The relationship between writers and their editors is generally a very private one, and few other than the principals know what they really consist of. At their best, an editor can give a writer a sense of who he or she is writing for and help to bring their best work out of them, by a mixture of encouragement, sympathy, appreciation and prodding.
Stuart ProffitFootnote 1In August 1964, the University of Cambridge historian G. R. Elton received an out-of-the-blue enquiry from a newly established university press in Australia asking whether he would consider writing a book on the nature of history. It is unlikely that Elton would have heard of Sydney University Press and he certainly knew nothing about the commissioning editor, Michael Turnbull. The latter's hopeful enquiry resulted in The practice of history, one of the best-known books of its type. It gave Turnbull considerable professional satisfaction that he was the impetus behind the project and he was especially proud of the somewhat unusual acknowledgement from Elton, who wrote: ‘I want to express my gratitude to the Sydney University Press, and especially to Mr Michael Turnbull who not only suggested this book to me but from the first to last gave me encouragement and excellent advice. Authors do not often feel well disposed towards editors; this one does.’Footnote 2
Some of Michael Turnbull's involvement as midwife to The practice of history has been recounted by Richard J. Evans in his able ‘Afterword’ to the most recent edition, published by Blackwell in 2002.Footnote 3 Evans traverses the book's publishing history, but his main concerns are with the critical reception of The practice of history, setting the book into the context of its times, and in providing his own assessment. Such discussion enables readers better to interpret the text, and doubtless many an earlier student would have appreciated Evans's ‘Afterword’ for a better understanding of where Elton was coming from and what he was about.
The present article has a different set of concerns. It elaborates on the book's unusual publishing history and draws attention to the role of Michael Turnbull in the production of The practice of history. Turnbull was an inspired editor with a flair for attracting authors and getting the best out of them. Without him, it is unlikely that one of the more significant books on the nature of history would have come into existence (and neither, in all probably, would Elton's complementary follow-up text, Political history: principles and practice, have been writtenFootnote 4). It was all the more remarkable because in those days Antipodean authors sought out English publishers, but not vice versa.
I
Geoffrey Elton (1921–94) is well known as the combative and prolific historian who formulated the concept of a ‘Tudor revolution in government’, and for his advocacy of a hardline empirical approach to the study of history – or what one critic described as an ‘austere and arid insistence on the primacy of traditional and narrowly based archival research’.Footnote 5 Michael Turnbull (1922–98) is unlikely to be a familiar name. He fell into a publishing career circuitously. Born into a landed family in the Hawkes Bay area of New Zealand, he attended Canterbury University College in 1940–1, majoring in History and Political Science.Footnote 6 He was conscripted in 1942 and his ‘confident personality and bearing’ contributed to promotion to second lieutenant at the age of twenty. Turnbull went through active combat physically unscathed, but the casualty rate of the Italian campaign and his time in Japan in 1946, so soon after the atomic bombs, horrified him. He was grateful to have survived but his time in the army had a profound effect on his personality. He likely suffered survivor guilt, which may explain his somewhat driven quality in later life.
Discharged in 1946, Turnbull wished to resume academic studies and presented himself to the Rehabilitation Board, a statutory body charged with assisting ex-servicemen in returning to civilian life. During his thirty-two months on overseas service, he had completed the last two units of his BA extramurally. He applied for educational assistance with the ultimate view of gaining a doctorate from the University of Cambridge and becoming an academic historian. The Board was impressed with his obvious sincerity and decided that he should embark on further academic studies as preparation for acceptance at Cambridge University. Following the submission of a well-regarded MA thesis on the East Coast War of 1865–8,Footnote 7 Turnbull was awarded an Army Rehabilitation Scholarship. He enrolled for a D.Phil. degree at Oriel College, Oxford, but after a difficult two years he decided to take out the lesser degree of B.Litt. for a thesis on the application of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's principles of systematic colonization.Footnote 8
Returning to New Zealand in early 1951, Turnbull faced an uncertain future. His marriage was clearly in trouble, his prospects looked grim, and he would have had a sense of not having ‘made it’. He had asked about jobs in New Zealand, and received the depressing news that there were no positions for historians in either universities or government. His fallback position was relief school teaching but in 1952 Victoria University College threw out a lifeline with a Junior Lectureship. He had enormous enthusiasm for lecturing and relished the exchange of ideas. For the next twelve years, Turnbull alternated between university teaching and educational publishing. He taught at Victoria University College (Junior Lecturer, 1952–4; Lecturer, 1956–9) and the New South Wales University of Technology (Senior Lecturer, 1962–4). He was also assistant editor with the School Publications Branch of the New Zealand Department of Education (1954–5) and the educational manager of the Melbourne Branch of Longmans (1959–62), which included six months of training at the company's London office.
