In the introduction to The Long Revolution, published in 1961, Raymond Williams made, almost in passing, a striking claim. ‘There is’, he declared, ‘no academic subject within which the questions I am interested in can be followed through; I hope one day there might be’. In context, his claim was both apologetic and reproachful. He was acknowledging that he had drawn upon work from several fields, fields in which his own expertise was necessarily limited, and that in so doing he had gone, as he put it, ‘well beyond the limits of any kind of academic prudence’. But the questions he was addressing were important; he maintained that the response to his earlier book, Culture and Society, demonstrated that ‘the pressure of these questions was not only personal but general’.1 By implication, therefore, the real failing lay in the current state of academic disciplines: anyone attempting to ‘follow through’ the questions Williams was raising about the nature and development of culture would, it is suggested, encounter an absence or gap. In that earlier book, Williams had famously focused on culture as ‘a whole way of life’, and in The Long Revolution he expanded this remit to take in what he now described as ‘cultural history’, defined as the study of ‘relationships between elements in a whole way of life’. Williams proposed this as a new synthesizing enterprise, constituting ‘more than a department, a special area of change’, embracing the interaction of the main ‘systems’ that compose the ‘general organization’ of society.
A recurring feature of the writings by literary critics examined in the previous chapters is their frequent invocation of something they tend to call ‘cultural history’. This most often seems to refer to an aspiration, a desire for a kind of understanding of the lived experience of the past that, it was claimed, was not provided by professional historians. We have already encountered other examples, beginning with a passage quoted in Chapter 2 where, in 1933, Leavis and Thompson were recommending how the theme of ‘Culture and Environment’ might be taught and how pupils’ awareness of change could be educated. The principal authorities they cited were not works of history but Bunyan and Sturt, and then they added this disconcerting rider, quoted in that chapter: ‘Obviously, too, in the teaching of cultural history a historian would be able to co-operate, though he would have to be energetic as well as intelligent, for his formal historical training would not have helped him much, and there are few useful books.’2 As I observed earlier, it is revealing that, although the subject to be taught is ‘cultural history’, the most ‘a historian’ is expected, perhaps allowed, to do is to ‘cooperate’; literary critics are clearly to be the principal practitioners of this subject.
A couple of years later, writing about English poetry in the seventeenth century, Leavis observed: ‘A serious attempt to account for the “dissociation of sensibility” would turn into a discussion of the great change that came over English civilization in the seventeenth century … ’. This attempt would embrace ‘intellectual and cultural history in general—a great and complex variety of considerations would be involved’.3 As I remarked in my earlier discussion, his sustained use of the conditional here sufficiently indicates Leavis’s conviction that no mere historians had thus far attempted this task. ‘Intellectual and cultural history in general’: that is what ‘would’ be involved, though it seems that it is literary critics who are most likely to provide it. L. C. Knights, writing two years later about ‘Shakespeare and profit-inflations’, reiterated a similar plea: ‘Cultural history of the kind desiderated’, he announced, ‘still remains to be written. It will not be—need I say?—a “literary” history, and the literary critic who undertakes it will need to submit to a strenuous extra-literary discipline—including the discipline of grappling with “the materialist interpretation of history”.’4 Here, some twenty-five years before Williams’s comparable remark, ‘cultural history’ is again projected into the future as a discipline that is yet to be constituted. Moreover, Knights clearly specifies that, although this will not be mere ‘literary history’, it will be written by ‘literary critics’, albeit critics also schooled in ‘a strenuous extra-literary discipline’.
When, a few years later still, Knights addressed the question of ‘the university teaching of English and History’ under the heading of ‘A Plea for Correlation’, his twin premises were, first, that a university education ought to prepare people to think about ‘the quality of life’ in society, particularly whether it was improving or declining; and, second, that literary criticism deals with questions of ‘value’ in a way that history does not. His conclusion is that, as he put it, ‘some degree of critical ability is indispensable to the historian of culture’. The evaluative role of ‘the historian of culture’ appears unproblematic here, and, although it may at first sound like a role for historians, the clear implication, again, is that it will at present be filled only by a certain kind of literary critic. Moreover, Knights’s illustration of what might be achieved by such an approach revealed some rather more specific historical assumptions. Proposing that the critic can illuminate a period by attending to ‘the evidence of style and language’, he itemizes: ‘the vivid, idiomatic raciness of Elizabethan English, the “polite reasonableness” of Augustan prose, the increasingly “literary” language of most nineteenth-century poetry, the debased idiom of the modern newspaper’.5 Not only is the trajectory unmistakably downhill, but these are oddly incommensurable units—why compare great literature of the past to the modern newspaper, why represent the nineteenth century exclusively by poetry, and so on? These four (ostensibly historical) characterizations make sense only as touchstones of the post-Eliotic, Leavis-inflected version of cultural decline. They certainly do not permit the telling of a story of, say, increasing diversity and sophistication of language use over these centuries.
William Empson, as we have seen, did not share the Scrutiny circle’s declinist assumptions, but he, too, writing subjunctively in 1951, imagined (in a sentence quoted earlier) a similar discipline or subdiscipline into being through the agency of the literary critic: ‘I should think indeed’, he wrote, ‘that a profound enough criticism could extract an entire cultural history from a simple lyric’.6 Characteristically, Empson does not sound too exercised by this possibility, though for all its off-hand tone the remark indicates a confidence that the right kind of literary criticism could achieve something beyond the reach of mere historians—namely, to generate ‘an entire cultural history’. Although Williams’s version of these claims was, characteristically, more programmatic, it was certainly not new.
A pattern of this kind, once detected, calls for general or structural rather than merely individual explanations. Lurking in and behind these declarations was an aspiration to arrive at an understanding of the lived experience of the past, something it was felt that conventional professional history did not do, perhaps even could not do. At the time, the term ‘cultural history’ was used rather sparingly by academic historians in Britain, who tended to see it as an alien import—perhaps as part of the brilliant but unsound impressionism of the likes of Burckhardt or Huizinga or the Kulturgeschichte of theory-inebriated Germans. But a wider reading public, unconcerned by matters of classification or academic turf wars, eagerly sought pattern and significance in accounts of the past, and in decades during which, as I have indicated, literary criticism enjoyed an unprecedented intellectual prominence, the various historical schemas assumed or implied by works of criticism came to be influential.
