PART II
7
Serious historians care for coins and weapons,
Not those re-iterations of one self-importance
By whom they date them,
Knowing that clerks could soon compose a model
As manly as any of whom schoolmasters tell
Their yawning pupils,
With might-be maps of might-have-been campaigns,
Showing in colour the obediences
Before and after,
Quotes from four-letter pep-talks to the troops
And polysyllabic reasons to a Senate
For breaking treaties.
Simple to add how Greatness, incognito,
Admired plain-spoken comment on itself
By Honest John,
And simpler still the phobia, the perversion,
Such curiosa as tease humanistic
Unpolitical palates.
How justly legend melts them into one
Composite demi-god, prodigious worker,
Deflecting rivers,
Walling in cities with his two bare hands,
The burly slave of ritual and a martyr
To Numerology.
With twelve twin brothers, three wives, seven sons,
Five weeks a year he puts on petticoats,
Stung mortally
During a nine-day tussle with King Scorpion,
Dies in the thirteenth months, becomes immortal
As a constellation.
Clio loves those who bred them better horses,
Found answers to their questions, made their things,
Even those fulsome
Bards they boarded: but those mere commanders,
Like boys in pimple-time, like girls at awkward ages,
What did they do but wish?
W. H. Auden, ‘Makers of History’, 1955.
Well they do: historians do care about coins and weapons among many other things, though we might prefer to say: care about the economies and conflicts of the past that coins and canons give access to, even though the modern social historian (professional, card-carrying, academic historian) is more interested in the living of everyday lives under particular economic regimes, or in the female munitions workers – for example – who made the weaponry of conflict during the First World War (‘Young Alexander conquered India./He alone?/Caesar beat the Gauls./Was there not even a cook in his army?’). Nor can the first stanzas of ‘Makers of History’ be read as an ironic or even sarcastic comment on the monovalent obsessions of amateur collectors, and Auden may not have thought badly of them anyway, for his father was a member of the British Numismatic Society, founded in 1903 for the study of all forms of coinage, tokens, and banknotes of the British Isles and its colonies. George Auden contributed an article on antiquities, including coins, found in York, to its journal in 1907, the year of his third son’s birth; Auden knew his father to be a serious man.1 Moreover, one serious historian of 1958 thought ‘Makers of History’ to be a comment on historical method, thanked the London Magazine in which it originally appeared for permission to quote its first lines in which, he said, Auden argued that as far as ancient history was concerned, coins were a better form of evidence than ancient texts. Unfortunately however, added the historian, coins were just as unreliable as the literary tradition, albeit in a different way.2
I find it very difficult to determine levels of seriousness here, including my own. On the one hand, it is solace to find a historian, sixty years since, treating one of Auden’s history-poems as a straightforward historiographical statement – an assertion of historical theory and method – for this is the way I have spent my last thirty years with Auden’s poetry. And it’s always a pleasure to find a working historian saying anything at all about these questions, for the modern academic variety is generally historiographically mute, preferring, in a dogged, artisnal kind of way to just get on with it and leave questions of meaning in what they produce to the philosophers of history. In the 1990s, ‘robustly practical practising historians’ who skirted round theoretical discussion of their own work occasioned a furore of irritation in the other disciplines, and among other kinds of historian.3 How serious have I been, in taking Auden’s historiographical statements at face value? How serious was he, when he wrote of ‘serious historians’? I believe (though I may misremember) that I have always read the first five verses of ‘Makers of History’ as a kind of comic turn on the history of armies and fleets and great men purveyed at school, the inexorable way in which, through tears of boredom on long summer afternoons and double history, the salacious little details of a king’s sexual proclivities doled out to wake you up a bit, a hundred years’ war melts into myth in the pages of a child’s notebook. How acute it was of Auden, in describing such lessons (and he may have been doing that as well as anything else), to note how the deep structure of the historical narrative allows teachers and writers to add the little coda about great kings and caesars wandering their realms in disguise to seek the views of the common people. A 14-year-old might briefly recall through her yawning the Story of King Alfred and the Cakes from primary school. Now, having read Charles Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture (1940) – because Auden said that he read it so often – I see here the inclusionary tactics of the later Roman emperors, in allowing at least the facsimile of opinion to those obedient after conquest, across all their vast empire.4 Coins were a minor though important part of Cochrane’s story – and Auden certainly thought Cochrane a serious historian.5 Now, the poet moves swiftly across a contemporary historiographical terrain: a history of historical production in the twentieth century. This kind of history learned at school and from other media of instruction is the sort that ‘makes the past easier to deal with by punctuating the record with great crises and great persons’. It is history made (written) to be remembered, and it is, as Frank Kermode noted, ‘in some measure shared by all, learned and simple alike’.6
In the year before Auden composed ‘Makers’, Arnold Toynbee described his own formation as a historian in a turn-of-the century, upper-class English childhood. He evoked the way in which ‘history’ was pressed on the minds of many children like him by the war memorials, street names, the fields and farmsteads they saw around them.7 The child also knew about the inaugurations of presidents and the coronations of kings and queens: ‘this automatic social milieu in which a human being grows up, and in which he continues to live and work as an adult, is the earliest and most widely radiative of the inspirations of potential historians’, he said.8 Toynbee also provided the outlines of history-as-myth: the way in which the details of campaigns and battles and treaties shade into legends every child knows, or become a fairystory of some battle or other with King Scorpion.9
Toynbee’s A Study of History was published in ten volumes between 1934 and 1954, with subsequent volumes of maps and a Reconsiderations published in 1958 and 1961. The last was a response to his many critics, who were vituperative and condescending in the UK, and rather more receptive in the US.10 The hypothesis of Toynbee’s massive work was that civilisations follow a pattern of origin, growth, breakdown, and disintegration. There are parallel processes at work in this pattern of rise and fall across all cultures; stages of development can be discerned; when civilisations ‘fall’, their cultural, religious, and social forms may shape the ‘new’ civilisation that then arises.11 Auden read Toynbee, maybe even the 1954 volumes, though the abridgement of volumes I–VI made in 1946 must also be a contender for his attention.12 Edward Mendelson says that during the 1950s he was still excited by ‘the scale and scope’ of Toynbee’s Study, though had longstanding doubts about claims that it had ‘tamed’ history into a system.13 It is said that in The Age of Anxiety (1947) Auden used the names of historical clans and kinship groups mentioned by Toynbee across the six volumes by then published – his Qaraquorams and Quaromanlics and Krimchaks, with their inchoate cries announcing the Dance of Death – in order to evoke the irrationalism underlying Western civilisation.14 The names are also funny to any English-speaking child dozing in a classroom: funny to anyone trying to drag one jot of interest out of a history lesson; almost as funny as the petticoated man tussling with King Scorpion.