His year at the School Publications Branch amongst a group of highly creative people was the start of Turnbull's transition from academic teaching to academic publishing.Footnote 9 First, it consolidated his existing interest in the methods and practices of historical research. It also made him more keenly aware of the nuances of educational publishing and foreshadowed works that he would later be responsible for getting published (The practice of history included) – and not only other authors' texts but also his own. He wrote three bulletins for primary school use on the wider aspects of emigration/immigration, and a thoughtful and wide-ranging bulletin for secondary school use that dealt with historical evidence, divergent interpretations among historians, and historical revision.Footnote 10
In 1964, Turnbull was appointed editor of the recently founded Sydney University Press.Footnote 11 It is not hard to see why his combination of academic and publishing credentials were attractive to Sydney University Press, and Turnbull would also have realized that he was a better publisher than an historian. He had written innovative school textbooks, which introduced students to the use and function of primary sources, and which conveyed a sense of how life was lived in the past and the ways in which the past itself was different to the future.Footnote 12 No other New Zealand history school texts had such qualities but his concentration on school books meant that his academic writing was falling behind. Rather than converting his B.Litt. thesis into a proper monograph, Turnbull compressed it into a booklet entitled The New Zealand bubble, which contained little elaboration of his arguments and almost no footnoting.Footnote 13 He had also taken shortcuts in researching one of the school bulletins, From Kent to Wellington. In 1965, in response to an enquiry from a puzzled reader, he admitted that ‘[t]he presence of Wakefield at Thorndon Hall is pure fabrication. The needs of narration required that I “plant” explanation on existing characters.’ He explained that such sleight of hand, which he thought ‘phoney’, was standard practice with the School Publications. But he could offer no excuse that some of his figures were ‘needless fabrications: I knew, of course [that Wakefield] had land: I was too lazy (or unable, I forget the circumstances) to look up the registers. Just as well, perhaps, that I have become a publisher!’Footnote 14
Turnbull's academic background, a love of debate and the exchange of ideas, and the social idealism that emerged from his wartime experiences fed into his notions of what publishing ought to be about – not simply to bring out the best in his authors but ‘to communicate…big ideas to the masses, or better put, to democratize and de-mystify knowledge’.Footnote 15 His publishing vocation and social idealism provided the vision to go ahead with important work. His most notable venture was when he moved to Fontana Books (the paperback imprint of Wm Collins & Co.) and inaugurated the ‘Modern Masters’ series, under the editorship of Frank Kermode, where one great thinker assessed another.Footnote 16 Underlying his desire to reach out to a broad audience was to use publishing as a vehicle to effect social and political change and to facilitate curriculum development.Footnote 17 He liaised with educational instititutions on means and ways to break down the barriers between young people and academia. His first major venture in these directions was The practice of history.
II
Geoffrey Elton committed The practice of history to a publisher that was barely known in Britain. The idea of a publishing arm at the University of Sydney was first mooted in 1917 and revisited in the late 1940s.Footnote 18 Nothing came of either initiative and regrets were expressed that Melbourne University Press had long been in existence whereas Sydney, the oldest university in the country, lacked such a symbolic asset. It was only the receipt of a substantial bequest that enabled the creation of Sydney University Press in 1965.Footnote 19 In short order, the New Zealander Hugh Price was appointed the foundation manager of the Press. Price at the time was working for the School Publication Branch and had established his own small publishing firm, Price Milburn.Footnote 20 His publishing background was in the design of books rather than editorial work, which helps explain the appointment of Turnbull as the Press's foundation editor. Under Price and Turnbull, the Press embarked on an ambitious publishing programme involving monographs, series of books, school texts, journals, and booklets. There was a clear understanding of the need to differentiate from Melbourne University Press, whose list was largely Australiana, and to sponsor a ‘non-parochial’ and more broadly based list embracing other parts of the world and spanning the sciences as well as the humanities. The extent of non-Australian publications often meant co-publishing with an overseas publisher.Footnote 21
Turnbull demonstrated his energy when editing Bruce Mansfield's biography of a nineteenth-century New South Wales politician: ‘Turnbull wore his pencil to a stub’, recalls Mansfield, ‘in “streamlining” my text, as he put it. I was daunted, even affronted, but submissive.’Footnote 22 Mansfield suspects that Turnbull's thoroughness was because Australian democrat was the Press's first book and that he ‘probably wasn't so interventionist with later books when the workload increased’.Footnote 23 Actually, Turnbull did all his editing down to the last detail. As Price recalled forty years later, ‘we did actually work at a tremendous pace…We were getting this thing off the ground…and I must admit that the work I did – the managerial work – was simply a full-time job. It went right through the weekends, and took up all my evenings. And I know that Michael was working very hard too.’Footnote 24
