Long History of Photoshopping: or about Celebrity Portraiture and its Mediated Nature

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Believe it or not, Celebrity

A number of portraits of Isaac Newton have survived up to our day. Yet, we do not know how exactly the famous polymath looked like. After all, in each portrait his appearance was adjusted to correspond with the messages which Newton himself and those who commissioned the portraits wished to convey. There was nothing extraordinary in this. On the contrary, a defining feature of the portraiture of the famous was – and had been already for centuries – that they were manipulated. The aim of such portraits was to accentuate and enhance the sitters’ virtuosity and power. This was obvious to everyone who was involved in the production and consumption of portraitures. Against this background, it has been astonishing to follow the outrage which the photoshopping of the Mother’s Day portrait of the Princess of Wales has caused all over the world. Surely, the quality of the photoshopping was clumsy and the events leading to the publication of the doctored photograph – the surgery of the Princess and her long absence from public duties – played their role in the public’s response. But this does not change the fact that the audience seemed to expect royal photographs to be genuine and unmediated. Such a profound trust in the authenticity of publicly circulated imagery produced by a royal family should make us all pause in this era of false news and AI generated images.

Isaac Newton in 1712, by Sir James Thornhill (source: Wikipedia)

Ludmilla Jordanova, writing about scientific and medical portraits between 1660 and 2000, emphasizes how the relationship between artists, sitters, audiences, commissioners, and the prevailing aesthetic ideals have shaped how the famous have been immortalized on canvas. The overarching idea in such portraiture has been that portraits should be carefully constructed expressions of identity, status, profession, and personal taste. Lucy Aiken reported already in 1818 in the Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth that the state papers revealed how Elizabeth had been upset about some of the “ill-favored” likeness of her countenance which circulated among her subjects. Consequently, a royal prerogative was issued to correct the situation: only the approved patterns of the queen’s image could be used to make portraits of her, Aikin explained. Hence, as Elizabeth’s maneuvering with her portraiture suggests, portraits should not be taken as authentic reproductions of likeness or read literally as historical documents. However, this does not mean that portraits do not have any value as historical sources. On the contrary, they can tell us how the contemporaries thought that a ruler, scientist, wealthy merchant, or another renown member of the society should look like to fill his public role. Moreover, as Patricia Fara observes, portraits can be “instructive not just because of what they do show, but also because they are imbued with assumption of what should be shown or concealed.”

What is more, portraits are intriguing reflections of the shifting aesthetic ideals. Godfrey Kneller’s Isaac Newton (1689) provided a model for a visual expression of a savant. The contemporaries interpreted Newton’s thin, pale face, disheveled hair, and fine, fragile fingers as signs of melancholy, but the Romantics understood them as external markers of genius. As realism gradually emerged as the leading aesthetic ideal during the nineteenth century, the notion of “likeness” gained popularity in portraits. Artists aimed at realism, and this meant that the youthful skeleton-like geniuses were replaced with aging scientists, scholars, politicians, and other renown figures whose wrinkles communicated wisdom gained through experience and thorough learning. Blemishes, age, or illnesses were no longer hidden; sitters carried such marks with fortitude.

Godfrey Kneller’s painting of Newton in 1689 defined the features of a savant (source: Wikipedia)

For a moment, the invention of photography enhanced the impression of authenticity in portraiture as photography was linked from the outset to documenting and observing scientific evidence. However, it did not take long before sitters began to embrace the possibilities of what is today known photoshopping. According to Raymond Blathwhyt’s article “How Celebrities Have Been Photographed” in The Windsor Magazine in 1895, the famous were keen to have their portraits taken, but they could be sensitive about what they considered weaknesses in their physiognomy. Robert Browning, for example, gave to the renowned photographer Julia Cameron specific instructions how to improve his appearance in one of the photographs she had taken of him. Blathwhyt quoted a letter from Browning to Cameron where the poet asked the photographer to render “a certain twist” of his nose “less prominent” by toning down its thickness.

Portrait of Robert Browning by Julia Cameron, reproduced in The Windsor Magazine in 1895 (source: Internet Archive)

Browning’s request bears witness to the sitters’ vanity, sensitivity about their looks, and to the significance which celebrities and other eminent individuals placed on the art of portraiture. They were aware that their images would be reproduced in the popular media and that the audience would draw inferences about their inner virtuosity based on their physical features. Therefore, the curation of photographic images was critical for the fashioning of public selves. Certainly, not much has changed since the days when Browning wished Cameron to modify “the deeper lines” of his face. Yet, when the Royal household is exposed as photoshoppers in the 2020s, the whole idea of manipulated portraiture seems to appear to the public as unprecedented, shocking, reprehensible, and something that must be fiercely objected.

Sources

Aikin, Lucy. Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth, vol. 1. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818.

Blathwayt, Raymond. “How Celebrities Have Been Photographed,” vol. 2, 1895, 639–648, of photoshopping pp. 645–646.

*

Fara, Patricia. “Framing the Evidence: Scientific Biography and Portraiture.” In The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, edited by Thomas Söderqvist, 71–91. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

Jordanova, Ludmilla. Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660–2000. London: The National Portrait Gallery and Reaktion Books, 2000.

From Shaved Chins to Bushy Beards: Semantics of Facial Hair in Victorian Britain

Thomas Hobbes, the famous seventeenth-century philosopher, refused to wear a beard. He knew that a Socratic beard was a symbol of sage, but he wanted to be respected by his wit, not by some imagined external marker of abstract intellectual abilities. Hobbes’s protestation reveals how science and scientific knowledge have been considered as embodied and, consequently, how appearance, habitus, and sartorial choices have been used for articulating scholarly authority. The Socratic beard is a quintessential example of the symbolic meanings embedded in physical features. The reliability of such indicators of learning, however, has been undermined in different times by the competing meanings inscribed in them and by their easy manipulation. This made the semantics of facial hair a highly complex issue in Victorian Britain where middle-class men were extremely sensitive about the performative side of respectability and moral character. Henry Sampson, an expert in the history of advertising, pointed out in the 1870s that it was easy to tinker with looks. He could not understand why Victorians were so confident that they could read the messages stamped on bodies. He compared appearances to advertisements and concluded that both were equally deceptive as sources of information. Against this backdrop it is not hard to discern why Victorian middle-class men were so anxious about beards throughout the century.

Socrates and the famous beard. (Louvre, image: Wikipedia)

The early-Victorian men were clean-shaven and only accepted side whiskers. There were acute political reasons for this fashion choice. Beards were associated with the French revolution and seeped revolutionary and radical tendencies. There were also other radical political affinities which a beard denoted; a hairy face was an immediate sign of Chartism, socialism, and Bohemian tendencies. But this was not all. Beards were also linked to poor hygiene which the French apparently were famous for. Cleanliness, or course, was something that Britons were very proud of and filthy beards did not fit into that image. In other words, there were more than enough arguments for urging men to shave.

It was in the 1850s when beards made a comeback as a fashion item. The Crimean war introduced British soldiers to Ottoman beards, and this rendered facial hair trendy among all social classes. There was an obvious momentum for this shift in fashion and T. S. Gowing argued strongly in The Philosophy of Beards (1854) for the manliness of a bearded face. According to him, an absence of beard indicated effeminacy as well as physical and moral weakness. The manliness of a beard was also a counterargument to all those who feared that “ladies don’t like” a hairy face. Gowing assured that “Ladies by their very nature like every thing manly.” To convince his audience about this point, he borrowed authority from Benjamin Disraeli who had observed how earlier, when “the fair sex” had grown accustomed “to behold their lovers with Beards,” the “shaved chin” had exited “feelings of horror and aversion.” Finally, Gowing also wished to assuage those who feared that beards were terribly unhygienic. This was not an issue at all in a country like England where “every one washes the face more than once a day.” To conclude his essay, Gowing stressed how a beard was a “natural feature of the male face” and “designed by Providence for distinction … and ornamentation.” The message sank in the audience and bushy beards remained in fashion until the 1890s when they were replaced with clean-shaven faces which in turn were interpreted as markers of respectable modernity.

