A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty (review)

In a recent London Review of Books (June 10, 2010), Keith Thomas began an essay by reflecting on the dangers of historians revealing their research methods: “Only too often, such revelations dispel the impression of fluent, confident omniscience; instead, they suggest that histories are concocted by error-prone human beings who patch together the results of incomplete research in order to construct an account whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence.” He went on to confess his own method: a pleasantly domestic business of relabeling used envelopes and stuffing them with clipped-out notes and quotes from his immense reading (“my aim is to go on reading until I can hear the people talking”). Then, with the reading done and the ghostly voices talking, the time has come to start writing: “I go through my envelopes, pick out a fat one and empty it out onto the table, to see what I have got. At this point a pattern usually forms” (and we wonder, briefly but poignantly, how).

Thomas quotes a reader’s cheerful report on the manuscript of his own most recent book, The Ends of Life:

There is always a line of argument, but it tends to be both contained and artfully concealed in a great many references to and citations of a generous selection of (mostly printed) texts and documents. . . . According to strict and even censorious critical criteria, these materials cannot stand as proof of any argument, since the reader is in the hands of the author and of what he has chosen to serve up as, strictly speaking, illustrations of his own contentions, it being, in principle, always possible to build up a different picture with the aid of different examples.

As we read, we realize with discomfort that this insight was exactly the one behind the sequence of jujitsu throws that Hilary Mantel inflicted on the discipline in her brilliantly subversive “historical novel,” Wolf Hall. And it is exactly at the point where we realize that “a different picture” is always possible by tweaking the evidence that questions of epistemology impose themselves on the historian. Yet, while claiming to admire “those who write tightly focused micro-studies of episodes or individuals,” and also to be “impressed by the kind of quantitative history . . . which aspires to the purity of physics or mathematics,” Thomas says that he remains “content to immerse [himself] in the past until [he knows] it well enough for [his] judgment of what is or is not representative to seem acceptable without undue epistemological debate.” But why “undue”? Historians, he tells us, “are like reliable local guides. Ideally, they will know the terrain like the backs of their hands. . . . They may not have much sense of world geography and probably can’t even draw a map. But if you want to know how to get somewhere, they are the ones to take you.” One would not debate epistemology with a reliable local guide.

I understand what Thomas says about “representative” bits of evidence, but where do the patterns that he finds in them come from? He declares his subject to be “the historical ethnography of early modern England,” which makes his close-to-total focus on written records surprising. Nor is there a conceptualization of “culture” in sight, presumably because that would incite more “epistemological debate.” I am reminded that when, for example, E. P. Thompson beckons me into unfamiliar territory, I do not follow him because he “knows the terrain like the back of his hand,” though often enough he does. I follow because he is alert to the epistemological precariousness of historians’ preposterous project of discovering something of the thinking of people not personally known to them and moreover long dead — and this, when we have difficulty enough understanding not only the people around us but even ourselves. Yet, undeterred, we track changeful individuals; we struggle to retrieve changing contexts...