One framework within which to address this theme is provided by the wider narrative of disciplinary formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have already alluded more than once to the well-documented story of how the partial and uneven professionalization of history in the second half of the nineteenth century, largely but not entirely within the universities, brought together elements of German historicism, ideals of scientific accuracy and disinterestedness, and an inherited focus on the political, administrative, diplomatic, and legal machinery of the state. Late-nineteenth-century literary history may have focused on different material, but similar methodological protocols applied. Judgements about the ‘quality of life’ in a society were not part of serious scholarship. What historians of criticism sometimes call ‘the critical revolution’ of the 1920s and 1930s introduced a different note into what became the most fashionable style in academic criticism—more urgent and intense, more discriminating and evaluative, and, most relevantly here, more imperial and more comprehensive. When literature is approached as the most distilled or intense expression of life, it easily comes to serve as an index of human flourishing in whole societies. This encouraged what we might call a qualitative history of experience. If literature provided the most intense expression of lived experience, then the critic became the accredited assessor of the quality of life revealed by different moments in literary history.
This intimacy between literary criticism and ‘experience’, and the consequent attempt to compare and evaluate forms of experience across the generations and centuries, was bound to incite a certain level of disciplinary conflict, and we can see this playing itself out in various episodes of mid-twentieth-century intellectual history that are well known in themselves but that tend not to be analysed in these terms. But let me begin with an obscure, indeed almost entirely neglected, episode in which the tensions came to the surface. A special summer course on ‘Literature in Relation to History’ was held for Oxford Delegacy extra-mural tutors in literature and history in Hertford College in July 1950, with Raymond Williams as Director of Studies. The course was focused on the years 1850–75, and distinguished figures from both disciplines lectured for it, including, from the history side, Asa Briggs, Raymond Postgate, G. M. Young, and, less predictably, F. M. Powicke. But, as Williams’s somewhat pained report on the course makes clear, the attempt at conjoining the two disciplines was far from successful. Williams took exception, in particular, to the way in which the historians appeared to treat literature simply as an inferior or unreliable kind of historical evidence, and this led him to voice a more general complaint about the practice of professional historians:
I had thought that the study of dates and treaties and constitutions was now more widely recognized as only a part … of the general study of human actions in time. I had assumed that historians would be naturally interested in an account of the nature and quality, at any given time, of specific, though unpolitical, human experience; or of the particular workings of social institutions; or of the effect of economic change upon differentiated individual persons, as well as upon a class. … The fact that experience, including social experience, had been shaped and assessed by the workings of an imaginative consciousness did not seem to me to make it any less important than experience which had passed through the statistical or generalizing process of the historical record.
This is at once an expression of disappointment, a rebuke to professional narrowness, and a manifesto for the kind of historical illumination that might be derived from literature. Williams went on to restate the by-then familiar case for reading literature as literature, the imaginative realization of human experience expressed in a unique sequence of words, and not as a piece of substandard documentary evidence. And, in a way that clearly signalled the direction of much of his future work, Williams emphasized the importance of studying changes in language:
The change and continuity of a language, often seen most clearly in its use in literature, forms a record of vitally important changes and developments in human personality. It is as much the record of the history of a people as political institutions and religions and philosophical modes. Of all the evidence which literature can contribute to the study of human affairs, this evidence of language is perhaps most important.7
Williams’s report sparked a small debate in adult education circles that made clear he was not alone in his sense of the asymmetry between the disciplines of History and English in terms of their openness and their ambition.
He and his literary colleagues clearly had their own axes to grind, but in the early 1950s their strictures may not have been wholly groundless. To take a minor but relevantly local example, Jose Harris, writing in the large multi-volume history of Oxford University, made a not dissimilar point about a kind of narrowness in the Modern History school at this time: ‘The review section of the Oxford Magazine in 1954 welcomed a monograph on the late Lancastrian receipt of the Exchequer as a “major event”, but dismissed current interest in American history as a “fashionable craze”.’ Broadening the point, she observed: ‘Most Oxford historians at the start of the period [sc. 1939] laid great emphasis on impartiality and precise archival accuracy.’ These attitudes ‘were not infrequently the complement of parochialism and philistinism—and lack of interest in philosophic, intellectual and aesthetic history, and of indifference or resistance to the relationship of history to archaeology, anthropology, psychology and the new social sciences’.8
Where such attitudes dominated—they were not universal, needless to say—there was clearly some room for more wide-ranging enquiries into the history of human experience, especially, it might be said, enquiries that addressed the concerns of non-specialist readers. In 1939 one observer could casually refer, without apparent fear of contradiction, to ‘the fact that during the past fifty years historians have written primarily for specialists rather than for the general public’, and he regretted ‘the scarcity of good historical writing’. He went on: ‘The ideal of scientific objectivity … and the consequent retreat by historians into the laboratory left a vacuum which has been filled by journalists, propagandists, and charlatans.’9 Literary critics, too, were prominent among the miscellaneous types who came forward to fill the void, though perhaps it is hardly surprising, given that he was writing in Scrutiny, that he did not choose to add ‘literary critics’ to a list containing ‘propagandists and charlatans’.