Image: Internet Archive

As the fashion tide turned in the 1850s, also scholars once again eagerly embraced the age-old tradition of a Socratic beard. Among historians, an imposing beard became a popular accoutrement of learning. Lord Acton, Mandell, Creighton, and Frederick York Powell were renowned for their imposing facial hair and the sideburns of William Stubbs were hard to beat. John Robert Seeley and Montagu Burrows were the few history professors who seemed to be indifferent about the craze for a leonine beard. Yet, it was the hairy face of Edward Freeman which attracted most attention. The free-flowing facial hair which covered his well-rounded chest became his trademark. The newspapers frequently referred to his “ample” beard and when he was lecturing in the United States in 1881–1882, it was his hairy head that caught the attention of the local media. A writer from the New Haven Evening Register was astonished how profoundly hair really dominated the appearance of this famous English historian. The reporter aptly described how Freeman’s “hair was silver, gray, long and bushy,” the beard was long and of same color, and the mustache “lent additional charm to the hairy face.”

Edward Freeman and his staggering facial hair. (Image: Wikipedia)

A trendy beard was not a mere fashion statement for the later-Victorian men: they stopped shaving because facial hair regulated social and gender distinctions. Yet, beards were inscribed with competing and contradicting messages and it was this versatility of meanings that blurred many of the boundaries which facial hair was expected to establish, including the one that was emerging between the different kinds of masculinity. Nature, Gowing maintained, had adorned men and lions alike with a beard. This was an appealing message during the latter half of the nineteenth century when the masculine ideals were shifting from domesticated and intellectual manliness towards a more muscular, physical, and adventurous brand of manliness. Victorians who were convinced that physiology and other bodily features were signs of inner qualities were receptive to ideas that presented beards as indicators of bravery, courage, and other desirable manly qualities. Historians distanced themselves from physical manliness and cultivated instead the contemplative virtues of a learned man, but they, too, joined the craze for dramatic sideburns and beards. Drawing on the Socratic image, they found a beard a convenient marker of their character and status. Considering how a beard was a demonstration of the two competing types of manliness, it is not surprising that men like Henry Sampson were astonished and alarmed about the gullibility of their contemporaries who made categorical deductions based on appearances.

Sources

“Lessons of History.” New Haven Evening Register, December 1, 1881.

Gowing, T. S. The Philosophy of Beards. London: J. Haddock, [1854].

Sampson Henry, A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times. London: Chatto and Windus, 1874.

*

Condren, Conal. “The persona of the philosopher and the rhetorics of office in early modern England.” In The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, edited by Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger & Ian Hunter, 66–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Huggins, Mike. Vice and the Victorians. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. “Class and Social Status: ‘The More you have the better’ Or, the Politics and Economics of Hair.” In A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Empire, edited by Sarah Heaton, 139–155. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Shears, Jonathan. “Self and Society: Hair Consciousness in the Age of Empire.” In A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Empire, edited by Sarah Heaton, 35–51. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

When “Almost Nothing” Became “Nothing”: C. H. Th. Bussemaker and an Iberian Archive Tour

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Life's not fair, Travelling

Carel Hendrik Theodoor Bussemaker, a historian at the University of Groningen, was on an important mission in the spring of 1904. The recently founded Rijkscommissie voor Vaderlandse Geschiedenis, a commission for the advancement of national history, had sent him on an official expedition to archives in Lisbon, Seville, Madrid, El Escorial, Simancas, and Brussels. He had been given four months to unearth from these repositories all the important records pertaining to the history of the Netherlands. When Bussemaker returned home, he was a beaten man, for he had failed to fulfill his orders. Instead of finding piles and piles of important records, he had discovered what he considered worthless scraps.

C. H. Th. Bussemaker (1864-114). Image: Wikipedia

Bussemaker’s commission was yet another episode in the colorful history of nineteenth-century archive fever. As the archives gradually opened their doors to historians during the first half of the century, national research academies, historical societies, and ministries of education began to organize expeditions to foreign archives. The goal of these ventures was either to search for historically valuable documents for publication or to locate and catalogue such sources for a later consultation. Bussemaker was instructed to produce an inventory that would list the relevant collections and documents in the archives in Lisboa, Seville, Madrid, El Escorial, Simancas, and Brussels. The production of these kinds of catalogues with a carefully defined scope was hugely popular: they were obviously much faster to complete than the document editions and thus delivered tangible results in a relatively short span of time. Moreover, they garnered much scholarly admiration for their commissioners and producers. The cataloguing of the enormous quantities of unorganized archival material progressed slowly in the national archives. Historians, who were recruited to locate documents about a specific topic and to publish their results in handy directories, created a shortcut to at least a fraction of this historically valuable material lying in archives all over Europe. Quite understandably, historians were grateful for the fast-growing stock of helpful research aids. Despite the high volume of these catalogues, historiographers have remained remarkably indifferent about them and their role in the formation of modern scholarly practices.

Bussemaker quickly realized that the archives in Spain and Portugal stored only a small number of records that might interest Dutch historians. His spirits dropped, for he would not be coming back home as a celebrated hero of moldy archives. A key element in the nineteenth-century archive narratives was a historian’s glorious homecoming with heaps of notes and copies of hitherto unknown sources. Nothing less seemed to satisfy historians’ scholarly pride than a tremendously large catch. Since Bussemaker fell short of this, he had some explaining to do to the Rijkscommissie and the Ministry of Interior Affairs, which had supplied the funds for the expedition. He offered his excuses in a preface, which he attached to a short catalogue that contained the results of his journey: Verslag van een Voorloopig Onderzoek te Lissabon, Sevilla, Madrid, Escorial, Simancas en Brussel (1905). 

Image: Miss Footnote’s private collection of obscure titles

The prefatorial apology aptly summarizes the landscape of nineteenth-century archival research and the national rivalries embedded in historical expeditions. First, Bussemaker stressed that four months had not been enough for a thorough investigation of six archives. Second, the incomplete nature of existing archive catalogues and inventories had slowed down his work significantly. Third, the Dutch were hopelessly late with their commission. Bussemaker had no choice but to admit that he had encountered in the Spanish archvives “mown grass.” Belgians had organized official archival expeditions since the 1830s, and Louis-Prosper Gachard had ransacked the archives in Simancas, El Escorial, and Madrid already in the early 1840s. He had published several inventories and a sample of the copied records during the following decades. The Spaniards, too, had launched their own document series, Documents inéditos para la historia de España, around the same time. The Dutch, on the contrary, were remarkably slow to embrace the potential of official archival commissions and it was not until 1903 that the Rijkscommissie voor Vaderlandse Geschiedenis devised a comprehensive plan for a state-funded publication series for nationally valuable historical documents. Considering this belated start, Bussemaker did not have any another alternative but to report that the Belgian and Spanish publications contained a large share of the important documents which he had been instructed to locate. He had surely expected “a richer harvest” and could only hope that the catalogue he had devised would not be “entirely without use.”

