Charting the Past

Jeremy Black

Description

Eighteenth-century England was a place of enlightenment and revolution: new ideas abounded in science, politics, transportation, commerce, religion, and the arts. But even as England propelled itself into the future, it was preoccupied with notions of its past. Jeremy Black considers the interaction of history with knowledge and culture in eighteenth-century England and shows how this engagement with the past influenced English historical writing. The past was used as a tool to illustrate the contemporary religious, social, and political debates that shaped the revolutionary advances of the era. Black reveals this "present-centered" historical writing to be so valued and influential in the eighteenth-century that its importance is greatly underappreciated in current considerations of the period. In his customarily vivid and sweeping approach, Black takes readers from print shop to church pew, courtroom to painter's studio to show how historical writing influenced the era, which in turn gave birth to the modern world.

Preface

List of Abbreviations

1. The World of History

2. Purposes, Narratives, Methods

3. A Historical World of Partisan Strife: The Early Eighteenth Century

4. Contrasting Approaches: Burnet and Astell

5. The Unstable Past: Dissenters and History

6. History Suited to Mid-Century Struggle

7. From the New Reign to the Crisis of Empire, 1760-1776

8. Empire as Historical Narrative: Gibbon and the Descent of Civilizations

9. History in the Age of Burke

Conclusions: Bringing the Past into the Present

Selected Further Reading

Index

Sujets

• Social History
• 18th Century
• Modern
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Años 1700
• Inglaterra
• Escocia
• 1700s
• Modern history
• General officer
• Ireland
• Historiography
• History of Europe
• English Civil War
• Stephen Ireland
• Great Britain
• General
• Wales
• Scotland
• England
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 12 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253037794
• Langue: English

