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
Epilogue: Froude's Revenge
- 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
Thus historians are between Scylla and Charybodis, to use a novel phrase. They jump, like Mr. Froude, into a sea of MSS and bring up a book of absorbing interest – a pearl, but a bizarre pearl, like those cunningly set in gold by the artists of the Renaissance. Or they pour over their work with a patent double-million magnifying pair of spectacles, and never produce anything worth looking at. Of the two maladies give me Froude's disease. Measles is better than paralysis.
Andrew Lang, ‘History as She Ought to be Wrote’ (1899)Even though there is clear evidence that art was once again becoming an instrument of the English historian's toolkit, and in the pages of the specialized English Historical Review no less, the profession continued its boundary work against Froude with varying degrees of success, though ending in ultimate failure. The same could certainly not be said for Henry Thomas Buckle whose presence disappeared from the discipline of history in England almost as soon as the man died of typhoid in 1862. But the violence against Froude's work spanned his entire adult life, continuing into the 1890s and even beyond. His work and method would eventually be vindicated but only well after he passed away when the work of his great scientific contemporaries began to be judged from more critical eyes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Science of History in Victorian BritainMaking the Past Speak, pp. 153 - 164Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014