2001 - Hall - Men and Therir Histois PDF

Men and Their Histories: Civilizing Subjects
Author(s): Catherine Hall

Source: History Workshop Journal, No. 52 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 49-66
Published by: Oxford University Press
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Fig. 1. Charles Kingsley in Roman mode.
Bust by Thomas Woolner (1825-92),1875.
Men and Their Histories:

Civilizing Subjects
by Catherine Hall
In 1860 Charles Kingsley, celebrated author and erstwhile Christian socialist,

gave, and published, his inaugural lecture as Professor of Modem History
at the University of Cambridge.1 His subject was 'The Limits of Exact
Science as Opposed to History' and he took the opportunity to attack those
historians who asserted the importance of social laws to an understanding
of history. History, Kingsley insisted, was first and foremost a moral prac-
tice, and history was the story of great men. If the young gentlemen who
had gathered to listen to him wished to understand History, he suggested,
History Workshop Journal Issue 52 C History Workshop Journal 2001
50 History Workshop Journal
they must first try to understand men and women. 'For History is the history
of men and women', he told them, 'and nothing else'.2 Kingsley's strictures
provoked a sharp response from Edward Spencer Beesly, just appointed as
Professor of Modern History at University College. His stinging, if some-
what long-winded, thirty-two-page critique of Kingsley, concluded with the
judgement that:
The lecture is a bad one, from the title-page to the conclusion - bad in
conception and in execution, in argument, in style, and even in grammar.3
Let me use this clash between two significant mid-Victorian public men to
explore, in a very preliminary way, how the historical imagination and his-
torical thinking in Britain have been rooted in what I describe as the
'grammar of difference': the multiple differences associated with the hier-
archies of class, of race and of gender, always articulated through relations
of power. I say preliminary because it is a new development for me to
address the history of the discipline in its nineteenth-century, as opposed to
its late twentieth-century form. The occasion of my inaugural lecture as
Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University
College London seems an appropriate moment.
As a student I was fed and watered by Marxist historians, especially
Rodney Hilton, and learned of grand historical narratives, of causes and
determination, of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, of the division
of labour in manufacturing and modern industry, of class and class conflict,
of the politics of history. Lessons which I hope never to forget. But 1968 and
its consequences began to disrupt those paradigms. The British tradition of
feminist history, within which I proudly count myself, was powerfully influ-
enced by that school of history writing, but also made itself in antagonism
to it, insisting on the importance of gender, of sexuality, of emotionality and
subjectivity, of the home and the domestic, of the private sphere as a site of
history making, of gender as well as class as an agent of antagonism and
change.
Feminist history itself expanded and diversified: it became embroiled in
the debates over theory and history, poststructuralism and language, race
and difference, which came to dominate the late 1980s. Entangled as I was
in the troubled politics of feminism and race I encountered what James
Baldwin describes as the charged and difficult moment when the white man
confronts his own whiteness and loses 'the jewel of his naivete'. Whiteness
carries with it authority and power, the legacy of having 'made the modern
world', of never being 'strangers anywhere in the world'. White women
carry this legacy in different ways from those of men, but they carry it
nonetheless. The white construction of 'the African', the black man or the
black woman, depends on the production of stereotypes which refuse full
human complexity. When the black man insists, wrote Baldwin, 'that the
white man cease to regard him as an exotic rarity and recognize him as a
Men and their Histories 51
human being', then that difficult moment erupts and the naivete of not
knowing that relation of power is broken.4 The universal humanism of the
left and of the women's movement, the assumption that we all unproblem-
atically believed in racial equality, had allowed me to avoid the full recog-
nition of the relations of power between white and black, the hierarchies
that were encoded in those two paradigms. To dismantle those screens was
not simply a matter of personal willpower (though that is necessarily a part
of the process): rather it was something which became possible in a par-
ticular conjuncture, the postcolonial moment, a moment of crisis for the
whole culture. As Salman Rushdie wrote in 1982,
I want to suggest that racism is not a side-issue in contemporary Britain;

that it's not a peripheral minority affair. I believe that Britain is under-
going a critical phase of its postcolonial period, and this crisis is not
simply economic or political. It's a crisis of the whole culture, of the
society's whole sense of itself.5
The postcolonial moment is the time when it becomes clear that decoloniz-
ation has not resulted in total freedom. It was the time when the new nations
which had become independent began to recognize the limits of national-
ism, and in the old centres of empire the chickens came home to roost: in
the case of Britain in the shape of those once imperial subjects who 'came
home'. While first-generation migrants felt compelled for the most part to
make the best they could of the inhospitable mother-country, their children,
born here, made very different claims. At this point of transition, argues
Simon Gikandi, the foundational histories of both metropolitan and
decolonized nations begin to unravel: this was, and is, a disjunctive moment
when 'imperial legacies' come 'to haunt English and postcolonial identi-
ties'.6 In the metropole this was the moment when second-generation black
Britons asked what it meant to be black and British, when black feminists
asked who belonged and in what ways to the collective 'we' of a feminist
sisterhood. How inclusive were those humanist visions that white feminists
took for granted? The idea of the unity of black and white could not
simply be taken for granted: its founding assumptions needed radical re-
examination. At the same time the Powellite formulations as to the threat
to 'our island race' had passed into the commonsense of Thatcherism and
conservatism, provoking more explicit racial antagonisms. Race was an
issue for British society in new ways by the late 1980s. Racial thinking has
been there for a very long time, but the bringing of it to consciousness, the
making explicit of the ways in which the society is 'raced', to use Toni
Morrison's term, is another matter.7
It is the 'racing' of Englishness which has preoccupied me for the last ten
years. Race, it became clear to me, was deeply rooted in English culture.
Not always in forms which were explicitly racist, but as a space in which the
English configured both their relation to others and to themselves. Racial
thinking was a part of the everyday, part of English commonsense. The

