Abstract
The British historian of early modern England and Europe C. V. Wedgwood was one of the most decorated, prolific, and popular writers of the twentieth-century Anglophone world. Wedgwood wrote scholarly history for anyone interested in learning about the past. She kept her audience firmly in mind: the world of educated men and women, interested in politics, art, theater, fiction, and poetry. This was a world beyond the academy and epitomized by fashionable London society before, during, and immediately after World War II. Wedgwood believed that the “first duty” of the historian was to an audience: to educate, illuminate and tell a story. Nor was drawing morals problematic, for “if the accurate, judicious and highly trained fail to do so, the unscrupulous and unqualified will do it for them.” This essay focuses on Wedgwood’s career as a public intellectual, surveying her concerns to educate and influence men and women outside of the academy. Wedgwood saw history as far too important to be imparted only within schools and universities. The historian needed to be in the world, serving humanity.
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Notes
- 1.
Aphra Behn, Sir Patient Fancy (London, 1678), sig. A. Wedgwood sought to live off her writing. She did receive a monthly dividend but it was not until 1966 when she received her share of her father’s estate that she could stop worrying about money. Oxford: Bodleian Library, Wedgwood diary, MS. Eng.d.3338, f. 72.
- 2.
For example, A. H. Woolrych writes, “an academic career was open to her, but she decided against it. She wanted more freedom …” He wrote this in a sympathetic piece on her shortly after her death, “Cicely Veronica Wedgwood,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 97 (1998): 521–534 (quote on 523).
- 3.
Time and Tide is discussed below. John Lehmann’s New Writing, a monthly book magazine (later Penguin New Writing) debuted in 1936 and was committed to anti-fascism. Encounter was a left-wing, anti-Stalinist literary magazine, begun in 1953 by the poet Stephen Spender and American journalist Irving Kristol. The Geographical Magazine was founded in 1935 by diplomat Michael Huxley, and is now published as Geographical. The TLS and London Magazine still exist today. Wedgwood published in these periodicals.
- 4.
The BBC Third Programme aired from 1946 to 1970, and played a significant role in disseminating the arts.
- 5.
MS. Eng.d.3386, f. 93 (for the quote); also see, f. 85; MS. Eng.d.3387, ff. 30, 60.
- 6.
Annan identified these families as the Wedgwoods, Darwins, Stephens, Keyneses, Arnolds, Butlers, and Trevelyans in “The Intellectual Aristocracy,” in J. H. Plumb, ed., Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Trevelyan (London: Longman, 1955), 243–287. The Wedgwoods were also related to the Huxleys and Bowens . Also see Stephan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 140–145 (quote from 140).
- 7.
MS. Eng.d.3386, f. 78, describes Sir Ralph reading The Preludes aloud after dinner. Lady Iris Veronica Wedgwood (1887–1982) was the daughter of Albert Henry Pawson, a botanist and member of the Linnean Society of London. Veronica was also close to her grandfather. Lady Iris authored four novels in the 1920s and two works of non-fiction, Northumberland and Durham (1932) and Fenland Rivers: Impressions of the Fen Counties (1936).
- 8.
Sir Ralph Lewis Wedgwood (1874–1956), First Baronet, was the first Chief Officer of the London & North Eastern Railway for sixteen years; during the Second World War, he was chair of the wartime Railway Executive Committee. Bernard Burke, ed., Peerage (1999), 2963; Geoffrey Hughes, “Wedgwood, Sir Ralph Lewis, first baronet (1874–1956),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). His love for history and his library are mentioned in Elias Canetti, Party in the Blitz: The English Years, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: New Directions, 2005), 18. On the connections between Conrad and the Wedgwoods, see The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, 8 vols. ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 5–8, passim.
- 9.
Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 197.
- 10.
Josiah Wedgwood was also instrumental in the founding of the official History of Parliament and wrote, with his niece’s help, its first two published volumes, completed in 1936 and 1938. The story of the History of Parliament series is recounted in David Cannadine, “Piety: Josiah Wedgwood and the History of Parliament,” in his In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain (London: Penguin, 2002), 134–158; and in D. W. Hayton, “Colonel Wedgwood and the Historians,” Historical Research, 84/224 (May 2011): 348–355. C. V. Wedgwood later wrote about her uncle in The Last of the Radicals: The Life of Josiah Wedgwood, MP (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951).
- 11.
Mehta, Fly and the Fly Bottle, 189.
- 12.
She was a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton from 1953 to 1968 and a Special Lecturer at University College London from 1962 to 1991.
- 13.
