14, 29, 198–212. 116 Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 371; Butterfield, George III and the Historians. 117 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, pp. 369–370; Robert Walcott, ‘Sir Lewis Namier Considered’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (May 1964), pp. 85–108. 118 Lucy Stuart Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952); Robert Walcott, English Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956); John B. Owen, The Rise of the Pelhams (London: Methuen, 1957). 119 G. V. Bennett, ‘Review: British Politics in the Age of Anne’, English Historical Review, vol. 84, no. 331 (April 1969), p. 359. 120 Butterfield, George III and the Historians, p. 10. 121 Brooke, ‘Namier and His Critics’, p. 48; Herbert Butterfield, ‘George III and the Namier School’, Encounter, April 1957, p. 75. 122 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, p. 375. 123 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, pp. 396–397. 124 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, p. 397. 125 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, p. 398. 126 Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p. 187. 127 John C. Cairns, ‘Sit Lewis Namier and the History of Europe’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, vol. 1, no. 1 (June/Juin 1974), p. 3. 128 See also G. Tellenbach, Königtum und Stamme (1939), cited in Charles R. Bowlus, ‘Prosopographical Evidence Concerning Maravian’s Location’, Medieval Prosopography, vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring 1985), p. 1. 129 Ronald Syme, Emperors and Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). See his other biographical work including Tacitus (1958); Sallust (1964); and History in Ovid (1978).

258  Postwar debates over atomising lives 130 George Beech, ‘Prosopography’, in Medieval Studies: An Introduction, ed. James M. Powell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1976), pp. 151– 184; C. Warren Hollister, ‘Elite Prosopography in Saxon and Normal England’, Medieval Prosopography, vol. 2, no. 1 (Autumn 1981), pp. 11–20. 131 Pelteret, ‘The Challenges of Constructing the Prosopography’, p. 119. 132 Keats-Rohan, Prosopography Approaches and Applications, p. 24; Claude Nicolet, ‘Prosopographie et histoire sociale: Rome et l’Italie l’époque républicaine’, Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations (ESC), vol. 25, no. 5 (1970), pp. 1209–1228; A. Chastagnol, ‘La prosopographie méthode de recherche sur l’histoire du Bas Empire’, Annales. ESC, vol. 25, no. 5 (1970), pp. 1229–1235. 133 Joel Lipkin and Bernice Sacks Lipkin, ‘Data Base Development and Analysis for the Social Historian: The Educational Status of the Beneficed Clergy of the Diocese of Hereford, 1289–1539’, Computers and the Humanities, vol. 12 (1978), p. 114. 134 Jean-Philippe Genet, ‘Methodological Problems’, Medieval Prosopography, vol. 8, no. 2 (Autumn 1987), pp. 49–54 and 192. 135 Helene Millet cited in Allen E. Jones Jr., ‘Fifteen Years of Late Roman Prosopography in the West (1981–95)’, Medieval Prosopography, vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 263–274. 136 Medieval Prosopography, series description, accessed 17 August 2020, https:// www.jstor.org/journal/medpros?item_view=journal_info 137 Beech, ‘Prosopography’, pp. 151–184; and ‘The Scope of Medieval Proso­ pography’, Medieval Prosopography, vol. 1, no. 1 (1980), pp. 3–7. See also N. Bulst and Jean-Philippe Genet (eds.), Medieval Lives and the Historian: Studies in Medieval Prosopography. Proceedings of the First International Interdisciplinary Conference on Medieval Prosopography, University of Bielefeld, 3–5 December 1982 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publ., 1986); Averil Cameron, ed., Fifty Years of Prosopography: The Later Roman Empire, Byzantium and Beyond, Proceedings of the British Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 118. 138 Ralph W. Mathisen, ‘Medieval Prosopography and Computers: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations’, Medieval Prosopography, vol. 9, no. 2 (Autumn 1981), p. 74. See also The History and Computing Newsletter, which was established in 1988, and became the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing in 2007. The journal for the American Association for History and Computing (AAHC), established in 1998, was published until 2010. 139 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le territoire de l’historien (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); The Territory of the Historian, trans. Ben Reynolds and Sian Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 14. 140 Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction: The Numerical Study of English Society’, in An Introduction to English Historical Demography from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, ed. E. A. Wrigley (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), p. 6. 141 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 142 Quoted in Krista Cowman, ‘Collective Biography’, in Research Methods for the Arts and the Humanities: Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011) pp. 94–111, ProQuest ebrary online, accessed 24 April 2020, http://site.ebrary.com/ id/10569448 143 Keats-Rohan, Prosopography Approaches and Applications, p. 1. 144 Keats-Rohan, Prosopography Approaches and Applications, p. v.

Postwar debates over atomising lives  259 145 H. B. Clarke, ‘The Domesday Satellites’, in Domesday Book: A Reassessment, ed. Peter Sawyer (London, E. Arnold, 1985), pp. 50–70. 146 K. S. B. Keats-Rohan and David E. Thornton, comps., Domesday Book: Domesday Names: An Index of Latin Personal and Place-Names in Domesday Book (Rochester, NY and Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1997); K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, comp., Domesday People: A Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents 1066–1166, 1: Domesday Book (Rochester, NY and Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999); for a second project see the CD-ROM of the text and translation of John Palmer, Matthew Palmer and George Slater (ed.), Great Domesday with Supplementary Material Entitled Domesday Explorer (2001), part of the Hull Doomsday Project, http://www.domesdaybook.net/ 147 Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE), http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ humanities/cch/pase/, Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCED), http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/cce/, Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire (PBE), http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/PBE/ 148 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/project, accessed 28 April 2020. 149 Clare Anderson (ed.), A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). 150 David A. E. Pelteret, ‘The Challenges of Constructing the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England Database’, Medieval Prosopography, vol. 22 (2001), p. 117. 151 K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, ‘Introduction. Chameleon or Chimera? Understanding Prosopography’ in Prosopography Approaches and Applications, pp. 1–34. 152 Melanie Nolan, ‘From Book to Digital Culture: Redesigning the ADB’, in The ADB’s Story, ed. Melanie Nolan and Christine Fernon (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013), pp. 373–393; Karen Fox (ed.), ‘True Biographies of Nations?’ The Cultural Journey of Dictionaries of National Biography (Canberra: ANU Press, 2019). 153 See, for examples, John Carmi Parsons ‘Towards a Social History of the English Court: The Senches of London, 1246–1349’, Medieval Prosopography, vol. 9, no. 1 (Autumn 1988), pp. 51–71. 154 Robin Fleming, ‘Writing Biography at the Edge of History’, American Historical Review, vol. 11, no. 3 (2009), p. 606. 155 T. Bloemers, H. Kars, A. van der Valk and M. Wijnen (eds.), The Cultural Landscape & Heritage Paradox: Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape and Its European Dimension (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), pp. 83–113; Johannes Renes, Rita Hermans and Jan Kolen, Landscape Biographies: Geographical, Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on the Production and Transmission of Landscapes (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015); Hannes Palang, Theo Spek, and Marie Stenseke, ‘Digging in the Past: New Conceptual Models in Landscape History and Their Relevance in Peri-Urban Landscapes’, Landscape and Urban Planning, no. 100 (2011), pp. 344–346. Similarly, Malcolm Allbrook has written landscape biographies of 42,000-year-old Australian Mungo Man and Woman for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mungo-man-27704, accessed 25 April 2020. 156 Ian Donaldson, ‘Prologue: The Biographer’s Bones’, in Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 1–21. 157 J. Nelson, ‘Did Charlemagne Have a Private Life?’ in Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow, ed. David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2006), pp. 15–28.

260  Postwar debates over atomising lives 158 Alfred P. Smyth, King Alfred the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Richard Abels, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship, and Culture in AngloSaxon England (London: Longman, 1998); John Peddie, Alfred: Warrior King (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999); Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970); Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford and Maiden: Blackwells, 1997). 159 C. P. Lewis, ‘Joining the Dots: A Methodology for Identifying the English in Domesday Book’, in Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century, ed. K. S. B. KeatsRohan (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 69–88. 160 A. H. M. Johns, J. R. Martindale and J. Morris, The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971– 1992); C. Warren Hollister, ‘Magnates and “Curiales” in Early Norman England’, Viator, vol. 8 (1976), pp. 63–81; Ralph W. Mathisen, Studies in the History, Literature, and Society of Late Antiquity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1991). For examples of recent work, see Francisco Salvador Ventura, Prosopografía de Hispania Meridional (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1998); Keats-Rohan, Family Trees and the Roots of Politics; and Keats-Rohan, Prosopography Approaches and Applications. 161 Fleming, ‘Writing Biography at the Edge of History’, p. 606 (original emphasis). 162 Bowlus, ‘Prosopographical Evidence Concerning Marovia’s Location’, p. 1; T. F. Carney, ‘Prosopographie Payoffs and Pitfalls’, Phoenix: The Journal of the Classical Association of Canada, vol. 27 (1993), pp. 156–179. 163 Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary, pp. 325–326, 350–354. 164 Jenny Uglow, ‘Writing Group Biography’, Guardian Review, 23 September 2005. 165 Cowman, ‘Collective Biography’, pp. 83–100. 166 Keats-Rohan, Prosopography Approaches and Applications, pp. 15–16. 167 Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740– 1832 (London: Random House, 1994); Sybil Oldfield, Collective Biography of Women in Britain, 1550–1900: A Select Annotated (New York and London: Mansell,1999); James Fox, Five Sisters: The Langhornes of Virginia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001); Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts (London: Vintage, 2002); Anne De Courcy, The Viceroy’s Daughters: The Lives of the Curzon Sisters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000); Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Elisabeth Kehoe, Fortune’s Daughters: The Extravagant Lives of the Jerome Sisters: Jennie Churchill, Clara Frewen and Leonie Leslie (London: Atlantic Books, 2005); Barbara Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Melanie Nolan, Kin: A Collective Biography of a Working-class Family (Christchurch; Canterbury University Press, 2005). 168 Granville Fitzalon, The Lives of Phillip Howard, Earl of Arundel and of Anne Davies His Wife (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1857). 169 John Tosh’s A Man’s Place draws on the papers of sixty families, though explores seven in-depth. Pat Jalland explores the lives of women in more than 50 families in Women, Marriage and Politics 1860–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). On the theory of collective biography, see for example: Tosh, Making Men, p. 199; Jalland, Marriage, Women and Politics, pp. 1–5; Nolan, Kin, pp. 16–17, 23–33; Booth, How to Make It as a Woman, pp. 4,

Postwar debates over atomising lives  261 9–21; Diana K. Jones, ‘Researching Groups of Lives: a Collective Biographical Perspective on the Protestant Ethic Debate’, Qualitative Research, vol. 1, no. 1 (2001), pp. 325–346; Stone, ‘Prosopography’, pp. 46–79. 170 Tillyard, Aristocrats; De Courcy, The Viceroy’s Daughters; Fox, Five Sisters; Kehoe, Fortune’s Daughters; Lovell, The Sisters. 171 Pugh, The Pankhursts; Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury; John Rickard, A Family Romance: The Deakins at Home (Carlton South, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1996). 172 Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 173 Stephen Foster, A Private Empire (Millers Point, NSW: Pier 9, 2010). 174 Nolan, Kin. 175 Nolan, Kin. 176 D. K. Jones, ‘Researching Groups of Lives’, Qualitative Research, vol. 1 (2001), pp. 325–346; Luisa Passerine, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Michael Wildt, ‘Generational Experience and Genocide, A Biographical Approach to Nazi Perpetrators’, in Biography: Between Structure and Agency, Central European Lives in International Historiography, ed. Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig (New York: Berghahn, 2008), pp. 143–161. 177 Julie Anne Greer, ‘Learning from Linked Lives: Narrativising the Individual and Group Biographies of the Guests at the 25th Jubilee Dinner of the British Psychoanalytical Society at The Savoy, London, on 8th March 1939’, Doctoral thesis, University of Southampton 2014, accessed 9 April 2020, https:// eprints.soton.ac.uk/370351/2/EdD%2520thesis%2520-%2520JGreer%2520 updated%2520April%25202016.pdf1 178 Daniel Lerner, The Nazi Elite (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1951); Josie M. Abbott, The Angel in the Office (London: British Sociological Association, 2009). See also Robert Lanning, ‘The Role of Biography in Social and Historical Studies’, in The National Album: Collective Biography and the Formation of the Canadian Middle Class (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1996), pp. 15–44. 179 R. Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 2008), p. XXX 180 Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). See Randall Collins, ‘Review of Michael P. Farrell Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work’, Social Forces, vol. 83, no. 1 (September 2004), pp. 234–236. 181 Robert E. Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); ‘The Industrial Orientation of Science in the Lunar Society of Birmingham’, Isis, vol. 48, no. 4 (December 1957), pp. 408– 415; and ‘The Lunar Society of Birmingham; A Bicentenary Appraisal’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, vol. 21, no. 2 (1966), pp. 144–161. 182 Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730–1810 (London: Faber, 2002), p. 35. 183 Uglow, Lunar Men, p. xiii. 184 Matthew Boulton (1728–1809), Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Thomas Day, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, James Keir, Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), William Small, James Watt (1736–1819), Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795), John Whitehurst, William Withering. 185 Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 85. 186 Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 340.

262  Postwar debates over atomising lives 1 87 Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 66. 188 Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 257. 189 Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 133. 190 Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, rev. ed. (f.p. 1949; London: Macmillan, 1957). 191 Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 60. 192 Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 71. 193 See, for instance, Leonard G. Wilson, “Reviewed Work(s): The Lunar Society of Birmingham, a Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-Century England by Robert E. Schofield”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 19, no. 4 (October 1964), pp. 426–428. 194 Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 195 Dictionary of the English Language, 1755. See Valerie Capdeville, ‘“Clubbability”: A Revolution in London Sociability?’, Lumen, vol. 35 (2016), pp. 81–93. 196 See Ophelia Field, The Kit-Cat Club (London: Harper, 2008). 197 Damrosch, The Club, p. 1. 198 James Boswell, Life of Johnson (f.p. 1791; London: Penguin, 2008), pp. 251–252. 199 Boswell, Life of Johnson, pp. 21 and 502–503. 200 Joseph Priestley, A Chart of Biography (London: J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church Yard, 1765); Joseph Priestley, A Description of a Chart of Biography (Warrington: William Eyres, 1764 and 1765). 201 Reviews: Kirkus, 26 March 2019; Jenny Uglow, ‘Big Talkers’, The New York Review, 23 May 2019. 202 Lyndall Gordon, ‘The Friday Night Gab Sessions That Fuelled 18th-Century British Culture’, New York Times Book Review, 5 April 2019, accessed 26 April 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/books/review/leo-damroschclub.html?smid=tw-share 203 Uglow, ‘Big Talkers’. 204 Clare Bucknell, ‘Thinkers and Drinkers: Review of The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, By Leo Damrosch’, Literary Review, vol. 474, April 2019, accessed 26 April 2019, https://literaryreview. co.uk/back-issue/474 205 Caine, Biography and History, p. 58. 206 Stephanie Evans Christelow, ‘All the King’s Men: Prosopography and the Santa Barbara School’, Medieval Prosopography, vol. 11, no. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 1–15. 207 William Bruneau, ‘Towards a New Collective Biography: The University of British Columbia Professoriate, 1915–1945’, Canadian Journal of Education, vol. 19, no. 1 (1994), p. 67. 208 Stone, ‘Prosopography’. 209 Marnina Gonick, Susan Walsh and Marion Brown, ‘Collective Biography and the Question of Difference’, Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 8 (2011), pp. 741–749. 210 Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony, 1996), pp. 3–4 and 72–73. 211 B. Davies and S. Gannon, Doing Collective Biography: Investigating the Production of Subjectivity (New York: Open University Press, 2006). 212 For example, see Sybil Oldfield, Collective Biography of Women in England, 1550–1900 (London: Mansell, 1999); Booth, How to Make it as a Woman.

Postwar debates over atomising lives  263 213 Ian Kershaw, ‘Biography and the Historian: Opportunity and Constraints’, in Berghahn and Lassing, Biography: Between Structure and Agency, pp. 27–39. 214 Fairburn, ‘The Problem of Establishing Similarities and Differences’. 215 Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth–Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974). 216 Times Literary Supplement debate: J. H. Hexter, ‘The Burden of Proof’, 24 October 1975; Christopher Hill, ‘Reply to Hexter’, 7 November 1975; J. H. Hexter, ‘Reply to Hill’, 28 November 1975. William G. Palmer, ‘The Burden of Proof: J. H. Hexter and Christopher Hill’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1979), pp. 122–129. 217 J. H. Hexter, On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Makers of Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 243–243; Times Literary Supplement debate. 218 Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, pp. 242–243.

Further reading Collective biography focuses on groups which are bound together by some shared feature, such as national identity, ethnicity, gender, occupation, family, or perhaps a shared historical experience. ‘Collective’ biography may take the form of a major national project (such as the Australian Dictionary of Biography and other national dictionary projects), a major ideological movement (such as feminism), or focus its narrative on a family or professional group. See B. Davies, and S. Gannon, Doing Collective Biography (London: Open University Press, 2006). The classics include Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978); Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740–1832 (London: Random House, 1994); James Fox, Five Sisters: The Langhornes of Virginia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001); Anna Hillyard and Jane MacDermid, Revolutionary Women in Russia, 1870–1917: A Study in Collective Biography (2000); Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts (2002); Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: the friends who made the future, 1730–1810 (London: Vintage, 2002); Anne De Courcy, The Viceroy’s Daughters: The Lives of the Curzon Sisters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000); Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: the friends who made the future, 1730–1810 (London: Faber, 2002); Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Elisabeth Kehoe, Fortune’s Daughters: The Extravagant Lives of the Jerome Sisters: Jennie Churchill, Clara Frewen and Leonie Leslie (London: Atlantic Books, 2005); Barbara Caine, Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Melanie Nolan, Kin: A Collective Biography of a Working-class Family (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2005).: David Loades, The Cecils: Privilege and Power Behind the Throne (London: Bloomsbury, 2009); Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance (London: Chatto & Windus, 2010); Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

264  Postwar debates over atomising lives For the background of the lumping and splitting problem in history, see Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953) and Jim Endersby, ‘Lumpers and Splitters: Darwin, Hooker, and the Search for Order’, Science vol. 326, no. 5959 (December 2009), pp. 1496–1499 For an introduction to prosopography, use one of the large biographical databases: Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (affectionately known as PASE: http://www.pase.ac.uk/; ‘History of Parliament Online’, https:// www.historyofparliamentonline.org/about; the Trans-Atlantic and IntraAmerican slave trade databases https://www.slavevoyages.org/about/about# and Centre for the Legacies of Slavery and its database, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/; and for convicts, Founders and Survivors, https://foundersandsurvivors.com/.

7 Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory and the singularization of history

Trivial and significant microbiography? In 1976 microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg wrote a short piece on Costantino Saccardino, a converted Jew, who had been a court jester before becoming a distiller and charlatan, who was executed by the Inquisition in Bologna in 1622.1 The ecclesiastical court had found him guilty, together with three companions including his son, of secretly defiling the city’s saint painting with excrement, displaying placards full of heretical views that Christ had been born of an adulterous relationship; that the ‘Virgin’ was a whore and making innuendos against political and religious authorities. Saccardino preached that religion – particularly its approach towards Hell – was pure fiction. He declared at this trial that ‘only fools believe that hell exists. Princes want us to believe it because they want to do as they please. But now, at last the whole dovecote has opened its eyes.’2 He was opposed to a number of the church’s practices: indulgences, relics, the cult of saints and papal government. He did not believe that God created man, but that man emerged out of mud, an idea known as the theory of spontaneous generation. Saccardino was also the author of a book of medical secrets (1621). Ginzburg was attracted to Saccardino’s story because after being ‘aroused’ to the complex relationship between dominant and subaltern cultures by reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and Ernesto De Martino’s Il mondo magico (The World of Magic). He began to consider the relationship between elite and subaltern cultures.3 More generally, too, Ginzburg felt that his Jewish identity predisposed him to consider victims of persecution and increasingly to study the individual beliefs and attitudes of the accused. In the second half of the 1970s, he found himself part of a group of Italian historians, which also included Giovanni Levi, Edoardo Grendi and Carlo Poni, who coalesced around the journal Quaderni storici. These ‘microhistorians sought to reduce history’s scale in order to concentrate on a single, often exceptional, individual’ such as Saccardino. In their wake microhistorians develop this new historical genre which focused on the ‘study of an individual’, her or his experiences in relation to an event or

DOI: 10.4324/9780429426391-7

266  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory

Figure 7.1 Napoleon I with George III in a Lilliputian context. ‘George III, and Bonaparte as the King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver’: by James Gillray, engraving (26 June 1803), from Henry de Kock, Histoire des Cocus Célèbres (1871). Alamy.

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  267 historical problem.4 Eclipsing historians’ conventional biographical practices has not proved to be easy, however, even for the doyen of microhistory, Ginzburg. Although familiar with Saccardino’s story, Ginzburg had used the trial records of another heretic, miller Domenico Scandella – also known as Menocchio – as the basis for his celebrated classic microhistory, The Cheese and the Worms (1976).5 Menocchio believed that the universe evolved ‘just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels … and among [them] was God’. Scandella had formerly served as an administrator of the local church, but had quarrelled with the parish priest over the use of church funds. The priest, who was also suspected of trying to seduce his daughter, denounced him to the Inquisition, and he was tried and released but, when he refused to follow church orthodoxy, he was tried a second time and the Inquisition executed him in 1599. A few years after publishing The Cheese and the Worms, Ginzburg gave a paper on Saccardino to the History Department at Princeton University. By this stage, he had pieced together from fragmentary evidence more about Saccardino’s life and purposes in trying to stir up artisans to revolt against the Church, although he described this still as being little more than ‘traces’.6 One of those in the audience, a PhD student, James D. Amelang, remembered,7 Excitement was in the air, and the audience was delighted. But when someone asked the obvious question – when will the book on this new Menocchio come out ? – Ginzburg surprised everyone by saying that he had decided not to pursue further the case of Saccardino. When asked why he was turning his back on such an interesting story, he replied that yes, the case was interesting, but was it important?8 There were also research obstacles to publishing a microhistory on Saccardino. A Bolognese magistrate had written an account of his trial. Saccardino was the subject of two earlier trials in 1616 and, although Ginzburg has tried hard to trace them, the 1622 inquisition records were not extant and his own words on matters of religion were difficult to reconstruct. There were some references to Saccardino’s ecclesiastical trial records being sent to Rome. Ginzburg assumed that a copy would be in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which included the Inquisition archives from 1542 to 1902. This archive was closed to scholars, so in 1979 Ginzburg wrote to Karol Józef Wojtyla, then Pope John Paul II, requesting access, and suggesting in passing that it should be opened to scholars more generally. The Pope’s secretary replied, noting his enthusiasm for research, but advising that the Saccardino trial records were untraceable and presumed to have been destroyed. Indeed the Inquisition’s archive was almost entirely burned following the death of Pope Paul IV in 1559 and the Church had slowly, but systematically, burnt

268  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory many of the most delicate heresy files thereafter. Further files were lost after Napoleon’s troops carted them off to Paris in 1810. In 1998 when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – himself later Pope Benedict XVI but then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – opened what remained of the long-sealed inquisition archives (albeit not the post-1903 Vatican archives), he credited the decision to Ginzburg; that is the promptings of a scholar who described himself as having been ‘born Jewish and atheist’.9 Because of its fragmentary nature, the archive could not be used prosopographically, that is analysing the cohort of all the individuals who were victims of the Inquisition, and by classifying and re-examining all the details, recreate a new picture of the whole based on a detailed understanding of the parts. In 1998 a Vatican conference sought to measure the extent of the Inquisition. Cardinal Georges Cottier, a Vatican theologian, stressed the importance of having the facts before making judgements about history. As he reckoned, ‘You can’t ask pardon for deeds which aren’t there.’10 Ginzburg attended the 1998 conference and he, too, expressed doubts about using statistics to read a judgement about the period for ‘[i]n many cases, we don’t have the evidence, the evidence has been lost’.11 Ginzburg had little interest in analysing the number and kinds of Inquisition trials, convictions and executions, however. Statistics were irrelevant to him, for Ginzburg had never intended to research the archive prosopographically. His interest was in culture, which ‘offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities – a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own conditional liberty. With rare clarity and understanding, Menocchio articulated the language that history put at his disposal’.12 Ginzburg was interested in the culture of a particular peasant culture, or ‘popular culture’ which was hidden before being discovered serendipitously, that is by way of the telling case. Ginzburg argued that the sixteenth century was a period when the relations between the cultures of high and subordinated classes resulted in the strenuous repression of the latter. Saccardino was not a common peasant – he came from the middling sort – and, as Paola Zambelli noted, he was also a political individual. This made him a less suitable exemplar for a microhistorical study of the subordinates.13 Zambelli argued that Saccardino’s heretic ideas, such as ‘birth in putrefaction’, were not generated from uneducated and superstitious peasants, but were taught at Padua University and elsewhere. A number of historians have considered Saccardino in terms of his contacts and his radical medical views. William Eamon, for example, takes Saccardino to be representative of those who ridiculed the medical establishment holding that, instead of being a medico trained in complicated humours, he was a charlatan advocating that all disease involved the stomach and could be cured by a single ‘universal medicine’.14 He pointed to Saccardino borrowing his ideas from Leonardo Fioravanti and applying them in the religious arena.15 Similarly, David

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  269 Gentilcore used Saccardino for a study of the ‘world of Italian charlatans’, arguing that microhistory gave only gave a partial account of Saccardino’s life, its background and its context.16 By the time Ginzburg was deciding upon a subject for his first individual microhistory, he was familiar with teasing out common peasant culture from Inquisition records. The Reformation and the emergence of print gave historians access to peasant beliefs. In the 1960s Ginzburg had started researching inquisition trials of men and women accused of witchcraft. This led to the publication of his book, I Benandanti (1966), which was translated and published in English as The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1983).17 The benandanti claimed to ‘travel out of their bodies while asleep’ allowing them to do battle with malevolent witches ‘in order to ensure good crops for the season to come’. Both witches and benandanti were subject to trial. At that time he had been reading Gramsci’s notes on folklore and the history of subordinate classes, De Martino’s works, and also Bloch’s studies of medieval mentality.18 In 1989 Ginzburg published Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, which was about a study of the visionary traditions of early modern Europe. This too was based on trial records.19 Despite criticism that the only source for much of this work are the Inquisition records, Ginzburg suggested that the voice of the subordinated is heard in the records, with the notary’s recording: ‘[t]he voices of these peasants reach us directly, unveiled, not entrusted, as too often happens, too fragmentary and indirect testimonies filtered through a different and inevitably deforming mentality’.20 In reading the Inquisition records ‘a deeply rooted stratum of basically autonomous popular beliefs began to emerge by way of discrepancies between the questions of the judges and the replies of the accused’.21 Ginzburg’s work on Scandella/Menocchio was supported by trial records held in provincial archival records. He set out to ‘reconstruct the intellectual, moral, and fantastic world of the miller Menocchio on the basis of sources produced by persons who had sent him to the stake’.22 Ginzburg has since analysed the genealogy of microhistory: reading back into sporadic engagements with the method in the historiography, such as George R. Stewart’s minute analysis of the decisive battle of the American Civil War, Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Charge at Gettysburg July 3, 1863 (1959). In the 1970s, however, he claimed that his experiment was directly with the archives: By reducing the scale of observation, that for which another scholar could have been a simple footnote in a hypothetical monograph on the Protestant Reformation in Friuli was transformed into a book.23 Ginzburg believed that social structure resulted from interactions among ‘numerous individual strategies, a fabric that can be reconstituted only

270  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory from close observation’.24 Scandella was a self-taught heretic; he certainly protested that that he had thought up his ideas about the church, god and being independently, from his own reading, without some Protestant sect to indoctrinate him. Some historians have disputed this assertion.25 Ginzburg concentrated on the books Mennochio is known to have read and noticed the disparity between them and his views of them: detecting ‘a deep stratum of oral culture [that] emerged from the very discrepancy: the filter unconsciously employed by Menocchio when it approached the printed page’. Scandella had been born in 1532, in the early days of printing. Ginzburg argued that he brought ideas informed by the oral culture of ancient folklore to his reading of books. For example, in a text by an Augustinian monk, Scandella had read that the universe began as ‘a great and inchoate matter.’ But in confessions to the inquisitors, he twisted this concept beyond recognition into one holding that all life – and God himself – evolved like rotting cheese. His inquisitors wanted him to name his accomplices and subjected him to torture but he kept insisting, ‘[m]y opinions came out of my own head’. That head, Ginzburg argued had been schooled by an ancient myth that the world rose from a milky, curdling sea. Ginzburg argued that ‘[i]t was not the book as such but the encounter between the printed page and oral culture that formed an explosive mixture in Menocchio’s head’ and inspired a cosmology all his own. Ginzburg ruminated over the fact that, even though tortured (albeit ‘with moderation’), 67-year-old Menocchio refused to name any accomplices. Ginzburg’s point is that Menocchio came to his ideas by way of his reading books through the lenses of a pre-Christian peasant culture. The common people in fact possessed an autonomous culture of their own. Ginzburg argued that a narrative of a single case could be illuminating, undermining the Annales school idea of a people within a historical period sharing common homogenous culture or mentalité. As he noted in The Night Battles, he was taking aim at society-wide mentalités: one is inevitably forced to neglect the divergences and contrasts between the mentalities of the various classes and social groups, and to submerge them all into an undifferentiated, classless ‘collective mentality’. In this way the homogeneity (which, however, always remains partial) of the culture of a given society may be seen as the point of departure, rather than arrival, of an intimately coercive and, as such, violent process.26 Feasibility was not the only reason for abandoning a study of Saccardino. Ginzburg did not think that the distiller-buffoon could sustain a significant microhistory: he regarded this as trivial microhistory. The history of the benandanti, by contrast, was an ‘exemplary’ one to use to uncover popular culture; and Menocchio but not Saccardino was important to revealing pre-Christian peasant culture. The relationships between the cultures of

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  271 the dominant and subordinate classes were complex, dynamic and involved clashes, the very points at which a historian ought to research. Ginzburg put Menocchio’s case into the more general history of the dominant classes’ repression and effacement of popular culture in Italy from the second half of the sixteenth century. The masses appeared to be breaking loose of control and the dominant classes intensified the repression of the popular culture and reconquered them ideologically and physically.27 This repression could be measured by the intensification of the repression of vagabonds, gypsies, witchcraft trials (especially from 1580 and 1630) and also heretic trials. Pope Paul III established the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1542, the large permanent Holy Office to supervise local inquisitions. Menocchio was the exception who pointed the way to the relationship between the oral culture and the sixteenth-century church culture in a way that Saccardino did not. Microhistorians in Ginzburg’s wake chose to study small-scale history, focusing on the single case study in history, be it event locality, family or life – mostly individuals – to reveal the ‘structures’ which underlie life in the particular period.28 By reducing the scale of observation, microhistorians argued that they are more likely to reveal the complicated function of individual relationships within each and every social setting and they stressed its difference from larger norm. Microhistorians tend to focus on outliers rather than looking for the average individual as found by the application of quantitative research methods. Instead, they scrutinize those individuals who did not follow the paths of their average fellow countryman, thus making them their focal point.29 ‘[M]any significant social forces and events converge’ in the lives of these exceptional-typical individuals30: In microhistory the term ‘normal exception’ is used to penetrate the importance of this perspective, meaning that each and every one of us do not show our full hand of cards. Seeing what is usually kept hidden from the outside world, we realize that our focus has only been on the ‘normal exception’; those who in one segment of society are considered obscure, strange, and even dangerous.31 Ginzburg argued that microhistory ‘hypothesises the more improbable sort of documentation as being richer’ or the ‘exceptional normal’, as Edoardo Grendi’s famous quip described it.32 Saccardino was too conventional for Ginzburg’s historiographical purposes. Ginzburg argued that there was a pattern amongst peasant society, that Menocchio’s ‘isn’t an exceptional case’, but a revealing one.33 Of course, Ginzburg never indicated the extent to which Menocchio was typical. The

272  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory most common criticism of historians of Ginzburg’s work was that he concentrated on interesting individuals without weighting or contextualising his evidence. Alberto Tenenti complained that he did not indicate their proportion, for instance, of the benandanti in the Friulian population.34 Ginzburg’s references to individuals who had ideas similar to Menocchio were indeed sparse. First a poem from ‘an unknown rustic in Luchese countryside who hid behind the pseudonym Scolio; Scolio’s prophecies and Menocchio’s discourses’ are similar. But the main comparison is with another miller, Pellegrino Baroni, called Pighino, ‘the fat’ who lived in a village in the Modenese Apennines. Pighino opined that the Church, not God, had instituted the cult of the intercession of the saints, confession, fasting, the Eucharist, the idea of the Virgin Birth, that Christ was crucified, that that the soul survives death. This anti-clerical position did not recognise any special ecclesiastical hierarchy of priests or popes when it came to questions of faith. Like Menocchio, he claimed that ‘all religions were good for those who observed them inviolably’. Called to account by the Holy Office, Pighino was tortured, he denied accomplices, and managed to live out his days as a servant for the bishop of Modena. He may have had inspiration, rather than accomplices. One was Vinceno Bolognetti, a Bolognese gentleman in whose house Pighino served at one time. Pighino had been a tutor in a house at the same time as Paolo Ricci, a famous heretic who argued that Madonna had greater powers than Christ. Ginzburg mentioned the similarities between the two cases of Menocchio and Pighino: ‘Truly these two millers who lived hundreds of kilometres apart and died without ever meeting, spoke the same language and shared the same culture.’ His decision to write about Mennochio also involved aesthetics: Ginzburg was attracted by his personality more than he was by that of Pighino’s. The Italian publisher Giulio Einaudi’s sponsored a series that facilitated the development of the microhistorical school that emerged in Ginzburg’s wake.35 Ginzburg’s taking an academic position at the University of California (1988–2006) helped in this, with the university press publishing translations of his work. Ginzburg now garnered an American following. Amelang, who remembered Ginzburg’s answer about Saccardino at Princeton, soon became one of Ginzburg’s most enthusiastic supporters, pointing to the main issue: The greatest risk, or even threat, that microhistory poses, according to those who have strong misgivings about it, is the ease with which it trivializes the past. Trivialize here means mistaking what is not that important in history for what is. For these critics, what is important – and which microhistory errs by ignoring – is the big picture, social, economic, political, whatever. And there are certainly some microhistories, as well as numerous small-scale, monographic works (biographies come readily to mind) that relegate the larger world to a lesser, background role of context, at best.36

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  273 Mennochio was Ginzburg’s way into a critical stance over the major cultural theorists of early modern popular culture: [Robert] Mandrou (a pioneer, but given to hasty conclusions); [Geneviève] Bollème (naive, even saccharine); [Mikhail] Bakhtin (fruitful and suggestive, but too indirect in his use of Rabelais to speak for peasants and artisans); and [Michel] Foucault (given to an aesthetic irrationalism in thrall to Derrida’s ‘facile nihili’ – and this was only the beginning of Ginzburg’s campaign against both gurus). Needless to say, this was heady stuff for a firstyear graduate student. Once this deck is cleared, then came the more positive suggestions for dispelling ‘confusion in the concept of popular culture’.37 We need to unpack Amelang’s account of Ginzburg’s methodological challenge. During World War Two, Russian Mikhail Bakhtin read across French Renaissance writer Francois Rabelais’ work to focus on the carnival as a ‘myth and ritual in which the celebration of fertility and abundance converged, the jesting inversion of all values and established orders, the cosmic sense of the destructive and regenerative passing of time’.38 Bakhtin drew a distinction between official festivities and folk festivities. Bakhtin focused on a cultural dichotomy and proposed a methodology which he called circularity: ‘a circular reciprocal influence between the cultures of the subordinate and ruling classes which had been especially intense in the first half of the sixteenth century’. 39 Similarly, Lucien Febvre’s pupil, Robert Mandrou, argued that popular cultures of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France involved distinct and separate religious ideas of magic and miracle. Popular culture could be accessed by analysing popular pamphlet literature.40 Mandrou, in collaboration with George Duby, had developed ideas of reconstructing the popular mentality of a period which came to be known as the ‘history of mentalities’.41 Febvre had led the way in this regard. Mentalité history insisted on the inert, obscure, unconscious elements in a given world view. Survivals, archaisms, the emotional, the irrational: all these are included in the specific field of the history of mentalities, setting it off from such related and established disciplines as the history of ideas or the history of culture (which, however for some scholars encompasses both of the preceding).42 While these views recognise a difference between official and a folk culture views, they still treat these views as homogeneous in themselves. Concentrating on trials, Ginzburg argued that even distorted biased documents were useful, if they were read skilfully across the grain to show stress points and the direction of change.

274  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory

Figure 7.2 Trial records, especially the confessions of those tortured in the inquisition, have been an important source for microhistorians biographical study. ‘Inquisition in the middle ages’, by Joseph-Nicholas RobertFleury, engraving (1841). Bridgeman.