work which I did in the 1980s, in collaboration with Leonore Davidoff, on
the nineteenth-century middle class, had focused on the centrality of gender
to middle-class culture.8 It had not reflected on the national, in the sense of
what was peculiarly English, or the imperial aspects of this culture. Class
and gender were indeed crucial axes of power, constituting and differenti-
ating men and women in crosscutting and complicated ways. But questions
of race and ethnicity were also always present in the nineteenth century,
foundational to English forms of categorization and relations of power. The
vocabulary of English men and women, whether they knew it or not, was a
racialized vocabulary, for supposed racial characteristics were always an
implicit part of their categorizations. This was part of being English.
The time of empire, and here I am talking of nineteenth-century empires,
was the time when anatomies of difference were being elaborated: differ-
ences of class, of race, of religion, of gender and sexuality. These elabora-
tions were the work of culture, for the categories were discursive and their
meanings historically contingent. The language of class emerged as a way
of making sense of the new industrial society in Britain of the late eight-
eenth and early nineteenth centuries. The language of 'separate spheres'
became a common way of talking about and categorizing sexual difference
in this same period of transition. It was colonial encounters which produced
a new category, race, the meanings of which, like those of class and gender,
have always been contested and challenged. The Enlightenment inaugur-
ated a debate about racial types and natural scientists began to make a new
object of study, that is, the human race. They laboured to produce a schema
out of the immense varieties of human life. On the one hand were those who
operated within a Christian universalism which assumed that all peoples
were the descendants of Adam and Eve and that the differences between
peoples could be explained by the differences of culture and climate. But
this did not mean that all were equal: white people, it was widely thought,
were more advanced, more civilized than others. Given the right conditions
those who lived in less developed cultures would be able to advance. Many
indigenous peoples, however, were seen as destined for extinction. On the
other hand were those who focused on the notion of permanent physical
differences which were inherited and which distinguished groups or races
of people one from another. In the context of evolutionary thinking, classi-
ficatory racial schemes which involved hierarchies from 'savagery' to
'civilization', with white Anglo-Saxons at the apex, became common. But
these two discourses, of cultural differentialism and of biological racism,
were, as Stuart Hall has argued, not two different systems but 'racism's two
registers' and discourses of both were often in play, the cultural slipping into
the biological and vice versa.9
The apparently binary oppositions, between men and women, between
black and white, between working-class and middle-class, constituted
through processes of differentiation which positioned their subjects as if
such divisions were natural, were constantly in the making, in conflicts of

power. As Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler argue, the most basic tension
of empire was that 'the otherness of colonized persons was neither inherent
nor stable; his or her difference had to be defined and maintained'. This
meant that 'a grammar of difference was continuously and vigilantly crafted
as people in colonies refashioned and contested European claims to superi-
ority'.10 The construction of this 'grammar of difference' was the cultural
work of both colonizer and colonized, and it has been the 'grammar of
difference' of the colonizer which has been the focus of my recent work.1"
How then, does this connect to the making of the discipline of history
and its writing?
History was in itself intended to be a civilizing subject. In John Stuart

Mill's definition of civilization he contrasted civilization with barbarism.
Barbarism was characterized by savage tribes wandering across the land, by
the absence of commerce, manufacturing and agriculture, by individuals
fending for themselves, by no institutions of law, administration or employ-
ment. Civilization, on the other hand, meant dense populations in towns and
villages which were rich in commerce, manufacturing and agriculture,
human beings acting together for common purposes and relying on social
arrangements rather than strength for their safety. Civilization, he believed,
had advanced most speedily in Europe, and especially in Great Britain. 'It
is only civilized beings', he thought, 'who can combine': savages and slaves
were incapable of acting in concert. England's joint stock companies, its
associations and societies, its Trade Unions and benefit societies, its news-
papers, which enabled 'each to learn that others are feeling as he feels' and,
therefore, could 'form a collective will', all these marked its high level of
development in the scale of civilization. But there were problems: the
middle classes were too preoccupied with making money, public opinion
was not sufficiently well-grounded, too many books were produced too
quickly and not properly read, individuals were becoming lost and insig-
nificant in the crowd and being reduced to a form of moral effeminacy.
Faced with these dangers Mill argued for the importance of intellectuals and
of education. The existing universities were failing to produce men with
critical minds, rather they were encourging the adoption of received
opinions. Education must be about the creation of intellectual power and
the love of truth, conducted in a spirit of free inquiry. History could play an
important part in this for it provided, 'the record of all great things which
have been achieved by mankind' and made possible an understanding of the
'pliability of nature' and the vast effects which could be achieved by good
guidance and endeavour.12
The lessons of history had the potential to improve the reading public,
British subjects. They could learn of the difference which men could make,
how nature could be shaped and progress increased. But furthermore
history would teach those British subjects how to civilize and improve the
subjects of empire. As scholars of Mill have observed, throughout his life
he used his knowledge of India, acquired from his employment, like his
father before him, in the East India Company, to provide negative analo-
gies by reference to which readers could think about Britain or the West
more generally.13 Medieval Europe and India provided the contrast
between those who were ready for liberty and those who were not. Des-
potism was a legitimate mode of government for dealing with barbarians, if
the end was their improvement and the means were justified by actually
effecting those ends. In elaborating the distinctions between civilization and
barbarism Mill was providing the bedrock of the liberal imperial imagin-
ation and of history writing.
In 1857, Harriet Martineau was to take up his challenge and use the
weapon of history in an attempt to educate the British public. The context:
the First Indian War of Independence, universally known in Britain as the
'Indian Mutiny', when Indian soldiers in the British army seriously threat-
ened imperial power with terrible consequences. Martineau was a commit-
ted student of political economy, who had long seen it as her responsibility
to popularize those doctrines and educate through her writing, a feminist
who was part of the tradition of 'imperial feminism' first identified by
Antoinette Burton, a convinced mesmerist, and increasingly associated with
the new doctrine of positivism.14 Already established as a historical writer,
Martineau was strongly influenced in this period of her life by the French
positivist philosopher, Auguste Comte. Positivism provided, as Royden
Harrison has argued, 'a theory of knowledge, a philosophy of history, and
a programme of social and political action'.15 A new scientific understand-
ing of society, closely associated with evolutionary ideas of progress, would
afford a basis for secure and demonstrably-correct moral judgements. Intel-
lectuals were to play an important part in the struggle for a better world.
Free inquiry was vital and no beliefs could be entertained unless warranted
by available evidence.
Martineau speedily produced a volume with 'a humble aim': to explain
'what our Indian empire is, how we came by it, and what has gone forward
in it since it first became connected with England'. The book's title, British
Rule in India; a Historical Sketch, was as succinct as its contents. Only 'bulky
works' were currently available, she noted, and she hoped that her brief
sketch would teach 'the English people the broad facts of Anglo-Indian
history'.16 This would enable them to act in an informed way and contribute
to the formation of a collective opinion as to how India should now be ruled.
In this way they would civilize themselves and others. The book was serial-
ized in the Daily News throughout 1857, as Brenda Quinn has noted, thus
securing a wide audience.17
Martineau's history of India contributed to the construction of the
'grammar of difference' of the English in the late 1850s. The 'high designs'
of 'the lords of humankind' were elaborated, along with what she saw as the
necessary critique.18 For it was essential to acknowledge that Britain had