An author with reason to be appreciative was the New Zealand economist W. B. Sutch, who had presented the Press with an assortment of his published but mostly unpublished papers. Turnbull's work on this amorphous corpus resulted in Sutch paying tribute to his editorial and personal skills in terms remarkably similar to what Elton would say a year later: ‘without the work of Michael Turnbull the mass of material could not have been concentrated, tightened and given coherence. I wish to thank him for his drive, enthusiasm and skill, and above all for his friendship.’Footnote 25 Turnbull's philosophy was that editing involved a partnership, that there be a symbiotic relationship between editor and author. As he said to Elton, ‘I know I can make good books grow, and thanks to you it looks as though I am going to have a chance.’Footnote 26
III
Elton came to the notice of the Press through the columns of the Times Literary Supplement. The people at the Press read the TLS each week and their interest was piqued by a letter to the editor by Elton on 18 June 1964 in response to a review that had appeared a fortnight before.Footnote 27 The (anonymous) reviewer was Eric Hobsbawm and he was considering four history textbooks. More accurately, he used the textbooks ostensibly under review as a peg to discuss what he perceived as the unresolved problems of the genre, which was mushrooming with the advent of the ‘plateglass universities’, in the early to mid-1960s, and the dramatic increase in student enrolments. In Hobsbawm's view, the swelling numbers of history textbooks were falling between two stools: whereas the narrative-driven texts rendered ‘the systematic consideration’ of the great themes of history ‘virtually impossible’, the analytical and semi-analytical texts ‘could do no more than skim the surface of the subject’. What was needed was more historiographical discussion and ‘editorial reflection’.Footnote 28 How these strictures were compatible with a concisely written text is a teasing question and one not addressed by Hobsbawm.
There were squawks of protest from three of the authors and a rejoinder from Hobsbawm.Footnote 29 But it was Elton's reflections on the review that generated interest in Sydney: here was a writer of highly regarded history textbooks who was offering thoughtful observations. Elton foreshadowed some of the conclusions in The practice of history when he opined:
No one would wish to write purely narrative history about wars, politics and all that. No one could or should ignore the dimensions in depth which the analytical forms of study have added to our knowledge of the past. But the supposition that in consequence all history should be written in a fundamentally analytical form is both dangerous and stultifying. History remains a story: it takes place in time…The analytical method is proper when a situation or problem is being analysed: it cannot be right when a story is being told.
And further on:
What kind of history we write should never depend on the imagined audience or the supposed practical purpose to which the book is being put. It should depend on the matter to be handled. Once one is clear what kind of book – what organization and content – is required by the particular content envisaged, all that remains is to write as lucidly, as carefully, and as excitingly as one knows how, not thinking that this will assist an examination candidate or that will be too much for all but total specialists.Footnote 30
It was decided to approach Elton for a book along these lines. Hobsbawm never seems to have realized that he was indirectly responsible for The practice of history; he says nothing about it in his autobiography, although on at least two occasions he mentions the expansion of the British education system in the 1960s and its effects on the book trade.Footnote 31
Elton received Turnbull's offer to write such a book with evident surprise. He was ‘not unattracted’ to the proposition, but in view of his numerous commitments he sought further details.Footnote 32 Turnbull explained that he wanted to bring out a series of books on various academic disciplines, and the one on history would be a key volume. These books would combine:
(a) Reflection on the nature of the subject together with
(b) Consideration of how that nature can best be conveyed to an under-graduate audience and translated into objectives and technique of teaching.Footnote 33
Elton was interested but life was ‘intolerably busy’ and he wanted to think further about the proposal over the Christmas break. Turnbull was happy to wait and was pleasantly surprised in mid-March the following year to hear that Elton had made a tentative start with ‘a sort of draft chapter’. What Elton proposed was in line with Turnbull's original formula and remarkably similar to the eventual shape and content of The practice of history. He proposed a short book of 50,000–65,000 words broken into four chapters on:
(1) history and historians – what is history, what makes a good criterion for judging historians, the essential importance of ‘professionalism’, the fundamental criterion of usefulness which is the search for truth. (2) Research – i.e. what do we mean by historical truth and how, and how far, can we establish it. (3) Writing – the problems involved in giving coherence and meaning to the truth discovered, the varieties of historical exposition, criteria for judgment. (4) Teaching – what should be taught and how, and why.Footnote 34
Thus emboldened, Turnbull approached the Board of Sydney University Press who, in turn, asked three senior historians for advice on whether to proceed. They were all positive to varying degrees.Footnote 35
John M. Ward (1919–90), the Challis Professor of History at Sydney, wrote that ‘Elton is well known as a successful History teacher at Cambridge. His writings on the Tudors are certainly controversial and I am not sure that he has always had the best in the controverseys [sic] in which he has been engaged.’ In conversation, Ward had expressed some reservations, but made it clear that he did not think that Elton ‘would write a bad book’.