Amelang cited his story about Ginzburg thinking Saccardino’s story was too trivial to use whenever he heard anyone dismiss microhistory as trivial, sensationalist, or just interested in telling (and selling) a story. It fits in well with the insistence of Ginzburg and others like him that microhistory exists as a tool of exploration, as a means of putting to the test – it’s no accident Italian microhistorians repeatedly use the metaphor of mettere a fuoco, which means (among other things) to put on the fire (while hinting of slow food) – in order to explore serious questions of method and analysis, and to think out new solutions to important problems.43 Ginzburg encapsulated his own point in this regard in the last sentences of The Cheese and the Worms. He referred to an innkeeper, called Marcato or Marco, who also believed, as did Menocchio, that ‘when the body died the soul also died with it’. Ginzburg noted that there were ‘so many others’ like Marcato ‘who lived and died’, but critically ‘without leaving a trace- we know nothing’. But ‘we know many things’ about Menocchio and that a micro history could be written on him as an individual.44 Microhistory was

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  275 the art of making use of the rich revealing case to question the received historiography. Broader intellectual currents in the late twentieth century made the study of a rich revealing case more attractive, by questioning the attempt to construct broad generalisations or grand narratives. István M. Szijártó and Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon have argued that the Italian Microstoria and French Microhistoire were ‘probably most fashionable in the 1990s’ at about the same time as postmodernism and post-structuralism ‘stood at its apogee’.45 Microhistory coincided with rising doubts about the ability of metanarratives to be objective. Faith in the grand narratives of liberalism, Marxism, and nationalism declined from the late 1980s onwards. Postmodern ideas raised questions about received wisdoms and instead promoted the study of scepticism, subjectivism and relativism. Concrete experience seemed more valid than abstract ideas and scholars were attracted to the singularization of history. Similarly poststructuralism challenged the accepted systematic structures of thought of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’. Poststructuralists always call into question how certain accepted ‘facts’ and ‘beliefs’ worked to reinforce the dominance and power of particular actors. There are always hidden agendas in the archaeology of knowledge, which need to be exposed. Magnússon has argued that historians were increasingly been drawn to approaches ‘that emphasised ordinary experience’, subjective and personal approaches and especially microhistory, focusing on subaltern as much as dominant cultures.46 He has argued that microhistorians’ approaches are ‘grounded in the certainty that every source is ambiguous and requires exegesis’.47 One cannot think the thoughts of too many of those in the past or interrogate all the subjects included in grand narratives because it would be unmanageable, but scholars can focus on the individual and her or his own testimonies. Magnússon has championed the singularisation of history through biography, a new kind of microhistory, as being a significant ‘corrective’ to grand narratives.48 Magnússon founded and chaired the Centre for Microhistorical Research at the Icelandic Reykjavík Academy in 2003, which has become one of the hubs of microhistorians. He established a web journal and a book series; he co-edited The Journal of Microhistory with Dr. Davið Ólafsson from 2006; and he was one of three editors of the Anthology of Icelandic Popular Culture book series published in cooperation with the University of Iceland Press. Similarly, others have also written admiringly of a Dutch school of microhistory. Daniel R. Meister characterised it as ‘moving biography studies away from the less scholarly life writing tradition and towards history by encouraging its practitioners to utilize an approach adapted from microhistory’.49 The Biografie Instituut (Biography Institute), founded in 2004, was based within the Research Centre for Historical Studies at Groningen University. Hans Renders, a literary historian, former journalist and biographer of Dutch poets, was appointed

276  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory professor-director with two objectives: to facilitate and support biographical research by PhD students, and ‘to stimulate the further development of a theoretical framework with regard to the biography as an academic genre’.50 Renders has argued that microhistory is a corrective which allows historians to ‘test and materialise historical concepts and explanations on the level of ‘the daily historical reality as experienced by actors’. It is a ‘neutral method to focus on small, non-exemplary cases in order to correct or re- interpret ‘the larger historical narrative’.51 Magnússon exemplified this scepticism about grand narratives and generalisations. While he was at pains to emphasise that microhistory is a diverse ideology and that its methods have varied from country to country, particularly in Europe, he seemed reluctant to accept historians’ ways of using microhistory. On the contrary, he has argued that historians use microhistory to show that the few are indicative of the many; they regard microhistory from the perspective of empiricism and assume that material they work with ‘will have some application to a broader context’.52 Historians are concerned about how ‘representative’ the individuals, events or other small microhistories are for the larger society. They are not interested in them for their own sake. Magnússon argued that these views of historians are inappropriate, for microhistory is a qualitative method, and an evidential paradigm rather than another tool for producing facts for an empirical biography. Microhistory requires reading small clues in a text about a small unit of study and ‘deconstructing the position of the people concerned’.53 The microhistorian is not interested in how the mass of the population lived their lives, only in how the subject of study managed his/her own affairs. For the microhistorian knows that each of us walks his/her own path when we grapple with living our lives, and the is the path the microhistorian seeks to trace.54 Historians, then Magnússon argued, always want to ‘say something about the ‘bigger picture: in history: ‘Conventional history has, from its earliest days … [has aimed] to throw light on developments over long periods, on large geographical areas, and on dramatic events’.55 Others make the same point about historians: Matti Peltonen observed that they ‘are actually trying to discover very big things with their microscopes’.56 Jill Lepore has argued, that they often believe that the examination of their case can be ‘an allegory for … ‘the culture as a whole’.57 Magnússon argued that did this in error, for the ‘bigger history in history … relates only indirectly to the subject’. Indeed, he went further to argue that [m]icrohistorians have, in the end, proved to have relatively little influence within the discipline of history … precisely because they [historians] have been too concerned with the ‘great historical questions’, or

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  277 what I term the ‘grand narrative’. Instead of focusing on studying as minutely as possible the fragments they have in their hands, they fall into the temptation of conventional history, of contextualising their findings.58 On these views historians wrongly resisted a thoroughgoing ‘singularisation of history’ and misused microhistory. The view that this is misuse can be resisted. In this chapter I take a different path to Magnússon and others who overlook or criticise historians’ microhistories. I concentrate on Italian, French and American microbiography written by historians, the traditions in which Francesca Trivellato argued microhistory was most influential.59 I begin with Ginzburg and the Italian microstoria. As Magnússon suggested, historians have been torn by a desire, on the one hand, to question meanings and, on the other, for the ‘few to be representative of the many’ or at least to contextualise microhistory. They have tended towards the latter. I then consider Natalie Zemon Davis and the French-North American historians’ microhistoire which flirted with postmodernism to tell stories. Their speculative work initiated a debate over the distance historians could take from the empiricism. As with a number of other methodologies, many, perhaps most, historians have subsequently taken a halfway position on microbiographical dilemmas: their stories remain empirical biographies, such Linda Colley’s microhistorical The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh and they continue to call into question larger narratives. They remain divided over privileging microscopic or macroscopic spheres and, as Colley has done, prefer to consider the relationship between microhistory and macrohistory rather than see microhistory as a blunt instrument of correction or as a replacement for macrohistory. I argue that this led to a genre, which includes works like the Return of Marin Guerre and Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, which has gone some way to reconnecting academic historians writing biography with a more general public.

Carlo Ginzburg’s attack on Annalistes, armed with a microscope Ginzburg’s support for microhistory as an historical methodology was developed in response to the Annales school, and explicitly the work of Francois Furet. A former Communist Party member, Furet first supported and then became critical of Marxist historiography with its concentration on social and class conflict. Annales shared with Marxist historians an interest in the economic constraints but considered much more diverse material, including social, geographical, regional and cultural constraints and historical compromises. Furet was associated with the Annales historians but he moved towards intellectual history rather than continuing to focus on long-term structural factors. Furet himself was enmeshed in debates over his work on the French Revolution, coming to argue that its

278  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory historians should not in thrall to the 1789 Revolution as the key to all aspects of modern French history. In his preface to the Italian edition of The Cheese and the Worms Ginzburg specifically criticised Francois Furet’s suggestion that ‘what we know about the non-privileged classes is necessarily statistical which ipso facto, disqualified as irrelevant research such as mine’.60 Above all else, Ginzburg’s work, however, was a reaction to the French Annales School, both to its ‘serial history’, as well as approaches to mentalités. The Annales school was based on its journal in the first instance but it was institutionalised in French historical life in a range of ways. Considered the ‘core of the school’, the journal established in 1929 was the Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale, the ‘Annals of Economic and Social History’, whose title signalled its concern with economic and social history.61 Medievalist Marc Bloch and Renaissance historian Lucien Febvre, the founders of the Annales school, however, also sketched guidelines for ‘mentalities’ as a field of historical study.62 Ginzburg was initially attracted to Annales work, especially Bloch’s method for ‘making sense out of ‘irrational’ phenomena like rumours and mass delusions’ and his work on curious seemingly ‘marginally important historical occurrences’ such as the medieval belief in ‘the king’s touch’. Above all, he was impressed with Bloch’s work because it was interdisciplinary using a wide range of documentation. It deliberately set out to be a ‘corrective to the cruder varieties of Marxist ‘scientific history’ and developed an ‘extremely subtle treatment of’ collective mentalities’, enabling ‘the historian to understand and sympathize with the most humble and oppressed members of past societies without abandoning his commitment to objectivity’.63 The tension between divergent approaches played out during the Annales institutionalisation process. Annales became the dominant school of historical analysis in France from the interwar years onwards with its emphasis on social structures as explanatory forces. Structures limited individuals: there were cultural and material constraints on human agency which needed to be elucidated. Febvre and Braudel had also founded the social science-oriented École des hautes Études en sciences sociale (EHESS), the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, the Sixth Section for economic and social sciences. Under the influence of a sequence of directors, first Febvre (1947–1956), then Braudel (1956– 1972), Jacques Le Goff (1972–1977) and Furet (1977–1985), the initiative was particularly focused on quantitative economics. Not surprisingly so was the journal Annales as the directors were often also its editors. Qualitative approaches began to challenge this focus. Historians of the mentalités branch had begun focusing on collective cultural structures which a methodology which was not particularly qualitative. Eventually the historians of mentalities parted company with the Annales school.64 Meanwhile, neither the EHESS nor the Annales, were enamoured by microbiography.

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  279 This mix of groups was complex and can be explained to some extent because the Annales school, like most historical schools, had evolved over time.65 Peter Burke has suggested a three-stage generational analysis of the trajectory of the school.66 Bloch, Febvre and the journal comprised the first generation. The second generation, between 1956 and 1968, was ‘The Age of Braudel’, which focused on early modernist period. The third generation focused largely on France, region by region, and is closely associated with cliometrics, that is the application of economic models and econometric analysis to historical data. In this they were akin to the contemporary Cambridge Population Group, and American cliometricians. But in addition prominent figures in the third-wave Annales school also worked on cultural approaches, especially histoire des mentalités (mentalities).67 The best known of the regional studies were Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966) and Pierre Goubert’s Beauvais et le Beauvaisis (1960). A fourth, more recent generation, led by cultural historian Roger Chartier, is more disparate.68 By this stage, critics of cliometrics, such as G. R. Elton, pointed to the ‘excesses of data’. He had in mind cases like Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean (1949), which was translated from the French in 1972–1973 with its concentration on longterm structures; and R. W. Fogel and S. Engerman’s Time on the Cross (1974), which used selected data to compare slaves’ lives to those of the urban working class to allegedly show that slavery in the United States was relatively efficient and humane.69 What we can conclude is that, despite this range of approaches over time, Annales as a collective approach maintained ‘that human beings were constrained by structural forces rooted in material conditions that were largely beyond their control’ and, like all structure-first views of history, it has been beset with tensions about the extent and kind of determinism. While some Annalistes considered ‘deeper’ slower changing material constructs, others concentrated on teasing out social systems and changing structures of meaning and collective elements in human consciousness and behaviour.70 It is difficult to put one’s finger on the ‘Annales School’ view on the signature biography. It is simply difficult to delineate the common historiographical ideas of all its members. Traian Stoianovich and Lynn Hunt preferred to call the ‘Annales school’ a paradigm.71 Much discussion has focused on its major works. Hunt makes the point that ‘[d]espite the enormous prestige of La Mediterranée [The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (1949)]72, Braudel’s example did not elicit many works within the French historical community on cross-national networks of commercial exchange’.73 Moreover, the approach itself could be biographical. Braudel’s study had three time scales, the long-term history, ‘histoire quasi-immobile’ of geographical and climatic forces, the conjectural of civilization’s social and economic structures, and events and individual lives which functioned together as a system.74 Braudel himself, and Annales in general, however, came to be associated with the longue durée

280  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory and serial history.75 ‘Geo-historical structuralism’ and the relationships shaping them involved long-term patterns and structures which were slow-moving and long-lasting.76 He was sceptical of history that focused on smaller events and individuals, because, to him, individuals and events were little other than the channel for long-standing, repetitive interactions between space and time, which could be accessed through serial data.77 Mostly Braudel did not attend to the ‘surface disturbances’ the events, which were short, rapid ‘only momentary outbursts’ and the ‘surface manifestation of these larger movements and explicable only in terms of them’, except in his lesser-known works such as Out of Italy, which was an account of the Italian Renaissance.78 Mostly he wrote in reaction to the dominance of modern political history, arguing that society was immobile at the village level from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. ‘Event history’ went over the heads of the peasantry ‘because seigneurialism and the subsistence economy kept villagers bent over the soil’.79 Some Annalistes wrote biography and even, like Le Roy Ladurie, became champions of microhistory.80 Ginzburg, however, was reacting to main currents in the Annales School. Annales biographies were not standard, just as we have seen that Febvre’s biography of Luther (1928) was not a standard Freudian analysis. George Duby considered long-term trends, but also shorter-term histories about mentalities or the history of attitudes, as in his The Knight, The Lady and the Priest (1983), about marriage practices in medieval France.81 Early microhistories, like Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre, built upon the Annales’ approach and used some of their concepts but it also went further to contest certain aspects of the tradition with a different or ‘small history’ approach to the past. The line between some kinds of Annales mentalities and microhistories was fuzzy, then.82 So while there were microhistory-like elements in their practice, the outspoken statements of prominent Annalistes attracted microhistorians’ attention and critique more than their subtle case studies, or their own ‘outliers’. Members of the Annales School made some millenarian predictions and bold statements about their methods. Fernand Braudel cared most about the matters beneath surface events and he disparagingly described modern and political events, and microhistory, in the Mediterranean as ‘dust’. In 1968 Le Roy Ladurie predicted that by the 1980s ‘the historian will be a programmer or he will be nothing’, that is historians ought to concentrate on large-scale computerised history.83 And Furet, whom Ginzburg cited in the preface to The Cheese and the Worms, as we have seen, was convinced ‘that what we know about the nonprivileged classes is necessarily statistical’. Furet had declared the document, ‘facts,’ no longer exist for themselves but in relationship to the series that precedes them and follows them; it is their relative value that becomes objective, and not their relationship to an ungraspable ‘real’ substance.84

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  281 In turn, Ginzburg challenged the Annales School over the fragmentary nature of the documentation that serial historians in the Annales school used. He claimed that the social and cultural histories being written by Annales social scientists consisted of generalisations ‘that do not hold up when tested against the concrete reality of the small-scale life they claim to explain’.85 The processes missed normal exceptions. Historians had to have the right attitude to anomalies; Furet just ignored them. He believed that ‘any document, even the most anomalous, can be inserted into a series. In addition, it can, if properly analysed, shed light on a still-broader documentary series’.86 Ginzburg disagreed: he was effectively arguing that the development of an articulate programme to submit to the computer was a fraught business.87 Programmes were only as good as the evidence they processed: rubbish in; rubbish out. The Annales worldview not only ignored the history of ideas and cultural politics but, even when it focused on collective mentality, its approach was one that homogenized and equalized everyone into a common mentality. At a time when virtual teams of scholars have embarked on vast projects in the quantitative history of ideas or serialized religious history, to undertake a narrow investigation on a solitary miller may seem paradoxical or absurd, practically a return to handweaving in an age of power looms. It is significant that the very possibility of research of this kind has been ruled out a priori by those who, like Francois Furet, have maintained that the reintegration of the subordinate classes into general history can only be accomplished through ‘number and anonymity’, by means of demography and sociology, ‘the quantitative study of past societies’. Although the lower classes are no longer ignored by historians, they seem condemned, nevertheless, to remain ‘silent’. 88 So, above all, the Annales approach had resulted in ‘the equalization of individuals in their roles of economic or sociocultural agents’.89 Unimpressed, Ginzburg praised Febvre’s work on the individual in history, while at the same time also being critical that ‘even Lucien Febvre one of the greatest historians of this century, fell into a trap of this sort’. He attempted to distinguish the mental coordinates of an entire age on the basis of studying a single individual, albeit a very exceptional one – Rabelais. Despite his consideration of a homogeneous collective mentality, however, ‘Febvre succeeded in identifying the complex of motifs that connect an individual to an historically determinate environment and society’.90 Ginzburg used a life for its own terms, focusing on an individual. As he wrote in the preface to the English edition in 1980, Consequently, an investigation initially pivoting on an individual, moreover an apparently unusual one, ended by developing into a

282  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory general hypothesis on popular culture (more precisely, peasant culture) of preindustrial Europe, in the age marked by the spread of printing and the Protestant Reformation – and by the repression of the latter in Catholic countries.91 He was able to do this because he had focused on the singular process or the dynamics at play. This focus on using a life or singularisation history on its own terms distinguished Ginzburg’s work at the time from his contemporaries because he was concerned with the disconnection between the anomaly and the norm. He argued that the single case ‘can assume a significance that is in some ways paradigmatic’, rather than representative. So, wary of ‘generic and vague terms like ‘collective mentalities’ or ‘collective psychology … because they seem to transmute individual attitudes into lifeless abstractions’, he came to focus on ‘the divergences and contrasts between the mentalities of various classes, various social groups,’ and not ‘submerging them in an undifferentiated interclass ‘collective mentality’.92 Historians needed to reconstruct both the indistinct masses and individual personalities. A number of biographical studies have shown that in a modest individual who is himself lacking in significance and for this very reason representative, it is still possible to trace, as in a microcosm, the characteristics of an entire social stratum in a specific historical period, whether it be the Austrian nobility or the lower clergy in the seventeenth-century England.93 We noted in discussion above that Trivellato had considered a range of national schools of Italian, French and American microhistory. In 2013, Magnússon and Szijártó, in What Is Microhistory?, also surveyed the French school but also considered other American historians working on French history, too, as well as the more recent Icelandic and Dutch microstory schools, all of which contemplated biographical methodology.94 For example, in the 1980s a raft of microhistorians working on French history produced experimental works. We have already considered Ladurie, whose work on a single microcosm offered a window into a total history, that is, an opportunity to see the world in a village. In doing so, they paradoxically contributed to grand narratives in which entire periods were imagined to resemble the very microcosms that had been given life in their local studies. American historians working on French history, including Robert Darnton and Natalie Zemon Davis, emphasised a different ‘small history’ approach to the past. Both came from the mentalities tradition and were sympathetic to Annales histories.95 Given that Ginzburg was in reaction to Annales, it is not surprising that, while some French historians were particularly ‘receptive’ to Italian microstoria, they did so with ‘French twists’.96

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  283 The American cultural historian Darnton, for instance, was critical of the Annalistes’ ‘considerations of long-term change rather than events’, and argued that there was an ‘overcommitment to the quantification of culture’ under the Annales tradition.97 Quantitative history caused misrepresentation. Darnton declared that historical documents should be ‘read, not counted’.98 The French attempt to measure attitudes by counting – counting masses for the dead, pictures of Purgatory, titles of books, speeches in academies, furniture in inventories, crimes in police records, invocations to the Virgin Mary in wills, and pounds of candle wax burned to patron saints in churches. The numbers can be fascinating, especially when they are compiled with the masterly hand of a Michel Vovelle or a Daniel Roche. But they are nothing more than symptoms produced by the historian himself and they can be interpreted in wildly different ways.99 Darnton did not deny the existence of long-term structures, or the importance of looking at the past over a long-term scale. This work had produced good generalized accounts of the past which answered particular questions, especially about material culture. He was interested in how ordinary people’s thought, as was microstoria,100 but even more the range of viewpoints within cultures.101 He argued that historians should study small groups and individuals as if they were anthropologists studying alien cultures.102 Darnton had taught a course on history and anthropology with Clifford Geertz at Princeton University and was aware both of the degree of difficulty in accessing an alien culture and ways of doing so. Anthropologists gained access to cultures by focusing on their most opaque points, perhaps a joke, a proverb or ceremony, which was the most difficult to understand. By understanding opaque point, one entered a whole foreign system. Darnton used the massacre of cats by apprentices to understand eighteenth-century French society. He argued that for the workers that the cat massacre was funny. Contemporaries would think it was animal cruelty. Darnton painted a world of peasant brutality, in which the apprentices’ lives were harsh, dangerous and unfair; and distrust, deceit and revenge were its best response. Killing cats whose wails had symbolic value and, in particular murdering the employer’s wife’s beloved cat, was a symbolic revolt.103 Darnton’s collection of essays, The Great Cat Massacre, was an assortment of snapshots into France in the eighteenth century, just prior to the Enlightenment, a time when ideas about reason and individualism emerged in contrast to belief in traditional collective customs. He set out to excavate French cultural grammar by way of a range of sources; all of them fine, rich, detailed and meaningful. For instance in addition to the cat ­massacre, he used folktales told by French peasants; a bourgeois man’s

284  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory description of his city, Montpellier; a policeman’s files on the prominent intellectuals of France; the organizational schema of the Encyclopédie, an encyclopedia published in France (1751–1772) which was meant to be ‘A systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts; and, finally, a merchant’s dossier about his favourite Enlightenment writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Darnton argued that people ‘think with things, or with anything else that their culture makes available to them, such as stories or ceremonies’.104 In his first essay, ‘Peasants Tell Tales’, Darnton argued that by communicating ‘traits, values and attitudes, and a way of construing the world that was peculiarly French’, folklore told peasants how the world was, and how they could cope with it.105 When discussing the one source he had for The Great Cat Massacre, Darnton noted, ‘[t]he subjective character of the writing does not vitiate its collective frame of reference, even though the written account must be thin compared with the action it describes’.106 More clearly, he sets out his general methodology, which was based on widespread scholarship: Given those uncertainties, it seems unwise to build an interpretation on a single version of a single tale, and more hazardous still to base symbolic analysis on details … one can compare it with other stories … [and] by working through the entire body of French folktales, one can distinguish general characteristics, overarching themes, and pervasive elements of style and tone.107 His method was to grapple with idiom as well as individuality. How can I know that I have struck a chord of sensitivity that runs throughout a culture rather than a note of individual sensitivity – the raving of a peculiarly cruel printer or the obsession of an unusually garrulous Montpellierian?108 First. he makes clear that he had pored over the archives. Secondly, he never presented typicality but had deliberately chosen good examples, choosing points of ‘opacity’ that begged analysis. Thirdly, he stressed the importance of ‘working back and forth between texts and context’. In this way Darnton both questioned the Annales concept of interconnectedness across the entirety of human history and within cultures, while his microhistory differed from Italian microstoria in considering group agency.109 While the Massacre of the Cats was popular, having been published in eighteen languages, The Return of Martin Guerre, by the Canadian/ American historian Natalie Zemon Davis, was both popular and among the most controversial of the French microhistories. She explained that the Martin Guerre story certainly came as a surprise – a total surprise. I heard about it in 1976 from a wonderful graduate student in Chinese

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  285 history, who decided to take my seminar at the University of California at Berkeley on ‘Family, kin, and social structure in early modern France.’ She was going to do her dissertation on the history of adoption in China. I said, ‘Why don’t you do your term paper on adoption in early modern France? It’ll give you some ideas for your thesis.’ I sent her to the rare books at the law library, and she came back and said, ‘I came across a book on a criminal case you’ll find very interesting. It was Jean de Coras’s book about the Martin Guerre case! She had used it for one sentence on adoption. I read the book and thought, ‘This has got to be a movie!’ I had two interests at that point: one was anthropology, the other was outreach to a larger public through film 110 Indeed subsequently it is has been made into several films, on one of which Davis acted as the historical consultant.111 She remembered trying to contact a film director in France, by good luck I heard about Jean-Claude Carrière and Daniel Vigne, who coincidentally wanted to make a movie on the Martin Guerre story. They asked me to work with them from the start. I helped them with the scenario and tried to make it as plausible as possible.112 Trained in Annales methodology, she abandoned that for microhistory, which she saw as having great potential.113 In her telling of The Return of Martin Guerre, Davis situated her subjects, the Guerres and Roys in their sixteenth-century Languedoc context. Bertrande de Roys and Martin Guerre married when they were about ten and fourteen years old respectively in the 1540s in the village of Artigat in the Pyrenees which was in the Languedoc Province. Martin was impotent for the first eight years of marriage. Magic was suspected, somehow the bewitchment lifted and they welcomed a son. However, after being accused of theft from his family, Martin deserted his wife, son and property and became a mercenary soldier, losing a leg in war. After about eight years later a ‘new Martin’ appeared in the village. Bertrande lived with him for three or four years; their son died but their daughter survived. In a litigious society, court cases piled up: the ‘new Martin’ sued his uncle and Bertrande’s family sued him. Bertrande’s relatives forced her to take a case against Martin as an imposter. Her case to the court suggested the imposter had tricked her. The judges were about to find the ‘imposter’ innocent, however, when the original, now one-legged, Martin Guerre dramatically entered the courtroom in Toulouse. Arnaud du Tilh, the ‘new Martin’, was convicted and hung four days later in front of the house of Martin and Bertrande Guerre. Davis challenged the view that peasants had little choice in their lives. In a world with little documentation of self-revelation, the unusual case and trials of Martin Guerre showed that ‘individual villagers’ tried ‘to fashion their lives in unusual and unexpected ways’. Her account, based on a bizarre episode which one of

286  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory the magistrates, Jean de Coras, or Corasius, who had been involved had recorded as Arrest Memorable du Parlement de Toulouse (1560), hoped to show that the adventures of three young villagers was not too many steps beyond the more common experience of their neighbours, that an imposter’s fabrication has links with more ordinary ways of creating personal identity.114 Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre occasioned a debate in historiography and biography around postmodernism and, in particular, the presentism and speculation of her writing. Davis’s feminism was said to have coloured her interpretation.115 She was certainly a feminist. As early as 1966, Davis and a colleague circulated a faculty questionnaire to graduate women at the University of Toronto who were also mothers. The university simply did not respond to their report, ‘A Study of 42 Women Who Have Children and Who Are in Graduate Programs at the University of Toronto’, which included recommendations about daycare and library hours. 116 In 1971, Jill Ker Conway and Davis established one of the first courses in women’s history at the university: ‘Society and the Sexes in Early Modern Europe and the United States’. They had ‘no model to follow, no pre-existing syllabus’ and few resources. 117 Davis went on teach ‘Society and the Sexes in Early Modern Europe’, first at UC Berkeley and then at Princeton, and ‘helped found a Women’s Studies Program both places’.118 Davis openly ‘integrated women and gender fully into the central narrative’ in her historical publications.119 Davis was also unabashed about being speculative in The Return of Martin Guerre. As she explained, ‘the Story of Martin Guerre has been recounted many times’. It was a famous case already, with several versions in print before Davis wrote her book, including Janet Lewis’s historical novel The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) and the libretto she wrote for an opera by William Bergsma, ‘The Wife of Martin Guerre’ (1956). Davis’ research in the archives is meticulous, ‘using every scrap of paper left me in the past’.120 Nevertheless, the narrative is riddled with the language of speculation, the perhaps, ifs and likelys: ‘a possible scenario’ (p. 39), ‘one must surmise’ (p. 46), ‘it is possible, even probable’ (p. 48), ‘they must have realised’ (p. 50), ‘[i]f I were to hazard a guess’ (p. 56), ‘Still it is conceivable’ (p. 83). Indeed Davis was attracted to the story because of the uncertainties, the ‘perhapses’, the ‘may-have beens’, to which the historian has recourse when the evidence is inadequate or perplexing’. 121 Similarly in her later microhistory. Trickster Travels (2006), Davis fills in ‘silences and occasional contradictions and mysteries’ surrounding Leo Africanus’s enigmatic biography by making use of ‘the  conditional  –

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  287 ‘would have,’ ‘may have,’ ‘was likely to have’ – and the speculative – ‘perhaps,’ ‘maybe’ – ‘in order to reconstruct ‘a plausible life story.’122 Davis described her biography of al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan, who published as Leo Africanus, and moved between Africa and Europe, Islam and Christianity as being of a Man with a double vision, sustaining two cultural worlds, sometimes imagining two audiences, and using techniques taken from the Arabic and Islamic repertoire while folding in European elements in his own fashion.123 He was elusive in archives – just mentions of himself in his writings – and she had to reconstruct his life imaginatively. In the case of Bertrande de Rols, evidence of thoughts, feelings and motivations, is simply non-existent. Davis argued that her account ‘is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past’.124 Trivallato has argued that ‘The marriage of microhistory with “the conditional tense” is what troubled Ginzburg the most and what contributed to the initial transatlantic drift between microstoria and microhistory’.125 For her part Davis argued that You speculate and you make it clear you’re speculating. But even if you can’t resolve the matter, it’s important to venture it. Resorting to speculation is better than not asking the question at all. 126 Speculative biography has been defined as biography which suggests ‘possibility (an informed idea of what may well have happened)’ rather than ‘asserting certainty (what must have happened) in some aspects of the biographical narrative’.127 It has focused on ‘figures who have been largely neglected by history, or forgotten over time’ and for whom there are fragments in the archives with, given their social position, gaps and silences especially in regard to biographical subject’s thoughts, feelings and motivations.128 This work is based on the usual meticulous researching of archival records. Given this research base, speculative biographers have argued that a close reading of the archival record with empathy and imagination results in ‘non-fiction life writing’. Virginia Woolf is often cited as an inspiration for her views on the centrality of ‘the biographer’s imagination’ and the faculty of narrative construction.129 Keira Lindsey, the author of a speculative biography of a family relative, has called for historians to experiment with biography, faced with evidentiary silences that threaten to slow or stop the narrative, the speculative biographer draws upon contextual detail, interior motivation and conjecture, to fill in the gaps.130 Most historians ensure that she or he indicates when they are ‘interpreting’ and when they are speculating, or, as Donna Lee Brien has put it, being

288  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory clear about where it is made up.131 Lindsey and O’Brien have recently edited a collection, Speculative Biography: Experiments, Opportunities and Provocations (2021). Unsurprisingly even its exponents agree that speculative biography is ‘the most contentious of all biographical sub-genres’.132 Davis believed that Guerre and du Tilh attempted to ‘remake’ themselves or adopt masks. She speculated that Bertrande was not a dupe but someone who has some ‘independence of spirit’, ‘she does not seem a woman so easily fooled’ so concluded she colluded with the new Martin Guerre for reasons of her own.133 The ‘stubborn woman calculated and made her plans. She would go along with court case against the imposter [which Uncle Pierre had fraudulently started in her name] and hope to lose it’.134 Historians, including Robert Finlay, disputed this conclusion about Bertrande playing a ‘double role’. He argued that Bertrande was duped, as most of her contemporaries believed, including the trial judges. As Davis herself noted Here was a case where the ‘best’ witnesses turned out to be mistaken, hearsay evidence turned out to be true, and the judges almost went astray,135 It was only the appearance of Martin Guerre at the end of the trial that exposed the imposter. Finlay argued that he thought that Davis attempted to overlay the modern concept of an independent self-determining woman onto 16th century peasants which was not based on the sources; it is, rather, an opinion by a modern historian who [about the] artful construction of identity [and a] discourse on self-fashioning … [which] is compelling to a modern sensibilit[ies].136 Touched by postmodernist moment, Davis presented lives that were fragmented and non-holistic.137 She believed that their sources were multivocal and allowed for multiple meanings. History was ‘necessarily open-ended, capacious enough to admit many nuances’. For all their differences, Davis and Finlay shared with Ginzburg a scepticism about collective, homogeneous cultural identities. Similiarly, Darnton made clear that he did not believe there is such a thing as a typical peasant or representative bourgeois … I do not see why cultural history should avoid the eccentric or embrace the average, for one cannot calculate the mean of meanings or reduce symbols to their lowest common denominator.138 Davis did not try ‘to integrate everything into a single, seamless account’ of sixteenth- or eighteenth-century French culture because she did not believe that any such thing existed.

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  289

Figure 7.3 The return of Martin Guerre, appearing before his wife, Bertrande de Rols, and the one who had usurped his identity, the impostor Arnaud du Tilh (Thil), has been the basis of a number of microhistories, including Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre (1984). Engraving by Henry de Kock, Histoire Des Cocus Célèbres (1871). Bridgeman.

She held that the story she told was significant and revealing, as well.139 She set out to show that this remarkable case was rooted in ordinary common causes, in the context of a litigious culture.140 She argued that the evidence supported her version. Responding to Finlay she argued that historians ought to re-create ‘the complexity in historical experience’ and

290  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory that all historians have to interpret literature and explore emotional and psychological dimensions which involves a degree of complexity.141 She informed her readers that her account was ‘in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past’.142 And yet she also ended her account by hoping that du Tilh was not playing an ultimate trick on her. Ginzburg had stressed the differences rather than the similarities between his and Davis’s understanding of the microhistorical genre in this regard in the preface he wrote to Martin Guerre warning against speculation.143 In response Ginzburg’s most vocal and persistent warnings were against ‘the radically anti-positivist scepticism that attacks the reliability of texts as such’.144 Ginzburg was offended equally by too little as too much empiricism.

