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THE AGE OF PROTHERO: BRITISH HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE LONG FIN DE SIÈCLE, 1870–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2010

Michael Bentley
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Abstract

This paper revisits two generations of highly talented and significant historians who flourished in Britain between c. 1870 and 1920. George Prothero stood high among them and he, with his brother Roland, receives a good deal of attention at the centre of the argument here. But others stood still higher: Tout, Firth, Poole, Acton, the incomparable Maitland; and the purpose of the piece is to present a portrait of the British historical profession as a whole during a crucial period of its formation by using the Protheros’ experience as a platform from which to depart. The journey inevitably begins with that Prothero experience seen as a microcosm of greater tendencies; but it soon winds away toward Germany and Scotland and France; we pause to admire fresh perspectives yielded in what had become an age of edition and what would become an age of economic and social history. Of course the track leads also to Sarajevo and the implications of European war for a fledgling profession. All this itinerary lends an opportunity, therefore, to think through some of the themes and characteristics which made this period of development distinctive; but it also warns and guards against reducing these years to a time of ‘transition’, remarkable only for what would follow it. The personalities and achievements discussed here deserve better of us and recommend that we devote more energy to considering the features of the age of Prothero, for their own sake and in their own terms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 20 , December 2010 , pp. 171 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2010

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References

1 Crawley, Charles, ‘George Prothero and his Circle’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 20 (1970), 101–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. C. W. Crawley (1889–1992) had been vice-master of Trinity Hall, whose history he wrote, between 1950 and 1966. He married Augusta, daughter of Samuel Butcher, bishop of Meath. See Prothero, G. W., Samuel Henry Butcher (Tralee, 1911)Google Scholar.

2 The diaries have now been separated from the main collection of Prothero MSS held by the Royal Historical Society and have been deposited in the Archive Centre of King's College, Cambridge. A further Nachlass relating to Prothero's Edinburgh experiences is deposited in the Special Collections Department of the University Library in Edinburgh. ‘Prothero MSS’ will here denote the RHS material; ‘Prothero collection’ will relate to the Edinburgh deposit; ‘Prothero diary’ to the King's College manuscript diaries. In all quotations I have expanded the shorthand prose normally used by Prothero when writing for himself.

3 His central achievement concerned the Corn Production Act of 1917 which encouraged the expansion of land under corn to meet wartime demand for food.

4 Lord Ernle, From Whippingham to Wetminister (1938), 12–13, for childhood distancing. It is remarkable that Ernle's autobiography contains only two fleeting references to his brother.

5 Between 1860 and 1869 Modern History figured only as a subject within the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos. After four years in the Law Tripos (1870–4), History became its own Tripos in 1875 but did not assume its modern shape for another ten years. See Prothero, G. W., The Historical Tripos (Cambridge, 1892)Google Scholar.

6 Witness his deprecation of Rowland's Life of Stanley: ‘too long, some repetitions . . . somehow there is a lack of distinction about the book’. Prothero diary, 28 Mar. 1894, GWP/1/5.

7 There is a hint that George, senior, had been underwhelmed by the Oxford Movement: see his commemoration address on the death of A. P. Stanley: ‘A Sermon Preached at Whippingham on July 24th, 1881’, published in London as Arthur Penrhyn Stanley: A Sermon (1881) 7, 11–13. But George, junior, conceded, for example, that Liddon had been ‘a grt man’ if not so ‘grt’ as Newman. Prothero diary, 10 Sept. 1890, GWP/1/5.

8 Shaftesbury, quoted in Wormell, Deborah, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History (Cambridge, 1980), 23Google Scholar. Cf. R. T. Shannon, ‘John Robert Seeley and the Idea of a National Church’, in Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark, ed. Robert Robson (1967), 236–67. George Prothero saw through the press Seeley's posthumous The Growth of British Policy: An Historical Essay (2 vols., Cambridge, 1895).

9 Charles Plummer (1851–1927), The Life and Times of Alfred the Great (Oxford, 1902), and editions of Bede, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle and Sir John Fortescue. Alfred Plummer (1841–1926) wrote on early modern ecclesiastical history and was a distinguished commentator on the Gospels.

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12 A. P. Stanley (1815–81), The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold (1844); R. W. Church (1815–90), The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years 1833–1845 (1891); Mandell Creighton (1843–1901), A History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation (5 vols., 1882–94); William Cunningham (1849–1919), An Essay on Western Civilization in its Economic Aspects (2 vols., Cambridge, 1898–1900).

13 R. E. Prothero, The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (2 vols., 1893); R. E. Prothero, The Psalms in Human Life (1904).

