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Laurence Brockliss, Emeritus Professor of History at Oxford University, is no stranger to Calderonia’s followers. For ten years he and his research team worked to create a relational database that crunched biographical information from online sites, archives, newspapers and other sources, on 750 families and 16,000 individuals across Britain throughout the nineteenth century. In guest posts for us, Professor Brockliss used some of the findings to refocus sharply our ideas about George Calderon as a journalist, about George and Kittie’s marriage, and above all about what the ‘Edwardian Age’ and ‘Edwardianism’ really were. This odyssey of ‘digital history’ has now been published.
The professions that the book addresses include the traditional three of the Church, Law and Medicine, but it was in the decades 1840-8o that the ‘modern’ professions were born, and between 1851 and 1911 the number of British ‘professionals’ rose from roughly 275,000 to nearly a million — ‘more rapidly than the population as a whole’ (p. 6). Thus the book is dealing with nearly forty professions that were either recognised or coming into being during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, from accountants to vets. Its ‘cohort’ of male professionals from eight British provincial towns originates in the 1851 census, from which the study extends ‘longitudinally’ between the end of the eighteenth century and the mid-1920s by tracing the 750 families over four generations. Nor are women remotely excluded! Although expanding, the number of professions that women could work in during this period was severely limited (unbelievably, nursing was not recognised as a profession), but since this is a study of families women feature on nearly every page. A whole fascinating chapter 9, ‘Wives and Daughters’, is devoted to them.
This is a statistical study with lots of tables, but it is no exaggeration to say that it is a truly vibrant book — for two contrasting reasons, of which the second strikes me as unusual and highly skilfully managed. On the one hand, the authors analyse and evaluate their statistics most judiciously. It is a sheer pleasure to follow them weighing evidence, considering hypotheses, playing with arguments, arriving at their own conclusions, which are all the more convincing for their empirical basis. And these conclusions often shake up the historical orthodoxy and our stereotypical notions of the Victorians and Edwardians.
For instance, in reality there was no strict system forcing the eldest son into his father’s profession, and among the professionals there was astonishingly little snobbery about occupations in trade and manufacturing; ‘any hard division between the professional and the entrepreneurial or capitalist class was an illusion’ (chapter 2, ‘Male Occupations and Career Mobility’, p. 80). Being a self-employed professional was precarious; there was a vast range in professionals’ income; the ‘extraordinary conclusion’ is that ‘virtually all the better-off cohort families became poorer, not richer, over time’ (chapter 3, ‘Male Family Members and Intergenerational Wealth’, p. 120). Families tended to be attached to their home ground, for cultural and networking reasons, and it was ‘only in the third generation that the regional attachment of the majority of cohort families began to break down’ (chapter 4, ‘Moving About’, p. 147). ‘Membership of a church in some form or other was all but de rigueur’ (p. 220); no more than 15% of the cohort were ever involved in national or local affairs; the cohort’s enthusiasm for pursuits outside the home ‘waned dramatically’ among their sons, and their grandsons seemed only interested in sport (chapter 5, ‘Male Leisure’). Where ‘Family, House, and Home’ are concerned (chapter 6), popular beliefs are overturned by the fact that nearly 90% of men married and the average age of marriage was as high as ‘just under thirty’ (p. 227); moreover, the Victorian/Edwardian nuclear family was ‘porous and […] many households, for a time at least, contained permanent visitors [!] whose presence complicated the traditional picture’ (p. 241). Chapter 7, ‘Fathers and Sons’, radically revises notions of the importance of public schools and Oxbridge in this period; for a variety of reasons even the richest professional families were content to send their sons to a local grammar school. Divorce or annulment was ‘fairly rare’ (p. 333), almost every marriage was ended only by death, and the family really was as strong a social unit as we probably expected: ‘A close circle of relations and friends provided a network of succour and comfort which helped individual families through the bad times as well as the good’ (chapter 8, ‘The Domestic Circle’, p. 368). Chapter 9 is replete with new fact-based insights into women’s lives, from which the authors draw the conclusion that the strictly gendered ‘separate spheres’ conception of nineteenth century British society is inaccurate. This is important, because ‘separate spheres’ was the main argument of the Edwardian anti-suffragists (of whom George Calderon was one). Similarly, in chapter 11, ‘Concluding Remarks’, it is shown that the professions were not a separate ‘class’ as many social historians have asserted, and that the term ‘middle class’ itself is an ‘overused and often hackneyed social referent’ (p. 470).
By profession I am not a historian, but I would put money on this book shaking up their cohorts. It is the first statistical study of its kind. The team behind it deserve our sincere thanks and congratulations on their stupendous effort.
