Connecting Through : History is closer than we think.

In a short essay by Peter Stearns he asks the question - Why Study History?  [1]

Why indeed?  Surely all that matters is the here and now. The present?  After all that is all I am, all any of us are, in the present. 

In his summation of why people study history although as he states while there may be many facets and passages of inquiry, his basic thought is when we boil it all down there are two driving notions, relying on two fundamental facts.

1) History Helps Us Understand People and Societies

2) History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be 

I'd agree with that. But for me that is all just a little too dry. For me, struggling to make sense of the world as an independent researcher, history has always been about connections. Connections are exciting. Connections send research down uncharted rabbit holes of adventure, often deviating widely from the planned path theorised at the beginning of the would be journey. Connections (albeit tenuous) have given rise to this short essay. And like all good connections it began with a book I picked off the bookshelf this week. 

In 1871, the Tinsley Brothers published a novel by an unknown writer trying to make his way in the world. One Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928). Desperate Remedies was a commercial flop, but that didn't stop both Hardy and Tinsley rushing out novel number 2 in 1872 (and for me Hardy's most purest novel). Under the Greenwood Tree. For decades I've read Hardy's work. I love his depictions of rural life in the early 19th Century. His love of Dorset was partly responsible for my love of history. Under the Greenwood Tree opened my eyes to descriptive natural history wordsmithing.  

But (and importantly) Hardy was at heart a historian. The influence of his paternal grandmother awakened a lifelong interest in the dying customs, superstitions, and unusual events of rural Dorset [2]. Hardy  frequently looked back to the era of the 1830's 40's and 50's. When his older relatives were talking about their past, like a sponge the child Hardy absorbed their knowledge. The rural early Victorian England had changed forever by 1872. Wessex, that fact-fiction geographical place loved by the modern reader, had not arisen from the Dorset heaths by the time Under the Greenwood Tree was written. The novel looks back at change, change in many forms, lamentation from the standpoint of a mid Victorian mind. Peter Stearns point number 2 I believe.

Connections however can flick and fizz through the air without reasons. Remember the uncharted rabbit holes of adventure? I'm turning left.

In the summer  of 2019 I read a now almost unheard of novel, The Mistress of Langdale Hall by a once well known Victorian author Rosa M Kettle. My single reason for reading this (I have to admit not that great a novel sadly) was due to researching Anne Lister of Shibden Hall near Halifax in Yorkshire. Anne Lister (3 April 1791 – 22 September 1840) was the inspiration for Maud Langdale, the swashbuckling 'manly and aloof' landowning heroine of this family saga. Rosa M Kettle spent time researching places, facts and letters with Anne's ancestor John Lister at Shibden Hall. The setting for Langdale Hall is Shibden Hall, Anne's home. Details of Anne as a person as embodied by Maud radiate through the pages. 

Now, I suggest, for historical connections to work, there has to be a pivot around which the fairground carousel of knowledge flashes by. An event, a person, a year, and I suggest here it is the years 1872, or 1840. Take your pick.  

That pivot could be 1840. Anne Lister died in September 1840. Thomas Hardy was born (initially stillborn) in June 1840. Death and Resurrection? Possibly if I had a fanciful mind, and of course Hardy was born before Anne died. The year 1840, is just coincidence. I'll leave that to the role of the philosopher rather than the historian maybe?

Yet. As this front plate facsimile shows The Mistress of Langdale Hall was published in 1872 by one Samuel Tinsley. I felt my route being diverted into a question? Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree was published in 1872 by the Tinsley Brothers. Rosa M Kettle's The Mistress of Langdale Hall published the same year 1872 by Samuel Tinsley. Surely there had to be a connection. As it turned out, not really, but the answer lay in a third connection. 

The realisation dawned on me, the pivot for all these connections is me. And only me. History teaches us that often it is the historian who writes the story. Be that a paid scribe to rewrite the medieval battle scene, or the reviewer who spots something overlooked and changes knowledge forever. I am interested in Thomas Hardy. I am interested in Anne Lister - the connection? Me.

Or is it?

I can be sure of one thing. Thomas Hardy never met Anne Lister. But in 1872, was Anne Lister's name mentioned as the inspiration for The Mistress of Langdale Hall by Rosa Kettle to Hardy. As a history researcher I have to ask the question - I will never know the answer.  But I can daydream on the conversation "Mr Hardy my brother Samuel is about to publish a novel about this extraordinary woman...."  It's tenuous, but without contrary evidence, that connection remains a possibility.