Linda Colley’s holding a grain of sand in her hand A stream of historians wrote award-winning microhistories in Davis’ wake. The Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 won a sheaf of book prizes, including the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in History. A second microbiographer, Alan Taylor, won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for his William Cooper’s Town: Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. Interestingly, these historians won the history category, rather than that of biography. Few of these studies employed the ‘normal exception’ approach of European microhistory. They did not invoke Ginzburg or cite other microhistorians’ work. They focused on dramatis personae: Ulrich introduced Martha Ballard and the reconstruction of her life through her diary. Like Alfred F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, they meditated on the sources.145 The biographical studies are tightly focused in time and place, concentrating on interpersonal transactions and social processes and their analyses rely heavily on thorough, multi-dimensional contextualization. According to George M. Fredrickson, writing in the New York Review of Books in February 2002, [s]pecialization on increasingly narrow subjects is the dominant trend in American historical scholarship … [and that it] is less concerned with making and establishing general patterns than with recapturing the experiences and appreciating the achievements of those who were overlooked by previous generations of historians … women, African-Americans, Latinos, low-skilled workers, and poor people generally.146 Microhistory merged with social history and focused on everywoman and ordinary men. Alain Corbin’s The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-Century France (2001) sets out the ambition in the prologue to ‘stand the methods of nineteenth century

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  291 social history on their head’ to consider the ‘torpor of an ordinary existence’ of a ‘very small sample, of people whose fates were exceptional’, albeit whose lives were typical. He was also standing microhistory on its head by closing his eyes and selecting his subject by random in the archives from records at the municipal archives of Orne.147 In their diversity, microhistorians turned to biographies which interrogated global history. This was a new historical site more generally.148 The end of the Cold War saw a geo-ideological shakeup. Work emphasising the interconnectedness and interdependence of the world saw the emergence of the globalization paradigm which overtook earlier paradigms historians has used, such as Marxism, modernization, and the Annales school. It is related, too, to the developing understanding of the global connections in the work of Edward Said and Dipesh Chakrabarty who provincialized Europe.149 The longer view pops it into a continuum of Braudel’s notion of the total history of the Mediterranean, Immanuel Wallerstein’s focus on world systems, with some regions more developed and exploiting others, and Andre Gunder Frank’s and Barry K. Gills’s attempt to consider the whole world and ‘reorient’ thinking about globalization to pay greater attention to Asia, especially China’.150 Lynn Hunt, a French social and cultural historian who began to work on larger perspectives described her global history Writing History in the Global Era (2015) as a reworking of transnational history from the bottom up. Invented in 1989, the worldwide web and digitisation facilitated this research. Whatever the motivation, human agency should be at its centre. One of Hunt’s objectives was a ‘sweeping re-evaluation of individuals’ active role and their place in society as the key to understanding the way people and ideas interact’.151 Linda Colley noted that global microhistory suited her historical purposes: she liked ‘doing close analysis of particular texts’, but at the same time tried to ‘locate them in a broader context’, in her case, the broadest context of global history.152 Colley first wrote on the Tory party in England in the eighteenth century before researching the British Imperial diaspora and developing international themes.153. Most surveys indicate that while proportions are narrowing, biography is still mostly written by men about male subjects.154 Discussing the widening out of history with Hunt, they were clear that global history had to include social history, subaltern and women’s history. These were topics that women’s historians were more often researching.155 Hunt worried that ‘globalization [was] a Trojan horse that threatens to bring back old paradigms rather than offering a truly new one?’.156 Linda Colley pointed out that despite the rhetoric of ‘global history’, it was geographically biased: ‘Europe, the US, and Canada are the subject of more than three-quarters of all historical research in Britain and North America’.157 Colley first began to make use of contemporary accounts of individual lives to explore the historiography of British’s global expansion in Captives

292  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory which considered captivity narratives – that is, of Britons taken prisoner – in three geographical zones of Britain’s maritime empire: the Mediterranean, America, and India.158 It made her keen to write more. She said that she had ‘always wanted to try biography’. More than this, she thought it would be interesting to write about a woman, because that side of the globalising world of the 18th century tends to be neglected. Even today, most self-describing global historians are male, and they often write about huge frameworks, tell very big stories and their characters are mainly other men. I wanted to write something that was global history but in a different way.159 Colley developed social, subaltern and women’s history in her 2007 Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History.160 She set out to offer ‘a world in a life and a life in the world’, that is, a world history told through the biography of one such itinerant Elizabeth Marsh.161 Conceived in Jamaica and possibly of mixed-race descent, Marsh (1735–1785) was born to a seafaring family in Portsmouth, England, a Jamaican mother and a British shipwright father. She moved to Menorca, Spain, at age 19 with her parents and siblings, as Colley puts it, and was ‘in motion for most of her life’. Marsh was an exceptional woman ‘who travelled farther and more dangerously by sea and in four continents than any female contemporary for whom records survive’, before perhaps Lady Jane Franklin, who was a celebrity and probably the best-travelled woman of her era.162 Franklin wrote several thousand words a day, leaving an archive of over eight million words. Marsh was no publicist and left little of what is known as ‘egodocuments’, that is, ‘those documents in which an ego deliberately or accidentally discloses or hides itself’.163 Colley did not even have an image of Marsh. Most biographers work from the inside out using egodocuments, that is diaries, letters, autobiographies, travel accounts and testimonies. They attempt to convey the experiential perspective, which is associated with what is known as the experiential turn.164 Biography, with its preference for the interior life, is sometimes held as the opposite of historical narrative. Dominick LaCapra has noted that: historians have turned or returned to the question of experience, particularly with respect to nondominant groups and such problems as memory in its relation to history. The experiential turn has led to an increased interest in … recapturing the voices and experience of subordinate groups that may not have left sufficient traces in official documents and histories … Hence much attention has been given to microhistory, which focuses on small or face-to-face groups … or even on the experience of an individual.165

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  293 It originated from the Annales work which focused on ‘small or face-toface groups’: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou (1975), Michael de Certeau’s Possession at Loudun (1970) and, of course, later on, Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976). Hunt herself had been involved in spearheading both experiential and global history, which she described as a ‘global-neuro’ approach. As she suggested, neurohistory was a means to uncover how people experienced history. The neurosciences could unlock ‘the interior dimension of the past as it was lived’.166 The history of emotions is allied to this wanting to ‘know what it felt like’.167 This approach has also been described as the ‘history from within’, compared to the ‘Histories from below’, which sought to give voice to those ordinary people whose social position had failed to afford them great power, wealth, or responsibility: the neglected undocumented.168 Global microbiography is another pathway to such understanding.169 While Hunt called it ‘global-neuro’, Brice Cossart refers to it as ‘global lives’, referring to biographies of individuals who were particularly involved in globalization.170 The problem, of course, there are few individuals who lived global lives from subaltern groups. Some subjects for global biography, such as navigators and travellers, are obvious candidates: Sanjay Subrahmanyam has written on the Portuguese naval commander Vasco da Gama, who pioneered sea routes for the West. Da Gama plied the sea route from Portugal to India and opened up access to the spice trade, which the Venetians had dominated. Like Subrahmanyam, most microbiographers working on biography set out to make global history personal. Colley described her method as ‘personal and epic’ ‘global biography for our globalizing times’. Colley’s Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh is not a standard cradle-to-grave account, partly because the evidence is largely circumstantial. She noted, Elizabeth Marsh represented an extraordinary challenge because she was not remotely an affluent woman. She was the daughter of a ship’s carpenter, We have the narrative she wrote of her captivity in Morocco – the first published text in English by a woman in that country [although recorded several years afterwards].171 Then there is the unpublished diary she wrote of her travels along the eastern coast of the Indian subcontinent in the mid-1770s – one of the very first narratives of this sort by a woman not accompanying her husband. But when I wrote the book, I had no letters by Marsh at all (since it came out, we have found a few). So I had to reconstruct her largely through the writings of others. It is not a book I could have attempted without the world wide web. It was this that led me to some of the sources out of which I could wrench details to fill out her remarkable and remarkably itinerant life.172 So, Colley embarked on an international data chase. Even then she had to resort to proxies to convey Marsh’s experience, as Megan Marshall noted:

294  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory When Marsh’s husband loses his job as a salt agent with the East India Company in April 1777, Colley has no direct evidence of his reaction. To fill the gap, she cleverly supplies the comment of a senior company official, written that same year and now archived in the India Office Library in London: to be caught ‘without an appointment’ as a white European on the Indian subcontinent was ‘a woeful extremity. It gives me a shivering to think that … a man should be reduced to it.’ It gave me ‘a shivering’ to think of Colley’s ability to put her hand on this document.173 When Marsh underwent a mastectomy without anaesthetic in 1785, Colley uses Fanny Burney’s account of the same operation. This approach does mean that the weight of the context means we lose sight of Marsh at times, as if her life is navigated in absentia. Colley set out to ‘play with notions of a kind of global history’ while incorporating people at the bottom of society. She interrogated larger webs of identity in a single life believing that disadvantaged individuals lives ‘thicken, nuance and test global history’. Indeed, the narrative accounts ‘needed to be tested at an individual level’ to show that people perceived the history as it has been written up. Colley had questions to ask of the Royal Navy, the East India Company, imperial warfare, and widening international trade using Marsh’s life: The experiences of Marsh and those connected to her reveal, among other things: the changing nature of slavery and unfree labor in the British empire; the evolution of the Royal Navy and its principal home of Portsmouth; the global ambitions of Sidi Muhammad, sultan of Morocco; the evolving social and cultural norms of middling sorts in eighteenth-century Britain, partly transformed by global trade and travel; the frenetic expansion of the eighteenth-century British state against the backdrop of the global Seven Years’ War, but refracted through changes as local as the constitutional status of the Isle of Man; the uncomfortable social world of the British, particularly of British women, in late eighteenth-century Company India; and so on.174 But her principal aim was to consider individual agency amid traditional narrative. The empire made Marsh’s life possible but hers was also ‘the story of a woman who was more, of course, than the puppet of impersonal forces’.175 She made her own fortune amongst others in a global world. In a review of the title, Philip J. Stern suggested that microbiography approached by a global historian results, in fact, in a macrobiography: Yet, despite its title, Ordeal is hardly just the interior story of one individual. For Colley, Marsh’s lives – from her conception in the

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  295 West Indies through highs and lows in England, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and India – are both a subject and a device, engaging the global stories evoked not only by her own experiences but also by those of her parents, uncle, husband, children, extended family of ‘cousins,’ friends, connections, acquaintances, and the strangers she encounters. As a consequence, this book offers a macrobiography of a changing eighteenth-century world.176 It revealed the rethinking of the permeable and flexible meanings of national, imperial and global history. Alison Light in Common People and, more recently, Malcolm Allbrook and Sophie Scott-Brown, reflecting on family biography and microhistory, noted that these genres can be just as effective at eschewing the pitfalls of an ‘Olympian version of world history’ as they can be at documenting the lives of those who never travelled more than a few miles away from home.177 The difference is that so often context is an unintended consequence of family history, while macrobiography deliberately sets out to contextualise a life.178 The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh ‘thus demonstrates in various ways that biography, imagined to its fullest extent, can be one of the most powerful tools at our disposal in achieving a nuanced and textured vision of this moment of early modern ‘proto-globalization’.179 Colley’s microhistory then adapted biography as a genre. John-Paul A. Ghobrial points to a wave in work like Colley’s. He called on other historians to ‘adopt microhistorical and biographical approaches to help populate our models and theories [of global historical structures] with real people, to write what one might call global microhistory’.180 He distinguished between two kinds of global microbiography: those that focus on a ‘single individual, object or place’ and then contextualise; and those works that begin with connections.181 ‘Where the first looks for the world in a grain of sand, the second sifts through many beaches around the same ocean with a fine-toothed comb’.182 ‘Global microhistory’, or global microbiography, reprised the microhistory theme of scale without really dealing with issue of distinguishing between the trivial or the significant that Ginzburg’s work wrestled with.183 The emergence of microhistory interwined with global and transnational history has led to renewed consideration about the relationships between macrohistory and microhistory.184 As a consequence, by 2016, Ginzburg argued that microhistory ‘may in fact be regarded as an indispensable tool’ of global history.185

Conclusion By 1989 Jacques Le Goff, once a director of EHESS, published an article, ‘After Annales: the Life as history’.186 He pointed to the phenomenon to which he had contributed, as an Annaliste, that so often an individual was ‘swallowed up in his or her context’. Quoting from Bernarn Guene he

296  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory pointed to the attractions of the study of structures but believed now that ‘it made everything too simple’: [a] biography enables one to take a first look at the overwhelming complexity of things … the story of a life helps us to understand better how fragile ad uncertain the destiny of men is … A biography makes it possible to pay more attention to chance, to the event, to chronological sequence; it alone can give the historian a sense of the time through which people actually lived.187 Above all, Le Goff noted, biography was a necessary narrative. He was concerned, however, about the ‘deeply reactionary and intellectually stifling biography’ that some were writing displayed ‘such ignorance of advances in historical thought and its new methods and directions’: What distresses me about … current … historical biographies is that so many of them are purely and simply a return to traditional biography, superficial and anecdotal, boringly chronological, indulging in out-ofdate psychologizing and incapable of revealing the general historical significance of a particular life …188 Once an Annaliste, most of Le Goff’s writing was based on that approach pioneered by Bloch and Braudel, which emphasised long-term social history, ideas, and the conditions of ordinary people. He was heavily influenced by social anthropology, which gave him insights into human relations and ways of thinking. In The Birth of Purgatory (1981), he had shown how the adoption of the doctrine that souls after death spent time in an intermediate state before judgement had wide-reaching social implications. Contemporary admirers of the Annales approach were disapproving of Le Goff’s decision to write biographies of Louis IX of France (1996), who was canonised, and St Francis of Assisi (1999). However, they need not have worried that he himself was reverting to an outmoded form of historical writing: only a third of the Louis book was devoted to a narrative of events; the rest consisted of analysis of cultural dimensions of kingship, religion and family. Similarly, his biography of St Francis of Assisi was not a traditional cradle-to-grave account but rather locating the saint in the collective mental structures of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century feudal work and exploring the social and political changes taking place at the time. He argued that the biography should begin in the spirit of the Annales school, by asking a question; it is an example of l’histoire probleme, or history which tackles a problem.189 The problem was the records of St Louis were produced through a process of memorialisation of a king; he pondered over the production of

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  297 historical memory. He referred to this biography as new biography. He had come to believe that ‘biography offers greater opportunities than any other historical genre for its author to exploit the resources of historical writing’. Like many other historians, he added biography and microhistory to his other ways of doing history. These various ways of adapting and developing the microbiographical approach of the Italian and Iceland schools raise the issue of whether historians have misused microhistory, as Magnússon has argued. He complained that historians insisted on contextualising their microhistories. This has been a criticism implicit from the outset of the wider adoption of microhistoria. Historians have also stood on its head the original microhistorical aim of Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi, Eduardo Grendi and Carlo Poni of ‘normal exception’ by moving outside beyond small units and how people conducted their lives within them. As Trivellato noted, In their historiographical reflections and empirical studies, Italian microhistorians repeatedly grappled with the challenge of how to conceive of the relationship between micro- and macro-scales of analysis. But they never outlined a uniform and coherent theory.190 Others in their wake have inverted the original method: the concrete reality of the small-scale life has led to generalizations and the consideration of social mentalities. Historians like Ginzburg had remained fellow travellers because this work fulfils the fundamental historical principle of empiricism: it ‘meant [however] tackling the hardest questions in all sciences humaines: questions of proof and demonstration, questions of how we arrive at our generalizations’.191 Historians have not approached their research as microhistorians; they are historians who have added and adapted microhistory to their biographical toolkit.192

Notes 1 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘High and Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Past and Present, vol. 73 (1976), pp. 28–41; with Marco Ferrari, ‘La colombara ha aperto gli occhi’, Quaderni storici, vol. 38 (1978), pp. 631–639, published in English as ‘The Dovecote Has Opened Its Eyes’, in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, trans. Eren Branch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 11–19. Saccardino had been a buffoon to the grand Duke of Tuscany and the Azanini of Bologna. 2 Cited in David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (eds.), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 347. 3 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Some Questions Addressed to Myself’, International Balzan Prize Foundation Forum, Rome, 18 November 2010, https://www.balzan.org/ en/prizewinners/carlo-ginzburg/rome-forum--ginzburg, accessed 10 October 2021.

298  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory 4 Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2014). 5 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (London: Routledge, 1976). 6 Ginzburg, ‘Some Queries Addressed to Myself’, p. 14. 7 James S. Amelang, ‘Honored Citizens and Shameful Poor: Social and Cultural Change in Barcelona, 1510–1714’, (PhD, History Department, Princeton University 1981). 8 James Amelang et Danièle Tosato-Rigo, ‘Nine Questions for James S. Amelang’, Études de lettres [En ligne], nos. 1–2 (2016 mis en ligne le 01 mai 2019), http://journals.openedition.org/edl/888; accessed 5 October 2020. 9 Card. J. Ratzinger, ‘Le ragioni di un’apertura’, L’apertura degli Archivi del Sant’Uffizio Romano (Roma, 22 gennaio 1998), Rome 1998, p. 185. 10 In 2000 Pope John Paul apologized for the sins of Roman Catholics made in the name of their faith, including abuses during the Inquisition, a systematic crackdown by church officials to defend doctrinal orthodoxy by targeting Catholics suspected of being heretics, witches or others considered of dubious faith, including Muslims and Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Agostino Borromeo estimated that 1 percent of the 125,000 trials of suspected heretics in Spain ended in execution; 5.7 percent of the more than 13,000 people tried before church tribunals in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century were condemned to death. 11 Vatican downgrades Inquisition toll, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/5218373/ns/ world_news/t/vatican-downgrades-inquisition-toll/#.Xpnb-C-r31K, accessed 18 April 2020. 12 Cited by P. Zambelli, ‘From Menocchio to Piero Della Francesca: The Work of Carlo Ginzburg’, The Historical Journal, vol. 28, no. 4 (December 1985), p. 984. 13 Zambelli, ‘From Menocchio to Piero Della Francesca’, p. 994. 14 William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature. Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 248–250. 15 William Eamon, ‘With the Rules of Life and an Enema’: Leonardo Fioravanti’s Medical Primitivism’, in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. J.V. Field and Frank A.J.L. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 29–44. 16 David Gentilcore, ‘Caught between Unorthodox Medicine and Unorthodox Religion: Revisiting the Case of Costantino Saccardini, Charlatan-Heretic’, in Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft, ed. Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and Raisa Maria Toivo (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 57; and Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See his broader views of the strengths and weaknesses of microhistory: David Gentilcore, ‘The Ethnography of Everyday Life’, in Early Modern Italy, 1550– 1796, Short History of Italy, ed. J. Marino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 188–205. 17 Carlo Ginzburg, I Benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983) with a foreword by Eric Hobsbawm. Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces. True False Fictive, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press 2012), pp. 202–203.

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  299 1 8 Zambelli, ‘From Menocchio to Piero Della Francesca’, p. 986. 19 Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Hutchinson Radius, 1990 f.p. Guilos EinadiI, 1989). 20 Anne Jacobson Schutte, ‘Carlo Ginzburg’, Journal of Modem History, vol. 48 (June 1976), p. 307. 21 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xix. 22 Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, p. 204. This section was first published as Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory, Two or Three Things that I Know about it’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 20 (1993), pp. 12–13. 23 Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, p. 203. 24 Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, p. 213. 25 David Levine and Subedeh Vahed, ‘Ginzburg’s Menocchio: Refutations and Conjectures’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, vol. 34, no.68 (2001), pp. 437–464. 26 Ginzburg, The Night Battles, p. 45. 27 Ginzburg, The Worm and Cheese, p. 120. 28 Sigurd̄ur Gylfi Magnússon, ‘The Singularization of History: Social History and Microhistory within the Postmodern State of Knowledge’, Journal of Social History, vol. 36 (Spring 2003), pp. 701–735. 29 Magnússon, ‘The Singularization of History’, p. 709. 30 Jill Lepore, ‘Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography’, Journal of American History, vol. 88 (June 2001), pp. 131–132. 31 Sigurd̄ur Gylfi Magnússon, ‘What Is Microhistory?’, History News Network, (5 July 2006), http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/23720, accessed 26 October 2021. 32 Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, p. 213 33 Ginzburg, The Worms and Cheese, p. 106. The discussion of other exceptional cases is on pp. 106–119. 34 Schutte, ‘Carlo Ginzburg’, p. 307. 35 Edward Muir, ‘Observing Trifles’, in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe. Selections from Ouadenii Storici, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, trans. Eren Branch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. xxii. 36 James Amelang et Danièle Tosato-Rigo, ‘Nine Questions for James S. Amelang’, Études de lettres [En ligne], nos. 1–2 (2016 mis en ligne le 01 mai 2019), http://journals.openedition.org/edl/888; accessed 5 October 2020. James S. Amelang, ‘Review of The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Carlo Ginzburg. trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi. London: Routledge, 1976’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 40, no. 1, Special Fortieth Anniversary Issue (Spring, 2009), p. 32. 37 Amelang, ‘Review The Cheese and the Worms’, pp. 31–34. 38 Stanley Aronowitz, ‘Literature as Social Knowledge: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Re-emergence of Human Sciences’, in Bakhtin in Contexts: Across the Disciplines, ed. Amy Mandelker (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), p. 122. 39 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xxiv. 40 Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France 1500–1640. An Essay in Historical Psychology, trans. F.E. Hallmark (London, Edward Arnold, 1975). See also Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). 41 Georges Duby and Robert Mandrou, A History of French Civilization, trans. James Blakely Atkinson (London: Random House, 1964, f.p. 1958). 42 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xxx. 43 Amelang and Tosato-Rigo, ‘Nine Questions for James S. Amelang’.

300  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory 4 4 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. 121. 45 Sigurd̄ur Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijártó, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 6–9. For a discussion of the distinctions. 46 Magnússon, ‘The Singularization of History’, pp. 791–735; and ‘The Life Is Never Over: Biography as a Microhistorical Approach’, in The Biographical Turn: Lives in History, ed. Hans Renders, Binne de Haan, and Jonne Harmsma (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 42–52. 47 Alan Munslow, Deconstructing History (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 25–26, 41–44 and 62–66. 48 See a related discussion: Nigel Hamilton, ‘Biography as Corrective’, in Biographical Turn, ed. Renders, de Haan, and Harmsma, pp. 15–30. 49 Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography. Approaches from History, Microhistory and Life Writing (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013). Binne de Haan, Van kroon tot bastaard. Biografie en het individuele perspectief in de geschiedschrijving [From Prince to Pauper. Biography and the Individual Perspective in Historiography] (Groningen: Groningen University Press, 2015). Marijke Huisman, ‘Life Writing in the  Netherlands’, The European Journal of Life Writing, vol. 4 (2015), R19–R26. 50 http://www.rug.nl/research/biografie-instituut/, accessed 25 October 2021. 51 Renders and de Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography, p. 9. 52 Sigurd̄ur Gylfi Magnússon, ‘Postscript’ in Magnússon and Szijártó, What Is Microhistory?, pp. 147–159. He invokes others to this view, including Brad S. Gregory, ‘Is Small Beautiful? Microhistory and the History of Everyday Life’, History and Theory, vol. 38 (February 1999), pp. 100–110. 53 Magnússon, ‘Postscript’, p. 149. 54 Magnússon, ‘Postscript’, p. 150. 55 Magnússon, ‘Postscript’, p. 148. 56 Matti Peltonen, ‘Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro–Macro Link in Historical Research’, History and Theory, vol. 40, no. 3 (2001), p. 350. Giovanni Levi, ‘On Microhistory’, in New Perspectives in Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 93–113. 57 Lepore, ‘Historians Who Love Too Much’. 58 Magnússon, ‘Postscript’, p. 158. 59 Francesca Trivellato, ‘Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory’, French Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 33, no. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 122–134. 60 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. x. 61 Lynn Hunt, ‘French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the  Annales’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 21, no. 2, Twentieth Anniversary Issue (April 1986), p. 210. 62 Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982, f.p. 1942), esp. pp. 1–18, 491–501. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973, f.p. 1924), esp. pp. 15–24, 409–429. 63 Schutte, ‘Carlo Ginzburg’, p. 300. 64 Hutton, ‘The History of Mentalities’, pp. 237–259. 65 Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1976). Jean Glenisson, ‘France’, in International Handbook of Historical Studies: Contemporary Research and Theory, ed. Georg G. Iggers and Harold T. Parker (Westport, CT, 1979), pp. 175–192.

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  301 66 Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–2014 (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). 67 Karl Appuhn, ‘Microhistory’, in The Encyclopaedia of European Social History, vol. 1, ed. Paul Stearns (New York: Scribner’s, 2001), pp. 105–112. 68 Burke, The French Historical Revolution. Janmesh Kokate has been the editor of Annales committee from 2003 to the present. Philip Daileader and Philip Whalen (eds.), French Historians 1900–2000: New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. xxi–xxii. 69 G.R. Elton and R.W. Fogel, Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 70 Maurice Aymard, ‘The Annales and French Historiography (1929–72)’, The Journal of European Economic History, vol. 1 (1972), pp. 491–511. J. H. Hexter, ‘Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien …,’ The Journal of Modern History, vol. 44 (1972), pp. 480–539. 71 Stoianovich, French Historical Method, p. 235. 72 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, f.p. 1949), p. 21. 73 Lynn Hunt, ‘French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 21, no. 2, Twentieth Anniversary Issue (April 1986), pp. 212. 74 Stoianovich, French Historical Method, p. 235; Hunt, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm’, p. 211. 75 Ulysses Santamaria and Anne M. Bailey, ‘A Note on Braudel’s Structure as Duration’, History and Theory, vol. 23, no. 1 (February, 1984), p. 78. 76 Fernand Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée’, in On History, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 32–34. Braudel, The Mediterranean, p. 21. 77 Hunt, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm’, pp. 211, 214. 78 Fernand Braudel, Out of Italy, 1450–1650 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1991, f.p. 1974). 79 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes on French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 2009, f.p. 1983), p. 25. 80 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: George Brazuler, 1978). Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York: George Brazuler, Inc., 1979). 81 Georges Duby, The Knight, The Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, trans. B. Bray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 800–802. 82 Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, pp. 206–207. Pioneering British and French microhistories preceded Ginzburg’s book but did not discuss the methodology. For example, Richard Gough, The History of Myddle (Folio Society, 1983). 83 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Territory of the Historian, vol. 1, trans. Ben and Sian Reynolds (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979, f.p. 1973), p. 14. 84 Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, p. 202. 85 Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: from Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), p. 108. 86 Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C Tedeschi (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989, f.p. 1979), ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’ pp. 96–125. 87 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, ‘Preface to the Italian edition’, pp. xxvii–xxviii.

302  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory 88 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xxvii. 89 Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, p. 202. 90 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xxx. 91 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xx. 92 Quoted by Schutte, ‘Carlo Ginzburg’, p. 304. 93 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, ‘Preface to the Italian edition’, pp. xxvii–xxviii. 94 Trivellato, ‘Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory’, pp. 122–134. Magnússon and Szijártó, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice. 95 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. xiii. 96 Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It’, p. 26. 97 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 258. 98 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 257. 99 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 258. 100 Patrick Hutton, ‘The History of Mentalities’, p. 3. 101 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 260. 102 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 3. 103 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, pp. 92, 96. 104 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 4. 105 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, pp. 53, 63. 106 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 100. 107 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, pp. 18–19. 108 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 262. 109 Levi, ‘On Micro-History’, pp. 93–113. 110 Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black, ‘“Being speculative is better than to not do it at all’: An Interview with Natalie Zemon Davis’, Itinerario, vol. 39, no. 1 (April 2015), p. 9. 111 Natalie Davis was a consultant for Retour de Martin Guerre, a French film which Daniel Vigne directed in 1982. There was a Hollywood version, Sommersby, in 1983 and a musical in 1993. Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941). 112 Roitman and Fatah-Black, interview with Natalie Zemon Davis’. 113 See Maria Lucia G. Pallares-Burke, The New History. Confessions and Conversations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 68–69. 114 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 4. 115 Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins. Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 116 Jill Ker Conway and Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Feminism and a Scholarly Friendship’, in Minds of our Own: Inventing Feminist Scholarship in Canada and Quebec, 1966–76, ed. Wendy Robbins, Meg Luxton, Magrit Eichler and Francine Descarries (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), p. 82. 117 Conway and Davis, ‘Feminism and a Scholarly Friendship’, p. 82. 118 Conway and Davis, ‘Feminism and a Scholarly Friendship’, p. 84. 119 Conway and Davis, ‘Feminism and a Scholarly Friendship’, p. 82. 120 Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, p. ix. 121 Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, p. viii. 122 Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). Clifford Geertz, ‘Among the Infidels’, New York Review of Books (23 March 2006). 123 Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Hill and Wang, 2006), pp. 12–13. 124 Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, p. 5.

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  303 1 25 Trivellato, ‘Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory’, p. 128. 126 Roitman and Fatah-Black, interview with Natalie Zemon Davis. 127 Donna Lee Brien, ‘“Welcome Creative Subversions”: Experiment and Innovation in Recent Biographical Writing’, Text: Journal of Writers and Writing Courses, vol. 18, no. 1. (2014), http://www.textjournal.com.au/april14/ brien.htm, accessed 21 October 2021; and Donna Lee Brien, ‘The Facts Formed a Line of Buoys in the Sea of My Own Imagination: History, Fiction and Speculative Biography’ in Fictional Histories and Historical Fictions: Writing History in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Camilla Nelson and Christine de Matos, special issue no. 28 TEXT Journal of Writers and Writing Courses (April 2015), http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue28/Brien.pdf, accessed 21 October 2021. 128 Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien and Nike Sulway (eds.), Recovering History through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), p. 2. 129 Virginia Woolf, ‘The New Biography’ in 1960 Granite and Rainbow: Essays (London: Hogarth, 1927), p. 155 130 Kiera Lindsey, ‘Boundary-riding in Never Never Land’, review of Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien and Nike Sulwaym (eds.), Recovering History through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives, Text, vol. 22, no. 1 (April 2018), http://www. textjournal.com.au/april18/lindsey_rev.htm, accessed 23 April 2020. Kiera Lindsey, The Convict’s Daughter: The Scandal that Shocked a Colony (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2016), Allen & Unwin will be publishing her second speculative biography, on the colonial artist, Adelaide Ironside, in 2023. 131 Donna Lee Brien, ‘Being Honest about Lying: Defining the Limits of Auto/ biographical Lying’, TEXT: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, vol. 6, no. 1 (April 2002), http://www.textjournal.com.au/ april02/brien.htm, accessed 13 June 2016. 132 Brien, ‘The Facts Formed a Line of Buoys in the Sea of My Own Imagination’: 133 Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, pp. 118, 144. 134 Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, p. 61. 135 Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, p. 106. 136 See Robert Finlay, ‘The Refashioning of Martin Guerre’, The American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 3 (June 1988), pp. 553–571. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘On the Lame’, The American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 3 (June 1988), pp. 559, 565–566. See also Natalie Zemon. 137 Richard D. Brown, ‘Microhistory and the Post-Modern Challenge’, Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 23, no. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 1–20. 138 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, pp. 5–6. 139 For a discussion of the ways in which Davis contextualises and fails to contextualise, see Joseph Tendler, An Analysis of Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre (London: Macat Library, 2017); Cole Bricker, McGill Blogs, 2014, https://blogs.mcgill.ca/hist-399-2014/2014/03/19/the-return-of-martinguerre-reviewed-by-cole-bricker/, accessed 8 January 2021. E. William Monter, Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 14, no. 4 (Winter, 1983), p. 516. Edward Benson, The French Review, vol. 57, no. 5 (April, 1984), pp. 753–754. Donald R. Kelley, Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 2 (Summer, 1984), pp. 252–254. A. Lloyd Moote, The American Historical Review, vol. 90, no. 4 (October 1985), p. 943. David Potter, The English Historical Review, vol. 101, no. 400 (July 1986), pp. 713–714. 140 Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, p. 4. 141 Davis, ‘On the Lame’. 142 Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, p. 5.

304  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory 143 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Proofs and Possibilities: In the Margins of Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre’, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, vol. 37 (1988, f.p. 1984), pp. 113–127. 144 Trivellato, ‘Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory’. 145 Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). 146 George M. Fredrickson, ‘Wise Man’, a review of John Higham, Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture’, New York Review of Books, 28 February 2002 . 147 Alain Corbin, The Life of an Unknown. The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. v & vxi. 148 One of the first books to have global in the title was Hans Kohn, Age of Nationalism: First Era of Global History (1968). 149 Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). Dipesh, Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000). 150 Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), pp. 55–6). Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York/San Diego: Academic Press, 1974, 1980, 1989). Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (London: Routledge, 1993). 151 Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era. 152 Linda Colley interviewed, British Academy Review, no. 28 (Summer 2016 [27 June 2016]), p. 2. 153 Colley interview, p. 23. 154 Richard J. Evans, ‘“Big Books by Blokes about Battles”: Why Is History Still Written Mainly by Men?’, Guardian, 6 February 2016, accessed 23 August 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/06/books-blokesbattles-historywritten-by-men 155 Lynn Hunt and Linda Colley, ‘Is Globalization the New Paradigm?’, University of Essex 2013, https://www.sam-network.org/video/is-globalizationthe-new-paradigm?curation=1973, accessed 7 November 2021. 156 Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era, p. 52. 157 Hunt and Colley, ‘Is Globalization the New Paradigm?’ Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt, It’s a Small World After all’ the Wider World in Historians’ Peripheral Vision’, Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association (1 May 2013), https://www.historians.org/ publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2013/its-a-smallworld-after-all\, accessed 26 September 2021. They examined nearly 60 history departments from those three countries, comprising almost 2,400 historians in total, to assess how much non-Western history is being done in our most prestigious universities. US-based historians do a better job of covering the history of the wider world, while UK-based historians do worse, with Canada being somewhere between the other two. 158 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002). 159 Colley interview, p. 24. 160 Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh. A Woman in World History (London: Harper, 2007). 161 Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, p. xix. 162 Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, p. xix. Alison Alexander, The Ambitions of Jane Franklin. Victorian Lady Adventurer (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2016).

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  305 163 For a discussion of ‘egodocuments’ and their reconception over time, see Michael Mascuch, Rudolf Dekker, and Arianne Baggerman, ‘Egodocuments and History: A Short Account of the Longue Duree’, Historian, vol. 78, no. 1 (Spring 2016), pp. 11–56. 164 Iain McCalman and Paul A. Pickering (eds.), Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 165 Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 2004), p. 3. 166 Lynn Hunt, ‘AHR Round Table. The Self and its History’, The American Historical Review, vol. 119, no. 5 (December 2014), pp. 1576–1586. Neurohistory was the subject of a high-profile panel at the 2014 American Historical Association, and its journal, the American Historical Review devoted an entire issue to neuroscientific methods; Hunt’s is the introduction to this. 167 McCalman and Pickering, Historical Reenactment. 168 Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, ‘History from Within? Contextualizing the New Neurohistory and Seeking its Methods’, History of Psychology, vol. 15, no. 1 (February 2012), pp. 84–99. 169 Julie Evans, ‘Biography and Global History: Reflections on Examining Colonial Governance through the Life of Edward Eyre’ in Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott (Canberra: ANU Press, 2008), pp. 21–39. 170 Brice Cossart, ‘“Global lives”: Writing Global History with a Biographical Approach’, Entremon. UPF Journal of World History, no. 5 (June 2013), pp. 1014. 171 Elizabeth Marsh [published anonymously], The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts, Which Happened in Barbary, in the Year 1756 (London: Printed for C. Bathurst, 1769). 172 Colley Interview, p. 24. See Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, p. xxviii. 173 Megan Marshall, ‘A Life Less Ordinary’, New York Times (16 September 2007). 174 Philip J. Stern, ‘Neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth: Early Modern Empire and Global History’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 1 (March 2009), pp. 120–121. 175 Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, p. 300. 176 Stern, ‘Neither East nor West’, p. 120. 177 Quote from Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, p. 300. Alison Light, Common People. The History of an English Family (London: Fig Tree, 2014). Malcolm Allbrook and Sophie Scott-Brown (eds.), Family History and Historians in Australia and New Zealand: Related Histories (New York and London: Routledge, 2021). 178 For some exceptions see Melanie Nolan, Kin: A Collective Biography of a New Zealand Working Class Family (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2005); Stephen Foster, A Private Empire (Millers Point, NSW: Pier 9, Murdoch Books, 2010); Malcolm Allbrook, Henry Prinsep’s Empire: Framing a Distant Colony (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014); Tanya Evans, Fractured Families: Life on the Margins in Colonial New South Wales (Sydney: New South Publishing, 2016). 179 Stern, ‘Neither East nor West’. 180 Antonio Andrade, ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory’, Journal of World History, vol. 21, no. 4 (December 2010), p. 574. 181 See, for example Amy Stanley, ‘Maidservants’ Tales: Narrating Domestic and Global History in Eurasia, 1600–1900’, American Historical Review, vol. cxxi,

306  Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory no. 2 (April 2016); and Mary C Wilson, ‘The Damascus Affair and the Beginnings of France’s Empire in the Middle East’, in Histories of the Middle East: New Directions, ed. Israel Gershoni, Hakan Erdem and Ursula Wokock (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2022), pp. 63–74. 182 Thomas Cohen, ‘The Macrohistory of Microhistory’, in Thomas Robisheaux ed., Microhistory and the Historical Imagination: New Frontiers, in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 41, no. 1 (2017), p. 67. 183 John-Paul A Ghobrial, ‘Introduction: Seeing the World like a Microhistorian’, Past & Present, vol. 242, issue suppl. 14 on Microhistory and Global History (November 2019), pp. 1–22; Jan de Vries, ‘Playing with Scales: The Global and the Micro, the Macro and the Nano’, Past & Present, vol. 242, issue suppl. 14 (November 2019), pp. 23–36. 184 Francesca Trivellato, ‘Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?’, California Italian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (2011), https:// escholarship.org/uc/item/0z94n9hq, accessed 1 October 2021. 185 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory and Global History’, in The Cambridge World History, vi, The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Merry Wiesner-Hanks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), part II, 446–73. For a unique exception to this, see Magnússon, ‘Far-reaching Microhistory’. 186 Jacques Le Goff, ‘After Annales: The Life as History’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 4489 (14 April 1984), pp. 394, 405. 187 Le Goff, ‘After Annales: The Life as History’, p. 394. 188 Le Goff, ‘After Annales: The Life as History’, p. 394. 189 Le Goff, ‘After Annales: The Life as History’, p. 405. 190 Trivellato, ‘Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?’. 191 Trivellato, ‘Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory’, p. 130. 192 Johnson R. Burke, Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, Lisa A Turner, ‘Towards a Definition of Mixed Methods Research,’ Journal of Mixed Methods Research, vol. 1, no. 2 (2007), p. 113. Charles Teddlie and Abbas Tashakkori, Mixed Methods Research: Contemporary Issues in an Emerging Field, ed. Denzin and Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), p. 286.

Further reading The classics in microhistory have often appeared in national clusters and kinds. This chapter has concentrated on those who have written on early modern Italy (Carlo Ginzburg, and Giovanni Levi) and France (Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Le Roy Ladurie). Among those writing on modern Britain, see Barry Reay, Microhistories: Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England, 1800–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). A number of historians have written microbiographies about colonial and revolutionary America. America: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary 1785–1815 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) and John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story From Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994) Other European classics include Richard Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophesy in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Alf Lüdtke, The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans. William Templer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Late twentieth-century debate over microhistory  307 For considerations of the single case in history, see Johan Galtung ‘Macro-History as Metaphor for Biography: An Essay on Macro and Micro History’, Biography, vol. 13, no. 4 (Fall 1990), pp. 283–299, and Josh Pacewicz, ‘What Can You Do With a Single Case? How to Think About Ethnographic Case Selection Like a Historical Sociologist’, Sociological Methods & Research, vol. 41, no. 3 (2022) pp. 931–962. Historians have been concerned with a range of issues about perspective, space, size and historical distance and the question about whether microbiography should be privileged over context. For the current interest in the relationship between macrohistory and microbiography, see Jan de Vries, ‘Playing with Scales: The Global and the Micro, the Macro and the Nano’ Past & Present, vol. 242, suppl. 14 (November 2019), pp. 23–36; John-Paul A. Ghobrial, ‘Introduction: Seeing the World like a Microhistorian’, Past & Present, vol. 242, issue suppl. 14, November 2019, pp. 1–22; Thomas Robisheaux, ‘Microhistory and the Historical Imagination: New Frontiers’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies vol. 47, no. 1 (2017), pp. 1–6; and Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, ‘Far-reaching Microhistory: The Use of Microhistorical Perspective in a Globalized World’, Rethinking History, vol. 21, no. 3 (2017), pp. 312–341.

8 Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire

Figure 8.1  The life writing phenomenon satirised. Michael Leunig ‘Help me ­doctor. I’ve a book inside me’, cartoon (14 April 2016). Michael Leunig.