Frank Kermode said that although the edges between historical myth and historical record are often blurred, most people can distinguish between the two: most of us, quite spontaneously it appears, accept concepts ‘such as the decisive battle, the world-historical-individual’. We need mnemonics, he said, ‘if we are to hold in our minds a past we can contemplate or use’. The mnemonics come from a common education (in its broadest sense) in a particular society, and bear in this way some relationship to Jorma Kalela’s later conceptualisation of history-in-society.15 But though Toynbee was eloquent on the social and educational factors that had made him a historian, he did not believe that he was describing a universal social and psychological process, because ‘for at least three-quarters of the men and women alive on Earth in A. D. 1952, History was virtually non-existent … [they were] still living in a social milieu that spoke to them, not of History, but of Nature’. It had been the same through the aeons he had described in his ten volumes: ‘for the Peasantry since the dawn of Civilization, History, as they had experienced it so far, had been a tale that had signified nothing, in spite of being “full of sound and fury” ’.16 He gave thanks that he had been born in an era when a ‘higher religion’ clad in its traditional form made ‘ “going to church” (or mosque or synagogue or Hindu or Buddhist temple) … an automatic education in History’. Being in such a place, looking, and listening, a child was carried ‘far afield in Time and Space’. Toynbee gave particular thanks that he had been born ‘early enough in the Western Civilization’s day to have been taken to church every Sunday’, and to have received his formal education at a school and a university in which the study of Greek and Latin were the foundation of the curriculum. The Church of England and its liturgy gave the child the verbal and visual resources to become a historian: ‘the apostles, prophets and martyr cited collectively in the Te Deum … the cross, the sword wheel, or other means of death through which the martyr had attained his crown … these pictures … told the spectator at a glance, what they stood for’. He was even more grateful not to have been taken to worship in the extreme plainness of a ‘tabernacle of a Protestant sect’.17 Later, after childhood, the sights and sounds of the Anglican liturgy would make the great pattern of history plain – or at least provide a partial vision of ‘God seen through the diverse fractions of His “inconceivably mighty works” ’; then might be seen ‘in History a vision of God’s creation on the move, from God its source towards God its goal’.18
Under the auspices of the new global history, Toynbee’s reputation has been revived, though the ‘historical angle of vision’ by which he saw ‘human souls … raised by the gift of the Spirit, moving, through a fateful exercise of their spiritual freedom, either towards their Creator, or away from Him’, is somewhat downplayed by academic historians. Over the question of faith, particularly the Christian faith, Toynbee remains the ‘embarrassing uncle at a house party’ that he was in the later twentieth century. It is suggested that one of the reasons for our embarrassment is that practitioners today ‘are not at all certain what is signified by the concept of “religion.” ’.19 But by 1955, Toynbee’s insistence on Christ as the culmination of the historical process had receded. He now proposed a global syncretisation of world religions as the historian’s working method and philosophy. ‘I have not returned to the religious outlook in which I was brought up’, he told his readers. ‘I was brought up to believe that Christianity was a unique revelation of the whole truth. I have now come to believe that all the historic religions and philosophies are partial revelations of the truth in one or other of its aspects.’ But the problem for historians of the modern era has been the remaining Western, and ultimately Christian, inflection of both his earlier and later positions.20
We do not know if Auden read the later pronouncements of Toynbee during the Ischian early summer in which he composed ‘Makers of History’. We really do not know what kind of history he read, apart from the frequently noted ‘big’ historians of the 1930s and 1940: de Rougement, Cochrane, Rosenstock-Huessy. Mendelson’s discussion of their – and Toynbee’s – influence on Auden in the 1940s and 1950s is to do with their historiographical or philosophical meaning for Auden rather than their meaning as works of social, cultural or political history.21 But there are scattered references to what would now be understood as social history.22 In 1936, Auden had positively loved R. H. Mottram’s Portrait of an Unknown Victorian. He knew it was ‘self-love’ that made readers ‘peculiarly interested in the lives of the obscure of another historical period’; but he loved it all the same. ‘The historian tells us of the monuments of the exalted, the average laws of behaviour, the civic triumphs and catastrophes, but pays little attention to our first question, which is: “What should I have done if I’d been there?” We want to know what kind of job we should have done, how much money we should have made, what we should have eaten, what hobbies we should have taken up, what sort of things would have irritated or amused us.’23 Mendelson claims that he found the same kind of history of everyday life in Toynbee; that Toynbee provided ‘an authoritative sense of geopolitical scale with almost lyrical passages of praise for humane, domestically scaled societies where one could feel at home’. He argues that Auden adopted Toynbee’s double focus on large and small scales in ‘In Praise of Limestone’ (1948) and that he refused, as Toynbee refused, ‘to be overawed by the larger while admitting its power to crush the smaller’.24 But I don’t see it myself, in Toynbee. The home life of his Krimchaks and Timurids was not very much like that of the Norwich bank clerk about whom Mottram Jnr had written. Auden enjoyed the English ordinariness of Mottram Snr in the same way that he enjoyed the Reverend Sydney Smith. We all love the Reverend Smith for his self-satiric horror at being exiled in the provinces, and as far away from the Metropolis as the North Riding! We love his complaining, wittily and self-deprecatingly, about being inured in a North Yorkshire rectory ‘twelve miles from a lemon’, in 1809.25 But it is not clear that Auden read the academic social history produced in the 1930s and 1940s, or any works from its post-War efflorescence, shortly to be described. He just didn’t ‘click’ with G. D. H. Coles’ history of the labouring classes, he said. Yet in 1936 he had told Lord Byron about the dissonance between the bright new modernity of the South, and Up North, where lay the desolate battlefields of class conflict –
in the north it simply isn’t true.
To those who live in Warrington or Wigan
It’s not a white lie, it’s a whacking big ‘un
There on the old historic battlefield,
The cold ferocity of human wills,
The scars of struggle are as yet unhealed;
Slattern the tenements on sombre hills
And gaunt in valleys the square-windowed mills.26
– a view as likely to have come from contemporary social surveys and social anthropology as social history. And yet ‘Makers’ is a fragment of modern social history.
