Three Victorian Historians

Victorian England understood itself through history. The historians that it read changed over the decades from gentlemen-scholars like Henry Hallam who wrote after wide reading to professional historians such as Samuel Rawson Gardiner who wrote after laborious archival research. Its fascination with history even allowed Victorian England to celebrate, albeit briefly, Henry Thomas Buckle, who tried to make history a science on the model of physics and astronomy. His popularity lasted longer outside his homeland in countries such as Russia, Japan, and Brazil. Diverse and contrasting historians like Hallam, Buckle, and Gardiner open different, sometimes blurry windows though which the twenty-first century can try to see the Victorian era as it changed. Scholars recently have reinterpreted the books written by these three historians and their lives, often persuasively, sometimes controversially. The present book offers its own insight into the works of these great historians whom the Victorians read.