Historian’s egohistoire as historiographical intervention: subjectivity and its critique? Charles Manning Hope Clark, one of Australian history’s best-known historians, is said to have given Australians ‘the signature account of their own history’ in six volumes of A History of Australia.1 He himself subsequently became the subject of considerable biographical interest.2 He was anticipating this when he started transferring his extensive archive with letters, journals and diaries to join oral interviews and other accounts in the National Library of Australia from 1988.3 He knew biographers would pursue his story and even left helpful notes amongst his files to ‘assist’ them.4 Furthermore, Clark facilitated matters by writing his own three-volume autobiography for posterity: The Puzzles of Childhood ­ DOI: 10.4324/9780429426391-8

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  309 (1989), The Quest for Grace (1990) and A Historian’s Apprenticeship (1992). The latter was published after his death, having been edited by his widow, Dymphna.5 In a number of places in this record, Clark recorded that in 1938 he had arrived at the railway station at Bonn am Rhein in Germany on the morning after Kristallnacht. He was met by the woman he was to marry, Australian-born Dymphna Lodewyckx, who had enrolled in a PhD in Germany. Dymphna was there on the platform at the Bonn railway station when I stepped off the train early in the morning of 8 November, 1938. We walked in ecstasy up the stairs of the Bonn railway station, out of the darkness below into the light. We were in for a rude shock. It was the morning after ‘Kristallnacht’.6 Of course, ‘Kristallnacht’ actually took place on 9–10 November. In the Quest for Grace Clark remembered Glass was everywhere on the footpath. The windows of Jewish shops had been broken, and their goods scattered over the pavement and the road. There were trucks with men in uniform standing in the tray. These men with guns, these men who looked as though they would never be complete unless they had a whip in their hands, were an epitome of evil. How had they risen to power in one of the most civilised countries in the world?7 Elsewhere he recalled that the storm-troopers had destroyed Jewish shops, Jewish businesses and the synagogues. Burned them and so on … I saw the fruits of evil, of human evil, before me there on the streets of Bonn.8 Clark first started to record his ‘Kristallnacht’ experience four decades after the event.9 Thereafter he retold his Kristallnacht story a number of times on radio, on television and in newspapers and then in his autobiography.10 These events, he argued, had created the ‘vision in my breast’, an epiphany, to write his magnum opus history; it was ‘conceived by the experience of seeing evil on the morning after ‘Kristallnacht’ in Germany’ and he later added also ‘of standing in front of the Madonna in Cologne Cathedral’.11 It transpired some years after his death, however, that Clark was not actually present in Germany in early November 1938. In 2007, in an article published in the Monthly, one of his biographers, Mark McKenna, revealed that Clark did not reach Nazi Germany until a fortnight after Kristallnacht.12 In fact, Dymphna did witness the broken glass and smoking synagogues

310  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire on the morning of 10 November 1938 and she wrote to Clark from Bonn describing it. Clark had appropriated her experience. McKenna argued that Clark did not appropriate her feelings, however. He did not doubt that what Clark learnt of the pogrom and what he saw of its aftermath a few weeks later had the profound impact he always claimed and, so, ‘In this sense, there is no fabrication’. He created himself as a myth, cultivating a theatrical persona of the people’s priest and sage, telling history as parable. And as the Kristallnacht epiphany reveals, the moral of the parable always mattered more than the facts.13 McKenna devoted a chapter to ‘remembering Kristallnacht’ in his prizewinning biography of Clark, An Eye for Eternity (2011). He stressed that Clark’s telling of the event was ‘in the context of autobiography, a notoriously imperfect and fraught enterprise at the best of times’.14 The meaning of the experience looms larger in Clark’s biography over time. McKenna argued that Clark’s experience of Kristallnacht was critical to explaining his life and work ‘for it sent him on a journey to seek an understanding of the human condition’.15 He observed that ‘Clark’s untruth was the most revealing parable of all’. According to this account, the mixing up of dates does not matter. Another of Clark’s biographers, Brian Matthews, made similar points, noting that when Clark met with Dymphna they had discussed the pogrom of the night of 9–10 November. His diary entry for 25 November 1938 recorded his seeing evidence in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, which was still shockingly visible, and it was explicit and confronting enough to scar his sensibilities and live in his memory … With his capacity for imaginative reconstruction and his acute sensitivity to emotional ambience and atmosphere, what he saw of its immediate aftermath was for him quite as shattering as the original event had been for Dymphna and others who had experienced it on the night of 10 November 1938.16 Others were less forgiving, however; they argued that they could see a broader pattern in Clark’s professional and private lives. After his death, Clark’s publisher at Melbourne University Press, Peter Ryan, took up the cudgels to critique Clark as a fraud both personally and professionally.17 Ryan argued that people—including himself—would not publicly criticise Clark while he was alive, out of respect. A publisher had good reason; Ryan castigated the historical profession’s ‘dereliction’ of duty for not to have robustly criticised Clark’s work at the time.18 After Clark’s death, Ryan recorded his criticism of him in a series of periodical articles, focusing especially of the latter volumes of A History of Australia.19 Ryan’s own

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  311 memoir devoted a chapter to the Clark saga.20 Again the incident took on wider significance as a window to understanding Clark’s historical writing, which tended to regard Australian history as a great tragedy, and, being a Dostoyevsky devotee, as being fundamentally concerned with spirituality.21 His theme was how Catholicism, Protestantism and the Enlightenment were engaged in a struggle for Australia’s soul. It was a homosocial European soul that largely excluded women and Indigenous Australians. He focused on a number of individuals with tragic flaws, such as the wealthy and powerful European pioneers to Australia, John MacArthur and William Wentworth. Others emphasised his tendency to myth and exaggeration, suggesting he was a novelist at heart. Recently, Doug Munro has examined the debate in forensic detail, in History Wars: The Peter Ryan–Manning Clark Controversy (2021), weighing in on Clark’s side.22 For our purposes, the Clark saga is indicative of a number of developments in the historiography of historian’s autobiography and life writing more widely. First, as suggested above, historians have long used autobiographies or egodocuments, that is all texts centred on the life and experience of the person generating them, as sources, rarely as ‘facts’, as much as evidence for mindsets. As the Clark saga was being discussed in Australia, the Virginian historian Allan Megill was pointing out, later accounts of memories of past events more generally are not primary evidence for the events they describe, but they are primary evidence for states of mind about those events.23 Interestingly, it is rare that an historian’s life writing is subjected to the detailed consideration that Clark’s was, which revealed his discrepancies of ‘memory’. He was controversial and his work attracted inspection. This was partly due to his celebrity status abetted by a widening range of heroes and an interest in their backgrounds and family history.24 Clark was what is known ‘down under’ as a ‘tall poppy’. He was a public intellectual who was the subject of a 1988 stage production ‘Manning Clark—the Musical’. The History Wars of the Peter Ryan–Manning Clark controversy was also part of a wider History Wars involving the politicisation of Australian history, which Stuart Macintyre and Clark’s granddaughter Anna Clark, have analysed.25 Clark was associated with the Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating’s push for republicanism with his work coming under scrutiny for its ‘negative view of Australian history’. Allegations resurfaced that he had been a covert ‘agent of influence’ for the Soviet Union.26 Any controversy about his memory lapses is relatively unimportant for it has not tarnished Clark’s place in Australia’s imaginary Hall of Fame amongst his supporters. Secondly, McKenna’s analysis of Clark’s myth-making can be related to wider analyses in autobiographical writing. Many aspects of Clark’s autobiographical writing was in code; his widow Dymphna was perplexed and devastated about how she was portrayed in his diaries when she read them after his death.27 As mentioned above, Clark was taken with Russian Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s religious and philosophical literature.

312  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire Dostoevsky’s code has been described as a polyphony, containing a variety of conflicting ideological voices.28 Clark’s diaries and his histories were also ‘coded’. So they had a strong marriage, Dymphna was loved, but he had affairs over which he was conflicted. Matthews has argued ‘Clark was always seeking forgiveness from two great figures in his life - Christ and Dymphna - and he probably never found it’.29 Behind a mask, he was an anguished soul. He was reticent about revealing much of himself in his published autobiographies, particularly about the sexual matters. His autobiographies, then, were masked too. Thirdly, while historians have always used autobiographies and personal testimony as sources, by the end of the twentieth century they had begun to focus on themselves and turned to writing about themselves in significant numbers.30 Clark’s autobiographies are, then, part of a wider episode in historiography of the rise of egohistoire, which Jeremy A. Popkin and Jaume Aurell have considered in detail.31 The rise of egohistoire is usually credited to Pierre Nora’s 1987 call to historians to write about themselves and create an historian’s intellectual historiographical movement: [t]he exercise consists in shedding light on one’s own story as one would do the story of another, in trying to apply to oneself, each in his style and with the methods that are dear to him, the cold, encompassing, explanatory gaze that we have so often cast on others’.32 So, Clark was in good company in writing autobiography at the time he did. More generally, there was a renewed interest in writers’ lives and their own reports of their lives. A concern with the author and their relationship with their subject has been a matter of life and death, or rather of resurrection. Roland Barthes is said to have played an important role in the ‘death of the author’ by way of an essay of the same title he wrote in 1967.33 In turn, Barthes’ perspective was challenged, to the point that, by 1992, it is said that the author had ‘returned’.34 Once swept off the literary stage, particularly with postmodernists decreeing the ‘death of the subject’, it had reappeared.35 And, in the process, the white male western autobiographical canon that Sidonie Smith has suggested shaped autobiographical practices had changed. Historians, with their contextual and contingent lenses, have considered more widely some of the changes in life writing. Until recently historian’s life writing ‘othered’ women’s, working-class and indigenous voices.36 The recent democratization of life writing, including of historians, is said to have liberated identity, such as race, class, gender and sexuality, from previous constraints as the dominance of the symbolic white, male hero broke down.37 During the course of the twentieth century, historians became increasingly aware of their own subjectivity, the inverse of the growing disillusionment with simple objectivity, which Peter Novick has characterised as ‘That Noble Dream’ which has been lost.38 The gradual acceptance of subjectivity can be detected in the use of the first-person singular pronoun.39 At one time relatively few historians used the first-person singular pronoun in

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  313 academic writing.40 The thinking was that, by avoiding self-referencing, writers would be more detached and objective. Thus, a century ago style manuals, like Strunk and White, advised avoiding self-reference, for it eliminated the role of the author’s ‘mood and temper’ in interpretations.41 More recently, a number of style manuals, such as that penned by James C. Raymond, have suggested that avoiding first-person pronouns is ‘a rhetorical ploy … [designed to create] the appearance of objectivity’, as someone who simply presents the facts in accordance with Leopold von Ranke’s ‘ideal of objectivity’.42 Writing in first person and writing one’s own autobiography are matters, however, over which historians are divided.43 In 1999 Michael Dintenfass argued that some historians construed ‘the rise of selfrevelation among historians as progress, an enlightened recognition of the close interplay between the observer of the past and the past under observation’ while others saw ‘in the same propensity to self-expression a descent into self-indulgence’.44 There is starting to be some critique of historian’s autobiography and some historians have disparaged life writing. Nigel Hamilton and Renders, among others, have protested that too few life writing accounts are peer-reviewed or critically assessed. They have gone further, asserting that life writing itself is ahistorical.45 Hamilton and Renders have warned about ‘the dangers of unbridled autobiographical outpourings in our society’. They are adamant that memoirs should not be confused with biography, or biographical studies. They are concerned that recent life writing clouds established distinctions and the implications of that. There are traditionally recognised genres: biography is written by someone else, autobiography is ‘focused on the self’, while memoir is focused ‘on others’.46 All three are long-standing.47 Distinctions between kinds of life writing, however, began to fray during the twentieth century.48 In 1960 Roy Pascal argued that clean lines were hard to draw between kinds of life-writing: ‘there is no autobiography which is in some respect a memoir and no memoir which is not without autobiographical information’.49 Pascal proposed there was a difference based on standpoint. Autobiography and memoir could be distinguished from both fiction and biography because the author, narrator and central protagonist ‘must be identical’.50 Hamilton and Renders want to retain the distinctions, especially between third-person biography and first-person reportage, whether of self or others, arguing that life writing is the bad boy (or girl) of modern literature. It is a genre invented in the late twentieth century in ten parts: four parts entertainment, four parts narcissism, two parts self-help. It has nothing to do with biography. It cannot be quoted by biographers, save in assessing the self-image of the author, since it is unverifiable.51 In their recent collection on Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies (2020), Renders and David Veltman noted the

314  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire international prevalence of life writing which they characterised as ‘deceptive biography’. Hamilton devoted his chapter in the collection to that issue, ‘Truth, Lies and Fake Truth’ holding ‘poststructuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism’ undermined truth; several other contributors, including Elsbeth Etty and Carl Rollyson, also addressed this issue.52 They suggested that life writing failed the historian’s empirical test. While most autobiographies claim to be true, life writing rarely involves critical evaluation of the sources. Indeed Jill Ker Conway noted that ‘virtually the only prose narratives which are accorded the suspension of disbelief today are the autobiographers’ attempts to narrate the history of real life’.53 Thus, the battlelines of a debate have been drawn. On the one side is the assumption that autobiography is truth personified. Philippe Lejeune famously elaborated on a ‘autobiographical pact’ between the author and the reader over the issue of truthfulness.54 In his 1990 consideration of Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (1990), Timothy Dow Adams muddies the lines by distinguishing between ‘narrative truth’ and ‘historical truth’, similar to the distinctive between myth and truth above.55 He and others were of the view that that the lies, fictions and myths themselves were revealing, again as has been suggested in the Clark saga.56 On the other side, Renders and Hamilton are anxious about the fabrications themselves. Like the Australian Keith Windschuttle, they have worried that If we … disown a realist and empiricist account of history, anything goes. We would have no means of distinguishing between history and myth, between biography and hagiography, between eyewitness reports and fairy tales.57 This chapter is concerned with three historiographical issues involved in historians’ direct engagement with and navigation of the life writing phenomenon. So I consider historians’ analyses of life-writing codes over time, the rise of historians’ egohistoire and the suggestion that historians’ autobiographies are too often used as privileged sources for historiography and not sufficiently scrutinised. Secondly, historians have created a particular kind of egohistoire or, as Aurell has put it, historians’ autobiographies are historiographical interventions, too. Aurell concentrated on the model which Carolyn Steedman established with her Landscape for a Good Woman (1986). She famously said ‘I want what I have written to be called history, and not autobiography’.58 Historians in her wake whose autobiographies set out to chart significant shifts in the wider historiographical landscape in the postwar period by way of their personal histories include Geoff Eley, Natalie Z. Davis, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Dominick LaCapra, Gerda Lerner, William H. Sewell Jr., John Elliott and Sheila Fitzpatrick.59 Steedman and Fitzpatrick in particular interrogate their memories. Having said that, finally, I argue, that when we examine historians’ autobiographical practices carefully, we find that, while most of

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  315 historian’s autobiography is neo-hagiography in the sense that it is life writing which tends to hold its subject in undue and uncritical reverence, there are significant exceptions that Hamilton and Renders and others have overlooked.

Historians consider clusters, codes and canons in life writing: the breakdown of the symbolic white male hero We have already discussed the central role of context in the way historians have approached various kinds of biography. The distinctive characteristics of historians’ consideration of autobiographies or memoirs as a genre has been the extent to which they have contextualised it. Literary theorists tend to approach autobiography differently to historians as Jennifer Jensen Wallach has shown; she discerns overlap but differing emphasises. On the one hand is the ‘highly eclectic and jargon-laden body of autobiographical “theory”’ of literary analyses. On the other, historians’ believe above all in a ‘real extra-textual past and [share a] keenness to fight fiction’.60 She emphasized that The historian is more interested in what a piece of autobiographical writing reveals about a particular time and place. The literary theorist is more inclined to generalize about what kinds of things memoirs, regardless of their historical situation, might reveal about literature, or the human condition, or about the construction of the self, or about any number of topics.61 Furthermore, Wallach argued that literary critics exerted ‘disciplinary proprietorship of the memoir’ by their sheer interest in the genre, with life writing or ‘autobiography and memoir studies’ being ‘more or less subsumed by literary studies’.62 For instance, Margaretta Jolly edited the two-volume Encyclopedia of Life Writing in 2002, with ‘an obvious literary emphasis’ focusing on cross-cultural, inter-disciplinary or even trans-­ cultural aspects of life writing.63 Zachary Leader was the General Editor of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, a seven-volume series published by the Oxford University Press between 2018 and 2022, with the first volume analysing life-writing from late Antiquity to the threshold of the Renaissance.64 He is an Emeritus Professor of Literature with a similar approach to Jolly. There were no self-identifying historians included in Richard Bradford’s 2010 Life Writing.65 Leader’s 2015 On Life Writing ‘gathers together fifteen original essays by eminent literary scholars, biographers, poets, philosophers, novelists and an [a solitary] historian to give a sampling of the types of writing the genre encompasses’.66 So, while their interests overlap, literary critics were concerned with the development of modern identity or self-knowledge, especially its facilitators, and the changing marketplace of publishing and bookselling. Emerging life writing studies have emphasized

316  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire a range of lenses through which to understand a writer’s life experiences and work, including gender, race and class. Historians shared some of those ‘literary life writing’ concerns but anticipated many, having seamlessly during the twentieth century advocated primary document analysis and questioning the purpose, message and audience of any text as part of their empirical method.67 They have long been attuned to the possibility of fraudulent sources, as J. B. Bury set out to address with ‘scientific biography’.68Autobiographies and memoirs are just one more kind of source for a historian to contextualise and historicise. This contextualisation is exemplified in the work of historian and feminist biographer Jill Ker Conway who argued that life writing was bound in the ‘prison of history and culture’ with its forms and stylistic patterns varying ‘profoundly over time’. She asserted that analysis of this cultural history was critical to understanding the patterns of life writing.69 Culture gave subjects ‘an inner script by which we live our lives’ and write narratives.70 Conway concentrated, then, on the code underlying the canon. She viewed life writing of all kinds as social documents—intermingling author, subject and object.71 She did not draw a clear distinction between biography and autobiography; it was all life writing to her, belonging to history as well as to literature. In a series of publications in the 1990s, she teased out an universal Western European script, which included ‘white settler societies that are its offshoots’. However, she went further in a series of surveys to show that women’s memoirs in Africa, Asia, Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand as well as the United States largely shared this script.72 As a liberal feminist historian, Conway focused on gendered differences when she considered this universal Western European autobiographical and life-writing script. While the genre’s forms and stylistic patterns were contingent and varied ‘profoundly over time’ its variations constituted ‘a kind of history of the way we understand the self’, the theoretical categories ‘defining a genre may be fixed’.73 She argued that theoretical issues remained important, with male and female life scripts being fundamental. For instance, Freud and Jung inscribed the conventional male and female life scripts as thoroughly into their practice as did those writing in classical antiquity. Conway judged the linguistic conventions of life writing as subsuming the female within the male, resulting in a male-dominant infrastructure or archetypical life script for memoir and biography. This conviction meant that her main research question in history became, as she put it, ‘[h]ow can she construct the life history of someone other than a sex object whose story ends when soundly mated?’74 The overarching pattern for life writing derived from adaptations of the story of the epic hero in classical antiquity which cast life as an odyssey. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Confessions (1781), reworked this model into a new template for male life history, based on the secular hero fashioning his life as ‘an odyssey, a journey through many trials and tests, which the hero must surmount alone through

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  317 courage, endurance, cunning and moral strength’.75 Conway surveyed a series of ‘archetypal male biographical epics’; those by Benjamin Franklin (1818), Frederick Douglass (1845, 1855, 1881) and Henry Ford (1923).76 Whereas the symbolic male hero’s life changed over time, until relatively recently the life of a powerful woman was regarded not as admirable but rather as monstrous. Western culture rendered women extraneous to two core areas of life: politics and theology. Nevertheless, the presence of women in monasteries and the gradual increase in the education of girls led to calls for their political and cultural rights, gradually undermining the patriarchal obstacles to their telling their stories. Once autobiographies were a genre as a primarily Western phenomenon written by significant educated men.77 Of late, then, as a result of women’s expanded agency and their growing literary consciousness, their memoir writing was responsible for the breakdown in the symbolic male hero dominance in biographical scripts. Conway’s discussion of a universal script and its long-enduring efficacy did not blind her to variations in and from that script. She argued that memoirs were ‘invaluable documents for the historian for the patterns of culture’ that they delineated, as well as for their contribution to the analysis of universal scripts. While she was analysing patterns in life writing, Conway was also practising the art. She wrote her autobiography, dividing it up into a trilogy. Her first, best-selling book The Road from Coorain (1989), is an account of her childhood in a remote sheep station in the Western Plains of New South Wales in Australia and her journey to being accepted into Harvard’s doctoral program in the United States of America.78 It was on the New York Times’ best-seller list for 54 weeks and the Australian Public Broadcasting Service produced a film based on Conway’s autobiography in 2002. Less well-known were the second and third volumes. In True North, published in 1994, she argued that, as an Australian woman who had come of age in the 1950s, she could not have had an interesting career as a young woman; she ‘had to get away from Australia’.79 Conway’s decision to go to North America was decided on professional grounds after having exhausted ‘all the possibilities of interesting careers in Australia, discovering, one by one, that they were not open to women’.80 However, being refused entry, for instance, into the Australian foreign service allowed her to ‘view life from a different perspective’ over her many years living in the US and Canada.81 A Woman’s Education spans Conway’s decade, from 1975 to 1985, as the first woman president of Smith College, the largest women’s college in the US, a period when, dealing with fashions in scholarship, she had to overcome ‘a conservative faculty and ossified traditions’ in attempting to prepare the young women in her charge for the new realities they would face in the world beyond the campus.82 While Conway distinguished between her work on historicizing the canon and her own autobiography, others have favoured breaking down the auto/biographical distinction. As feminist theory reminds us, the

318  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire personal element is relevant to the broader intellectual agenda.83 The feminist scholar and her experiences are implicated in her scholarship. Both Conway and Natalie Zemon Davis have provided respective accounts of their collaborating to offer the first Women’s Studies course at the University of Toronto in 1971, a personal and a historiographical development’.84 Similarly, rather than attempting to stand aside from her biographical subjects, sociologist and now Director of the Centre for Narrative and Auto/ Biographical Studies (NABS) at the University of Edinburgh, Liz Stanley, has argued that ‘“biography” and ‘autobiography’ are inseparable dimensions of basically the same experience’. She and others began to construct a ‘feminist theory of lifewriting that grapples with subject, author, reader, and the cultural political milieu in which they merge’.85 Stanley argued against the idea that the more information you collect about a subject the closer you are to the truth. Rather than offering a ‘conventional linear “jigsaw”’ model of biography, Stanley viewed research and writing as a relationship. She described biography as a ‘kaleidoscope’ rather than a ‘microscope’.86 Increasingly, feminist biographers have begun to consider their role in the processes they are narrative, and, having contextualised the script intellectually, are often active in restructuring the historical profession, such as in terms of subject matter and gender balance. One historical trend is clear. Elite white males are no longer the sole or paradigm subject of life writing. Diverse autobiography and changing canons were some of the outcomes of the burgeoning of the many forms of social history. Others also teased out other changing cultural scripts beyond gender, such as the interrogation of the whiteness of autobiographical narration. Work has been published on the development of the African American autobiographical genre through a series of ‘linguistic codes’.87 Before the Civil War, black autobiography was ‘the story of a battle between the black self and repressive socio-cultural institutions’, essentially the slave narrative. The slave script produced few accounts. From 1760 to the end of the Civil War in the United States, approximately 100 autobiographies of fugitive or former slaves appeared. After slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, at least 50 former slaves wrote or dictated book-length accounts of their lives. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the WPA Federal Writers’ Project gathered oral personal histories from 2,500 former slaves, whose testimony eventually filled 40 volumes.88 Ironically, as Brett Goodin and others have suggested, a handful of white American sailors taken captive by North African Barbary State pirates also penned narratives of their enslavement during the nineteenth century. These white slaves’ captivity narratives were best-selling and influential. Riley’s account of his captivity, Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, is said to have played an influential role in

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  319 Abraham Lincoln’s thinking on slavery.89 William L. Andrews has argued that the voice of Afro-American autobiography was exercised but, with some rare exceptions, its span was ignored until later in the twentieth century. He considered ninety black American autobiographers and their works between 1865 and 1930. Post-bellum Afro-American autobiographies were ‘much more concerned with the consolidations of power, the institutionalisation of power, and the manipulation of power’.90 They are more middle-class, a genre sometimes described as bourgeois black autobiography. They were neglected because little was known about the authors, with the exception of Booker T. Washington, who, having been born into slavery, became a member of the black elite.91 The postwar transition in the AfroAmerican autobiographical script, black pride and identity, resulted in the outpouring of powerful black-authored autobiographies in the 1960s and 1970s, complemented by the introduction of black studies courses and programs into colleges and universities across America, produced an explosion in the critical attention paid to the subgenre.92 One of the most famous was The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965); journalist Alex Haley interviewed Malcolm X and, after his assassination, completed the collaboration to publication. Attention was given to Haley as well as to the subject. John Edgar Wideman argued that Haley was attempting to satisfy ‘multiple allegiances’ to his subject, the publisher, his editor and to himself.93 Subsequently, Haley went on to publish best-selling Pulitzer-winning Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), which was made into an eight-episode television series viewed by an audience of around 130 million. He took a family story about an African slave ancestor who refused to be called by his slave name ‘Toby’, insisting on his African name ‘Kinte’. Haley had researched this ancestor, Kunta Kinte, an eighteenth-century Gambian who was enslaved and transported to America, explaining in an appendix that he worked in 50-odd archives over 12 years on establishing a narrative based on his family’s ‘oral history’. He also attempted to re-enact his ancestor’s slave ship voyage from Africa to the United States. The family narrative he wrote followed six generations, starting with Kunta Kinte. Haley himself described the book as ‘faction’, ‘a mixture of fact and fiction, arguing that the Blacks who read his book ‘wanted to know who they are [… The] book has touched a strong, subliminal chord’.94 In this regard, his book proved to be controversial. At one point he settled a legal plagiarism allegation admitting that he had lifted some paragraphs from a 1967 novel, The African. Questions were also asked about the archival record; for instance, Kunta Kinte died five years before the birth of Haley’s great, great, great grandmother, Kizzy, although Roots portrays Kizzy as Kinte’s daughter.95 Despite these doubts, Haley’s Roots has been considered a significant contribution to ‘interest of non-academic folk the world over in the Atlantic

320  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire slave trade and the African diaspora’, the genealogy boom, and to ‘experimental biography’, the intersections between auto/biography and fiction.96 Meanwhile a further step toward the personal in terms of authors and autobiography occurred in the 1990s when Paul A. Cimbala and Robert F. Himmelberg responded to their University’s president, Reverend Joseph O’Hara’s call ‘to the university community to devise creative ways to rekindle an awareness of the work and the goals of the men and women of good will who had rallied to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call to action’ by organising a series of conferences. Participants were asked ‘to reflect upon their careers and how their personal experiences might have influenced their approach to scholarship’. This resulted in a 1996 publication, Historians and Race: Autobiography and the Writing of History.97 This was one of the first of many such accounts discussing how autobiographical subjectivity fed into academic scholarship on the history of race.98 Eric Foner was among the white contributors to Historians and Race. A historian of the Reconstruction era, his broader objective had been to include the experiences of a range of previously neglected groups—blacks, women, labourers, and others—in historical accounts. There is also a working-class autobiographical canon. The British historian David Vincent’s comprehensive survey of nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies, memoirs and diaries argued that these men and women life writers cut themselves off from their own communities. They were different and ‘other’.99 In a parallel study, John Burnett gives more weight to the material factors that deprived working-class men and women of the opportunity to write about their life experiences—their work-related fatigue, the pressures and stresses of economic insecurity, and lack of spare time.100 He set out to explain not why a few workers kept diaries, but why more of them did not do so.101 Autobiography has been democratized, and the volume of life writing has expanded greatly, but most autobiographies are not critically analysed.102 Binne de Haan, Hamilton and Renders have noted a flourishing of memoirs: a search on Amazon database for ‘autobiography’ or ‘memoir’ results in 80,000 titles in print.103 Tom Wolfe attributed the memoir boom to the exponential growth in college and university education: 3.4 percent of young people in the UK in 1950 had risen to more than 50 percent by 2010.104 In Reading Autobiography (2001), a critical overview of the genre, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson describe 52 genres of autobiographical writing (including memoir) under the umbrella term ‘life writing’. By the time of the second edition in 2010, they distinguished 60 genres of ‘Life Narrative’.105 There are so many life histories that it would be impossible for a critic to read them all.106 Life writing might be democratic, but those associated with large-scale political movements—second-wave feminism, Black Civil Rights in the United States like Roots, gay and lesbian liberation—especially those that win book prizes or are best-sellers—are more likely to be critically assessed.107 Given the degree of subjectivity of much of the life writing,

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  321

Figure 8.2 Writing his memoirs was one of the ways Napoleon fought the battle for posterity. Napoleon I dictating his memorials to General Gourgaud, St Helena, by Charles Auguste Steuben, painting (1820). Bridgeman Images.

many are simply not verifiable. They are about the author’s memories and feelings. At the same time, often at the publisher’s behest, usually there are no footnotes or scholarly scaffolding which is an obstacle to interrogation.

Historians’ egohistoire and its enemies The genre of historians’ egohistoire is usually dated to Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life and Writings, which appeared posthumously in 1796.108 Gibbon’s literary executor put together autobiographical pieces he

322  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire had written and removed anything that could have been construed as offensive.109 Gibbon, like many of his successors, however, did not discuss his historical practice. There have been hundreds of historians’ autobiographies since Gibbon. We have already considered Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams (1907), in which he discussed how the world changed with the second industrial revolution. While this was important for his historical work, it is not something he connected with wider intellectual currents in the historiography, most of which he thought was unscientific.110 In 2005 Popkin published a study of the egohistoire movement among contemporary historians ‘setting down [of] one’s own story’ from about 1960 until 2005.111 His grandmother, the novelist Zelda Popkin, and his father, the historian of philosophy Richard Popkin, had both written autobiographies. As a historian, he became interested in his professional colleagues’ lives, and although he reached the point at which he no longer wanted to read another historians’ autobiography, he updated his analysis in 2017.112 These published accounts exhibited the usual range ‘from exceptional to abysmal’ and he should know, because his bibliography listed 327 autobiographers whose works he discussed in the text.113 Most of the historians he considered had been born in the 1920s and 1930s and experienced World War Two; the single largest subgroup of historian-memoirists in his survey were European Jews who had been displaced by Nazism. They had had ‘cultural authorisation’ as Holocaust survivors to bear witness. Writing in 2005, Popkin argued that the wave was slowing because the number of professional historians had grown and the ‘disciplinary community has become larger and more anonymous’.114 It was more difficult to be a standout historian ‘celebrity’. Eric Hobsbawm, Peter Gay, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, C. Vann Woodward, Gerda Lerner, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Clark stood out in their various national historiographies in a way contemporary historians do not. Writing in 2005, Popkin thought the wave of historians’ egohistoire was coming to an end. Despite the prediction, the wave continues to grow.115 Some amongst the tsunami of historians; autobiography, like Erik Hobsbawm, used their autobiographies to explore their own identity and contexts.116 Some concentrated upon the craft of writing and were literary bestsellers like Conway.117 They all maintained ‘a single scientific [empirical] method, the systematic application of which leads us to the historical ‘truth”.118 Aurell identified patterns in the constructionist autobiographies: ‘the need to justify their life writing exercise, the fear of revealing too much about a personal life, the use of analytical language, and the search for objectivity’.119 Various canons still operated and, although changed, continued to subsume variation. For instance, in general, women historians have emphasized their feminism and their life writing has been about their reaction to systemic discrimination.120 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese had been the founding director of the Institute for Women’s Studies at Emory University in 1986, where she established the first doctoral programme in

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  323 women’s studies in the United States. Her research was mostly in the life stories of the last generation of black and white women of the Old American South. Her 1996 autobiography, however, said ‘out loud what many women have only whispered: “Feminism is not the story of my life”.’121 She argued that the script in memoirs for elite educated women like herself was feminism. Other aspects, especially class, were more important to her or to working-class women and professionals, single and married mothers– all struggling to live independently and to have families.122 Popkin concluded that Australian historians were early to, and enthusiastic about, the ego-histoire movement or the ‘setting down [of] one’s own story’.123 Australians anticipated Nora’s 1987 egohistoire call. Popkin dated the Australian historians’ memoir bulge from 1982 when collective projects including ‘a volume of professional women’s narratives, The HalfOpen Door, appeared and the four volumes of essays starting with the Victorian History Institute’s 1984 forum in which leading historians R.M. Crawford, Clark and Geoffrey Blainey participated’.124 A ‘series of autobiographical lectures in 1984’ resulted in a publication, and Australian historians’ memoirs thereafter appeared at a rate of more than one a year.125 This Australian egohistoire has largely lacked the ‘theoretical pretensions’ of French égo-histoire. Australians seem to prefer politics to ‘European interests’ in microstoria, poetics, and the theory of biography. Australia has been one of the centres of the institutionalization of life writing, with the 1994 formation of units such as the La Trobe Unit’s for Studies in Biography and Autobiography. In 2004, the newly established Life Writing research Unit of Curtin University launched the Australian peer-reviewed journal Life Writing in the field of autobiography and biography.126 In 2008, the National Centre of Biography was established at the Australian National University which has sponsored work on clio’s lives.127 When he considered Australian historians’ memoirs more specifically in 2007, Popkin argued that ‘[o]n a proportional basis, more historians from Australia than from any other country’ have written ego-histoire: he had identified ‘more than three dozen different’ Australian historians who had written her or his memoirs compared to just 200 United States historians published memoirs.128 Popkin also argued that contemporary Australian historians’ memoirs helped to establish ‘a tradition of first-person writing, a relatively recent development in their own culture’ and that they had greater impact in Australia than groups of other historians elsewhere in other countries. Works by both male and female authors, such as W. K. (Keith) Hancock, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Bernard Smith, Conway, Clark, Ann Moyal, Brij Lal and Inga Clendinnen, constituted a distinctive strain of historical life writing generally and had become major contributions to the national literature.129 This creative non-fiction won major mainstream literary prizes, not simply the specialist history ones. Australian historians’ life writing had a greater impact within society than their contemporaries in France or the United States respectively, according to Popkin, because

324  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire of the literary quality of the work and the ‘high degree of authorial self-consciousness’ in the context of a relatively new sense of Australian cultural identity.130 Australian historians’ autobiography has been methodologically important to the profession beyond the breaking down the methodological divide between history and autobiography. Australian historians’ personal lives and experience challenged received versions of the national past. Popkin argued: Australian historians have used their personal stories to dramatise the issue of Australia’s relationship to Britain and Europe, its ability to define a distinctive national personality, the role of gender in that definition and how Australia might come to terms with its troubled relationship to its Aboriginal population.131 Popkin singled out the trailblazing importance for Australian historians of Hancock’s reflections: his 1954 volume of memoirs, Country and Calling, and his 1976 extended autobiographical essay, Professing History.132 For example, in 1976 Hancock took umbrage at R. G. Collingwood’s position: I found rather more perplexing the assertion made by another philosopher, R.G. Collingwood, that every work of biography is not only non-historical but anti-historical. It seemed to me that Collingwood was hitting below the belt, for he also had published an autobiography … I had applauded his contention that the subject-matter of history is past experience re-enacted in the historian’s mind; but I parted company from him when he went on to argue that human experience is all mind and no body.133 Collingwood, famous for his work on the idea of history, pioneered the idea of autobiography being historiographical, an intellectual discussion of historians’ practices.134 His autobiography written in 1927 and published in 1939 had begun as follows: The autobiography of a man whose business is thinking should be the story of his thought. I have written this book to tell what I think worth telling about the story of mine.135 A second, perhaps larger genre of Australian historians’ autobiographies involve contextualising their lives in their family history. Many historians are more comfortable writing their own lives into family history than they are into the historiography. Certainly, that was the case the biographer historian of historian-autobiographers, Popkin who had turned down invitations to write a ‘full’ autobiography himself:

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  325 I did respond to an invitation from Alan Munslow, editor of the journal Rethinking History, to publish a short piece about my childhood and education (‘History’), but rather than launching me on a longer narrative of my own life, that exercise pointed me in a different direction, one that has also attracted a number of historians and other academics in recent years: a family biography that combines the stories of parents and other relatives with reflections on one’s own experiences and how they have been shaped by the family’s past. My engagement with the International Auto/Biography Association has certainly encouraged me in this direction. I recall a lunch with colleagues at the conference in Hawai’i in 2008 at which everyone at the table was doing some- thing similar.136 Much recent historians’ egohistoire has been in the form of ‘family biography that combines the stories of parents and other relatives with reflections on one’s own experiences and how they have been shaped by the family’s past’.137 In 2015, Graeme Davison observed that family history had emerged from the world of the ‘private hobby’ and, taking on new understandings of genealogy, memory and history, had become a new ‘shared civic endeavour.’138 He pointed to evidence of a remarkable upsurge of interest in family history as popular culture worldwide. He attributed a new willingness to locate our families ‘in the throes of history’, and ‘against the background of their times’. As faith in the grand narratives of civic responsibility class, and national identity has declined, that is accounts informed by liberalism, Marxism, and nationalism, family history has come to promise a deeper sense of who we are. So family history has flourished as disillusionment in grand narratives has developed. And Davison, for one, reluctant to write about himself, was reconciled to do so through family history.139 It is social and therapeutic history rather than intellectual history. Whereas Australians used to take pride in their independence from notions of heredity, favouring the emancipated Australian environment in their depiction of who and what we are, what we now see happening is a turning away from ‘civic, class or national identities’ towards what might be found in ethnic and family loyalties. Jim Davidson suggested that Australian family historians have had a particular tailwind: once the nationalism of the 1960s and 70s made convict ancestors a source of pride—rather than something best passed over in silence—tracing family history became an exploration of involvement in the saga of this country.140 It is underwritten by the massive digitization with huge convict archives online. Previously sceptical of family history,141 Davison was given the task of writing his family’s history by members of his family as ‘he was the

326  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire professional’. The book is about his mother’s family—the Hewetts.142 He interweaves details of his family history into a broader social history. It starts in farmland in Hampshire, England, Jane Austen country, and moves steadily and in quite a leisurely manner through the social history of that region to migration to Australia, John’s widow Jane and her eight children aboard the infamous Culloden onto the goldfields at Castlemaine (1851–1860) and then several emerging branches of the family in different locations in rural Victoria. The linking thread in his family is Wesleyan Methodist belief. He became convinced that life is shaped by family tradition and expectation, not to mention genetics, and that an analysis of the relationship between the familial and the communal pasts was significant.143 Alison Light has suggested a historiographical motivation to historians writing family history, including their own, regarding it as a way of rescuing ordinary folk from historical amnesia. Historians have increasingly been drawn to approaches ‘that emphasised ordinary experience’ and subjective and personal approaches.144 This is history not from above or below but, as Alison Light in her Common People, In Pursuit of My Ancestors has described it, history from within. She said that her first instinct in writing Common People was to find the people who had been missing from past. I wanted not so much to rescue them from ‘the condescension of posterity’—Edward Thompson’s marvellous phrase in The Making of the English Working Class (1963)—but from sheer oblivion.145 Light argued that poverty homogenises and even effaces people; whereas family history gives everybody significance.146 She believed it humanises history’. ‘I hoped that a family history would bridge the gap between the official records and … [those] who had really lived, a man or woman who had once been known and cared for.’147 The ‘mere facts of the census deceive.’148 ‘[P]art of the bridge is local history—the local history always connected to the wider world’ and also allows you to think ‘in terms of generations’—a more natural longitude and latitude than other periodisations.149 Her autobiography was genealogy as a ‘corrective’ to narrative history—the family being more important than the state or religion or occupations or other structures. Light argued that ‘[t]racking all the members of a family over time unsettles assumptions’ about simple universal experience and narratives.150 Families are about basic commonalities which are accessed by way of privileged personal sources.151 She encouraged others to write their family history as public history ‘from inside’.152 Her narrative deliberately puts women at the centre. Indeed, Light’s latest book is about women’s particular relation to ideas to forms of belonging; and women’s contribution to life writing in its different genres and is entitled, Inside History.153 This is aspirational work.

