Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain 1850–1950 (review)

So far, book historians have said little about history books. Their main focus (at least in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) has been the novel, which accounted for half of all British titles published between 1870 and 1919. But history took a solid twelve- to fifteen-percent share, including a large slice of the post-Education Act textbook market, and some historians could easily match popular novelists in sales. T. B. Macaulay’s The History of England (1848–61), J. R. Green’s A Short History of the English People (1874), H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History (1920), and G. M. Trevelyan’s English Social History (1942) were among the bestselling nonfiction works of their respective decades. So why are we not studying them as intensively as we study Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf?

As the current president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Leslie Howsam has published “a preliminary sketch” of that unknown territory and a plan for future exploration (10). The history book, she does well to remind us, poses questions very different from the issues we encounter when we study fiction. More than most other genres, historical volumes are called into existence and shaped by market-conscious publishers. They may be repeatedly revised and republished in successive editions for a century or more. They are often issued in collectively written series, such as the Cambridge Modern History, which inevitably force the editors to strive for consistency, coherence, and definitiveness. And we cannot afford to ignore paratexts, especially illustrations and maps.

Just when modernist and mainstream fiction began to diverge, a similar chasm opened up in historiography. In the early 1880s J. R. Seeley urged Cambridge undergraduates to escape “the old literary groove which leads to no trustworthy knowledge, but only to that pompous conventional romancing of which all serious men are tired. Break the drowsy spell of narrative; ask yourself questions; set yourself problems” (qtd. in Howsam 53). Academic history accordingly became professionalized, footnoted, monographic, specialized, analytical, and unprofitable, and the responsibility for publishing it was left to the university presses. That abandonment of the general reader left an opening for middlebrow historians like Wells, Arthur Bryant, and Winston Churchill, who continued to write bold and stirring narratives that sold stupendously. But the great gulf between academic and popular history was never rigidly fixed: Trevelyan was able to bridge the two audiences, and Churchill, without the benefit of a university education, produced respectable scholarship in Marlborough: His Life and Times (1933–38).

Past into Print is a version of Howsam’s 2006 Lyell Lectures in Bibliography, a format that inevitably imposes constraints. The main text runs a mere 128 pages (closer to one hundred if we don’t count illustrations), and in that confined space she can only be suggestive. For fuller coverage, she promises a second volume. But as a program for future research, Past into Print succeeds in provoking thought. Howsam offers illustrative episodes of publishing history that are necessarily sketchy and leave the reader hungry, but they can incite brainstorms. It struck me, for example, that long before it was an established field in academia, women were writing social history in children’s books: Elizabeth Penrose’s History of England (1823), Eileen and Rhoda Power’s Boys and Girls of History (1926), and the A History of Everyday Things in England (1918–34) series produced by Marjorie and C . H. B. Quennell.

In fact historians of historiography are beginning to adopt book history methods. The one serious omission from Howsam’s bibliography is In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (2005), in which David Reynolds shows how the monumental six-volume history was shaped by legal constraints, political pressures, and ghostwriters. Julia Stapleton’s Sir Arthur Bryant and National History in Twentieth-Century Britain...