Derek Wilson

March/April 2008 Historically Speaking 19 Derek Wilson« I can read poetry and plays, but history— number. This was reflected in the growth of historreal solemn history—I cannot be inter- ical books, television programs, and popular magaested in."zine features that appeared in the lead-up to 2000 A.D. It was no coincidence that in 2002 the number of students opting for history degree courses was up by 14%. It is a feature of our crossover culture that, -Jane Austen, NorthangerAbbey Adam Hochschild's article evokes for me a feeling of déjà vu. The debate on popular versus academic history raises its head frequendy, as Hochschild himself intimates.Jane Austen's heroine struggled with "real solemn history" but so, a quarter of a century later, did Lord Macaulay. In his celebrated 1828 article for the Edinburgh Review he spoke of the historian's two taskmasters, Reason and Imagination, and berated those who served the former at the expense of the latter. Lord Acton's no less famous inaugural address as Regius Professor at Cambridge in 1895 deplored the advent of a "documentary age" of historiography, the products of which would cease to be literature designed to stir the imagination and instead pretend to be science. A century later we find David Starkey in the Times condemning die academic historical establishment for promoting "a cult of the obscure, the esoteric and the illiterate," making "what should be the most public of subjects . . . one of the most hermetically sealed." David and I were near contemporaries at Cambridge and I certainly know what he meant. In our undergraduate days there was a great gulf fixed between "proper historians" and "popularizers." Like the members of all establishments, academic historians built stockades to defend die purity and integrity of their discipline and to keep out uninitiated amateurs. Such attitudes lingered long. It was only a few years ago that I was part of a high-table debate on this very subject during which Hugh Trevor-Roper delivered himself of the waspish apothegm, "I don't know which is worse, a gentleman pretending to be a historian or a historian pretending to be a gendeman." He was referring to the advent of the "teledon," and there can be no doubt diat the phenomenon of the TV expert has changed die parameters of the professional versus amateur debate. But has it closed die gap? To a large extent, I believe it has. The lure of megabucks (or even minibucks) prompts many of today's specialists to doff dieir purism and don the mantle of mass communication . If that reads like unwarranted cynicism, let me hasten to say that I am well aware that many academics venture into the public arena out of conviction . They know that history belongs to everyone and that it is important to help everyone to understand it. Many people are interested in our shared past, and the millennium undoubtedly increased dieir A 1 9th-century engraving of Jane Austen. Library of Congress, Prints Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-103529]. for example, one of our leading Tudor historians, John Guy, could choose that most romantic of subjects , Many Queen of Scots, and write a biography that was an exciting read both for its elegance of style and its original research. Inevitably, the lord mayor's carriage of finely written, accessible history is followed by die dustman 's cart of trivialization. This is certainly true of television. Oversimplification is the mark of the beast. It can scarcely be otherwise when important topics are wrapped up in 50-minute gobbets. A glut of ill-researched, derivative books followed in die early years of the century, for which Hochschild is right to blame publishers. Because trade publishers had come to be held in the vice-like talons of the marketing men, the tendency was to produce books on well-worn subjects whose popularity could be measured in terms of the sales of previous similar books. Authors with somediing interesting and fresh to say were obliged to play along with this short-termism if they wanted to stay in business. Just as die and academic writer was tempted to ask, "What will impress my...