made mistakes and not always governed well. A major failure had been an
inadequate understanding of the character of the 'natives'. Only through a
better understanding could an improved system of rule emerge. Martineau
set out to provide a 'record of the great things achieved by mankind', and
'the vast effects which could be achieved by good guidance and endeavour',
as Mill had recommended. She told the stories of great men, of Clive and
of Hastings, the transformations they had wrought, yet the faultlines they
created. To the East India Company belonged the credit of introducing
Great Britain and Hindostan to each other, and bridging over the gulf
between civilization and barbarism. But it had been the historic mission of
the middle class to defeat the power of monopoly, and open India to free
trade. Once railways and canals, steam communication and electric
telegraphs, 'our arts and modes of life, belonging to a different stage of
civilization' crisscrossed the country, 'Musselman pride and Hindoo apathy'
were doomed: progress, Martineau believed, meaning Western civilization,
was both inevitable and desirable.19
A long-time supporter of anti-slavery, Martineau, like Dickens, had
been deeply disturbed by her first encounter with both free and enslaved
black men and women in the U.S. Yet as Cora Kaplan has argued, her
ambivalence about racial difference and its relation to liberalism fractured
her discourse.20 British Rule in India is caught in the logic of racism's two
registers, that of cultural differentialism and biological racism. At some
points Martineau's emphasis was on a common humanity, the 'essential
ideas and feelings which are common to all races in all times'. Thus in one
moment Hindu women are the same as other 'matrons and maidens': but
at another, in a much-utilized trope of both nineteenth-century and twen-
tieth-century western feminist thinking, the gender practices of Indian
society, whether the Hindu practice of widow-burning or the Moslem
harem, were seen as evidence of a low level of development.21 The two reg-
isters were produced in similar ways in her commentaries on Indian sensi-
bilities. For example, evidence was cited that, 'the inhabitants of our
Asiatic territories are just as human in their admiration of great personal
qualities ... as the men of Europe and America. But this was juxtaposed
with an insistence on the 'peculiarities' of 'imaginative and credulous
Asiatic peoples', and a belief in the distinct stages of development from
Hindu, characterized by immutability, patience, indolence and stagnation,
to Moslem, characterized by greater energy, to British, the last a clearly
'superior race'.22 Martineau's confident characterization, despite the fact
that she had never set foot in India, of the 'peculiar' characteristics of the
'Rajpoots', those warriors who had been for so long, as she put it, 'the per-
plexity of plain witted Englishmen' spoke volumes about English stereo-
types of imagined others. 'Rajpoots' were 'men with no faith but plenty of
superstition, servile to power and diabolically oppressive to helplessness,
lacking affections or morality, smooth in language and manners, yet brutal
in grain'.23 At one and the same time Martineau believed that a very long
process of secular education would make civilization possible, that middle-
class 'natives' could be educated, and that there was a 'bottomless chasm'
between Asiatic and European races, a chasm which had been fully
revealed by the mutineers and which it would never be possible to cross.24
So, grammars of difference were part of the fabric of history writing. But
what then of Mr Kingsley and Mr Beesly? In the early 1860s history was not
yet established as a discipline. In the universities it was a poor sister to the
classics and it was not until the late 1860s that Stubbs in Oxford and Seeley
in Cambridge (who had himself been the professor of Latin at University
College) began the systematic rethinking of historical research and teach-
ing.25 The appointment of Kingsley to Cambridge was a sign in itself of the
absence of any notion of professional historian. (Fig. 1) He was born in
1819, to a clerical father and a mother who came from a long line of white
West Indians. Educated at King's College London and then in Cambridge,
where he took a first in classics, he followed in his father's footsteps and
became a clergyman. In the 1840s his sympathy for the working man led him
to Christian socialism. His first novels, Alton Locke (1850) and Yeast (1851),
expressed his horror at the 'condition of England' and he developed a life-
long preoccupation with sanitation and cleanliness.26 In the late 1840s he
lectured in English at Queens College, an institution established to teach
'all branches of female knowledge', but entirely run by men.27
Kingsley was not interested, as his friend Max Muller noted, in detailed
historical research but he was deeply interested in the historical imagin-
ation.28 Carlyle's The French Revolution was a constant reference point for
him throughout his life and by 1860 he had already published two historical
novels, Hypatia (1853) and Westward Ho! (1854).29 The Queen had greatly
liked Two Years Ago (1857), a novel written, as was Westward Ho!, in the
context of the Crimean War, and Kingsley, previously unwelcome on
account of his erstwhile radical predilections, was invited to Buckingham
Palace and later proposed as Regius Professor at Cambridge and tutor to
the Prince of Wales.30 Critical judgements on Kingsley's writing were never
lacking: Carlyle thought Alton Locke 'a fervid creation left half chaotic'
while George Eliot, with characteristic wisdom, noted that 'Kingsley sees,
feels and paints vividly, but he theorises illogically and moralises
absurdly'.31 Miller, when writing the preface to the posthumous new
edition of Kingsley's history lectures at Cambridge, The Roman and the
Teuton, commented that his writing was always immediate, never the
product of long reflection or research. Yet he inspired great enthusiasm and
loyalty amongst his listeners and readers: 'few men', he judged, 'excited
wider and stronger sympathies'.32
Kingsley's inaugural was centred on human beings and their actions,
always within a framework of Christian providentialism: for history, in his
definition, was God educating man. Metaphors from science, he argued,

