Abstract
This is the third collection of essays by Roger Richardson, and, like the previous two volumes, it reminds us of Richardson's enviably broad chronological range. In terms of subject matter, the essays here progress from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, if we go up to the death of Joan Thirsk, the subject of one of them, in 2013. Few historians could publish on topics covering such a time span, and on such a variety, from the biography(ies) of the puritan John Bruen of Stapleford, Cheshire (1560–1625) to the About Britain series of regional guidebooks issued in conjunction with the 1951 Festival of Britain. Several of these essays have been published before (most since 2011 and updated for this volume) but some are unpublished lectures or have been hidden away in obscure periodicals and difficult to access. All of them can, to a large extent, be seen as forays in local history but, importantly for Richardson, as for the historians he studies, local history done properly sheds light on national history and larger questions. For Richardson, the interest is in the historians and writers who produce local history, and the shape and nature of the histories they create.
Readers of this journal will be interested in the ways in which Richardson connects authors, histories, and circumstances. As befitting a long-time (26 years!) co-editor of Literature & History, the real interest of these essays is in how authors, consciously and unconsciously, shape texts (in this case mostly historical writing of various genres). In so doing, Richardson, who will have edited for this journal a huge number of essays tackling ways of approaching interdisciplinary investigations, might have stood back in the introduction and, drawing on both decades of insight into how scholars have connected literature and history, and some of the (lightly) theoretically informed insights and remarks in this volume, made some wider and more explicit reflections on the relationship between literature (very broadly understood) and history. Perhaps he’ll do this in a further collection!
Be that as it may, this is undoubtedly a stimulating volume. A key interest for Richardson, as he notes, is historiography. One way of approaching this, as revealed in his essay on ‘Changing Perspectives on England in the 1650s’, and his own earlier monograph on images of Oliver Cromwell, is to track how historians over time have changed the manner they have studied specific periods – in this case, this is to take the 1650 s seriously on its own terms and not just as a hangover from the 1640 s or anticipating the 1660 s. Richardson is particularly good at seeing patterns in historical writing. His grasp of historiographical debate is also evident in a nicely crafted essay on ‘The Ranter Sensation in Hampshire and Wiltshire, 1649–51’ in which he uses little-known local evidence to engage with debates about the Ranters amongst modern historians. Likewise, the essay on ‘Town and Countryside in the English Revolution’ is an excellent summary of the issues, revealing his fascination with local history and a command of the scholarship, rightly emphasising the connections between the urban and the rural as well as the tensions. But in some ways, his strength and forte – brought out in many of the essays collected here – is to position individual historians (again broadly understood) within the context of their times and placing their work within wider frameworks. He is particularly adept at examining the sources they used, their methodology, what they emphasised, and in some cases what they omitted. Richardson is masterly at bringing this approach to a number of large-scale historical endeavours and to a variety of genres: religious biography, urban history, philological works and dictionaries, histories of nonconformity, economic and regional histories and guidebooks.
The first essay, on the biography of the Cheshire puritan John Bruen by William Hinde, and published posthumously by Hinde's son in 1641, gives a good flavour of Richardson's approach to analysing textual sources. Richardson pays careful attention to the structure, shape and language of the text and the significance of the date of its eventual publication. Bruen is portrayed as an exemplar head of a godly household, and the biography's publication in 1641 would have echoed well with the need to defend Protestantism and the social order. Richardson also notes the text's afterlife, when it was republished in 1799, now devoid of most of the religious content, and presented as a lesson in social harmony and order in the context of the unsettling times of the French Revolution.
As befits someone who has lived in Winchester most of his life, Richardson's essay on the Roman Catholic John Milner's History and Antiquities of Winchester (first published in 1798) is a tour de force. Richardson gives an evocative analysis of Milner's book, and it is clear why Milner's work should resonate so well with Richardson. Milner's concern was with local history as an exemplification of national history and wider matters, and this chimes with what Richardson admires in other historians. In this case, Milner's interest is in the pre-Reformation period, which coincided with the city's golden age.
A later essay provides a fascinating study of one of the pioneers of local and regional history. The now little-known (except by specialists) G.H. Tupling is credited with writing the first serious economic history of the north-west of England in his The Economic History of Rossendale (1927). Like his analysis of previous historical texts, Richardson places this within the wider historiographical context (where economic history was still a fledgling discipline in the UK). He then examines the structure and argument of the book, ending with some comparisons between Tupling's approach and those of the University of Leicester's School of English Local History, arguing that Tupling should be more recognised than he is. Perhaps Richardson is wanting to give due weight to the University of Manchester, where he did his PhD, as well as to the University where he was an undergraduate, for developing regional history and he provides insights into the contrasting fates of the subject at the two universities, and why Tupling did not have the advantages that W.G. Hoskins, often seen as the pioneer, had.
The final essay on ‘Cultural mapping in 1951’ is a fitting end to the collection since the About Britain series for the Festival of Britain draws together the themes of the volume, covering as they do thirteen ‘regions’ of Britain. Hoskins reappears as the author of two of the books – East Midlands and Chilterns to Black Country, and where he displayed his usual prejudices against modern life. Richardson draws out the range of sources used by the authors, which included cultural and linguistic (including dialect) material, and studies of the landscape, which helped make these volumes a ‘remarkable venture’ (p. 209). Again, Richardson is especially good at showing what these authors emphasised (and missed out) and their style and language; teasing out – as he has done so magnificently throughout this volume – the connections between writers, texts and contexts.