Victorian Historians Research Articles

Women Historians and Acknowledgments: Scholarly Collaboration as Expression of Authorial Self in Alice Stopford Green’s Histories, c. 1880–1916

ABSTRACT Making historical knowledge is a social practice, and disciplinary etiquette encouraged Victorian historians to acknowledge their collaborators in publications. This essay argues that acknowledgments were not merely expressions of scholarly politeness but also crucial for historians’ self-fashioning. The meanings ascribed to the acknowledged names served as clues about a historian’s competence, methodological preferences, interpretative outlooks and cultural and ideological views, all of which constituted her scholarly self. The essay addresses the link between acknowledgments and self-fashioning by exploring how Anglo-Irish historian Alice Stopford Green (1847–1929) used the names of her collaborators to forge and express her competing and shifting scholarly selves. While her acknowledgments are reflections of her authorial selves, they also convey the impact that scholarly, gendered and ideological factors had on women’s historical endeavours and collaboration at the time.

Britain’s post Brexit trade deals: Taking back control or a threat to sovereignty?

In a speech given a few days after Britain officially left the European Union, Boris Johnson boasted about the merits of Brexit which, according to him, paved the way for Britain to take back control and lead a full free trade agenda, renewing ties with the Commonwealth and developing links with high-growth emerging economies. Similar rhetoric, which echoes late Victorian historians like Edward Freeman, was used by David Davis, Michael Gove, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and the Adam Smith Institute to paint a positive image of Britain outside Europe. Yet, as Gammage and Syrpris (2020) underline, defining what taking back control or notions of sovereignty imply is not clear. Adhesion to the EU may be viewed as pooling sovereignty, so that control remains not only in the domestic sphere but also over international markets in which sovereign states trade. However, the debates surrounding Brexit have clearly revealed another conception of sovereignty, that of protecting a country’s interests above all other considerations. Brexiters contend that being part of the EU diminishes Britain’s absolute power and calls into question its sovereign power because it cedes a part to the supranational level. Brexit has thus been lauded as an opportunity to be free from the intensive infrastructure of the EU, its rules and enforced mechanisms. Yet Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) may also impinge on Britain’s sovereign powers. The ‘take back control’ rhetoric thus lacks a depth of understanding and knowledge of the actual impact of FTAs on sovereign states. This conceptual paper thus seeks to discuss, through extensive analysis of FTAs signed by the UK and/or in process, how the new landscape of comprehensive and progressive trade agreements may call into question notions of sovereignty. It will attempt to show how imperial nostalgia and Britain’s ambitions to take back control ignore the reality of FTAs in which public procurement, competition, ISDS and TRIPs-Plus clauses may well undermine attempts at regaining full sovereign control. The article draws on extensive secondary material: government documents, official speeches, and research papers.

‘Contesting Teutomania’: Robert Gordon Latham, ‘race’, ethnology and historical migrations

ABSTRACT The essay elucidates the intellectual and historiographical phenomenon of migration to the forefront by engaging with the perceptions of the Teutonic/Germanic migrations of the fifth century among a few major Victorian ethnologists and historians. It focuses particularly on the unique view of the ethnologist and philologist Robert Gordon Latham (1812–88). While many Victorian historians of the mid-nineteenth century became obsessed with the Teutonic narrative, arguing that these ancient tribes had conquered vast territories of Europe, Latham, in contrast, downplayed the impact of Teutonism, discounted the vastness of the Teutonic expansion in Europe and expressed his doubts regarding the alleged Teutonic purity of the English nation. Instead, Latham advocated for an ethnological investigation, drawing conclusions which were critical of the very influential Teutonic narrative that he considered misleading, since it was founded solely on superfluous ancient historical sources. Latham’s challenge of the prevailing thesis, hence, reflected a heightened mid-nineteenth century debate between ethnology and history. Rather than delving into the historical migrations themselves, the study of the perception of Teutonic migrations contributes to the understanding of how these historians and ethnologists differentiated between ‘ideal’ and ‘destructive’ historical migrations while inserting different meanings to the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘language’.