were inadequate to the task of explaining the human heart. History was not
the story of the masses, and could not be discerned through the operation
of laws of development. It was great men, men of genius, whose actions
decided the course of history and left their stamp upon 'whole generations
and races'.33 Prior to his appointment Kingsley's history writing had been
fictional: and it was this work which was to last. (Though it has to be said
that I have had little success in getting history students to read him!) His
historical imagination was vivid. Bred on tales of his West Indian forefathers
he loved the romance of the sea, the adventures of Drake, Raleigh and
Admiral Rodney, epic tales of gallant Englishmen conquering the world.
His immensely-popular Westward Ho! (reprinted 37 times by 1997) was
written to inspire patriotism, and was dedicated to Rajah Brooke, an
authoritarian colonizer who had violently exerted his power in Sarawak
against troublesome 'natives'.34
By 1860 Kingsley's early radical opinions had given way to a much more
instinctual conservatism with strong echoes of Carlyle. Men must be led by
those who knew better than themselves. The 'truest benevolence' might be
'occasional severity': a doctrine particularly pertinent to 'lesser races'.35
While the central problem to be addressed was a lack of civilization both at
home and abroad, 'at home' had crucial advantages, for Protestant Anglo-
Saxon men were the bravest and the best. (Kingsley seriously doubted
whether a Roman Catholic country would ever be fit for constitutional
government - which points to the limits of whiteness and the hierarchies
inscribed within it.)36 Centrally preoccupied with questions of manliness
and femininity, Kingsley was a passionate husband, whose vision of con-
nubial bliss was somewhat akin to Milton's Adam and Eve, and a passion-
ate believer in 'separate spheres'. Men and women were naturally different
and it was men's task to act in the world, women's to be.37 His fictional hero,
Amyas, in that paeon of praise to Anglo-Saxon masculinity, Westward Ho!,
'never thought about thinking or felt about feeling': from childhood he had
dreamt of going to sea and fighting the Spanish, he was a symbol, with his
long fair curls,
of brave young England longing to wing its way out of its island prison,
to discover and to traffic, to colonise and to civilise until no wind can
sweep the earth which does not bear the echoes of an English voice.38
The 'island prison', as Gail Lewis has pointed out, carries the unconscious
knowledge of the lacks embodied in Englishness and the island home, lacks
which are recast as the civilizing imperative, to discover, to traffic, to colon-
ize and to dominate, sweeping the earth with Anglo-Saxonism.39 Kingsley's
fictional villain in the almost unreadable Two Years Ago (Queen Victoria's
favourite) was an effete and narcissistic poet who lived off the relatives of
his unfortunate and neglected, yet ever-loving, wife.40 While supportive of
At '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~A
Fig. 2. Edward Spencer Beesly.