Margaret Haig Mackworth , Viscountess Rhondda, introduction to Time and Tide Anthology, ed. Anthony Legeune (London: André Deutsch, 1956), 13; Ornella de Zordo, “London 1920s: Time and Tide Wait for No Man,” in Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America, ed. Marina Camboni (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), 233, 235; Muriel Mellown, “Lady Rhondda and the Changing Faces of British Feminism,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 9/2 (1987): 7–13.
- 14.
Her colleague at Time and Tide, John Betjeman, called her the “saintly backbone of all our lives.” For this quote and her attempts to restrain strong personalities, see Richard Ollard, A Man of Contradictions: A Life of A. L. Rowse (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 180.
- 15.
Mehta, Fly and the Fly Bottle, 200–201.
- 16.
MS. Eng.d.3333, f. 2 records her contributions to refugees; MS. Eng.d.3386, f. 17 on her conversation with J. H. Hexter. Jack H. Hexter (1910–96) was an American historian specializing in early modern English history. Wedgwood would spend time with the Hexter family when visiting the US.
- 17.
In her lecture “Principles and Perspectives,” published in 1960, she does refer to the “deeds and ideas of great men and women.” But she was not consistent and usually returned the masculine nouns and pronouns. Truth and Opinion: Historical Essays, 42. In 1946 she wrote an essay focused solely on women, the story of the Quakers, Katherine Evans and Sarah Chevers during their captivity in Malta, published in a Catholic periodical, Windmill. It was obviously meant as a sort of curiosity piece for the educated public.
- 18.
Time and Tide, 24 (May 1952). In her diary for 1952, Wedgwood describes being “fairly shocked” by Lady Rhondda’s decisions. MS. Eng.d.3386, f. 85. Wedgwood was still working for Time and Tide in 1958, the year Lady Rhondda died. In 1959, Wedgwood records hosting a “Time and Tide party;” it may have been a farewell party since the following year, the magazine was sold to new owners and revamped as a conservative Christian weekly. MS.Eng.e.3336, f. 16.
- 19.
Wedgwood’s 1957 speech, focusing on what historians owe the public, was published in The Author and the Public: Problems of Communication, introduction by C. V. Wedgwood (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1957). Wedgwood remained active in PEN for many years after her presidency.
- 20.
Among those she helped were: the music and theater critic Philip Hope-Wallace; the novelist Friedl Benedikt (Anna Sebastian); the Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti; and the historian A. L. Rowse. Wedgwood lived with Hope-Wallace and his sister, her partner, Jacqueline. Philip died in 1979. Wedgwood wrote the introduction to a collection of his writings assembled by Jacqueline, entitled Words and Music: A Selection from the Criticism and Occasional Pieces of Philip Hope-Wallace (London: Collins, 1981). Jacqueline cared for Wedgwood who died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1997.
- 21.
Wedgwood quoted in Mehta, Fly and the Fly Bottle, 201. Wedgwood was also a member of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (1953–78), president of the English Association (1955–56), president of the Society of Authors (1972–77), and vice president of the London Library. She served on the Arts Council (1958–61) and the Advisory Council of the Victoria and Albert Museum (1960–69), and was twice a trustee of the National Gallery (1962–68 and 1969–76), and its first female trustee.
- 22.
At Glasgow, Sheffield and Smith College.
- 23.
Wedgwood helped both A. L. Rowse and Elias Canetti publish their work through her connections, particularly with Jonathan Cape. Yet both men published uncharitable portraits of her and described her work as “second rate,” as discussed below.
- 24.
Richard Schlatter, “Review of Truth and Opinion,” Journal of Modern History, 33/1 (1961): 57.
- 25.
Strafford, 1593–1641 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), revised as Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford, 1598–1641: A Revaluation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1961); Oliver Cromwell (London: Duckworth, 1939); William the Silent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946); Richelieu and the French Monarchy (London: Hodder & Stoughton for English University Press, 1949); The Last of the Radicals: The Life of Josiah Wedgwood, MP (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951); Montrose (London: Collins, 1952); The World of Rubens, 1577–1640 (New York: Time-Life, 1967).
- 26.
The Great Rebellion: The King’s Peace, 1637–1641 (London: Collins, 1955); The Great Rebellion: The King’s War, 1641–1647 (London: Collins, 1958).
- 27.
Velvet Studies: Essays on Historical and Other Subjects (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946); Truth and Opinion: Historical Essays (London: Collins, 1960); History and Hope: Essays on History and the English Civil War (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987).
- 28.
Seventeenth-Century English Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1950).
- 29.