14 Quoted in Crawley, ‘George Prothero and his Circle’, 16.

15 R. E. Prothero to Round, 26 June 1898, Round MSS, University of London Library, IHR 924, 666.

16 Burrows to Anson, 23 May 1890, Anson MSS, 79–80, All Souls College, Oxford. The Fellows elected Acton pace Burrows.

17 Julia Namier describes the incident (with telling documentation from Pollard) in Lewis Namier: A Biography (1971), 99–101.

18 Georg Reinhold Pauli, Simon de Montfort: The Creator of the House of Commons (Eng. trans. 1876).

19 Prothero, G. W., The Life of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester (1877), 1, 363Google Scholar.

20 I am indebted here to my former research student, Paul Churchill, and his doctoral dissertation on ‘The Production of History: Historians, Publishers and the Transfer of Knowledge in Britain, 1895–1960 (St. Andrews, 2007).

21 A Literary and Biographical History or Dictionary of the English Catholics from 1534, ed. Joseph Gillow (5 vols., 1885–1902); Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (6 vols., Oxford, 1887); The Life and Letters of Sir George Savile, First Marquis of Halifax, ed. Helen Foxcroft (2 vols., 1898); Supplement to the History of my Own Time, ed. Gilbert Burnet (Oxford, 1902); The Creevey Papers, ed. Herbert Maxwell (2 vols., 1904).

22 Pleas for the Crown in the County of Gloucester before the Abbot of Reading and his Fellow Justices Itinerant (1884); Bracton's Note Book: A Collection of Cases Decided in the King's Courts during the Reign of Henry the Third (1887).

23 Stubbs, William, Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward I (Oxford, 1870)Google Scholar.

24 W. H. Stevenson (1858–1924) [ed.], Calendars of Close Rolls (11 vols., 1892–1908); Asser's Life of King Alfred (1904); etc.

25 The original DNB, modelled on the Biographie universelle (40 vols., Paris, 1843–63), appeared in sixty-three volumes. A three-volume Supplement appeared in 1901 followed by ten chronological supplements from 1912. The project was taken over by Oxford University Press in 1917.

26 For all the slightness of his contribution, George Prothero was the first of Acton's commissions, made before the venture had even been approved by the Syndics of Cambridge University Press. Acton to Prothero, from Tegernsee, 14 Aug. 1896, Prothero MSS, bundle 1/13.

27 Prothero diary, 12 Oct. 1901, GWP/1/7.

28 ‘The Constitutional Struggle in England (1625–40)’, iv, 265–85; and ‘The First Two Years of the Long Parliament (1640–2)’, ibid., 286–301. His reading in history had also declined sharply as his own record of reading suggests in his diary for October 1902 to September 1905: GWP/1/8.

29 For a survey, see The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, ed. Martin Daunton (Oxford, 2005).

30 S. R. Gardiner (1829–1902). Vast narrative of English politics and religion between 1603 and 1656 rendered in a series of sub-periods and continued by C. H. Firth. For his austerity about knowledge, see Gardiner to Seeley, 4 Mar. 1887, with a disparagement of ‘elegant writing’ among the young. Seeley MSS, MS 903/1B/8, University of London Library.

31 G. W. Prothero to Oscar Browning, 25 Mar. n.y., Browning MSS, i/Prothero, King's College, Cambridge.

32 Ranke's ambition to represent the past wie es eigentlich gewesen has been consistently mistranslated ‘as it actually was’, though in 1825 the word ‘eigentlich’ meant something closer to ‘essentially’. See Iggers's, G. G. seminal article ‘The Image of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought’, History and Theory, 2 (1962), 17–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Leopold von Ranke, The Oldest Historical Group of Nations and the Greeks, trans. G. W. Prothero (1884).

34 Firth, C. H., The Historical Teaching of History (Oxford, 1904)Google Scholar. This was the famous inaugural lecture for whose assertions and tone he was later made to apologise.

35 When training young men in ‘general knowledge of history’, Oman alleged, ‘the so-called “study of methods of investigation”, and all the Hilfswissenschaften will be of comparatively little use’. Oman, Charles, Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History: Delivered on Wednesday, February 7, 1906 (Oxford, 1906), 20Google Scholar.

36 Fredericq, Paul, L'enseignement supérieure de l'histoire: notes et impressions de voyage (Ghent and Paris, 1899)Google Scholar. For a recent study of him, see Tollebeek, Jo, Fredericq & Zonen: een antropologie van de moderne geschiedwetenschap (Amsterdam, 2008)Google Scholar.

37 See Slee, Peter, Learning and a Liberal Education: The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester 1800–1914 (Manchester, 1986)Google Scholar; Soffer, Reba, Discipline and Power: The University, History and the Making of an English Elite 1870–1930 (Stanford, 1994)Google Scholar, and History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: The Great War to Thatcher and Reagan (Oxford, 2009); Michael Bentley, ‘The Evolution and Dissemination of Historical Knowledge’, in The Organization of Knowledge, ed. Daunton, 173–98.

