Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book was written in splendid isolation, one of the increasingly rare benefits of the academy. I thank the generous ways of Washington and Lee University for the several summer Lenfest Grants and two sabbaticals that permitted my work. I hope my effort embodies all of the benefits and none of the limitations of that old-time luxury afforded me. Nonetheless, such claims of solitary achievement are seldom true, and, particularly at the beginning, middle, and end of this narrative, I received considerable help. The junior faculty reading group of Lesley Wheeler, Marc Conner, Kary Smout, and Suzanne Keen (now all happily tenured—congratulations!) heartened me with their positive responses to the first chapters of this project—at a time of difficulty (the fire!), when such enthusiasm was most needed. Midway, Jay Dixon, known through our mutual friend Douglas Mao, recommended me to Thomas Gillcrist as a worthy contributor on The History of England for a special journal issue on Macaulay. I wish to thank Barry Tharaud for permitting its use here. At the end, the anonymous reader and Jerome McGann and Herbert Tucker at the University of Virginia Press greatly encouraged me with their detailed and generous responses. My final revisions have been firmly guided by both the spirit and the letter of their suggestions and criticisms and then carefully corrected by Colleen Romick Clark and Ellen Satrom. At the very end, my friends Stephen Cochran and John Hutson lent me a charming beach cottage (twice!) where the painful business of cutting was made (almost!) a pleasure. And long ago at Yale, before the beginning, Claude Rawson primed me to detect the subtle interworkings of style, violence, and the death wish lurking at the heart of this study. Finally, there are two others: Suzanne, who has already been acknowledged , and John Evans. Suzanne Keen along with her husband and my friend Fran MacDonnell bore the burden of advising and listening to me all along, and, though I sought not to impose, I am sure I sometimes did. It is because of her advice that I did not submit a 300,000–word manuscript, though I still plagued UVaP (and its appropriately sharp first x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS reader) with more than enough. Monsieur Evans has been a marvelous intellectual stimulus for many years—and many more to come. John first directed me to Churchill, and though that addition led to the most painful of this expansive manuscript’s many subsequent depopulations, the sorry day that saw the removal of Lawrence of Arabia, another had to roll over and fall out. LIBERAL EPIC ...