One can see somewhat similar disciplinary tensions working themselves out in the response by a literary critic to the publication in 1951 by C. V. Wedgwood, one of the few undeniably popular historians in the middle decades of the century, of a volume in the Home University Library series entitled Seventeenth-Century English Literature. Leavis, writing to one of his regular reviewing lieutenants, R. G. Cox, asked: ‘Have you noticed what a portent the Wedgwood creature has become on the strength of being established by Bloomsbury? She’s now an authority, not merely on seventeenth-century, but on contemporary literature: she holds forth on air, and recommends Good-Houskeeping-like jejune stuff as subtle and profound art … Clearly a firm and astringent note is wanted.’10 Cox duly complied. In his review of Wedgwood that appeared in Scrutiny later that year, he tartly upbraided the author for failing to take the opportunity provided by a contribution to the Home University Library series ‘to bring to the notice of a wider audience of students and general readers the remarkable interest and enthusiasm this literature has commanded during the last thirty years, to make available the results of something like a revolution in taste, and to exemplify the new critical principles and methods which have accompanied it’. Wedgwood’s failure to have adequately imbibed the milk of the Eliotic word, as pasteurized by Leavis and Scrutiny, is then demonstrated at some length. Wedgwood, it is conceded, knows a lot about the history of the period, but she lacks ‘the critic’s power to distinguish sharply between the living and the dead and to enforce his judgements by convincing analysis’. (The use of ‘enforce’ in such a context is one of the minor tics of the Leavisian style; the use of the awkward masculine possessive might now be seen as part of a wider cultural deformation.) Cox ends, again in characteristic Scrutiny manner, by taking Wedgwood’s volume as an indication of a larger problem:
In healthier cultural epochs it is probable that things were different, but today the fluent expression of the opinions of an average cultivated reader, whatever specialist knowledge may be super-added, is just not sufficient for a task of this kind. One cannot help wondering how the academic historians would have received a work in this series on a historical subject by a writer who was primarily a literary critic.11
Scrutiny may have criticized unsparingly the ‘academicism’ of orthodox literary scholarship, but it was not about to allow the fashionable amateur to supplant those trained in the ‘discipline’ of literary criticism. However, the irony surely is that the clinching reversal of roles that Cox hypothesizes in his final sentence was precisely what had become common in the years covered here. Works on ‘historical subjects’ by those who were primarily literary critics were far from rare, and the response of the ‘academic historians’ was, by and large, to ignore them entirely.
One emblematic way to indicate the traditional version of the division of labour between general history and literary history would be to compare the character and remit of the most authoritative or influential series of such histories produced in this period. The Cambridge Modern History and the Cambridge History of English Literature, both originally products of the two decades before 1914, were strongly marked by a confident positivism, even though the material covered in their respective volumes revealed remarkably little substantive overlap. A comparison of the fourteen volumes in the original Oxford History of England series that appeared between 1934 and 1961 with the rather more ragged Oxford History of English Literature, conceived in 1935 and of which fifteen volumes were published between 1945 and, somewhat embarrassingly, 1997, would reveal some diminution in the confident evolutionary form of positivism that had governed the Cambridge volumes, but the division of the territory was relatively little changed. In the history volumes, literature, where it is treated at all, tends to appear in a rather dutiful final chapter, either on its own account or as part of a larger survey of the arts and cultural life, whereas in the literary volumes general history, in so far as it makes any separate appearance, is assumed to provide the relevant setting or context. An example of the former, dealing with the period at the heart of the developments I have been discussing, is provided by Godfrey Davies’s volume in the history of England, The Early Stuarts 1603–1660, published in 1937. (Despite the patina of official neutrality attaching to such series, the seventeenth century seems to have retained its power to divide historical opinion. As late as 1956, Christopher Hill declared: ‘It is noteworthy that in the Oxford and the Penguin Histories of England the volumes dealing with this period are among the least satisfactory in the series.’12) Davies’s volume has a final chapter on ‘Literature’, though here the term is still used in the older sense, which embraces political thought, historiography, and so on. Perhaps not surprisingly, the chapter seems entirely innocent of the work and ideas of Eliot, Leavis, or Knights. The traditional division of territory partly expressed the demands of different professional communities, partly publishers’ views of the needs of particular readerships, but clearly the two kinds of ‘additional’ chapters also represented different assumptions about the causal or explanatory role of their respective subject matters. There were, however, signs that the limitations of the assumptions governing the original CMH were coming to be acknowledged by the middle of the century. In the prospectus for the New Cambridge Modern History, G. N. Clark and Herbert Butterfield declared in 1945: ‘The accepted idea of general history has changed. In the first place some branches of the subject will require fuller and more continuous treatment, especially economic and social matters and the history of literature, thought and religion.’13 (Although Clark had made a similar plea in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor at Cambridge the previous year, it had not been something he emphasized when planning the Oxford History of England volumes in 1929.14)
By the 1950s it was similarly coming to be recognized that the conventional literary histories were old-fashioned—they tended, as was said of George Saintsbury’s Short History of English Literature, to ‘resemble a well-tended graveyard of noble monuments’15—and that they needed to be replaced by an enterprise that reflected the newer critical practices that had come to the fore since the 1920s and 1930s. One of the less bright ideas briefly entertained by Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, in the early 1950s was that of reprinting the Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, compiled by George Sampson in 1941. This had attempted to condense the original fifteen volumes of the Cambridge history published between 1907 and 1916 into a thousand pages, and it represented all that was characteristic of traditional literary history as well as all that was alien to the Penguin ideal—it was comprehensive, dull, not easily portable, and almost unreadable. Fortunately, Lane’s chief adviser, W. E. Williams, steered him away from this idea towards a specially commissioned series.16 The Pelican Guide to English Literature, published in seven volumes between 1954 and 1961, became one of Penguin’s minor commercial successes, although it is worth remarking that it sold poorly in the United States. However, it has not been recognized, I think, how far the Pelican Guide provided, for a very wide audience in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and beyond, what amounted to almost a covert interpretation of English social, cultural, and intellectual history—and my use of ‘Britain’ to designate the market for the volumes but ‘England’ to refer to their historical interpretation reflects the realities. The volumes’ historical function was touched on in the proposal for the series that its general editor, Boris Ford, wrote for Penguin, where he asserted that the Guide would not be
another History of English Literature. Yet at the same time it must be an historical work and not simply a series of introductions to great writers. The critical sorting and placing is intended to establish a pattern of significances, to elucidate the nature of the literary tradition, and to suggest the relations of literature to social forms and the more inclusive intellectual traditions of this country.17
The series was certainly ‘an historical work’, but of a peculiar kind.
One can detect early signs of the eventual character of the Guide in a review that Ford wrote in 1941 of Sampson’s one-volume condensation of the old Cambridge History. Ford made some predictable points about the datedness of the CHEL and the need for a more fashionably ‘critical’ approach. But in the final paragraph he called for something rather different: ‘And finally the time has come for a history of English society at its margin of contact with English literature.’18 Quite what this would mean is not immediately apparent. A ‘history of English society’ sounds familiar enough, suggesting some kind of systematic social history or history of social structure rather than the kinds of political and constitutional history to which professional historians had mostly devoted their energies for the previous half century. But ‘at its margin of contact with English literature’ suggests that the criteria for selection of what might be included in such a social history, and perhaps the sequence and manner of its presentation, would be determined by focusing initially on the literary works that were to be interpreted in the light of such history.
