In January 1903, the new Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, J.B. Bury, delivered a famous inaugural lecture on ‘the Science of History’, proclaiming the virtues of collective research and scholarship over the traditional belletristic qualities of English historical writing, reaching back to Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle. Bertrand Russell, G. M. Trevelyan and Lytton Strachey, who were in the audience, were not impressed. As members of the same college and same societies, including the elete Cambridge ‘Apostles’, they knew each other well, and had similar views about history, literature, ethics and philosophy. Each of them penned replies to Bury, in what Trevelyan, certainly, saw as a concerted campaign against the ‘new gospel of science’, to be conducted on the pages of their new journal, The Independent Review.

Despite their common commitment to the ‘Apostolic’ values propounded by G.E. Moore and their common cause against ‘Buryism’, there were, however, profound differences of temperament and belief between them: differences about the meaning of ‘reality’ and ‘phenomena’, the contemplative and the active life, political engagement and disengagement, and the use and abuse of history and historical biography. I hope to explore their intellectual and psychological divergence by examining the different styles or tropes of their writing between 1903 and 1920: exemplary, rhetorical, poetic and didactic; or, to deploy Hayden White’s categories, romantic, comic, tragic and ironic.

 

Dr Alastair MacLachlan is an Adjunct Fellow at the Research School of the Humanities & the Arts. He was a member of the History Department at the University of Sydney for nearly 30 years and has also taught at Cambridge University, the University of New South Wales and Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England (1996, 2110), and of a number of articles and essays on 17th century British History and its historiography, 18th century French, Dutch, Austrian and British History, The Enlightenment, The French Revolution, Nationalism and 20th century British historians. He is currently completing a study of Trevelyan and Strachey entitled  ‘The Pedestal and the Keyhole’, and a study of popular historical writing in the 1930s and 40s focusing on the work of Trevelyan, Churchill, and Arthur Bryant entitled ‘The Patriot Historians’