Pencil drawing by Sydney Prior (1842-1922), 1889.
the extension of female education and medical training for women, Kings-
ley was strongly critical of the women's movement and what he saw as the
'abnormal' and unfeminine behaviour of some of its adherents. The position
of women, he believed, should be improved by men.41
Kingsley had a lifelong interest in questions of race and their historical
significance. In the late 1840s he was planning a lecture on Edward the
Confessor. It was to focus on 'the rotting of the Anglo-Saxon system' and
the inability of the Saxon mind to innovate. The Anglo-Saxons, a female
race, required 'impregnation by the great male race, the Norse'.42 It was this
mix of male and female races which made the English unique. His con-
viction as to the importance of intermingling, so that the so-called stronger
races could improve the weaker, marked him off from the protagonists of
racial purity such as Robert Knox, who believed that interracial sex would
result in degeneration.
Kingsley's Cambridge lecture provoked Beesly (Fig. 2) to a spirited
critique of this vision of history. Beesly, born in 1831, and only recently
down from Oxford, was appointed to the chair of history in University
College in 1860.43 Such a position guaranteed neither money nor influence,
for students had to be won to lectures, and history was regarded as a poor
relation to the more weighty subjects.44 Beesly, however, started as he
meant to go on and used his position as a base from which to intervene more
effectively in the public world. A child of evangelicalism, he had been
moved by the revolutions of 1848 and the radicalism of Cobden and Bright.
Through his Oxford tutor, Richard Congreve, he came under the influence
of Comte, who was to inspire him for the rest of his life. His positivism was
more fully fledged than that of Martineau and he became convinced of the
historical destiny of the proletariat. Increasingly sceptical of the progressive
nature of the bourgeoisie, he saw workmen and women as the two great
oppressed sections of society. It was the historical destiny of workmen,
organized in trade unions and guided by intellectuals, to moralize capital-
ism and utilize wealth for the good of all. Along with a small group of like-
minded men, the 'priesthood of positivism', as Royden Harrison has
described them, he began to work in the London labour movement,
identifying himself with the cause of bricklayers, masons, carpenters and
printers.45
Beesly's plain-spoken attack on Kingsley in the Fortnightly Review began
with a critique of Oxbridge as the last bastion of an outmoded view of
history: the new modern history was being ignored and Kingsley's appoint-
ment marked the old establishment's refusal to recognize 'any fresh step in
human knowledge'.46 Kingsley's performance was 'feeble, confused and
pretentious'. It was not enough to vividly depict the features of a bygone
age, as the celebrated author had shown he could do: history had now
become a science and Kingsley had taken on the misguided mission of
attempting to demolish it. Beesly argued that modern history should be cul-
tivated scientifically, not as an exact mathematical science which of course
it could never be, but with a view to discovering and verifying the 'general
tendency of social evolution' and 'the continuous and unlimited progress of
humanity'. Martineau was congratulated as one of the new modern his-
torians, along with Mill. 'The first duty of the historian', he insisted, 'is to
trace the successive stages of existence through which man has passed, and
to connect each with the corresponding state.' Great men did not make
history: rather they were the embodiment of the mentality of the time.47
Beesly was in part attacking literary historians, with their 'warm, sensational
colouring', and he insisted on a careful use of sources in the interests of a
sustained social analysis.48 In his own teaching he liked to lecture on 'wide
fields and long periods of history', to look at patterns and trace change, to
represent the history of the West 'as a continuous and natural evolution'.49
The analogy with what was to become Marxist historiography is clear.
Kingsley and Beesly were to clash swords further: both men were active
in the public world of politics and letters, and both seem to have enjoyed a
fight. Kingsley, W. R. Greg remarked, reminds us of nothing so much as a
war-horse, while the Pall Mall Gazette described Beesly as a man who was
'always foaming at the mouth'.50 Both were convinced of the importance of
historical writing as an intervention in the present, and both wrote history
as part of a larger life. While Kingsley scorned cosmopolitanism and those
who saw themselves as 'citizens of the world', Beesly was a committed
internationalist and believed that it was in France that the proletarian spirit
would first be fully manifested.51 They took opposite sides in relation to the
American Civil War, for Kingsley was a fervent supporter of the South,
deeply admiring what he saw as the Southern chivalric spirit. He did not
support slavery, but neither did he support those enslaved men and women
who had been freed. Much family money had been lost as a result of emanci-
pation in the West Indies, he told his friend Tom Hughes, and he had no
intention of contributing further to aid freedmen.52 His sentimental account
of the fate of an escaped woman of mixed-race, a 'quadroon' in contem-
porary parlance, in Two Years Ago is remarkable in its ambivalence. Her
double nature, the result of her mixed blood, had a 'strong side of deep
feeling, ambition, energy and intellect rather Greek in its rapidity than
English in sturdiness'. This coexisted with her 'weak side, of instability,
inconsistency, hasty passion, love of present enjoyment ... tendency to
untruth'.53 Yet Kingsley allows her to marry a white American at the end
for the stronger Anglo-Saxon would ensure the survival of the fittest.
Beesly, meanwhile, was a passionate supporter of the North: 'the cause of
labour is one all over the world', he argued to a packed meeting of London
trade unionists, with both Mill and Marx present. The 'negro slaves of
America', he argued, 'are infinitely below you in intelligence, in organis-
ation, and in social position', but they were still workmen and part of the
same struggle: hierarchies of race were crosscut with the solidarity of
labour.54
In 1865, in the wake of the rebellion at Morant Bay in Jamaica, Kingsley
and Beesly found themselves once again on opposite sides. Liberals, led
by Mill, had been quick to condemn the brutal repression of the rebels,
instigated by Governor Eyre, when four hundred had been killed. They
called for government action. Their main support came from working
men, particularly those who were involved in the struggle for parlia-
mentary reform. Conservatives, led by Carlyle, were to rally to Eyre's
support. Kingsley found himself unwittingly in the eye of the storm for he
was staying with Lord Hardwicke in Southampton in August 1866, when
Eyre arrived back from Jamaica. Local supporters organized a dinner for
Eyre and congratulated him on the 'firmness and determination' of his
conduct; he had 'saved a colony' and ensured that the white population
was not massacred. Kingsley was prevailed upon to speak and despite his
acknowledged ignorance of the details as to what had happened in
Jamaica, he celebrated Eyre's 'English spirit of indomitable perseverance,
courage and adventure' alongside his good nature, his understanding of
human beings, and his knowledge of the management of men. Relying on
a recent article by his brother Henry, which provided a most favourable
account of Eyre's earlier years as an explorer in Australia, he concluded
that Eyre possessed, 'in a very high degree that English spirit which had
carried the Anglo-Saxon tongue round the world and had made us the
father of the United States and the conquerors of India'. On leaving the
banquet the guests were dismayed to be met by a large demonstration of
'roughs' who were less appreciative of Eyre's actions, while respectable
working men were gathered in the Victoria Rooms, protesting the disgrace
of the dinner. Kingsley was shocked to find himself the butt of the radical
press and offended both friend and foe since he retired wounded, leaving
Carlyle and Ruskin disgusted by his cowardice and denouncing him as an
unworthy protagonist of the 'muscular Christianity' he had espoused.55
The 'harsh school of facts' had taught Kingsley, he wrote in 1866, that the
doctrine he once enthusiastically followed, that 'all men are born into the
world equal, and that their inequality, in intellect or morals, is chargeable
entirely to circumstances' was wrong. Mill was a man he greatly admired
but he got some things seriously wrong. His mistake: 'to disparage, if not
totally deny, the congenital differences of character in individuals, and still
more in races'. 'There are congenital differences and hereditary tenden-
cies', Kingsley was now convinced, 'which defy all education.' Irish Celts
were unfit for self-government, negroes, though he was 'no slaveholder at
heart', he did not like.56
Beesly, meanwhile, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Jamaica Com-
mittee which campaigned to make Eyre accountable. But his take on the
events was particular. The issue was a labour issue, he insisted, as in the case
of the South. 'The emancipation of the blacks', he argued, 'left all the land
in the possession of the whites, a lazy, vicious, bankrupt class, filled with
hatred for their late slaves ... They complain that the free negroes will not
work. But the truth is that the employer will not, or rather cannot, pay him
decent wages... .'57 This had been at the root of the rebellion. But Beesly
was quite ready to disassociate himself from the stereotype of anti-slavery
enthusiasts, the 'nigger-philanthropists' in Carlyle's derogatory term. Born
in 1831 he was not of the generation who had been shaped by anti-slavery:
rather he belonged to that next generation who saw themselves as having a
less sentimental and more realistic attitude to the capacities of black people.
'I protest I am no negro-worshipper', said Beesly:
I don't consider a black man a beautiful object, and I daresay he sings