Kettle's publisher Samuel Tinsley was the 7th son of 10 children, his elder brothers being Edward and William. While they shared the same name and of course were family siblings, their respective publishing businesses were confusingly - not least as they both operated from the Strand in London.  - wholly separate, 

Samuel began publishing in 1872 so Kettle would have been one of his earliest authors. Although he was known as a publisher of low-grade fiction for a number of years he was successful, until in 1881 he sold his business to concentrate on playing chess. Something which by all accounts he excelled at. 

By contrasts Edward and William operated the very successful and more upmarket Tinsley Brothers publishing business. Later after Edwards death William founded the very popular Tinsley Magazine. I digress. The fact is the Tinsley Brothers took onto their books many household authors and in Hardy's case, William then running the business engaged an unknown Dorset lad. Hardy was off the blocks. In fact William published not only Hardy's first two novels but from a biographical note that third connection arises [3],

[they published]; ....first novels of Richard Jefferies. In both Hardy's and Jefferies' case, he let the authors take a part of the risk, asking the former for £75, the latter for £60 to guarantee the costs. Hardy had brought Desperate Remedies (1871) to Tinsley because of the firm's reputation as a publisher of sensational novels; but the book (like Jefferies' early novels) was not a success and Hardy regained only £59, 12s., 6d. from his original £75. 

For a couple of years I was a trustee of the Richard Jefferies Museum just outside Swindon. I am still a member of the Richard Jefferies Society. Jefferies (6 November 1848 – 14 August 1887) is today regarded as possibly the father of modern nature writing. But he was so much more, journalist, thinker, social reformer, living much of his adult life not in his beloved Wiltshire, but Surbiton. Hardy too left his beloved in Dorset in the belief that to be a successful novelist he needed to live in the capital. In London they shared, at different times, the same publisher. They also shared the connection that history, along with other themes, played out in their writing.  Hardy and the slightly younger Jefferies were connected by leaving the land they loved, to earn a living adrift from where their hearts gave them energy, and yes for a while shared their publisher. Hardy of course returned to Dorset, Jefferies dying young failed to return.

The historian researcher in me therefore has yet another connecting question. While Hardy wasn't at Tinsleys at the same time as Jefferies, did they ever meet? 

Well yes they did, but not until 1880 at a dinner. The wildlife and natural history author Henry Williamson noted this happened in February of that year. Writing as a result of a talk [4], Henry Williamson added a postscript to what is known as his Wedmore Lecture [5]

Connected over the supper table, I wonder what they discussed? Hardy the now established writer offering advice to the journeyman Jefferies maybe? Indeed much later there formed a somewhat critical connection. Miller and Matthews (1993) [6] suggest that Jefferies "Greene Ferne Farm [published in 1880] is the best of his early novels comparable with the Hardy of Under the Greenwood Tree."  Was that dinner in February 1880 maneuvered to connect Jefferies with the great Victorian novelists?

This is why connections in history excite the historian. The germ of the idea for this essay emerged while flicking through my old copy of Under the Greenwood Tree. It emerged because I made an incorrect connection with Tinsley which then diverted me off into Jefferies. Within minutes my mind fizzed and crackled with the thoughts of where does this all fit in to England in the 1840's 

Well it does, but only because I allow it. Historians through time have a bias, we write about what we know, and theorise on what is not certain. And that is stimulating. There is a delicious greyness at times which fuels the research into the most scant of evidence. So how did my flicking through a Hardy novel therefore connect me to Anne Lister? 

Bear with me. In October 2019 I visited Halifax and took this image:

This is the ancient medieval packhorse route Anne took while walking from Shibden Hall to Halifax. She was known as a strong walker and this rather steeper-than-it-looks path was a near daily perambulation, dressed in her black riding habit and stout mens' boots. Her manly ways and odd dress sense inspired the name Gentleman Jack and the descriptive character of Maud Langdale in The Mistress of Langdale Hall. While Anne Lister never published a novel, her diaries have more recently inspired modern historians both for their socio-sexual content but also their indepth reveal of life in Georgian England - albeit from the view of a wealthy female landowner. Anne, like Hardy, like Jefferies, was not keen on change especially in the fall out of the 1830's Reform Act's. And, while she was interested in new technology, she resolutely stalled and prevented change to the Shibden Estate as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace around her. In the The Mistress of Langdale Hall there is a telling passage of the dense smoke from the mills smothering the countryside of the hall and causing autumn to come early. Even today many stone buildings there remain coal-black as a result of Victorian industrial soot.