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  327 Historians have followed genealogists’ footsteps in querying people’s memories and despairing at the uncertainty of the official record in the past. The literary biographer Michael Holroyd wrote A Dog’s Life, a fictional account in 1959 based ‘partly’ on his family which he published in the US only because his father objected to its publication in the UK too.154 In the decade before his parents died, near the end of the 1970s, Holroyd asked his parents to write ‘some account of their early lives’.155 He returned to the same subject of A Dog’s Life, but this time as family history over two decades later; his parent’s accounts became the coat hangers upon which he writes his memoirs, Basil Street Blues (1999) and Mosaic (2004). This time round, rather than a fictional account based on his own memories, he sets out to establish ‘the gap between ascertainable fact and family legends’.156 He consulted birth, marriage and death certificates, deeds of covenants, wills, bank records, everything that he could. He tested his father’s belief that his grandfather was successful at King’s College Cambridge, obtaining a Blue in cricket, ‘was an excellent mathematician, worked hard, finally taking a First’. Holroyd finds instead that his grandfather gave up cricket, did not get a Blue and ‘[t]he printed register of King’s admissions records him as having been awarded a Third in History Tripos of 1897’. Holroyd was a little shocked to discover from his great grandmother’s death certificate that he purchased from the General Register Office for Scotland in Edinburgh that she committed ‘suicide by carbolic acid’.157 And so he goes, especially trawling backwards and forwards over the years at the Public Search Room at St Catherine’s House.158 Like many other historians writing autobiography and biography, he was startled to discover, Looking through so many birth, marriage and death certificates for this book I am amazed how regularly men raise their status and women lower their age.159 The motivation of Holroyd’s egohistoire is quite clear in that he wanted ‘to recreate the events that would give my own fragmented upbringing a context’; in this sense it is therapeutic. I checked birth, marriage, and death certificates, hunted for wills and probate information, examined street directories and census returns, travelled to places my parents and grandparents had told me about, and revisited places I had known when I was a child. I also wrote to people I had not seen for up to fifty years, asking for their recollections.160 He wrote an alternative history which was sadder than he had anticipated: examinations never passed, money lost, illicit marriages, and illegitimacies, breakdowns, secret elopements and liaisons, and inexplicable deaths. The gap between memory and empirical record became the story. It is also a warning about how unreliable memoire and testimony can be.

328  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire This discord between the testimony of memory and the records is ammunition for those who are sceptical about contemporary life writing. They reprove historians for privileging unverified accounts and using memoir too uncritically as evidence. De Haan, Hamilton and Renders go so far as to describe contemporary ‘life writing’, as a biographical ‘mutation’ in which academics are inculcated.161 They dated the rise of uncritical memoir to about 2007 when the Centre for Life Writing Research at King’s College London was established and the first texts designed for university education, such as those by former editors of the journal Biography, Craig Howes and Miriam Fuchs’ Teaching Life Writing Texts, were published.162 That is, they regard the institutionalisation of life writing in higher education as a turning point. The date can be disputed, but clearly there was a change from the turn of the century. Over a period of a couple of decades, a number of dedicated institutions were established: the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex in 1999; the Centre for Narrative and Auto/Biographical Studies (NABS) at the University of Edinburgh in 2006; the Oxford Life Writing Centre at Wolfson College, Oxford University in 2011; the research group Life Sciences—Life Writing at Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz in 2014; the Center for the Study of Egodocuments and History, and 2019, Prozhito: Center for the Study of Ego-Documents was founded at the European University at St. Petersburg.163 The International Auto/biography Association (IABA) was founded at the First International Auto/ Biography Conference at Peking University in 1999. The a/b: Auto/Biography Studies journal was founded at the 1985 at the ‘International Symposium on Autobiography and Autobiography Studies’. The Life Writing journal was founded in Australian in 2004, the European Journal of Life Writing (EJLW) was founded by the European Chapter of the International Auto/ Biography Association, in 2010. De Haan, Hamilton and Renders argue that life writing has become an academic industry. Renders regarded ‘life writers’ as idealist therapists of subjective identity politics, who wanted to offer ‘retrospective justice’ by sustaining ‘overwhelming attention’ to those deprived of it in history, like ‘women, coloured people, homosexual, victims of the Holocaust, and so on’ in order ‘to show that the authors of these autobiographical documents were victimised by their social context’.164 Similarly, de Haan described life writing as ‘subjective identity politics’ in which ‘Life Writers’ use documents and other texts as ‘vehicles for emancipation’.165 He evaluated the development of life writing, writing about yourself, in negative terms, because he held that the field was ‘populated by a- or anti- historical scholars solely interested in literary “theory”, memory, identity, self and persona, and the “emancipation” of “subaltern cultures”’.166 They distinguished between autobiographies which are modelled on biography and history, which have ‘literary and social purpose’ and life writing which is largely ‘fantasy or fiction’. Worse, de Haan argued that life

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  329 writing has undermined biography.167 As Marijke Huisman noted to prove this point, he analysed the contents of the journal Biography, an interdisciplinary quarterly which has been published since 1978. De Haan noted ‘a sharp decrease in the number of contributions on biography, biographical subjects and biographical theory in the 1990s, as well as a simultaneous rise in the number of articles on life writing’.168 Life writing courses outnumbered biography courses in history in universities.169 Daniel Meister has compared the number of publications of works of biography and life writing published annually in Canada between 1998 and 2018, revealing a surprising yearly fluctuation, but also, overall, that there are at least twice as many examples of life writing as there are of biography.170 Renders and de Haan accepted biography as a historiographical genre, because its legitimacy is ultimately founded in its reference to reality and truth about the past. In their view, life writing lacked this commitment to empirical validation.171 In defending life writing, Huisman objected to Renders and de Haan ‘claiming biography for history and historians’ and their view that, unlike life writers, historians sought ‘historical truth, however problematic that might be’.172 Indeed, de Haan, Hamilton and Renders implicated life writing in current ‘culture wars’, a cultural conflict worldwide between realism and fabrication struggling for dominance in social values, beliefs and practices. The classics were under assault by life writers, who sought to make biography more ‘inclusive’. Against the threat of ‘cultural relativist’ life writing– the notion that all individuals’ stories are equal—some historians have argued for classical methods and the exercise of judgement. For their part, supporters of life writing contended that many traditional biographers were racist, elitist and reactionary. Despite the growth of ‘cultural relativism’, most biography, written either by men or women, is still about men.173 Women are still in the process of ‘decolonising’ autobiography.174 While biographers and life-writing researchers use similar documents—‘egodocuments’—de Haan argued that different groups approach them fundamentally differently: In Life Writing research, the source is more often used as the determining starting point for research without extensive historical contextualization and evaluation—essential matters for … a biographer and a scholar of biographies. The Life Writing researcher addresses above all the ethical, literary-theoretical and social-emancipatory analyses of Life Writing texts [whereas biographers regard biography as contributing to] and the consequence of an ongoing historiographical debate.175 Politicians, celebrities, sportspeople and have churned out memoirs, written quickly, with fragrant speculation, without peer review and rarely critically evaluated.176 Their attitude, so the critics say, to truth is proprietorial, managerial and, or, political.177 Historians, however, should know better.

330  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire

Historians’ egohistoire of particular historiographical significance? The debate has been complicated more recently, however, by historians beginning to write about themselves, not only following empirical techniques of archival research which is footnoted but is sometimes contextualised in ways de Haan advocated’ . Amid the many historians’ autobiographies are some explicitly empirically based accounts. They are self-reflexive about memory. They also set out to be historiographical. According to Popkin, in general, most historians do not write egohistoire in order to reflect on the practice of history. Indeed, he argued that few historian-autobiographers have reflected at much length on the significance of their enterprise for the wider understanding of history, and even fewer have been conscious of what philosophers or literary theorists have had to say about these issues.178 Rather, he and others, such as James Banner and John Gillis, found historian-autobiographers concentrated particularly upon their discovery as young people of their vocations to become historians and on how they negotiated their professional lives subsequently.179 Jaume Aurell considered 450 historians’ autobiographies.180 and likewise Robert A. Rosenstone has read a great number of them, noting that [i]t astonishes me, in reading their accounts, to learn that some … [historians] can trace the roots of their desire to become historians back to before puberty. Often this decision seems tied up with their heritage, a kind of homage to the glories of a particular region or the larger culture of their native land.181 In general, Popkin noted that historians’ egohistoire are positive accounts, rarely written in ‘an angry or embittered tone’. They presented the historical profession as one in which ‘talent and hard work is duly rewarded’. The silences are about the routine of teaching that does so much to define the profession because to do so would be boring; they omit their memories of epic battles in committee meetings because the disproportion between the matters at stake and the emotions invested in them would be embarrassing. To avoid appearing bitter or self-pitying, they pass over the unpleasantness of personal rivalries and the oppressiveness that can result from professional hierarchies thereby minimizing some of the less admirable characteristics of the discipline.182 Reviewers found that puzzling, as Rudolf Dekker noted, ‘when contrasted with academic novels in which university life is described as a theater of

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  331 politics and passions’. Most historian-autobiographers emphasized that they ‘had another life besides their profession’ and they did that by contextualising ‘their own lives against the background of great events’.183 Like all codes, they present a stylized portrait ‘calculated to sustain the self-esteem of both its individual practitioners and the group to which they belong’. In these respects, they are inching towards hagiography. Aurell has identified a small group of historians writing about the epistemological nature of life writing. He argued that, ‘the experience of historians as autobiographers has led them to reconsider the nature of historical knowledge and the function of the historian as a contemporary interpreter of historical phenomena’.184 This small group were more unconventional, experimental and they raised epistemic issues.185 They were interested in the nature of historical knowledge and the function of the historian as an intermediary between the past and present.186 They did so on the context of ‘different theoretical conceptions of history’. The model was Carolyn Steedman, which we discuss below.187 Their works were artifacts of ‘historiographical evolution’.188 Intellectual histories, anthropology, as well as developments in the sociology of knowledge contributed to the trend. For instance, Aurell highlighted Clifford Geertz’s 1995 work, locating himself ‘in his own history’, After the Fact: Two Countries. Four Decades, One Anthropologist.189 His friend, Greg Dening, played a similar role in Australia and Pacific history with his semi-autobiographical Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Time, Cultures and Self (2004): ‘My study is an archive of my mind, an archaeological site of my spiritual and intellectual voyaging. The books that surround me are those that have taken me on my journey’.190 Denning was influential in Australian history circles in the Melbourne school of ethnographic history, which included Rhys Isaac, Inga Clendinnen and Denning’s partner, Donna Merwick.191 This reflection on history spread locally. La Trobe History Department had introduced a compulsory segment on reflective history to be taught in every subject in 1971.192 Tom Griffiths has considered this work in The Art of Time Travellers: Historians and their Craft (2016).193 He does this by way of biography but he also puts himself in the story. Such accounts about the cultural and sociological of knowledge have challenged the existing ‘scripts or canons’ or habitual forms of genres. Aurell has considered the various literary styles among historians as autobiographers more generally. In Aurell’s 2016 account, Theoretical Perspectives on Historian’s Autobiographies, he identified three generations of historian-autobiographers between 1915 and 2015: interwar historians; postwar historians who were trained in a social-scientific framework amid Marxist, structural and quantitative methods; and historians who trained after the 1970s and were touched by the linguistic turn and postmodern methods.194 They wrote their accounts at the end of their careers. The larger group, telling the story of their lives and setting out to explain the discipline that they practised,

332  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire used humanistic, biographic, ego-historical and monographic styles. Interwar European historians were public intellectuals who adopted a humanistic approach, while Americans adopted a biographical approach. They both wrote for an intellectual audience. Postwar trained historians tended to adopt egohistoire articles or monographs which were written for an audience of other historians. The historians whose autobiographies were historiographical inquiries tended to use interventionist styles or codes with postmodern predispositions.195 We have seen a tendency in debates above for historians to find a middle way between extreme positions. Sheila Fitzpatrick is an example of a historian writing family history which has also become a contribution to the historiography. She has written a series of family histories and autobiographical works in which she has have interrogated historians’ methods in writing biography.196 She was lured to the genre by an invitation to contribute to a conference about her father and Manning Clark; and she co-edited a collection of papers arising from the event, Against the grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian history and politics (2007).197 She was taken aback by her co-author, Stuart Macintyre, seeming to know her father, Brian Fitzpatrick, better than she did in some aspects. She then embarked on an account of her relationship with her father, the Australian journalist and radical historian Brian Fitzpatrick in My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (2010). In her A Spy in the Archives (2013) she considered her experiences as a student at Oxford and as one of the pioneer researchers doing fieldwork in the USSR. Mischka’s War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s (2017) is an account of her husband’s life (and of hers with him).198 She drew on her memories as well as the diaries she kept and letters. Her regular testing the accuracy of her memory with the archival record raised wider issues. For instance, in A Spy in the Archives, at several points she is astonished to realise that she has misremembered something.199 There has been an increasingly amount of research on memory. A. J. P. Taylor reckoned that ‘written memoirs are a form of oral history set down to mislead historians and are ‘useless except for atmosphere’.200 Oral historians, and others as we have seen above, have pointed to the importance of what people thought about the past as a historical phenomenon in itself. Historians, such as David Blight, have suggested that historical memory is ‘cultural struggle, of contested truths, of moments, events, or even texts in history that thresh out rival versions of the past which as in turn put to battle in the present’.201 Meta-biography questions the divide of objective and subjective, suggesting ‘how “reality and myth” are inextricably mixed in all human perception of the world’.202 Fitzpatrick argued that the process of writing autobiography ‘changed her stance on the objectivity/subjectivity question’.203 As a pioneer Sovietologist, she was used to dealing with ‘faulty archives’. It was the process of being a historian-autobiographer that resulted in her ‘sense of

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  333 the difference between’ history and autobiography ‘narrowing’.204 She came to regard subjectivity not as the opposite of objectivity.205 Fitzpatrick flirted with experimenting in her account of her childhood and relationship with her father: Given all this, I could have ended up writing a postmodern self-reflexive book about my search as a historian for the truth about myself, offering, Rashomon-style, all the different versions of the truth I had come up with.206 The Rashomon effect is named after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, in which a murder is described in four contradictory ways by four witnesses.207 It has come to describe more generally the notorious unreliability of eyewitnesses. It described a situation in which an event is given contradictory interpretations or descriptions by the individuals involved. Cognitive psychologists like Elizabeth Loftus have researched the malleability of human memory using eyewitness accounts and autobiographical memories. Her work concludes that memory can be full of fiction.208 Despite this effect, Fitzpatrick resisted the temptation: Had I been in residence at the University of Chicago at the time, the very air of the place might have impelled me to do so. But, as it happened, I was temporarily in a different, less rigorously postmodern environment, the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. The more I thought about the story of my early life that seemed to be emerging, the more I thought it was a story with its own drama, and I ought to tell it straight. I changed my mind about leaving out ‘irrelevant’ personal stuff, since it now seemed to me that, unless I put it in, it would be distorting not only my own experience but even my relationship with my father.209 Fitzpatrick argued instead for a position close to Karl Mannheim’s with regard to ‘relational’ objectivity. There are bodies of knowledge which are false and inauthentic. Relational truths are authentic to the subject’s experience but partial and limited. You can explain this in terms of perspectives which are different, and those can be allowed for and explained. Relational truths can be synthesised into comprehensive accounts.210 This synthesis is a standard method of all historians. They draw coherency from the richest range of sources in ‘archive’ most widely defined. Unlike the experimental autobiographers, most historians, like Fitzpatrick, write self-evidently partial accounts in which their ‘eyes were wide open’ to their shortcomings and yet they continue to pursue objectivity and truth. Aurell suggests there was a transformation ‘from modernism to postmodernism,

334  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire from constructionism to innovationism, from objective to subject–object history’.211 The reality by way of historian-autobiographies is more complicated than that. The radical historian Carolyn Steedman is one of those historians engaged in the epistemological paradigms of her profession and whose autobiography challenged the writing of history in experimental ways that Aurell highlighted. In Landscape for a good woman in 1986, Steedman compared her own and her mother’s working-class childhoods.212 More importantly, she used both to challenge the accounts of a monolithic working-class culture, both theoretically and methodologically. She argued that there was a masculine mode of analysis whereby ‘the sons of the working class’ delineated ‘a background of uniformity and passivity’ with women and children’s roles being marginal. Her ‘central theme’ is that so much of labour history used a central or summary code and canon for the working class and refused ‘a complicated psychology to those living in conditions of material distress is a central theme of this book…’.213 She took aim especially at two seminal postwar studies: Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literary: Aspects of Working-Class Life and Jeremy Seabrook’s Working-Class Childhood.214 When she attended the University of Sussex in 1965, … should I have met a woman like me (there must have been some: we were all children of the Robbins generation), we could not have talked of escape except within a literary framework that we had learned from the working-class novels of the early sixties (some of which, like Room at the Top, were set books on certain courses); and that framework was itself ignorant of the material stepping-stones of our escape: clothes, shoes, make-up. We could not be heroines of the conventional narratives of escape. Women are, in the sense that Hoggart and Seabrook present in their pictures of transition, without class, because the cut and fall of a skirt and good leather shoes can take you across the river and to the other side: the fairy-tales tell you that goose-girls may marry kings.215 The world of the ‘old working class’ and its solidarity was successful. The Labour movement in the United Kingdom achieved a welfare state and, in particular, its health service. Postwar materialism, in turn, replaced the interwar world. Steedman argued the old or traditional working-class world was conceived too narrowly as a union and political labour movement, with its ethical spirit, sought better living conditions and socialist ends. It was ‘a decent, self-denying solidarity’ which excluded ‘more private ambitions, envies and fantasies’.216 There were other aspirations, however, that were built into working-class culture. Steedman interrogated her mother’s own Lancashire mill town childhood and concluded that her mother ‘came away wanting: fine clothes, glamour, money; to be what she

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  335

Figure 8.3 The 1950 movie Rashomon gave rise to the ‘Rashomon effect’ whereby the same event is described in significantly different (often contradictory) ways by different people who were involved, suggesting the unreliability and subjectivity of eye-witnesses’ memories. Rashomon directed by Akira Kurosawa, film poster by Toho Tokusatsu Company (1950). Everett Collection Inc/Alamy.

wasn’t’.217 The idea of the old working-class aspirations entailed deferring individual dreams to work collectively towards a labour, if not a socialist, future. That simply did not include ‘private desires’, which were motivated not by radical ideology but by a desire to democratise capitalism. Poor people wanted things that others had and that ‘this was not to be put down by anyone as some shameful ‘envy’: I take a defiant pleasure in the way that my mother’s story can be used to subvert this account. Born into the ‘old working class’, she wanted: a New Look skirt, a timbered country cottage, to marry a prince.218 Steedman had a clear objective: I want to open the door of one of the terraced houses, in a mill town in the 1920s, show Seabrook my mother and her longing, make him see the child of my imagination sitting by an empty grate, reading a tale that tells her a goose-girl can marry a king.219

336  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire She held that Personal interpretations of past time—the stories that people tell themselves in order to explain how they got to the place they currently inhabit—are often in deep and ambiguous conflict with the official interpretative devices of a culture.220 Steedman sets out to ‘intervene’ in historiography, believing ‘once a story is told, it ceases to be a story: it becomes a piece of history, an interpretative device’.221 She used her memories of her mother’s life and her childhood, her autobiography, to question the historiography and change it. She and other historians used their autobiographies on which they considered ‘their own intellectual and academic trajectories as the source historiography’ to engage in theoretical debate.222 As she stated, [t]he past is re-used through the agency of social information, and that interpretation of it can only be made with what people know of a social world and their place within it. It matters then, whether one reshapes past time, re-uses the ordinary exigencies and crises of all childhoods whilst looking down from the curtainless windows of a terraced house like my mother did, or sees at that moment the long view stretching away from the big house in some richer and more detailed landscape.223 Steedman did not want to replace one canon or code with another. In this respect she was allied to Ginzburg and the microhistorical scepticism of a homogeneous culture. She was not arguing that all working-class childhoods are the same, nor that experience of them produces unique psychic structures) but so that the people in exile, the inhabitants of the long streets, may start to use the autobiographical ‘I’, and tell the stories of their life.224 Historians needed to particularise and historicise various historical landscapes. Geoff Eley and Raymond Evans both noted the same things about Steedman’s approach: As a formal structure, her book disobeyed all the rules. It ranged back and forth between different parts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between historical works and types of fiction, between history and psychoanalysis, between the personal and the political, and between individual subjectivity and the dominant available narratives of a culture, whether in historiography or politics, grand theory or cultural beliefs, psychoanalysis or feminism.225

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  337 While Eley applauded her subversion, it worried Evans, especially in terms of the ‘conservative’ political implications of her view. We can describe this work either as meta-autobiography or, as Aurell suggests, as ‘constructivist autobiography’. Recent autobiographies question more directly the methodologies and theory of biography than in the past, although Robert Rosenstone’s postmodern biography is conspicuous in its degree. Unconventional or experimental approaches, such as those espoused by Robert Rosenstone … result in more self-conscious autobiographies, which are, paradoxically, often more realistic and more revealing of the epistemological nature of life writing.226 Early in his career Rosenstone was the author of an award-winning biography of John Reed. He is now best-known as a visual and experimental historian, and one of the founders of the journal Rethinking History.227 Aurell used him as an example of the historian-autobiographer who has ‘always considered biographical reflection and practice as part of his historical operation’.228 In 2004 he wrote an article in Rethinking History entitled ‘Confessions of a postmodern historian’.229 He wrote a transgressive family story, The Mostly True Story of My Jewish Family (2005), which considered three generations of his family, beginning with his Latvian and Romanian grandparents. He mixed genres and styles: for instance, he adopted the persona of Rabin to tell the story, sometimes in the first person and sometimes in the third. He presented ‘several version of the founding event of his family story—his grandfather’s dramatic escape from Russia’, swimming across the Prut River to Romania. These pieces were a rehearsal for his 2016 memoirs, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian. Living and Writing the Past, as a novel/memoir.230 His objective is to try to understand, in one career, how the persona has inflected the historical and vice versa, to chart if, and to what extent, the experiences of a historian engaged in doing research reflect the work in which he lives and somehow shape the history he (in this case) writes.231 A common enough objective in egohistoire, Rosenstone argued, however, that he personified postmodernism. In recreating his half-century research journey, he wanted to draw together his private life and his career to do away with the compartmentalisation that structures our lives and to being together some of the many selves that jostle within each of us. One way to describe the result is with the word hybrid, which critic Daphne Merkin applied to the works of the late, great writer W. G. Sebald, defining it as another way of saying [it is] committed to but not hindered by the obligations to tell the truth.232

338  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire Indeed, Rosenstone is no naive empiricist; he denied that historical interpretations can be based ‘on observable evidence alone, with the historian standing outside history, outside ideology, outside pre-existing cultural narratives, and outside organising concepts’.233 He believed that history was not created in the archives, but was created in his mind.234 His complicated background facilitated his attraction to postmodernism. Indeed, Aurell has noted that Rosenstone only ‘flirted with postmodernism’ to call into question the ‘jargonistic language of history-as-a-science’ and its pretensions to objectivity.235 Rosenstone argued that historians were aware that verifiable sources did not ‘create a truthful or meaningful past’ in themselves: The reality of the past—national, familial, personal—does not lie in an assemblage of data but in a field of stories—a place where fact, truth, fiction, invention, forgetting, and myth are so entangled that they cannot be separated. Ultimately it is not the facts that make us what we are, but the stories we have been told and the stories we believe.236 Aurell suggested that experimental autobiographies involve an ‘increased complexity of the autobiographical act’. They are simultaneously historical evidence and interpretation.237 Rosenstone had shown the way, first through his triple biography in one volume (Rosenstone 1988)238 and after that through his multivoiced autobiography—where he speaks simultaneously as a historian, historiographer and novelist [decentralising and multiplying] the experimental autobiographies’ voice …239 In terms of perspective and multiple accounts, Steven Shapin has noted postmodern metabiography emphasises ‘that shifting biographical traditions make one person have many lives’, none of these necessarily more real than any other, because all are ‘configured and reconfigured according to the sensibilities and needs of the changing cultural settings.’240 In this sense, metabiography expresses a belief in the observer-dependence of historical knowledge.241 It is concerned with the relational nature of biographical representations, the relation of biographies to the temporal, geographical, institutional, intellectual or ideological locations of their writers (the biographers sees the biographical subject (the ‘biographee’) as a collective construct of different memory cultures, proposing an essential instability of historical lives. While Steedman’s work is conspicuous, Rosenstone’s is even more so, for historians have not trampled one another to death in a stampede to follow his model. As Klaus Newmann noted in 2008 Only one academic historical journal published in English, Rethinking History, invites and publishes historians’ experimental texts. That

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  339 journal is comparatively marginal: it has been around for only eleven years, carries at least as many articles by non-historians as by historians and is probably read outside the historical discipline more so than within. The data-base Historical Abstracts with its more than 720,000 entries of academic articles, books and doctoral dissertations about post-fifteenth-century historical topics provides further evidence of historians’ reluctance to experiment themselves or to engage with those who do: a search for titles or abstracts with the string ‘experimental history’ nets only four entries.242 Meta-biography, writing a biography about writing a biography, is a new genre, as is meta-autobiography, writing an autobiography about writing an autobiography.243 Popkin was surprised at the conclusion of his research on historian’s egohistoire in 2005 that, while there had been much critical analysis of both history and autobiography, the nature of history and the potentialities of autobiography still ‘remain relatively unexplored particularly from the perspective of the historical discipline’.244 He noted that ‘few historian-autobiographers have reflected at much length on the significance of their enterprise for the wider understanding of history’.245 He was taken aback because he argued that historians had the skills to do this: Historian-autobiographers are uniquely placed to show that the historian’s subjectivity is not arbitrary but rather a result of choices among a historically defined range of possibilities.246 Aurell has echoed this view.247 One group ‘tend towards an explicative mode’,248 writing about the story of their academic lives, designing their autobiographies in the same way they articulate their historical texts: by foregrounding objectivity and establishing critical distance between the subject—the historian who narrates the story—and the object—one’s own life.249 De Haan, Hamilton and Renders have not been considered this genre of life writing, albeit limited, that has emerged among historians writing biography. They seem uninterested in distinguishing between kinds of autobiography and memoir. David McCooey, in his Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography, has dissected ‘the theories that deny the referential nature of autobiography, or propose that all narrative is falsification’.250 He stressed the ‘heterogeneity of forms in autobiographical practice’ and the need to weight verisimilitude, creatively and empirically.251 Some, but not all, historians’ autobiographies can be critically assessed in terms of their literary form and their relationship to the social and historical world.252 While most historians’ egohistoire is largely family history or  therapeutic memoir. there is second kind of historians’ egohistoire,

340  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire however which complicates the critique of life writing that de Haan, Hamilton and Renders have made, that of self-conscious meta life writing, or meta-biography. The historians beginning to write about themselves in which they follow empirical techniques of archival research which is footnoted and is sometimes contextualized is more difficult to critique. Historians’ life writing, as nuanced and reflective as Fitzpatrick’s and Steedman’s, is not only as egodocumentary sources for future historians to consider but increasingly as critical historiography too.

Conclusion: the kaleidoscope of life writing The sheer kaleidoscope of life writing defies categorisation in some ways. The sheer degree of subjectivity and presentism involved in life writing compounds the usual critical issues for academic historians: how useful is partial and fragmentary testimony and the single case in history? Some historians think about life writing in pejorative terms. Renders, Hamilton, de Haan and others complain that identity politics has led to the abandonment of critical analysis. They question unverified testimony privileging someone’s own feelings and words. They argue that autobiographies and memoirs should not be privileged over other sources. For historians, this is preaching to the converted. Most historians do not normally privilege first-person sources.253 They use them as ‘instruments of historical understanding’ and subject them to analysis. They read ‘autobiography as an historical artefact’, holding that ‘interpretation must be reined in by historical context, feasibility, and authorial intent’.254 Some readings are better readings than others, which will stand the test of time and peer review. In the end, it is about balance and weighting. Rather than bundle the entire category of life writing into a single assessment, there are variations which need to be weighted. Just as we weight objectivity, we ought to weight subjectivity. Historians’ autobiographies are an ambiguous genre but sometimes positive genre. A.J.P. Taylor’s advice was that ‘Every historian, I think, should write a biography’; most omit the second part of his advice, ‘if only to learn how different it is from writing history’.255 It seems historians writing biography have resorted to writing their own memories for the opposite reason. Having researched and written other people’s lives and grappled with the epistemological issues, writing your own life becomes an experiment and one relevant to the historiography. Surely you are standing on firm ground having experienced and known the people and events? As Rosenstone said, he wrote his memoir because ‘the only historian I know a great deal about is yours truly’.256 Perhaps not, it seems. The memoirs that historians write amplify the issues of the fallibility of memory and the issues of perspectivism. Some historians have been touched by the postmodern moment and their historian-autobiographies are held to be indistinguishable from other life writing. Recognising subjectivity and using it to interrogate history ‘does not, however, mean that we must reject objectivity and truth’.

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  341 Most historians, however, attempt to carve out a space between objectivity and subjectivity, between ‘simple empiricism’ and ‘subjective products of the mind’. A small group of historians’ autobiography really do consider the ideas about biography with which they have worked.257 They have pioneered a new kind of biographical genre which considers the ‘past from the inside, filling in the dimension of motives and reactions that the outside observer can never fully know’. They relate their work to the wider biographical context.258 They are however too few in number: too much of life writing, even historian’s egohistoire, is neo-hagiography.

Notes 1 Mark McKenna, An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (Carlton, Victoria: Miegunyah Press, 2011), 2 Stephen Holt, A Short History of Manning Clark (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999). 3 Manning Clark Papers, National Library of Australia, MS 7550, MS Acc03.178. 4 McKenna, An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark. 5 Manning Clark, A Historian’s Apprenticeship (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1992). Dymphna Clark became editor of Clark & Pryor’s Select Documents in Australian History, a volume of her late husband’s lectures and speeches, and the third volume of his autobiography, Phillip Jones, ‘Dymphna Clark Obituary’, The Guardian (29 May 2000). 6 Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 68–69. 7 Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 69. 8 Manning Clark, Interview, John Tranter, 17 June 1987, Radio National. 9 Brian Matthews, ‘What Dymphna Knew’, Australian Book Review, no. 291 (May 2007) suggested it was first articulated in an interview which Rob Pascoe wrote up as ‘The History of Manning Clark’, National Times, 1978. See also McKenna, An Eye for Eternity, pp. 634–635. 10 Manning Clark interviewed by Don Baker, 16 August and 20 December, 1985, NLA. 11 Clark, The Quest for Grace, p. 115. 12 Mark McKenna, Monthly (March 2007). Matthews, ‘What Dymphna Knew’. 13 McKenna quoted by David Marr, ‘Manning Clark’s Fraud’, Sydney Morning Herald (5 March 2007). 14 Mark McKenna, An Eye for Eternity, p. 644. See also pp. 153–155. 15 McKenna, An Eye for Eternity, p. 636; and p. 638. 16 Brian Matthews, Manning Clark. A Life (Crows Nest, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008), pp. 28–29. 17 Peter Craven in ‘The Ryan Affair’, in Manning Clark: Essays on His Place in History, ed. Carl Bridge (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1994), p. 174. Edward Kynaston attacked Clark in The Australian (24 October 1981), and Claudio Veliz, professor of sociology at La Trobe University, did so in Quadrant (Claudio Veliz, ‘Bad History’, Quadrant, May 1982). 18 Doug Munro, History Wars: The Peter Ryan–Manning Clark Controversy (Canberra: ANU Press, 2021), p. xxvii. 19 Peter Ryan, ‘Manning Clark’, Quadrant, vol. 37, no. 9 (September 1993), pp. 9–22; Ryan, ‘A Reply to my Critics’, Quadrant, vol. 37, no. 10 (October 1993),

342  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire pp. 11–14; Ryan, ‘The Charge of the Lightweight Brigade’, Quadrant, vol. 38, no. 10 (October 1994), pp. 10–14. The three articles were republished in his Lines of Fire: Manning Clark & Other Writings, ed. A.K. Macdougall (Binalong, NSW: Clarion Editions, 1997), pp. 179–234. 20 Peter Ryan, Final Proof, Memoirs of a Publisher (Sydney: Quadrant Books, 2010), pp. 135–139. 21 McKenna, An Eye for Eternity, pp. 282–288. 22 Munro, History Wars: The Peter Ryan–Manning Clark Controversy. 23 Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2007), pp. 28–29. 24 Stephen Holt, Manning Clark and Australian History, 1915–1963 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1982). 25 Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2003). 26 Mark McKenna, ‘Clark, Charles Manning (1915–1991)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/clark-charles-manning-225/ text29719, published online 2015, accessed 27 November 2022. 27 McKenna, An Eye for Eternity, pp. 684–686. 28 M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Carly Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 6. 29 ‘Behind a historian’s mask’, Age (28 August 2009). 30 Barbara Caine, Biography and History, 2nd ed. (London: Red Globe Press, 2019), ch. 4, especially pp. 70–81; and ‘Concluding Reflections’, in Clio’s Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians, ed. Douglas Munro and John G. Reid (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017), p. 301. 31 Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005). Jaume Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies. From Documentation to Intervention (London: Routledge, 2016). 32 Pierre Nora, Essays in Ego-history (Paris: Gallimard,1987), p. 5. Luisa Passerini and Alexander C.T. Geppert, ‘Historians in Flux: The Task and Challenge of Ego-histoire’, in Historein, vol. 3, special number on European Ego-histoires Historiography and the Self, 1970–2000 (2001), pp. 7–18. 33 Lawrence Lipking, ‘The Birth of the Author’, and Martin Stannard, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, in Writing the Lives of Writers, ed. Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 36 & 8 respectively. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, f.p. 1967), p. 142. 34 J. C. Carlier, ‘Roland Barthes’ Resurrection of the Author and Redemption of Biography’, Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 4 (2000), pp. 386–393. 35 Barbara Taylor, AHR Roundtable, ‘Separations of Soul: Solitude, Biography, History’, American Historical Review, vol. 114, no. 3 (2009), p. 641. 36 Sidonie Smith, ‘Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices’ f.p. 1990, in Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing, 2017). 37 Linda H. Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of NineteenthCentury ‘Hidden’ Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 38 Peter Novak, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  343 39 Ken Hyland, ‘Humble Servants of the Discipline? Self-mention in Research Articles’, English for Specific Purposes, vol. 20, no. 3 (2001), pp. 207–226. Lisa McGrath, ‘Self-mentioned in Anthropology and History Research Articles: Variation between and within Disciplines’, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, vol. 21 (March 2016), pp. 86–98. 40 Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). 41 William Jr. Strunk, and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, 4th ed. (Needham Heights, MA: Longman Publishers, 2000, f.p. 1918), p. 70. 42 James C. Raymond, ‘I-Dropping and Androgyny: The Authorial I in Scholarly Writing’, College Composition and Communication, vol. 44, no. 4 (December 1993), p. 482. Gesa Kirsch, ‘The Politics of I-Dropping’, College Composition and Communication, vol. 45, no. 3 (October 1994), p. 382. Leopold van Ranke did not always achieve objectivity: see Andreas Bolt, ‘Ranke: Objectivity and History’, Rethinking History, The Journal of Theory and Practice, vol. 18, no. 4 (April 2014), pp. 457–474. 43 For a discussion of the different instances of ‘I’ in autobiography, see Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, pp. 71–76. Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier’, The American Historical Review, vol. 104, no. 3 (June 1999), p. 725. 44 Michael Dintenfass, ‘Crafting Historians’ Lives: Autobiographical Constructions and Disciplinary Discourses after the Linguistic Turn’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 71, no. 1 (March 1999), p. 150. 45 Nigel Hamilton and Hans Renders, The ABC of Modern Biography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), p. 111–119. 46 Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (New York and Oxford: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2016) f.p. 1960, p. 5. See also Donald J. Winslow, A Glossary of Terms in Life Writing, Biography, Autobiography and Related Forms, 2nd ed. (Manoa, Hawai’i: Biography Monographs published for the Biographical Research Center by the University of Hawai’i Press, 1995, f.p. 1980). Similarly, Karl J. Weintraub earlier described the convention that autobiography focuses on the ‘inward realm of experience’ in contrast to memoirs which focus on the ‘external realm’ of fact, in ‘Autobiography and Historical Consciousness’, Critical Enquiry, no. 1 (1975), p. 823. 47 P. Lopate (ed.), The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (New York: Anchor, 1994). 48 Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); and (ed.), The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Tom Couser, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Margaretta Jolly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms (London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001). For a wider discussion about the permeability of genres, see Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, ‘De/ Colonization’, in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Narratives (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. xviii. 49 Marlene Kadar suggests there is a continuum: Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 10. 50 Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, p. 5. 51 Nigel Hamilton and Hans Renders, The ABC of Modern Biography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), p. 111. 52 Nigel Hamilton, ‘Truth, Lies and Fake Truth: The Future of Biography’, in Different Lives. Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies, ed. Hans Renders and David Veltman (Leiden: The Netherlands:

344  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire Brill & Boston, 2020), pp. 12–20; Elsbeth Etty, ‘Biography in the Netherlands. The Biography’s Pretention to Truth is Relative’, pp. 208–216 and Carl Rollyson ‘Double Sutch: The Art of Presidential Biography’, pp. 99–110. pp. 119–120. 53 Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998), p. 4. 54 Philippe Lejeune, ‘The Autobiographical Pact’, in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine M. Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 5; Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 4. 55 Timothy Dow Adams, Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 11. Herbert Leibowitz, Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). Natalie Z. Davis, A Life of Learning (New York: American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, no. 39, 1997), p. 23. 56 John Sturrock, ‘The New Model Autobiographer’, New Literary History, no. 9 (1977) p. 52. 57 Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How a Discipline Is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists (Sydney: Macleay Press, 1994), p. 90. 58 Carolyn Steedman, ‘History and Autobiography: Different Pasts’, in Steedman, Past Tenses; Essay on Writing, Autobiography and History (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1992), p. 50. 59 Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). Natalie Z. Davis, A Life of Learning (New York: American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, no. 39, 1997), pp. 1–26. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘France for Belgium’, in Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination, ed. Laura Lee Downs and Stéphane Gerson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 89–98. Dominick LaCapra, ‘Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts’, in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. D. LaCapra and S. L. Kaplan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 47–85; and ‘Tropisms of Intellectual History,’ Rethinking History, vol. 8, no. 4 (2004), pp. 499–529. Gerda. Lerner, No Farewell: A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003). William H. Sewell, Jr., ‘The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History, or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian’, in Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2005), pp. 22–80. J.H. Elliott, History in the Making (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2012). Sheila. Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2013). 60 James A. Winn, ‘An Old Historian Looks at the New Historicism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 35, no. 4 (1993), p. 862. 61 Wallach, ‘Remembering Jim Crow’, p. 64. 62 Jennifer Jensen Wallach, ‘Remembering Jim Crow: The Literary Memoir as Historical Source Material’, PhD, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2004, p. 59. 63 Margaretta Jolly, Defining a Field: The Encyclopedia of Life-Writing, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (1999), pp. 309–316. 64 The first in the series was Karen A. Winstead (ed.), The Oxford History of LifeWriting: Volume 1: The Middle Ages, Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 65 Bradford (ed.), Life Writing. 66 Leader (ed.), On Life-Writing, blurb. See Sally Cline and Carole Angier, The Arvon Book of Life-Writing: Writing Biography, Autobiography and Memoir (London: Methuen Drama, 2010).