This construal is encouraged by his examples, as in the following interesting list:
What one needs is a history which could supply one with the material necessary to an understanding of, for instance, [Ben] Jonson’s satire, of the emergence of modern English prose, of Jane Austen’s assurance—in short the kind of information that is lacking so patently when Mr Sampson describes George Sturt as a ‘faithful interpreter of southern English village life’.19
The three illustrations of what is needed conjure up three rather different enterprises: a relatively straightforward history of the social types and social debates of early Jacobean England might assist the understanding of Jonson’s satires, but what would similarly illuminate ‘the emergence of modern English prose’? That the phrase could be used as though it referred to a known and accepted moment in the history of English writing may just indicate the standing of a post-Eliotic orthodoxy about the Royal Society-influenced prose style of the Restoration, but, even so, the history involved here would be of a radically different type—perhaps an intellectual history of philosophical presuppositions or religious ideals as much as a history of the development of science and of the rise and decline of Puritanism.
And what kind of history might contribute to an understanding of ‘Jane Austen’s assurance’? One suspects that Ford is here not simply implying that an elaboration of the social and economic position of the class to which Austen’s family belonged would help account for her social confidence and her opportunities as a writer, but, rather, that the right kind of delineation of late-Augustan moral attitudes would give insight into the working of a widely shared socio-ethical code, which Austen could presume without having to defend. The implied criticism of Sampson’s reference to Sturt involved not just the reclaiming of a Scrutiny touchstone, but an insistence that the critic or historian must be alive to questions about the quality of experience in any given setting. Sampson’s phrase, Ford implies, fails to grasp the diagnostic or elegiac character of Sturt’s writing and correspondingly fails to understand the significance of the changes in social experience that he is describing. Sampson is thus charged with treating Sturt as a celebrant of rural life when he was, according to Ford (drawing, of course, on a Leavisian orthodoxy by this date), writing about changes in English society rather more in the style in which the Lynds had written about ‘Middletown’. It is hard to see what kind of history would ‘correct’ such a misreading unless it were one already infused with a belief in the decline of the quality of living in the contemporary world.
Attempting to illustrate further what is needed, Ford invokes ‘something of the kind supplied by L. C. Knights in relation to Jonson or (if it had a more specifically literary reference) by Basil Willey in his two books’, though even these two exemplars are notably different, as we saw in Chapter 3. But was there an existing example of the kind of historical work that would contribute to an understanding of ‘Jane Austen’s assurance’? It sounds rather like a version of Leslie Stephen’s Ford Lectures but rewritten by Queenie Leavis. In any event, Boris Ford’s clear implication was that none of the types of history he was calling for—forms of cultural-intellectual-social history directed to illuminating the literature of a period—seemed likely to be forthcoming from professional historians at the time, or even recognized by them as ‘history’.
What may at first not be obvious when one encounters the familiar blue-liveried volumes of the Pelican Guide, now so plentiful on the shelves of second-hand bookshops, is how the very conception of the series depended on a contrast with orthodox literary history. As Ford wrote in his general introduction, reproduced in each volume: ‘the Guide does not set out to compete with the standard Histories of Literature. … This is not a Bradshaw or a Whitaker’s Almanac of English Literature. Nor is it a digest or potted-version, nor again a portrait-gallery of the Great. Works such as these already abound and there is no need to add to their number.’20 Even if we allow Ford an element of dismissive hyperbole here, this does capture an important aspect of orthodox literary history when viewed critically: the enumeration of facts about literature could all too easily subside into a compendium resembling a reference book or timetable. And yet the contemporary reader was in need of some guide to what Ford had called ‘the living tradition’ of English literature, an elusive entity that inevitably came to function as a kind of ersatz cultural history.
At the same time, there was the obligation to characterize and account for the specificity of each period, so every volume would begin with two more general historical chapters. These chapters, as Ford explained in his introduction, would provide ‘an account of the social context of literature in each period’, offering, in a phrase that echoed his own prescription from thirteen years earlier, ‘an account of contemporary society at its points of contact with literature’. Once again, we are plunged into the ambiguities of ‘context’, ‘background’, ‘setting’, and so on, a diverse series of attempts to write a form of selective history that could stretch out a welcoming hand to the analysis of writers and texts that is advancing to meet it. These chapters, Ford continued, would address such questions as ‘Why did the literature of this period deal with this rather than that kind of problem?’ ‘What factors tended to encourage the play rather than the novel, prose rather than verse, in this period?’ ‘What was the relationship between writer and public?’ ‘What was the reading public like in its tastes and make-up?’21 One, perhaps rather oblique, thing to be said about this is that these are not questions that appear to grow principally out of an engagement with a Marxist interpretation (in the way that was clearly true of some comparable preoccupations in Leavis and Knights and others in the 1930s). The first question suggests a rather low-level form of ‘context’: simply identifying certain themes as expressive of contemporary society (for example, that literature in the Jacobean period engages with the question of Puritanism in a way that literature in the early eighteenth century did not have to, and so on). The second is a more probing kind of context: at its lowest it is to do with the market and the means of reaching it; more ambitiously, it might be trying to identify some homology between literary genres and forms of social life (as, say, Lukacs was doing at roughly the same time but in a totally different idiom). The last two questions are about the reading public, and this is clearly the central thematic concern. The two opening chapters of each volume were, therefore, attempting to serve several purposes simultaneously, with the result that they exhibit a curious unsteadiness—they do not read like chapters from a history textbook yet they do offer a general if partial interpretation of the period in question. Moreover, as Ford’s introduction goes on, it makes almost embarrassingly clear that the whole venture had a kind of cultural criticism built into it: he presents the series as an antidote to what L. H. Myers is quoted as calling ‘the deep-seated spiritual vulgarity that lies at the heart of our civilization’.22 Literature, at least literature of the right kind or read in the right way, is once again being prescribed as an antidote to the failings of ‘modernity’.