The Spoils of Time: A Short History of the World up to 1550 (London: Collins, 1984); The Spoils of Time: A World History from the Dawn of Civilization through the Early Renaissance (New York: Doubleday, 1985).
- 30.
Karl Brandi, The Emperor Charles V, trans. C. V. Wedgwood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939); Elias Canetti, Auto-da-fé, trans. C. V. Wedgwood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946).
- 31.
“The Historian and the World,” originally published in Time and Tide (14 & 21, 1942); republished in Velvet Studies, quote from page 158.
- 32.
Velvet Studies, 9.
- 33.
The Thirty Years War, repr. ed. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 506.
- 34.
“The German Myth,” originally published in The Tablet (April 25, 1942), an international Catholic weekly review published in London from 1936 to 1967, and republished in Velvet Studies; the quotes are from pages 48 and 52.
- 35.
“Reflections on the Great Civil War” originally published in Time and Tide (August 22 and October 24, 1942), republished in Velvet Studies, 121–122.
- 36.
“Aspects of Politics,” originally published in Time and Tide (October 21 and November 4, 1945), republished in Velvet Studies, 91.
- 37.
“The Historian and the World,” 154–156.
- 38.
“Principles and Perspectives,” in Truth and Opinion: Historical Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 47.
- 39.
Wedgwood’s amusing reference here is to the last line of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem The Question (1820), a dream about gathering flowers in a nosegay, but for whom? “The Historian and the World,” 155.
- 40.
“The Historian and the World,” 155.
- 41.
“The Historian and the World,” 156–157.
- 42.
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) was G. M. Trevelyan’s great-uncle. Wedgwood and Trevelyan shared many of the same beliefs. David Cannadine points out that Trevelyan believed that history provided readers with “just principles and noble emotions,” role models, inspiration, and an understanding of the human predicament. The same can be said of Wedgwood. See his G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), 184.
- 43.
“Reflections on the Great Civil War,” 124.
- 44.
“Government By Consent,” originally published in Time and Tide (July 3, 1943), Velvet Studies, 124.
- 45.
“Reflections on the Great Civil War,” 120.
- 46.
MS.Eng.e.3338, f. 29. The quote is from her diary where she is referring to Wylie Sypher’s Four Types of Renaissance Style (New York: Doubleday, 1955).
- 47.
“Good Company,” originally published in The Spectator (November 20, 1942), Velvet Studies, 81.
- 48.
“Reflections on the Great Civil War,” 123; “Good Company,” 82.
- 49.
MS. Eng.d.3386, f. 5, 30; Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: G. Bell and Sons, 1931).
- 50.
Truth and Opinion, “Introduction,” 13; and “Literature and the Historian,” 73; MS.Eng.e.3336, f. 73.
- 51.
Lord Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888, repr. 1992).
- 52.
S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1898–1901); Ivan Roots, “Gardiner, Samuel Rawson (1829–1902),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); see also J. S. A. Adamson, “Eminent Victorians: S. R. Gardiner and the Liberal as Hero,” Historical Journal, 33/3 (1990): 641–657.
- 53.
In her one semi-biographical essay, “The Velvet Study,” Wedgwood speaks to her early love of primary sources, particularly Gibbon and Clarendon, Shakespeare and Pepys, and asserting that she only read “secondary authorities” in fear that some reviewer would pronounce that, “the author appears ignorant of the important conclusions drawn by Dr. Stumpfnadel.” Velvet Studies, 11. Later in an interview she gave in 1962, she declared that “I don’t have much patience with secondary sources which stud the Why historian’s pages in the form of bulky footnotes.” Mehta, Fly and the Fly Bottle, 119. But Wedgwood’s multi-volume diary demonstrates that she clearly did read secondary literature, and was familiar with current historiography, even as she was also very fond of fiction and poetry and tasked to write reviews of many different kinds of books.
- 54.
The King’s Peace, 16, 17.
- 55.
Raymond P. Sterns , “Review of The King’s Peace,” AHR, 61/2 (1956): 388; Harold L. Fowler, “Review of The King’s Peace,” William and Mary Quarterly, 13/2 (1956): 286.
- 56.
This historiographical debate received its name from J. H. Hexter’s piece, “The Storm over the Gentry,” Encounter, 10 (May 1958): 22–34. For a review of the controversy, see R. C. Richardson’s Debate over the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 120–140.
- 57.
Letter to the Editor, Encounter, 11/5 (November 1958): 81.
- 58.
Christopher Hill, The Spectator (December 12, 1958): 870.
- 59.