The members of the Rijkscommissie seemed to grasp the situation. After they had politely acknowledged Bussemaker’s report in one of their meetings, the Spanish archives vanished from their discussions. When the Commission published its proposal for the envisioned document editions, Spanish archives were referred to only briefly in it. Archives in Vienna, Paris, Brussels, and London had proven to be more promising destinations for archival expeditions and the writing of Dutch history. “Almost nothing” valuable did not translate into “something”; it meant “nothing” for these historians.

There is something empathetically recognizable in Bussemaker’s mortification which the meagre results of his archival tour caused. Even today, historians share stories either of the immense quantities of pictures they have taken during their archival trips or of how they have patiently searched for weeks and months for that precious needle hidden in a haystack called archival collection without ever finding it. Yet, the silences may become valuable discoveries in themselves. The absence of Spanish archives from the papers of the Rijkscommissie can be, in fact, a significant result. It tells at least as much about the large nineteenth-century research ventures than do the hundreds of pages of recorded discussions about these enterprises amidst the archived papers of learned societies and academies.

Sources

The National Archives, Den Haag: Archief van de Rijkscommissie voor Vaderlandse Geschiedenis en haar voorgangers.

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Bussemaker, Th. Verslag van een voorloopig onderzoek te Lissabon, Sevilla, Madrid, Escorial, Simancas en Brussels naar archivalia belangrijk voor de geschiedenis van Nederlanden. ’S Gravenhage: W. P. van Stockum & zoon, 1905.

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Dorsman, Leen. “De nieuwe eruditie: Het ontstaan en historische bedrijf.” In De palimpsest: Geschiedschrijving in de Nederlanden 1500–2000, edited by Jo Tollebeek, Tom Verschaffel, & Leonard H.M. Wessels, 159–176. Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2002.

Vanity, Egotism, and Scholarly Vices: Frontispieces with Author Portraits in Victorian History Books

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Proper historian

It was not long after Gutenberg had introduced the movable-type that printers in Central Europe realized that it was the name and face of the author that sold books. Thanks to this, they began to issue books with lavishly and elegantly decorated frontispieces with authors’ portraits. Readers appreciated this paratextual innovation: seeing the author gave them confidence that the book had been written by a real person. How authentic these portraits were, is of course a matter of opinion. Nevertheless, frontispieces with authorial “liking” gained a permanent paratextual place in books. Victorian publishers eagerly carried on the tradition. The modern idea of author branding, coupled with the invention of photography and innovations that enable the cheap reproduction of images, gave new acuteness to authorial biographies as marketing devices. Hence, authorial portraits remained a standard feature in novels and poetry throughout the nineteenth century. Scholarly literature, however, made a significant departure from this long-lasting paratextual trend. Historians, for instance, adamantly objected the use of an authorial image as a frontispiece. They feared that such a frontispiece would undermine their virtuosity and create a misleading impression about their motives for conducting historical research.

Historians visited photographers’ studios just like other members of the Victorian middle class did, exchanged portraits with their colleagues, and even lend pictures of themselves for publication in the illustrated magazines, but they did not allow their portraits to cross the threshold of their own books. The boundary between scholarly portraiture in books and in other types of media was a moral one and broiled down to vanity as a scholarly vice and egotism as a false motive for historical endeavors.  Historians, just like scholars and scientists, were expected to be altruistic and acquire truthful knowledge for the benefit of the society, not for fame and money. Because of this, authorial portraits were interpreted as ostentatious and boastful. An anonymous reviewer in The English Historical Review censored James Croston for attaching his portrait as a frontispiece in his County Families of Lancashire and Cheshire. According to the anonymous critic, “we could have spared the likeness of the author, which, after an evil and nearly exploded taste, appears as the frontispiece.” This was certainly the kind of publicity historians wished to avoid and helps to explain why frontispieces with author’s portraits are extremely rare in history books in the later Victorian era.

Source: Internet Archive

It was critical for historians to avoid paratexts that might have compromised their authority or virtuosity. It was widely accepted among writers of every description that the public assigned the responsibility of paratexts to the author. Publishers disagreed with this, but authors were hard-pressed – and for a reason. Readers fostered an idea that it was indeed the writer who was in charge of the text and paratexts. Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, allowed with great hesitation the use of his portrait as a frontispiece though reminded his publisher Paul Keegan how the audience will impute such “Yankeeims” to him, not to the publisher.

Great many compilations of Tennyson’s poems were issued with his portrait as a frontispiece. (Source: Internet Archive)

If historians feared that their portrait in the front matter might subject their virtuosity to criticism, they were not mistaken. In some quarters, such frontispieces were becoming objects of ridicule. For satirists, they were indicators of authorship driven by a lust for fame and money, not by a sincere artistry or a wish to do good for the society. Scholarship was not spared from this kind of satire. All the Year Round introduced in 1866 a fictitious Great Bunglebutt and his astounding frontispiece. Bunglebutt, a member of parliament and expert in political economy, had published “A book on the great coal question, consisting of one thousand and one closely printed pages” filled with a variety of statistics. Against all expectations, Bunglebutt’s Our empty Coal-cellars, and What’s to fill them? became a publishing sensation and the name of the great author a fixture in “every column of every morning and evening newspaper.” In no time, there was a need for “the twenty-second and much-augmented edition” and someone got the marvelous idea that “it should be adorned with a portrait of the great Bunglebutt, ‘beautifully engraved upon steel, in the highest style of art’.” At this point, the writer let the readers to realize that this idea had come from the very vain Bunglebutt himself. If there were any doubts about the source of the idea, they were vanished later in the story when Bunglebutt rejected one engraver’s proof after another. According to Bunglebutt, the engraver had failed to “express perfectly” his “left-hand eye,” the eye that was “a stern expression on deep meditation, combined with a profundity of philosophical thought.” The engraver – and the writer – saw the profundity of Bunglebutt’s philosophical thought, or the left-hand eye, quite in the opposite way.

Source: Internet Archive

The common association between portraits in frontispieces and authors’ selfish and immoral motives was a severe risk for historians’ reputation. According to the age-old scholarly virtues, a historian was expected to be an altruistic acquirer of truthful knowledge, not a fame or money hungry charlatan. Since scholarly authority and reliability hinged on historians’ virtuosity, it was better to avoid any paratexts that might have compromised readers’ trust on historians’ moral and scholarly character. After all, it was not the face of a historian, but the name and the qualities associated with it, that vouched for authority. This made it even easier for historians to abstain from furnishing their books with frontispieces with authorial images. The matter stood differently with posthumous editions. They were often embellished with historians’ portraits for posthumously published images were free from authorial responsibility or moral concerns. They were not demonstrations of vanity or self-love. On the contrary, they were tokens of admiration towards the late historian.

Sources

[Anon.]. “Engraved on Steel.” All the Year Round, October 27, 1866, 372–376.

[Anon.]. Review of James Croston’s Country Families of Lancashire and Creshire. In The English Historical Review 3, no. 10 (1888): 382.

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Garritzen, Elise. Reimagining the Historian in Victorian England: Books, the Literary Marketplace, and the Scholarly Persona. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

Howsam, Leslie, Kegan Paul a Victorian Imprint: Publishers, Books and Cultural History. London & Toronto: Kegan Paul International and University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Peterson, Linda H. “Presenting Alice Meynell: The Book, the Photograph, and the Calendar.” In Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Ann R. Hawkins and Maura Ives, 169–187. London: Routledge, 2016.