Present Tense Futures of the Past

Present Tense Futures of the Past Anna Kornbluh (bio) Look at a map of greater London, on which the town proper shows as a dark, irregularly rounded patch against the whiteness of suburban districts. . . . The streets have a smell of newness, of dampness; the bricks retain their complexion, the stucco has not rotted more than one expects in a year or two; poverty tries to hide itself with venetian blinds, until the time when an advanced guard of houses shall justify the existence of the slum. George Gissing, The Nether World (364) George Gissing’s gritty masterpiece of poverty realism The Nether World (1889) continually interrupts its past tense narration to shift into present tense, and almost every such scene is a description of spaces—urban spaces, architectural spaces, residential and commercial spaces: the Clerkenwell slum in which his characters are entombed, the Crystal Palace whose imperial amusements taunt and enchant “the slaves of industrialism” (104), Hanover Street “where squalor is kept at arm’s length” (65). This striking trope of presenting space in present tense underscores the profound interface between spatiality and presentism: thought out of time is thought in space; to think the structures of space is to think presently. While Gissing’s characters have discrete stories in the past, the netherworld spaces remain present, aligning the social structuration of the novel with social structuration outside the novel: the environs and extent of modern capitalism abide in space. Through this trope, present tense emerges as the tense in which it is possible to think the general, as the mood in which it is possible to transcend the detail/the fact/the particular, as the grammar of grasping what continues, the syntax of [End Page 98] structural analysis and critical abstraction. Indeed, it is into abstract thinking that we can resolve not only the presentist operation in Gissing, but also the presentism of George Eliot’s signature interjections of humanist commentary; of Charles Dickens’s eerie immanence of aristocratic eminence in both Bleak House (1852–53) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65); of Anthony Trollope’s echoing, incriminating The Way We Live Now (1875). All these strategic deployments of the present tense mobilize the present as the very linguistic infrastructure of critique: making an abstract claim about the logics and structures that concretely organize the conditions of social life, constructing the conditions of possibility for changes in social life. Critique of present conditions was a project Victorian novelists shared with Victorian historians like Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris, all of whose particular historiographies actuated the past for critical appraisal of the present. This is to say that the kind of historicity proper to the Victorians was often itself presentist. Strategic presentism, which V21 speculates might proffer an alternative to positivist historicism and might invigorate our scholarship with consequence, might therefore first of all be understood as a historically specific commitment, an intimacy with the nineteenth century. Victorian presentism refracted as strategic presentism in Victorian studies pressingly opposes significant academic trends in our own present—trendy demands that literary scholars ought to renounce the very project of critical intervention, resign the very enterprise of critically engaging with formations of the political, and aim instead for scientific accuracy, stockpiled information, big data, MRIs, facts.1 Strategic presentism opposes these tendencies in favor of dynamizing in the past that which is decidedly urgent today: Gissing’s presentism of space, spatial thinking, thinking of adjacency and extent, thinking of generality, systematicity, and abstraction. Such thinking must be governed by two simultaneous principles: illuminating Victorian structures that overdetermine contemporary experience—financial capitalism, virulent patriarchy, violent racism, rapacious imperialism—and projectively mapping other structures, other spaces. Franco Moretti has recently, with trademark provocation, declared, “In the 20th century the natural sciences have produced some amazingly stunning and beautiful theories. . . . The humanities have produced nothing of this sort,” and argues that “to make the humanities relevant you need something much bigger than the digital humanities. What the humanities need are large theories and bold concepts” (n.p.). The biggest ideas in the humanities, to my mind, travel along these vectors of critically thinking space and critically projecting new formations. That other Victorian...

The Johnson Club and Late Victorian Literary Culture

In 1902 both the Order of Merit and the British Academy came into being. As David Cannadine has noted, Gladstonian liberals including Lord Rosebery, John Morley and Sir G.O. Trevelyan occupied a key segment of the newly formed elite with several others who were admitted to one or both of the new groups, belonged to the Club, the private society founded by Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds in 1764. In fact several members took a leading part in the negotiations leading to the establishment of the Academy. The article seeks to demonstrate the significance of the Club in promoting what Cannadine terms ‘liberal and literary culture’ in the later nineteenth century. A detailed examination of the membership shows a broad array of high achievers in the arts and sciences, as well as many individuals who held important public office. In particular, the Club elected a remarkable group of distinguished Victorian historians, including Macaulay, Grote, Froude, Lecky, Acton, Maine, Stubbs and Creighton. At the end of ...

Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing (review)

Reviews Rohan Amanda Maitzen, Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998. xvii + 229. Rohan Maitzen charts new territory in Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing, introducing readers to works ofa range ofhistorians little considered by Victorianists trained in literary study. Addressing the issue ofhow Victorians broached the thorny issue ofwhat constituted historical significance, she argues that women writers — a group that includes not only George Eliot, but also Agnes Strickland, Elizabeth Stone, Frances Palgrave, Annie Forbes Bush, Julia Kavanagh, and Hannah Lawrence, among others — capitalized on instabilities in existing models ofhistory to "broaden the range ofmeanings that could be articulated" (xiii). Among the book's considerable virtues is Maitzen's consistent attention to the relationship of these writers, and the issues raised by their approaches to historiography to a more canonical and male-dominated tradition represented most visibly by Macaulay, Carlyle, and Froude. Far from arguing that women's historical writing constitutes a separate tradition, Maitzen instead uncovers a range ofways that both amateur and professional historiographers grappled with the vexed Victorian idea (1) of feminine "influence." While in her introduction Maitzen calls attention to a "new category offacts" about women that emerged in the nineteenth century and altered the landscape ofhistorical writing, her subsequent chapters appeal to domestic ideology more generally. Chapter One, "The Victorian Discourse of History: Problems of Gender and Genre," sets the stage for understanding conflicts within historiography that underwrote the histories produced by women, and provides a convincing overview ofhow Victorian historians and critics advocating new criteria for history writing "almost certainly without meaning to" enabled women writers to enter the field (24). I found her discussion of the "valorization of details" as both aesthetic principle and historical substance especially interesting, and Maitzen is adept at showing how stylistic choices were invested with social and political significance. That said, the chapter might have established a 1 32volume 26 number 2 Reviews more precise account of factors influencing the "turn to the domestic and everyday" (23), what in the next chapter becomes the "turn to social history" (34), or in chapter four the "new and controversial field ofsocial history" (102). Chapter Two, "A Clique of Living Clios: Nineteenth-Century Women Historians," belongs to an array ofscholarship showing how Victorian women appropriated authority. Maitzen's achievement is to assess how they accomplished this without attempting "to masquerade as masculine" (55). Focusing on the rhetoric ofexemplarity that characterized many historical biographies, she begins by suggesting that the didacticism built in to the public role ofthe historian/sage was one not easily accommodated by women, but she goes on to reveal the crucial pedagogical work performed by their texts. In this chapter, I found myselfwishing that Maitzen had had the advantage ofpositioning her argument in relation to other recent scholars whose works came out when her own was no doubt "in press." Adrienne Munich's Queen Victoria's Secrets and Margaret Homans' Royal Representations would have provided an illuminating backdrop to her discussion ofthe ways Agnes Strickland and Hannah Lawrence represented queens and might have helped Maitzen think through Victoria's own role in influencing contemporary historiography. Kate Flint is footnoted at one point, but her work on the woman reader might have been more thoroughly integrated throughout Gender, Genre and Victorian Historical Writing. Chapter Three, "Stitches in Time: Needlework and Victorian Historiography," examines the "unexpected intersection of two discourses during the period: needlework and historiography" (61). Maitzen shows that the feminized art of needlework served as a metaphorical and practical alternative to traditional conceptions of history, "in the process fixing gender as a constant and conspicuous component ofthe debate" (62). At times I questioned the logic of her claims. Does the fact that needlework crossed class boundaries necessarily mean that those boundaries were thereby "obscured," as she contends? Despite some questions, I could not help but be impressed by Maitzen's close reading skills, which enable her to Victorian Review133 Reviews uncover a treasure trove ofevidence, much ofit gleaned from periodicals, to support her claims. In the Quarterly Review, for example, she finds a discussion ofMacaulay that critiques him for finding that "history itselfwould be much more popular with a large...