The poem opens with a comedy, or pastiche, of history teaching, which may have been recognisable to many middle- and upper-class schoolchildren, educated in the UK between 1880 and 1940. It is a kind of satire on ‘big history’, ‘great-man history’, and grand, large-scale theories of history, and what happens to them in a classroom. And then, without announcement, without enjambment, Clio arrives, silently mirroring the first verse. She does not merely care for those within her purview; she loves them. She loves the workers, the menials, the labourers, the clerks who, also in a silence like hers, served Roman Senators and Egyptian Kings; the agricultural workers who bred the fleeter horses for their armies, the contracted writers who penned the pep-talks to the troops; all the workers who made, with the labour of their bodies, all the things with which the elite furnished their many mansions. The house-poet too (like Stephen Duck in his day) is a worker, a maker, just churning out the verse celebrating victory in exchange for bread and board; a piper unpaid in cash. Here are the makers who did built the Seven Towers of Thebes; who conquered India. Clio may enter stage right, but she will leave stage left.
Social history enters here, and I do not for the life of me know where she comes from. Nevertheless, the Clio of ‘Makers’ (Clio I, for there is another, to be discussed in the next chapter) is the perfect – and beautiful – encapsulation of the development of social history as a research practice and historical theory in Britain, between about 1930 and 1970. The origins of social history were understood to be multiple; its origins and progress were frequently discussed in the post-War period. ‘The “Cinderella of English historical studies” only a few years earlier, it was by the mid-1960s the “in” thing, the queen of the ball; today, more than thirty years later, it is still often regarded as the main innovation of the period’, wrote Jim Obelkevich in 2000.27 The Annales school in France has been described as one point of origin, as has the labour history undertaken in university economic history departments, from the 1930s onwards: the kind Auden couldn’t be doing with. An Oxbridge axis of social history has been described, in which Sir Lewis Namier’s concerns with the psychological as well as economic factors underpinning social structure and social distinction (‘what lay beneath’, in Miles Taylor’s nice depiction) influenced the work of historians far beyond the golden triangle, from the 1930s through to the 1950s.28 David Feldman and Jon Laurence have described a baggy, protean concept – ‘social history’ – which for fifty years now has stood in, more or less, for ‘everyday life’.29 After ‘everyday life’ had been conceptualised as a field of study within the social sciences in general, says Ben Highmore, historians came to use the term in order ‘to side with the dominated against those that would dominate … to invoke … those practices and lives that have traditionally been left out of historical accounts, swept aside by the onslaught of events instigated by elites’. The term ‘everyday’ became a ‘shorthand for voices from “below” ’.30
Most mid-century commentators on the genesis of social history indicated the importance of G. H. Trevelyan’s English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries: Chaucer to Queen Victoria (1942, 1944) for popular understandings of what kind of history it was; others reminded readers that J. R. Green’s Short History of the English People (1874) had underpinned many early twentieth-century histories for children, teaching not ‘of English Kings or English Conquests, but of the English People’.31 Most small children educated in the state system during the first half of the twentieth century learned more about the furnishings of a Viking long-house, the way food was cooked by medieval people, and clothes made ‘through the ages’ than they did about war and high politics.32 When Victor Neuberg discussed Edward Thompson’s phrase ‘history from below’ as indicative of a new way of doing history, he actually reviewed eight works of social history for young children, including the emblematic Life in England (1968–1970) series, ‘a vivid, panoramic view of how men lived’.33 Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is the marker of social history’s birth for many of these commentators. His work was understood to be symbolic of a movement to challenge the elite and conservative focus of the historical discipline, by recuperating the experiences of those who had been excluded from conventional histories.34
Social history for children was targeted at parents as well as schools: in 1962 Look and Learn magazine promised ‘Art, Literature, Science, People, World, and Social History – These and More are Presented in a Vivid, Authoritative Way’.35 An elaborate advertisement for vacuum cleaners in 1950 evoked the concepts of everyday life and (the not yet named) women’s history by use of the term ‘social history’.36 ‘Social history’ spelled selling power for publishers who, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, advertised a wide variety of books with descriptors like: ‘the piano as the “centre” for writing the social history of the last 300 years’ (November 1955); ‘a comment on social history’ (March 1959); ‘a fresco of social history’ (March 1960); ‘a delectable social history’ (March 1961); ‘a lighthearted slice of social history’ (1963). There were social histories of hunting, of opera, of button collecting; readers were perceived to like it, and to know what kind of read was promised by the term; reviewers used ‘social history’ to bestow praise, as in ‘a delectable social history’. ‘Social History in Song’ was broadcast on the Home Service (BBC Radio 4) in February 1968. Material objects, events, and groups of people ‘had’ a social history; social history was clothes, the changing shape of babies’ bonnets, or the railways; Asa Briggs’ first volume of the history of broadcasting ‘is often social history’, said one reviewer, reassuringly (1961). It was frequently ‘our’ social history, a national and personal possession. ‘The Nottingham Captain, a bitter account by Mr Arnold Wesker’ was reviewed as ‘a sorry episode in English social history’ in 1962.37 Readers of the broadsheets and the literary magazines had been prepared for understanding E. P. Thompson’s 1966 proclamation that ‘social history lives in the language of the commons’, reported in The Times under the title ‘History’s Widening Frontiers’; to understand even (or perhaps especially) the freeborn English men and women who haunt the phrase.38 The vocabulary of ‘social history’ was thus made familiar to parents and children of the post-War era. ‘Important Decision in Social History’ was a subhead announcing the Robbins Report, ‘as important as any in the social history of this country’.39
The academic origins of social history were related to these common understandings, sometimes in edgy and distancing ways. At the University of Warwick, Edward Thompson did the same work of distancing in one of the many committee papers he wrote in the long run-up to the formal establishment of the Warwick Centre for the Study of Social History: ‘The very considerable advances in recent years in this country in the social studies and in sociology has been accompanied only by a piecemeal and disconnected advance in the study of social history. In some places “social history” has scarcely advanced beyond the status of belles lettres …’, he wrote in 1965.40 The task of persuasion was not only to distance university social history from the middlebrow version, but also from the kind ‘advanced within the aegis of departments of economic history’. Progress there had been impressive, but ‘distorted by the tendency to limit study to quantitative or institutional problems’.41 Ten years later (Thompson long departed from Warwick), the new director of the Centre for Social History acknowledged the turn from labour history to social history and the special relationship between the two; but academic social history had still not lost the accent of its somewhat philistine origins out in the wider society: social historians must guard against ‘a return to the “everyday”, the residual and the tedious’.42 Labour history remained the more respectable endeavour well into the 1970s.43 Developments in the paradigm of social history after 1955, when ‘Makers of History’ was written, are not, of course, of much use in determining whence came the Muse of Social History in Auden’s poem. The US experience of the new social history would be useful were there evidence that Auden read, or was sent for review, any of its works; but retrospectives of the US social history movement locate its arrival in the 1960s, long after the ‘Makers’ was written.44