Something that I am, perhaps, better qualified to comment on, is its nature as writing. This is the ‘second reason’ for its vibrancy. Brockliss’s and Smith’s prose never stops punching forwards. There is an admirable and amusing robustness to their style (‘he idled his life away’, ‘died worth £54’, ‘quick descent into drudgery and poverty’, ‘she hit rock bottom’, ‘both families need a leg-up’, ‘egregiously disloyal’, ‘she was no shrinking violet’ etc). The authors discuss how the novelists of the period have influenced our perceptions of its professionals (pp. 12-15), and they reference Dickens, Austen, George Eliot, Gissing, Trollope and others throughout. But the authors themselves have produced a kind of novel: beneath the surface of the statistics and historical analysis, as it were, flows the life of the myriad individuals named, whose biographies are skilfully narrated, either piecemeal from chapter to chapter or at some length in self-contained paragraphs, and whom you get to know, become involved with, believe in the warm existence of. To create a statistical study that is so humane, a human comedy in itself, is a rare achievement; I can only conclude that Brockliss and Smith have been appropriately influenced by the Victorian novelists they have read. I defy anyone, for instance, to forget the stories of ornithologist John Latham (p. 371), or Dennis Henry Wickham (p. 449), or Thomas S. Boase (p. 452), not to mention John Stanhope Baines, whom we featured in 2020.
Of particular interest to Calderonians would be chapter 10, ‘The First World War and Beyond’, which traces the lives of the cohort’s descendants in the Great War and after. There are marvellous sidelights — for instance that the empirical evidence ‘would suggest there was widespread reluctance to play the hero’ (p. 430) — but the authors also address major, familiar issues about the interpretation of the War and its aftermath generally. Amongst the cohort’s descendants, the war was not ‘a Damascene moment’; you might have expected some of them to ‘lose their faith and others to have been radicalized’, but ‘no clergyman in the third generation abandoned the cloth, and no grandson is known to have become a pacifist’ (p. 448). But was the War a watershed in these families’ history? Most survivors went back to their pre-War occupations, and the digitized information suggests that ‘there was no visible alteration to the rhythm of their family life’ (p. 451). On the closing pages of this chapter the authors movingly describe the ‘visceral feeling of loss’ that still existed in British families marking the recent centenary of the Great War, and how the War was commemorated; not so much officially, as ‘by the people’. It is very gratifying to see Andrew Tatham’s book singled out for praise here.
Thanks to online computer databases, more people are researching their family history than ever. In the past, the family tree with its births, marriages and deaths used to be inscribed on the inside covers of the Family Bible. I suggest that any family that has had Victorian-Edwardian antecedents who were in the professions should immerse themselves in Brockliss’s and Smith’s book — and keep a copy beside the Family Bible.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain was a new departure for me. For most of my adult life I have worked on seventeenth and eighteenth century France. It is also principally a work of socio-economic history and I would see myself as a socio-cultural historian. In one important respect, however, it has allowed me to pursue a question which directly relates to my previous interests: when did the Republic of Letters end? I have written extensively about the Republic of Letters in the past. What was its size? From what sections of European society did it draw its members? How did this virtual Republic hold together? But hitherto I had not said anything of substance about its demise.
The general assumption, which seems fair, is that the Republic was doomed from the end of the eighteenth century once knowledge became specialised and research in the arts and sciences was institutionalised in universities and academies. Thereafter, the amateur polymath, often only pursuing his intellectual interests in his leisure hours and principally reliant on his own library, laboratory and botanical garden, could not compete with salaried professionals.
Dating precisely the demise of the Republic, on the other hand, is difficult. This is especially the case in Britain where gentleman amateurs continued to make a splash throughout the nineteenth century – think of Darwin – and where few university post-holders showed any inclination to do serious research before the end of the First World War. My current book, I feel, has helped to pinpoint the moment the Republic died in this country with some accuracy. The mainstay of the Republic had always been members of the three traditional professions, if only because they had had the training in Latin which remained Europe’s learned lingua franca until 1800. It was interesting to discover therefore that among the 750+ professionals that form the core of my study, there were always two or three, even in small provincial towns, who were active as antiquarians, natural historians, astronomers and so on. Most, like the solicitor William Dickson of Alnwick, had a local reputation: they belonged to local learned societies and published on local history and the local flora and fauna. But a few had a national and international renown, notably the Leeds doctor Charles Chadwick who was responsible for the British Association for the Advancement of Science holding its annual conference in the town in 1858.
These republicans of letters belonged to a generation of professionals who were in their prime in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Among the sons and grandsons of the 750, the only individuals who made any contribution to the advancement of learning were the few who held university positions. My cohort of 750 were part of Darwin’s generation. Darwin could exist and flourish because the British Republic of Letters was still alive when he too was in his prime. When he died in 1882 that Republic was all but dead as well.
