The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak by Ian Hesketh (review)

At least since the publication of John Burrow’s A Liberal Descent (1981), the dramatis personae of high Victorian historiography have become familiar characters to those who follow Victorian intellectual history. On one side stands the arts team: the inspirational Thomases Macaulay and Carlyle, their epigones Charles Kingsley and James Anthony Froude; on the other, the science team, including William Stubbs, Edward Augustus Freeman, John Dalberg-Acton, and John Seeley, with little Johnny (John Richard) Green seeking to mediate between them. For all their differences in style and method, the two teams together built the Whig history that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have lovingly dismantled, a tale of sturdy Anglo-Saxon virtues disciplined by Norman authority, of rude liberty canalized into parliamentary government, of Elizabethan derring-do ultimately finding ample occupation in the British Empire.

Ian Hesketh’s book focuses on differences in style and method, on the contest between art and science, as befits the latest entry in a series of monographs on “Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century” edited by Bernard Lightman. The spine of the book is devoted to Freeman’s and Seeley’s efforts to embed “a Rankean science of history” in the ancient universities and heavyweight periodicals (74). Their boundary work, seeking to professionalize their own cadre and delegitimize literary types like Froude and Kingsley, is meticulously documented in fiercely polemical reviews and the politicking surrounding appointments to the Oxford and Cambridge Regius chairs. A lot of this is already pretty familiar. It is hard to remain shocked, after so many repetitions, by Kingsley’s appointment to the Cambridge chair in 1860 and Froude’s to the Oxford chair in 1892. At points Hesketh sticks very closely indeed to the analysis offered in Burrow and in Reba N. Soffer’s Discipline and Power (1994).

Nevertheless there are novel features that recommend Hesketh’s return to familiar territory. He begins his book unpredictably with an excellent chapter on the false start toward scientific history offered by Henry Thomas Buckle, usually given short shrift because his natural-scientific methods and radical teleology were unpalatable to the intellectual establishment. Rankean methods were valuable precisely because they offered something safer, more particular and controllable, and above all more moral than Buckle’s clockwork vision. Hesketh uses Acton’s critique of Buckle to show clearly the ways in which Buckle’s nomothetic science differed from that of his mainstream successors. Thereafter he reverts to the main event, the duels between Froude and Kingsley on the one hand, and Freeman, Stubbs, and Green on the other, though enlivened with colourful material mined from deep veins of the periodical literature. Another unusual feature of Hesketh’s treatment is a chapter based on the obituaries of the great Victorian historians, used to document creeping changes in mood at the turn of the century that would lead to a synthesis of art and science, and then further to George Macaulay Trevelyan’s explicit repudiation of his Dryasdust predecessors.

Slightly disappointing, given the ostensible justification for the study, is the handling of the Dryasdusts’ scientific method. In English hands, as Hesketh notes, Rankeanism was stripped of its philosophical idealism and reduced to a grim reliance on facts, preferably gleaned with minute accuracy from original manuscripts relating to medieval constitutional history. Acton in particular urged an impersonal, colourless approach. Of course contemporaries understood that this was an illusion—Freeman freely admitted that “each of us [has] his own way”—but it was held to be a noble illusion, a puritanical resistance to temptation, a necessary discipline in aid of disciplinarization (qtd. in Hesketh 124). It also seemed to endow the scientific historians’ inevitable selections and judgments with a moral authority grounded not in the partisan and ephemeral values of this clerical party or that political fad, but in the imperishable and unalterable facts themselves.

Taken simply, there is not much more to say...