Montagu Burrows and the Generational Anxieties of a Victorian Historian

Abstract

Abstract The generation-consciousness of Montagu Burrows (1819–1905), first a naval officer and later Chichele Professor of Modern History in Oxford, illustrates how Victorians located themselves at the juncture of biological and socially constructed historical generations and had overlapping and conflicting generational affiliations. As a historian Burrows believed in progress: the flow of generations connected past, present, and future, and each generation advanced to a higher position. As a professor, Burrows was marginalized and this essay suggests that generational affinities played a role in this. Spending his adolescence at sea, he missed out the vital formative experience of early Oxford education. By adopting the romantic ideal of a historian as a moral guide he cultivated the persona of an instructor rather than a researcher. This persona, embraced by earlier generations, appeared antiquated to Burrows’s near contemporaries who endeavoured to make history a research-based discipline. By exploring how Burrows negotiated the generational belonging and unbelonging he experienced as an historian, this essay shows that generation could function as an important category of inclusion and exclusion for professional communities.