Extrait

CHARTING
THE PAST
CHARTING
THE HISTORICAL WORLDS OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
THE PAST
JEREMY BLACK
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Jeremy Black
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-03776-3 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-03777-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03780-0 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19
Dedicated to
Bill Gibson
CONTENTS
PREFACE
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
1 The World of History
2 Purposes, Narratives, Methods
3 A Historical World of Partisan Strife: The Early Eighteenth Century
4 Contrasting Approaches: Burnet and Astell
5 The Unstable Past: Dissenters and History
6 History Suited to Midcentury Struggle
7 From the New Reign to the Crisis of Empire, 1760-76
8 Empire as Historical Narrative: Gibbon and the Descent of Civilizations
9 History in the Age of Burke
Conclusions: Bringing the Past into the Present
SELECTED FURTHER READING
INDEX
PREFACE
Thanks to Providence, the sacred monuments of History extend the short contracted span of human life, and give us years in books. These point out the glorious landmarks for our safety, and bid us be wise in time.
The Craftsman , London newspaper, March 13, 1727
JOHN ADAMS WAS ANGRY. THE UNITED STATES FIRST AMBASSADOR to Britain was touring England in 1786 with Thomas Jefferson, who was visiting from his ambassadorial post in Paris. Having surveyed a number of landscape gardens, including the splendors of the stately home at Stowe, with its Temple of British Worthies recording Whig heroes, they pressed on. In his diary, Adams recorded: Edgehill and Worcester were curious and interesting to us, as scenes where freemen had fought for their rights. The people in the neighbourhood appeared so ignorant and careless at Worcester, that I was provoked, and asked, And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for? Tell your neighbours and your children that this is holy ground; much holier than that on which your churches stand. All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year. 1 The meaning is apparently clear: Adams had found a people ignorant of their past. Edgehill (1642) was the first battle of the English Civil War, and Worcester (1651), Oliver Cromwell s last victory, brought to an end Charles II s attempt to defeat the parliamentarian regime.
But pressing on, Adams continued: This animated them, and they seemed much pleased with it. Perhaps their awkwardness before might arise from their uncertainty of our sentiments concerning the civil wars. 2 Moreover, the contents of Valentine Green s History and Antiquities of the City and Suburbs of Worcester , a work that appeared in 1764, with, after the fashion of the period, a lengthier version published subsequently (in 1796), scarcely suggests a lack of local interest or, indeed, ignorance. Green s work, however, reflected-as did the highly positive response by Worcester s citizens to George III s visit in 1788 (the first by a king since that of Charles II)-a different view than that of Adams: Cromwell s victory was certainly not applauded in Green s history. Moreover, the Civil War had led to damage to the cathedral, which was repaired only in the early eighteenth century.
Indeed, to understand England in the long eighteenth century, it is important to consider its engagement with history, for this was an age that took an understanding of the past very seriously and one that employed this understanding in much of its discussion. England was suffused with history. That, of course, is not how it is presented in posterity. Instead, the themes then are of change, indeed revolution. A plethora of revolutions, a veritable line to the crack of doom, as if shown to Macbeth by the witches, are found, from the first and most famous, the Industrial, now to include Agricultural, Transport, Financial, Commercial, Consumer, Demographic, Emotional, Sexual, and others. More eighteenth-century revolutions, doubtless, will follow from the fertile keypads of historians. The continuing emphasis is on new ideas, new techniques, new technologies (particularly steam power); on the birth of new sciences, such as economics, sociology, and geology; and on new cultural forms and themes, notably the novel, the landscape garden, and the neo-Gothic. The idea of the Enlightenment, indeed of an English Enlightenment, 3 adds a sense that even the very context of ideas was changing. And secularization theorists suggest that religion was on its way out from the eighteenth century. In such accounts, England appears to be a country propelling itself away from its past and very self-consciously to a transformed future.
Why then see historical writing in the period other than as a branch of belles lettres? Indeed, there was relatively little (although much more than is generally appreciated) then of the archive-based research that was to be highly significant in the age of scientific history that was assumed to begin in the nineteenth century. In part, this change in the nineteenth century reflected the methods, as well as the location, of a history that was increasingly pursued in universities. Moreover, in considering the earlier period, it is apparent that the English historians of the eighteenth century did not define the age. Nor were they as influential in cultural terms, at least for posterity, as those writers who developed the novel or the Romantic movement or, arguably, the landscape gardeners of the period.
Yet the society, eighteenth-century England, which more than any created the modern age, was also profoundly historical. This was the case in terms of thought, religion, politics, law, society, literature, art, architecture, music, sculpture, and much else. It was true at all levels of society. Indeed, a sense of history was a unifying social force, a shared interest between mansion and cottage. Because of this, whereas the focus of attention in works on eighteenth-century history is very much on the culture of print and notably on books with history in the title, that does not mean that the approach to the subject necessarily should mostly be in these terms, and certainly not entirely in them. The literary, like the academic, approach to historiography poses many disadvantages, as it can lead to a failure to appreciate the full range of engagement with history that was seen in the period and, in practice, in others-what can be termed the historical culture. 4
Historical writing and consciousness were dominated by the interests and preoccupations of people in the eighteenth century. In this respect, history then was as present-centered as it has been in subsequent centuries. Major topics, such as the character of civil and religious liberties, the nature and legitimacy of the state, the engagement with interests overseas, and the nature of society and civilization, were opportunities for historical writers to connect the past with the present. In order to make that connection, writers had to use argument by analogy; and the use of analogy opened discussion of the validity of the comparison being made.
This method of comparison was one of the major foci of historical writing in the period. So, for example, when historians compared the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 to the overthrow of Richard III and the succession of Henry VII in 1485, they were beginning or taking part in multifaceted historical conversations about the validity of such comparisons. This drove historical debates toward the complex issues of what were acceptable and justifiable precedents and what was the reasonable and sustainable evidence for them. Consequently, the eighteenth century, building on controversies in the seventeenth century, saw the development of what can be presented as a discipline in historical writing, in the sense that the evidence and judgments would be tested and interrogated, rather than accepted without evaluation.
Present-centered history, which was highly contentious, had to be more defensible than historical writing, which did not pack a contemporary punch. This gave a considerable sophistication to historical writing in the eighteenth century. Present-centered history was not, however, one-dimensional. It reflected the major political and theological arguments for and against the settlement of 1689. But it also explored specific issues of government policy during the eighteenth century so that entanglements in Europe, taxation and government spending, and the extent and nature of the naval and military capability of the country were all subject to examination through a historical lens. In this way, historical comparisons were able to be deployed with reference both to broad and to narrow themes.
Present-centered history was also able to offer alternative imagined futures. Writers like Mary Astell (considered in chap. 4 ) offered a vision of an England returned to theocratic government and absolute monarchy, far distant from the parliamentary settlement of 1689. Ferdinando Warner (cons