The Pelican History of England Retrospective

I spent the first half of this year reading the Pelican History of England, a series of nine paperback books chronicling the history of England from the Roman conquest up to the 1970s. The first eight were originally released in the 1950s, joined by a ninth in the 1960s. They were reissued, as far as I can tell, fairly consistently until the 1990s when Penguin finally let them go out of print. Some were reprinted as is, but others went into multiple editions—volume 4 had eight! In some cases, the differences between editions were apparently pretty small, but others were almost wholly rewritten. In one case (volume 6), the book was replaced by one written by a different author in the 1970s.

One thing that fascinated me reading the books was how much history had to be squeezed into these slim volumes. Volume 2, for example, goes from A.D. 449 to 1066, covering 617 years in 237 pages, meaning each page has to cover 2.6 years! But also as the series went on, each volume got a narrower year range... and some of the later volumes were thicker than the early ones, too.

Volume	Start	End	Years	Pages	Pages/Year
1	500 B.C.	449	949	189	0.20
2	449	1066	617	237	0.38
3	1066	1307	241	267	1.11
4	1307	1536	229	254	1.11
5	1485	1603	118	303	2.57
6	1603	1714	111	345	3.11
7	1714	1815	101	204	2.02
8	1815	1914	99	227	2.29
9	1914	1979	65	348	5.35

(You could argue volume 1's start date should be A.D. 43, since its overview of pre-Roman Britain is pretty quick; that would change its years covered to 406, and its pages per year to 0.47. Also, yes, volumes 4 and 5 do overlap for some reason. It's volume 4 that's at fault, actually; the series was released out of order, and volume 5 was published first.)

As you can see, the volume covering the twentieth century far and away gets the most detail. Partially this is because it is somehow the longest volume despite having the least amount of time to cover! I was surprised to realized the series peaked, though, with volumes 5 and 6, which were a bit chunkier than the subsequent volumes.

Lastly, here's a picture of my eclectic set of editions:

The blue-spine ones are 1970s printings. These I picked up at a used bookstore, and are what launched me on this project to collect them all. The white-spine ones are 1980s printings. Volume 8 I found in a box of free books in grad school.

When buying the other volumes to plug the gaps for this project, I stuck to 1990s printings in order to have the most recent editions of each book; these are the ones with orange spines. You can't always trust online booksellers, though; I am pretty sure the copy I bought of volume 5 was listed as a 1990s one but I received a 1980s one instead.

The picture demonstrates how, even within a decade, Penguin did not do a good job of maintaining consistency. Why does my 1982 printing of volume 5 have a different spine design than my 1986 printing of volume 8? Why was the 1990s printing of volume 1 taller than all the other volumes? (I'm guessing it's related to the fact that the 1990s printing of volume 1 was a new edition, whereas all of these other stopped getting new editions in the 1980s at the latest.) Why are the book title and author name in black on volume 6 when they are white on all other 1990s printings? Why does the spine of volume 7 call it the Penguin History of England instead of the Pelican? (An attempt to rebrand the series that didn't last? Or an honest mistake?)

These are the questions that keep me up at night. 

The third edition of volume 1 was released in 1995; this was the first significant change to the series since the second edition of volume 6 came out in 1985. Weirdly, just a year later, Penguin began superseding the series with its new effort, the Penguin History of Britain; the first release of that series, volume 6 (covering 1603-1714) came out in 1996. It would take two decades to publish them all; the last was volume 8 (covering 1800-1906) in 2017. (Except that volume 7, covering 1707-1815, never came out at all!) These are, I understand, a bit different in approach than the Pelican Histories: hardcovers without a uniform design or branding. 

I do intend to read them too, but that will be a project for 2026... I need a break!

The Pelican History of England #9: The World Wars and Beyond (1914–79)

The final volume of the Pelican History of England was published in 1965, covering 1914 to 1963; I read that edition many years ago. In 1981, it was updated to cover through 1979, but since author David Thomson died in 1970, one of his former students, Geoffrey Warner, did the update. According to his preface, Warner didn't update Thomson's text very much; instead, he just added two chapters to the end to cover the last fifteen years. The result is somewhat odd, because it takes what was already one of the longest Pelican Histories and makes it even longer—even though it covers the shortest span of time!

I'll say more about the overall design of the series in a future post, but I did think this book had more detail than earlier ones... which wasn't always warranted. Whereas previous volumes would not really go into detail about the movement of foreign wars, this one does. I think probably this is partially because it has the space to do, but also because its author lived through the events in question (Thomson would have been in his thirties during World War II), so they seemed important to him. Additionally, there's more blow-by-blow detail on the politicking and the parties; again, I suspect the dual reason of 1) available space, and 2) recency bias. To me, though, this made the book less effective; the best Pelican Histories (such as Thomson's own volume 8) have given a bird's-eye view of the era in question, but here I felt a bit bogged down in the identities of specific cabinet ministers. (The other consequence of recency is that he's more likely to assume readers already know what something is than other contributors to the series, which I guess is fair enough, but I would have appreciated an explanation of what the "coupon election" was!)

The Pelican History of England: 9. England in the Twentieth Century (1914-79)
by David Thomson with Geoffrey Warner

Second edition published: 1981
Originally published: 1965
First edition previously read: August 2013
Acquired and reread: July 2025

The other thing that makes this volume unusual is that it's the only one to be written by a repeat author. Thus, unsurprisingly, Thomson continues the emphasis of his previous volume, focusing on how the government became increasingly invested in the management of society through a variety of means. Though as I said above I did think we got a bit too much detail about specific ministries, Thomson does ably show how the two major political parties, and the succession of prime ministers, attempted to regulate the economy and elevate the welfare of the citizenry in ways that were sometimes surprisingly similar and sometimes very different. By the 1950s, "British society now presupposed full employment, economic growth, mass consumption, and therefore mass advertising" but "[u]like the Welfare State, it cared little about inequalities of wealth" (260).

For example, he points out that what used to be called "departments," "boards," and "offices" largely became "ministries" after the Great War: "The change implied a new theory of government, in which politicians and their 'departments' of expert administrators jointly shaped and pursued policies" (64). The world wars were also significant in that the pyramid-shaped power structures introduced during wartime became a guiding principle for the organization of government after (219). Of particular importance was the growth of education, which expanded significantly across successive generations in the first half of the century: "The national system of education kept pace with – though perhaps several paces behind – the development of modern Britain: its advance helped, in turn, to make possible the next phase of growth" (189).