Both the historical unsteadiness of these introductory chapters and their inherently polemical character emerges most strikingly in G. H. Bantock’s contribution on ‘The Social and Intellectual Background’ in the final volume of the series, The Modern Age, published in 1961. Bantock was by this point recognized as one of the most uncompromising champions of the anti-progressive strain in Scrutiny’s cultural criticism, and it is revealing to see how the neutral category of ‘background’ could be aligned with the expression of this perspective. ‘Rarely, indeed, can there have been a time when “background” more readily obtrudes as an essential part of foreground’, he remarked, gesturing towards both the seismic events of the twentieth century up to that date and the heightened capacity of society to shape individual experience. In practice, the elements Bantock treated as ‘background’ were heterogeneous: discussion of patterns of employment, the decline of agriculture, and the shifting alignment of political parties are juxtaposed to brisk accounts of the work of influential writers, philosophers, and social critics. It cannot even be said that ‘background’ signifies everything that is not literature, since figures such as Lawrence, Forster, and Woolf are among the most frequently cited witnesses, importing an element of circularity into his diagnosis of ‘the writer’s predicament’. Bantock acknowledges that ‘the complexities of assessing the relative movements of a whole civilization’ are ‘immense’, but he proceeds on the premise that this is nonetheless what an introductory chapter in such a ‘guide’ should be doing. And his indictment of contemporary popular culture is premised on some familiar historical assumptions. Having inveighed against ‘the inane triviality’ of the programmes most people now enjoyed on radio and television, he hectored his readers about the standard of comparison: ‘And these, it is necessary to remind ourselves, are the “educated” and literate descendants of the people who produced the folk song and the folk tale, who built the parish churches and nourished Bunyan.’ There is a somewhat promiscuous quality to his historical allusions, which are united only by the reproach they are supposed to offer to the present, as when he goes on to say: ‘Today there is none of that interpenetration of artistic, social, and political life that characterized the Augustan age.’ In concluding, he explicitly endorses Eliot’s diagnosis of ‘the dissociation of sensibility’, and he insists that ‘the role of the greatest writers, where intellect is suffused with emotion and emotion controlled by intelligence, points a way to “unity of being” ’.23 There may now seem to have been a dying fall to this analysis, as though its historical allusions must have seemed stale and its critical energies spent, yet its appearance in such a widely used volume meant that it was given a new lease of life for a readership in the 1960s unfamiliar with the originals of the ideas now embalmed in these phrases.
Inevitably, the introductory chapters in the volumes of the Pelican Guide are often representative of the understandings of history current among scholars of English literature, who, if they were of sufficient standing to be asked to write for these volumes in the mid- or late 1950s, mostly received their intellectual formation and early professional development in the 1930s and 1940s. This meant, as the chapters’ footnotes reveal, extending the life of certain works of history that had been important thirty or forty years earlier. Several of Trevelyan’s books are hardy perennials; Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism from 1926 makes frequent appearances; and a further boost was given to the already remarkable longevity of Beljame’s book, now translated as The Public and Men of Letters, though first published as long ago as 1881. In this way, the Guide became one of the main conduits for transmitting the ideas I have discussed in previous chapters to a new generation of readers, including—for they were a notable element of the series’s readership—students in the expanding higher-education system of the 1960s and 1970s. Individual volumes were selling over 20,000 copies a year in the UK in the late 1960s, and were mostly reprinted annually through the 1970s. By contrast, in-house reports showed each volume to be selling no more than 3,000–4,000 a year in the USA by the mid-1960s. As one of Penguin’s New York staff reported, ‘the reps tell me that the books are not well thought of in most departments of English, that the critical point of view is badly out of date’. A report commissioned from an American academic condemned the series as not professional enough to appeal to academics and graduate students: ‘The whole tone is that of the facile amateur.’24
As Chris Hilliard has recently pointed out, some of the views originally associated with Scrutiny are reproduced in the volumes of the Guide but without what he calls the ‘performative force’ of the originals.25 But this point can also be reversed to emphasize how such interpretations were represented as no longer being insurgent or sectarian but, rather, the accepted coin of literary studies—indeed, as the established fruits of critical-historical scholarship, a curious outcome given that these interpretations had initially been defined by their repudiation of all existing forms of historical scholarship. For example, the opening chapter to the volume on ‘The Age of Shakespeare’ by the Cambridge critic Leo Salingar distilled a good deal of social and intellectual history, but subordinated this to its overall contention that by the end of the period a damaging divorce between polite and popular culture had taken place. In other ways, too, the Guide often communicates a sense of decline, sometimes because of a nostalgia for the allegedly more settled communities of the past, sometimes just because the celebration of earlier great writers tends to secrete a chastened feeling of having fallen from such heights. As a confidential report on the series commissioned by Penguin in 1977 put it, the contributors ‘tend to fall into rather routine lamentations against the modern world’.26 The appearance of this knowing weariness in a reader’s report in the later 1970s indicated just how decisively the heyday of such declinist literary-cultural history had, by that date, passed.
The Pelican Guide was by no means representative of English studies as a whole at the time, but one can see some of the same dynamics around a literary interpretation of cultural history at work in other minor subdisciplinary developments in the 1940s and 1950s, though without the same overarching cultural pessimism. For example, the beginnings of what came to be called ‘Victorian Studies’ can be traced to scholarship emanating from English departments, both in Britain and in the USA. It drew particularly on a series of influential works by John Holloway, Walter Houghton, Jerome Buckley, and Basil Willey concentrating on the intellectual life of Victorian Britain, though even here there could be a form of nostalgia at work. As Basil Willey, the most conservative of these writers, put it in 1949: ‘In our own unpleasant century we are mostly displaced persons, and many feel tempted to take flight into the nineteenth as into a promised land.’27 It may also be relevant to note that G. M. Young’s sepia-tinted Portrait of an Age (1936) sold much better in the 1950s and 1960s than ever it had done in the first decade or more of its life, and in 1960 it was chosen to be one of the first of Oxford University Press’s new paperbacks, going through seven paperback editions by 1973.28 Looking back to the early years of the transformation of this interest into a thriving subdiscipline, Michael Wolff, who played something of a founding role in this development, recalled: ‘The word “culture” was not then used as pervasively as it now is, though I had often spoken of what we were doing in Victorian studies as “cultural history”.’29 ‘We’, it should be noted, were overwhelmingly not historians. Much of the empirical groundwork for the new field was done by literary scholars interested in the history of periodicals and of reading more generally, such as Houghton or Richard Altick. As a later assessment put it: ‘While literary studies has been the dominant partner within the Victorian studies project, cultural history has been its preferred methodology.’30 Cultural history thus conceived was later to have its closest affinities with cultural studies, not with other branches of history.
