English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture

by Stefan Collini

This is an accessible collection of essays by a leading historian and critic. Subjects include the idea of "the national past," the historian as social critic, the claims of Cultural Studies, the nature of academic "research," the function of the literary biography, and the lives and ideas of such figures as Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Bertrand Russell, R. H. Tawney, Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart.

Genres: Essays, History

Paperback

First published March 25, 1999

About the author

Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University. After degrees at Cambridge and Yale, he taught at the University of Sussex before moving to a post in the Faculty of English at Cambridge in 1986. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Nation, and other periodicals, and an occasional broadcaster.

His research includes the relation between literature and intellectual history from the early 20th century to the present. Current research focusses on the cultural role of, and the historical assumptions expressed in, literary criticism in Britain from c.1920 to c.1970. Recent work has dealt with the question of intellectuals in 20th-century Britain, the relation between academic critics and 'men of letters', the role of cultural criticism, as well as individual essays on figures such as T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, George Orwell, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart. Also work on the history, and public debates about the role, of universities in Britain.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this collection of essays six years ago and a memory of their quality remains but these sorts of essays are the kind of writing that can date all to quickly. I would recommend the review by Jonathan Norton on GoodReads for anyone wanting an intelligent and in depth appraisal of the book. My memory of the essays is at one with his fine analysis - one that I could never have formulated with such elegance or brio.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1999, this is one of the several collections of Collini's essays. In this volume the focus is on "History and culture", with no specific time limit, and the text is grouped in to 3 sections: "Histories", "Minds", and "Arguments".

The first section ponders the problems and prospects of the very idea of "writing the national history", and how it relates to "heritage". The existence of multiple, and possibly conflicting, versions of that history is considered, and also the fact that interested parties have their own reasons for preferring to place the emphasis on some topics rather than others. Collini is sensitive to these issues but does not adopt a simple "radical" line to repudiate all manifestations of traditionalism. In all his collections he does show a strand of fascinated sympathy for the various patrician-scholars such as G.M.Trevelyan, who presumed their intellectual authority much like their political influence: as a birthright, not requiring much reflective justification. Collini is also aware of British intellectual life as part of a wider world, and he takes an extended interest in emigrant thinkers such as Lewis Namier and Isaiah Berlin. There is a comparative study of how the French cultural establishment deal with the issues, and a study of Elie Halevy, a great French mind who was devoted to the study of British thinkers.

The 2nd section includes plenty of eminent Victorians, but plenty more qualified admiration for Sir Isaiah, who gave a noble example of a fertile mind that didn't feel contained in academic boundaries. The greatest admiration clearly goes to Richard Hoggart, however, who is obviously Collini's hero, and his model for a British intellectual who has risen from a modest provincial background to holding a position amongst the academic elite (though not the powerful). Raymond Williams is compared unfavourably, though he gets some credit for having a world-wide impact.

The final section is the most dated, since much of it relates to the changes in higher education that started in the Thatcher years. There is now a generation of academics who never knew the golden times that old men like Collini remember, just as their students can only dream of getting full maintenance grants and no fees. Cultural Studies - Williams' legacy - is appraised as "Greivance Studies" and various instances of sloppiness and stridency identified. This part is really an extension of his homage to Hoggart, whose example has been way-laid even though the project he inspired was a worthwhile one. Collini obviously wishes the cultural students would write in way he does about R.H.Tawney: empathising and giving space to the subject's motivations, but stepping back to voice sceptical judgements on the implicit paternalism of such high-born socialists, and the tendency to cultural authoritarianism. A problem easier to see if you grew up in a "graceless 1950s bungalow beyond Croydon" and not the various mansions where earlier historians learned to see the land around them.