Fun fact I learned from this book: H. G. Wells was supposedly the first person to ever use the term "leftism" in print (116). Unfortunately, Thomson gives a date for this (1927)... but not a citation! I think this may have been in his lecture Democracy under Revision, which was published that year by the Hogarth Press, but in a quick online search, it seems like the text isn't available online. Alas, a Google Books search for "leftism" with the date filter set to terminate at 1926 brings up a number of hits, mostly from communist periodicals, so it seems to be untrue. One gets the feeling that Thomson himself is a liberal if not a leftist, but often disappointed with the actual execution of leftist policies in practice. There is a funny bit where he cites a book read at the first meeting of the Left Book Club in 1936: "Describing future possibilities of artificial insemination, the author exclaimed: 'How many women, in an enlightened community devoid of superstitious taboos and of sex slavery, would be eager and proud to bear and rear a child of Lenin or of Darwin!' Fortunately some of its successors were more realistic" (163). I'll have to see if I can work that into my book chapter on left-wing use of Darwinism somewhere. 

I was struck by how Thomson described prime ministers Ramsey MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s: "Like a sedate and leisurely firm of comfortable family solicitors, they conducted the business affairs of Great Britain and the Commonwealth with mild, unhurried manners, facing no issue until it was claimant, seeking no decision until it was overdue. [...] History may come, more and more, to see them as Tweedledum and Tweedledee – presiding jointly over British national life in one of its peculiarly unheroic periods" (141). I don't know enough about the reception of British prime ministers to know if this actually came about!

There is a little but not a lot of discussion of the changing social mores of the twentieth century, though I found what there was to be quite interestingly framed; I sort of sensed a young person sneering at how his elders saw as controversial things he had not seen as controversial at all: "one marvels at how restricted they were in their modernity, how lacking in robust dissipations. Even there wildness was brittle, their cult of self-indulgence as synthetic as the cocktails at their interminable parties, or the jazz played in the night-clubs. [...] It was not long before they got tired of themselves" (87). C'mon, David, just how boring were your parents, really?

We see a combination of Thomson's critique of the left and his issues with twentieth-century social mores when he claims that "[t]o all those who, before the war, had held the materialist view that crime was caused largely by slums, poverty, and bad economic conditions, it was disconcerting to discover that the Welfare State brought a steep rise in crime," especially among teenagers, whose incomes had risen the most! (276) "The conclusion seemed to be that crime is determined not by material conditions alone, but by the whole social environment, including such intangible factors as the ethical standards and values prevalent in society as a whole, the personal and collective anxieties to which men were subjected, and even the effectiveness of humanistic or religious teaching about human relationships" (276-7). If Thomson mentions him, I didn't catch it, but it seems very much not a coincidence that Thomson supports this point by citing statistics from 1959-61 and that Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in 1962. 

In volume 8, Thomson discussed the monarchy a bit; surprisingly, there's less discussion of the abdication crisis than you might expect, but I found what Thomson said about Edward VIII's father, George VI, charming: "He had perhaps, as his successor remarked, waged 'a private war with the twentieth century', but his very old-fashionedness had been his strength" (151).

I wonder if I would have registered it if I hadn't been cued by the preface, but Geoffrey Warner's two chapters at the end are noticeably different, and I'm not just talking about the fact he breaks them up into fewer but longer sections than Thomson. While Warner maintains Thomson's focus on specific ministries and politicians and parties, he largely moves away from Thomson's focus on the "social state"; we get a lot more detail here about Britain's foreign policy during the era in question, especially issues surrounding decolonization and the Commonwealth. This is interesting but didn't really seem to be of a piece with the book I'd just read.

The Pelican History of England #8: The Victorian Period (1815–1914)

Surely I am at least somewhat biased in favor of this book, because the nineteenth period is my own special period of study, which means that (as opposed to many of the earliest volumes) I have a wider context in which to fit this book. But even aside from that, I think England in the Nineteenth Century is one of the best installments of the Pelican History of England, if not the best.

One of the goals of this series was to provide a "social history" of England, to focus not just on "dates and kings and battles" as A. R. Myers put it in volume 4, but how society itself was changing and evolving. This is an admirable goal, but I have found that many of the series's writers struggled with pulling this off in practice, leading to books where you would get snapshots of different aspects of society, but no coherent story. In my review of volume 4, I made this comment about volume 1 that I think sums it up well: "I felt like I got told a lot about what Roman houses in Britain looked like but not, say, why the Romans turned up to build houses to begin with." Volume 4 itself was another that struggled with this approach.

Some other authors moved away from this, preferring to work forward chronologically through a period, and I've found these the better volumes, because they were usually able to tell a story about the era in question—but even though each writer has their own prism of what they're interested in, it still would feel like you were moving forward through kings and politics, even if not "kings and battles," as if they had perhaps only succeeded because they had abandoned the whole raison d'être for the series. (I particularly liked volumes 5 and 6.)

The Pelican History of England: 8. England in the Nineteenth Century (1815-1914)
by David Thomson

Originally published: 1950
Acquired: August 2008
Previously read: January 2013
Reread: July 2025

But Thomson manages to make a social history and to tell a story in a way that achieves the platonic ideal of this series, and I don't think it's just the fact that I'm a Victorianist myself that makes me say this. Thomson focuses on how during this time the English were coming into a greater understanding of their own society, and thus attempting to do something about. He is writing to reclaim the Victorian period to the way the modernists came to view it in the early twentieth century (see Woolf's Between the Acts, which would have come out less than a decade prior, for a good example of this): "The whole meaning of Victorian England is lost if it is thought of as a country of stuffy complacency and black top-hatted moral priggery.... [They were] a people engaged in a tremendously exciting adventure – the daring experiment of fitting industrial man into a democratic society. Their failures, faults, and ludicrous shortcomings are all too apparent: but the days when Mr Lytton Strachey could afford to laugh at the foibles of the 'Eminent Victorians' have passed,* and we must ask ourselves the question whether we can laugh at our great-grandfathers' attempts to solve problems to which we have so far failed to find an answer" (33-4). Yes, it was an age of empire and of unequally distributed wealth, "[b]ut even when least fully aware of whence their power came Victorian Englishmen usually used it well, for they used it in the cause of freedom" (10). Some of their attempts seem comic to us now, yet "[i]t is wiser but more difficult to try to understand mid-Victorianism than to ridicule it" (102).

Drawing on another historian, M. D. George, Thomson puts it this way when discussing the conditions of the working classes in London: "hardships begin to be talked about only when they are no longer taken for granted: and it is the increased attention paid to them that is perhaps the main feature of the period.... Sweated labour and cellar dwellings were not invented by the men who made the industrial revolution: they were discovered by them, discussed by them, and in the end partially remedied by them" (18-19).