A more prominent and more contested instance can be cited to underline the general point. It may seem that there is nothing further to be said about the notorious ‘Two Cultures’ controversy of the late 1950s and early 1960s. But even this overworked episode can be illuminated by recovering the clash between the imperial claims of a certain style of literary history and the sense of proprietorial entitlement among professional historians. Leavis had always been uncompromisingly clear about the value of the contributions to understanding to be expected from these quarters. ‘It is the great novelists above all who give us our social history; compared with what is done in their work—their creative work—the histories of the professional social historian seem empty and unenlightening.’31 This is the most high-toned, or even high-handed, version of the case, not helped by the fact that one is bound to wonder how much work by professional social historians since Trevelyan Leavis had actually read. After Leavis’s notorious attack on Snow in 1962—which included the charge that ‘He knows nothing of history’—the social and economic historians saw an opportunity to strike back.32 Snow’s close friend J. H. Plumb led the charge in confronting Leavis’s account of the past, especially of the Industrial Revolution, with the findings of current historical scholarship, and the correspondence between Plumb and Snow reveals their concerted campaign to bring the artillery of professional historical scholarship to bear on Leavis’s account of the past. In May 1962 Snow urged Plumb to give some radio talks ‘about the historical findings on the Industrial Revolution’ and asked for ‘some information about the most up-to-date historical treatment’. Several weeks later, when Snow asked for more ammunition, Plumb quickly reassured him: ‘We have a complete run of the Economic History Review.’33
As Snow insisted in his ‘The Two Cultures: A Second Look’, published in 1963: ‘It is important for the pre-industrial believers to confront the social historians.’34 Snow and Plumb agreed that the larger problem lay not just with Leavis but with the pernicious influence of the declinist view of history associated with literary critics more generally. As Plumb put it in a widely cited essay, antipathy to material progress had exercised a distorting power over literary and artistic representations of the past, adding pointedly: ‘It runs like dry rot through literary criticism.’35 Snow broadened the list of suspects to include E. P. Thompson, writing (in characteristic tones) to Plumb:
I’ve no doubt that you’ve got your eye on E. P. Thompson. He is a lapsed (or dissident or Trotskyist) Marxist: I’ve never known anyone of that provenance have any judgement of any kind. But some of your chaps ought to cope with him. Things are going our way on this front, and when you’ve got your enemies down it is a good old English rule to kick them in the teeth.36
Those who voiced reservations about the benefits of economic progress tended to be stigmatized by Snow’s supporters as ‘happy peasants’, longing for some organic society that never existed.37 As a result of these and other episodes, any attempt to vindicate the claims of the organic was, as John Fraser put it, ‘to lay oneself open to charges … of a major and reactionary misreading of cultural history’. And he went on, bearing out the comment by J. P. Cooper that I quoted in Chapter 1: ‘And for a while in the Fifties and Sixties, it was hard to pick up one of the higher weeklies without coming across some sarcastic reference to the organic community or “the old wheelwright’s shop”.’38 That counter-attack was largely successful: the next generation of literary scholars was less disposed to assert its dominion over the terrain of social and cultural history, while the more adventurous work of a new generation of professional historians in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated their claims to sovereignty over it.
This episode also raises larger questions about the political affiliation of certain forms of history during this period. In so far as the literary critics after Eliot found congenial authorities among contemporary historians, it tended to be those figures whose focus on, or incorporation of, forms of social history involved a serious radical purpose or critical estimate, such as the Hammonds, Tawney, and, later, Thompson. And it also tended to be the case that it was left-wing historians who were most drawn to using literary sources at a time when that was unfashionable among their professional colleagues. In the 1940s and 1950s, probably no academic historian of the seventeenth century wrote more about literature than Christopher Hill. According to one later estimate:
More than any other major historian of the seventeenth century, Hill values literature as an integral expression of English life. No-one else makes literary evidence so central to their interpretations; no one else so regularly reminds a generation fascinated with the inarticulate of those who read and wrote. Despite the modest nature of many of his texts, Hill is a historian of ideas and he has preserved intellectual history in a generation that has rejected more conventional intellectual historians.39
Similarly, Victor Kiernan and E. P. Thompson, both of whom studied English as undergraduates, wrote extensively on literary topics (Kiernan took a BA in English at Edinburgh; Thompson, taking advantage of the two-year degree available in wartime, took his BA in History and then spent his third year ‘working on Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and history … his first love was probably always literature, especially poetry and drama’).40 It would be an exaggeration to see this as amounting to a paradox, but there is at first sight the minor puzzle that a form of commentary that in the hands of the most prominent literary critics tended to be declinist, and thus to nourish conservative attitudes towards the past, proved fertile soil for more progressive readings of history. In so far as there is anything genuinely puzzling here, it can be largely explained away by the hostility to industrial capitalism that united cultural critics of Right and Left. But it was also the case that those who wanted answers to some of the most pressing questions about the meaning of the human past found scant encouragement in the work of mainstream academic historians in the half century before the 1960s. Where Leavis or Knights may have seen an essential opposition between literature and Marxism (at least as represented by the English Marxism of the 1930s), some of their more radically minded historical colleagues of the next generation found a kind of common ground in the sympathetic recovery of those forms of experience excluded or occluded by official records.