John McManners (1916–2006), another Professor of History at Sydney, was more positive:
I would advise the Press board to accept Elton's offer at once. He is a most distinguished historian. His work is not in my own sphere of interest, but his name is universally known. His proposal for a book is a conventional one, in that this sort of thing is fashionable now, and I fancy that every historian who reaches a certain level of distinction inevitably feels obliged to write about the nature and purpose of history. The philosophers have organised a tremendous debate on this subject, of course, so that some practicing historians must necessarily express an opinion.
Elton is right, I think, in saying that a lot of what has been said (especially by E. H. Carr) is of very shaky validity to practicing historians. I think that a contribution from him will bring the debate to earth. His book will almost certainly be controversial – many will be angry at what he says.
The third referee was Oliver MacDonagh (1924–2002), the foundation Professor of History at what became The Flinders University of South Australia, and his opinion was that
Elton is one of the leading and best known English historians and perhaps the pre-eminent one (certainly in the top two or three) in the Tudor field. I can't tell you how his reputation stands in the United States, but I should be astonished if his works were not widely known and highly regarded there. Apart from his more exact monographs, he has written very good general books on the Reformation period and on Tudor England and these must be used extensively in American teaching.
Turnbull notified the result and finally, a full twelve months after the initial enquiry, Elton committed himself to writing The practice of history.Footnote 36 He warned that ‘the book was twenty months away’, and in the meanwhile contractual details (distribution, co-publisher, paperback rights, and royalties) and publicity were discussed in some detail. Elton finished the book in half the time: ‘I have called it “The practice of history” because that's what it really rests on – analysis and comment derived from experience.’ In early September 1966, Turnbull telegrammed Elton, ‘the practice of history has arrived giving great pleasure to us all.’Footnote 37
Contrary to his normal practice, Elton was agreeable to Turnbull's request to make detailed suggestions. When writing about his own subject area, Elton did not consider that he needed advice or guidance, and in a technical sense this was true – his scripts required very little editorial attention, apart from superficial matters; he could copy-edit his own work better than anyone else; and the presentation of his scholarly apparatus was impeccable.Footnote 38 In the case of The practice of history, however, he was less confident:
It was written at great speed, it worked in my mind more like a public address than a book, and I know that it therefore suffers from some repetition, lack of organisation, and stylistic weaknesses. However, it was the sort of book which I could neither usefully revise at once nor bear to leave about for months to gain the necessary distance, and I shall therefore be truly grateful to you for editorial advice and pressure. I will not, indeed you would not want me to, commit myself to accepting all you suggest, but I can promise you that all you say will be very carefully considered. And, I repeat, I am in (for me) an unusual state of readiness to admit that improvement is possible!Footnote 39
Even before Elton's approval, Turnbull set to work with a will, giving the manuscript detailed attention. He wanted to
look carefully at the following points and make detailed suggestions if I can: 1. the opening of the book, especially in relation between Chapter I [‘Purpose’] and the Introduction. 2. the relationship between Chapter III [‘Writing’] and some other parts of the book. I have a feeling that there just may be grounds for some slight rearrangement of some details. 3. Chapter III. I have a feeling that more examples were needed (those used were very effective); I also felt that this chapter might be a little too long.Footnote 40
Successive drafts of The practice of history have not been located and neither have Turnbull's lists of detailed suggestions, so one cannot trace how the manuscript changed in response to Turnbull's editing, but Turnbull did explain his modus operandi:
I have set [the editorial suggestions] out in a way that, I hope, shows the reader's mind at work, and therefore helps you to shed some of that familiarity with the thought and expression that makes revision of detail so difficult. I have followed (for a somewhat similar reason) a strict page and line order so that you can easily see how the work unfolds to a stranger's eye. I have tried to be a neutral stranger (impossible of course) and to read line by line in a niggly sort of way. This method can lead to error in context, emphasis, and taste, but because it seems the kind of reading least congenial to an author, I consider it the one incumbent on an editor.Footnote 41
A specific suggestion was that Elton include self-criticism of occasional lapses in his own written expression. Elton obliged, although not with the ones suggested by Turnbull.Footnote 42 Turnbull was bullish: ‘I feel that this book is a classic statement of a particular position at a particular time. I feel also that we may have on our hands a classic in the wider sense of the term.’Footnote 43
An indication of Turnbull's and Elton's enthusiasm may be gauged from the rapid turnarounds in dealing with the manuscript (and by the fact that their correspondence was on a first-name basis by the end of 1966). It was less than six weeks between receipt of the original version and Elton's revisions. The subsequent processes would take another eleven months before the book appeared in the bookshops.
