Hamish Hamilton first edition - 1980
G.M. Trevelyan had published an un-self-revealing autobiography in 1949 and forbade anyone to write his biography - he had also burnt all his personal papers. His daughter, Mary Moorman, decided to ignore his request for two reasons. Firstly, having studied other letters (such as to his father, brother Charles and herself), she considered them to have literary and historical importance. Secondly, she argued that the world he grew up in has passed away so completely that it is as much a part of 'history' as the age of Napoleon or of the Stuarts. That was in 1980 - so much more so in 2022.
There had already been a short appraisal/tribute of Trevelyan in 1951 by J.H. Plumb, in one of a series of pamphlets published as Supplements to British Book News. Then, in 1992, David Cannadine published a full-length biography, which I read a few years back.
J.H. Plumb 1951 David Cannadine 1992
Plumb bordered on the hagiographic (Trevelyan was still alive) but his sincerity shines through. On Trevelyan's early work England Under the Stuarts (1904), Plumb wrote of its outstanding quality...it may be generations before the most dramatic century in English history is so finely portrayed between the covers of a single book...surely no text-book has ever before or since been written with such a gusto... In his summary, Plumb stated, if one quality is to be singled out, it should be this, for, of all historians, he is the poet of English history.
I have, tucked inside the back of Cannadine's biography, a TLS review by Christopher Haigh. Historians are, perhaps, renowned for their bitchiness, but I found Haigh's approach overly spiteful. He says he had disliked Trevelyan since being set England under the Stuarts to read at A-level. He didn't like other Trevelyan books and wrote Thank heaven for Christopher Hill. Well, that sums Haigh up for me! He takes Cannadine to task for campaigning yet again against the professionalisation of history; variations on an old theme by Sir John Plumb. Haigh snidely writes of Trevelyan coming from the landed gentry, having friends such as John Buchan and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and drafting George V's silver jubilee speech, and what a monument of ignorant irrelevance it now seems - its confidence in parliamentary government, industrial recovery and affection for the Royal Family a mockery of our own times. Trevelyan himself thought the world was turning sour... Well Tutor Haigh, studying the Britain of the last 60 years, certainly of the last ghastly 30, I can absolutely empathise with Trevelyan and not with your viewpoint. Give me the literary histories of Trevelyan, John Buchan, Jack Plumb. C.V. Wedgwood, A.L. Rowse, Peter Ackroyd, even Arthur Bryant, rather than the plodding, boring 'professionals' of today, with their endless endnotes and bibliographies often taking more pages than their main text. The best History is literary and imaginative, it's about people not economic graphs. I recall a mild criticism of one of my essays for the M.A. course in English Local History being commented upon as rather literary. I took it as a compliment.
As for Mary Moorman's book, she rightly calls it a Memoir rather than a Biography. It is based on GMT's letters and is therefore dependent on which were available to her. It means that the period when he seemingly wrote the most to his Family was when he was in Italy during the Great War, working as the Commandant of a Red Cross Unit. Clearly this was an important aspect of his life, supporting his beloved Italy and Italians, but it is the least interesting part of the book for this reader, as it is crammed with lists of people, places and incidents which become hard to follow. A map of the area would have been invaluable. What his daughter has got across is GMT's love of life, places and people. Nine years before his death in 1962, he published Carlyle: An Anthology, where he showed how Carlyle had taught him that history is not statistics or constitutional documents, though these have a part in it, but a living scene pulsing with life, full of passions and faiths and fears of men.
I looked up references to Trevelyan in my copy of The Diaries of A.L. Rowse, edited by Richard Ollard (Penguin, 2003). Rowse visited the old man in Cambridge and at Hallington and recorded that Trevelyan hates the modern world - more completely and consistently than any of us; for he hates modern science and the world it has made...I suddenly thought that G.M.T. is really an eighteenth-century figure (1955) and, in 1959, at Hallington, Rowse gives over nearly nine pages in Ollard's selection to the three days he spent with Trevelyan. G.M.T. has very strict and upright moral principles...evidently not a love-match (with Janet) on his part...he had to stand by and see Wallington go to his eldest brother (Charles), whom he strongly disapproved of ('He never had any morals')... Virginia Woolf - 'a horrid woman' (hear! hear!) ...he detested Bloomsbury and its works (hear! hear!) ...of Belloc, 'he was a liar'. Rowse continued of G.M.T. , he is a man of absolutely firm and simple principles, which he applies consistently to history. Thank you, A.L. Rowse, for adding to my liking for G.M. Trevelyan. It has persuaded me to get down off my Study shelves my copy of the first British edition of English Social History (printed by Novographic process in 1944 by Longmans, Green and Co.) - I see on the front flap of the dust wrapper the TLS has commented: A history which is also literature. Good!
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