Pettegree, Andrew. The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Social Awkwardness and Egotism; or How to Become a Quintessential Victorian Scholar

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Proper historian

The writers of Victorian periodicals were enthralled by scholarly oddities. Periodicals published scores of stories portraying real and fictitious historians, antiquaries, and classicists as archetypical eccentrics. The Strand Magazine, for instance, introduced John Stuart Blackie, a classical scholar from Edinburgh, in 1892 by foregrounding his quirky habits. Apparently, Blackie was like a walking and talking encyclopedia who “quote Plato one moment, dilate on the severity of the Scottish Sabbath the next, and with lightning rapidity burst forth into singing an old Scotch ballad that sets one’s heart beating considerably above the regulation rate.” If this was not enough to convince the readers that Blackie was truly an oddball erudite, the reporter explained how he, when “worried for a sentence, or troubled for a rhyme,” walked in circle “humming ‘I am a motive animal’.” An eccentric was one of the most common “types” of scholars which Victorian periodical literature cherished. Some other popular types were the recluse ascetic, effeminate antiquary, combative scientist, and the self-absorbed specialist. There were numerous real-life models to match these types and readers were greatly amused by the peculiarities of the greatest minds of their age.

Professor John Stuart Blackie, by Sir George Reid, 1893 (illustration: Wikipedia)

Each of these types would deserve a blog post of its own, but let’s turn our attention to the self-absorbed specialist who was characterized by an overbearing personality, conviction of the superiority of his (rarely hers) mind, and a compulsion to share his views with whomever happened to be around. The egomania made the self-absorbed specialist unbearable company in an age that held such virtues as modesty, altruism, self-restrain and self-discipline in high esteem, and appreciated refined sociability and simplicity of manner. After all, selfishness was considered a serious flaw in the moral character of an educated middle-class man. A manly man was always in charge of his conduct and emotions. Even the slightest hint of contrary alarmed scholars and demanded urgent public image polishing. A good example of this is William Stubbs, Regius Professor of Modern History in Oxford.

Stubbs, as I have written elsewhere, was venerated by his peers as the embodiment of the new scientific history. Nevertheless, and despite his colleagues’ avid hero-worshipping, a persistent rumor about Stubbs as an unbearable erudite circulated among the public. Stubbs, being one of the most eager constructors of his heroic public image, was aware of both the rumor and how stories about his assumed egotism could damage his otherwise untarnished reputation. He was so concerned about the situation that he decided to dedicate part of his last statutory lecture in Oxford in 1884 to correcting such misconceptions about his character.

William Stubbs, by Hubert von Herkomes, 1885 (illustration: Wikipedia)

According to the story which Stubbs wished to refute, his first encounter with the young historian John Richard Green had been strained by his egotistic tendencies. The two had met on a train on their way to visit another well-known historian, Edward Freeman. One of them had been “a stout and pompous professor,” the other “a bright ascetic young divine.” The “burly professor” had “aired his erudition by little history lectures … on every object of interest that was passed on the way.” Stubbs found all this ridiculous and entirely unfounded. His side of the story was that, yes, he and Green had met for the first time on a train on their way to visit Freeman, but that he had certainly not bored Green with arrogant lectures on every possible topic that had occurred to him. On the contrary, the two had immediately fallen into an inspiring conversation and that this vibrant exchange of ideas had continued since then until Green’s premature death in 1883. “And that is all,” Stubbs ensured. The story was nothing but “confusion and inversion.” After his rhetorical attempt to restore his reputation as a modest, selfless, and generous scholar, he reverted to his professorial pose and rounded off the tale by reminding the attendees how history was often “written out” of such unfounded tales.

The stories about scholarly eccentricity flourished in fact and fiction in Victorian Britain. For scholars, the images of dust-covered historians perusing illegible manuscripts or antiquaries tramping across muddy fields in a frantic search for a Roman teapot were insulting and alarming at once. They feared that the constant mockery might undermine both their authority and the credibility of scientific knowledge. Moreover, the parodies of compulsive behavior and egomania threatened the morality and manliness of their character. This was anything but insignificant at a time when behavior and respectability were critical for one’s social stature and membership in the society. Because of this, John Ruskin, an Oxford art historian and an inspiration for countless rumors and pernicious anecdotes, must have been pleased to read how the famous celebrity-journalist Edmund Yates complimented him in The World for never monopolizing the social space. After observing how Ruskin had hosted a party at his home, Yates was able to assure that Ruskin’s guests had no need to “be afraid of being victimised by that spirit of self-conscious dictation … which has been known to spoil enjoyment in the company of some literary men.” This was praise that would have exhilarated any man with scholarly ambitions.

Sources

[Anon.]. “Illustrated Interviews. No. IX. – Professor Blackie.” The Strand Magazine, 1892.

Stubbs, William. Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History and Kindred Subjects. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886.

Yates, Edmund. Celebrities at Home. Printed from ‘The World,’ vol. 2. London: Office of ‘The World’, 1878.

Lost Keys, Missing Archivists, and other Archival Surprises in the Nineteenth Century

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Travelling

Nineteenth-century historians were inspired by two overarching principles. First, all historical knowledge had to rest on original authorities, and second, the virtue of completeness warranted the reliability of historical knowledge as it eliminated the biases embedded in a selection of sources. Neither of these ideas was a nineteenth-century invention, but the opening of archives gave a new acuteness to these traditional views. Historians realized that completeness, the idea of gathering every source pertaining to their subject matter, was an elusive goal as they made their way through the sea of hitherto unknown documents dispersed in public and private archives all over Europe. Nevertheless, as the idea of completeness continued to haunt them, they abandoned their studies and launched long journeys from one archive to another.

These archival journeys have left us a wealth of material – letters, diaries, memoirs, official reports, and articles – with minute reports about every imaginable aspect of archives and historical research. The archival accounts are rich with obstacles and misfortunes: they abound with complaints about bureaucratic regulations which either restricted or altogether denied access to archives, about lack of catalogues, inventories and finding aids, limited opening hours, and about the feelings of solitude the long archival pursuits evoked. Furthermore, the accounts attest how the lack of comprehensive information about archives and their holdings meant that historians just had to try their luck and knock on the doors of families, parishes, monasteries, schools, local authorities, and other similar institutions which might hold valuable historical records. But the archive narratives are also moving testimonies of the joys of discovery as the past suddenly emerged in a more complete form in front of a historian’s eyes in some remote archive in some foreign country. Or about the extra mile which some archivists, librarians, and owners of private papers went to accommodate historical research. As the following examples show, the encounters with keepers of historical records could gain almost epic proportions in the nineteenth-century archival lore.

The Royal Historical Commission of Belgium published scores of reports about archival travel in the 19th century.

The entanglement of national histories ensured that historical records had moved from one repository to another as boundaries had been drawn and redrawn time and again in the past and, consequently, historians had to travel extensively to gather all the necessary material. Most recently, Napoleon’s dream of one universal archive in Paris had caused havoc in archives in central and southern Europe. French officials had transported hundreds and thousands of bundles of documents from Brussels, Simancas, Vatican, Vienna, and numerous other locations first to Paris and then returned most of them back where they had come from. Hence, when historians began to ransack archives in earnest during the first quarter of the century, many of the repositories were still inventorying and reorganizing their collections after the French intervention. Due to these recent events, archivists tended to be highly protective about their wares and weary about foreign scholars requesting to consult their collections.

This was very much what the German historian Friedrich Bluhme experienced in Italy in 1822. Bluhme was one of the first editors of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and he was commissioned to Italy to explore the local and regional repositories. He reported about his progress in detail to George Heinrich Pertz in Berlin. When he reached Verona, he was determined to consult the collections held in La Capitolare, known today as the most ancient library still in operation. This was not an easy task. Bluhme told Pertz how he had earlier failed to gain access to La Capitolare because the archivist had maintained that he “did not have the key” to open the door of the archive. Bluhme was not convinced about this explanation at all  and this time he had been appealing to the saints not to let the Archivist-Canonicus to once again “spread his robes in front of the bookcases” to protect the manuscripts from the prying eye of a foreign historian.

