Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: That Never-Ending Battle
- 1 The Enlarging Horizon: Henry Thomas Buckle's Science of History
- 2 The Sciences of History
- 3 Controversial Boys
- 4 Discipline and Disease; or, the Boundary Work of Scientific History
- 5 History from Nowhere
- 6 Broad Shadows and Little Histories
- 7 The Death of the Historian
- Epilogue: Froude's Revenge
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
3 - Controversial Boys
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: That Never-Ending Battle
- 1 The Enlarging Horizon: Henry Thomas Buckle's Science of History
- 2 The Sciences of History
- 3 Controversial Boys
- 4 Discipline and Disease; or, the Boundary Work of Scientific History
- 5 History from Nowhere
- 6 Broad Shadows and Little Histories
- 7 The Death of the Historian
- Epilogue: Froude's Revenge
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
These lectures will not be, in the popular sense, history at all.
Charles Kingsley, The Roman and the Teuton (1864)But the drama of history is imperishable…
James Anthony Froude, ‘The Science of History’ (1864)While Stubbs was attempting to found a school for historical workers under the new inductive methodology at Oxford, his counterpart at Cambridge, Charles Kingsley (1819–75), was far less interested in advancing the cause of history as an autonomous and scientific discipline of study, or so believed his critics. Stubbs and Kingsley could not have been more different and not just in historical outlook. Stubbs was, as we have seen, a High Churchman and Tory, whereas Kingsley's Anglicanism was of the Essays and Reviews variety. He was also, for much of his life, a Christian socialist. Where controversy seemed to follow Kingsley throughout his life, Stubbs avoided it at all cost, believing it to be the natural result of an inherent subjectivity that should be suppressed. ‘Of all things in the world except a controversial woman’, Stubbs said at one of his Oxford lectures, ‘a controversial boy is the most disagreeable’. Stubbs was also a self-described historian, an editor, a diligent archival worker. Kingsley, on the other hand, would likely have never referred to himself as a historian: at best he was an historical novelist; at worst he was a writer of autobiography who hid his opinions behind the veil of ‘fiction’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Science of History in Victorian BritainMaking the Past Speak, pp. 55 - 72Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014