38 Acton, Lord, ‘German Schools of History’, English Historical Review, 1 (1886), 7–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Kadish, Alan, ‘Scholarly Exclusiveness and the Foundation of the “English Historical Review”’, Historical Research, 61 (1988), 183–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Poole, R. L., ‘The Beginnings of the “English Historical Review”’, English Historical Review, 36 (1921), 1–4Google Scholar; and Goldstein, Doris, ‘The Origins and Early Years of the “English Historical Review”’, English Historical Review, 101 (1986), 6–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Poole, R. L. (1857–1939), Chronicles and Annals (Oxford, 1926)Google Scholar, Studies in Chronology and History (Oxford, 1934), etc. Cf. Clark's, G. N. introduction to Poole, ‘The Origins of the “English Historical Review”’, English Historical Review, 36 (1921), 1–4 at 1Google Scholar, and Poole to Round, 11 Apr. 1894, Round MSS, IHR 924 Round, 664.

41 Prothero diary, 19 Apr. 1895. Acton and Bryce had learned from Creighton that Lord Rosebery had no intention of moving Prothero from Edinburgh so soon after his appointment.

42 Herbert Butterfield, Man on his Past (1955), 97.

43 Bury, J. B., An Inaugural Lecture Delivered in the Divinity School, Cambridge, on January 26, 1903 (Cambridge, 1903)Google Scholar. Prothero could not suppress his disappointment at being overlooked and felt ‘rather bad about it all week’, following the announcement: Prothero diary, 7 Dec. 1902, GWP/1/8.

44 Prothero diary, 14 Oct. 1890, GWP/1/5.

45 Peter Hume-Brown (1849–1918). He succeeded in his professorial ambitions in 1901 when appointed to the Sir William Fraser Chair at Edinburgh. ‘A pleasant little man’, said Prothero in his patronising way, ‘& seems to bear me no grudge.’ Prothero diary, 16 Jan. 1895, GWP/1/6.

46 G. W. Prothero to Seeley, Seeley MS 903/1b/12, University of London Library.

47 Prothero's diary, quoted in Crawley, ‘George Prothero and his Circle’, 109. It cannot have enhanced joie de vivre that he also recorded ‘[i]ndigestion, cold, slight tendency to giddiness sometimes, & a fit of rheumatism’. Prothero diary, 12 Oct. 1894, GWP/1/6. Writing his inaugural lecture – ‘frightfully commonplace stuff . . . and not convincing either’ – perhaps deepened the gloom: ibid., 9 Oct. For the published version, see Why Should We Learn History? An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at Edinburgh, 16th October 1894 (Edinburgh, 1894).

48 He was not the first choice, even of own brother. Prothero diary, 5 Nov. 1898, GWP/1/7.

49 Edinburgh was significantly the first institution – ‘très florisante’ – to be visited by Paul Fredericq on his British tour: L'enseignement supérieure de l'histoire, 5.

50 Edinburgh (1901), Glasgow (1913). Hume Brown's appointment to the former led only, however, to ‘the persistence of an older constitutional idiom’. See Colin Kidd, ‘The Strange Death of Scottish History Revisited: Constructions of the Past in Scotland, c.1790–1914’, Scottish Historical Review, 76 (1997), 86–102 at 102.

51 A. J. and R. W. Carlyle, A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West (6 vols., 1903–36). See MacKenzie, John M., Empires of Nature and the Nature of Empires: Imperialism, Scotland and the Environment (East Linton, 1997)Google Scholar.

52 Bryce, James (1838–1922), The Holy Roman Empire (Oxford, 1964 and many editions)Google Scholar; The American Commonwealth (1888), etc.

53 Davis to Anson, 1 Apr. 1897, Anson MSS 101.

54 His Edinburgh material contains, for example, a catalogue from Oscar Schack of Leipzig in 1893 with substantial marginalia from Prothero's pen. Dk.5.59

55 ‘Lectures on the History of the Tsars’, Prothero collection, Dk.5.44, University of Edinburgh Special Collections.

56 For his lectures on modern European history, Prothero lists among his authorities Seignobos, Charles, Histoire politique de l'Europe contemporaine (Paris, 1897)Google Scholar. Edinburgh collection, Dk.5.45. Prothero met the author after the war.

57 1066 and All That (1930).

58 See Bentley, Michael, Modernizing England's Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2005), 34–6Google Scholar, and Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Evans, R. J. W., ‘The Creighton Century: British Historians and Europe, 1907–2007’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 320–39 esp. 323–4, 326–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more optimistic reading of a later period, see Evans, Richard J., Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 G. B. Malleson, The Refounding of the German Empire, 1848–71 (1893); James Headlam-Morley, Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire (1899).

61 W. H. Jervis, A History of France from the Earliest Times to the Fall of the Second Empire in 1870 (1902); Louise Creighton, A First History of France (1893).