Bluhme shared his archival experiences in printed form. (Image: HathiTrust)

Missing keys played a central role in numerous archive accounts. Thirty years after Bluhme, the editorial board of Monumenta Germaniae Historica sent another German historian, Ludwig Bethmann, to Italy to search for more unpublished medieval manuscripts. Bethmann reported about his journey from Todi, a small village south of Perugia. The city archives of Todi, Bethmann explained, were hidden in the sacristy of the local church, and could be entered only by first pushing aside the confessional that blocked the door to the archive and then unlocking the hidden door with two separate keys. It took “enormous effort” to induce the official in charge of the archive to come to open the door and to see the trouble to find the second key which had been held by someone who had died. But it was all worth the trouble; when the door was finally opened, Bethmann discovered nine unpublished “Kaiserurkunden” among the other papers held in that archive. This was not the only occasion when Bethmann’s work was slowed down by lost keys. In Civitanova, he discovered an old chest that was locked and seemed to belong to Marquis Ricci von dem Dasein. The Marquis, too, became highly curious about the chest and since he did not have a key to open it, he ordered it to be broken. The chest contained parchments and Bethmann was able to trace the history of the chest to the upheaval which Napoleon’s archival vision had caused in the local archives in Italy. Apparently, the chest had been standing unopened in Civitanova since it had been returned to Italy from France and experienced some damage during its lifecycle. Much of its contents had “turned into dust.”

Todi, 1663 (source: Wikimedia commons)

As the century progressed, the suspicions which many of the keepers of records held towards historians gradually diminished. Consequently, historians could expect substantial help from the archivists as they chased the documentary treasures. The troubles with missing keys, though, continued. In England, Samuel Rawson Gardiner was in Colchester, where the local parish church had some important seventeenth-century Act Books. They were, Gardiner explained in a footnote in The Fall of the Monarchy of Charles I. (1882), under the charge of the registrar who had fallen ill. However, unlike in Bluhme’s case fifty years earlier, no one in Colchester wished to complicate or obstruct historical research. Therefore, Gardiner could thank cordially “the Rev. Sir J. Hawkins, Bart., and F. T. Veley, Esq., for their kind assistance in helping me to see these books at a time when the illness of the late registrar made it difficult for me to procure access to them in the ordinary way.”

It is hard to say how much of the record keepers’ willingness to help historians during the latter half of the century owed to the modernizing tendencies in the archive profession. Despite the archivists’ more accommodating spirit towards historical research, historians continued to experience countless obstacles as archivists balanced between their obligations as protectors of historical secrets and as promoters of historical research. It might be safe to say that especially in the small, rural settings many of the manuscript collections were not professionally maintained and the generosity towards historians derived mainly from the kindness of those who were entrusted to guard the documents. Bethmann’s experiences in Todi capture this informal archival hospitality. According to his letter to Pertz, one day he found his way to a convent of S. Francesco, where the nuns were happy to accommodate his scholarly wishes. He received the manuscripts “one by one through the iron bars” accompanied by lemonade and “sugary treats.”

Sources

Esch, Arnold. “Auf Archivreise: Die deutschen Mediävisten und Italien in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts: aus Italien-Briefen von Mitarbeiter der Monumenta Germaniae Historica vor der Gründung des Historischen Instituts in Rom.“ In Deutsches Ottocento: Die deutsche Wahrnehmung Italiens im Risorgimento, edited by Arnold Esch and Jens Peters, 187–234. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000.

Gardiner, Samuel Rawson. The Fall of the Monarchy of Charles I. London: Longman, 1882.

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Donato, Maria Pia. Les Archives du Monde: Quand Napoléon confisqua l’histoire. Paris : Puf, 2020.

Ruthless Reviews as Useful Publicity? Historians’ Feelings and the Altering Culture of Scholarly Criticism in Late-Victorian England

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Edward Freeman, Life's not fair

The American painter James Whistler won in 1879 a libel claim against the renowned art critic and art historian, John Ruskin, who had described one of Whistler’s famous nocturnes “as flinging of a pot of paint in the public’s face.” The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine commented on the case, admitting that Ruskin had been “rather harsh,” but rushing to add that critics were “licensed to say very hard things” and that artists and authors just happened to be “as a rule, terribly thin-skinned.” Scholars and scientists, too, were highly sensitive about reviews. On the one hand, they realized that reviews were critical for attracting attention to their publications and that even bad publicity tended to boost the sales. On the other hand, damaging reviews caused severe mental and emotional pain that was hard to overcome. Historians were certainly not immune to acerbic reviews and the Oxford historian Edward Freeman was particularly vocal about what he considered as an unfair treatment of his books in periodicals and newspapers. While his remonstrances sprang from the human fear of public humiliation, they were also motivated by his dislike to modernizing culture of reviewing. The new kind of reviews alarmed Freeman and the other members of the cultural elite who regarded them as compelling evidence of a degeneration of intellectual life in England.

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket by James Whistler. The very painting which Ruskin took to pieces. The painting belongs to Detroit Institute of Art. (Image: Wikipedia)

The twenty to forty-page long essay-like-review in stoutly quarterlies was a quintessential element of Victorian learned life. They were written by men of letters, gentlemen with scholarly inclinations, or by occasional women writers and they were, by rule, published anonymously; their authority sprang from the reputation of the review, not from the name of the writer. Around mid-century, and around the time when Freeman was taking his first steps as a historian, the culture of reviewing began to gradually change and adjust to the modernizing media landscape and literary marketplace. First, the social fabric of readers diversified: the new working-class and middle-class readers lacked the time or patience to consume extensive essays. The weeklies and dailies responded to this novel demand by publishing short summaries that captured the books’ most essential qualities and bore a resemblance to a sales pitch. The field, indeed, splintered into short reviews in magazines and newspapers and extensive criticism in the established quarterlies and monthlies. Second, the expansion of media outlets created ample opportunities for writers to make a living with their pen. Here, too, the field split into two: there were the professional critics with university education and a membership in the cultural circles and then there were the journalists who were dismissed by the literary elite as mere hack writers who wrote to make money, not to benefit the society. Finally, the practice of anonymous reviewing began to disappear as the periodicals that were established during the latter half of the century preferred signed reviews that shifted the authority from the publication to the individual authors.

Edinburgh Review oozed high-brow literary life throughout the century. Everyone knew that its anonymous reviews were instilled with with Whiggish values. (Image: Internet Archive)

Freeman followed these changes with terror. He realized that he needed reviews to market his books, his historical views, and the ethos of scientific history which he embodied. He was also aware that even the most critical reviews were usually commercially useful though he struggled to reconcile the criticism with his scholarly pride and vanity. He was mostly concerned about the visibility which the reviews in magazines and newspapers provided. After all, the English Historical Review was established as late as in 1886 and its circulation was limited to historians and antiquaries. The price of the publicity which Freeman and his books gained in the non-scholarly press seemed high thanks to the new style of reviewing, and he was worried both about his own reputation and the deteriorating literary culture in England which the reviews betrayed.

