Historical Mindedness and the World at Large: E. A. Freeman as Public Intellectual

E. A. Freeman is best remembered as an historian, but he was also an extensive contributor to the ‘higher journalism’ of the mid-Victorian period. Yet his prolific journalistic output has never attracted sustained attention from historians. This essay analyses the relationship between Freeman’s historical work and his journalism in order to explore his place in Victorian intellectual life. It asks how far his journalism was reliant upon an authority derived from his distinction as an historian. While Freeman drew rather promiscuously on a number of analytically distinct ways of understanding the relationship between history and politics, he responded to accusations of ‘antiquarianism’ and ‘historical-mindedness’ by clarifying what he saw as the role of the historian in public life. Since history, he thought, would inevitably be deployed in political controversy, the important thing was that historical error should be expunged in order to clarify political issues.

E. A. Freeman and the Culture of the Gothic Revival

This essay looks at E. A. Freeman’s involvement in the Oxford Architectural Society, which provided him with the platform to develop as an architectural historian and writer. The varied interests of the OAS influenced Freeman’s approach to the history of medieval architecture alongside Thomas Arnold’s new philosophy of history. This contribution is set against the backdrop of Oxford in the 1840s and the rapid changes the City and University were experiencing. The OAS also provided Freeman with the opportunity to meet architects and even to act as a client in the restoration of Dorchester Abbey, which the OAS promoted from 1846, eventually using William Butterfield as architect. This experience encouraged Freeman to write about the theory of monument care, which is perhaps his most enduring contribution to the culture of the Gothic Revival.

Habits of Thought and Judgement: E. A. Freeman on Historical Methods

Why did E. A. Freeman’s The Methods of Historical Study (1886) meet with mostly negative responses from late 19th-century American and Continental European historians? This essay argues that while Freeman adopted the language of ‘historical methods’ that was becoming customary in the 1880s, he did not understand the term to refer to techniques of source criticism, as many of his contemporaries did, but to a comparative method firmly rooted in Thomas Arnold’s unity of history doctrine. Confusingly, then, Freeman’s method promoted a philosophy of history of the kind that, by the 1880s, was increasingly rejected in the name of historical method. It is not without irony, therefore, that The Methods of Historical Study was sometimes mistaken for a methodology manual like Ernst Bernheim’s Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (1889) and as such found wanting by historians interested in the newest techniques of source criticism.

Alter Orbis: E. A. Freeman on Empire and Racial Destiny

This essay analyses E. A. Freeman’s views on the past, present, and future of the British Empire. It elucidates in particular how his understanding of Aryan racial history and the glories of Ancient Greece helped to shape his account of the British Empire and its pathologies. Freeman was deeply critical of both the British Empire in India and projects for Imperial Federation. Yet he was no ‘little Englander.’ Indeed, it is argued that Freeman’s scepticism about modern European forms of empire-building was informed by an ambition to establish a globe-spanning political community composed of the ‘English-speaking peoples’. At the core of this imagined racial community, united by kinship and common citizenship, stood the Anglo-American connection, and Freeman repeatedly sought to convince people on both sides of the Atlantic about their collective history and their shared destiny. For Freeman, the institutions of formal empire stood in the way of this grandiose vision of world order.

A Liberal Descent? E. A. Freeman’s Invention of Racial Traditions

This essay explores some of the ways in which E. A. Freeman’s 19th-century political investments shaped his approach to history. Like other liberals, Freeman read history as the story of progress. But it was racial more than material progress that drove his vision of history forward. For Freeman, the superiority of Aryans over other races, of Teutons over other Aryans, and of Anglo-Saxons over other Teutons was the product of their respective histories. Paradoxically, it was the Anglo-Saxons’ penchant for racial purity that especially fitted them for their career of political evolution and institutional hybridity. For this reason Freeman was inclined to see Britain’s 19th-century empire as a trap, luring the superior Anglo-Saxons into the temptation of miscegenation, wasting their strength in missionary outreach to savages, and into an enervating alliance with the hated Ottoman Turk. His Comparative Politics (1873), Historical Geography of Europe (1881), and History of Sicily (1891–4) were all warnings in this regard.