IV
Elton's original title was In defence of history: it is quite a coincidence that Richard J. Evans's own book on the nature of history has the same title, given that Evans had no idea at the time of Elton's initial intention.Footnote 44 In the end, Elton decided on ‘“The Practice of History” because that is what it really rests on – analysis and commentary derived from experience. Also since a good deal of it is rather combative and arrogant, I think a modest title a good idea…[W]e can't have a title which shows that I attack historians – modesty on the surface is what is required!’Footnote 45 With Elton, attack was always the best form of defence: ‘tentative was not in his register’, declared John Burrow and a reviewer of Practice noted its ‘unnecessary air of contention’.Footnote 46 Nonetheless, Practice is ultimately a defensive book – defending what Elton regarded as proper ways of doing history in the face of the ‘pernicious nonsense’ and ‘philistine judgement[s]’ that were being peddled by those who ought to know better, or by delinquents who knew no better. A prevailing theme concerned the autonomy of history – by which Elton meant that history is self-sufficient and other disciplines had nothing to offer, not least sociology but including anthropology, quantification, Marxism, and – horror of horrors – psychohistory.Footnote 47
In short, The practice of history is a vigorous manifesto that history was studied for its own sake and not for presentist purposes. Elton was insistent on the ‘independent reality’ of the past and proclaimed that ‘The historian [is] the servant of his evidence.’ There was a corresponding distrust of theory, models, and hypotheses; and he asserted that ‘a philosophic concern with such problems as the reality of historical knowledge or the nature of historical thought only hinders the practice of history’.Footnote 48 Conversely, he was emphatic that political activity and administrative action was central to any understanding of the past, or what some would call a narrowly institutional approach. Social history was beyond the pale as much as inter-disciplinarity, and it would likely have grieved Elton that the Journal of Social History was founded in the same year as The practice of history.
One endorsement of multi-disciplinarity which aroused Elton's ire was a three-part symposium in the TLS entitled ‘New ways in history’, which represented a ‘break with the traditional incestuous focus on British history’ so prevalent in the British historical profession and so revered by Elton.Footnote 49 He was particularly incensed by the contribution in the first instalment by Keith Thomas, whom he regarded as a presumptuous young upstart and whose views he repeatedly attacked in The practice of history.Footnote 50 There is the mistaken view that the TLS symposium provoked Elton to write The practice of history.Footnote 51 Elton was certainly irked and the symposium probably stung him into starting in earnest on a book he had agreed to write months earlier. It is fair comment that The practice of history was ‘written in anger’.Footnote 52
A feature of The practice of history is extreme statements being qualified, moderated, or even contradicted in other parts of the book. When Elton said that ‘historians are commonly charged with hedging their bets, with qualifying all they have to say, with obscuring their subject in a welter of back-trackings and reservations', he was probably unaware that the same stricture could be applied to The practice of history.Footnote 53 Thus, the claims for autonomy and the barbs aimed at interdisciplinarity are softened by conceding, at one point, that the other social science disciplines can be of use to historians after all.Footnote 54 He also oscillates between a certitude about ‘proper’ methods of scholarship (‘if [the historian] asserts a sovereignty over his facts he is a traitor to his calling’Footnote 55) and moments of humility (‘History is an unending search for truth, with the only certainty at each man's end that there will be more to be said and that, before long, others will say it’Footnote 56). The confident sweep of his judgements was partly the product of his facility with the English language and, in turn, an ability to write his way out of a problem. As a reviewer of his follow-up manifesto, Political history, pointed out, ‘one reads Professor Elton for other things than consistency, not least his conviction in his own point of view, and the panache with which he takes on all comers'.Footnote 57
There was another target besides Keith Thomas. The practice of history is often paired with E. H. Carr's What is history? Footnote 58 For several decades after their appearance, legions of undergraduate and postgraduate history students have cut their teeth, or else been force fed, on Carr and Elton. The two texts have a Siamese-twins quality. Great equals and opposites, each helped to ‘make’ the other. Half a century later, these grey-haired tomes are showing their age and have been superseded by competitors. In their time, however, they served the more-than-useful teaching purpose of being a contrasting duo. Each represented competing schools of thought: loosely speaking, Elton's hard-line objectivism could be could be pitted against Carr's relativism. It was once a familiar sight in historiography tutorials and seminars for students to lay on the table their copies of the paperback editions of What is history? and The practice of history – two books of equal size and dimensions but quite different in cover design and content. Nothing better symbolized their complementarity, even while their respective authors were slugging it out in an attempt to win hearts and minds to their views of what the historical discipline ought to be about. All that Carr and Elton seemed to have in common was being based at Cambridge University, and even then Carr never held a faculty post but was a senior research fellow at Trinity College.
