| Tracing the fortunes of the genre "classical history" sheds light on the values of the English elite reading and writing this literary form. In the period 1671-1757 the chief model for English historians was classical. In antiquity history had been a serious, truthful narrative of great deeds, morally and politically edifying, memorably written to last forever. English critics discerned two types: the Thucydidean history of one's own times and the Livian general history of a nation.;Part One contains two introductory and theoretical chapters setting forth this question, analyzing the ambiguities of the models, and defining the other literary genres confused with, but subordinate to, history.;Part Two is a more social, institutional, and political than a literary study. Three narrative chapters describe the fortunes of the classical models from 1671, when Clarendon successfully imitated Thucydides, until 1757, when Hume wrote a Livian history. The classical historian was supposed to be an independent inquirer, but the Church, the crown, and an expanding reading public sponsored clerical, polemical, and popular history at odds with both genres. The retired statesman, chief candidate for Thucydides' mantle, failed to step forward, due to the nature of political opposition, to competing leisure activities, to the debilitating rigors of politics, and to the secret-keeping of mighty families. Clarendon's success inspired other historians, but the nearest imitation of him, by Bolingbroke, for whom Clarendon symbolized a vanishing social, political, and aesthetic order, proved abortive. The eighteenth-century meaning of Hume's achievement is also important to understanding other "philosophical historians" such as Robertson and Gibbon: Hume's was a Livian history.;The dissertation examines the constraints on, and temper of, intellectual life, by addressing a question contemporaries asked: why has no Englishman been able to write a history attaining classical standards? The answer lies not in a purely textual approach, which has dominated scholarly work on English history-writing, but in a study of the wider "historical culture"--a social history of the two genres focusing on the audiences and institutions which either helped or hindered successful imitation of the ancient historians. |