The beginning of the book is a bit jarring coming off of J. H. Plumb's volume 7, because Plumb ended his book on kind of a cliffhanger: "To thinking men the horizon was dark and foreboding.... [I]n 1815, at the end of long endurance, there was fear, and envy, and greed, but little hope" (214). But Thomson doesn't see 1815 this way at all! He says that in 1815, England "was on the brink of an era of prosperity and greatness unrivalled in her whole history," though he does also admit "she was entering upon a period of remarkable social distress and unrest" (32). One of the selling points of the series was that each writer had the freedom to advance their own interpretation, so this isn't necessarily bad, but it does read weird, like when an issues of a comic book ends on a cliffhanger, but the next issue has a new creative team, so they just ignore it and do what they're interested in. Thomson doesn't position 1815 as a dark time like Plumb did, but as a time where people began to see the darkness and therefore began to do something about it.

Thus the book manages to tell a story, but instead of being the story of kings or prime ministers or battles, it's the story of how England attempted to improve itself; if there was "[t]he spread of social distress and economic upheaval," what matters to Thomson is that this led to the creation of "what soon came to be called 'the condition of England question'." He talks about the many significant people, but what matters about them is how behind their actions was the "fermenting of a new spirit of discontent" (43). The book is filled with examples of how things were changing for the better, leading to results that might seem bad in isolation but were improvements on how things had been. For instance, Thomson discusses the reduction of crimes for which the death penalty could be imposed; before 1832 you could be hanged for pickpocketing or stealing a sheep or "impersonating out-pensioners of Chelsea Hospital" (17). The new alternative was transportation (i.e., exile to Australia), and while this may seem like a bit of a barbaric punishment to us in isolation, it really was a serious improvement; after 1838, murder (or attempted murder) was the only crime anyone was hanged for. Okay, yes, hanging is barbaric, but limiting hangings to murders is definitely an improvement!

One of his big emphases throughout is the way the modern "social service state" developed; Thomson had previously written a book called Equality (1949) where he discussed this in detail, and I am interested enough to probably track it down someday. The belief that the government could be the remedy for social ills through systematic intervention was a new one in the period. Here, he says that the period created "well-rooted and flexible institutions of government and of social life.... [T]hese institutions of national life could be preserved, adjusted, modified, and used for new ends" (230). For example, he talks about how Robert Owen ("[c]ompletely a crank, something of a prig, but very much a saint"!) promoted education because it was the solution to the new idea that "our characters are made for us by environment and heredity alike, and therefore we are not responsible for what we are.... Men can all recognize truth when it is placed before them, and by moulding men's minds to the truth, society and even human nature can be revolutionized. Here was a simple and powerful basis for any program of comprehensive reform" (46).

A related emphasis is the Victorians' attempt to create a scientific understanding of society and thus a scientific basis for reform—this is my area of interest when it comes to the Victorians, so of course I'm into it. Thomson discusses Herbert Spencer, of course, but also figures less well known to a modern reader, like H. T. Buckle, who "attempt[ed] to handle human society by the methods of the physical sciences" and Walter Bagehot, who wanted more conscious discussion of a society that had evolved without conscious direction, and applied principles of natural selection (105). I found his discussion of how Darwin's Origin created an intellectual break particularly fascinating; I want to quote at length his quotation of Edward Pease, one of the founders of the Fabian Society, writing in 1916:

It is nowadays not easy to recollect how wide was the intellectual gulf which separated the young generation of that period from their parents. The Origin of Species, published in 1859, inaugurated an intellectual revolution.... The older folk as a rule refused to accept or to consider the new doctrine. I recollect a botanical Fellow of the Royal Society who, in 1875, told me that he had no opinions on Darwin's hypothesis.... Our parents, who read neither Spencer nor Huxley, lived in an intellectual world which bore no relation to our own; and cut adrift as we were from the intellectual moorings of our upbringings, recognising, as we did, that the older men were useless as guides in religion, in science, in philosophy because they knew not evolution, we also felt instinctively that we could accept nothing on trust from those who still believed that the early chapters of Genesis accurately described the origin of the universe, and that we had to discover somewhere for ourselves what were the true principles of the then recently invented science of sociology. (qtd. on 151)

But as he says, a man like Charles Dickens is born out of the same intellectual conditions that give us people like Spencer, even if he might seem very different at first glance: "His significance is not that he propounded any programme of social reforms or political improvements, but simply that he painted, for all to appreciate and enjoy, a vivid picture of working class folk whose poverty could be seen not as a penalty from heaven or the punishment of sin, but as the product of bad social conditions and the consequence of man's inhumanity" (114).

Thomson discusses imperialism, thankfully, fitting in too into his overarching story. I liked his take on Rudyard Kipling: "He made popular the ideal of a common imperial patriotism, transcending every diversity of birth and circumstance, ennobled by an ideal of selfless service. He has much too often been quoted as an exponent of aggressive imperialism. He is rather the voice of unrepentant but chastened imperialism, seeking perhaps to unconsciously equip British power with moral purpose and a human content" (204). I don't think you have to buy this interpretation of Kipling in specific or Victorian imperialism in general, but it shows where they were coming from—or at least where they believed they were coming from. On the other hand, I was a bit skeptical of his claim there was little malice in the British attitude to Germany before the Great War (218), given the strong anti-German sentiment in some of the era's future-war fiction I have read.

This is a smaller part of the book, but he also discusses the way the monarchy changed in this era to become what we (I would argue) still recognize it as today, as a physical symbol of Britain's greatness (172), calling it "a new type of royal authority, resting not on constitutional prerogatives or political activity, but on the psychological needs of nationalism and imperialism" (174).

I think probably the whole story of the book is probably summed up by this bit: "Later generations have come to regard as man-made and intolerable many things which the Victorians accepted as without remedy. The Victorians regarded as intolerable many others things which their ancestors had deemed without remedy, and they had slowly to invent appropriate means to deal with these new-found but not novel social evils.... Evils felt to be humanly remediable were tackled as promptly, and, on the whole, as competently, as the means at their disposal allowed" (115). 

It's a strong story of social transformation, and I think the best of these volumes by far. Perhaps a bit too sympathetic to the Victorians at times, but I guess I wouldn't be studying them if I wasn't sympathetic to them myself. It is certainly noteworthy that this is the first Pelican History where the book's publication date is closer to the era in question (it came out 36 years after the book's closing date) than it is to the time I read it (it came out 75 years ago). I am further from him than he was from many of the people he discusses! I think there is something to be said for the "power of distance," but proximity yields its own insights. I look forward to finishing off this project by (re)reading Thomson's second volume, which covers the era he himself lived through.

* Strachey's Eminent Victorians came out in 1918. 