psalms more than is good for him. Some negroes may be men of ability
and elevated character, but there can be no doubt that they belong to a
lower type of the human race than we do, and I should not like to live in
a country where they formed a considerable part of the population. But
there is no reason why the negro should work cheaper for us because he
is ugly. If a white labourer has a right to put a price on his labour, so has
the black labourer.58
Beesly's analysis was a class analysis: but crosscut with, one might even say
undercut by, racial thinking. Black men were lesser, but should have the
same rights to proper wages for their labour. In the last analysis, as Engels
might have put it, the struggle in Jamaica was the same as the struggle in
England: a struggle between capitalists and the proletariat. But there was
never a last analysis, only the continual play of hierarchies of difference in
relations of power.
In Beesly's hands history was represented as a struggle over class, if
always undercut with race. Women might be understood as oppressed, but
their historical moment had not come. Beesly was to marry Emily Crompton,
a historian herself. He assured Marx that his wife fully shared his political
and social views, and that his marriage would lead to no dilution of his
political opinions.59 Yet his historical writing reproduced traditional splits
between domesticated heroines and wicked women who used their sexu-
ality to ensnare men, and, as my colleague Negley Harte has documented,
he was to oppose the entry of women to University College both as students
and as teachers.60 For Beesly it was class which provided the motor of
history. A series of essays that he published between 1865 and '67, on the
Roman republic, underlined this analysis. An enthusiastic republican who
nevertheless believed that the Roman empire had marked a progressive
stage in the evolutionary development of history, he was determined to
rescue Catiline, a republican reformer, from the unjust verdict of history. It
was Cicero, Beesly believed, that arch-literary historian, whose 'carefully
cooked narratives' had defamed Catiline and been taken as the truth.
Cicero was always a friend to those in power and a man who believed that
clever writing and eloquent speaking were the key virtues. Catiline, Beesly
maintained, had had the support of the populace and the peasantry, 'groan-
ing under an infamous government': despite this he was defeated and the
corrupt oligarchy had survived.61 Cicero's mendacious account had been

repeated for centuries, Beesly wanted to put the record straight. History was
not simply stories of great men as Kingsley had argued: humble men had a
right to have their stories told too. 'History has always been written ... by
the rich or their friends. Rulers who have deceived that class have suffered
accordingly. But how would contemporary history look', he wrote with
extraordinary prescience, 'if recorded by an Irish peasant or a Spitalfields
weaver?'62
Marx was relatively impressed by Beesly's essay, he told Engels. 'Pro-
fessor Beesly has an article on Catiline in the Fortnightly Review a few
weeks ago justifying him as a revolutionary', he wrote. 'There's all sorts of
uncritical stuff in it (as you'd expect from an Englishman, e.g. he's wrong
on Caesar's position at that time), but the intense rage at the oligarchy and
the "respectable" is nice. Also his digs against the respectable English dull
litterateur.'63 (Many years later Beesly, writing about Marx, observed that
they had always been good friends. 'I am sure that he considered me to be
a well-meaning person - which was more than he was willing to allow with
regard to most people who differed with him.')64 Beesly's third essay in the
series, a defence of the maligned Emperor Tiberius, was first delivered to a
meeting of working-class reformers in Bradford in March 1867, at a time
when agitation for parliamentary reform was still linked with attempts to
bring Eyre to justice. Once again Beesly found an opportunity for a swipe
at Kingsley: both his rotten politics and his rotten history. On this occasion
he rammed the lessons of history home to his audience: Rome had suffered
from 'that worst of all governments, the monopoly of power by a privileged
class'. 'Such a horde of blood-suckers and extortioners never before or since
fastened on a set of oppressed people.' But the people rose, led by Caesar,
their tribune and champion against the nobility. The people carried Caesar
to power so that he could establish something like equality. 'Instead of
relying upon oratory, and agitation, and street demonstrations, and monster
meetings, they carried a sharp sword.'65
Four months later, when the 1867 Reform Act was on its way to becom-
ing law, Beesly was working on a six-point programme which would secure
a satisfactory legal settlement for Trade Unions. His mentor Comte
regarded the free operation of Trade Unions as of much greater significance
than suffrage. At the same time Beesly was petitioning in favour of Fenian
political prisoners, along with Bright, and raising unpopular questions about
the conduct of the army in Ireland and Jamaica. But it was his speech on
the Sheffield outrages, when murders had been committed by a trade union-
ist in the context of a trade dispute, that most seriously offended respectable
opinion and led to attempts to remove him from University College.66 At a
large London meeting in July 1867 Beesly argued that 'a trades union
murder was no better or worse than any other murder'. 'During the last
twelve months', he continued, in reference to his support for the prosecu-
tion of Governor Eyre:
he had subscribed his money and given what other assistance he could to
bring a great murderer to justice - a murderer whose hands were red with
the blood of not two or three victims but of more than four hundred.
Yet the wealthy classes in England had supported Eyre; they had encour-
aged murder. Why was it expected that London workmen should 'take
blame or shame for themselves for what had been done at Sheffield'?67 Why
was there one set of values for the rich and another for the workers? These
comments provoked outrage and for a month it looked as if Beesly would
lose his job for he was denounced as unfit to teach young men, but he sur-
vived and remained in post until 1893.68 Kingsley, meanwhile, gave up his
appointment in favour of more lucrative preferment in the Church.
In 1863 Kingsley published The Water-Babies, perhaps now his best-