‘Love’ – the way Auden’s Clio I loves the workers – is so apt; it is so perfect; it denotes Clio in her aspect as social history over the last European and Atlantic World 200 years. Under the title ‘Mixed Feelings’, Frank Kermode discussed the ways in which being in love with the working class became a quest for many bourgeois writers of the 1930s. He almost, but not quite, includes Auden in the work of transference that made the proletariat ‘beautiful, doomed, unlucky’ and because doomed, irresistible to many a bourgeois sympathiser, whether a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain or not. Kermode suggests that many writers transferred their ‘sense of what it meant to be outcast, alienated, maudit, to the worker’.45 The poor were also people ‘apart’, ‘possessors of a strange, possibly a splendid alien culture’. The frontier must be crossed to meet them, dead or alive, however dangerous and costly the journey.46 This motion of the heart and mind could not be but condescending and – Kermode’s judgement – ignorant. He recounts Louis MacNeice’s exile in Birmingham in the 1930s, teaching classics at the university and despising his unresponsive and malnourished students as they recited Homer in broad Brummagen. When MacNeice and his wife visited Birmingham picture palaces, sometimes five times a week (what else was there to do in Brum?), they were not using it as a means of escape; they were not forgetting their troubles in a celluloid world. ‘You can tell from the tone,’ says Kermode, ‘that it was all the other people in the cinema who were experiencing … bogus solace and not the MacNeices.’47 There is a glass wall between the anthropologist-poet visiting the land of the poor and the people passing in its greasy streets. MacNeice’s poem ‘Birmingham’ announces itself as the soundscape of a great industrial city, but all the voices in the street are occluded; he cannot hear what the people are saying:
The lunch hour: the shops empty, the shopgirls’ faces relax
Diaphanous as green glass, empty as old almanacs
As incoherent with ticketed gewgaws tiered behind their heads
As the Burne-Jones windows in St. Philip’s broken by crawling leads …48
The new social history that emerged in the academy between 1950 and 1970 had a different kind of problem with loving the workers, but problem it certainly had. No actually-historically-existing eighteenth-century cobbler, or nineteenth-century fustian cutter could possibly live up to the expectations placed upon him (or her; but that’s another story) by the post-Marxist eschatology that would have the course of history reach its end by the revolutionary triumph of the workers. Actually-existent spinners and weavers and labourers and miners were as unheroic to the historical imagination as were MacNeice’s shopgirls to the poetic. This is a cheap remark, to which I intend to give better value, and I would not like anyone to think that I am not deeply implicated in this history of political sensibility; and I do know I am re-iterating my own self-importance by stating it.
In the late twentieth-century West, the practice of social history was accompanied by the social historian’s guilt and anguish at rescuing those who maybe do not want to be rescued, at all, from what Thompson called the vast condescension of posterity.49 Other kinds of historian have been plain-speaking about our desires: social historians’ desire that our historical subjects be the way we want them to be. In 1977, Jacques Rancière addressed a History Workshop held in Oxford on the topic of ‘French social historiography … and the real deep gap between French social history as an intellectual product and the organised working-class movements’. He emphasised social history’s effacement by Annales-school longue durée history in general, and the ‘motionless history’ of Leroy Ladurie’s work in particular; of what we had already come (after Thompson’s Making) to know as the workers’ ‘experience’. The French historiography he evoked was ‘a comeback to earlier history which is nothing to do with the working class’.50 ‘Who needs social history, or working-class history; and who does it?’, he asked. French workers had not (did not), for the main part, want their own history as penned by their historians. ‘For instance there was an important literary movement among French workers in the mid-nineteenth century, but they wrote poetry rather than history … (they) wanted to gain their identity through other means than history and memory, and even the history of their own struggles, working-class struggles, did not serve their purpose.’51 Moreover, in early twentieth-century France, it was not academic historians who wrote the history of trade union and labour struggle, but sociologists and anthropologists producing popular ethnological accounts of the habits and manners of the nineteenth-century working class. Sociologists produced the most twentieth-century French working-class history because sociology was ‘the official science of the new radical republic’. After 1870, the science of ‘social solidarity and reciprocity’ wrote the workers and working-class history from the perspective of class harmony and ‘solidarism’. Histories of the working class had been inaugurated by the French state. Civil servants writing state-sanctioned history were often themselves veteran militants of the nineteenth-century working-class movement. ‘Dismissed and marginalised by the new forces – socialist, collectivist … anarchist’, the first books ‘representing real research into the history of trades unions and the working class were written by men who had been defeated in their own attempts to reconcile the classes when they were militants in the labour movement … [they] wanted to take their revenge as civil servants, as investigators for the state’. Rancière also told of the underestimation of working-class history in French universities: ‘if you write social history, you are taken to be a militant, interested … because of your political involvement’. Raphael Samuel’s editorial note to the published talk explained that ‘social history’ has a double meaning in French, the first much as in English, the second inherited from the nineteenth century as ‘social movement’ – the popular forces that battled to resolve ‘the social question’. ‘Social history’ was the narrative of that struggle, he explained; ‘in other words something much more akin to the [English] term “labour history” ’. In Rancière’s argument, the latter meaning was predominant.52 But how lucky the French! How lucky to be a French academic historian in the 1970s: to be an object of suspicion in a university system so clear-eyed about the political purposes of the history you wrote! How much better to be conflated with the workers and their struggle than to be one of those (English) academics waltzing around with yet another paper about nineteenth-century working-class experience of something-or-other in your hand. Reading what Rancière wrote for the 1979 History Workshop now, after all the turns taken by historical studies these thirty years past, his argument becomes a signal that one day, someone will ask not only about who needs and wants the history of working-class experience that social historians write, but about the propriety of writing it in the first place, with all the acts of treachery it involves.