In attacking Carr's positions, the same sorts of inconsistencies are evident. Elton comes close to repudiating his diktat that ‘The historian [is] the servant of his evidence’ and to cancelling out his criticism that Carr ‘think[s] that history is what historians write, not what happened’ by stating that: ‘though I believe in the independence of history and the possibility of discovering a right truth by the techniques of scholarship, I do not hold that these facts result in historical writing independent of the writer’.Footnote 59 There are also convergences between Elton and Carr that are difficult to square. Elton's insistence that the historian's personality and predilections be expunged from his or her calling is at odds with his statement that ‘Historians cannot exist in a vacuum: they live in the society of men, influence it whether they like it or not, and should therefore be conscious of what they are about.’Footnote 60 This echoes Carr's famous statements that one should ‘Study the historian before you begin to study the facts' and that the historian is ‘a social phenomenon, both the product and the conscious or unconscious spokesman of the society to which he belongs.’Footnote 61
The practice of history and What is history? were both were rapidly written in a polemical vein. Unlike Elton, Carr had been thinking for some years beforehand of writing a short book ‘on the problems of causation in history, moral responsibility, etc.’ For the sake of sales, Carr set out to be deliberately provocative – to the extent that his biographer wondered how serious he was being and why the content and writing style of What is history? were at such variance with the sort of history he had been writing.Footnote 62 Each book, moreover, provided the opportunity to settle old scores. In particular, Carr waded into Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper. Elton's list of miscreants was as varied as Lord Acton, Eric Erikson, Christopher Hill, J. H. Plumb,Footnote 63 R. W. Southern, Lawrence Stone, Keith Thomas, G. M. Young, and G. M. Trevelyan (‘That really fine amateur’, in Elton's view, who ‘too often achieved literary distinction by an easy saunter around any problem of intellectual gravity, and by superficial methods of explanation which left the serious and involved student gasping’Footnote 64). But his harshest words were directed at Carr, which has a certain irony because they did share a fundamental attribute. They were political historians of the same ilk, interested in
the operation of government and administration. At bottom, they shared an elitist view of history. Nowhere did Carr's elitism, his identification with the government rather than the governed, come out more strongly than in his dismissal not only of the losers in history but also of a vast majority of human beings throughout recorded time as being uninteresting to the historian because they had contributed nothing to the process of historical change.Footnote 65
In this respect, Carr had out-Eltoned Elton. But far from seeing a kindred spirit, Elton objected to almost everything else in Carr's philosophy of history – his ‘extreme relativism’ (an exaggeration); his alleged prioritizing of the historian over the evidence (‘Mr Carr's relativism makes the historian the creator of history’); his notion of ‘progress’ and the Whiggism it implied; his ‘very pretty distinction between facts as such and the facts of history’, which Elton lambasted as ‘an extraordinarily arrogant attitude to both the past and to the place of the historian in studying it’;Footnote 66 and his advocacy of the teaching of non-European history.Footnote 67 The disagreement over non-European history compounded their already tense personal relations because Carr had been prominent, in the teeth of Eltonian opposition, in curriculum reform of the Cambridge History Faculty involving a greater representation of African, American, and Asian history and some watering down of British and European history. This hardly represented the overthrow of the existing order but, by all accounts, the exercise was a bruising series of encounters and Elton was embittered by Carr's involvement in what transpired.Footnote 68 The reason Elton wrote The practice of history so quickly, and with such passion, was because he was angered by this reversal, as well as by Keith Thomas's exhortations in the TLS.