known work. Not a history, of course, but part of his body of writing and
thinking. It is a lyrical evocation of the wonders of nature, and an argu-
ment for the coexistence of evolutionary thinking with Christianity. It is
replete with a grammar of difference, from 'the most beautiful little girl'
under the snow-white coverlet, whose cheeks were almost as white as the
pillow, and whose hair was like threads of gold, to the 'ugly, black, ragged
figure, with bleared eyes and grinning white teeth', the dirty little black
ape who has to be washed clean, Tom.69 It reminds us of the pervasive
nature of hierarchies of difference and the relations of power constituted
through them. History writing, whether fictional or scholarly, aimed to
civilize: it would educate British subjects and prepare them to civilize
others in the empire. In its mappings of difference, whether of class, of
race, of gender or sexuality, it was engaged in the constitution of new
subject positions, as patriotic Britons, responsible and progressive
workers, domesticated women, or those who were colonized. It config-
ured a world in which nation and empire were intimately connected and
in which race was a critical determinant shaping an English sense of self.
Unpicking this concept of civilization and attempting to grasp its deep
and complex relation to Englishness, is, I suggest, part of the work of cre-
ating a more egalitarian world, and this is a task in which history con-
tinues to have a central place.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
This is the text of an inaugural lecture, delivered at University College London on 18 January
2001.
1 I first came across this lecture in T. B. Wiseman's most interesting essay, 'E. S. Beesly
and the Roman Revolution', published in Gareth Schmeling (ed.), Qui Miscuit Utile Dulci.
Festschrift Essays for Paul Lachlan MacKendrick, Illinois, 1998. Thanks to my colleague
Michael Crawford for giving me this essay when I was first appointed to UCL.
2 Charles Kingsley, 'The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History', The Romans and
the Teutons, London, 1864, p. xi.
3 Edward Spencer Beesly, 'Mr. Kingsley on the Study of History', Westminster Review
New Series 19: 2, April 1861, pp. 305-36, p. 336.
4 James Baldwin, 'Stranger in the Village' (1953), reprinted in Notes of a Native Son,
Harmondsworth, 1995, pp. 151-65.
5 Salman Rushdie, 'The New Empire within Britain', Imaginary Homelands: Essays and
Criticism 1981-1991, London, 1991, p. 129.
6 Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism,
New York, 1996, p. 17.
7 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, New York,
1993, p. xiv.
8 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English
Middle Class 1780-1850, London, 1987.
9 Stuart Hall, 'The Multi-cultural Question', in Barnor Hesse (ed.), Un/settled Multi-
culturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, London, 2000, p. 223.
10 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures
in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley CA, 1997, pp. 34, 37.
11 Civilizing Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination 1830-1867,
Cambridge, 2002, elaborates the arguments which are summarized in this lecture about the
centrality of empire to Englishness.
12 John Stuart Mill, 'Civilization' (1836), reprinted in Dissertations and Discussions.
Political, Philosophical and Historical, 4 vols, London, 1859, vol. 1, pp. 165, 170, 171, 185, 203.
13 M. I. Moirs, D. M. Peers and L. Zastoupil (eds), John Stuart Mill's Encounter with India,
Toronto, 1999. See particularly Alan Ryan's 'Introduction', pp. 4-5 and Lynn Zastoupil's
'India, John Stuart Mill and "Western" Culture'.
14 Harriet Martineau, Harriet Martineau's Autobiography with Memorials by M. W.
Chapman, 3 vols, London, 1877; Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History. British Feminists,
Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915, Chapel Hill NC, 1994.
15 Royden Harrison, 'E.S. Beesly and Karl Marx', International Review of Social History
4, 1959, pp. 22-58, p. 23.
16 Harriet Martineau, British Rule in India; a Historical Sketch, London, 1857, pp. v-vi.
17 Brenda Ann Quinn, 'India in the Making of Liberal Identities: the case of Mary
Carpenter and Harriet Martineau', University of Essex PhD, 2000, p. 138.
18 Martineau's epigraph on the titlepage is Goldsmith's,
Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,

I see the lords of humankind pass by,
Intent on high designs.
19 Martineau, British Rule in India, pp. 242, 244.