Self-abasement and suffering-envy were deeply imbued in the practice of British social history. In their deep identification with (their love for) their historical subjects, many engagé scholarship boy and girl historians of the mid-twentieth century contemplated the betrayal involved in writing about the working-class dead and gone.53 Whilst attempting to give the lost myriads of the past – all the nameless ones – a voice and a history, social historians sought out the saddest stories ever told, of what the English fiscal-military state, the legal system, industrial capitalism, did to people in the past.54 Historians had – and have – the very great power of making immortal ordinary people whose stories of suffering are a passport to the historical record, in a way that their everyday, ordinary life never would have been.55 The sympathies and empathies of twentieth-century British social history can be read as part of a longstanding project of modernity (originating in the eighteenth century and given its most elegant exposition by Adam Smith in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments) of finding your own soul finer in its ability to apprehend the pain of others. After the eighteenth-century empathetic turn, you do not ask: how does, or did, this person feel? Rather you ask: how would I feel if that happened to me? How do I feel, looking at the weight of the world, the suffering of others?56 (‘What should I have done if I’d been there?’, as Auden put it.) Mark Phillips now suggests that the sentiment which propelled twentieth-century social history originated in the eighteenth century, in its own history-writing, and its concern with the everyday habits and manners of all kinds of people, dead and gone, remote in time and space, or emerging on a city street or in a novel, Somewhere Near You: a way of seeing and thinking the social world.57 This was the structure of feeling that provided George Henry Lewis’s historiography, as early as 1844. He had visited Paris in 1842, had a conversation Jules Michelet, and now reported on ‘The State of Historical Science’ in France.58 He discussed Michelet’s Oeuvres Complètes in comparison with the work of Thierry, Guizot, Hegel, and Michelet’s translation of Vico’s Scienza Nuova into French, reflecting on the charges that might brought against Michelet for want of gravity. Not hard, in this company, for Michelet to be called the most ‘captivating’ of historians. Lewes’ reading also allowed him to speculate on the sources for a history of everyday life. ‘History should be grave’ he conceded
but in a deeper sense than our ‘classical historians’ have understood … History must be grave, or cannot be written; but this gravity does not exclude anything, which throws light upon the subject, whether a ballad, a legend, a custom, a silly fashion, or a secret anecdote; it holds nothing to be derogatory to its dignity, because it includes everything, as the greater does the lesser.59
Now, beyond the cultural, linguistic, subjective, and archival ‘turns’ in historical studies, beyond historiographical questions asked from the postcolony about the West as the Subject, or ‘I’, of historical writing, historians have started to interrogate their relationship with all their subjects, asking juridical questions to do with rights, duties, obligation, and ownership.60 Who owns history? Who has the right to speak for the dead? For particular categories of the dead? New protocols of imagining and writing emerged from Holocaust history and sociology – from the event that ‘resisted … long-standing frameworks of historical reasoning, development, and emplotment … Who can claim the moral ground to consider the meaning … of the lives and deaths of others?’61 Without any right on their side, social historians do it everyday.
Western historical practice is, as Marc Bloch remarked, deeply Christian – eschatological – in its structures of temporality and meaning.62 And as social history it has operated with a specifically Christian notion of love. Caritas accompanies you, whether you want it to or not, as you read the fragmented testimony of the abject child-labourer, child-murdering maidservant in the condemned cell, pauper pleading for relief before a magistrate, for whom you feel the subordinating impulse of sympathy. Its traffic is from high to low, from superior to subordinate; caritas involves the pity and tenderness of the superior person (or historian) much more than its conventional translation as ‘Christian love of humankind; charity’, allows: it is pity, plain and simple. But as you attempt the egalitarian and democratic move of incorporating all the lost ones into a historical narrative, pity is what you most profoundly do not want to feel. It is not a grown-up sentiment; it is not an emotion that pertains between equals in the civil society of the living and the dead; it abandons your historical subjects to the place they are already in, and reaffirms the hierarchies that separate you in the first place. But I do believe that it is caritas, dressed as social history, who enters, silently, the stage of Auden’s ‘Makers of History’.
For readers of 1955, Clio I stepped out of the pages of the London Magazine, accompanied by the codes and conventions of one particular ‘little’ magazine.63 The editorial pages did not mention the poem, concentrated rather on the question of protest in literature, explored by another contributor. Compared with the US, there had been little discussion of the theme since the war, wrote the editor, perhaps because the UK was free of McCarthyism and there had been such enormous advances in social justice in the decade after 1940. But protest was needed: ‘is there no need, in the tight little Britain of the ‘fifties, of artists to “wage contention with their times (sic) decay”?’64 What alarmed John Lehman was this island’s absence of passion. He railed, in a mild kind of way, against a candyfloss world and a never-never culture, in the recognisable tones of a Richard Hoggart (who had not yet published The Uses of Literacy) or a Frank Leavis (who had been railing at it for years). Underneath the surface of everyday existence, ‘gigantic concentrations of power are forming’, not only manifest in colour TV, ‘gas turbine sports cars, and Atlantic crossings on the never-never plan’. It was plain that although the Korean War was over, ‘The Ministry of Fear has not stopped growing’. This was the herald of Auden’s Social-History Clio, or maybe her train, depending on which order readers took in the issue, which contained a review of Auden’s selections from Kierkergaard, also published that year.65
Here are some points Auden made about social history, for it was in his vocabulary as a critic. In 1936, in a lecture on poetry and film, he provided a history of the Industrial Revolution to chart aesthetic developments across Europe: the Industrial Revolution was formative of class – it made employers and employed and workers and rentiers. A distinct kind of art arose from the outlook of the latter, ‘developing through Cezanne, Proust and Joyce’. Co-existent with this, was the ‘art of the masses expressing itself in the music-hall’; this had ‘been taken over and supplanted by film’.66 The lecture was an elegant and shorter version of the history he related to Lord Byron in Letters from Iceland; it moved beyond national borders. He understood the nature of the dual revolution that ushered European modernity into being, writing in 1947 about the political and economic crisis of the later eighteenth century. A society ‘weakened from within by the strains of a transition from a mercantile to an industrial economy, and without by the strain of the American and French wars’, its political taken-for-granted ‘threatened by the ideology of the French Revolution’– in the 1790s ‘the social structure of England was nearer collapse than at any time since 1640’.67 In The Dyer’s Hand (1963) he reiterated the background to British modernity: ‘Between 1533 and 1688 the English went through a succession of revolutions, in which a Church was imposed on them by the engines of the State, one king was executed and another deposed, yet they prefer to forget it and pretend that the social structure of England is the result of organic peaceful growth.’68 In the year of ‘Makers of History’ he reviewed a work of US history that provoked his antinomian use of ‘Nature’ as a substitute for ‘historical factors’: ‘Americans think of their society as being made by their own revolutionary actions’, he wrote; ‘whilst it was in fact, as a result of Nature’, Nature in this case being a large virgin underpopulated territory to appropriate: ‘To call their secession from allegiance to the British Crown a Revolution is nonsense’.69 After ‘Makers’ had been published, he contemplated the differences between social and literary history, quoting approvingly C. S. Lewis on the literary historian, whose business is not ‘the past as it “really” was (whatever “really” means in such a context) but with the past as it seemed to those who lived it: for of course men felt and thought and wrote about what seemed to be happenings to them. The economic or social historian’s “appearances” may well be the literary historian’s “facts”.’ Like any other historian, the literary historian had to attempt to see the literary product through ‘the eyes of its maker and his contemporaries’; ‘but then, unlike the social historian, he cannot avoid passing judgement upon it as a work he is now reading’.70 Editing Goethe’s Italian Journey the year before, he had made a historiographical statement about the uses of time in various types of history-writing, ‘about natural history and … art history … the two kinds of history are different. Natural history, like social and political history, is continuous; there is no moment when nothing is happening. But the history of art is discontinuous; the art historian can show the influences and circumstances which made it possible and likely that a certain painter should paint in a certain way, if he chooses to paint, but he cannot explain why he paints a picture instead of not paining one,’71 By now his interest in R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history – and his history – had, perhaps, faded. But Collingwood’s understanding, that the point of history was to discover how and why people managed to believe, feel, and think what they did feel, believe, and think in any specific set of circumstances, is present in the thought of his Homage to Clio history-poems.72 Auden had read Collingwood’s history of Roman Britain when he worked on his radio play Hadrian’s Wall in 1937; Collingwood had analysed Auden’s play The Ascent of F6 (1936, 1937) in his Principles of Art in 1938 (with a rare sensitivity and perspicacity, says Edward Mendelson). In 1940 appeared the Collingwood book Auden seemed to need the most: An Essay in Metaphysics, in which it was argued that metaphysics was not the study of the absolute, as philosophy assumed it to be, but rather the study of ‘absolute presuppositions’, that is, the unverifiable assumptions about the universe that underlie every society’s sum of available knowledge. For Collingwood metaphysics was a means of historical understanding, not a science of timeless truth. Edward Mendelson says that Auden immediately adopted Collingwood’s terminology, and his historical analysis as well, which identified Christian orthodoxy with the presuppositions that first enabled modern science. At the same time Auden began his inner debate about whether the same orthodoxy remained the basis of modern science, and thus of political practice.73 We may care to note, as did Mendelson, that Collingwood was Norris Cochrane’s tutor at Oxford.
I could – and some will say I ought to – exercise more of the historian’s dreary arts in this pursuit of sources and contexts for Clio I – for the next five years, or forever: read everything published between the beginning of 1954 and the spring of 1955, find all the works of history produced from 1940 onwards that were not recorded in the ecumenical and international Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature (I know what was recorded, between 1930 and 1955). I could think hard about the cultural legacy of the Korean War in the US and in Europe. I could note random happenings of the world historical stage of the type that Social History-Clio (Clio I) ignores: US McCarthyism; the USSR finally decreeing the end of war with Germany; an EOKA-bomb attack on British government buildings in Cyprus on 1 April 1955; the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies signing the Warsaw Pact on 14 May 1955, integrating the military, economic, and cultural policy of eight Communist nations; Giovanni Gronchi elected President of Italy (well: Auden was in Italy when he wrote Clio I); the overthrow of Juan Peron in Argentina (but that happened in September 1955, so scarcely relevant to the composition of ‘Makers of History’). I could note the proclamation of Pius X a saint, by Pope Pius XII (he was in Italy, after all); and I could go on for a very long time. But none of it would help with my question about where the Clio of ‘The Makers’ came from, for it is the wrong one. If there is a dark rather than dreary art of historical practice, it is to develop a sense of when you’ve been asking the wrong questions, looking for the wrong thing (in an archive, in a work of literature, in a timetable of significant events). Social-History Clio does not come from anywhere; she is, rather, there, as a sign that historiographical change and developments in the philosophy of history emerge outside the academy as well as within it; that they are thought by ordinary people and an extraordinary poet. Of course she’s present a little earlier than our conventional works of historiography (history of History) tell us she should be; but then, her earliness is part of my point. Clio may not bless the poets, but she does, sometimes, lob a historian the odd grace.
1 G. A. Auden, ‘A leaden cross bearing a styca impression and other antiquities found in York’, Journal and Proceedings of the British Numismatic Society, 4 (1907), pp. 235–237. Dr Auden had also read much about coins when translating Friedrich Rathgen’s The Preservation of Antiquities. A Handbook for Curators, trans. George A. Auden, M. A., M. D. (Cantab.) and Harold A. Auden, M. Sc. (Vict.), D. Sc. (Tübingen), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1905. Harold Auden was his brother.
2 Michael Grant, Roman History from Coins. Some Uses of the Imperial Coinages to the Historian, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1958, pp. 10, 16–17; ‘Makers of History’, London Magazine, 2:9 (September 1955). It was reprinted as one of the Best Poems of 1955, Borestone Poetry Awards for 1956. A Compilation of Original Poetry, published in the Magazines of the English Speaking World in 1955, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1957.
3 Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (1991). With a new preface and conversation with the author by Alun Munslow, Routledge, London, 2003, p. 3 and passim. For some of the arguments and objections, Alexander Macfie, ‘Review of Keith Jenkins Retrospective’ (review no. 1266), www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1266 (accessed 16 October 2017).
4 Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture. A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1940. ‘I have read this book many times, and my conviction of its importance to the understanding not only of the epoch with which it is concerned, but also of our own, has increased with each rereading.’ W. H. Auden, ‘Augustus to Augustine’, Prose Volume II. 1939–1948, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2002, pp. 226–231, orig. review of Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, New Republic, 25 September 1944.
5 Cochrane, Christianity, p. 143.
6 Frank Kermode, Poetry, Narrative, History, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, p. 50.
7 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. 10 (The Inspirations of Historians), Oxford University Press, London, 1954, pp. 3–24.
8 Toynbee, Study of History, pp. 5–6.
9 There were two kings or chieftains named Scorpion in Upper Egypt during the Protodynastic Period. They were mentioned by Toynbee in Volume 9 of The Study of History, also published in 1954.
10 Alexander Hutton, ‘ “A belated return for Christ”? The reception of Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History in a British context, 1934–1961’, European Review of History – Revue européenne d’histoire, 21:3 (2014), pp. 405–424, for critical reactions to Toynbee as ‘a veritable intellectual history of the midcentury’. Michael Lang, ‘Globalization and global history in Toynbee’, Journal of World History, 22:4 (2011), pp. 747–783. For other comments on the coming of global history, David Christian, ‘The return of universal history’, History and Theory, 49 (2010), pp. 691–716; Matthew Hilton and Rana Mitter, ‘Transnationalism and Contemporary Global History’, Past and Present, Supplement, [ns], 8, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013.
