Froude Biography

IN THIS SUBSTANTIAL, thoughtful, and meticulously researched intellectual biography, Ciaran Brady helps us come to grips with James Anthony Froude’s extensive contributions to nineteenth-century life. Best known for The Nemesis of Faith (1849), a novel that was widely seen by contemporary reviewers as heretical, sexually promiscuous, and unnecessarily antagonistic, Froude (1818–1894) was also an academic historian, the executor and biographer of Thomas Carlyle, editor of Fraser’s Magazine, a defender of the British Imperial project, and the author of fiction, history, journalism and travel writing. The difficulty of categorising Froude should not be underestimated. Brady quips that at “one time or another almost everyone in British public life had good reason to feel mortally offended by Froude,” and many of Froude’s friends were critical of or disappointed by his work, especially The Nemesis of Faith. Froude’s conservative leanings made it hard for writers at the turn of the twentieth century to recruit him as an ally for the modernist attempt to throw off the conventions and shackles of the Victorian age, and scholars since then have faced the difficulty of knowing what to do with his less palatable ideas, particularly the racism of his later essays.

Acknowledging that Froude’s writing is unruly and not always as polished as one might wish, Brady makes a case for the coherence of Froude’s life-long project nevertheless. Although the personal details of Froude’s life are covered and psychological explanations for them are considered, the focus of the biography is on intellectual history. For Brady, Froude is best understood in the prophetic tradition of Thomas Carlyle. Like Carlyle, Froude believed “in the capacity of all human beings to rise above their individual deficiencies, and to realise the potential which the force of creation planted within them.” His writing was determined to provoke audiences into confronting this truth, but Froude lacked Carlyle’s confidence in his own authorial voice and compensated by adopting a much wider range of different voices and modes of writing. At times, argues Brady, the different voices we hear in Froude’s writing are deliberately chosen for the purpose of challenging a specific audience; on other occasions, they are the unintended consequence of Froude’s multiple and conflicted roles. This mix is most apparent in Froude’s controversial biography of Carlyle, which emerged out of a complex relationship between the two writers that Brady explains with great clarity. Aware of the different perspectives at work in the biography of Carlyle, Brady writes: “The voice of the troubled moral executor, however, is not the only one adopted by Froude in the course of the biography. He is in addition the close confidant, the ardent disciple, and the critic.”

Brady’s attempt to make sense of Froude’s oeuvre is impressive, and this biography will surely be the standard work on Froude for the foreseeable future. I am persuaded by the case Brady makes for understanding Froude in the tradition of Carlyle, a figure that Froude became much closer to when he moved to London in 1861 to become editor of Fraser’s. And I am also broadly persuaded by the argument that Froude’s role as a prophet needs to be understood within the context of someone who sought to mediate that role through more sophisticated modes of writing. But I have some reservations about the implicit idea that authors are always able to detach themselves from their writing. If Froude’s writings are seen only as strategic interventions into the public realm for the purposes of encouraging debate and making an audience think about its place in the world, they become separated from their author too strongly. Brady is too good a biographer to claim that the severance is complete, but he does make repeated efforts to separate the author from his writing. Despite telling us early on that Froude “speaks with a distinctive authorial voice” and is no “detached and dispassionate commentator,” the claim is immediately undercut with the...