Whiggery and History: Connecting the Political and Historical Thought of Nineteenth-Century Liberalism

My project explores the intersection of 'whig history' with 'Whig politics' in nineteenth-century Britain. It considers how far the political positions of Whigs and Liberals were influenced by the elaboration of the 'Whig interpretation(s) of history' (Butterfield 1931), as well as assessing how this style of historical scholarship was itself affected by the political developments of the Victorian and pre-Victorian era.

In evaluating this process of reciprocal influence, my project aims to present a new and distinctive portrait of Whiggery (and the Liberalism into which it flowed), as a dynamic, polyvalent mode of political and historical argument, and to highlight the plural visions of time and history which contributed to the liberal intellectual world.

There has been important scholarly attention paid to nineteenth-century whiggish historiography (Burrow 1981; Bentley 2006; Kirby 2016), as well as significant work detailing the intellectual contexts which underlay Whig policy (Brent 1987; Mandler 1990; Parry 1993). However, with the partial exception of Thomas (2000), little attempt has been made to trace the crucial connection which existed between these two elements of nineteenth-century life, despite an acceptance that history both 'infused... political values', and was used to 'root... political aspirations' (Hawkins 2015, 2-3).

My DPhil will explore this critically neglected relationship as it developed through the nineteenth century. This presents an especially significant focus for research given the number of Whig and Liberal statesmen engaged in historical scholarship (i.e., Charles James Fox, Lord John Russell, and William E. Gladstone), as well as the frequency with which whiggish historians (such as James Mackintosh, Thomas B.

Macaulay, and E.A. Freeman) engaged in Liberal political activity. In order to consider these dynamics, my project will engage with recent work which explores the relationship between politics and time (Robertson 2023): uncovering the conceptual structures on which understandings of history were necessarily based.

Following Christopher Clark's inversion of François Hartog's formulation, this means analysing the historicity of the Whig regime (Clark 2019): their organisation of the correspondence between past, present and future. Evaluating the interconnections of whig history and Whig politics through the nineteenth century, this project will deepen understandings of the ideas informing Victorian liberalism, and elucidate the structures connecting politics to the fertile intellectual culture in which it was embedded.

I will engage with three types of sources. Firstly, I will consult the private material of key actors, located mostly in archives across the UK. This will be undertaken alongside a second type of evidence: public political matter, like Hansard's report of parliamentary debates and political pamphlets.

I will place these resources in dialogue with historical and political writing more broadly. This project is thus committed to an interpretation of politics as inextricable from the intellectual contexts in which it was exercised, and incomprehensible without their due consideration.