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  345 67 Mark Bevir, ‘Meaning and Intention: A Defence of Procedural Individualism’, New Literary History, vol. 31, no. 3 (2000), p. 385. 68 Albert Bushnell Hart, ‘Imagination in History’, American Historical Review, vol. 15, no. 2 (January 1910), pp. 227–251. This was his presidential address to the American Historical Association, New York, 28 December 1909. 69 Conway, When Memory Speaks, p. 4. 70 Conway, When Memory Speaks, p. 7. 71 Jill Ker Conway, In Her Own Words: Women’s Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States (New York: Vintage, 1998), p. vii. 72 Jill Ker Conway (ed.), Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology (New York: Vintage, 1992); Written by Herself, vol. 2: Women’s Memoirs from Britain, Africa, Asia, and the United States (London: Vintage, 1996); and In Her Own Words: Women’s Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States (New York: Vintage, 1998). 73 Conway, When Memory Speaks, p. 4. 74 Conway, When Memory Speaks, p. 4. 75 Conway, When Memory Speaks, p. 7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1781). 76 Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (London & New York: Dent/Dutton, 1948 [1818]). Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised 1892). Henry Ford, in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1924, f.p. 1923). 77 Georges Gusdorf, ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’, in Olney (ed.), Autobiography. Essays Theoretical and Critical, p. 38. 78 Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). 79 The first three women accepted into the Australian diplomatic service in 1943 were Diana Hodgkinson, Bonnie Taylor, and Julia Drake-Brockman; Coral Bell and Cynthia Nelson joined External Affairs soon after. The first resigned as a result of the marriage bar by 1948; Bell did not marry, but went into academia in 1951, while Nelson was the first female career diplomat, serving until she married in the late 1950s. 80 Conway was part of a wave of Australian women who came to the US. See Anne Rees, ‘Travelling to Tomorrow: Australian Women in the United States, 1910–1960’, Ph.D thesis, Australian National University (ANU), 2016. 81 Jill Ker Conway, True North: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 1995 [1994]), p. ix. 82 Jill Ker Conway, A Woman’s Education (New York, Vintage, 2001). 83 Susan Ware, ‘Writing Women’s Lives: One Historian’s Perspective’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 40, no. 3, special number on Biography and History: Inextricably Interwoven (Winter 2010), pp. 413–435. 84 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘A Life of Learning’, ACLS Occasional Paper no. 39 (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1997), pp. 1–26. Jaume Aurell, ‘Making Intellectual History by Contextualising Oneself’, History and Theory, vol. 54 (May 2015), pp. 244–268. 85 Stanley, The Auto/ Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist. 86 Liz Stanley, ‘Biography as Microscope or Kaleidoscope? The Case of “power” in Hannah Cullwick’s Relationship with Arthur Munby’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 10, no. 1 (1987), p. 19. 87 Hayden White, ‘The Problem of Change in Literary History’, New Literary History, no. 7 (Autumn 1975), pp. 97–112. 88 ‘Slave Narrative’, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/art/ slave-narrative accessed 1 December 2021. 89 Brett Goodin, From Captives to Consuls. Three Sailors in Barbary and Their Self-Making across the Early American Republic, 1770–1840 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2020).

346  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire 90 William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story. The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (University of Illinois Press, 1986); African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993). 91 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1901). 92 Joe Weixlmann, ‘African American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: A Bibliographical Essay’, Black American Literature Forum, vol. 24, no. 2 (Summer, 1990), pp. 375–415. 93 John Edgar Wideman, ‘Malcolm X: The Art of Autobiography’, in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 101–116. 94 Alex Haley Interview by Lawrence Grobel, 1985, https://alexhaley.com/2019/ 05/25/alex-haley-interviewed-by-lawrence-grobel/, accessed 12 December 2021. 95 Donald R. Wright, ‘The Effect of Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’ on How Gambians Remember the Atlantic Slave Trade’, History in Africa, vol. 38 (2011), pp. 295–318. Philip Nobile, ‘Uncovering Roots,’ The Village Voice (23 February 1993). Stanley Crouch, ‘The Roots of Alex Haley’s Fraud’, [New York] Daily News (12 April 1998). Jack Kerwick, ‘Alex Haley’s Fraudulent Roots’, The New American (12 March 2012). 96 Julia Novak, ‘Experiments in Life-Writing: Introduction’, in Experiments in Life-Writing, ed. Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 1–36. See also: Ina Schabert, In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography (Tübingen: Francke, 1990); John F. Keener, Biography and the Postmodern Historical Novel (Lewiston: Mellen, 2001); and Irene Kacandes, ‘Experimental Life-Writing’, in The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, ed. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 382–383. 97 Paul A. Cimbala and Robert F. Himmelberg (eds.), Historians and Race. Autobiography and the Writing of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 98 Vanessa Castejon, Anna Cole, Olivers Haag, Karen Hughes (eds.), Ngapartji, Ngapartji. In Turn, In Turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014). 99 Working-class memoirs were a major source for Jonathon Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010). 100 David Vincent Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-century Working-Class Biography (London and New York: Methuen, 1981); Burnett, Useful Toil, pp. 10–12. John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall (eds.), The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography (New York: New York University Press, 1984), vol. 1, p. xiii. Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and their Diaries (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984). 101 Miles Fairburn, Nearly Out of Heart and Hope (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995), pp. 2–3. J. Lecompte (ed.), Emily; the Diary of a Hard-Working Woman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987). A Macfarlande, The Family of Life of Ralph Josselin; a Seventeenth-century Clergyman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). T. Mallon, A Book of One’s Own; People and Their Diaries (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984). R. A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). H. Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days; Englishwomen’s Private Diaries (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  347 University Press, 1967). W. Evans (ed.), The Dairy of a Welsh Swagman 1869– 1894 (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1975). 102 Isabel Waidner (ed.), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (Manchester: Dostoyevsky Wannabe Experimental, 2018). 103 Sydney Morning Herald (4 October 2020), p. 43. 104 Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009). 105 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Appendix A. ‘Sixty Genres of Life Narrative’, pp. 253–286. 106 Nancy K. Miller, ‘Introduction: Extremities; or, Memoirs at the Fin de Siècle’, A/b: Autobiography Studies, vol. 14, no. 1 (1999), pp. 1–4. 107 James Tully, ‘Identity Politics’, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 517– 533. Francis, Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018). 108 Douglas Munro and John G. Reid (eds.), Clio’s Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017). 109 Edward Gibbon, Autobiography. Memoirs of Edward Gibbon, Esq. (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1877). 110 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Introduction by Edmund Morris (New York: Modern Library, 1996, f.p. 1907). 111 Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘Ego-Histoire and Beyond: Contemporary French Historian-Autobiographers’, French Historical Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, Special Issue: Biography (Autumn, 1996), pp. 1139–1167. History, Historians, & Autobiography (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 74. 112 Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography. Conversation with Jeremy Popkin, 2009. See Rudolf Dekker, ‘Review of Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography’, The American Historical Review, vol. 111, no. 2 (April 2006), pp. 429–430. Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘History, Historians, and Autobiography Revisited’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 32, no. 3 (2017) pp. 693–698. 113 Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography, p. 3. 114 Popkin, ‘History, Historians, and Autobiography Revisited’, p. 694. 115 Popkin considered 300 historian’s autobiographies between 1970 and 2005; Jaume Aurell considered 450 historian’s autobiographies in 2016. Recent Australian work includes Penny Russell, ‘Travelling Steerage: Class, Commerce, Religious and Family in Colonial Sydney’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 38, no. 4 (2014), pp. 383–395. John Docker, ‘Of Pearls and Coral: Jurisography and Ego History’, Law, Text, Culture, no. 20 (2016) 18–32. Charles Sowerine, ‘The Making of a Historian: Class, Race and the Other’, History Australia, vol. 16, no. 2 (2019), pp. 399–409. Anna Cole, ‘“The History That Has Made You”. Ego-histoire, Autobiography and Postcolonial History’, Life Writing, vol. 16, no. 4 (2019), pp. 527–538. Sylvia Martin, Sky Swimming (UWA Publishing, 2020). Ann Curthoys, ‘From Montserrat to Settler-Colonial Australia: The Intersecting Histories of Caribbean Slaveowning Families, Transported British Radicals, and Indigenous Peoples’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 90 (Autumn 2020), pp. 211–232. 116 Annie Kriegel, Ce que j’ai cru comprendre (Paris: Laffont, 1992). 117 Jill K. Conway, The Road from Coorain (London: Vintage, 2003). Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana (New York: Free Press, 2003). 118 Aurell, ‘Autobiography as Unconventional History’, p. 435. 119 Aurell, ‘Autobiography as Unconventional History’, p. 439. 120 Nancy K. Miller, ‘Public Statements, Private Lives: Academic Memoirs for the Nineties’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 22, no. 4 (1997), pp. 981–1015. Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhur (eds.), Voices of

348  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire women historians: The Personal, the Political, the Professional (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Helen M. Buss, Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002), pp. 21–22. 121 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Is not the Story of My Life: How Today’s Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996). 122 Lois McNay, ‘Feminism and Post-Identity Politics: The Problem of Agency’, Constellations, vol. 17, no. 4 (2010), pp. 512–525. Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (eds.), Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 123 Jeremy Popkin, ‘Ego-histoire Down Under: Australian Historian-Autobio­ graphers’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 38, no. 129 (2007), p. 110. 124 Patricia Grimshaw and Lynne Strahan (eds.), The Half-Open Door: Sixteen Australian Women Look at Professional Life and Achievement (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982); R.M. Crawford, Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey, Making History (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble/Penguin, 1985); Bain Attwood (ed.), Boundaries of the Past (Melbourne: History Institute, 1990); Bain Attwood and Joy Damousi (eds.), Feminist Histories (Melbourne: History Institute, 1991); Bain Attwood (ed.), Labour Histories (Melbourne: Monash University Printing Services, 1994). 125 Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography, p. 74. 126 Oxford Centre of Life Writing: https://oxlifewriting.wordpress.com/what-islife-writing/ Journal of Life-Writing https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rlwr20/ current, accessed 19 December 2021. 127 Munro and Reid, Clio’s Lives. 128 Popkin, ‘Ego-histoire Down Under’, p. 110. 129 Brij Lal, Mr. Tulsi’s Store: A Fijian Journey (Canberra: Pandanus, 2001). Just before his death in 2021, he also edited a collection, with Vicki Luker (eds.), Serendipity. Experience of Pacific Historians, which remains unpublished at the time of writing. 130 Melanie Nolan, ‘Country and Kin Calling? Keith Hancock, the National Dictionary Collaboration, and the Promotion of Life Writing in Australia’, in Clio’s Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians, ed. Douglas Munro and John G. Reid (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017), pp. 247–272. 131 Popkin, ‘Ego-histoire Down Under’, p. 123. 132 Popkin, ‘Ego-histoire Down Under’. 133 Hancock, Professing History, p. 53. 134 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1939). 135 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, Preface. 136 Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘History, Historians, and Autobiography Revisited’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 32, no. 3 (2017), p. 695. 137 Popkin, ‘History, Historians, and Autobiography Revisited’, p. 694. 138 Graeme Davison, Lost Relations Lost Relations: Fortunes of My Family in Australia’s Golden Age (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2015). 139 Malcolm Allbrook and Sophie Scott-Brown (eds.), Family History and Historians in Australia and New Zealand: Related Histories (New York and London: Routledge, 2021). 140 Jim Davidson, ‘Graeme Davison Delves into his Family’s Past in Lost Relations’, The Australian (20 June 2015). 141 Graeme Davison, ‘Speed-Relating’, Family History in a Digital Age History Australia, vol. 6, no. 2 (2008) 43.1–43.10; Graeme Davison, ‘Ancestors: The

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  349 Broken Lineage of Family History’, in his The Use and Abuse of Australian History (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000), pp. 98–100. 142 Davison, Lost Relations. 143 Davison, Lost Relations, p. xiii. 144 Popkin, ‘Ego-Histoire Down Under’, p. 109; Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, ‘The Singularization of History: Social History and Microhistory within the Postmodern State of Knowledge’, Journal of Social History, vol. 36, no. 3 (Spring 2003), pp. 791–735; and ‘The Life Is Never Over: Biography as a Microhistorical Approach’, in The Biographical Turn: Lives in History, ed. Hans Renders, Binne de Haan, and Jonne Harmsma (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 42–52. 145 Alison Light, Common People: In Pursuit of My Ancestors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. xxv. 146 Light, Common People, p. 221. 147 Light, Common People, p. xxi. 148 Light, Common People, p. 35. 149 Light, Common People, pp. 31–32. 150 Light, Common People, p. 24. 151 Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies. 152 Light, Common People, pp. 57 & 255. 153 Alison Light, Inside History: From Popular Fiction to Life Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). 154 Michael Holroyd, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. Family Stories (London: Vintage Books, 2010), f.p. 1999 and 2004 respectively pp. 255–256. 155 Holroyd, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic, p. 3. 156 Holroyd, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic, p. 33. 157 Holroyd, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic, p. 25. Indeed he went on to write A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers (2010) the Villa Cimbrone on the Gulf of Salerno and the Edwardian literary and society figures who lived there. 158 Holroyd, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic, p. 76. 159 Michael Holroyd, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. Family Stories (London: Vintage Books, 2010), f.p. 1999 and 2004 respectively, p. 238. 160 Holroyd, Basil Street Blues, p. 321. 161 Nigel Hamilton and Hans Renders, The ABC of Modern Biography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), p. 111. 162 Craig Howes and Miriam Fuchs (eds.), Teaching Life Writing Texts (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008). 163 Marijke Huisman, ‘Life Writing in the Netherlands’, The European Journal of Life Writing, vol. 4 (2015), R19–R26. Marijke Huisman and Marleen Rensen, ‘Introduction: Life Writing and European Identities’, International Journal for History Culture and Modernity, vol. 7 (2019), p. 1051. 164 Monica Soeting, ‘The Land of Letter-Lovers: The Year in the Netherlands’, Biography, vol. 43, no. 1 (2020), p. 137, quoting from Hans Renders, ‘Biography in Academia and the Critical Frontier in Life Writing: Where Biography Shifts into Life Writing’, in Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, ed. Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (Brill, 2014), pp. 169–176. 165 Monica Soeting, ‘The Land of Letter-Lovers: The Year in the Netherlands’, Biography, vol. 43, no. 1 (2020), p. 137, quoting from Binne de Haan, ‘The Eclipse of Biography in Life Writing’, in Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, ed. Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (Lieden: The Netherlands: Brill & Boston, 2014), pp. 177–194.

350  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire 1 66 Renders and de Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography, p. 89. 167 Binne de Haan, ‘The Eclipse of Biography in Life Writing’, in Theoretical Discussions of Biography. Approaches from History, pp. 265–293. 168 Marijke Huisman, ‘Life Writing in the Netherlands’, The European Journal of Life Writing, vol. 4 (2015), R19–R26. Huisman and Rensen, ‘Introduction: Life Writing and European Identities’. 169 Susan Ware, ‘Review of The ABC of Modern Biography by Nigel Hamilton and Hans Renders’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 50, no. 3 (Winter 2020), p. 438. 170 Daniel R. Meister, ‘Historical Biography in Canada: Historians, Publishers, and the Public’, in Renders and Veltman, Different Lives. Global Perspectives, p. 29. 171 Huisman, ‘Life Writing in the Netherlands’, R19–R26. 172 Renders and de Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography, p. 274. 173 See figure 1 ‘Gender of biographers and their subjects’, 1998–2018, in Meister, ‘Historical Biography in Canada’, p. 36. 174 Susan Stanford, ‘Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice’ and Mary Mason, ‘The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers’, in Women, Autobiography and Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 72-82 & 321-323, respectively. 175 Renders and de Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography, p. 178. 176 Again, Meister has provided statistical data for Canada, showing political biography pipping literary subjects, Academics followed by celebrities, which does not include sales figures: Figure 3, ‘Occupations of biographical subjects’ 1998–2018, Meister, ‘Historical Biography in Canada’, p. 37. 177 Josh Black, ‘The Political Memoir Phenomenon: Federal Political Life Writing in Australia, 1994–2020’, Australian National University, doctoral thesis forthcoming. 178 Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography, p. 5. 179 Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography, p. 7. James M. Banner, Jr. and John Gillis (eds.), Becoming Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Alan Munslow (ed.), Authoring the Past: Writing and Rethinking History (London: Routledge, 2012). 180 Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies, p. 19. 181 Robert A. Rosenstone, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 3. 182 Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography, p. 281. 183 Dekker, ‘Review’. 184 Aurell, ‘Autobiography as Unconventional History’. Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies. 185 Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986). Georges Duby, L’histoire continue (Paris: Odile Jacob. 1991). John H. Elliott, History in the Making (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010). Barbara Taylor, ‘Historical Subjectivity’, in History and Psyche. Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past, ed. Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 195–210. Robert A. Rosenstone, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian: Living and Writing the Past (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) 186 Aurell, ‘Autobiography as Unconventional History’, p. 433. 187 Aurell, ‘Making History by Contextualising Oneself’. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman. 188 Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies, pp. 5–6.

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  351 189 Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies, p. 244. Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 190 Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures and Self (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press & Carlton: The Megunyah Press, 2004), p. 20. 191 Clifford Geertz, ‘History and Anthropology’, New Literary History, vol. 21 (1990), pp. 325–329. 192 For a discussion of the Melbourne ‘ferment’, see Bronwen Douglas, ‘Obituary: Greg Dening: Way-finder in the Presents of the Past’, The Journal of Pacific History, vol. 43, no. 3 (December 2008), p. 383. Kenneth Lockridge, ‘Obituary Remembering Rhys Isaac’, Rethinking History, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 24–25. 193 Tom Griffiths, The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft (Carlton, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2016). Even more biographical is Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski (eds.), The Work of History. Writing for Stuart Macintyre (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2022). 194 Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies, pp. 20–22. 195 Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies, pp. 5–6. 196 Sheila Fitzpatrick trilogy of memoirs: My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010); A Spy in the Archives. A Memoir of Cold War Russia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013); Mischka’s War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2017). 197 Stuart Macintyre and Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds.), Against the grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian history and politics (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Publishing, 2007). 198 Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives. 199 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Writing History/Writing about Yourself: What’s the Difference?’ in Clio’s Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians, ed. Douglas Munro and John G. Reid (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017), p. 22. 200 Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 104. 201 David W. Blight, ‘E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory’, in History and Memory in American Culture, ed. Robert O’Meally and Genevieve Fabre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 46. 202 Thompson, ‘The Voice of the Past: Oral History’, p. 131. 203 Fitzpatrick, ‘Writing History/Writing about Yourself’, p. 18. 204 Fitzpatrick, ‘Writing History/Writing about Yourself’, p. 36. 205 Caine, ‘Concluding Reflections’, p. 305. 206 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Can you Write a History of Yourself ?’ Griffith Review, vol. 33 (August 2011), https://www.griffithreview.com/editions/such-is-life/, accessed 15 December 2021. 207 Blair Davis, Robert Anderson and Jan Walls (eds.), Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). Karl G. Heider, ‘The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree’, American Anthropologist, New Series, 90, no. 1 (March 1988), pp. 73–81. 208 H. Roediger and M. Abel, ‘Collective Memory: A New Arena of Cognitive Study’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 19, no. 7 (2015), pp. 359–361. Kelly Jean Butler, Witnessing Australian Stories: History, Testimony and Memory in Contemporary Culture (London: Routledge, 2017). Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (London: Routledge, 1993). Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton, Memory and History in TwentiethCentury Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994).

352  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire 209 Fitzpatrick, ‘Can you Write a History of Yourself ?’ Griffith Review, vol. 33 (August 2011), https://www.griffithreview.com/editions/such-is-life/, accessed 15 December 2021. 210 Gayle Letherby, John Scott and Malcolm Williams, Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research (London: Sage, 2013), pp. 47–52. 211 Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies, p. 25. 212 Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman. 213 Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, p. 12. 214 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life, with Special References to Publications and Entertainments (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957). Jeremy Seabrook, Working-Class Childhood (London: Gollancz, 1982). 215 Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, pp. 15–16. 216 Raymond Evans, ‘Desire: A Review of Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman’, London Review of Books, vol. 8, no. 7 (17 April 1986), https:// www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n07/raymond-williams/desire, accessed 12 June 2019. 217 Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, p. 6. 218 Raymond Williams, ‘Desire’, London Review of Books. vol, 8, no. 7 (17 April 1986), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n07/raymond-williams/desire, accessed 20 December 2021. 219 Williams, ‘Desire’. 220 Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, p. 6. 221 Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, p. 143. 222 Karl J. Weintraub, ‘Autobiography and Historical Consciousness’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 4 (1975), pp. 821–848; James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Paul J. Eakin, Touching the World: Reference on Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Lionel Gossman, ‘History as (Auto)Biography: A Revolution in Historiography’, in Autobiography, Historiography, Rhetoric, ed. Mary Donaldson-Evans, Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, and Gerald Prince (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 103–129. 223 Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, p. 5. 224 Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, p. 16. 225 Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line, p. 174. 226 Aurell, ‘Autobiography as Unconventional History’, p. 433 227 Robert A. Rosenstone, Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988). Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘Introduction: Practice and Theory’, in Experiments in Rethinking History, ed. Alun Munslow and Robert A. Rosenstone (New York: Routledge, 2004). 228 Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies, pp. 194–195. 229 Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘Confessions of a Postmodern (?) Historian’, Rethinking History, vol. 8, no. 1, (2004), pp. 149–166. 230 Robert A. Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (New York: Alfred Knopf, Inc., 1975); and Adventures of a Postmodern Historian. 231 Rosenstone, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian, p. 2. 232 Rosenstone, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian, Foreword. 233 Alan Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 54. Alan Munslow and Robert A. Rosenstone, Experiments in Rethinking History (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). 234 Rosenstone, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian, p. 2. 235 Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies, p. 200. 236 Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies, p. 200.

Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire  353 2 37 Aurell, ‘Making Intellectual History by Contextualising Oneself’, p. 262. 238 Robert A. Rosenstone, Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 239 Aurell, ‘Autobiography as Unconventional History’, p. 444 240 Autobiography and Postmodernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). 241 Steven Shapin, ‘Lives After Death,’ Nature, vol. 441 (2006), p. 286 242 Klaus Neumann, ‘But Is it History?’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 14, no. 1 (2008), p. 20. 243 Ní Dhúill, Caitríona, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), p. 24. 244 Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography, p. 4. 245 Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography, p. 5. 246 Popkin, ‘Ego-Histoire and Beyond’, pp. 1166–1167. 247 Jaume Aurell, ‘Autobiography as Unconventional History: Constructing the Author’, Rethinking History, vol. 10, no. 3 (September 2006), p. 433. 248 Jaume Aurell, ‘Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies’. 249 Aurell and Davis, ‘History and Autobiography: The Logics of a Convergence’, p. 503. 250 David McCooey, Artful Histories. Modern Australian Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Gillian Whitlock, Autographs: Contemporary Australian Autobiography (St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1996). 251 McCooey, Artful Histories, p. 8. 252 Susan Lever, ‘Review of Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography’, Australian Book Review, no. 182 (July 1996). 253 Jennifer Jensen Wallach, ‘Remembering Jim Crow: The Literary Memoir as Historical Source Material’ (PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2004). 254 Wallach, ‘Remembering Jim Crow’, p. 38. 255 Kathleen Burk, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 256 Rosenstone, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian, p. 1. 257 Edward Saunders, ‘Defining Metabiography in Historical Perspective: Between Biomyths and Documentary’, Biography, vol. 38, no. 3 (Summer 2015), pp. 325–342. 258 Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography, p. 6.

Further reading The classics in autobiography are numerous; one could consult Margarita Jolly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, 2 vols. (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), or a recent overview such as Adam Smyth (ed.), A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Often cited are Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (London & New York: Dent/Dutton, 1948 [1818]); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised 1892); Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901); and Henry Ford, in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1924 fp. 1923). As set out above, David Amigoni, Linda H. Petersen and Juliette Atkinson have been at pains to show the diversity

354  Current debates about life writing and historians’ egohistoire of Victorian life-writing, and so it is the case with much of the more recent kinds. For instance, one might consider feminist classics like Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959); Force of Circumstance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965); The Prime of Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965); All Said and Done (London: Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973). For a consideration of the life-writing boom, see Julie Rak, Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) and for a general analyses of it, see Paul John Eakin, Writing Life Writing: Narrative History Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2020). Jaume Aurell gives a useful overview of egohistoire in ‘Egohistory in Perspective: Reflections on the Nature of an Ambition Historiographical Project’, Cahiers de civilization medieval, no. 238 (2017) pp. 125–138 surveys egohistoire on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Pierre Nora’s Essais d’ego-histoire in 1987. For the challenges for egohistoire, see Luisa Passerini and Alexander C.T. Geppert, ‘Historians in Flux: The Task and Challenge of Ego-histoire’, in Historein, vol. 3, special number on European Ego-histoires Historiography and the Self, 1970–2000 (2001), pp. 7–18.

9 Conclusion Trevelyan’s empiricism and historians’ biographical practices

Biography is relevant to a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. I have argued that it is of particular importance, however, to historians. Rather than being uneasy about the relationship between history and biography, most historians have both questioned and written biography. Biography is now, and has always been, central to most historians’ practices. All too often, however, historians have not published their reflections on their biographical methodological toolkit. So even when the historiography has been considered, more attention has been given to the biographies historians have written, rather than to the study of the development of biographical methods (in plural). This is changing: currently historians of landscape, ‘for instance, in the emerging field between cultural biography and archaeology are first asking about how to do it before writing lives based on bones.1 These conversations and debates are methodological. In this conclusion, I review debates over biographical methods about more modern lives that have been considered in the body of the text. I argue that empiricism is the umbrella method for historians writing biography and its development underwrote the pattern of contemporary biographical practice. Finally, I show how considering the debates over methodology sharpens our analysis. Current biographies have drawn on earlier practices with developments having been informed, wittingly or unwittingly, by earlier conversations and debates in the historiography about biographical methodologies.

The biography of the debate: the life and death of debates A number of issues in the last two centuries have been especially influential in shaping historians’ current biographical practices. Seven debates have been considered in sequence: Carlyle’s hero worship, scientific modernism, psychobiography, prosopography, Marxist biography, microhistory and egohistoire. There has not been a smooth linear progression of the epistemology and methods of writing lives. Some methods have been adopted (British Marxists’ non-teleological causation and prosopography—with some conditions). More generally, this could be described as a rejection of presentism, with the rejection of teleology. Others have just been rejected DOI: 10.4324/9780429426391-9

356 Conclusion (hero worship and psychoanalysis). Some have been integrated but adapted (microhistory). Yet others remain unresolved (the role of the individual in history). So the development was mixed and uneven. Each debate has to be considered in its own terms. Yet each has influenced the next, in turn. In sum, these seven debates will familiarise readers with the contours of biographical practice from the historians’ perspective. A good example of a method which was rejected after a heated debate is scientific biography. J.B. Bury, an historian of the late antiquity and the early middle ages and a philologist, experimented with biography as a science. He wanted to write history and biography that closely aligned with the facts in the archives, which was impersonal and ‘objective’. He believed that ‘though history may supply material for literary art or philosophical speculation, she is herself a science, no less and no more’.2 He thought that that meant much spadework in the archives and writing up his research by way of developing hypotheses, just as in natural science, to advance knowledge. Nearly half of his biography of St Patrick consists of complex appendices and discussion of the documentary evidence: important scholarly details as the author’s notes on Patrick’s own writings, the memoirs of the same by other writers including Tirechan and Muirchu, an examination of other Irish source materials, and a look at the historical evidence for such events as the dates of Patrick’s birth and captivity, his possible visit to Rome in 432, his consecration, the location of his burial, and much more.3 Bury’s publicizing of his method in 1903 in his inaugural professorial lecture elicited cutting responses from historians such as G. M. Trevelyan, John Morley and S. Henry Butcher.4 They were all, as Trevelyan described himself, a ‘traditional kind of historian’.5 They challenged Bury’s pious devotion to ‘facts’ over craft and narration. Butcher criticised both Bury and John Robert Seeley for wanting to create ‘historical scientists’. He protested that history was not ‘a mass of facts’ and that it was the historian’s task ‘to clothe the story of a human society in a literary dress’, that is, to write biographically: History is not merely the story of movements, of institutions, or of changes in the order of society. It is also the story of men, doing, feeling, thinking; acting as individuals, though within and in relation to the political organism. A purely scientific history could hardly touch the fringe of the inward world of human motive and personality. That world, with its reactions on the outer can never be reduced to the certitude of scientific truth; its facts cannot be tested or authenticated by methods which strict science recognises. They need some divining power, some faculty of imaginative interpretation to make them intelligible; and such a faculty demands the art of literary expression.6

Conclusion  357 Butcher feared that ‘[T]o be a literary historian will probably be a rare achievement in the future’.7 But literary historians have thrived. In this case, over time Bury said that he agreed with Butcher and Morley. Historians remain committed to extensive and critical archival research. But few or none think that the archives speak for themselves. Moreover, the rejection of scientific biography narrowed the divide between amateur and professional historians. Biography was one of the major methods they shared. So, the debate over the scientific biography that Bury and Henry Adams championed had consequences they certainly did not intend. Prosopography exemplifies a method that has been integrated into historians’ biographical practices. In Lewis Namier’s case, there was a lag before his biographical experiments became widespread. His methods required the power of digital tools. He tried out prosopography as the fundamental historical method by tracing the individual biographies of eighteenth-century parliamentary representatives in the House of Commons and teasing out common characteristics. He set out to systematically analyse the economic and social connections of the men concerned with the business of government. He never managed to finish the task of detailed analysis of all the individuals. Indeed, the study of the British House of Commons members is a massive ongoing digital biography project.8 Others have developed Namierist prosopography, as seen in the vast biographical databases on slaves and convicts being created around the world. The debate between Namier and Herbert Butterfield was inauspicious for it became extremely embittered. An infamous 1953 Times Literary Supplement article which accused Namier of ‘taking the mind out of history’ was initially attributed to Butterfield, although it later turned out to have been written by A. J. P. Taylor.9 Butterfield himself attacked Namier in a 1957 article in Encounter, ‘George III and the Namier School’, and he wrote crushing reviews of the works of the Namierites, in particular John Brooke.10 According to J. H. Plumb, Namier hated Butterfield, [with] a hatred that deepened year after year and became a kind of obsessional rage. He spoke of him with sneering bitterness, arranged for his books to be savaged by anonymous reviewers and wrecked his reputation whenever opportunity offered.11 The debate, however, shaped practice, for historians took heed of the arguments against the atomisation of history and modified or adapted the thick prosopographical study of individuals to develop a range of collective biographical practices. The outcome of this debate illustrates a general theme of this book. As a profession, historians remain committed to mixed methods, rejecting the view that there is a single, privileged tool for finding out about the past. Even when it appears that the debates had a life of their own independent of context, we find we need to put them into their times. So one might

358 Conclusion draw a straight line from Victorian hagiography to life writing hagiography. Many Victorians were hagiographers ‘dominated by the idea of Goodness’. Virginia Woolf noted ‘that the Victorian worthies are presented to us’ as ‘Noble, upright, chaste, severe’.12 One needed to be reverential and uncritical. When we consider current egohistoire or life writing we noted that post-Victorians seemed not to have abandoned the hagiographical approach. Many regard life writing as a privileged sensory source for which we should suspend our critique. Who can say that your account of your own life is fallible or wrong? Hagiography is a biography that treats its subject with undue reverence. Egohistoire is often self-reverential, and even when not, it invites an uncritical telling of the life, if not of the life itself. The Victorians treated their biographies with reverence and much life writing treats its subjects reverentially too. I have argued that life writing is neo-hagiography. The neo-hagiographers are more nuanced in the twenty-first century and more inclusive than their nineteenth-century forebears, and, as we have seen, some historians’ egohistoire can be testable and perfectly consistent with historians’ empirical method. The same can be said for the neo-Carlyleans. I have shown elsewhere, in the case of the debates over the role of the individual in history, that there are discernible generations of debate over fundamental biographical questions, but the approach in general has endured.13 The same is the case with life writing and writing about great men and women in history. Historians have reacted, responded and adapted theories and methodologies and, in the process, amended and revitalized their empirical method. Most literary accounts of biography emphasise Romanticism, modernist New Biography, psychoanalysis and postmodernism. We have seen the way in which Carlyle modified his Romanticism. Few historians experimented with psychoanalytical biographies in the same way that Lytton Strachey did, but by the same token many historians writing biography attempted to use some kind of psychological insights to analyse their subjects. When the evidence permits, the inner life is not ignored. While most historians have rejected psychobiography as a master variable, it remains popular among feminist historians and those considering irrational behaviours.14 Lyndal Roper is touched by psychoanalytical approaches and has reflected this in her biographies and accounts of witches and Martin Luther. Similarly, there is a genre of postmodern biography and autobiography, but it remains a small minority development; Robert Rosenstone is one of the few examples of a postmodern historian writing biography and autobiography.