The Pelican History of England #7: The Long Eighteenth Century (1714–1815)

As I get to the end of my project to read all the Pelican Histories of England, I've reached the point where I've read them before—back in 2012/13, I read the ones covering the eighteenth through twentieth centuries in parallel to my Ph.D. exam reading covering the same era. My copy of volume seven, however, I got from the library at the time, so for this reread, I bought my own copy. My new one is a 1990 printing (unlike some other volumes of the series, this one never went into new editions), and it does something I haven't seen in any of my other volumes of the series... it renames it! According to the cover and the spine, this isn't the Pelican History of England, but the Penguin! I don't know why they would rename the series, especially why they would only do this on one of the 1990s editions I have. Was it just a mistake? The interior list of other books in the series still calls it the "Pelican History" after all.

The Penguin History of England: 7. England in the Eighteenth Century
by J. H. Plumb

Originally published: 1950
Previously read: August 2012
Acquired: April 2025
Reread: June 2025

J. H. Plumb takes a similar approach to A. R. Myers in volume four, dividing his era into three sub-eras, in this case by three Prime Ministers: Walpole (1714-42), Chatham a.k.a. "Pitt the Elder" (1742-84), and Pitt a.k.a. "Pitt the Younger" (1784-1815). Unlike Myers, though, who carried out a strictly parallel construction in each of those three sections, Plumb has a bunch of different chapters that covers a lot of topics very quickly, though there is usually one on literature in each section. He's also fond of giving a quick biography of a key figure in a single chapter, such as John Wesley (founder of Methodism), John Wilkes (a reform journalist), and each of the three prime ministers. I think this probably has the most chapters of any Pelican History, with twenty-five in total. (Some of the earlier volumes had just five!) Like some of the earlier volumes, though, Plumb focuses less on giving you a blow-by-blow.

Anyway, like I said, I read this before, and my old review indicates I was not a big fan: "Plumb seemed to assume a level of general knowledge with the era's politics that I simply did not possess, as the whole book was organized around three principal prime ministers who were referred to as though I was already an expert." As another reviewer on LibraryThing says, "this is an introduction to the period for educated people. So names are used as if you should know who they are. I think when it was written that would have been alright, today it isn't, sadly." I'm not sure that Plumb ever explicitly says that Chatham and Pitt the Elder are the same person! But I did find it a bit easier to follow this time, no doubt thanks to having read the preceding six volumes and thus having a grounding in the time and era.

One thing I've been tracking across this project is not just how each writer structures their volumes, but also what kind of thesis they give about their era. Plumb's volume is diminished, I think, by not having one. Across the twenty-five chapters, he tries to cover a lot: politics, empire (the loss of America and the acquisition of India both happen here), religion (like I said, Wesley gets a chapter), the Napoleonic Wars, moves toward full democracy. It's hard to say that one thing dominates the book. I can see why Plumb might take this approach, wanting to give a broad view of a time period, but it does mean that I finished the book having felt I received a lot of glimpses of interesting bits but not a coherent panorama of the entire time. The problem is he does kind of give a thesis at the end, but he's been so all over the place in terms of details up until that point, that it doesn't feel very supported: "To thinking men the horizon was dark and foreboding.... [I]n 1815, at the end of long endurance, there was fear, and envy, and greed, but little hope" (214). Why?

The potted biographies of the prime ministers are particularly interesting and frustrating; Plumb hints at a lot but explains little. Apparently Pitt the Elder was insane? And sick every year of his life, both mentally and physically? But somehow a great prime minister anyway? How does this all add up? Once again, I find myself wanting to do some outside reading; I guess I will be tracking down a full-length biography of him at some point. Similarly, when talking about Pitt the Younger, he calls him an "enigma," "narrowly rational, and frequently mistaken," "atrociously bad in all questions of strategy," and "a drunkard" (208)! So what was he good at?

To the extend that Plumb does have a focus, however, it seems to be trade. He shows how trade both drove England's prosperity during this time, and also failed to transfer all of that prosperity to members of the working classes: "There were more families of middling wealth than ever before, but the vast bulk of the population fell within the contemporary category of 'labouring poor'.... [T]he poorest working men today would have found the lives of their ancestors almost unbearable.... [T]he human animal broke down under the burden..." (150). This is the time where England's economic prosperity takes off, leading us into the Victorian period (but more on that next time). 

Trade policy is the major area of focus he discusses with the three prime ministers. Plus, trade was also the impetus for empire, of course, in both India and Ireland, and the crippling of trade was a key outcome of the American Revolution. Trade so much drove the empire that, in the 1780s, we wouldn't really recognize imperialist rhetoric in India: "They were traders, proud of their race, determined to make money as fast as they could, but they were wholly free from the sense that manifest destiny had called them to rule the native people" (171). By the end of the century, there was a very different attitude: "Distasteful as it was for the Englishman to live in India, the provision of good government was an obligation which he could not avoid. It was his destiny" (178). Plumb himself, though, is a bit of an imperialist, suggesting "the British Raj was more just, and less extortionate, than its native counterpart" (178). Doubt you would see that in a 2020s history book!

Other things of interest: Like I said, he focuses on the slow transition toward wider democratic enfranchisement; I found his discussion of the reformers' own view of history fascinating: "they helped to foster the strange national mythology of the Victorians. They believed... that Saxon England was the golden age of political democracy. This was destroyed by the Normans and a monarchical tyranny imposed. A long struggle ensued. The first triumph was the Magna Carta... but final success was jeopardized by the corruption of George III's government.... Misleading, yet simple..." (136). If you've read the earlier volumes of this series, particularly three and six, you'll know just how wrong this is!

Anyway, I still found this one of the weaker volumes of the series but on the other hand, I got more out of it than I did on my previous pass. Lots of interesting tidbits even if not much of a coherent whole.

The Pelican History of England #6: The Stuart Period (1603–1714)

Originally, The Pelican History of England covered the seventeenth century with 1952's England in the Seventeenth Century by Maurice Ashley. That would be the only volume in the series, however, to be totally replaced. While some went into many editions, and Roman Britain was even substantially revised by a different author, in 1978, Stuart England by J. P. Kenyon was published, and that was it for England in the Seventeenth Century. Why? I don't know. I own a 1990 printing of the 1985 second edition of Stuart England; perhaps the first edition explained this choice, but Kenyon's preface to the second mostly focuses on explaining the changes since the first. Maurice Ashley didn't die until 1994, so it wasn't that, say, he was unavailable to update the book or something.