The development of the Australian Manuscripts Collection at the State Library of Victoria

The author reviews the early development of the collection and concludes that although it may have taken a little while to find its feet, it is now a most significant resource in its own right, due in no small measure by the stimulation provided by Victorian historians.

The Genetic Turn of Mind in Victorian Britain - A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past. By J. W. Burrow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Pp. x + 308. $49.50 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). - The Face of the Past: The Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England. By Charles Dellheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Pp. xvii

The Genetic Turn of Mind in Victorian Britain - A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past. By J. W. Burrow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Pp. x + 308. $54.50 (cloth). - Volume 24 Issue 3

J. W. Burrow. A liberal descent: Victorian historians and the english past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. x + 308 pp

Journal of the History of the Behavioral SciencesVolume 20, Issue 3 p. 283-286 Book Review J. W. Burrow. A liberal descent: Victorian historians and the english past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. x + 308 pp Robert Alun Jones, Robert Alun JonesSearch for more papers by this author Robert Alun Jones, Robert Alun JonesSearch for more papers by this author First published: July 1984 https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6696(198407)20:3<283::AID-JHBS2300200327>3.0.CO;2-2AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume20, Issue3July 1984Pages 283-286 RelatedInformation

A liberal descent: Victorian historians and the English past

(1984). A liberal descent: Victorian historians and the English past. History of European Ideas: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 113-114.

A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past. John W. Burrow

<i>A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past</i>. John W. Burrow

A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past

1. Introduction Part I: The whig 2. A heritage and its history 3. Macaulay: progress and piety 4. Macaulay's res publica Part II: The tory 5. The German inheritance: a people and its institutions 6. Autonomy and self-realisation: Stubbs' constitutional history Part III: The democrat 7. Teutonic freedom and municipal independence 8. Conquest, continuity and restoration Part IV: The imperialist 9. 'Something strange and isolates': Froude and the sixteenth century 10 The spirit's trials: Reformation and renewal 11. Postscript.

