Immersed in Great Affairs: Allan Nevins and the Heroic Age of American History

Chapter 4. Biography in the “Victorian Manner”: (1927–45)

C H A P T E R 4 Biography in the “Victorian Manner” (1927–45) During the 1920s, bookstore shelves began to be filled by an arsenal of biographies, some scholarly, some popular, some debunking, some of prominent historical figures, and some of lesser-known subjects .1 Attempting to explain this literary phenomenon, the historian Bernard DeVoto suggested that people read biography to learn about themselves and about the life and times of other people. “The man who reads The Life and Times wants to . . . know about how this particular person was entangled with the world, what the conditions of his life were, what they did to him, how he dealt with destiny, what he overcame, what overcame him.”2 The academic community responded favorably to this development, creating, as the historian Roy Nichols noted, courses in biography and in a few cases even departments .3 Nichols believed biography provided a case method approach to the study of history and introduced a course along these lines at the University of Pennsylvania.4 Many historians believed that by giving greater prominence to the personal element through the use of biography rather than history, they would be able to attract the interest of the general reader. “The myriad corridors of history will . . . be deserted by the casual inquirer, if he finds there only generalizations and word of movements, tendencies, [and] developments . . . ,” wrote Dixon Ryan Fox in Caleb Heathcote (1926), a biography of an eighteenth-century political and business leader in Westchester, N.Y. He added, “[The reader] does not want his history, at least not all of it, so careful of the type that it must be so careless of the single life. All of us, counting in the hardened statistician, find comfort in the simple words, ‘for instance,’ which bring us down to the single human being.”5 67 I Once admitting the value of the personal element, however, historians confronted the question of balancing it with historical influences, particularly since, as the historian John Higham has written, the public favored “vividly personal biography in which portraiture and the interpretation of subjective experience play a large part . . . rather than an integrated analysis of process, which was history’s more fundamental concern.”6 Nevins agreed that biography , unlike history—which dealt with larger entities, groups, institutions, and nations—provided a means to glimpse “the mind and heart of man.”7 At the same time, he believed the real value of biography lay at the intersection between personality and history. He wrote, “It is all very well to say that the personal element in history is not the most important element,” but though “the ordinary reader will admit this, . . . he will say that what he understands most readily, and what interests him most strongly, is the play of personality in history.”8 As this issue developed, Nevins found himself at the center of an intellectual debate with the English writer Lytton Strachey. In Queen Victoria (1921), Strachey focused nearly all his attention on the personal relationships of Victoria, Albert and Lord Melbourne rather than the historical issues these figures faced. Like Nevins, Strachey had a talent for characterization and used it to its fullest, describing Melbourne as displaying a manner toward Victoria that “mingled with perfect facility, the watchfulness and the respect of a statesman and a courtier with the tender solicitude of a parent.”9 Albert was described as “an outsider, a political cipher, whose manner and features—tall, but clumsy, smooth, but smug—offended British sensibilities.”10 As significant as their disagreement regarding the limitations, if any, of personality in biography, Nevins and Strachey also differed about the use of facts, an issue that inevitably resulted as well in their preferences regarding the size and character of the books themselves. Disturbed by large, fact-filled books, Strachey preferred short, selective studies in which the author chooses from the welter of historical material those aspects that seemed most pertinent and shed new light. Nevins believed the historian needed to be as comprehensive as possible, portraying subjects in the round rather than focusing on selected incidents in their life.11 As he told an interviewer for the New York Times in 1940, he had been raised on the Victorian novel and was by nature a Victorian, and he preferred “large, exhaustive books, filled with detail, showing a man 68 Immersed in Great Affairs in the round.”12 The public interest was...