Edward A. Freeman (1823-1892) – a frontispiece in The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, vol. 2, by W. R. W. Stephens. (Image: Internet Archive)

The fast appearance of new periodicals astonished Freeman who was unable to keep track of all the titles or to decipher their credentials. Even more vexed he was about the new type of reviewer. How could these young men, who obviously were ignorant about history or historical methods, judge books whose writers were well above their intellectual faculties? For Freeman, reviewing entailed an ethical duty to be fair and to get to the core of a book, but these “cockney scribblers” who had superseded the men of letters seemed to care more about making jokes than understanding what they read or improving the moral character of the nation. Hence, Freeman filled his letters with bitter remonstrances about these “hired jesters” who had never called Oxford – or even Cambridge – home, and who nonetheless arrogantly dismissed his historical views and mocked his pedantry, which, according to Freeman, should have been praised as an indication of his virtuous accuracy.

If Freeman was astonished about the reviewers’ ignorance about history or the bold assumption that anyone was competent to review history (this would not be so with chemistry or astronomy, he bitterly remarked), he was also devastated about the reviewers’ eagerness to evaluate his personal traits instead of the qualities of his books. Victorians were convinced that the reliability and truthfulness of knowledge hinged on the abilities of its producers and the reviewers’ keen interest in Freeman’s character is a good indication of this conviction. His intricate and awkward personality was like an open invitation for the reviewers to connect the dots between his notions about early English history, his scholarly practices, and his personal quirks. Freeman was genuinely offended by such attempts to promote his weaknesses, but his public remonstrances only provided more material for the reviewers to caricature and parody his “angularity of character.” Freeman’s letters are a powerful testimony about the emotional effects which such reviews could have. He was insulted, humiliated, and hurt by the public exposure of his presumed weaknesses which he interpreted as strengths and scholarly virtues. He once wrote to Edith Thompson, his confidant, how could it be possible that he had become a persistent “subject of mockery” to the “’literary’ class”?

While Freeman’s constant whimpering about reviews was certainly inspired by the new culture of reviewing and modernizing literary marketplace, we should not miss the hypocrisy in his statements. After all, he was famous for the hard punches he delivered to all the historical writers who failed to meet the high standards of scientific history. Moreover, he did not abstain from alluding to personal qualities when he tore to pieces histories by Dr. Doran, Charles Kingsley, or James Anthony Froude. He, for instance, emasculated Doran, who wrote histories of queens, by maintaining that “A male author, dealing with these matters, rather suggests the idea of a man-milliner,” and disgraced Froude with a diagnosis of an inherent malady that disabled Froude from writing truthful history. In other words, Freeman was not holier than the “London hack writers” whom he despised. It was just easier to frame the new trends in reviewing as alarming signs of a degenerating intellectual life than to admit that even the scholarly elite resorted to similar tricks or that trenchant criticism hurt a historian’s pride.

Sources

British Library: Macmillan Papers

Hull History Centre: E. A. Freeman’s correspondence with Edith Thompson

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Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, January 1879, 18–20.

[Freeman, Edward]. “The Art of History-making.” Saturday Review, November 17, 1855, 52–54.

Stephens, W. R. W. The life and letters of Edward A. Freeman D.C.L, LL.D., vol. 2. London: Macmillan, 1895.

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Shattock, Joanne. “The culture of criticism”. In The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1830-1914, edited by Joanne Shattock, 71–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Scholarly Persona and Reimagining the Historian in Victorian England

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Proper historian, Thrills of research

Something rather remarkable happened since my previous post. The following is an unashamed puff of this incident (which also happens to address the puffing of history books).

Victorian magazines and newspapers published scores of reviews of history books with lively sketches of the historians who had authored those books. Augustus Jessopp, for example, praised in the Edinburgh Review William Stubbs’s “largeness of view,” “matchless precision of language,” “vigorous manliness,” “profoundly critical insight,” and “fearless quest of truth.” Jessopp’s elegant hyperbole is admirable, but more importantly, such a focus on skills, virtues, and personal qualities undermined any illusions about scientific pursuits as detached or disembodied. Victorians were convinced that the reliability of knowledge hinged on scientists’ and scholars’ abilities and qualities. Historians have recently begun to investigate in detail this link between knowledge and the qualities of its producers at different historical moments by adopting the analytical concept scholarly persona. In short, a scholarly persona means a collective and ideal type of a historian, mathematician, philosopher, or any other specialist in learning. Historians have, accordingly, addressed different constellations of virtues, skills, and qualities and how they alter according to the goals which scientists pursue as well as the cultivation, contesting, and adjusting the competing personae in various temporal, disciplinary, and national contexts. I was able to draw inspiration from this rich literature in my new book Reimagining the Historian in Victorian England. Yet, as always, there was also room to expand the field in several significant ways and my book illustrates how the persona was appropriated by English historians, how it was forged in paratexts, how historians’ overlapping responsibilities determined the persona, and, finally, how a cadre of non-expert commentators contributed to the forming of the persona. A few words about each of these four points might be in order here.

A fair amount of historiographical attention has been paid to nineteenth-century German historians, largely thanks to Herman Paul’s work. But the idea of a collective ideal type was not foreign to English historians either and their adaptation of the persona offers an intriguing comparative case study to the more professionally oriented German historians. As the late-Victorian historians sought to establish history as a branch of science to distance themselves from the Romantic sages, they began to construct a persona that would have matched the new kind of scientific historian. The persona proved to be highly useful for English historians’ disciplinary project because the development of professional institutions such as professorships, research seminars, or professional societies lagged significantly behind the rest of the Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, historians needed an institutional stage to promote scientific history and a clearly delineated persona gave historians the necessary institutional tool to define and establish the standards for scientific history and its proponents. In this sense, a scholarly persona as a reflection of the new idea of what it meant to be a historian opens a novel perspective into the development of history in late-Victorian England.

William Stubbs embodied scientific history. His colleagues used him as a model of an ideal persona which scientific historians should cultivate. Image: Wikipedia

A scholarly persona can be promoted, debated, questioned, and revised in laboratories, lecture halls, libraries, professors’ offices, and anniversary dinners, or it can be produced and enacted in rituals, voices, bodily practices, and appearances. Scientific notes, obituaries, and handbooks are also common sites for fashioning the persona. In addition to this, a scholarly persona has a strong, but until now somewhat overlooked, presence in books. The persona radiates in the narrative itself, but above all, as I show in my book, in the textual, material, and visual elements which encircle it. Victorian historians were highly resourceful in employing these paratexts to discuss, demonstrate, and perform their persona. They, for example, used footnotes to enact the methodological procedures to show which skills a scientific historian needed. They devised titles that indicated their core virtues. The material and visual appearance of history books performed the desired persona. This connection between the scholarly persona and books meant that the publishers and the literary marketplace set condition for the paratextual performance of the persona. As publishers were more interested in making profit than in historians’ scholarly concerns, the persona project in paratexts was at least partially conditioned by the economic realities. This, however, should not be exaggerated. Publishing was still largely a collaborative venture between authors and publishers. Moreover, publishers could be surprisingly indifferent about certain paratexts. This allowed historians for instance to freely use the authorial attributions on a title page to establish the normative conditions for the persona.

Historians considered the somber look of the English Historical Review to represent dignity and gravity of their persona. Image: Internet Archive

Historians were not mere scholars in the Victorian era. They were also educators and entrepreneurs advertising their own books. This multitasking demanded from them a mastery of a broad spectrum of skills, knowledge, virtues, and dispositions which were specific for their scholarly, pedagogical, and entrepreneurial pursuits. As I dug into historians’ various endeavors, it became evident that a narrow focus on the persona of a scholar did not do justice to the diversity of scientific historians’ office or to the multi-dimensional character of their persona. The persona was a sum of contradicting and conflicting virtues and qualities. Virtues could become vices when historians shifted between their different tasks. As scholars, they were expected to adhere to utmost honesty and accuracy, but these were not desirable virtues for historians as advertisers. After all, the modernizing marketplace or advertising business were not known for earnestness or sincerity. The composite character of the persona meant that historians constantly adjusted and prioritized the various components of the persona according to the specific task at hand. They demanded accuracy from historical facts but were less concerned about the accuracy of the titles of their books – the prime marketing devices of history books – when they wished to use these paratexts to enhance their commercial success.