That said, The practice of history was not conceived as an explicit rejoinder to What is history?. Elton did not, as Evans points out, ‘set out to write his book as an attack on [Carr]’.Footnote 69 Neither did Turnbull put him up to it: his motivation was to write on the nature of history, and it is incorrect to say that it was Turnbull's idea that ‘a line of approach’ would be for Elton to launch an attack on What is history?. At one point Elton did say to Turnbull, ‘You hoped I would lay into Carr: I have done, I hope sufficiently to please you.’Footnote 70 When quoted in isolation, this passage conveys a misleading picture, because Carr was already in Elton's sights. What happened – quite apart from the tensions over syllabus reform at Cambridge – was Turnbull informing Elton of a proposed three-day, bi-annual historiography seminar at the University of Sydney, scheduled for August 1967, and that the discussion would revolve around Carr's What is history?. Turnbull hoped that Elton could give the keynote address and that, hopefully, The practice of history could be launched at the seminar. In the event, the seminar did not eventuate but in his letter of reply Elton said, almost in passing, that his book would ‘in part be an attack on E. H. Carr's jejuner views, which would make his book quite suitable for your seminar’.Footnote 71 The point is, though, that he was already contemplating an assault on Carr's ‘pernicious nonsense’, and Turnbull's letter confirmed the wisdom of doing so. When Turnbull received the manuscript of The practice of history, he made a comment on ‘the slaughter among the mediocrities who owlishly quote Carr's more obvious or dubious remarks’. This letter crossed in the mail with another of Elton's who said (possibly tongue in cheek): ‘if in [your publicity] you attack Carr, be mild: he is an old man, even if his reputation is undeserved’.Footnote 72
Elton, in other words, had intended taking Carr to task from the moment he began the book. What Turnbull probably did was to goad Elton into being even more severe. What Elton's onslaught against Carr ensured was that their respective books would be paired – that one book could hardly be discussed without reference to the other. Each contributed to the sales and the notoriety of its competitor.
V
The Turnbull–Elton correspondence reveals an intense and entirely satisfactory professional relationship, one characterized by warmth and respect on either side. Elton appreciated Turnbull's enthusiasm and competence whilst Turnbull was delighted that such a distinguished historian appreciated his work and was receptive to suggestion. But it was altogether less agreeable on another front. Turnbull was having his problems with his manager and the Board of Sydney University Press, and they with him.
For five weeks during September–October 1964, Turnbull travelled around the Australian universities on a promotion and fact-finding mission. Enthused and energized, he then wrote a long memorandum ‘Publishing policy’ proposing an expansive future for Sydney University Press and concluding that ‘The Press is, in my view, forced to declare a definite policy. I believe that the choice is restricted to two alternatives: we must seek a reputation for enterprise or for austerity.’ His package was rejected, which he interpreted as ‘a vote of censure’ by the Board, and he greatly resented being told to concentrate on editing and leave planning to the Board and the manager.Footnote 73
This and other disagreements resulted in a difficult relationship between Turnbull and the mild-mannered Price. The irony is that Price had recommended Turnbull's appointment and had looked forward to working with him. The two had known each other in New Zealand, and Price Milburn had published The New Zealand bubble. One of the Turnbull's tactics was to play up his academic credentials: for example, ‘I have by no means avoided the memory of my commercial past – therefore I can hardly bitch at you, who are still a commercial publisher, for not thinking academically!’Footnote 74 Price, in fact, also had an MA in history and his publishing house in Wellington primarily catered for academics.Footnote 75 In Price's view, Turnbull ‘really believed that in forming an opinion and deciding something, this had some kind of occult significance. That this had been decided in some kind of celestial way…And there was no arguing or reasoning about it, or discussion on the matter.’Footnote 76 Turnbull handed in his notice in early December 1966, having spent some eighteen months with the Press. The resignation would not be effective for several more months, which would give him time to find alterative employment. A few weeks later, Sir William (Billy) Collins of Collins publishing house in London and Glasgow was visiting Australia and Turnbull presented himself as a prospective employee.Footnote 77
This is where The practice of history re-enters the picture. At the time of Turnbull's resignation, the Board was discussing options for the paperback rights, the arrangements for which were delegated to Price. The British paperback rights were up for grabs between Methuen, Penguin and Fontana Books, where Turnbull hoped to be going.Footnote 78 He then hatched a plot that his prospective employer would get the non-North American paperback rights. The tactic was to persuade Elton that Fontana should have the paperback rights, and when Elton agreed he acted very quickly, because he had only days left before departing for England to attempt to prevail upon Collins to employ him. With Elton's preference for Fontana to hand,Footnote 79 Turnbull wrote several letters in the one sitting. Fontana was informed that