Anyway, how's the actual book? I find it interesting how the writers of these books were obviously granted a lot of freedom in their approaches; Kenyon does something I don't remember seeing before, which is he doesn't just open by laying out a thesis about the period in question, but he actually takes differing theses about the period in question as his topic. Kenyon rejects the "teleological approach of the Whig–Liberal historians" (15) where "a form of government... proceeded, subject to various trifling adjustments, down to the present day, and which not only made the nation Free and Right but showed it to be Great and Right" (14). That is to say, a lot of previous historians viewed this period as the gradual but inevitable evolution to the current system of British government, where the monarch's power is subordinated to that of a permanent, elected Parliament: "We have been brainwashed into accepting the... theory of inevitable, almost effortless parliamentary advance" (44). But this evolution was by no means inevitable... but if you don't accept the claims of the Whig approach to history, what do you have left? "Instead of striding along a brightly illuminated high road, the historian now shuffles uneasily in a thick fog from one lamp-post to another, the lamp-posts wide apart and eccentrically sited, and frequently shifting their position" (15). How's that for a metaphor!?

The Pelican History of England: 6. Stuart England
by J. P. Kenyon

Second edition published: 1985
Originally published: 1978
Acquired: March 2025
Read: April 2025

The body of the book mostly focuses on the shifting status of the monarchy versus Parliament, which makes sense in a period that saw the temporary abolition of the monarchy, and another monarch run out of the country and replaced with someone else. The introduction does lay out some other issues, such as the fluctuating status of the gentry (25), and Kenyon mentions in his preface that the first edition did have a chapter on literature and art that he cut (9-10), but overall it's monarchs that he focuses on here. (I like what he says near the end of the introduction about James I and Charles I: "It is a truism that they did not understand the English; it is not always acknowledged that their subjects took some understanding" [56]). At first, this made me view the book as the kind of traditional history that previous writers in the Pelican History series largely eschewed. 

But when I got to the conclusion, I realized Kenyon wasn't going through kings (and queens) because he was interested in kings qua kings; I realized it was because he was specifically interested in the status of the monarchy versus that of Parliament, which he portrays as much more complicated than it was usually perceived as: "It is conventional to assume that 1649 and 1688, and even 1660, represent the triumph of parliamentary over monarchical institutions. With the benefit of hindsight this may seem obvious; it was not so at the time, and it is to be doubted if it ever was.... [W]eak and disorganized as the monarchy often was, Parliament was more so... (353). Kenyon ends up claiming that if power was vested anywhere, it was in neither monarchy nor democracy but aristocracy; the most stable institution of the era was the House of Lords: "What was founded in 1688... was not parliamentary monarchy but aristocratic monarchy" (355).

So, as a guide to how the monarchy and Parliament negotiated their shifting power, I found this a strong and clear volume of the series, one of my favorites... though like many of the later volumes in the series, it certainly benefits from having 350 pages to cover a single century, as opposed to three centuries or more. Parliament became increasingly bold in this era, for example asserting that Charles I needed "to give up all his powers of command, appointment and policy-making right across the board, even in the education, upbringing and marriage of his own children" (151)! Unfortunately, Kenyon argues, "few people outside his immediate family felt any emotional attachment to the person of the King, and without this he lacked the catalyst which might have transmuted a very strong and widespread support for the institution of monarchy into loyalty to the monarch himself" (154). Sure, people liked the idea of kings, but not this king, unfortunately for him. Similarly, Charles II could have concentrated power back in the monarchy, but Kenyon argues it was once again a problem of the monarch's personality: "in the first few vital years of the Restoration, Charles squandered all his chances. He was not a lazy man, but he lacked concentration, his interests were too diversified, and he did not apply himself to the business of governing" (211-12). If England had had monarchs with different personalities, the long-term victory of Parliament would have been by no means assured. Even so, when James II came to power in 1685, Kenyon claims that "the monarchy was at the very zenith of its power" (242-43), which historian overlook because of their "foreknowledge of the Revolution, only three years away" (242).

The negotiations over the Glorious Revolution are fascinating; basically Parliament wanted someone else to be king because of James II's Catholicism (among other issues) but also needed to thread a very narrow needle to make this happen. How can you ignore James II's son the Prince of Wales but claim that Mary ought to be the new queen regnant on basis of her being the child of James II? (275) Parliament ended up exerting a lot of authority over the monarch when it required monarchs to declare they weren't Catholic, and that they weren't allowed to marry Catholics either (277). Later this was extended to the monarch having to specifically be an Anglican (305). It used to be that monarchs established a government, but now there was "the concept of government existing independently of the King, who is just another official, though the most important one" (277). This all eventually resulted in some disputes: "Was [Queen] Anne's title purely hereditary, as the Tories insisted, or was it, as the Whigs argued, dependent on the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement?" (336) How much power did Parliament have over the monarch?

Kenyon is a lively and opinionated writer at times; I laughed at his description of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham: "Such men do not attract first-class historians" (84)! Quite a burn to whatever biographers had written about Buckingham before him! If the book has a flaw, it's that Cromwell, the Commonwealth, and the Interregnum feel kind of glossed over... but I suppose that makes sense; if Kenyon's interest is in the power of monarchy, then the actual Interregnum isn't really of interest to him, only how it began and how it ended.

In our current era in America, where the executive asserts continually expanded powers, it's fascinating and almost comforting to realize what an aberration that last couple centuries in America have been. For most of human history, rulers often did just summarily imprison or execute their opponents. Yes, it hasn't been that way for some time, but that's just a blip across the scale of most of history. Cold comfort, one supposes, but I will take what I can get.

The Pelican History of England #5: The Tudor Period (1485–1603)

My copy of the fifth "Pelican History of England," Tudor England, is a 1982 printing of a 1950 publication; unlike the other books in this series (which ranged from two to eight editions by the 1990s), it doesn't ever seem to have gone into a later edition. Also oddly, it actually overlaps with the previous volume in the series, England in the Late Middle Ages. That book's final section covered up through 1536, whereas this one jumps back to 1485. Though actually, as the books were published out of order, it's England in the Late Middle Ages (1952) that's the anomaly; Tudor England came out first.

The Pelican History of England: 5. Tudor England
by S. T. Bindoff

Originally published: 1950
Acquired and read: March 2025

Tudor England opens with King Henry VII's victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and it's central approach to the era is to consider how the monarchs of England attempted to stabilize what had been a pretty unstable era politically. As Bindoff says in his introduction, "A Crown which had become a football was ceasing to be a referee, and a game which begins... without a referee runs a risk of finishing without a ball" (8). So while it might be odd that there's a fifty-year overlap between this and the previous volume, I appreciated it because I found Bindoff's approach to the era much more focused and clear than Myers's. Unsurprisingly, Bindoff is very interested in the Protestant Reformation and how it took place, and how it was kept in position.