Even historians realized that history books did not sell without advertising at the competitive literary marketplace and that therefore their persona had to comprise an entrepreneurial dimension. Image: Internet Archive

Last but not least, the persona was not a privilege of the scientific historians. Quite the contrary! Historians’ scholarly persona fascinated the public because they were engrossed with the past which provided respite from the hustle of modern life. Moreover, the narrative of an uninterrupted progress bolstered their patriotic sentiments. Since history was not just an innocent storehouse of entertaining incidents but also a potentially perilous political vehicle, it truly mattered who were permitted to call themselves historians. On the other hand, readers engaged in the debates about the persona because they, too, tried to make sense of the new scientific history. The book reviews with sketches of the newfangled scientific historian form compelling evidence of this eagerness to participate in the formation of the new ideals and standards for a historian. Importantly, these discussions about historians’ persona expanded from the leading cultural periodicals, weeklies, and the metropolitan newspapers to provincial papers. Provincial journalists and critics came to have a crucial role in both circulating and contesting historians’ scholarly persona beyond the Oxbridge colleges and metropolitan libraries, museums, clubs, and dinner parties. Historians could be irritated about such amateur attempts to define their persona and did their utmost to control and manage the representations of the persona in scholarly and non-scholarly venues, but only with limited success. The scholarly persona and the authority, which its cultivation conferred, were considered politically and socially so relevant that the general audience refused to grant historians full liberty to decide what was required from someone who claimed to produce reliable historical knowledge or represent the select group of scientific historians. In other words, the persona was not merely an academic triviality or an epistemic factor, but something that could have had wider ideological implications as well.

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If you wish to know more about scholarly persona, paratexts, and Victorian historiography, you can purchase my new book from here.

The Allure of Hidden Archival Treasures: Family Archives and the Quest for Historical Truth

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Life's not fair

Samuel Rawson Gardiner was a man who kept his composure. There were very few things that made his temper boil over. One of these were the aristocrats who stood in the way of historical truth. England – and the rest of Europe – was dotted with aristocratic families who had cumulated an immense wealth of manuscripts higlighting the economic and political power which they had held for centuries. While the state archives and other public repositories began to gradually open their doors to historians during the nineteenth century, the keepers of the private collections set rules of their own to regulate the access to their manuscript collections. Colleges, monasteries, guilds, aristocratic families, and many others possessed scores of historically valuable records. Gardiner, a specialist in the Stuart era, knew very well that a large share of the material which he needed, laid dispersed in the numerous libraries of the private estates. He showed no compassion whatsoever for those families who refused to share their manuscripts with historians and, despite his dispassionate character, was willing to publicly dishonor such enemies of history. In the preface to the ninth volume of his  History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Outbreak of the Civil War (1884) he announced how 6th Earl Fitzwilliam had “not considered it to be consistent with his duty to allow me to see the Strafford correspondence preserved at Wentworth Woodhouse.” To enhance his message, he praised in the same preface Sir Harry and Lady Verney of Claydon for their commitment to share the treasures in the Verney MSS. with “all who know how to make use of them.” The Athenaeum, a weekly journal of the educated middle-class, joined Gardiner in humiliating Lord Fitzwilliam as it professed how the denial of such an important collection for an eminent historian prompted “feelings of disappointment.”

6th Earl of Fitzwilliam (source: Wikipedia)

Gardiner’s preface illustrates well how some families showed great hospitality towards historians while others refused every request for consulting their private papers. Referring to the latter, Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote to his sister Frances in 1849 that “it is ludicrous to see how sore people are at seeing the truth told about their ancestors.” Between the two opposing poles of admission and rejection were those families who set conditions for whom they allowed to examine their manuscripts, which parts of their collections they allowed the visitors to see, and whether historians were given a permission to make copies of the records or not. Lord Stanhope showed great understanding for Macaulay’s historical pursuits by lending him the “Pitt’s letters” from his collections, but with the condition that no copies would be made of them. When Macaulay returned the letters to their rightful owner, he emphasized how such valuable documents “ought not be withheld from the public.” If Macaulay was allowed to at least read the Stanhope MSS., Margaret Oliphant found herself in a much worse situation when she was requested to write a biography of Comte de Montalembert and was invited to the family’s castle in France to examine the family papers. When she arrived in the castle in late-1871, she learned that “The vie de châteua is the coldest vie I ever had anything to do with.” Even worse than the shivering cold in her chambre was the fact that she was not permitted access to the “masses of papers which would make my work most interesting and easy.” She was horrified when she realized that instead of being allowed to exame the journal which Montalambert had kept from his twelfth year till the end of his life, she had to do with Madame de Montalbert reading the journal of her late husband to her for a couple of hours in the afternoons. “We have been at it a week, and have got to his eighteenth year! Imagine my feelings,” she wrote with terror to her publisher at Blackwood.

Margaret Oliphant (source: Wikipedia)

Despite the limitations and the extraordinary working conditions, historians had a great impetus pursuing the private collections. Truth to be told, many of them secretly enjoyed such hurdles. The hunt for hitherto unknown documents was part of their work description, and the thrill of the chase and the unexpected discoveries compensated all the hardships they had to endure. The sudden discoveries were the scholarly and emotional rewards as historians were once again one step closer to the full historical truth and as they came out as the winners of the archival race. The opening paragraph in the preface in John Forster’s Sir John Eliot: A Biography captures this excitement of scholarly victory so elegantly that is worth quoting in length:

If any one had told me when I began, now very many years ago, the study of the popular movement against the Stuart princes in the seventeenth century, that there existed in the archives of one English family the still inedited papers of the most eloquent leader of the first three parliaments of Charles the First; that among these papers, numbering between two and three hundred original letters, lay the familiar correspondence of Sir John Eliot with such men as Hampden, Selden, Bevil Grenville, Richard Knightley, Sir Oliver Luke, Sir Robert Cotton, Edward Kyrton, Sir William Armyne, Sir Dudley Digges, Sir Henry Marten, Benjamin Valentine, Lords Warwick and Lincoln, Bishop Hall, and many others; that they contained an elaborate Memoir, written by Eliot, with innumerable abstracts of speeches not elsewhere reported, of the first and least known (but by no means least memorable) parliament of Charles’s reign, as well as careful and ample notes, taken by Eliot in the house of commons, of the principal incidents of the second parliament; that they contributed to the illustration of the momentous matters debated then and in Charles’s third parliament, as well as in the last of James, no less than twenty important speeches actually spoken by Eliot himself and not reported in any of the histories, together with revised and much amended copies of the only three great speeches forming all that were before believed to have survived of this master of eloquence; and that finally they included, with other interesting fragments found after Eliot’s death in his prison, touching personal appeals in vindication of the course taken by him, intended for a later time, and notes for a speech against the violation of the public liberties by his imprisonment, which he proposed to have spoken in the parliament that did not meet until he had been eight years in his grave; if, I say, it had been stated to me that such manuscript treasures as these were lying in the old family mansion still occupied by the descendants of Sir John Eliot, I should hardly have dared to think credible what I too eagerly should have desired to believe.