Fanatical Hatred or Brotherly Love? Rethinking E. A. Freeman’s Feud with J. A. Froude

When J. A. Froude published his articles on Thomas Becket in the Nineteenth Century (1877), he found himself attacked again by his nemesis E. A. Freeman, who published a 100-page review, concluding that Froude’s history of Becket was in fact a fiction. It has been argued that such criticisms were motivated by the professionalising historian’s need to exclude the literary and artistic Froude from a discipline seeking to promote its newly adopted scientific methodology. But the nature of Freeman’s review of Froude’s ‘Becket’ suggests that there was something deeply personal at the core of Freeman’s vitriol, originating not in a methodological dispute but rather in ecclesiastical debates that embroiled Oxford life while both Froude and Freeman were students and later fellows there almost 30 years before, when a very different history of Becket was first published.

E. A. Freeman and His History of the Norman Conquest

E. A. Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest was the work which he hoped would cement his academic standing and, at the time it was begun, finally secure a chair at Oxford. The work was initially conceived as a single volume which grew to five and an index volume. It exhibits both Freeman’s strengths and weaknesses: on the one hand his knowledge of the printed sources and topography of the sites discussed and, on the other, his stress on the Teutonic descent of the English, his over-readiness to see the present in the past, his narrow focus on political and constitutional history, and his overblown language. This essay explores the work in the context in which it was written, and its place in the historiography of the Norman Conquest.

The Consolations of Amero-Teutonism: E. A. Freeman’s Tour of the United States, 1881–2

In 1881, E. A. Freeman sailed across the Atlantic, one of a number of British historians, scientists, and literary figures to tour the United States in the period between the Civil War and 1900. For Freeman the financial rewards of touring were balanced by onerous press scrutiny and unwelcome competition from rival celebrities, notably Oscar Wilde. Freeman’s lectures were intended to remind his American audiences of what he insisted was a shared Anglo-American history, one founded in racialist celebration of the birthright of free Teutons. Although resisted by Irish-Americans and those who insisted on American exceptionalism, Freeman’s views were shared by fellow Britons such as James Bryce and Charles Kingsley, as well as by founding fathers of the history as an academic discipline in the United States. This view reassured Britons concerned at the rise of the United States and shaped the understanding of the ‘special relationship’ in both countries.

An Erastian Descent: History and Establishment in the Thought of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley and E. A. Freeman

E. A. Freeman’s distaste for Erastianism, his contempt for Whigs, and his equivocal interventions in debates on disestablishment and disendowment are well-attested. Yet the career of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–81) reveals that Whig liberalism remained a historiographical force in Freeman’s time. Although Stanley was dismissed by Freeman as a slapdash historian, as dean of Westminster Abbey (1864–81) Stanley developed a vision of historical scholarship that could support an Erastian defence of established churches. Stanley curated the Abbey to show how the established church had been interwoven with the national past. There and elsewhere in Britain, he sought to pacify Nonconformist advocates of disestablishment by remembering their heroes as national not sectarian figures. This essay surveys Stanley’s energetic involvement in controversies over disestablishment and contrasts it with Freeman’s scholarly detachment, concluding that despite the differences between them, neither historian made much impact on Nonconformist minds.

Architecture as Evidence: E. A. Freeman and Harold’s Church

E. A. Freeman maintained that he always sought the truth in his historical research. He asserted that ‘personal theories’ and ‘national prejudices’ had no place in the study of history, but did his actions always match the rhetoric? This essay focuses on Freeman’s hero-worship of Harold, the last Anglo Saxon king, and his quest to prove Harold’s link with Waltham Abbey. This quest became a personal obsession which was to embroil him in a controversy which, many have argued, led him to compromise his academic principles and to allow ‘romantic nationalism’ to get in the way of the objective search for truth.