Nobody could really call the last great Whig historian G. M. Trevelyan a Conservative almost by definition though many of his ideas would now be described as conservative with a small 'c'. Here is a somewhat hostile piece about Trevelyan and the Trevelyan family in general by John Vincent, which informs us, among other matters that the famed if outdated historian burned all his personal papers. Tory Historian recalls reading David Cannadine's biography and finding it most interesting as well as surprisingly sympathetic.Trevelyan...
And this account by Nathaniel Morton based on William Bradford's in the Wall Street Journ...
In pursuit of more detective stories Tory Historian came across Lee Jackson's Victorian mysteries, in particular A Metropolitan Murder that starts on the Metropolitan line soon after it opened in 1863, apparently only 3 years after the construction started. No particular opinion of it as yet. The style, which is mostly in the present tense is slightly irritating but the description of mid-Victorian London is fascinating. How good the plot is remains to be seen. However, Tory Historian was led to Lee Jackson's website, which...
Twenty years ago today Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister. Tory Historian is far too well behaved to launch into invectives against the people in the lady's own party (something nobody outside this country ever understood) who engineered her premature departure. Not only they but, sadly, the whole party has paid the pri...
Tory Historian is about to put that book back on the shelf but would like to quote one last paragraph, which says things that TH has also said before: so much about present-day America reminds one of Victorian Britain. Professor Himmelfarb puts it more eloquently:Having derived a good deal of its own Enlightenment from the mother country, the United States is now repaying Britain by perpetuating the spirit of her Enlightenment. We are often reminded of the theme of American "exceptionalism". America was exceptional at the time...
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh monthThey shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.At the going down of the sun and in the morningWe will remember th...
Tory Historian has spent some time recently reading M. V. Hughes's books about her life in Victorian London and the later one about life between the wars in Cuffley, a village just outside London that was, in that period, steadily moving towards becoming a suburb. The question that comes to one's mind immediately is why is Molly Hughes not better known? She used to be on schools' reading lists as Tory Historian can recall but, possibly,...
Tory Historian is very apologetic: a combination of a bad cold and various other commitments produced a neglect of the most important thing, this blog. This cannot happen again. For today, a quotation from Gertrude Himmelfarb's The Roads to Modernity, a telling comparison between the English and the French Enlightenments:One historian [Ronald I. Boss] has described the philosophes' belief in the social utility of religion as a "paradox", a "contradiction", a "lag in their social thought" caused by their inability to create an...