11 ‘It is a careful, voluminous, intelligent endeavor to find a recurrent pattern enabling a better understanding of the whole range of human history. Its focus of interest lies in civilizations, of which events and personalities are regarded as expressions or indices. Six volumes have appeared; about nine more are projected’. A. L. Krober, ‘A Study of History. Arnold J. Toynbee (Vols 1–6. London, 1934–39)’, American Anthropologist, 45:2 (1943), pp. 294–299.
12 The abridgement was a wild success in the US. Toynbee appeared on the cover of Time magazine in March 1947. For sales figures on both sides of the Atlantic, Hutton, ‘”A belated return” ’, p. 408. Humphrey Carpenter says that Auden’s taste in reading during the Ischian years was for ‘large-scale historical works’: Dean Stanley’s History of the Eastern Church, Toynbee’s The Study of History, and ‘a three-volume account of the later Roman Empire’. Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden. A Biography, Faber and Faber, London (1981, 1983), 2010, p. 364. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church. With an Introduction on the Study of Ecclesiastical History, John Murray, London, 1861, does not appear to have been reissued after 1907. There was an Everyman edition in 1910. Toynbee referenced Stanley but in regard to his edition of Thomas Arnold’s letters, not his Lectures. Carpenter does not say why Auden was reading it. Carpenter, W. H. Auden, p. 364; 362–388 for ‘Ischia’.
13 Edward Mendelson, Later Auden, Faber and Faber, London, 1999, pp. 245, 294; also Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, ‘Auden in History’, Tony Sharpe (ed.), W. H. Auden in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 181–192.
14 Hutton, ‘ “A belated return” ’, p. 415; W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, London, 1991, p. 518; Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 245.
15 See above, p. 20.
16 Toynbee, Study, Vol. 10, pp. 6–7.
17 Toynbee, Study, Vol. 10, p. 5.
18 Toynbee, Study, Vol. 10, pp. 1, 3.
19 Toynbee, Study, Vol. 10, p. 2; Lang, ‘Globalization’, pp. 747, 783.
20 Arnold Toynbee, ‘A study of history. What I am trying to do’, International Affairs 31:1 (1955), pp. 1–4.
21 Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 306–407.
22 For the genealogy of social history, Miles Taylor, ‘The beginnings of modern British social history’, History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997), pp. 155–176; Carolyn Steedman, ‘Social History Comes to Warwick’, Miles Taylor (ed.), The Utopian Universities, Oxford University Press, Oxford, forthcoming.
23 W. H. Auden, ‘The Average Man’, Prose Volume I. 1926–1938, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Faber and Faber, London, 1996, pp. 159–160; review of R. H. Mottram, Portrait of an Unknown Victorian, Robert Hale, London, 1936, orig. New Statesman and Nation, November 1936.
24 Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 294.
25 W. H. Auden, ‘Portrait of a Whig’, Prose Volume III. 1949–1955, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2008, pp. 273–285; orig. English Miscellany (1952).
26 For Auden’s response to Cole, above, p. 120. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, Collected Poems, p. 88.
27 Jim, Obelkevich, ‘New developments in history in the 1950s and 1960s’, Contemporary British History, 4:4 (2000), pp. 125–142.
28 Taylor, ‘The beginnings of modern British social history’, pp. 155–156.
29 David Feldman and Jon Laurence ‘Introduction: Structures and Transformations in British Historiography’, Feldman and Laurence (eds), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011.
30 Ben Highmore (ed.), The Everyday Life Reader, Routledge, London and New York NY, 2002, p. 1.
31 J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People, Macmillan, London, 1874, p. v.
32 Jenny Keating, ‘Ideas and Advice about History Teaching 1900–1950s’, History in Education Project, Institute of Historical Research, University of London April 2011; David Cannadine, Jenny Keating, and Nicola Sheldon, The Right Kind of History. Teaching the Past in Twentieth-Century England, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2011. The twentieth-century project of elementary and primary school history teaching is described as imperialist at best and racist at worst, but that did not prevent 7- to 11-year-olds drawing more farthingales and porringers than they did maps of imperialist conquest. Carolyn Steedman, ‘Battlegrounds: History in primary schools’, History Workshop Journal, 17:1 (1984), pp. 102–112.
33 Victor E. Neuberg, ‘… History from Below’, Times Literary Supplement, 22 June 1968, p. 20; E. P. Thompson, ‘History from Below’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 1966.
34 This story has been so frequently told by historians for students of history that it is useful to see the emblematic Making from the perspective of another discipline: Richard Fardon, Olivia Harris, Trevor H. J. Marchand, Mark Nuttall, Cris Shore, Veronica Strang, and Richard A. Wilson, The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology, Volume 1, Sage, London, 2012, p. 122.
35 A British weekly educational magazine for children published by Fleetway Publications Ltd, 1962–1982.
36 ‘The Missing Volume. Hoover Limited’, display advertisement, The Times, 20 January 1950: ‘One of the most important volumes in the Social History of England has – so far as our knowledge goes – yet to be written. It will deal with the Twentieth Century Housewife and the way her life has been transformed by the introduction of scientific labour-saving devices.’
37 ‘Music for Wesker Text’, The Times 21 November 1961. The play had been performed by Centre 42 at the Trades Union Festival held in Hayes and Southall. www.arnoldwesker.com/plays.asp?workID=45 (accessed 16 October 2017). This ‘Moral for Narrator, Voices and Orchestra’ told the story of Jerry Brandreth, Oliver the Spy, and the Nottinghamshire Luddites, also to be told by Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, Gollancz, London, 1963, pp. 711–733, a year later. Also Paul Long, Only in the Common People. The Aesthetics of Class in Post-War Britain, Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle, 2008, pp. 197–198.
38 The Times, 9 April 1966: ‘Mr E. P. Thompson, of Warwick declares that Labour History now feels confident enough to move onwards from the base which Cole and his successors secured.’ E. P. Thompson, ‘The free-born Englishman’, New Left Review, 1:15 (May–June 1962); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Part 1, Chapter 4; Cal Winslow (ed.), E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left. Essays Polemics, Monthly Review Press, New York NY, 2014, pp. 290–306.
39 The Times, 20 November 1963. For a detailed account of social history remade as ‘the history of everyday life’ in the first half of the twentieth century, see Laura Carter, ‘The Quennells and the “History of Everyday Life” in England, c. 1918–69’, History Workshop Journal, 81 (2016), pp. 106–134.