Like Myers, though, one of the thing Bindoff considers is how quick and easy the breach with Rome was under Henry VIII. Bindoff's take is that "[t]he air of inevitability which hangs about the great events of these years is the inevitability, not of gradualness, but of breakneck speed; and the fact that they took place so quickly goes far to explain why they took place at all... Something must be ascribed to the forcefulness of the royal personality which inspired it. Henry VIII is not, to most people, an attractive figure... [b]ut he was beyond question a masterful one" (95-6). Even when people rebelled against the Reformation, Bindoff argues that it wasn't really about the religion but governmental power; discussing one set of demands, he says of the protestors, "[t]hey made no attempt to argue the theological issues, and it is doubtful whether even the priests among the rebels would have been much interested in or conversant with these. What had stirred them and their flocks to anger was the sudden and, to them, unwarranted suppression by a remote government of the rites and symbols which made up so large a part of their religion" (156).

Bindoff argues that once done, rolling back the Reformation was a tricky business. Sure, England once again received a Catholic queen when Mary came to the throne... but "[i]f the Mann was now legally restored, it was because parliament had restored it; and if Mary were no accounted legitimate, it was because parliament had declared her to be so. What a statute had taken away, only a statute could restore.... In grounding his Reformation upon parliamentary authority Henry VIII had invested parliament with a competence in matters spiritual which not even the most Catholic of his successors could take away" (169). When Queen Elizabeth came along, Bindoff argues she basically didn't care about all this religious stuff, and kept her theological opinions private. "But was not a ruler whose only real belief was belief in herself, and whose only real devotion was devotion to her people, the ideal restorative for a country which had just undergone the drastic purge of the Marian Persecution?" (189)

If the crown had been a football, as Bindoff claimed at the beginning, it was Elizabeth who finally stabilized things after a long period of instability, and her ability to move beyond religious sectarianism seems to have been a major factor in that. Near the very end of her reign (1601), Bindoff remarks on a speech she gave: "Not many present could remember the time when she had not been Queen, and those who could did not cherish the memory.... [E]ven those who were already looking forward to the exciting novelty of a King could not deny the majesty of this Queen's leave-taking" (306).

Overall, I found this one of the more effective volumes of this series, certainly aided by the fact it only has to cover just over a century in its 309 pages, but also by Bindoff's clear focus. Many of the earlier volumes tried to take in the whole social picture of England, but by emphasizing how the monarchy led up to, carried out, and dealt with the repercussions of the Reformation, Bindoff provides a direction to this volume that keeps everything in context, even if there's less emphasis on broader social trends than there were in some previous volumes.

One bit that caused me to raise my eyebrows a bit, though, was Bindoff's take on the end of Queen Mary's reign; he says she "sank into a melancholia bordering on insanity"... partially because she couldn't have any kids (181). Would Bindoff speak this way of a male sovereign? Would any historian write about a woman sovereign this way now? I'm guessing "no" in both cases, and it made me want to read a more modern, more sympathetic take on her.

The Pelican History of England #4: The Late Middle Ages (1307–1536)

I'm totally but unproductively fascinated by the paratext of these books. My copy of volume 4, which mostly covers the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is a 1974 printing of the 1971 eighth edition. Why did volume 4 take only twenty years to get up to eight editions, when volume 1 only got its third edition after forty years? From Worldcat, though, I can see that the eighth edition was the final one, lasting up until it went out of print after 1991. (Presumably this is because Myers died in 1980, leaving him unavailable to do any more updates.) And why aren't the titles consistent? Volume 3 was "English Society in the Early Middle Ages" followed by a date range, while volume 4 is just "England in the Late Middle Ages" with no date range. I demand answers!

The first three volumes of this series were very much social histories, giving details about kings and such almost incidentally, and preferring to emphasize social arrangements. Myers somewhat rails against this concept in his foreword: "To limit history to 'dates and kings and battles' was a mistake; but equally mistaken is the recent tendency to exclude politics and war as much as possible from the now fashionable social history" (7). I will say that I have struggled a bit with the social history emphasis of this series, which often leaves me feeling adrift; in volume 1, in particular, I felt like I got told a lot about what Roman houses in Britain looked like but not, say, why the Romans turned up to build houses to begin with. (To be fair, I do think volumes 2 and 3 handled this somewhat better.)

The Pelican History of England: 4. England in the Late Middle Ages
by A. R. Myers

Eighth edition published: 1971
Originally published: 1952
Acquired: April 2013
Read: March 2025

While previous volumes had about five or six chapters covering broad topics across the entire time period in question, Myers uses a very different arrangement here for volume 4. The book is divided into three parts covering 1307-99, 1399-1471, and 1471-1536 respectively; each part is then divided into five chapters. In each case, the first chapter of each section covers the politics of the era in question, especially who had the kingship, and the other four chapters always have the same titles: "The Government of the Realm," "Economic and Social Developments," "Religious and Educational Movements" (or "Change" for part III), and "The Arts."

I guess I can see why Myers did this, but I didn't find it very effective in practice. The end result is that there's not a lot of continuity, and it's not easy to follow the story of each topic across the course of the book. You get a bit about, say, growing antipapalism on p. 74, then more on p. 165, and then it comes to a climax on p. 236, but there are big gaps in between where you don't hear about it at all. And despite his claim to not be downplaying the political history as much as some other volumes in the series, I felt like major events like the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) and the War of the Roses (1455-87) were just kind of mentioned in asides rather than explained. So, other than the Roman volume, I found this one the most frustrating so far.

Still, I continue to trace the various prisms through which the authors of this series attempt to explain their periods. Myers very much emphasizes the changing fortunes of the kingship throughout: basically the king goes from a position of being politically and financially constrained by the lords to being much more secure in his power even as limits were applied to it. This wasn't quite absolute, though; Myers claims that when Edward IV died, "[i]f he had been succeeded by an able, grown-up son, England might have taken a road towards an absolute monarchy, wealthy enough to dispense with parliamentary rights, strong enough to keep order, and basing its claims on the indefeasible divine right of hereditary kingship" (201). Things didn't go this way, as Edward V (one of the "Princes in the Tower") was only twelve, but by the time of Henry VII, the king was financially independent.

Myers argues that the increasing importance of a council of lords in the latter part of this period actually shows how much power the king had; he could afford to delegate it without threatening his own position. This ends up culminating in Henry VIII's break from Rome, which was kind of about who Henry wanted to marry, but not just about that: "It is an absurdity to assert that the breach was due to Henry's lust for Anne Boleyn" (209). You wouldn't upend an entire country's organized religion over that! The Reformation also pays off a running thread about Lollardy throughout the book, which I found quite interesting. 

As Myers points out, if it was just about Henry's own whims, it "would have imperilled his throne if there had been widespread and organized resistance. Henry's almost unopposed success must have been due to something deeper than his own will" (237-8). Myers argues that popular anti-papal sentiment had their roots in growing Church corruption, but also growing English nationalism, the rise of the merchant classes (less dependent on the old order), and increasing education. But the consequences of this were quite drastic: a king not beholden to a pope "br[ings] out the unmedieval idea that the king was supreme in every sphere of life, and that England was a self-sufficient empire, with Henry as its emperor, subject to no other authority on earth" (211). But as that's not a medieval idea, it is an idea that means this book has come to an end!