Empiricism as the motor to historians’ practices amid debates over biography I have emphasized empiricism in this account of historians’ biographical practices with G. M. Trevelyan’s formula being outlined at the outset. Historians accumulate historical facts based on all available sources.

Conclusion  359 Historians analyse this material to find patterns and explanations by way of rational analysis and contextualisation. It is premised on common-sense realism that there is an outside world which we can know and that we can know past worlds. Achieving this knowledge is not easy and while testing can show our estimates of the truth are fallible, there is an epistemological optimism that we are getting closer to truth. Why bother otherwise? Moreover, then, historians ‘play with the facts’ and test the archival material that has been gathered, selecting and classifying them. All history students are taught document analysis and scepticism.15 She or he uses imaginative thinking to generalise and explain. They begin from the view that, while everything might be fallible and needs to be critically assessed, we can make progress by revising and nuancing our views of the material. Finally, the historian constructs a coherent narrative. The sources, the ways of analysis and the narratives have changed over time. Even so, fairly constantly, under the standards of the time, the professional view of historians is that a poor historical biography would be one that used only part of the archive or none, or insufficiently contextualised the life and thus overstated its explanations of the life. As historian Stephen Davies and others have argued, despite ‘the challenges’ of a variety of approaches in the last two centuries, most historians have remained ‘wedded’ to empiricism: ‘empirical methods have prevailed, and the study of history remains broadly empirical’.16 So it is with historians’ biographical practices too. Historians researching lives have used some methods which are more theoretically orientated, such as psychoanalysis and microhistory. Others have used data-rich methods like scientific biography and prosopography. While biographical methods have not been static, the commitment of historians using lives to empiricism has been constant throughout, but without, in general, privileging any particular source or tool. Empiricism and peer review itself goes a long way to explaining the way most historians have navigated the variety of biographical approaches since Carlyle. This text has used the device of seven public debates to chart historians’ discussion of biographical practices, offering a map of biography from the historian’s perspective. Empiricism is at the heart of these debates. A commitment to empiricism led Robert Seeley to object to Carlylean ‘transcendental’ biography entering the academy. He wanted evidence and resorted to the evidence-rich political biography. Empiricism led Bury to object to Trevelyan’s way of doing things on the basis it was too artful. There needed to be more rigorous consideration of the data. In turn, most historians objected to scientific biography and stepped back from the excess of facts in a narrative. But they did not abandon empiricism. Seeley and Bury and others had already exposed the Victorians’ methods before Strachey took up the cudgels with Eminent Victorians (1918). The former thought Victorians were preoccupied with great men of a certain type which they treated in a hagiographical manner, writing moral

360 Conclusion and uncritical biography. Such biographies are empirical failures. It was empiricism that led Trevelyan to object to Strachey’s modernist biographical practices, even though his critique was private and quiet. Lack of evidence led Roland Bainton to object to Erik Erickson’s psychobiographical methods as the basis of analysing a life. While most historians were attracted to psychological explanation, and they used it where they could find evidence, they did not write psychobiography. Similarly, it was on empirical grounds that Herbert Butterfield objected to Lewis Namier’s prosopographical biography. He believed that Namier had been excessive in the way that he had tried to systematically control his analysis of the seventeenth-century parliamentary members. In his focus on family connection and material interest, he wrote out of his picture evidence of other motivations. His evidential scope was too limited. This was a little ironic as Butterfield’s Christian views were not evidence-based either. It was certainly on the basis of evidence in the archives as well as humanism that British Marxists were led to object to the structural methods of crude Marxism and Stalinist biography, and their consequent lack of interest in biography. British Marxists’ pursuit of non-teleological causation led them to consider the losers in life and the seemingly unimportant subjects in social history. They began writing biographies of ‘the people’, representative and seemingly unimportant as well as of significant men and women. Similarly, Carlo Ginzburg and Robert Finlay in their different ways each had qualms over Natalie Zemon Davis’ microhistorical narratives, worrying that there was little evidence to support her speculative biography. Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Nigel Hamilton have expressed concern that life writing is a sub-empirical genre. In the name of their empirical method, balance, critical analysis and scepticism, historians have denied that life writing is a privileged source to be treated without doubt. Historians’ empiricism was the method that led them to tinker and adapt biographical methods and theories looking for new and more reliable pathways to past lives. This sometimes led to pushback. For instance, historians’ tendency to contextualise single case studies in history led to Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijárto’s accusation that they have misused microhistorical theory. Historians tend to ignore the central principle of ‘normal exception’ to examine extraordinary lives and to insist on contextualising the lives and considering networks and individuals social relations. Even so, despite this pushback, historians typically use microhistory to say something more general about the times of the microhistorical subject. The debates themselves occurred in a range of contexts involving changing relationships between historians, new sources, developing societies and audiences over time. Empiricism is based on the view that theories require reference to the real world for confirmation. For historians, confirmation is found in the archives, all of which are moving feasts. I have tried to put historians’ changing methods and theories into conversation with their changing biographical practices.

Conclusion  361 The seven debates considered in this book have not exhausted the possibilities of contestation. Why are multiple biographies published on the one subject? Cultural historians like Marina Warner have considered this in terms of canons over time.17 The American writer and journalist Janet Malcolm considered multiple biographies written about the same time in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1992), deciding that biography was about choices made as much as truth.18 Historian Marnie Hughes-Warrington has also considered revisionism on the basis that revisionism is ‘underexplored within the growing literature on historiography’ and there is a paucity of work on it.19 But while there are other debates, none are as well developed in the historiography as the seven which have been considered in this text. They have been foundational and significant for historians working in biography.

Narrating the debates: biographical historiography biographically The debates in this text have been considered sequentially and synchronically in broad chronological order. There were alternatives to this choice. I could have treated each of the debates diachronically.20 I could also have narrated historians’ biographical practices by way of a consideration of familial and professional genealogies. Several familial genealogies are implicit in the text. Much has been written of Thomas Babington Macaulay, George Otto Trevelyan and G.M. Trevelyan.21 It is more illuminating, though, to trace not a family genealogy but an academic one: three generations of historians, each writing biography and each the supervisor of the next. So let’s briefly consider A. F. Pollard (1869–1948), John S. Neale (1890–1975) and Patrick Collinson (1929–2011). It is helpful to consider a professional genealogy and the trajectory of their biographical approaches to history in practice over time. Pollard was Neale’s doctoral supervisor while Collinson was, in turn, Neale’s student. Neale trained with Pollard in the 1920s, held that he ‘did his best work as a biographer’, but remembered that he was opposed to ‘biographies as research theses’.22 Collinson said the ‘last favour I received from my old teacher’, Neale, was his encouragement to write a modern biography of Archbishop Grindal.23 Collectively, their writing and teaching spanned Victorian, prewar and interwar biography, as well as postwar prosopography. Neale argued that the Between the two world-wars, biography had a remarkable vogue. Littérateurs [someone interested and knowledgeable about literature] and their publishers scanned history for interesting persons, hitherto unsung or uncursed, or insufficiently cursed. I doubt if there has been anything quite like the craze. Even Jane Shore [one of the many ­mistresses of King Edward IV of England], to cite one of the most conspicuous examples which came my way as a reviewer, found her biographer.24

362 Conclusion They all considered the historical method in print. Collinson considered ‘his historical methods and his intellectual priorities’ in chapter 5 of his memoir, The History of a History Man: Or, the Twentieth Century Viewed from a Safe Distance (2011). He believed that historians should write ‘not just the man, but the world in which he operated’, and, in the case of Archbishop Grindal, ‘a biography would open windows, if not into men’s hearts, then into what Collinson saw as the dominant religiosity of the age’.25 Similarly, in 1929 Pollard had argued that there were particular biographical questions of concern to historians, such as the tension between individual and collective, structure and agency, micro and macro, or, as Pollard encapsulated it, ‘the individual in society’. He noted that ‘The ‘life’ is always the ‘life and times’ or the ‘life and letters’ and a life cannot attain the ‘artificial isolation of a portrait’. He also believed that a subject’s autobiography was an ‘obstacle’ in a biographer’s path. No life-writing privilege here. He wondered, Will sociology reverse and revenge the biographical subjection of the ‘times’ to the ‘life’ of a man by merging his ‘life’ in his ‘times’ and reducing biography to a dictionary for sociological use?26 In 1951, Neale, Astor Professor of English History at the University of London, concluded his paper on the biographical approach to history ‘by assuring you that I am not advancing the proposition that all history is biography. Some history—very fruitful history—is biography’.27 This was the opinion of an historian seen as one of foremost historical biographers in the interwar period. He chose to publish his first biography on Queen Elizabeth (1934) without footnotes, bibliography or appendices and ‘all the other obvious trappings of scholarship’, including a reference to his title ‘Professor’.28 One historian-reviewer complained that ‘[a] n unobtrusive numeral in the text with appended references discreetly concealed somewhere in the back of the book could hardly have disturbed the casual reader and would have been distinctly helpful to the curious student’.29 Neale’s ‘warm-hearted and readable life of the Queen’, in which he did not dwell upon the shortcomings of the Virgin Queen, was a best-seller which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for a work of history In 2003, in the opinion of his fellow historian, and Neale’s own former graduate student, the biographer Collinson, Neale’s biography of Elizabeth I ‘has yet to be bettered’.30 He made that assessment in the context of over 100 books professing to be biographical accounts of Elizabeth and her reign … [which were] published between 1890 and November 2002, not to mention whole shelves of aspectual and monographical historical works, together with all that fiction, in print, celluloid, electronics and impersonation.31

Conclusion  363 The flood of biographies on Elizabeth, ‘abated in 1963 and became a trickle from 1974’.32 By that point, however, Neale had moved away from biography towards the study of Elizabeth’s parliaments, involving another biographical technique, the collective study of a historical group.33 What is, however, concealed from the casual reader is that he moved from what can be described as ‘archival positivism’—or dependence on considering primary archives as vehicle of historical truth in themselves—to a form of prosopography which required data to be processed. Neale’s supervisor Pollard (1869–1948) had moved in the same direction over time too.34 He had admired Carlyle’s biographer, James Anthony Froude’s ‘archival positivism’,35 observing in the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) that ‘[n]o previous history has incorporated so much unpublished material.’ Froude was an empiricist who waded into the archives, writing that I have been turned into rooms piled to the window-sill with bundles of dust-covered despatches, and told to make the best of it. Often I have found the sand glistening on the ink where it had been sprinkled when a page was turned [and lain undisturbed since it was written].36 In addition to Carlyle, Froude wrote biographies on Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Increasingly wary of the myth of Gloriana, his critical biography stressed Robert Dudley’s role in Elizabeth’s reign.37 For his part, Pollard came to believe that Froude’s Elizabeth was over-documented.38 Pollard, in turn, the Dictionary of National Biography’s Assistant Editor 1893–1901) resigned when George Smith published the original 63-volume set (1885 and 1901).39 He became deeply embedded in the professional institutions of history in the United Kingdom. He wrote 500 dictionary entries for the DNB. He became Professor of Constitutional History at the University College, from 1903 to 1931, founded the Historical Association (1906), edited History (1916–1922), and chaired the Institute of Historical Research (1921–31) and then becoming its honorary director (1931–39). He published The History of England from the Accession of Edward VI to the Death of Elizabeth, 1547–1603 (1910) and then changed tack to consider The Evolution of Parliament (1920). Neale suggested that while ‘Pollard’s Evolution of Parliament stimulated a remarkable amount of research’ it was, of course, Namier’s book that ‘began a new historical method’, that Neale embraced. This genealogically connected trend of a slow shift to more group- and network-orientated biography continued. Neale’s student, Collinson, wrote mostly group biography.40 The Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge from 1988 to 1996, over the course of his career, he wrote biographical works on Dering, Archbishop Grindal, Lady Margaret Beaufort, and edited the letters of Thomas Wood. His essay on Elizabeth I for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was issued as a paperback by the Oxford University Press (2007). Biography was central

364 Conclusion to his work on religion and included Cranmer to Sancroft (2006). His main thesis was that Puritanism was a ‘significant force within the Elizabethan Anglican Church instead of merely a radical group of individuals’. Three generations of biographer, student and ‘grandson’ student drew upon a range of techniques: archives-based biography, prosopography, group biography and autobiography from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. But there was a slow shift in emphasis, and a slow increase in the range of techniques. For Collinson, technique influenced but did not determine or replace interpretation. Interpretations on Elizabeth varied over time, but these debates were in many ways independent of the biographical technique. Froude, a Victorian but not a hagiographer, believed Elizabeth to be a woman who he found was full of tortuousness and artifice, without substance. He came to share what he believed to be the privately held opinion of her ministers that ‘she had no ability at all worth calling by the name’.41 Froude had argued for biography in terms of archival positivism, in the face of much opposition, including Bury’s ‘scientific biography’: Besides Roman Catholics he had against him: Anglo-Catholics; Protestants who disliked Henry VIII on moral or political grounds; advocates and practitioners of the so-called ‘scientific’ history; lovers of democracy and parliamentarianism; admirers and apostles of nineteenth century industrial progress; Utilitarians and Economic Individualists; Little Englanders; Irish patriots and Home Rulers; Humanitarians offended by his doubts of the wisdom of freeing the slaves; Carlyle haters; and extreme Carlyle lovers for his painting of the hero with warts and all.42 Modernist Lytton Strachey challenged Froude’s characterisation—which stood proxy for him for the wider defects of Victorian biography—by arguing that Elizabeth’s personality needed to be given much more weight than Froude allowed. In turn, Neale challenged previous accounts of Elizabeth by emphasising finance as the essence of her story; above all, she ensured unity, peace and prosperity. Indeed, Neale emphasised her pragmatism and ‘indifference to principle’. As Collinson noted, by the late twentieth century views of Elizabeth had turned full circle: ‘Deflationary, revisionist, books are now all the rage (there are two useful collections of revisionist essays, Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (1998) and The Myth of Elizabeth (2003)’.43 Collinson’s account was conspicuous to the extent to which he wrote on women’s history—Elizabeth was queen, of course—but there was also more general work on the role of women in the English Reformation, such as on Anne Lock, whose

Conclusion  365 dictionary article he also wrote. He was supportive to women graduates; Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger edited a collection of writings published in honour of his scholarship (festschrift).44 This professional genealogy is of biographers committed to both biography and empiricism.45 They used the richest range of sources and multiple methods to attain robustness. They often used mixed methods.46 They used ‘great person in history’ insights, were attracted to archival positivism but resisted scientific biography, and used prosopography but went on to use collective biography. Collinson was sympathetic to the rise of feminist accounts. You rarely find a reference to Neale, Pollard or Collinson in accounts of the history and evolution of biography. Their use of lives in their interpretations were sometimes controversial, but they were not in the forefront of the historiographical debates.47 Like so many others, they were methodological consumers rather than producers or experimenters. The work of these historians and their colleagues was, like the title of Edgar Johnson’s 1937 overview of biography, One Mighty Torrent.48 It gives lie to the idea that historians have been disinterested in biography before the late twentieth century ‘Biographical Turn’. We can find traces of their awareness of the wider biographical debates in their work but it is buried in the biographies they wrote. It is not easy to compile.49 They have not attracted biographies themselves, although Collinson wrote an autobiography,50 even though they were at the forefront of the historical profession attracting festschrifts.51 The debates, however, help us make sense of their trajectory over time. They exemplify rather than discuss the evolution of biography amongst practicing professional historians.

Conclusion The idea abroad is that Trevelyan’s formula was an old-fashioned burden. Once Trevelyan had been at the centre of biographical debates. After the war, Trevelyan had expected to go on writing in the same manner as before, returning to the ‘world of reform [he] so loved’. But fashion had changed, and the public had no time for his prewar heroes. Commented Harold Laski in 1919, for example, ‘I re-read Trevelyan on Italy, and to my astonishment, found a large part of it merely brilliant rhetoric, where ten years ago I remember being swept off my feet by it’.52 Historians have revised and adapted their biographical practices, and with it they have adapted Trevelyan’s formula. The kind of the material and evidence historians consider has widened over time. The subjects are much more diverse, representative and interesting as much as significant. Detailed biographies and methods have come in and out of fashion, as in accounts of Elizabeth 1, or during the time it has taken Robert Caro to write his four

366 Conclusion volumes of Lyndon B. Johnson,53 or the massive ‘every fact recorded’ biography of Winston Churchill in eight narrative volumes and series of supplementary documentation, so far, which has gone through three authors—Randolph Churchill, Martin Gilbert and now Larry Arnn—since it was begun in the 1960s. Victorian monumentalism is not dead. However, the empirical method and historians’ realism is something that they have clung to through wave after wave of biographical methods and experiments. Empiricism has served historians writing biography well.

Notes 1 H. Elerie and T. Spek, ‘The Cultural Biography of Landscape as a Tool for Action Research in the Drentsche National Landscape (Northern Netherlands)’, in The Cultural Landscape & Heritage Paradox: Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape and its European Dimension, ed. T. Bloemers, H. Kars, A. van der Valk and M. Wijnen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), pp. 83–113. 2 John Bagnell Bury, The Science of History. An Inaugural Lecture Delivered in the Divinity School, Cambridge, on January 26, 1903 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), p. 22. 3 J. B. Bury, Life of St Patrick and His Place in History (New York: Cosimo Books, 2008, fp. 1905), blurb. 4 G. M. Trevelyan, ‘The Latest View of History’, The Independent Review, vol. 1 (1903–1904), pp. 395–414. John Morley, Nineteenth Century and After, vol. 53 (October 1904) and S. H. Butcher, Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects, Lecture Six (London: Macmillan and Company, 1904), pp. 250–255. 5 G. M. Trevelyan, An Autobiography and Other Essays (London: Longman’s Green and Co., 1949), p. 1. 6 Butcher, Harvard Lectures, pp. 252–253. 7 Butcher, Harvard Lectures, p. 255. 8 Lewis Namier and John Brooke, Charles Townsend (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1964). 9 A. J. P. Taylor, ‘The Namier View of History’, Times Literary Supplement (28 August 1953), pp. xxii–xxiii. 10 Herbert Butterfield, ‘George III and the Namier School’, Encounter (April 1957), p. 75. 11 Quoted in C. T. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 279–280. 12 Virginia Woolf, ‘The New Biography’, in The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth, 1967), p. 231. 13 Melanie Nolan, ‘The Great Individual in History: Historicising Historians’ biographical practice’, in Fear of Theory: Towards a New Theoretical Justification of Biography, ed. Hans Renders and David Veltman (Leiden, The Netherlands & Boston: Brill, 2021), pp. 72–88. 14 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Writing Women’s Lives (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1998). 15 Hans Schleier, ‘Ranke in the Manuals on Historical Methods of Droyen, Lorenz and Bernheim’, in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, ed. Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), p. 111.

Conclusion  367 16 Stephen Davies, Empiricism and History (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 2. Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, ‘The Empiricists’, in The Houses of History, A Critical Reader in History and Theory, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 13–46. 17 Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981). 18 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1994). 19 Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Revisionist Histories (London: Routledge, 2013). See also Marnie Hughes-Warrington, ‘The “ins” and “outs” of History: Revision as Non-place’, History and Theory, vol. 46, no. 4 (2007), pp. 61–76. 20 Nolan, ‘The Great Individual in History’. 21 Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son. Architects of Imperial Britain (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2012). 22 John E. Neale, ‘The Biographical Approach to History’, History, New Series, vol. 36, no. 128 (October 1951), p. 193 23 Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583. The Struggle for a Reformed Church (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), p. 12. 24 Neale, ‘The Biographical Approach to History’, p. 193. 25 Kenneth Fincham, ‘Archbishop Grindal 1519–1583’, History, vol. 100, no. 342 (October 2015), Special issue: Patrick Collinson and his Historiographical Legacy, p. 536, See also Alexandra Walsham, ‘Introduction’, History, p. 514 in the same number. 26 A. F. Pollard, ‘Biographers and Historians’, History, new series, vol. 13, no. 52 (January 1929), p. 324. 27 Neale, ‘The Biographical Approach to History’, p. 203. 28 Conyers Read review of Queen Elizabeth by J. E. Neale, The American Historical Review, vol. 39, no. 4 (July 1934), pp. 718–719. 29 Read, review of Queen Elizabeth, pp. 718–719. 30 Patrick Collinson, ‘Elizabeth I and the Verdicts of History’, Historical Research, vol. 76, no. 194 (November 2003), p. 487. 31 Collinson, ‘Elizabeth I and the Verdicts of History’, p. 473. 32 Christopher Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), pp. 243–245. 33 J. E. Neale: ‘The Elizabethan Political Scene’, in his Essays in Essays in Elizabethan History (London, 1958, fp. 1948), pp. 59–84; The Elizabethan House of Commons (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949); Elizabeth I and her Parliaments (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953 and 1957); Essays in Elizabethan History (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958). 34 Patrick Collinson, ‘Pollard, Albert Frederick (1869–1948)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://www-oxforddnb-com.virtual.anu.edu.au/view/ 10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-35556?rskey= qfYGv0&result=1, accessed 28 January 2022. 35 Collinson, ‘Elizabeth I and the Verdicts of History’, p. 473. 36 A. L. Rowse, Froude the Historian: Victorian Man of Letters (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1987), p. 73. 37 James Anthony Froude, The Reign of Elizabeth. Short Studies I, 454–455. Cf. pp. 457, 460–461. 38 Curtis Howe Walker, ‘The ‘True’ Mr Froude’, Texas Review, vol. 8 no. 4 (July 1923), pp. 367–368. 39 A. F. Pollard, ‘Sir Sidney Lee and the “Dictionary of National Biography”’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, vol. 4, no. 10 (June 1926), pp. 1–13.

368 Conclusion 40 Patrick Collinson (ed.), Letters of Thomas Wood, Puritan, 1566–1577 (University of London: Athlone Press, 1960); A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism: The Life and Letters of Godly Master Dering (London: Dr. Williams’s Trust, 1964); Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979); Lady Margaret Beaufort and Her Professors of Divinity at Cambridge: 1502 to 1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); From Cranmer to Sancroft: Essays on English Religion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007); Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 41 Collinson, ‘Elizabeth I and the Verdicts of History’, p. 485. 42 Andrew Fish, ‘The Reputation of James Anthony Froude’, Pacific Historical Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (June 1932), p. 179. 43 J. M. Walker (ed.), Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 44 Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger (eds.), Belief and practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from his Students (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 1998). 45 Paulin Kewes, ‘“A mere historian”: Patrick Collinson and the Study of Literature’, History, vol. 100, no. 342 (October 2015), Special issue: Patrick Collinson and his historiographical legacy, pp. 609–625. 46 Gidon Cohen, Andrew Flinn and Kevin Morgan, ‘Towards a Mixed Method Social History: Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in the Study of Collective Biography’, in Prosopography approaches and applications, A Handbook, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (Oxford: Unit for Prosopographical Research, Linacre College, University of Oxford, 2007), pp. 211–230. 47 John F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England. Essays in response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2007). 48 Edgar Johnson, One Mighty Torrent: The Drama of Biography (New York: Stackpole Sons, 1937). 49 Short biography of Neale, in John Neale Queen Elizabeth I (London: Pelican, 1971). 50 Patrick Collinson, ‘Pollard, Albert Frederick (1865–1948)’ and ‘Neale, Sir John Ernest (1890–1975)’; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Collinson, Patrick (1929–1975)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Patrick Collinson, The History of a  History Man: Or, the Twentieth Century Viewed from a Safe Distance (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2011). 51 Wabuda and Litzenberger, A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from His Students. 52 Alistair MacLachlan, ‘Intersecting and Contrasting Lives: G.M. Trevelyan and Lytton Strachey’, in Clio’s Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians, ed. Douglas Munro and John G. Reid (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017), p. 167. 53 Robert Caro has written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012).

Index

Abbott, Josie 247 Abraham, Karl 131, 133, 135 Acton, Lord (John Emerich Edward Dalberg) 10, 18, 55, 60, 63–64, 97, 237 Adams, Henry 20, 84, 85, 99–103, 107, 110, 111, 322, 357; A Letter to American Teachers of History (1910) 101; History of the Jefferson & Madison Administrations (1889–1891) 102; The Education of Henry Adams (1918) 101 Adams, Samuel 133 Adams, Timothy Dow 314 Adler, Alfred 133, 139 Agency 4, 5, 10, 11, 16, 19, 21, 22, 25, 38, 42, 44, 50, 52, 53, 66, 93, 95, 99, 108, 132, 144, 149, 154, 174, 179, 180, 187, 188, 191, 192, 194, 202–209, 224, 235, 237, 248, 251, 264, 278, 284, 291, 294, 317, 336, 362 see free will, individual responsibility Alexander the Great 134, 176 Alexander, Sally 170 Alfred the Great 105, 243 Allen, Grant 51 Altick, Richard 45, 93 Ambrosius, Lloyd E. 32 Amelang, James D. 267, 272–274 American Psychiatric Association 139–140, 142 American Psychoanalytic Association 133, 140, 142 American Historical Association (AHA) 100, 102, 107, 129, 139, 181 Amigoni, David 17, 19, 39, 64, 353 Anderson, Clare 242 Anderson, James 142–144 Anderson, Perry 206

Andrews, William L. 319 Annales school 10, 18, 21, 22, 146–150, 207–209, 241, 243, 270, 277–285, 291, 293, 295–296 Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale (Annals of Economic and Social History) 150, 278 anti-­heroism in biography 58, 63, 102, 143 Anthon, Susan B. 247 Armytage, W. H. G. 101 Arendt, Hannah 155 Arnn, Larry 366 Arnold, Thomas 83, 84 Aron, Raymond 194–198, 200, 201 Ashley, Maurice 238 Ashplant, T. G. 141 Aspinall, Arthur 232, 235 Atkinson, W.P. 101 Atkinson, Juliette 7, 9, 17, 19, 41, 45, 97, 353 Atlas, James 7 atomizing lives 18, 21–22, 224, 357 see lumping and splitting lives Attila the Hun 176 Aurell, Jaume 16, 23, 312, 314, 322, 331, 333–334, 337–339, 353–354 Australian Dictionary of Biography xiv, 187, 243, 263 Australian Journal of Biography and History xv Avery, Todd 20, 93, 94 Ayer, A. J. 102, 109 Baár, Monika 121 Bacon, Francis 9, 54 Bachrach, Bernard 224 Bainton, Roland 20, 121–130, 360; Here I Stand (1950) 126

370 Index Bancroft, George 100 Bakhtin, Mikhail 273 Bakunin, Mikhail 43, 189 Baker, William 33 Ballets Russes 82 Banner, James 330 Barthes, Roland 13, 312 Barzun, Jacques 143–144 Bate, Francis 79 Battershill, Claire 90, 95–97 Baum, L. Frank 20 Beaglehole, Ernest 139 Beaglehole, J. C. 179 Beales, Derek 208 Beard, Charles A. 5, 15, 229–230, 232 Becker, Carl 15, 107–111; The Heavenly City of the 18th century Philosophers (1932) 108 Beech, George 224 Bell, Clive 78, 80 Bell, Vanessa 78, 80, 82, 84 Belltoc, Hilaire 4, 98 Benjamin, Lewis 226 Bennett, G. V. 238 Bentley, Michael 179, 183, 222, 225, 226, 234 Benton, Michael 7 Berlin, Isaiah 18, 172–182, 183, 189–201, 230, 234, 248, 264; Historical Inevitability (1955) 176–178; individual responsibility approach 176–177, 180, 191, 196; Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939) 173–179; The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (1953) 264 Bevir, Mark 121 Bindoff, S. T. 233, 234 Biografie Instituut (Biography Institute), Research Centre for Historical Studies at Groningen University 275 Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 328 biographical review writing 89, 90, 96, 134 biographical theories 3, 5, 7–8, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, 32, 39, 41, 45, 50, 51, 54, 57, 58, 63, 76, 80, 82, 91, 100, 102, 106–108, 124, 125, 127, 131, 138, 143, 144, 149, 153, 155, 170, 173, 175, 181, 183, 195, 203, 219, 236, 238, 265, 297, 315, 317–318, 323, 328, 329, 336

biographical turn 5, 11, 13, 15, 16, 265 Blainey, Geoffrey 323 Blaas, P.B.M. 103 Blass, Rachel B. 171 Bloch, Marc 3, 149, 269, 278, 279, 296 Bloomsbury group (Bloomsberries) 11–13, 19–20, 41, 77–79, 81–87, 94–97, 99, 110, 120, 134–138, 247, 263 see also idealism Bolognetti, Vinceno 272 Boswell, James 6, 10, 248, 249–250, 263 Bonaparte, Napoleon 37, 40, 44, 48, 52, 54, 58, 61, 63, 64, 98, 134, 188, 195, 200, 235, 266, 268 Booth, Alison 251, 263 Boulton, Matthew 248 Bradford, Richard 8, 24, 32 Brady, Ciaran 75 Braudel, Fernand 208, 278–280, 292, 296 Brett, Judith 157 Brill, A. A. 137 British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) 133, 153, 246 Brontë, Charlotte 75, 84 Brooke, John 221, 222, 234, 238, 357 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 79 Browning, Oscar 63 Browning, Robert 84 Bruneau, William 251 Buckle, Henry Thomas 60, 66, 100 Bullitt, William 141, 170 Burke, Edmund 249 Burke Peter 279 Burne-­Jones, Edward 80 Burns, Robert 37, 40 Burnett, John 320 Burguière, André 149 Burney, Frances 249, 294 Bury, John Bagnell 5, 16, 18, 20, 84, 85, 94, 97–99, 103–107, 109–111; The Life of St Patrick (1905) 105–106 see also scientific biography Butcher, S. H. 105, 356, 357 Butterfield, Herbert 5, 17, 18, 22, 52, 182, 189, 221–227, 235–240, 242, 245, 247–253, 357, 360; George III and the Historians (1957) 222, 238; ‘The Role of the Individual in History’ (1955) 76; The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) 228, 229, 235, 236

Index  371 Caesar, Julius 134, 176 Caine, Barbara xv, 9–11, 13, 17, 32, 110, 137, 225, 246, 250, 263; Biography and History (2010 & 2019) 9, 32, 110 see History and Biography Cambridge Apostles Society & Apostles 78–80, 88, 94, 138 Cambridge Clark lectureship 90 Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure 208, 241, 279 Cameron, Julia 80 Carmeli, Zvi 171 Cannadine, David 1–3, 104, 145 canons and conventions of writing biography 315–322, 361; breakdown of the symbolic male hero 315–318 Capps, Donald 121–123 Carlyle, Thomas 5, 8, 10, 15–16, 19, 23–25, 33–39, 39–46, 48–60, 62–64, 66, 75, 84, 86–87, 100, 104, 105, 138, 141, 145, 177, 188, 203, 355, 358, 359, 363–364 see also Great man theory of historyFrederick the Great (1858–1865) 40, 63; Heroes and Hero-­Worship (1841) 35, 39–41, 52; James Carlyle (1881) 41; James Sterling (1851) 41; Letters & Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1866) 37; Life of Burns (1859) 37; Oliver Cromwell (1845) 40, 86–87; On Biography (1832) 40, 145; Reminiscences (1881) 37, 86–87; Sartor Resartus (1831; 1833 & 1834) 35, 36, 41, 43, 177 Carlyle, Jane 37, 138 Carlyle, James 24, 41 Carnot, Lazare 44 Caro, Robert 365–366; The Years of Lyndon Johnson 4 vols. (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012) 366 Carpenter, Humphrey 263 Carr, E.H. 5, 10, 13, 17, 21, 172, 173, 180, 189–194, 201; Dostoevsky (1931) 189; Herzen (1933) 189; Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism (1934) 180, 190; Michael Bakunin (1937) 189; Romantic Exiles (1933) 189; What is History? (1961) 10, 189–190, 192–193, 194 Carrière, Jean-­Claude 285 Carver, Terrell 175

causation and biography 16, 18, 21, 52, 181–182, 188, 197, 201–207, 209, 219, 254, 355, 360 see agency Caute, David 18, 173, 176, 178–180, 189, 201 Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research, University of Sussex 328, 334 Centre for Life Writing Research, King’s College London 328 Centre for Microhistorical Research, Reykjavík Academy 275, 375 Centre for Narrative and Auto/ Biographical Studies (NABS), University of Edinburgh 318 Center for the Study of Ego-­ Documents European University, St. Petersburg 328 Cézanne, Paul 78, 80 Centre for Computing in the Humanities at Kings 242 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 291 Charles 1 98, 105, 190 Chartier, Roger 279 Chastognol, Andre 224 Chodorow, Nancy 141 Churchill, Jennie 246, 263 Churchill, Randolph 366 Churchill, Winston 188, 227, 366 Cimbala, Paul A. 320 see Himmelberg, Robert F. Clark, Anna 311 Clark, Charles Manning Hope 17, 308–312, 314, 322, 323; A Historian’s Apprenticeship (1992) 309; The Puzzles of Childhood (1989) 308–309; The Quest for Grace (1990) 309 Clark, Dymphna 309–311, 213 Clendinnen, Inga 323, 331 Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCED) 242 cliometricians 10, 279 Clifford, James 8 Cockshut, A.O. J. 8, 17 Cohen, Gerald 175 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 134 Coles, Robert 144 Cole, G.D.H. 180 collective biography 14, 16, 21, 24, 32, 109, 110, 245–252, 253, 263–264, 278, 365

372 Index Colley, Linda 22, 231, 234, 277, 290–295; Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (2007) 277, 292–295 Collingwood, R. G. 10, 87, 109–110, 145–148, 192, 324; An Autobiography (1939) 148, 324; Re-­enactment approach 148; The Idea of History (1946) 147 Collinson, Patrick 234, 235, 361–365 Collins, John 219 Communist Party Historians Group (Historians Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain) 183, 185–187, 219 Coombs, Helen (Fry) 80 Comte, Auguste 50, 60, 65, 100–102 conjecture 188–189, 287 Connelly, James 148 contingency 18, 21, 106, 181–183, 189–201, 208, 219, 235, 290 Conant, Maria Bernheim 195 Condorcet, Nicolas de 44, 91 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 267, 268 see Inquisition Continental Origins of English Landholders 1066–1166 (COEL) 242 Conway, Jill Ker 286, 314–318, 322, 323; A Woman’s Education (2001) 317; The Road from Coorain (1989) 317; True North (1994) 317 see canons approach to biography and autobiography Cooley, Elizabeth 82 Corbin, Alain 207, 290–291; The Life of an Unknown (1991) 290 Cossart, Brice 293 Costall, Alan 148 Costelloe, Karin 20, 135 Cottier, Cardinal Georges 268 counterfactuals 18, 21, 176, 181, 188–189, 195, 196, 198, 201, 210 Court, Jerrold Early 92 Courtenay, John 6 covering laws in history 180 Cowman, Krista 246, 251 Cox, Michael 189 Cranmer, Thomas 23 Crawford, R.M. 323 Creighton, Mandell 64 Crossman, Richard 180 critical biography 64–66, 90 see also hagiography

Cromwell, Oliver 19, 40, 50, 55, 57, 62, 64, 85, 98, 103, 176, 190, 200 Cromwell, Thomas 14, 23, 233 Crosland, Anthony 181 cultural anthropology 22 Cumming, Mark 36–37 da Gama, Vasco 293 Damousi, Joy 140 Damrosch, Leo 249–250 Danton, Georges 44, 98 Darnton, Robert 154, 280, 282–284, 288, 306; The Great Cat Massacre (1984) 280, 283–284 Darwin, Charles 35, 84, 100, 124, 206, 264; Darwinism 45 Darwin, Erasmus 208, 248 Davidson, Jim 325 Davin, Dan 180 Davies, B. 263 Davies, Ian ‘Foo’ 157 Davies, Stephen 32, 359 Davis, Natalie, Zemon 17, 277, 282–290, 306, 314, 318, 360; The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) 284–286, 288–290 Davison, Graeme 325 Day, Thomas 248 death of the author 10, 312 de Beauvoir, Simone 354 de Certeau, Michael 293; Possession at Loudun (1970) 293 de Haan, Binne 9, 23, 76, 320, 328, 329, 339, 340, 360 De Courcy, Anne 246 De Martino, Ernesto 265, 269 de Roys, Bertrande 285 deMause, Lloyd 141 de Vries, Jan 307 de Waal, Edmund 263 decolonised biography 291, 295, 320 Dekker, Rudolf 305, 330 Demos, John 306 Denifle, Heinrich 150 Dening, Greg 331 Dennis, Maurice 78 determinism 177–178 Derrida, Jacques 25, 273 Deutscher, Issac 13, 18, 21, 172–182, 189, 192–201; Stalin: A Political Biography (1949) 21, 173, 192, 196, 198–200; The Prophet Outcast (1963) 21, 173, 180, 192, 219; The Prophet Unarmed (1959) 21, 173,