My book suggests in addition that what killed it off was not just scientific specialism and professionalisation but the rise of the modern family with its emphasis on mutual affection and domestic responsibilities. Besides his intellectual interests, Dickson was a JP, chair of the local health board, and a poor-law guardian. Mrs Dickson and the children could never have seen him. His sons followed him into the law; but neither showed any enthusiasm for his leisure activities. Arguably, Dickens and his fellow Victorian novelists, who had promoted the virtues of a companionate marriage more than anyone, had had a limited effect on the behaviour of the males of their own generation but had worked their magic on the next.
Thank you for devoting valuable time to writing this fascinating Comment. If I may say so, it is awe-inspiring to see the author of a monumental work standing back from that work and considering it in the context of another monumental subject that ‘interests’ him. I confess I had to refresh my memory about the Republic of Letters. The Wikipedia entry reveals the major contribution you made to its study with your 2008 book Calvet’s Web and how historians debate the causes of the Republic’s demise.
The hypothesis that you propose in your Comment about the somewhat later death of the ‘amateur’ Republic of Letters in Britain, based on the cohort of Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain and their heirs, is surely very persuasive. It has made me reconsider the interpretation of George Calderon’s polymathery and convinced amateurism that I settled on in my biography — after a great deal of thought, as it’s an important Edwardian subject, but without any awareness of the full historical perspective that you can command.
In his own words, Calderon ‘hated’ professionalism, and ‘professionals’ reminded him of ‘bishops’. I took the line that that he espoused ‘amateurism’ to challenge what he saw as insular, stagnant production among the various Victorian writing establishments that he had difficulty breaking into and concluded he should never have aspired to. Maybe, however, he was simply nostalgic for the Republic of Letters that, as more than a bit of an elitist, he would have seen as his natural home, yet it had irrevocably passed before he came to maturity?
When I say that the British Republic of Letters was dead by 1880, I don’t mean to imply that thereafter there were no men and women outside universities, institutes and academies seriously involved in intellectual research of one kind or another. There are probably even more of them today than ever before, especially in my own field of history. But it has been very unusual for ‘amateur’ scholars and scientists to be taken seriously with a few notable exceptions. Institutional affiliation from then on provided the respectability that formerly had come through personal contacts and patronage and social status. Scientific ‘breakthroughs’ in the seventeenth century had nothing to do with experimental rigour, as we understand it: Pascal ‘proved’ the existence of air pressure by a relative taking ONE reading at the bottom and top of a mountain, and he confirmed the result by taking ONE reading at the bottom and top of the tower of the Paris church of Saint-Jacques (there would have been no visible difference in the second case). But he was believed, at least by Jansenists and Protestants, because he was Pascal, highly educated, well-connected and a best-selling polemicist. I would also stress that after 1880 it was less and less common for ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’ to be polymaths or often have even a minimal understanding about what was happening in all but cognate disciplines: C.P. Snow had a point. There was just too much to know.
Arguably, the literary arts was the one area that escaped professionalisation. Even in the present, there are successful novelists and poets who have not attended a creative writing course and journalists without a degree in journalism. But I suspect the number is declining. Would an agent promote your novel if you hadn’t an MA from UEA! The visual arts have long been institutionalised. Are there any ‘great’ contemporary artists who have not been to art college? So, Calderon could be a proud ‘amateur’ as a man of letters in the Edwardian era. But he would not have been able to cut a dash in the experimental or mathematical sciences, or even ancient languages and history, without being attached to a university. Lord Berkeley at the turn of the century had the money to have his own lab on Boars Hill outside Oxford but Oxford University validated his research. Two of the Bevans in my database (sons and brothers of rich bankers) were important ancient historians and linguists c. 1900 and had no need of a salary but they had academic positions, one at Trinity, Cambridge.
Very many thanks for fleshing that point out — and so entertainingly! (I love your reference to creative writing courses, which are a phobia of mine.) Although several aspects were previously unknown to me, e.g. about Pascal, I wholeheartedly go with your conclusions. As my biography shows, George Calderon’s journalism, scholarly research and many published articles, not to mention his work with Chekhov, made a greater contribution to Russian Studies in the U.K. between 1895 and 1915 than all his contemporary British Russianists in Academe put together (who hardly published anything); but, to use your key phrase, ‘without being attached to a university’ his achievement has never been recognised within that ‘professional’ enclave; no-one there ‘knows who he is’. On the other hand, as you suggest, George could cut a dash as an ‘amateur’ dramatist etc in the Edwardian era, but by the era of radio, where his work regularly featured, he was just regarded as a (professional) writer. Of course, I think that as a Rugbeian he was also sensitised about ‘professional’ sport. Everyone agreed he was a polymath, however, and Percy Lubbock stressed how George was in touch by letter with, mainly, amateurs in the many fields of his interest.