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.
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 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.
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.
Clio's footnotes 
Congratulations on your new book!