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

The Lyell (and indeed the Sandars) lectures present their annual succession of Readers with an opportunity not only to deploy their learning before an attentive and critical audience, but also for them to speak purposefully on the further development of their subjects. Leslie Howsam’s Oxford course of 2005–06 was some thing of a departure, taking the Lyell series very much into the realm of the history of the book. Its epilogue sets out concisely some wider considerations, and out lines the ambitious research programme she has set herself. This will see her researches extended from her initial century to a period perhaps from 1700 to 2000 (‘going back to David Hume and forward to David Starkey’, as she puts it). And the lecturer also gives her special attention to women historians who have been unduly neglected, especially when their contribution to Victorian general accounts of British history was a notable one. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography made some notable inroads into the subject, but there is much more to be said about the women pioneers.

The chosen range is already a wide one, from elementary schoolbooks, which often had their origins in texts much older than the later Victorian period, to the multi-volume academic series of the first part of the twentieth century. Public examination syllabuses in the Victorian board schools set specific targets that were met by a strongly competitive — and lucrative — market. The role-learning of catechetic textbooks was gradually replaced by illustrated narratives. One of these, not mentioned here, was (Miss) H. E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (1905), a middle-class nursery volume followed by several from the same pen (an abridged version of the England book was made for local authority schoolchildren to be used as a textbook between the wars). Our Island Story is nowadays periodically rediscovered, and republished, as an excellent provider of a chronological framework for children puzzled by the disparate and ill-sequenced topics of their history lessons.

It is rather a disappointment that Professor Howsam has chosen to publish the texts of her lectures (though with extensive referencing) but lacking at this stage the fuller arguments and examples she has set herself as a task for the future. She seems at present rather stronger on history publications for the general reader than on those for a scholarly market that developed rapidly from the early twentieth century. Historians such as Eileen Power, who with her sister Rhoda wrote well for children, are well considered, but H. A. L. Fisher, another skilled academic writer who knew how to aim at a general market, is not mentioned for his three-volume History of Europe (1935), which was ‘an instant best-seller’ (ODNB).

In the pages on various series, it is a pity that Longman’s twelve-volume Political History of England (1905–10) is not mentioned, and there are other omissions that might have been remedied in preparing the lectures for publication. The contrasts between the multi-author Cambridge Modern History (1902–12) and the single volumes of the Oxford History of England (1934–61) are discussed as a somewhat factitious rivalry, not least in the light of OUP internal memoranda chaffing their rivals’ ‘sausages’. But the charcutiers’ production-line was a success: Cambridge did well to produce Ancient and Medieval histories too (and a Cambridge History of English Literature), while Oxford was for far too long stuck with Fletcher and Kipling’s controversial school-book History of England (1911). Stories similar to these may not have fitted into the lecture-script format chosen, but they deserve further development as Howsam’s researches proceed. This is a progress that may be watched with interest.