As historians ransacked the private collections and made astounding discoveries among the family papers, they also laid bare the historical value of the private archives. At the same time, many began to show concern about the safety of these invaluable historical testimonies of England’s glorious past. The rumors about old papers kept in basements and attics did not raise confidence in their owners’ ability to preserve the precious manuscripts for the future generations. The Historical Manuscript Commission was established in 1869 as a response to this worry. Its main purpose was to systematically investigate the privately owned sources to gain a better idea about the existing materials. As Earl Fitzwilliam’s blunt rejection of Gardiner may indicate, not everybody welcomed such initiatives. They saw them as a violation of the right of private property. Some might have also feared that the documents contained information that could have been detrimental to the reputation of their family name. But once the Commission began its work, the opposition slowly petered out.

The Commission also organized and sponsored the printing of papers which had utility in illustrating the progress of history, laws, and sciences in England. Frederick York Powell wrote about the tenth report of the Historical Manuscript Commission in the English Historical Review in 1888 confessing how he had put down the report “astonished at the marvellous preservation of old papers in England.” He was convinced about the importance of the careful editing and printing of “unpublished English documents” because “True history is not to be learned from summaries, but from the living documents.” The promise of exhaustive knowledge of the past was an obvious attraction of the family archives, but the thrills of the chase or the addictive buzz of the discovery should not be underestimated as explanations for historians’ fascination for such manuscripts.

Sources

[Anon.]. “Our Library Table.” Athenaeum, 26 April 1884, 535.

Coghill, Mrs. Harry (ed.). The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs M. O. W. Oliphant. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1899.

John Forster: Sir John Eliot: A Biography. 1590-1632, vol. 1. London: Longman, 1864.

Gardiner, Samuel Rawson History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1603–1642, vol. 9. London: Longman, 1884.

Pinney, Thomas. The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, vols. 5 & 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.    

York Powell, F. Review of “Historical Manuscript Commission. Tenth Report.” English Historical Review 3, no. 9 (January 1888): 169–172.

Lending Prestige: Allographic Prefaces and Scholarly Endorsements in 19th-Century History Books

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Celebrity, Edward Freeman

The American historian Herbert Baxter Adams approached his English friend and colleague Edward Freeman in 1882 with a request. Baxter was launching a new Johns Hopkins University series for historical and political studies and hoped that the eminent English historian could have written “a good send-off” for the first issue. According to Adams, Freeman’s words would have gone “a great way towards convincing Baltimore and the American public of the importance of American Institutional History.” Adams had clearly grasped the value of what is today called an allographic preface, that is, a preface which is solicited from an outsider to boost the sales and reputation of lesser-known writers, or as in Adams’s case, novel publishing ventures. A quick look at the dust jackets and front matters in fiction and non-fiction reveal the confidence which contemporary publishers and authors have on the marketing potential of such endorsements. For readers, allographic prefaces are indications that someone other than the writer has considered the text worthy of their name. To properly function as attractions, allographic prefaces should be written by authors such as Freeman who have enough established cultural capital to recommend a text, and whose names are widely recognized among different communities of readers. Considering the remunerative potential of allographic prefaces, it should not come as a surprise that they have been – and continue to be – carefully choreographed paratexts.

Herbert Baxter Adams (1850-1901). Source: Wikipedia

The French translation of Henry Charles Lea’s history about the Spanish Inquisition was published with an allographic preface by the Belgian historian Paul Fredericq in 1900. Lea was flattered by its “the warmth of its laudation” and complemented his Belgian friend for furnishing his book with such a “learned & instructive introduction.” Nonetheless, Lea was not entirely happy with what Fredericq had written. As he bore the responsibility of his book, even the translation and its paratexts, he suggested two minor omissions to the preface. First, Lea wished that Fredericq would kindly delete a reference to his admirable efforts and sacrifices as a scholar. According to Lea, he had not made any such sacrifices; he had “simply indulged in what in English we call my hobby.” Lea asked Fredericq also to remove a reference to him as a director of a publishing house. This, he explained, was no longer the case as he had handed over the business to his sons “before I commenced work on the Inquisition.” Lea was pleased with Fredericq’s historiographical introduction, but less satisfied with the image which the allographic preface produced of the author. Hence, he begged Fredericq to redraw the authorial portrait. Lea obviously understood that the prefatorial information about the author would shape readers’ expectations about and the reception of his history.

Source: Gallica

Lea was certainly right about this. But the principle did not apply only to the authors themselves as the names of the composers of the allographic prefaces could have a similar impact on readers as well. If Adams considered Freeman’s name a valuable asset for the Johns Hopkins series as it symbolized scholarliness, for others the same name provoked associations about Freeman’s political outlook. The English Historical Review published a short review of the English translation of Louis Leger’s history of Austro-Hungary in 1890. The writer noted how the translation was accompanied by a preface by Freeman. It was obvious, that in this context Freeman’s name alone gave enough clues about the political message embedded in the book. The preface itself reaffirmed these assumptions because Freeman used it for “reasserting his well-known views on the nature and prospects of the Austrian Empire,” according to the reviewer. This made the critic fear that Freeman’s “Slavonic prepossessions … may impair [the book’s] its value to many readers.” This was unfortunate because Leger had done “his best to be impartial” and managed to write what could be “the best modern guidebook to the complicated history … of the house of Habsburgs and of its heterogeneous provinces.”

Source: Internet Archive

Freeman was not the only historian who used allographic prefaces for spreading political propaganda. Jeri English, referring to an allographic preface by Simone de Beauvoir, has argued that “the greater the symbolic capital of the preface writer, the greater the ease with which she can use her rhetorical abilities and discursive authority to appropriate the text in question for her own purposes.” The allographic prefaces in nineteenth-century history books fit this description. As I have shown elsewhere, James Anthony Froude appropriated the allographic preface which he wrote for Mary Hickson’s Ireland in the Seventeenth Century or the Irish Massacre of 1641–2 (1884) to circulate his highly divisive views about Ireland and Irish history. Because of Froude’s name and the preface, readers immediately categorized Hickson as a unionist historian who used history to advance a particular political cause.

If Freeman lent his name to Leger’s history, what happened to Adams’s request? Well, of course he accepted the invitation! He understood the honor which an allographic preface granted him as it vouched for his established status and recognition even overseas. A cleverly designed allographic preface could profit both the writer of the preface and the book. It is obvious that while allographic prefaces are compelling book advertisements, they do not merely fulfill publishers’ and writers’ commercial aspirations. Just as all the other paratexts, allographic prefaces, too, attest to the myriad authorial intentions embedded in books. What makes them unique is the guest-status of their writers and how these guests exploit the occasion to fashion their own authorial selves or to promote their ideological causes sometimes even at the expense of the success of the book and its writer.

Sources

John Rylands Library, Manchester: Edward Augustus Freeman Papers

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Review of Louis Leger’s History of Austro-Hungary from the Earliest Times to the Year 1889. English Historical Review 5, no. 18 (1890).

Tollebeek, Jo. Writing the Inquisition in Europe and America: The Correspondence between Henry Charles Lea and Paul Fredericq (1888–1908). Brussels: Koninklijke Commissie voor Geschiedenis, 2004.

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Garritzen, Elise. “Women Historians, Gender, and Fashioning the Authoritative Self in Paratexts in Late-Victorian Britain.” Women’s History Review 30, no. 4 (2021).

Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

English, Jeri. “Literary Patronage: Collaboration or Rivalry? Women’s Prefaces to Women’s Texts in the 20^th Century.” Women in French Studies 3 (2010).