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:CAN MINISTERS COPE? Australian Federal Ministers at Work. By Patrick Weller and Michelle Grattan.JAMES MACARTHUR: Colonial Conservative, 1798–1867. By John Manning Ward.A JUST SOCIETY? Essays on Equity in Australia. Edited by P. N. Troy.EQUITY IN THE CITY. Edited by P. N. Troy.INNOVATION AND REACTION: The life and death of the Federal Department of Urban and Regional Development. By C. J. Lloyd and Patrick N. Troy.SYDNEY; A Social and Political Atlas. By Michael Poulsen and Peter Spearritt.TOWARDS ADAPTIVE FEDERALISM; A Search for Criteria for Responsibility Sharing in a Federal System.PARLAMENTARISCHE BUNDESSTAATEN IM COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS: KANADA, AUSTRALIEN, INDIEN: Ein Vergleich. Bd I. Grundbegriffe und Grundlagen.UNDERSTANDING PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION. Edited by G. R. Curnow and R. L. Wettenhall.DECISIONS: Case Studies in Australian Public Policy. Edited by Sol Encel, Peter Wilenski and Bernard Schaffer.THE ABC–AUNT SALLY AND SACRED COW. By Clement Semmler.MELBOURNE STUDIES IN EDUCATION 1981. Edited by Stephen Murray‐Smith.HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES PRACTICE Edited by J. A. Pettifer.AUSTRALIAN IMPERIALISM IN THE PACIFIC: The Expansionist Era 1820–1920. By Roger C. ThompsonCRITICAL ESSAYS IN AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Edited by Graeme Duncan.WOOL IN WARTIME: A Study in Colonialism, by Les White.NORTHERN AUSTRALIA: Options and Implications. Edited by Rhys Jones.GUIDE TO NORTHERN TERRITORY RESEARCH RESOURCES IN NORTHERN TERRITORY COLLECTIONS. Compiled by M.A. Clinch for the Northern Territory Government.THE ABORIGINAL TASMANIANS. By Lyndall Ryan.ALBERT HAHL: Governor in New Guinea. Edited and translated by Peter G. Sack and Dymphna Clark.Peter Biskup, ‘Dr Albert Hahl–Sketch of a German Colonial Official’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 14 (3), 1968, 343–57.Peter Sack, Land Between Two Laws: early European Land acquisitions in New Guinea (Canberra, 1973).Stewart Firth, ‘Albert Hahl: Governor of German New Guinea’, in James Griffin (ed.), Papua New Guinea Portraits: The Expatriate Experience (Canberra, 1978), 28–48.WOMEN, POLITICS AND CHANGE: The Kaum Ibu UMNO, Malaysia, 1945–1972. By Lenore Manderson.UNEQUAL TREATY 1898‐1997: China, Great Britain and Hong Kong's New Territories. By Peter Wesley‐Smith.THE LAST COLONY: But Whose? A study of the labour movement, labour market and labour relations in Hong Kong. By H.A. Turner et al.CHINA'S INTELLECTUAL DILEMMA: Politics and University Enrolment, 1949–1978. By Robert Taylor.ANATOMY OF THE RAJ: Russian Consular Reports. Edited by Suhash Chakravarty.CLASS AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN KENYA: The Making of an African Petite Bourgeoisie 1905–1970. By Gavin Kitching.THE BRITISH SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT. Fourth Edition. By Anthony H. Birch.AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS. Third Edition. By Allen M. Potter, Peter Fotheringham and James G. Kellas.THE PROJECTION OF BRITAIN: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda 1919–1939. By Philip M. Taylor.GREAT BRITAIN GREAT EMPIRE: An Evaluation of the British Imperial Experience. By W. Ross Johnston.THE BRITISH BUSINESS ELITE: Its attitudes to Class, Status and Power. By John Fidler.A CLASS AGAINST ITSELF: Power and the Nationalisation of the British Steel Industry. By Doug McEachern.A LIBERAL DESCENT: Victorian Historians and the English Past. By J. W. Burrow.THE GREAT POWERS OF THE EUROPEAN STATES SYSTEM 1815 1914. By F. R. Bridge and Roger Bullen.WHO WERE THE FASCISTS: Social Roots of European Fascism. Edited by Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bern! Hagtvet and Jan Petter Myklebust.DECEPTION IN WORLD WAR II. By Charles Cruickshank.THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY, 1875‐1935: From Ghetto to Government. By W. L. Guttsman.DIE DEUTSCHE INFLATION 1914–1923. Ursachen und Folgen in internationaler Perspektive. By Carl‐Ludwig Holtfrerich.INTERPRETING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By François Furet.TSAR ALEXIS: His Reign and His Russia. By Joseph T. Fuhrmann.DIARY OF VOLODYMYR VYNNYCHENKO, Vol. 1, 1911–1920. Edited by Hryhory Kostiuk.THE ETHNIC REVIVAL IN THE MODERN WORLD. By Anthony D. Smith.POLITICS IN ETHNICALLY BIPOLAR STATES: Guyana, Malaysia, Fiji. By R. S. Milne.ETHNIC SOLDIERS: State security in a divided society. By Cynthia H. Enloe.ELITES IN AMERICAN HISTORY: The Federalist Years to the Civil War. By Philip H. Burch.BRITISH REGULARS IN MONTREAL: An Imperial Garrison, 1832–1854. By Elinor Kyte Senior.THE POLITICS OF THE SECOND ELECTORATE: Women and Public Participation–Britain, USA, Canada, Australia, France, Spain, West Germany, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Eastern Europe, USSR, Japan. Edited by Joni Lovenduski and Jill Hills.WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN: Essays in Philosophical Anthropology, Political Philosophy and Social Psychology. Edited by Ross Fitzgerald.JEAN BODIN: Selected Writings on Philosophy, Religion and Politics. Edited by Paul Lawrence Rose.MACHIAVELLI. By Quentin Skinner.CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY. By Geoffrey Marshall.THE DESIGN AND UNDERSTANDING OF SURVEY QUESTIONS. By William A. Belson.