40 ‘Until recently, much social history was a matter of gifted impressionism, while the most disciplined work was advanced within departments of economic history’, University of Warwick, Modern Record Centre (MRC), UWA/FICHE/REF/R1724, 9 March 1966, ‘For the meeting of the Planning and Executive Committee 9 March 1966’, Agendum 3C.
41 ‘A Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick. The Scope of the Subject’, MRC UWA/ FICHE/REF/R1724 9 July 1965.
42 Royden Harrison, ‘From labour history to social history’, History, 60 (1975), pp. 236–239.
43 Alexander Hutton, ‘ “Culture and Society” in Conceptions of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, 1930–1965’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014, pp. 131–173, 207–310, passim.
44 Paul E. Johnson recalls its arrival at UCLA in the late 1960s; it proclaimed ‘a “History from the Bottom Up” that ultimately engulfed traditional history and, somehow, helped to make a Better World’. Paul E. Johnson, ‘Reflections. Looking back at social history’, Reviews in American History, 39:2 (2011), pp. 379–388. The US Journal of Social History was founded in 1967.
45 Frank Kermode, History and Value. The Clarendon Lectures and the Northcliffe Lectures 1987, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988, pp. 42–62.
46 Kermode, History and Value, p. 21. Writing of his father’s generation, Matthew Spender describes this structure of feeling very well: ‘My father thought that the working class possessed a secret which had been eradicated from the bourgeoisie …’. A House in St John’s Wood. In Search of my Parents (2015), William Collins, London, 2016, pp. 24–27.
47 Kermode, History and Value, pp. 48–49.
48 Louis MacNeice, ‘Birmingham’, New Verse, 7 (February 1934), pp. 3–4.
49 E. P. Thompson, ‘Preface’, The Making, p. 12.
50 Bishopsgate Institute, London, History Workshop, 7/43, Session Report; History Workshop Audio Collection RS062b; Jacques Rancière, ‘ “Le Social”. The Lost Tradition in French Labour History’, Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981, pp. 267–272.
51 He described work that would appear in La Nuit des prolétaires: archives du rêve ouvrier, Fayard, Paris, 1981; The Nights of Labor. The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury, intro. Donald Reid, Temple University Press, Philadelphia PA, 1989.
52 Rancière, ‘ “Le Social” ’, p. 272.
53 Annie Ernaux, La place, Gallimard, Paris, 1993; Carolyn Steedman, ‘Reading Rancière’, Oliver Davis (ed.), Rancière Now, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 69–84.
54 The project of recovery was proclaimed in E. P. Thompson’s Preface to The Making of the English Working Class: ‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan … from the enormous condescension of posterity.’
55 Leora Auslander, ‘Archiving a Life: Post-Shoah Paradoxes of Memory Legacies’, Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdtke (eds), Unsettling History. Archiving and Narrating in Historiography, Campus Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main (distributed University of Chicago Press), 2010, pp. 127–148.
56 Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, A. Millar, London, A. Kincaid & J. Bell, Edinburgh, 1759, pp. 12–25. For ‘social suffering’, Pierre Bourdieu, La Misère du Monde, Seuil, Paris, 1993, trans. The Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999; Simon J. Charlesworth, A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.
57 Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment. Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2000, passim, but esp. pp. 14–18.
58 (G. H. Lewes), ‘State of historical science in France’, British and Foreign Review; or, European Quarterly Journal, 16 (1844), pp. 72–118.
59 Lewes, ‘Historical science’, pp. 109–110.
60 See the 21st International Congress of the Historical Sciences (Amsterdam, August 2010), Panel on ‘Who Owns History? (esp. Anton de Baets, ‘Posthumous Privacy’), and Panel on ‘The Rights of the Dead’, www.ichs2010.org/home.asp (accessed 16 October 2017).
61 Daniel William Cohen, ‘Memories of Things Future: Future Effects in “The Production of History” ’, Jobs and Lüdtke, Unsettling History, pp. 29–49; quote p. 43.
62 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992, p. 4, 25–26; Apologie pour l’histoire; ou, Métier d’historien, Librairie Armand Colin, Paris, 1949.
63 Andrew Thacker, ‘Auden and the Little Magazines’, Tony Sharpe (ed.), W. H. Auden in Context, pp. 337–346; Matthew Philpotts, ‘Defining the Thick Journal. Periodical Codes and Common Habitus’, https://seeeps.princeton.edu/files/2015/03/mla2013_philpotts.pdf (accessed 16 October 2017); ‘The role of the periodical editor. Literary journals and editorial habitus’, Modern Language Review, 107:1 (2012), pp. 39–337.
64 The quote is from Shelley’s ‘Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats’ (1821): ‘he is gather’d to the kings of thought/Who wag’d contention with their time’s decay,/And of the past are all that cannot pass away’.
65 ‘Kierkergaard. Selected and Introduced by W. H. Auden’ [Cassell, London, 1955], London Magazine, 2:9 (1955), pp. 88–92. This was the UK version of The Living Thoughts of Kierkergaard, D. McKay, New York NY, 1952.
66 W. H. Auden, ‘Appendix II Reported Lectures. Poetry and Film’, Prose Volume I. 1926–1938, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Faber and Faber, London, 1996, pp. 712–714. Lecture delivered 7 February 1936 to North London Film Society at the YMCA Tottenham Court Road; orig. Janus, May 1936.
67 W. H. Auden, ‘Mystic – and Prophet’, Prose Volume II, pp. 337–339. Review of J. Bronowski, A Man Without a Mask, New York Times Book Review, 14 December 1947.
68 ‘The Americans, on the other hand, like to pretend that what was only a successful war of secession was a genuine revolution.’ W. H. Auden, ‘American Poetry’, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, Faber and Faber, London, 1963, pp. 354–368.
69 W. H. Auden, ‘Authority in America’, Prose Volume III, pp. 521–527; review of Fiedler, An End to Innocence, The Griffin, March 1955.
70 W. H. Auden, ‘Stimulating Scholarship’, Prose Volume IV. 1956–1962, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2010, pp. 6–12, ‘O Lovely England’, review of C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, The Griffin, March (1956).
71 W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction to Italian Journey by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’, Prose Volume IV, pp. 324–333; orig. Encounter, November (1962).
72 This is the founding thesis of Collingwood’s The Idea of History (1946), expressed in the idea that ‘all history is the history of thought’. But there is no indication that Auden read this book.
73 Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 141–142; Robert W. Cox, Universal Foreigner. The Individual and the World, World Scientific Publishing, London, Singapore and New York NY, 2013, p. 316.