The frequent conjoining of the names of Hoggart and Williams in mid-century discussions of cultural criticism is a reminder that literary-critical forms of cultural history found a favourable institutional location in adult education in the 1940s and 1950s. This was a setting that encouraged an emphasis on the centrality of the Industrial Revolution, an episode widely understood as initiating the distinctively modern form of the exploitation of the working class or, indeed, the very formation of that class. And, of course, it was from this milieu that E. P. Thompson wrote The Making of the English Working Class, the classic account of that formation. The publication of that book in 1963, and the great boost it gave to a radical kind of social history in the next two decades, takes us into a changed world beyond my chosen period, though it is relevant that, as already noted, Thompson read a good deal of English criticism at Cambridge in the 1940s and was later the editor of an admiring new edition of that staple of Leavisian reading lists, Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop, where Thompson observed: ‘It is worth remembering that we owe the recognition of the book as a classic to literary critics rather than social historians, and historians should be grateful to literary critics for their percipience.’41 It would have to be said that the newly assertive social history of the 1960s and 1970s was not notable for its gratitude to literary critics of the previous two generations.42
The fact that Raymond Williams spent the formative years of his career as an adult-education tutor gave him a strong sense of audience and permanently marked his style. In later interviews and reflections he often spoke of trying to make ideas available to people who lacked much formal education, or of lending his authority to the task of liberating people from constraining or coercive ideas. Though at some level he also seemed to hanker after forms of academic recognition, his primary address was not to fellow-scholars, and this affected the initial reception of his work. As he wrote to his editor at Chatto, referring to the projected book that became Culture and Society: ‘I fight shy of pushing out an idea through a university press.’43 This applies particularly to The Long Revolution, published in 1961, which, although presented as a sequel to Culture and Society, was in reality a much more unorthodox book. Williams described it to his editor at Chatto as having ‘three parts—theoretical, historical, and critical—on the development of English culture’. The book was ‘not literary criticism, or only very partly so’, but rather ‘essays on the development of the reading public, the press, the educational system, and standard speech forms [taking] … certain key ideas—class, mobility, exile—in both literary and sociological terms, in what amounts to an attempt at a synoptic analysis of contemporary society’.44 One thing that emerges clearly from this description is that for Williams the historical material is a contribution to the analysis of contemporary society. The very conception of a ‘long revolution’ as something unfolding over time suggests that the project must be constitutively historical, and certainly the chapters in part two are potted histories. Yet the function of both parts one and two is essentially to dispose of obstructive or misconceived notions that might block or hamper a proper understanding of the present state of society, especially conservative arguments that claimed to see any form of democratic expansion as resulting in ‘declining standards’.
If it seems difficult now to take the measure of The Long Revolution as a book, that is partly just because the three sections into which it is divided are so strikingly heterogeneous, both in matter and, still more, in level of treatment. Part one discusses, in remorselessly abstract terms, concepts of creativity, culture, society, and so on. These give off a very strong sense of the autodidact theorist at work, piecing together from wide-ranging but somewhat random reading a Heath Robinson conceptual assemblage that aimed to replace the ‘outworn’ antithesis of ‘the individual and society’. Part two is made up of a series of empirical chapters on the history of several of the elements that compose what Williams saw as the third, cultural, prong of the ‘long revolution’ of his title—education, the ‘reading public’, the popular press, and so on. But to describe them as ‘empirical’, while it marks an obvious contrast with the chapters in part one, does not capture their curiously schematic quality. At one level, these chapters offer accounts of the history of their respective topics in the manner of a large-scale elementary textbook. Summaries of the development of, for example, education or the English language begin with a few brief remarks about the Middle Ages and then canter briskly down the centuries; the treatment is usually perfunctory until the nineteenth century is reached, and even then decades have to be skipped over or summed up in a phrase. But at another level the chapters have a strong argumentative drive that is somewhat at odds with their ‘empirical’ character: they are not so much condensed historical accounts as a series of rebuttals of an implicit counter-argument about ‘cultural decline’, a purpose that governs the selection and arrangement of what Williams liked to think of, in quasi-social-scientific terms, as ‘the historical data’.45 And then part three is quite different again, a polemic about some of the leading preoccupations of British culture at the beginning of the 1960s, emphasizing the obstacles to a properly socialist form of common culture. This part has some of the character of a free-standing pamphlet, including practical (though sometimes impracticable) policy proposals. Nor is the oddity of this part’s relation to the first two confined to the generic disparity; there is also a certain tension in the tenor of the main arguments of each, with parts one and, especially, two emphasizing the steady ‘advance’ or ‘growth’ in cultural enfranchisement, while part three concentrates on the fallacies of a bien-pensant narrative of progress given the constituent class antagonisms of capitalism.
Much of the intellectual energy of The Long Revolution is devoted to relativizing some of the common assumptions of cultural debate in Britain at the end of the 1950s. But, while Williams still, as in earlier works, treats the Industrial Revolution as the central determinant of the character of English society thereafter, it is noticeable that he here often projects a much longer perspective, tracing his mini-histories from the Middle Ages onwards. Arguments about ‘correct’ pronunciation of English or complaints about the ‘commercialization’ of the reading public or alarm at the rise of a ‘vulgar’ press are all shown to have a long and recurring history, in the light of which the supposed developments of the last generation or so no longer appear persuasive or decisive. Implicitly, these chapters are rebutting some of the conservative conclusions drawn from the Leavisite analysis, a position from which Williams is more clearly distant than he had been in Culture and Society.
