The English Idea of History from Coleridge to Collingwood, and: Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing (review)

The English Idea of History from Coleridge to Collingwood, by Christopher Parker; pp. 244. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2000, £39.50, $69.95.

Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing, by Rohan Amanda Maitzen; pp. xvii + 229. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998, $60.00, £47.50.

Interdisciplinarity has become a byword in nineteenth-century studies, yet particularly in the case of literary criticism where history is invoked as an informing discipline, the Victorians themselves might have been reluctant to recognize the highly selective use of fragments of discourse as "history." Christopher Parker's The English Idea of History from Coleridge to Collingwood and Rohan Amanda Maitzen's Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing both make a serious attempt to examine the significance of history in Victorian Britain. Parker surveys the intersections between history and idealist philosophy, while Maitzen explores women's history and its relevance to George Eliot's works.

Although Parker gives most attention to the work of R. G. Collingwood (1889- 1943), the English tradition of idealist history that he traces from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Collingwood should be helpful to those working in nineteenth-century studies, while those whose notion of historically based scholarship is limited to the invocation of Foucault may be given some pause for thought. Parker first presents a useful discussion of David Hume's empiricist model of history and Coleridge's reaction against it as he introduced the British public to contemporary German thought. He then examines later thinkers who searched for a unity in history and who wrestled with the question of how and in what sense historians can claim to know a past that they have not themselves observed. Parker shows the idealists' debt to Hegel, yet emphasizes the creation of a peculiarly English tradition. Parker's use of the term "English" establishes a contrast with Scottish Enlightenment philosophy while suggesting that English philosophies of history depart from those of their German and Italian influences. Yet to claim Thomas Carlyle as part of an "English" tradition because he sometimes identifies himself as English is to overlook the influence of the Edinburgh not just of the Enlightenment but also of John Knox on Carlyle's thinking.

Nevertheless, Parker does make a case for a tradition starting from Coleridge by noting Coleridge's insistence that ideas are "generated within the mind" (29), and that through searching for "relationships between things," the historian can attempt to understand the divine purpose of humanity, and avoid the thing that almost all of these thinkers feared the most, "Chaos." He thus characterizes Carlyle as peering into the abyss of chaos, doubting whether "God's purpose in history could be discerned by man" (37). Were a historian to attempt to discern such a purpose, he (and I use the gender-exclusive term pointedly here) would be a hero in the Carlylean sense, and in the later discussions of F. H. Bradley's depiction of the historian assessing the past through his own experience and Collingwood's theory of re-enactment, and, to a lesser extent, M. J. Oakeshott's constructionist view, we see historians making a truly heroic effort to avoid subjectivity.

This book does not provide a broad introduction to British theories of history in the nineteenth century. Although the fourth chapter discusses John Stuart Mill as representing "the most coherent expression of the opposition's views" (61), the so-called "Whig" view of history is only alluded to in the Conclusion, and positivism, although frequently mentioned, is not defined in its British form: neither Thomas Babington Macaulay nor Frederic Harrison are mentioned so much as once, although the former's work would provide the best example of the "grand narrative of history" that the idealist historians resisted, and the latter's work brought an English dimension to the positivist idea of history. Yet while I would not recommend this...