Power to the People? Proto-Social History

Kingstone, Helen

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-49550-7_6

Helen Kingstone³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

Chapter 6 continues the previous chapter’s analysis of long-overlooked Victorian contemporary histories by Harriet Martineau, J. R. Green, and Spencer Walpole. They were radical not only in narrating the controversial recent past, but also in aspiring to write social history. They all found this difficult to achieve in practice, and structured their narratives on a political chronology. Their radicalism comes into relief, however, in a comparison with Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Victorian Half Century: A Jubilee Book (1887), which is distorted by its royalist focus. The final section examines all four historians’ use of the unifying trope “the nation.” This atemporal concept sometimes encompasses everyone and sometimes only the middle classes. Ultimately, Victorian contemporary historians are shown as unable to represent the whole social spectrum.

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Notes

1.
Poovey, Making a Social Body, 15–16.
2.
Rohan McWilliam, Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England (London ; New York: Routledge, 1998), 45.
3.
Green, Short History, 1.
4.
Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race.
5.
J. R. Green to Edward Freeman, December 30, 1872, Stephen, The Letters of John Richard Green, 340. Qtd. in Brundage, The People’s Historian, 105.
6.
John Sherren Brewer, “A Short History of the English People. By J. R. Green,” The Quarterly Review 141, no. 282 (April 1876): 293.
7.
See Hesketh, Science of History, 123.
8.
P. L. Gell to J. Ramsay, May 27, 1896 (OUP Letter Books 65/195)
9.
Brundage, The People’s Historian.
10.
Lord Acton, “Mr Buckle’s Thesis and Method,” in Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History: Selected Papers, ed. W. H. McNeill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 3. See Hesketh, Science of History, 41.
11.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 152.
12.
Brewer, A Short History of the English People, 293.
13.
Anonymous, “Letters of John Richard Green,” Edinburgh Review 195, no. 400 (April 1902): 441.
14.
Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past.
15.
See Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe.
16.
Walpole, Land of Home Rule, 1.
17.
Spencer Walpole, A History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815 [1878–1886], 6 vols. (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1890), 1: vi.
18.
Walpole, A History of England, 6: 401.
19.
Walpole, A History of England, 1: v.
20.
Harriet Martineau, The History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace, 2 vols. (London: Charles Knight, 1849), 2: 705.
21.
David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy, 31.
22.
Martineau, Thirty Years’ Peace, 1849, 1:317–18.
23.
Martineau, Thirty Years’ Peace, 2: 49–50
24.
Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–1953, 75. See Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978); Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama : History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
25.
Altick, The Shows of London, 176; Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–1953, 75; Ulrich Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (Routledge, 2013).
26.
Altick, The Shows of London, 178.
27.
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History [1837] (London: Chapman & Hall, 1896), 2:291.
28.
Harriet Martineau, “Results of the Census of 1851,” Westminster Review 61 (April 1854): 345.
29.
Harriet Martineau, How to Observe Morals and Manners (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1838), 50.
30.
Valerie Sanders, Reason over Passion, 11–12.
31.
Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. J. A. Froude, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881), 2:216.
32.
Webb, Harriet Martineau, 280.
33.
Carlyle, The French Revolution, 2:168.
34.
Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History, 77.
35.
Martineau, Thirty Years’ Peace, 1849. 2: 35.
36.
Sanders, Reason over Passion, 122.
37.
Martineau, Thirty Years’ Peace, 1849, 1:50.
38.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century.
39.
Charlotte M. Yonge to George Lillie Craik, July 28, 1886, at Charlotte Mitchell, Ellen Jordan, and Helen Schinske, The Letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823–1901), 2007, http://www.yongeletters.com/ (accessed April 24, 2016).
40.
On the popularity and influence of Yonge’s novels among her readers, see Alethea Hayter, Charlotte Yonge (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), 1–3; Susan Walton, Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era: Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 12–13.
41.
Gavin Budge, Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (Bern; Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 13; Rosemary Mitchell, “Charlotte M. Yonge: Reading, Writing, and Recycling Historical Fiction in the Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 31, no. 1 (March 1, 2009): 31–43; Rosemary Mitchell, “Healing the Wounds of War: (A)mending the National Narrative in the Historical Publications of Charlotte M. Yonge,” Women’s History Review 20, no. 5 (November 1, 2011): 785–808.
42.
Walton, “Yonge and the ‘Historic Harem,’” 229.
43.
Walton, “Yonge and the ‘Historic Harem,’” 230.
44.
Walton, Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era, 26 and passim.
45.
Walton, “Yonge and the ‘Historic Harem,’” 245.
46.
Clemence Schultze, “Jubilees Then and Now,” Charlotte M. Yonge Review 35 (Autumn 2012): 8.
47.
Charlotte M. Yonge to George Lillie Craik, May 16, 1886; July 28, 1886. Charlotte Mitchell, Ellen Jordan, and Helen Schinske, The Letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823–1901), 2007, http://www.yongeletters.com/ (accessed April 24, 2016).
48.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 16.
49.
Budge, Charlotte M. Yonge, 17.
50.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 20.
51.
Charlotte M. Yonge to George Lillie Craik, May 21, 1886. Charlotte Mitchell, Ellen Jordan, and Helen Schinske, The Letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823–1901), 2007, http://www.yongeletters.com/ (accessed April 24, 2016).
52.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 91.
53.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 95.
54.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 104.
55.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 57.
56.
Charlotte M. Yonge, English History Reading Books, Adapted to the Requirements of the New Code, (London: National Society, 1885), 4:217.
57.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 23.
58.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 19.
59.
Budge, Charlotte M. Yonge, 13.
60.
See David Cannadine, “British History as a ‘New Subject’?”, in Uniting the Kingdom?: The Making of British History, ed. Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer (London: Routledge, 1995), 16.
61.
Barczewski, Myth and National Identity.
62.
Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, 199.
63.
See Robert Woods, The Population of Britain in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11.
64.
See Asa Briggs, “The Language of ‘Class’ in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” in The Collected Essays of Asa Briggs (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), 1:3–33.
65.
John Morley, “The Liberal Programme,” The Fortnightly Review 2, no. 9 (September 1867): 359.
66.
Qtd. in C. Kent, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 68.
67.
G. H. Lewes, “Review of The History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace,” British Quarterly Review 11 (1850): 360.
68.
Qtd. Briggs, “The Language of Class,” in Collected Essays, 1: 11.
69.
Martineau, Thirty Years’ Peace, 1849, 1: 50.
70.
Hall, “Writing History, Writing a Nation,” 239.
71.
Walpole, A History of England, 3: 245.
72.
Walpole, A History of England, 4: 340.
73.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 77.
74.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 24.
75.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 31.
76.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 34.
77.
Yonge, Victorian Half Century, 37.
78.
Mitchell, “Healing the Wounds of War,” 795–97; Mitchell, “Caring for Far-Extended Interest?”, 119–24.
79.
Bob Whitfield, The Extension of the Franchise, 1832–1931 (Heinemann, 2001), 72, 208.
80.
Poovey, Making a Social Body, 16.

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Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, Leeds Trinity University, Leeds, United Kingdom
Helen Kingstone

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Kingstone, H. (2017). Power to the People? Proto-Social History. In: Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49550-7_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49550-7_6
Published: 26 February 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49549-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49550-7
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