Index  373 180, 192, 219; ‘The Young Lenin’ 180; Trotsky—the Prophet Armed (1954) 21, 173, 180, 192, 219 Deustcher, Tamara 180 Dicey, A. V. 64 Dick, Susan 88 Dickens, Charles 84 Dickenson. Emily 141 Dickenson, Violet 87 Dictionary of American Biography 15 Dictionary of Labour Biography 187 Dictionary of National Biography 80, 84, 90, 92, 93 Dictionary of New Zealand Biography 3 Dilthey, William 109, 110, 147–148 Dobb, Maurice 183, 187 Donaldson, Ian 243 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 91–92, 133, 189, 311–312 Douglass, Frederick 317, 353 Dray, William H. 109, 181 Duby, George 273, 280 Durkheim, Émile 3, 38, 149 Dutch BiographyNet 242–243 Eakin, Paul John 354 Eamon, William 268 École des hautes Études en sciences sociale (EHESS) 278 Edel, Leon 8, 145 Edward the Confessor 243 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 248 egohistoire 16, 18, 23, 312, 314, 322, 323, 325–329 egohistoire, historians 23, 323, 330–341 Einaudi, Giulio 272 Eley, Geoff 314, 336–337 Eliot, T. S. 12, 82 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 84 Elizabeth I 19, 83, 92, 102, 105, 134, 223, 232, 235, 362–363 Elliott, John Huxtable 172, 314 Elliott, Gregory 219 Ellmann, Richard 143 Elton, Geoffrey 10, 13–14, 208, 279; individual and human nature approach 14 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 38, 64, 80; Representative Men (1850) 64, 80 emotions and biography 15, 35, 42, 51, 80–81, 108, 125, 128, 132, 146, 149, 150, 156, 157, 273, 290, 310, 330

empathy, Imaginative Sympathy’ or compassionate truth 25, 147, 176, 226, 236, 287 empirical method 1–5, 24–25, 55, 64, 85, 97–98, 102, 104–110, 177 Encyclopédie 284 Engerman, David 279 Engels, Friedrich 48–49, 175, 184, 202 Erikson, Erik 20, 24, 121–130, 139, 141, 153, 170; evolutionary ideas and biography 39, 46–48; Gandhi’s Truth (1969) 123, 141; Young Man Luther (1958) 122–123, 126, 141 Etty, Elsbeth 314 Evans, Raymond 336–337 Evans, Richard J. 189, 190, 194, 219 Falina, Maria 121 fate 19, 105, 127, 151, 156, 174, 182, 193, 296, 291 see predestination family biography 325–329 Farrell, Michael P. 247 Febvre, Lucien 10, 146, 148–151, 205, 273, 278–281; Martin Luther: A Destiny (1928) 146, 148, 150 feminist biography 137, 154–157, 251, 286, 316–318, 354, 358, 365 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas von 173–174, 202 Feichtinger, Johannes 121 Feilding, Keith 235 fiction and biography 7–9, 35, 43, 79, 83, 88–91, 97, 137, 265, 287, 314, 315, 319, 320, 317, 328, 333, 338 see Carlyle; Woolf 9, 79, 82–83, 88, 90–91, 97, 137, 287 Fillafer, Franz L. 121 Finlay, Robert 260, 288, 289 Finley, M.I. 194 Firth, Charles Harding 85, 103 Fisher, Herbert 180 Fiske, John 51 Fitzalon, Henry Granville 246 Fitzpatrick, Brian 322 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen 323 Fitzpatrick, Sheila 314, 332–334, 340; A Spy in the Archives (2013) 332; Against the grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark (2007) 332; Mischka’s War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s (2017) 332; My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (2010) 332 Fleming, Robin 243

374 Index Fogel, R. W. 279 Foner, Eric 320 Foot, Sarah 32 Fonagy, P. 171 Ford, Henry 317, 353 Forster, E. M. 80, 134 Foster, Stephen 246 Foucault, Michel 25, 149 Founders and Survivors, convict website 264 Fox, Alice 87, 89 Fox, Charles James 226, 252 Fox, James 246 Fox-­Genovese, Elizabeth 322–323 Frankl, Viktor 133 Franklin, Benjamin 317, 353 Franklin, Jane 292 Francis, Mark 38 Fredrickson, George M. 290 Freeman, Douglas Southall 14 Freeman, E.A. 39, 56, 64, 87, 98 free will 16, 49, 53, 54, 60, 76, 151, 175, 235, 237 see agency, individual responsibility Freud, Sigmund (also see other minds) 3, 122, 124, 125, 130–133, 135, 137, 139, 141, 142, 149; Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910) 128, 130–134, 142; Freudianism 15, 18 Freud, Anna 124, 132, 136, 139, 140, 155 Freudian biography 8, 16, 24 see also psychobiography Friedlander, Saul 140 Fromme, Erik 139 Froeyman, Anton 219 Froude, James Anthony 19, 33–34, 36, 39, 52, 54–55, 56–57, 60, 64, 66, 84; Life of Carlyle (& 1884) 87 Fry, Roger 19, 77–83, 84, 90 Fry, Margery 82 Fuchs, Miriam 328 Fuller, Margaret 133 Furet, Francois 277–278, 280, 281 Gaddis, John Lewis 219 Galton, Samuel 248 Galtung, Johan 307 Gardiner, Bertha 63 Gardiner, Patrick 65, 102, 109 Gardiner, Samuel Rawson 39, 64, 65 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 3, 5, 44, 104, 105 Garraty, John A. 15

Garrick, David 249 Gaskell, Elizabeth 75 Gaugin, Paul 78 Gay, Peter 141–142; Freud for Historians (1985) 141 Geertz, Clifford 11, 283, 331 Gentilcore, David 268–269 Geppert, Alexander C.T. 354 Ghobrial, John-­Paul A. 295 Gibbon, Edward 40, 94, 97, 321; Memoirs of My Life and Writings (1796) 321 Gignilliat, John L. 14 Gilbert, Martin 366 Gillis, John 331 Gills, Barry K. 291 Ginzburg, Carlo (see also microhistory) 11, 22, 265–290, 293, 295–297; The Cheese and the Worms (1976) 11, 267, 274, 278, 280, 293 Gladstone, William 78, 92, 93 global biography 22, 121, 242, 291–295, 307, 313 Glover, James 20, 135 Goethe, Johann von 32, 40, 42–44, 53, 58, 134 Goldsmith, Oliver 249 Gollancz, Victor 183 Goodin, Brett xiv, 334 Gorky, Maxim 90; Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy/i (1920) 90 Gordon, Lyndall 250 Gordon, Major-­General Charles George 83 Gosse, Edmund 8 Gould, Stephen Jay 205–206, 251 Goubert, Pierre 279 Graf, Max 133 Grant, Duncan 80 Gramsci, Antonio 49, 265, 269 great man (or hero) theory of biography 5, 8–9, 15–16, 19, 23–25, 35, 39, 41, 45, 47, 48, 53, 54, 192, 209 Greer, Julie 246 Green, John Richard 64, 87, 98 Green, Alice Stopford 75 Grendi. Edoardo 265, 271, 297 Grindal, Archbishop Edmund 361 Griffiths, Tom 331 Grinin, Leonid 75, 180 Group for the Study of Psycho-­ historical Processes 130 Guedalla, Philip 226

Index  375 Guerre, Martin 228 see Natalie Zemon Davis Guizot, François Pierre Guillaume 173–174 Gunder Frank, Andre 291 Guy, John 14 Gwatkin, H.M. 105 Hagiography, privileged sources 16, 19, 23, 154, 314, 331, 340, 357, 359, 360 see also neo-­hagiography Halbwachs, Maurice 149 Haley, Alex 319–320; Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) 319–320; The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) 319 Hall, Ned 219 Hamilton, Alexander 52 Hamilton, Nigel 7, 23, 313–315, 320, 328, 329, 339, 340, 360 Hamilton, Scott 219 Hancock, W. K. (Keith) 323–324; Country and Calling (1954) 324; Professing History (1976) 324 Harding, Henry 175 Harrison, Frederic 19, 50, 64, 65, 85 Haslam, Jonathon 173, 189 Hasler, Peter 235 Huisman, Marijke 329 Hayton, David 223, 226, 238, 239 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 44, 173–174, 176, 188, 192; spiritual determinism 176 Hemecker, Wilhelm 18 Hempel, C. G. 102, 109, 181 Herder, Johann Gottfried 18, 60 Hesketh, Ian 56, 58, 64, 65 Hexter, J. H. 252 Hillyard, Anna 263 Himmelberg, Robert F. 320 see Paul Cimbala historicizing biographical debates Chapter 1 generally 5, 16–23, 24, 40, 317 history and biography xv, 9, 19, 75–76, 86–87, 101–102, 208, 355, 356 see Barbara Caine History of Parliament project 223, 224, 228, 234–235, 238 History of Parliament Trust 229 Hill, Bridget: Catherine Macaulay (1967) 187; The Republican Virago (1992) 187

Hill, Christopher 172, 183, 185, 187, 193, 252; Lenin and the Russian Revolution (1947) 187 Hill, Katherine 97 Hilton, Rodney 172, 183 Himmelberg, Robert F. 320 History of Childhood Quarterly 141, 157; later Journal of Psychohistory 157 Hitler, Adolf 21, 24–25, 140, 141, 170, 176, 188, 195, 196, 209, 219, 233 Hobday, Charles 183 Hoberman, Ruth 7–8, 41, 44–45 Hobsbawm, Eric 172, 179, 180, 183, 185, 208, 219, 322 Hoche, Louis Lazare 44 Hogarth Press 9, 90, 95, 136–137 Hogarth Lectures on Literature 138 Hoggart, Richard 334 Holmes, Geoffrey 238–239 Holmes, Richard 75 Holt, W. Stull 100 Holroyd Michael 328; Basil Street Blues (1999); Mosaic (2004) Hook, Sidney 76, 188–189; The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (1943) 76, 188 Horney, Karen 139 Hotson, Leslie 233 Hotho-­Jackson. Sabine 87 Houghton, Walter E 45 Howe, Antony 184 Howe, Michael J. A. 171 Howell, David 219 Howes, Craig 238 Hughes, H. Stuart 140, 141 Hughes, Linda K. 120 Hughes-­Warrington, Marnie 361 Hull, David 108 Humboldt, Alexander 42, 75 Humboldt, Johann 42 Hume, David 40 Hunt, Lynn 279, 291, 293; ‘global-­ neuro’ approach 293 Hunter, Holland 194 idealism and biography 12, 42, 65, 85, 87, 148, 173, 252 see also R. G. Collingwood individual in history 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 14–16, 18–25, 34–35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43–52, 54, 56, 57, 66, 76, 80, 102, 108, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132,

376 Index 134, 138, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151, 153–157, 173–182, 183, 188, 190–192, 196, 201–203, 206, 208, 209, 221–226, 228–233, 236, 238, 239, 241, 243–247, 249, 350, 251, 264–265, 269–272, 274–278, 280, 282–285, 291, 294–295, 311, 329, 331, 333, 335, 336, 356–358, 360, 362, 364 see singularisation of history individual responsibility 177, 180, 196, 306 see agency, free will Inquisition 265, 267–269, 271, 274 see Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Inquisition’s archive 267–269 Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, Wissenschaftskolleg 333 Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 193 interiority approach to biography 12, 22, 146, 157 see literary biography, modernism in biography interactionalist approaches in biography 38–39, 42, 51–52, 53–66, 76, 111–112, 156–157, 188, 207–209, 253–254, 295–297, 341, 356–357, 359–360; between agency and determinism (structure agency problem) 4, 5, 10, 11, 16, 21, 22, 25, 38, 53, 66, 174, 179–180, 188, 203–204, 219, 224, 251, 278, 336, 362; E. P Thompson’s non-­ teleological compromise 207–209 see agency; between the few and the many; significant and representative 54, 147; Hexter’s compromise between lumping and splitting 253–254; between free will and structures 53, 132; Roper’s use of psychobiography 156–157; between hagiographical and critical life writing 330–341; between ‘life and times’ 5, 14, 38–39, 50–52, 61, 188, 362; between methods; mixed biographical methods 25, 106, 297, 337, 357–358, 265; between Romantic and scientific biography 39, 53–66; ‘Lewes interactionalism’ 38, 66; between scientific and artistic biography chapter 3 generally 84–85, 86, 103, 110–111; Becker’s anti-­fact fetishism 104–110; between single case and laws, micro

and macro 22, 54; Le Goff’s compromise between macro-­micro 257–259; between subjectivity and commonsense 4–5, 85–86, 110–111, 139, 147 International Auto/biography Association (IABA) 235, 238 International Interdisciplinary Conference on Medieval Prosopography 1982 240; Medieval Lives and the Historians (1982) 241 International Journal of Psychoanalysis 133, 171 International Psychoanalytical Society 124 International Psychoanalytical Library 137 Jackson, Andrew 52 James, William 19, 38, 50–51, 53, 64, 188; ‘Great Men and their environment’ (1880) 38, 50 Jameson, J. Franklin 15 Janowski, Maciej 121 Jefferys, Thomas 250; A Chart of Universal History (1753) 250 Jenkins, Keith 25 Jesus 58, 129, 132 Jiang, Xiaohu 75 Jolly, Margaretta 315, 353; Encyclopedia of Life Writing (2002) 315 Jones, Clara 87–88 Johnson, Edgar 365 Johnson, Lyndon B. 366 Johnson, Roger A. 129 Johnson, Samuel 6, 7, 9, 10, 18, 40, 58, 141, 249, 250, 263 Jones, Ernest 131, 133, 135, 137, 247; Hamlet and Oedipus (1949) 133 Jonson, Ben 12, 243 Jordanova, Ludmilla 9 Jordy, William H. 100–103 Joyce, Simon 97 Journal of Microhistory 275 Jung, Carl Gustav 130–133, 139, 316 Kagan, Richard 306 Kallich, Martin 134 Kaminsky, Jack 38 Kautsky, Karl 175 Keats-­Rohan, Katharine 241–242, 243, 246, 251 Kehoe, Elisabeth 246, 263

Index  377 Keir, James 248 Kemp, Betty 221 Kenniston, Kenneth 130 Kershaw, Ian 24–25, 76, 251 Keynes, John Maynard 80, 138 Kiernan Victor 183; Shakespeare, Poet and Citizen (1993) 187 King George III 22, 223, 226, 228, 234, 238, 239, 247, 266, 357 Kingsley, Charles 19, 36, 52–54, 56–60, 64 Kirby, Dianne 219 Klapman, Jacob W. 140 Klein, Melanie 133, 139, 146 Klugman, James 183 Kohut, Thomas, A. 157 Kopeček, Michal 121 Kováry, Zoltán 142, 170 Kossuth, Lajos 43 Kristallnacht 309–310 Kurosawa Akira 333; Rashomon (1950) 335 LaCapra, Dominick 292, 314 Lacan, Jacques 25 Laski, Harold 180, 365 Lal, Brij 324 Langer, William L 129, 139–141, 170 Langer, Walter Charles 140 Langlois, C.V. 56 LaPorte, Norman 16 Laslett, Peter 241 Llacuna, Adrià 219 Law, Joe 120 Le Goff, Jacques 278, 295–297; Louis IX of France (1996) 296–297; St Francis of Assisi (1999) 296 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 241, 279, 280, 293, 306, 322; Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966) 279; Montaillou (1975) 293 Leader, Zachary 315; Oxford History of Life-­Writing 315 Lee, Hermione 7, 11, 173 Lee, Sidney 92 Leckie, Shirley A. 9 Lecky, W. E. H. 38, 64, 65, 75 Legacies of Slavery 242, 264; Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery University College London 242; Trans-­Atlantic and Intra-­American slave trade databases 240, 242, 264, 357 Lejeune, Philippe 314

Lenin, Vladimir 175, 180, 183, 184, 187–189, 194, 196, 197, 199–201 Lerner, Daniel 247 Lerner, Gerda 314, 322 Leuridan, Bert 219 Levi, Giovanni 265, 297, 306 Lewes, George Henry 33, 38, 66, 84 Lloyd, Christopher 4 life writing xv, 11, 15–18, 23, 275, 287, 353–354, 358–360, 362 ‘life and times’ approach to biography 14 Life Writing Research Unit, Curtin University 323 Life Writing 323 Life Sciences—Life Writing, Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz 328 Lifton, Robert 130 Light, Alison 295, 326; Common People, In Pursuit of My Ancestors (2015) 327 limitations of memory 35, 333 Lincoln, Abraham 133, 319 Link, Arthur S. 15 literary biography 7–9, 11–13, 16, 100 literary criticism and theory 7, 25, 91 Little, Graham 156, 157 Litzenberger, Caroline 365 Loades, David 263 Lockhart, John Gibson: Life of Sir Walter Scott (7 vols. 1837-­1838) 87 Lodewyckx, Dymphna 309, see Dymphna Clark Loewenberg, Peter 20, 141; Decoding the Past: The Psychoanalytical Approach (1983) 141 Loftus, Elizabeth 333 Loos, Adolph 230 Loriga, Sabina 10, 76 Lovell, Henry Tasman 139 Lovell, Mary S. 246, 263 Lovell, Richard 248 luck and serendipity 51, 154, 175, 177, 178, 189, 237, 248 Lüdtke, Alf 306 Ludwig, Emil 226 lumping or splitting lives 16, 22, 224, 252–253, 264 Luther, Martin 20, 40, 54, 122–129, 147–156 Lynn, Kenneth 144 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 38, 60, 84, 87, 88, 100, 104, 138, 228, 361; Biographical Essays (1857) 38

378 Index Macaulay, Catherine 187 MacArthur, John 311 MacCarthy, Mollie 78, 95, 138 MacCarthy, Desmond 78, 138 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 14, 23 MacDermid, Jane 263 Mach, Ernest 230 Macintyre, Stuart 311, 332 Macmillan, Margaret 23 MacRaild, Don 4 Magnússon, Sigurður Gylfi 9 Mahomet 40, 54; see also Muhammad Malone, Dumas 15 Maine, Henry 64 Maitland, Frederic William 64, 181 Malcolm, Janet 361; Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1992) 361 Mandelbaum, Maurice 102, 109, 181 Manet, Edouard 78 Manlove, Colin 40 Mann, Tom 184–185, 207 Mannheim, Karl 333 Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward 83 Manuel. Frank 145 Marshall, Megan 293–294 Martin, Theodore 92 Matisse, Henri 78 Marius, Richard 123, 129 Marx, Karl 3, 10, 15, 24, 149, 173–176, 203–204, 206, 230 Marxist views of history and biography 10, 48–50, 177–178, 202, 206, 208, 219, 275, 277, 278, 291, 325, 331, 355 Marxist historians 15, 38, 39, 48–50, 123, 176, 179–180, 187–189, 195–196, 200, 201, 204, 206; British Marxists 16, 21, 103, 172, 181–183, 185, 194, 202–203, 209, 360 Mandrou, Robert 273 Marcato (Marco) 274 Mason, Stephen Finney 183 materialists and materialism 173–174, 176 see Marxist views of history and biography Matthews, Brian 310, 312 Maurice, C. E. 60 Maurois, Andre 226 Mayer, Claude-­Hélène 170 Mazlish, Bruce 130, 141 Mazzini Giuseppe 43–44 McDonough, Frank 76 McDowell, R.B. 75

McKenna, Mark 309–311; An Eye for Eternity (2011) 310 MacLachlan, Alistair 208 McTaggart, J.M. 79 Medieval Prosopography 224, 240–241 Megill, Allan 311 Meister, Daniel 11 Melbourne Psychological Group 157 Memoir Club 78, 95, 138 Mentalités 12, 130, 148–150, 156, 270, 278, 279 Merkin, Daphne 337 Merton, R. K. 230 Merwick. Donna 331 Meyer, Adolph 139 Michelet, Jules 100 Microhistory/ Microstoria/ Microhistoire/ microbiography 9, 11, 15, 18, 22, 265–277, 306–307, 323 micro and macro biography 16, 22, 277, 287, 294, 295, 307, 362 Middlebrook, Diane Wood 144 Middleton, John Henry 79 Mill, John Stuart 141 Mirabeau 44 mixed biographical methods 25, 106–107 modernism in biography 8, 11–13, 15, 19–20, 24, 92, 94, 120–121, 179 Molière (Jean-­Baptiste Poquelin) 133 Monk, Ray 7, 22–23 Montagu, Elizabeth 249 Moore, G. E. 38, 88 More, Hannah 249 More, Thomas 233 Morgan, Kevin 219 Morison, James Cotter 64 Morison, Samuel Elliot 1–3, 15 Morley, John 19, 58, 64, 78, 83–85, 105; The life of William Ewart Gladstone, 2 vols. (1903) 78, 92 Morley College for Working Men and Women 87–89 Morris, Robert 52 Morton, Arthur Leslie 183; A People’s History of England (1938) 183, 205; Robert Owen (1962) 187 Motley, John Lothrop 100 Moyal, Ann 323 mudmap or disciplinary map of biography 6; see also typologies of biography

Index  379 Muhammad 176, 287 see also Mahomet Munford, Howard 102–103 Munro, Doug 311 Munslow, Alun 194, 325 Murphy, Virginia 14 Murphey, Murray G. 4 Nabokov, Vladimir 20 Nadel, Ira 58 Namier, Lewis 14, 17, 21–22, 220; individual and human nature approach 14 Namierism (quantifiable structural analysis of political parliamentary history) 229, 236 Napoleon III 226 narrative biography (telling a story) 87 Nasaw, David 11 National Centre of Biography, Australian National University xiv, xv Neale, J. E. 190, 223, 232–233, 235, 361–365 neo-­hagiography 315, 341, 358 see hagiography Nemiroff, Ben 141 Nevins, Allan 15 Newton, A. P. 230 New Biography 12, 16, 85, 86, 89, 95, 120–121, 138, 297; see also modernism in biography Newman, John Henry 84 Newmann, Klaus 338 Nicolet, Claude 224, 240 Nicolson, Adam 94 Nicolson, Harold 7–8, 9, 13, 96–97, 138; Bryon (1924) 97; Development of English Biography (1927) 96–97, 138; Swinburne (1926) 97; Tennyson (1923) 97 Nicolson, Nigel 93–94; Portrait of a Marriage (1973) 94 Nichols, John 58 Nicholson, Graeme 14 Nicholson, John 64 Niebuhr, Bartold Georg 97–98 Nietzsche, Friedrich 134 Nightingale, Florence 83 Nixon, Mark 76 Nolan, Melanie 32, 76, 263 Nora, Pierre 23, 312, 323, 354 ‘normal exception’ 271, 290, 287, 360 North, Frederick Lord North 238 Novak, Peter 107

O’Hara, Reverend Joseph 320 objectivity 106–107 Oldfield, Sybil 251 other minds 16, 18, 20–21, 138, 145–156 Owen, John Beresford 221 Oxford Life Writing Centre at Wolfson College, Oxford University 328 Pacewicz, Josh 307 Pakenham, Fank 180 Paley, William 42 Palme Dutt, Rajani 184, 185 Palmerston, Lord, Henry John Temple 226 Pareto, Vilfredo 3 Pares, Richard 221 Parke, Catherine N. 8 Parker, Christopher 65, 85–86, 103 Parkman, Francis 100 Partner, Nancy 32 Passerini, Luisa 354; oral history approach to biography 319, 332, 354 Paul, L. A. 219 Payne, Sylvia 135 Petersen, Linda H. 353 Peleteret, David 242 Pellegrino Baroni, (Pighino, ‘the fat’) 272 Pepys, Samuel 87 Pettegrew, Andrew 156 Phillips, Mark Salber 75 Picasso, Pablo 84 Pick, Daniel 139 Piozzi, Hester 6 Pitt, William Earl of Chatham 105, 226 Plekhanov, Georgi 19, 38, 39, 48, 52, 53, 76, 175, 188; On the Role of the Individual in History (1898) 38, 48 Plumb, Jack 105, 223, 238, 357 Plutarch 8, 222 Poe, Edgar, Allan 133 Pole, Reginald 233 political biography 3, 59–66, 157, 172–182, 198, 208, 359 see History of Parliament project Pollard, A. F. 84–85, 103 Pomper. Philip 209 Poni, Carlo 265, 297 Pope Paul III 271 Popkin, Jeremy 23, 312, 322–324, 330, 339

380 Index Popkin, Richard 322 Popper, Karl 181, 189 popular culture 22, 265–277, 281, 325, see Carlo Ginzburg positivism and biography 32, 60, 65, 85–86 post-­impressionist movement 78, 79–82; Post-­Impressionist exhibitions, 1910 & 1912 78, 80, 81, 277 poststructuralism 10, 225, 275 postmodernist approach to biography 209, 276, 330, 337–338, 340, 358 Potter, Beatrice, later Webb 46, 48 Powell, Frederick York 56 Priestley, Joseph 248, 249–250; Chart of Biography (1756) Prescott, William Hickling 100 Predestination 27, 151, 156; see also fate Price, Jacob 227 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph 174 professionalization of historians 17, 19; biography taught in universities 53–66 Prosopon: The Journal of Prosopography 241 prosopography 11, 14, 16, 20, 21–22, 221–225, 227–232, 236, 238–246, 250, 264, 355 see lumping or splitting Prosopography Project (Linacre Unit for Prosopographical Research) of History, Oxford, 2004 241, 264 Prosopography of Anglo-­Saxon England (PASE), King’s College London 242 Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire (PBE) 242 Proust, Marcel 83, 95 Psychical Research Society 79 psychology, non-­Freudian 92, 133, 139–140, 145 psychobiography or psychoanalytical biography 16, 20, 122–123, 129, 130, 133–134, 141–145 Pugh, Martin 246; Quaderni storic journal 265 Queen Edith 243 Queen Emma 243 Quick, Jonathon 79 Rabelais, François 151 Rak, Julie 354

Ranke, Leopard von 4–5, 10, 20, 55, 60, 97–98, 103, 226, 237, 313; historians’ naïve realism 87 Raphael, Lutz 32 Rashomon effect 333, 335 Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph (later Pope Benedict XVI) 268 Raymond, John 221 Reay, Barry 306 relativism 5, 85, 107–108, 110, 189, 275, 329; see also Becker’s realism Renders, Hans 3, 9, 22, 23 Representative or significant 16 Rethinking History 325, 338 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 249 Rhys, Isaac 331 Ricardo, David 173 Ricci, Paolo 272 Rickard, John 246 Rhodes, James Ford 101 Robertson, William 40 Robespierre, Maximilien 52, 98 Robisheaux, Thomas 307 Roche, Daniel 283 Rollyson, Carl 32, 314 Romantic movement and biography 15, 39, 42–44, 65 Roper, Lyndal 146, 151–157 Roper, Michael 170 Rosenbaum, S.P. 95, 97 Rosenberg, Philip 19, 51 Rosenstone, Robert A. 330, 337–338, 340, 358 see postmodernist approach to biography Rosenthal, Joel T. 224 Ross, Stephen 120 Rotberg, Robert I. 14–15 Rothblatt, Sheldon 58 Rothschild, Emma 246 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques 40, 134, 284, 316; Confessions (1781) 316 Rowse, A.L. 180, 190 Rudé, George 183, 239; Robespierre (1975) 187; Wilkes and Liberty (1983) 187 Ruskin, John 84 Ryan, Derek 120 Ryan, Peter 310–311 Saccardino, Costantino 265–272, 274 Sackville-­West, Vita 79, 93–94, 96 Said, Edward 291 Saint-­Simon, Henri de 173–174 Sainte-­Beuve, Charles Augustin 91

Index  381 Saintsbury, George 8 Saler, Michael 121 Samuel, Raphael 183, 187 Sartre, Jean-­Paul 195 Saunders, Max 97 Saville, John 183, 185, 187, 219 Sand, George 134 Scandella, Domenico (Menocchio) 267–270 Schiller, Frederick 42, 43 Schilling, Heinz 155 Schofield, Robert E. 247 scientific theory of biography 5, 16, 18, 85, 97–103 School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris (Sixth Section for economic and social sciences) 278 Schultz, William Todd 123 Schulyer, Robert Livingston 181 Scolio 272 Seabrook, Jeremy 334, 335 Sebald, W. G. 337 Sedgwick, R. R. (Romney) 221, 222, 226, 233, 235 Seeley, John Robert 10, 19, 39, 53, 55–66, 356 Seeley, Robert 59 Sewell, Keith 222, 227, 237 Sewell Jr., William H. 314 Sexton, Anne 144 Shakespeare, William 19, 40, 133 Shapin, Steven 338 Sharpe, Ella 135 Shaw, William H. 76 Short Manual to the Art of Prosopography 242 Sichel, Edith 89; Catherine De’ Medici & the French Reformation (1905) 89 Sickert, Walter 80 Sidgwick, Henry 61–62 Siegel, Jules Paul 37 Siegnobos, Charles 56 Signac, Paul 78 Sima Qian 222 Simiand François 149 singularization of history 16, 18, 275; see also microhistory Szijártó, István M. 22, 275, 282, 360 Skinner, B. F. 20 Slee, Peter 76 Small, William 248 Smith, Adam 173, 249 Smith, Bernard 323 Smith, George 363

Smith, Preserved 123, 133 Smith, Sidonie 312, 320 Smyth. Adam 353 Smyth, Jim 182 social history and biography 21, 23, 155–156, 183, 207, 221, 240, 278, 290–291, 318, 326, 360 Society for Psychic Research 134 sociology 39, 52 sociologists view of biography 177 Soffer, Reba 98 Southcott, Joanna 187, 204, 206 Southworth, Helen 96 speculative biography 127–128, 139, 144 also conjecture 188–189, 287 Spencer, Herbert 19, 32–39, 45–53, 63, 66, 84, 188; Principles of Sociology (1855) 35, 37; Study of Sociology (1873) 45–46 Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 314 Spitz, Lewis W. 129 Squire, J. C. 188; If, or History Rewritten (1931) 188 Stalin, Joseph 18, 21, 173, 188, 195, 196, 199–201, 209 Stalinism and Stalinist biography 173, 178, 184, 197, 204, 360 Stanley, Liz 318 Stannard, David 143, 144 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 247 Starkey, David 14 Steedman, Carolyn 17, 314, 331, 334–340; Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) 314, 334–337 Stein, Baron vom 58, 60, 63 Stephen, Adrian 20, 80, 135 Stephen, Karin 135 Stephen, Leslie 19, 58, 64, 80, 86–87, 90, 93; Mausoleum Book (published posthumously) 95; Studies of a Biographer, 4 vols. (1898-­1902) 95 Stephen, Julia 80 Stephen, Thoby 78 Stephen, Virginia 78, 136 see Virginia Woolf Sterelny, Kim 219 Sterling, James 24, 41 Stern, F. 181 Stern, Philip J. 294 Stewart, George R. 269; Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Charge at Gettysburg July 3, 1863 (1959) 269 Stoianovich, Traian 279

382 Index Stone, Lawrence 143, 172, 222, 224, 229, 241 Strachey, Adrian 136 Strachey, Lytton 13, 19, 78, 80, 82, 83, 86, 91–95, 97, 104, 111, 134, 143, 150; Elizabeth and Essex (1928) 19, 83, 92, 102, 134, 137–138, 143; Eminent Victorians (1918) 19, 83, 93–95, 102, 109, 143, 134, 143; inner history and psychological problems approach 20, 134–135, 358; Landmarks in French Literature (1912) 91; Portraits in Miniature (1931) 92; Queen Victoria (1921) 19, 83, 92, 102, 134, 143 Strachey, James 20, 134–137 Strachey, Alix (Sargant) 20, 135, 136, 137 Strachey, Pernel 90 Stauffer, Donald A. 24 Stubbs, William 64, 65, 98 Studies in Biography and Autobiography, La Trobe University 323 structure-­agency problem in biography 5, 10–11, 16, 18, 21 subaltern subjects 15, 32, 187–188, 209, 265, 275, 291–293, 315–320, 328; see also canons approach to biography and autobiographydecolonised biography 291, 295, 320; history from below 187–188, 205; social history and biography 21, 23, 155–156, 183, 207, 221, 240, 278, 290–291, 318, 326, 360; women's biography 17, 88–90, 154–155, 329; working-­class biography 32, 187, 199, 201–207, 246, 312, 320, 334–336 subjectivity 5, 22, 42, 85, 110, 308–315, 320, 332–333, 336, 339, 340, 341 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 293 Sumner, William Graham 52 Survage, Léopold 78 Stuchtey, Benedict 75 Surman, Jan 121 Sutherland, Lucy 221 Syme, Ronald 225, 239, 240 Szijartö, Istvan M. 22, 275, 282, 360 Tapp, E.J. 21, 76, 208 Tarr, Roger L. 37 Tawney, R. H. 3

Taylor, Alan 222 Taylor Avram 4 Taylor, Barbara 170 Temperley, Harold 273 Tennyson, Alfred 84 Tenenti, Alberto 272 Thackery, William Makepeace 84 Thrale, Hester 249 Thirsk, Joan 172 Thirriard, Maryam 121 Thomas, Keith 172, 194 Thompson, E.P. 181, 183, 185, 188, 194, 201–208, 219, 235, 237, 326; history from below 187–188, 205; Non-­teleological approach to causation 201–207; The Making of the English Working Class (1963) 187–188, 204–206, 326; William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955) 185, 201–203; Witness Against The Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993) 185, 201, 207 Thompson, Dorothy 183, 187, 208; Queen Victoria: Gender and Power (1990) 187 Thorne, R. G. 235 Tierney, Michael 98–99 Tillyard, Stella 246, 263 Tolstoy/i, Leo Nikolaevich 92, 133 Tomalin, Claire 3 Torr, Dona 17, 183–187, 205, 206, 219 Tosh, John 9 Tout, Thomas 103 transcendentalism 32 transhistoricalism in biography 143–144 Trapp, E. J. 21 Trefusis, Violet 93 Trela, D, J 37 Trencsényi, Balázs 121 Trevelyan, G.M. 1–3, 5, 15, 17, 20, 60, 85, 88, 94, 104–105, 111, 138, 143, 145; Garibaldi trilogy (1907–1911) 104 Trevelyan, R C (Bob) 80 Trevelyan, Otto 104 Trevelyan’s formula 1–4 Trevor-­Roper, Hugh 238 Trimberger, Ellen Kay 204–205 Trivellato, Francesca 277, 282, 297 Trotsky, Leon 18, 21, 173, 175, 180, 188, 192, 197, 200–201, 219 typologies of biography 7–9, 41 Tyson, Alan 136

Index  383 Uglow, Jenny 247–248, 250, 263; Lunar Men (2002) 247–249 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher 290; A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard (1990) 290 Van Gogh, Vincent 78, 141 Vatican archives 268 Veltman, David 3 Vico, Giambattista 60 Victoria, Queen 92 Victorian biography 17 Vienna Psychoanalytical Society 124, 130; see also Wednesday Psychological Society Vigne, Daniel 285 Vincent, David 320 Vovelle, Michel 283 Wabuda, Susan 365 Waite, R. G. L. 20, 141 Walcott, Robert 238 Wallach, Jennifer Jensen 315 Wallerstein, Immanuel 291 Walter, James 157 Walsh, W.H. 181 Walsh, Dorothy 182 Ward, Steven 140 Warner, Marina 361 Washington, Booker T. 319 Watson, Julia 320 Watt, James 348 Watts, George Frederic 80, 84 Webb, Sidney 48, 180 Webb, Beatrice (Potter) 47, 48 Weber, Max 3, 253 Weber, Erik 219 Wedd, Nathaniel 79 Wedgwood, Cicely Veronica 17, 21, 190–194, 209, 229; Contingent approach to biography 191; Interest in ‘little’ people 209; The Trial of Charles 1 (1964) 190; Truth and Opinion (1960) 193; Velvet Studies (1946) 191 Wedgwood, Josiah 228–229, 233 Wednesday Psychological Society 124, 130–131

Wehler, Hans-­Ulrich 143 Wellington, Duke of 226 Wende, Peter 75 Wentworth, William 311 West, Francis 14 White, Hayden 25, 121 Whitehurst, John 248 Wideman, John Edgar 319 Withering, William 248 Wilson, Clyde N. 15 Windschuttle, Keith 314 Wojtyla, Karol Józef (Pope John Paul II) 267 Wolf, Tom 320 Wolpert, L. 171 Wolsey, Thomas 233 women's biography 17, 88–90, 154–155, 329 Wood, Frederick Adams 188 Woof, Friedrich August 98 Woodward, C. Vann 15 Woolf, Leonard 9, 78, 80, 96, 134, 136, 138 Woolf, Virginia 9, 12, 19–20, 77–80, 86–92, 95–97, 110, 135, 137; see also New Biography‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ (1909) 88; ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ (1924) 79; ‘New Biography’ (1927) 85; ‘Phyllis and Rosamund’ (1906) 88; ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906) 88–89; Flush: A biography (1933) 19–20, 79, 137; Orlando: A biography (1928) 19, 79, 90, 96, 137; Roger Fry (1940) 77, 82, 90, 137 working-­class biography 32, 187, 199, 201–207, 246, 312, 320, 334–336 Wormell, Deborah 56, 63 Wulf, Andrea 75 Wundt, Wilhelm 131 Yeats, W. B. 82 Young, Alfred F. 290 Young, Louise 52 Young-­Bruehl, Elisabeth 154–155 Zambelli, Paola 268