How well these historical chapters connect with the central argument about a ‘long revolution’ is very variable. Roughly speaking, those that deal with some form of cultural enfranchisement of the working class connect well enough; those that chart the ‘sociology of a cultural form’ (such as drama or even the realist novel) do so much less well. The chapter on the social background of English writers could, at a large stretch, be taken to show that the dominance of a certain narrowly educated class is relatively recent, but even then it allows no encouraging, let alone triumphalist, conclusions to be drawn. It is not easy to decide who are the implied readers of these chapters: perhaps people who share Williams’s antipathy to conservative forms of the argument about ‘declining standards’ and who need to be supplied with brief digests of the relevant history? Yet the book seems to have made little impression on professional historians, in part, no doubt, because it was not easily legible as a work of history. Williams acknowledged, as we have seen, that he had ‘risked an extension and variety of themes well beyond the limits of any kind of academic prudence’, something that made many of the book’s individual sections vulnerable to expert criticism. As he reflected, perhaps a little ruefully, three years after its publication: ‘if the connexions I make and try to describe are not seen or not accepted, the book as a whole is bound to be difficult to bring into focus, and then its local difficulties are exaggerated.’46
The book quickly found a substantial readership. Following a relatively large first printing of 5,500 in 1961, Chatto had to rush out a further printing within a couple of months, and when it appeared in Pelican it soon sold over 50,000 copies.47 But from reviewers it received a much less welcoming reception than its predecessor had done, and questions of disciplinary scope or identity came to the fore even more. According to Williams’s later account: ‘The degree of hostility was quite unforgettable. There was a full-scale attack of the most bitter kind in certain key organs. The TLS was particularly violent and ad hominem. But the reaction was very general.’48 Reading those reviews (including the TLS) now, it is hard not to see Williams’s description as a considerable exaggeration. Nonetheless, the chill wind of disciplinary as well as political disapproval could be felt blowing through some of the reviews. For example, to the unsympathetic eye of the conservative political historian Maurice Cowling, Williams was exceeding the bounds of any legitimate claim to intellectual authority.
Merely because Lawrence saw intensely a small segment of English society and criticized it, it should not be imagined that it is the function of an English school to engage in ‘social criticism’ also. … The professional literary sensibility, in its professional field, has great authority; but in pretending to determine the course political action ought to take, it stretches itself beyond its limits.
This threatened what he called ‘a new omnicompetence’, and Cowling, ever alert to the attractions of killing two progressive birds with one conservative stone, mocked the overweening ambition of English scholars: ‘There are no faculties in English universities (except the faculties of Political Science) where some dons are in greater danger of taking themselves too seriously.’49 Cowling’s essay appeared in the Cambridge Review in May 1961 shortly before Williams was due to take up his new appointment in the Cambridge English Faculty; it was clearly intended to be more of a warning shot than a welcoming embrace.
Such political animus was obviously not at issue with the much better-known two-part review of The Long Revolution by E. P. Thompson in New Left Review, also published in 1961, but for that very reason the review is particularly revealing of the reception of Williams’s work among even well-disposed historians on the Left who had for some time been giving more sustained attention to questions of historical causality than the bulk of their mainstream professional colleagues. The main burden of Thompson’s extended chastisement of Williams—for the piece was animated, as were so many of Thompson’s spirited polemics, by a not wholly fraternal ardour—was that both Culture and Society and The Long Revolution risked representing the processes of change they described as altogether too eirenic or painless. What Williams saw as processes of ‘growth’, Thompson insisted had in fact been processes of conflict and struggle. But, along the way, Thompson also took issue with the genre of writing to which Williams’s work belonged.
In Culture and Society Williams had focused on culture as ‘a whole way of life’, and in The Long Revolution he had expanded this remit to take in, as we have seen, what he now described as ‘cultural history’, defined as the study of ‘relationships between elements in a whole way of life’. But, as Thompson pointedly commented: ‘If Williams by “the whole way of life” really means the whole way of life he is making a claim, not for cultural history, but for history.’ Thompson then went on: ‘The fact that this claim can now be made, with some colour, against history by both critics and sociologists is a devastating comment upon the relegation of history to an inferior status in this country.’ Thompson speculated briefly on the reasons for this condition. Perhaps Marxist historians had too much tended to ignore the kinds of cultural activity on which Williams focused; perhaps the lack in Britain of conceptual thinking about history, recently pointed to by E. H. Carr in his Trevelyan Lectures, was involved; perhaps, as Thompson put it, ‘a further part lies in the eagerness with which academics in the empirical tradition have taken upon themselves the role of narrative drudges, making whole history schools into a kind of piece-meal baggage-train serving more ambitious departments’. Whatever the explanation, Thompson accepted that historians had not risen to a task that was properly theirs. ‘I do not dispute, then, that Mr Williams may have been provoked into making his claim by the eagerness with which historians, under the chiding of Sir Lewis Namier and Professor Popper, have abandoned theirs. The place has been widely advertised as being “To Let”.’ What Thompson did dispute was that this space could be adequately occupied by a form of enquiry that focused on culture in the way that had been done by literary critics, in the wake of T. S. Eliot’s conservative construal of that concept.50
For present purposes, there is no need to follow Thompson’s critique into his valorization of a renewed form of the Marxist analysis of the relation between agency and determination in historical change. But it is worth pausing over his suggestion that critics, writing with what he called a ‘kind of literary-sociological flair’, had occupied a territory that professional historians had left vacant (he mentions Richard Hoggart alongside Williams as Eliot’s leading contemporary heirs in this style). Whatever the truth of his general contentions about the place of history in Britain in the 1950s (a topic requiring more extended analysis), perhaps what was most striking about his challenge to Williams in the name of history is that it had to be made at all. For Thompson was surely right that both Culture and Society and The Long Revolution were historical works, and yet they were not presented or received as such. They had, after all, not been written by a historian and they scarcely ever referred to recent works of historical scholarship. To put the point in somewhat reductive guild terms, their world of reference was that of, say, Essays in Criticism rather than, say, the English Historical Review. The first of those journals carried long discussions of both of Williams’s books, and, as we have seen, the earliest published adumbration of the argument of Culture and Society had appeared in its pages. The EHR noticed neither book.
In political terms, Thompson would presumably have taken this latter omission to constitute a badge of honour, but more generally his discussion was registering an unease about the disciplinary character of Williams’s work and, especially, about some of the reasons for its current prominence. ‘I am concerned’, Thompson went on, ‘at the fact that in the past few years so much stimulating writing has burgeoned in the field of criticism and literary-sociology: so little in the sciences and in traditional social studies; and so very little in the field of political theory’.51 His was far from a narrowly academic concern with the relative standing of disciplines; he was expressing a passionate conviction that the kind of cultural critique that had been derived from literary criticism failed to grapple adequately with historical causation, and hence with all the questions about the primacy of class struggle that the Marxist tradition had focused on. His politics were, it hardly needs saying, at the opposite pole from Cowling’s, but both of them were exercised by what they saw as the misplaced intellectual imperialism of literary criticism. In this respect, both were recognizing, as well as anticipating the end of, something that had been a significant feature of British culture since the 1920s.