The Pelican History of England #3: The Early Middle Ages (1066–1307)

The third volume of The Pelican History of England, Doris M. Stenton's English Society in the Early Middle Ages, was originally published in 1951. I have a 1974 printing of the 1965 fourth edition; I don't know if there were any subsequent editions, but judging by other Pelican Histories I've read so far, updates for later editions (the series went out of print in the 1990s) were probably minor at best.

The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307)
by Doris Mary Stenton

Fourth edition published: 1965
Originally published: 1951
Acquired: April 2013
Read: January 2025

The book covers English history from the Norman Conquest in 1066 up through the death of King Edward I in 1307; like the other Pelican Histories (I am finding), it focuses less on giving a chronological account of its era and more on giving a sketch of how society operated in the era in question. But while volume one covered nine centuries and volume two six, this one covers just three, meaning that you do get a more solid sense of the events of the period, even if they are mostly just sketched in. Additionally, the book has a timeline of key dates in the back, an innovation I found helpful whenever I got a bit lost in the chronology. Chapters here cover topics such as the king's household and government (this is where you get the sketch of the changes in kingship over the centuries); barons and knights; the organization of places such as forests, villages, towns, boroughs, and cities; the church; and the arts.

It's interesting to note how each author of the series has a different prism through which they explore the society of the period. While volume one emphasized (to its detriment, I think) locations and volume two economic power, Stenton mostly focuses on political power: the growth of Parliament, the expansion of the bureaucracy, the creation of limits on the king in the form of Magna Carta. There is a lot of emphasis here on who owed whom allegiance, and whose power was channeled through whom. It's a useful way to understand how England was operating as a state not just a nation.

Unfortunately, this is the longest of the Pelican Histories that I own (I don't have all eight yet as of this writing) and reason is that it sometimes goes into unnecessary detail. For example, that the King's Forests were highly regulated is interesting and a good example of the way the new Norman kings exerted political power... but Stenton provides more detail than a book with this audience and scope actually needs in order to make this point. Moments like this felt more like they belong in a more academic piece. (But Stenton's style is probably the most academic of the three volumes I've read so far, as its extensive end notes attest!) I found that especially as I got closer to the end, I was doing more skimming.

Still, it's reasonably accessible and provides a clear sketch of the time. I particularly found myself fascinated by the so-called "Angevin Empire" (I don't think Stenton herself uses this term) from 1154 to 1214, when the King of England also ruled other parts of Britain as well of chunks of France through various political positions, but without any kind of unified government... and indeed, the King of England was also a duke who owed homage to the King of France! Complicated and kind of fascinating, and now I'd like to read something diving into the Angevin Empire more specifically; each of these books I read makes me want to read another book.

The Pelican History of England #2: The Anglo-Saxon Period (A.D. 449–1066)

The second volume of The Pelican History of England covers the early Middle Ages, from the time of the Roman withdrawal to the time of Norman Conquest. Originally published in 1952, the book went into a second edition in 1954. The copyright page of my 1991 printing notes it was revised several times after 1964, most recently in 1974; author Dorothy Whitelock died in 1982, but the book would not be superseded by a volume of The Penguin History of Britain covering the same period until 2010. I purposefully picked a 1991 printing because I figured it would match my 1995 printing of volume 1, but even though they have the same cover design, they're different sizes! My copies of all the ones I have so far (volumes 1-4 and 8) are mass market paperbacks, except for volume 1, which is a trade paperback. But my copies that are the same size also span several different decades and thus have different cover and spine designs. By the time I am done, I will have a very higgledgy-piggledy collection if this keeps up.

Anyway, like I. A. Richmond and Malcolm Todd in volume 1, Whitelock does not attempt to cram a narrative of over five hundred years into 243 pages; the book makes no claim of being historically comprehensive. There are lots of kings mentioned, but you won't get explanations of who became king when and why; we are told the Anglo-Saxons took over in 449 but not really why or how. Which makes sense—how can you go blow by blow when you'd have to cram over two years onto each page?

The Pelican History of England: 2. The Beginnings of English Society
by Dorothy Whitelock

Second edition published: 1954
Originally published: 1952
Acquired and read: January 2025

But unlike in volume 1, where I felt like I was getting a bunch of disparate facts about different places in Britain, Whitelock approaches the period by trying to provide you with a snapshot of various levels of English society and how they connected. So there are chapters about kings, lords, churls, slaves, and religious orders; there's also chapters about topics that explore the connections between these levels, such as taxation and finance, trade, and law.

The book has a real emphasis on economic power. If Whitelock has a thesis, I would say it's that the power of the king was exerted through money, but that the responsibility of the king was thus to regulate the economy. She gives a lot of data about the penalties for violating bonds and oaths and laws other obligations, which were almost always financial: lord to king, churl to lord, it was all about supplying economic power but also receiving economic power on your behalf. If you raised cows for a landowner, for example, you of course had to bring in as much profit as you could... but the landowner also provided you with a certain number of those cows per year, encouraging your best work.

Probably this is obvious to actual historians (I am but a literary critic, of course), but I had not actually really thought about kingship in this way before, more in terms of military might and protection. But as Whitelock tells it, anyway, the power and potential of kingship was largely economic, more as a regulator of trade than anything else.

The last few chapters flesh out other aspects of early English society—education, literature, and art—and to be honest, they felt a bit tacked on; I felt like Whitelock had more to say about Beowulf, for example, when using it earlier in the book to illuminate aspects of kingship than she did when discussing it as a literary work. But that's a small negative in what I found to otherwise be a successful book; I hope later volumes of the Pelican History are more like this one than the first.

As a small aside, I—as a person who was quite enthusiastic about all things Arthurian in my youth—was a bit surprised that the historical Arthur didn't even rate a passing mention. I mean, I know he wasn't actually a king of Britain, but surely he did something worth noting as an early warlord. But if he was mentioned, I missed it, and he's not listed in the index. I did a bit of research and learned that current thinking is that there probably wasn't any historical Arthur, not even as a random post-Roman warlord! A bit depressing, but there are some books I think I'll check out when I'm done with this project to learn more.

The Pelican History of England #1: Roman Britain (c. 500 B.C.–A.D. 400)

In the 1950s, Penguin released The Pelican History of England, a series of slim paperback (most are 250-300 pages) covering the history of England from Roman times to 1914 in eight volumes; in 1965, they released a ninth book covering the twentieth century up to that point. Over the years, they were periodically updated (or in one case, totally replaced by a new volume) until the 1990s, when Penguin superseded them with The Penguin History of Britain (1996-2017). 