Writes Wedgwood, in the Introduction to The King’s Peace, “I have sought to restore the immediacy of experience” (16). Wedgwood was deeply influenced by the historian G. M. Young, most famous for his essay on Victorian England, Portrait of an Age (London, 1936). He believed that what mattered most in history was what people believed and said about what was happening to them; the history experienced by the participants, not analyzed from on high by the historian.
- 60.
Orville Prescott, “Books of The Times,” The New York Times (April 3, 1959), 25.
- 61.
A. H. Woolrych, “Review of The King’s War,” EHR, 75/294 (1960): 163. Austin Woolrych (1918–2004) worked with Wedgwood on the Civil War scripts for the BBC in 1959. She wrote in her diary that he was a “particularly nice and intelligent young man.” MS.Eng.e.3336, f. 18.
- 62.
John Kenyon , The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), 232. Ibid., 284–285.
- 63.
Rowse , Historians I Have Known, 113–114.
- 64.
Woolrych , “Cicely Veronica Wedgwood,” 529.
- 65.
The Trial and Execution of Charles I (London: Collins, 1964); published in the US as A Coffin for a King (New York: Macmillan, 1964).
- 66.
MS.Eng.e.3336, f. 45. Garrett Mattingly’s (1990–62) The Armada, published in 1959, garnered numerous awards including a Pulitzer prize.
- 67.
MS.Eng.e.3338, f. 67. Esmond Samuel de Beer (1895–1990) is probably most famous for his edition of The Diary of John Evelyn, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955). In the 1960s, he was a major figure at London’s Historical Association and the Institute of Historical Research. He also served as a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. He and Wedgwood would have had plenty of opportunity to rub elbows.
- 68.
Yet, tellingly, the revisionists never cited her work. Conrad Russell praised Wedgwood’s story-telling style and her resistance to determinism in his 1995 Radio 3 talk (published in The Guardian, March 11, 1997, shortly after her death). But he never references her work in his own, including The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
- 69.
Wedgwood wrote about the topography of the battlefields in her books on the Civil War and in Battlefields in Britain (London: Collins, 1944). This book is still in print in both the UK and the US.
- 70.
Maurice Percy Ashley , “The Eve of the Civil Wars,” The Times Literary Supplement (January 7, 1955), 1.
- 71.
Rowse’s portrait of Wedgwood in his Historians I Have Known begins, “Veronica Wedgwood was my most eminent early pupil – not the ablest: that was J. P. Cooper.” J. P. Cooper (1920–78) was an economic historian, author of “The Counting of Manors,” EHR, 2nd ser., 8 (1956): 377–389 and “The Fortunes of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford,” EHR, 2nd ser., 11 (1958): 227–248. He also edited The Wentworth Papers, 1597–1628 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1973). He wrote a negative review of Wedgwood’s revised biography of Strafford which concludes, “it is a pity that modesty and lack of time because of other commitments should have conspired to prevent Miss Wedgwood from giving her full authority as well as her artistry to her first love.” J. P. Cooper, “Review of Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford, 1598–1641: A Revaluation,” EHR, 79/311 (1964): 377, 382.
- 72.
A. L. Rowse, Memories of Men and Women, American and British (New York: University Press of America, 1983); Kenyon , History Men, 232.
- 73.
“The Speech of George Macaulay Trevelyan made on the 12th November 1955 at the dinner in Christ’s College, Cambridge,” republished in Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan, 234.
- 74.
Ollard , A Man of Contradictions, 87. Richard Ollard knew Wedgwood. She notes in her diary for 1963, “Lunched with R. Ollard , who is now with Collins – a most amiable 40-ish historian, pupil of [David] Ogg.” MS.Eng.e.3337, f. 31.
- 75.
MS.Eng.e.3338, ff. 46–47. Rowse’s book was Bosworth Field and the Wars of the Roses (London: Macmillan, 1966). Paul Murray Kendall wrote The Yorkist Age (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1962). She also thought Rowse’s The Elizabethans in America (London: Macmillan, 1959) was “thin.” MS.Eng.e.3336, f. 45.
- 76.
For example, MS.Eng.e.3336, f. 10; MS.Eng.e.3337, f. 22; MS.Eng.e.3338, f. 41.
- 77.
Canetti , Party in the Blitz, 17.
- 78.
Anthony Grafton, “Foreword” to C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War, repr. ed. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), vii.
- 79.
Elizabeth Johnson, “C. V. Wedgwood and Her Historiography,” Contemporary Review, 201/1155 (April 1962): 209.
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Zook, M.S. (2018). C. V. Wedgwood: The Historian and the World. In: Smith, H., Zook, M. (eds) Generations of Women Historians. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77568-5_6
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