62 On these tendencies see Michael Bentley, ‘Shape and Pattern in British Historiography, 1815–1914’, in volume iv of The Oxford History of Historical Writing, ed. Daniel Woolf (5 vols., forthcoming, 2010–). The Cromwell and Alfred centenaries are considered respectively in Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil War and the Passions of Posterity (2001); and Readman, Paul, ‘The Place of the Past in English Culture’, Past and Present, 186 (2005), 147–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Petit-Dutaillis, Charles, Studies and Notes Supplementary to Stubbs's Constitutional History (Manchester 1908)Google Scholar; Chartes des libertés anglaises 1100–1305, ed. Charles Bémont (Paris, 1892); Michael, Wolfgang, Englische Geschichte im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (5 vols., Hamburg, 1896–1955)Google Scholar; von Ruville, Albert, William Pitt, Graf von Chatham (Stuttgart, 1905)Google Scholar.

64 The trend towards European authorship is especially marked in vol. vi on The Eighteenth Century, vol. ix on Napoleon and vol. x on The Restoration.

65 G. W. Prothero, ‘Presidential Address’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, new series, 18 (1904), 12. Of course Bernard Pares would make his own impact on the Russian case within a few years.

66 I have developed this comparative perspective in an essay, ‘Historians Delivering Untheorized Truth: The Turn to Science’, in The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory, ed. Sarah Foot and Nancy Partner (forthcoming, c. 2011). For the European perspective see Iggers, Georg, ‘The “Methodenstreit” in International Perspective. The Reorientation of Historical Studies at the Turn from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century’, Storia della storiografia, 6 (1984), 21–32Google Scholar; and Lutz Raphael, ‘Historikerkontroversen im Spannungsfeld zwischen Berufshabitus, Fächerkonkurenz und sozialen Deutungsmustern: Lamprechtstreit und französicher Methodenstreit der Jahrhundertwende in vergleichender Perspektive’, Historische Zeitschrift, 251 (1990), 325–63.

67 Charles Austin Beard (1874–1948). He spent two years based in Oxford, after graduation from DePauw University, and helped to found Ruskin Hall, forerunner of Ruskin College.

68 Mary Bateson (1865–1906). Prolific editor of medieval texts. Between 1890 and her death, according to her entry in the Oxford Dictionary f National Biography, she contibuted an article to EHR virtually every year.

69 For an account of female emergence in the university system, see Smith, Bonnie G., The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA, 2000)Google Scholar; and for a suggestive study of a British example, Berg, Maxine, A Woman in History: Eileen Power 1889–1940 (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar. A talented further exemplar, Caroline Skeel (1872–1951), lacks a biography.

70 For an overview see Alun Kadish, Historians, Economists and Economic History (1989).

71 Tawney, R. H., ‘The Study of Economic History’, Economica, 13 (1933), 1–21 at 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England: Popular Addresses, Notes and Other Fragments (1884).

73 Sir William Ashley (1860–1927), Introduction to Economic History and Theory (1888); Sir John Clapham (1873–1946), An Economic History of Modern Britain (3 vols., 1926–38). For Cunningham, see n. 12.

74 Frederic Seebohm, The English Village Community Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open-Field System of Husbandry: An Essay in Economic History (1884). For documentary literature see Richard Jefferies, Hodge and his Masters (1880), and George Bourne [sc. Sturt], Change in the Village (1912).

75 Prothero, G. W., ‘Presidential Address’, Transaction of the Royal Historical Society, new series, 17 (1903), ix–xxxivGoogle Scholar.

76 For a more balanced judgment see Ian Archer's account of the project and its history available at www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/RHSB.html.

77 An agonised narrative appears in the diary through March 1905. He only allowed his name to go forward at the last minute, again because of the reluctance of his wife to move to Cambridge but also because he feared that her health would not tolerate the public life associated with a Head of House. ‘I shall regret it as long as I live’ (27 Mar.). They elected Montague James.

78 H. Cozens-Hardy to George Prothero, 29 Nov. 1912, Prothero MSS, bundle 4.

79 For the London Congress, see Erdmann, K.-D., Die Ökumene der Historiker: Geschichte des Internationalen Historikerkongresse und des Comité Internationale des Sciences Historiques (Göttingen, 1987), 86–96Google Scholar.

80 E.g. Our Duty and Our Interest in the War (1914); German Policy before the War (1916); A Lasting Peace (1917).

81 Thomas Spring-Rice to Prothero, 30 Mar. 1916, Prothero MSS iv/1.

82 Lady Wemyss to Prothero, 2 Sept. 1918, Prothero MSS, with bundle 4.

83 Harold Temperley, Charles Webster and Harold Nicolson were cases in point.

84 Crawley, ‘George Prothero and his Circle’, 119.