Back when I was a young graduate student, I came across a free copy of volume eight; as it covered the nineteenth century, my period of study, I grabbed it. I eventually read it when studying for my doctoral exams to give historical context to the material I was reading, even adding in the volumes covering the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, which they had at the library. A few years later, I came across volumes three and four in a used bookstore and picked them up, deciding to someday read the series through in its entirety. Well, that day has finally come, and so I have now read the first book in the series, Roman Britain.

The Pelican History of England: 1. Roman Britain
by I. A. Richmond, revised by Malcolm Todd

Third edition published: 1995
Originally published: 1955
Acquired: December 2024
Read: January 2025

Roman Britain was originally written in 1955 by the archaeologist I. A. Richmond; there was a second edition in 1963, and then Richmond died in 1965. I have the 1995 third edition, revised by his student Malcolm Todd. (I was a bit grumpy to learn that the 1990s printings of the series are about a centimeter taller than the older ones, so my collection will not look very aesthetic when completed.) Todd's preface indicates that of the book's six chapters, one is totally new, three were "virtually completely rewritten," and one is "heavily revised," and thus there is just one where Todd "ventured to preserve parts of Richmond's original treatment" (ix).

Both Richmond and Todd were archaeologists, and I don't know that I've ever read a history book by an archaeologist before; if I am to be uncharitable, it certainly reads like it was by an archaeologist, down to its chapter organization, which is largely about different places: military sites (ch. 2), urban centers (ch. 3), rural settlements (ch. 4), and so on. Todd himself doesn't seem to happy with this, as his preface says, "an entirely new work... would certainly be differently ordered" (ix). I found the book frustrating because it seems to me that history ought to tell, well, a story, but a sense of story was very much missing from this book. The first chapter is a quick catalogue of pre-Roman tribes in Britain, but gives little sense of what they were actually like.

The second chapter, "Military History," is the only one that seems to tell some kind of story, moving chronologically from the Roman conquest in A.D. 43-44 to the building of Hadrian's Wall in the early 100s and then to the collapse of Roman influence in Britain around 400. But I often felt like I didn't know why things were happening: why did the Romans decide to conquer Britain? why did Boudicca rise up against it all? why did Roman influence fade? Often it felt like were just getting brief summaries of places things had happened without the actual context for the actual happenings.

This is even worse in most of the other chapters; "Urban Centers" is more a bunch of stuff found in cities than anything that gives you a sense of what urban life was actually like, I had a similar problem with basically every chapter. Perhaps this is an insurmountable problem in the sense that we just don't know what things were like, all we have are these fragments? But if so, I think Richmond and Todd could have made that more clear.

I intend to follow up reading The Pelican History of England by getting the replacement series, The Penguin History of Britain, from the library, so one of the things I am interested in seeing is how our understanding of history has changed over time. How do we view the past differently in the 1950s and '60s versus the 1990s and 2000s? To that end, I want to try to capture each book's "thesis," to get a sense of how it wants us to view the era in question. That's honestly kind of hard to do with this book, but what I found most interesting was its (occasional) sense of how the Romans managed Britain. Richmond and Todd tell us the Romans were adaptive, not imposing: "nothing is more characteristic of Roman Imperial development than readiness to work within existing arrangements, provided these could be assimilated to Roman form" (70). They focused on integrating new societies into theirs, not exclusionary... so long as the taxes flowed. This was true of religion, for example: "It may at first sight seem strange that the worship of native war-gods was permitted so freely. But Roman tolerance of native cults was very generous and in any case the virtues of the warrior were worth cultivating if they were turned to the service of Rome" (169). The way the natives were folded in was through persuasion and cultural incentives: Celtic aristocratic families "were encouraged to adopt Roman ways and to give their sons a Roman education.... Once this movement got under way the rest would follow" (55).

But of course Rome could use force of arms when it needed... but when they decided to do this is somewhat more sketchily explained, despite an entire chapter on military history!

Review: England in the Twentieth Century by David Thomson

Hardcover, 304 pages
Published 1976 (originally 1965)
Borrowed from the library
Read August 2013

The Pelican History of England: 9. England in the Twentieth Century (1914-63)

by David Thomson

This is a nice little history of fifty years in the early twentieth century. I was previously familiar with the broad strokes of this, especially the two World Wars, of course, but much of England's domestic affairs in the period between the wars was largely unknown to me. Thomson supposes some more familiarity with the covered politicians than I had, but I suppose that wasn't unreasonable in 1965. The big strikes and the formation of the Commonwealth of Nations were probably the part most interesting to me, as well as the details on the handling of the buildup to the Second World War, especially the the pacifistic sentiments of many in the 1920s and '30s. Not as essential as Thomson's nineteenth-century history, but he writes engagingly and informatively.

Review: England in the Nineteenth Century by David Thomson

Mass market paperback, 254 pages
Published 1986 (originally 1950)
Acquired October 2008
Read January 2013

The Pelican History of England: 8. England in the Nineteenth Century (1815-1914)
by David Thomson

I felt much more grounded in this book than in the previous Pelican History of England, Plumb's England in the Eighteenth Century. Partially, I am sure, this is because I study Victorian literature, and thus have more of a background, but I think it helps that Thomson doesn't divide his book into phases based on prime ministers whose importance I am supposed to take for granted, but three different "phases" (1815-50, 1851-74, 1875-1914) that emphasize, in turn, reform, progress, and statehood. With less of politics and more of the social situation, Thomson provides a very readable, light history with occasional moments of insight, such as: "Later generations have come to regard as man-made and intolerable many things which the Victorians accepted as without remedy. The Victorians regarded as intolerable many others things which their ancestors had deemed without remedy, and they had slowly to invent appropriate means to deal with these new-found but not novel social evils. [...] Evils felt to be humanly remediable were tackled as promptly, and, on the whole, as competently, as the means at their disposal allowed" (115). He's obviously working at point to reclaim the Victorians from later criticism (i.e., Lytton Strachey et al.), and I too am all for that.

Review: England in the Eighteenth Century by J. H. Plumb

Hardcover, 224 pages
Published 1976 (originally 1950)
Borrowed from the library
Read August 2012

The Pelican History of England: 7. England in the Eighteenth Century
by J. H. Plumb

I read this book for a general overview of the eighteenth century before I launched into my reading for my qualifying exams, which spanned 1780 to 1925. Some specific background knowledge on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seemed like it would be worthwhile. This book was maybe not all that I hoped; Plumb seemed to assume a level of general knowledge with the era's politics that I simply did not possess, as the whole book was organized around three principal prime ministers who were referred to as though I was already an expert. So it was okay, but I find that I've already forgotten much of the knowledge it contained. (Maybe I should have taken notes as I read?)