20 Cora Kaplan, "'A Heterogeneous Thing": female childhood and the rise of racial
thinking in Victorian Britain', in Diana Fuss (ed.), Human, All Too Human, New York, 1999.
21 Martineau, British Rule in India, pp. 54, 337-41.
22 Martineau, British Rule in India, pp. 54, 337-41.
23 Martineau, British Rule in India, pp. 211-2.
24 Martineau, British Rule in India, pp. 355, 296.
25 N. B. Harte, One Hundred and Fifty Years of History Teaching at University College
London, University College London, 1982.
26 Charles Kingsley, His Letters and Memories of His Life edited by his wife, 4 vols,
London, 1901; Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk. A Life of Charles Kingsley, London,
1974.
27 Ray Strachey, The Cause. A Short History of the Women's Movement in Great Britain
(1928), London, 1978, pp. 61-2.
28 Max Muller wrote the preface to a new edition of The Roman and the Teuton, published
after Kingsley's death in 1875. Preface p. xi. The copy in UCL library was presented to the
College by Rose Kingsley, one of Kingsley's daughters.
29 Kingsley, Letters and Memories, vol. 1, p. 55.
30 Chitty, The Beast and the Monk, p. 204.
31 The Beast and the Monk, pp. 133, 171.
32 Kingsley, The Roman and the Teuton, p. vii.

33 Kingsley, 'The Limits of Exact Science', p. xxxvii.
34 Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! (1854), Collins, London, n.d. On Brooke see Kingsley,
Letters and Memories, vol. 1, p. 231.
36 Letters and Memories, vol. 3, pp. 248-9.
37 See, for example, Letters and Memories, vol. 1, pp. 196-7.
38 Kingsley, Westward Ho!, pp. 16-17.
39 Personal communication, 15 Jan. 2001.
40 Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago (1857), London, 1900.
41 Kingsley, Letters and Memories, vol. 3, pp. 92-3.
42 Chitty, The Beast and the Monk, p. 115.
43 Royden Harrison, 'E. S. Beesly and Karl Marx'.
44 W. P. Ker, Notes and Materials for the History of University College, London, University
College London, 1898.
45 Harrison, 'E. S. Beesly and Karl Marx', pp. 23-4.
46 Beesly, 'Mr. Kingsley on the Study of History', p. 302.
47 'Mr. Kingsley on the Study of History', pp. 311, 334.
48 Edward Spencer Beesly, 'Cicero and Clodius' (1866), reprinted in Catiline, Cicero and
Tiberius, London, 1878, pp. 39-40.
49 Ker, Notes and Materials, pp. 36-7.
50 Chitty, The Beast and the Monk, p. 171; Royden Harrison, 'E. S. Beesly and Karl Marx',
p. 37.
52 Letters and Memories, vol. 3, p. 265.
53 Kingsley, Two Years Ago, p. 139.
54 Beesly's speech in St James Hall is reprinted in full in Royden Harrison, Before the
Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics 1861-1881, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1965,
pp. 72-7.
55 Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy, London, 1962, pp. 93-4, 113.
56 Kingsley, Letters and Memories, vol. 3, pp. 248-9, vol. 4, p. 265.
57 The Bee-Hive Newspaper, 25 Nov., 1865.
58 As previous note.
59 Royden Harrison, 'Professor Beesly and the Working-class Movement', in Asa Briggs
and John Saville (eds), Essays in Labour History (1960), 2 vols, London, 1967, vol. 1,
pp. 205-41, p. 232.
60 See, for example, Beesly's account of Agrippina in Catiline, Clodius and Tiberius, esp.
p. 133; N. B. Harte, 'The Admission of Women to University College London. A Centenary
Lecture', University College London, 1979.
61 Beesly, Catiline, Clodius and Tiberius, pp. 39-40, 28.
62 Catiline, Clodius and Tiberius, pp. 129-30.
63 Marx to Engels, 19 Aug. 1865. Cited in Wiseman, 'E. S. Beesly and the Roman Revol-
ution', p. 382.
64 Harrison, 'E. S. Beesly and Karl Marx', p. 32.
65 Beesly, Catiline, Clodius and Tiberius, pp. 87-8, 90. On Kingsley see especially the
footnote on p. 95.
66 Harrison, 'E. S. Beesly and Karl Marx', pp. 37-9.
67 The Bee-Hive Newspaper, 6 July 1867.
68 Ker, Notes and Materials.
69 Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (1863), London, n.d. pp. 25, 26.

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Men and Their Histories: Civilizing Subjects

Author(s): Catherine Hall

Men and Their Histories:

In 1860 Charles Kingsley, celebrated author and erstwhile Christian socialist,

History Workshop Journal Issue 52 C History Workshop Journal 2001

I want to suggest that racism is not a side-issue in contemporary Britain;

thinking was a part of the everyday, part of English commonsense. The

such divisions were natural, were constantly in the making, in conflicts of

History was in itself intended to be a civilizing subject. In John Stuart

necessary critique.18 For it was essential to acknowledge that Britain had

definition, was God educating man. Metaphors from science, he argued,

Fig. 2. Edward Spencer Beesly.

I don't consider a black man a beautiful object, and I daresay he sings

corrupt oligarchy had survived.61 Cicero's mendacious account had been

In 1863 Kingsley published The Water-Babies, perhaps now his best-

NOTES AND REFERENCES

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,

19 Martineau, British Rule in India, pp. 242, 244.

32 Kingsley, The Roman and the Teuton, p. vii.

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