Meanwhile returning to 1872 Hardy, while not grappling with debilitating air pollution, was lamenting on the loss of the old ways and changes coming to the Dorset countryside, through the simple plot of a pastoral story. Christmas bands like the Mellstock Quire had been the mainstay of the first forty years of the 19th Century. We're back to 1840. Victoriana driven by its high morals and righteousness did much to sweep away many of the more bawdy and base (as Victorians saw it) customs and society of the rural Georgian scene; so by 1880 when Jefferies was writing about his past, his own history around Coate near Swindon, the landscape there was changed, the agricultural practices he knew as that boy wandering the Wiltshire landscape had changed. In Greene Ferne Farm a conversation takes place on deep ploughing of the grasslands to improve fertility,

“You don’t think much of unexhausted improvements,” said Geoffrey.

“The greatest nonsense ever talked,” said the Squire, working himself into a temper.

Jefferies, like Hardy, like Lister wrote fondly of the past. Of History. But above all these three in my mind were connected by a love of the landscape which made them into who they were. And, who they became. History taught them that the land was always there, influencing and nurturing.

But for me, the connection does not end there. Around the year 1995, my parents holidayed in a hamlet called Toller Porcorum in Dorset. There they met an old lady, the mother of the bed and breakfast owner. The old lady had known Thomas Hardy in her early teens. He was then an old man, but she remembered him vividly. "Miserable old bugger" she told my parents. "Nice man, but very miserable".  Not the best epitaph for one of our great novelists. Jefferies too had that streak of melancholy. 

My parents told me. My own connection was made. I had spoken to my parents, who spoke to a woman, who had spoken to Thomas Hardy, who spoke to Richard Jefferies. We are all connected, but that connection only existed within me, until now that is. I have stood in the landscape of Lister, Jefferies and Hardy. Their connection to each other is via me. The simple act of writing it down, writes down a moment in history. It is a fact. That is the driver of history. Someone writes it down. Years later someone else will come along and re-interpret, re-listen, re-discover,  we look for provenance and we review, we produce the product of our present bias (I suggest it is impossible to have an unbiased connection) and write it down once again. 

Anne Lister's diaries are astonishing in their detail, I suggest her bias though is of a landowning woman often recoiling against both her gender, change of social order and her sexuality. 

Jefferies bias I suggest is that of a sick man lamenting his once free and unbridled access to the Wiltshire countryside as a child, as he is forced to live a life as a journalist near London to survive.

Hardy's bias is of a man who I feel was living in a time he never felt comfortable in, the influence of his mother Jemima who is often described as the real guiding star of Hardy’s childhood and the effect the landscape around Dorset had on his work. 

And who knows, Thomas Hardy may have spoken to William Tinsley about the book their brother published about a woman wearing black in Yorkshire in Georgian England, who as it turns out may have influenced the Bronte's novels. But that's for another essay.

What is clear pulling this all together in a form of triptych historiograph is that Hardy, Jefferies and Lister all had a strong connection to the land they belonged to. That connection can be realised today by the modern visitor, as I have done myself. We try and connect when we visit these places, but we can never place ourselves in their footprints. Not really. We can't really connect, as much as we would like to. 

I'm currently into a long research project into one of Anne Listers lovers, Mariana Lawton which has been fascinating. It is why I ended up reading  The Mistress of Langdale Hall. It's why I stood by Mariana's grave in Cheshire looking at the landscape both Anne and Mariana knew. It's why I connected with people in all those areas, simply by asking questions nobody else had asked.

However if we return to Peter Stearns two fundamental facts as to why do we study history. Can we now answer his points?

1) History Helps Us Understand People and Societies

2) History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be 

I think Anne Lister, Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies went a long way in doing both, helped guide me to understand what they were writing about, many years before I was born and became  myself fascinated by history. And all these connected thoughts came to life after casually opening a book at page 1 called Under the Greenwood Tree.

Footnotes:

[1] On Line. https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/historical-archives/why-study-history-(1998)

[2] Pinion, F.B. A Hardy Companion. A guide to the works of Thomas Hardy and their background. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd. 1968

[3] Hardy, Frances Emily, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1891. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1928.

[4] Henry Williamson's Wedmore Memorial Lecture 'Some Nature Writers and Civilisation', 1948. Given to the Royal Society of Literature.

[5] On Line. Henry Williamson Society. https://www.henrywilliamson.co.uk/57-uncategorised/294-henry-williamson-and-the-richard-jefferies-society

[6] G. Miller and H. Matthews, Richard Jefferies, A bibliographical study (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993). ISBN 0-85967-918-7