Your offer of 21 February…has been accepted. The decision is entirely my responsibility and I am informing Dr Elton of it by the same mail. However, there is an odd situation and I have to ask you to treat this letter as personal to you (and of course your colleagues) and the author of the book. You will hear officially from the Manager of the Press, Mr Hugh Price. You must not let this irregular procedure worry you in any way. I have tied everything up very tightly.Footnote 80
In similar terms, Methuen was told that it was the unlucky suitor:
There is an odd situation about this book. I have been the publisher in almost all respects and, in fact, the decision you are waiting for about the paperback rights can only be made by me. I write to you personally behind the Manager's back because I have no alternative. I leave the Press in a week's time and the decision has been delegated to me by the author. I will acquaint him with it by the same mail, but I ask you (and Mr Raymond) to await the official word from Price. However, you may rest assured that this is the final decision and that I have tied things up so that there cannot be any deviations from it. The paperback rights are to go to Collins. I will be very happy to discuss the grounds for the decision when we meet, but in the meanwhile, the less said the better.Footnote 81
The Press found out a day or so after Turnbull's departure. A sealed envelope awaiting postage to Elton was discovered propped against the leg of a table; it was opened on a need-to-know basis, and it transpired that Turnbull had been making unauthorized commitments.Footnote 82 Elton was immediately informed that the decision over the non-American paperback rights would be made by the Board alone, although his own preference for Fontana would be taken into account.Footnote 83 The point is, the paperback rights would have gone to Fontana anyway because it made good commercial sense: Penguin had shown a lack of interest; Methuen's likely retail price was too high; Fontana had made the best offer and for that reason was the successful bidder.Footnote 84
VI
The practice of history raised Elton's already high professional profile. Ever eager to do battle with those who did not share his vision of the past and what the historical discipline was about, and as productive as ever, he rapidly gained promotion and preferment. The high point came in 1983 when his accomplishments and honours, within months of each other, were a Festschrift, the third volume of his collected essays, and his appointment as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge.Footnote 85 With old age and attendant ill health, however, came a dramatic decline. The intolerance of his historical outlook intensified to the extent that he almost became a figure of fun – although it has been well said that only after his death did ‘many of the living came forward with criticisms of his work about which they had previously been silent’.Footnote 86 It is often overlooked that The practice of history contains sound advice on the research and writing of history. All the same, his penultimate book, Return to essentials, became its own parody. Evans described it as a ‘mix of prejudice and pomposity’ and ‘useful mainly as a quarry for alarmist quotes’.Footnote 87 His unyielding positions were not seen as conservative so much as downright reactionary.Footnote 88 As early as 1963, when assessing probable candidates for the chair of Modern History at Cambridge, Hugh Trevor-Roper observed that ‘Elton would be an unpopular choice. I am told that he has become an arrogant bore (I can believe that too), a stiff opponent of reform, and in general the bane of the Faculty. I don't myself much like what he writes, or the style in which he writes it, but there is no denying his energy and ability.’Footnote 89 Evans acknowledges ‘Elton's enormous prestige and influence among historians’ during his prime, and that The practice of history represented ‘mainstream orthodoxy among professional historians’ for many years: ‘Even if I couldn't agree with [his views], their forthrightness and the clarity with which they were put forced me to think again about my own position on the matters they addressed.’Footnote 90 He is sorely in need of the full-scale biography that are lacking among historians of Tudor and Stuart England.
Upon leaving Sydney University Press, Michael Turnbull became the non-fiction editor of Fontana Books. He briefly prospered within the scholarly segment of a trade publisher in ways he was temperamentally unsuited within the confines of a university press, forever answerable to a board of management. He did realize that Elton disapproved of some of his ventures, notably the ‘Modern Masters’ series, and wrote to him in placatory fashion:
You will be glad to hear that the series on Gurus, thinkers and so on is turning up some interesting things. The treatment of Marcuse is very critical indeed. So, I gather will be the one on McLuhan. Dr. Leach steers a very nice course between his critical view of Lévi-Strauss and the fact that the man is important.Footnote 91
For the ‘Modern Masters’ series, Turnbull sustained lengthy professional relationships with such notable figures as Raymond Williams, Stephen Spender, Jonathan Miller, and Al Alvarez. But he did not last in his new job, and for familiar reasons: his ideas increasingly diverged from those of the Collins management. They parted company in 1973 and he returned to teaching and working in the community.Footnote 92
He was also developing ideas for a future publishing form which he called Helix; he described it as ‘multi-authored writing’ – the equivalent of an edited book where a group of activist writers contribute to ‘an organised politicised pastiche of ideas…about feminism and the gender revolution’.Footnote 93 Financing this venture proved impossible in the midst of the Oil Crisis and he diverted his energies into sharing the work of bringing up his family with his wife Hilary. He still worked on his sample ‘book’ and completed it during his last illness and treatment for cancer, but family and friends were unable to find a publisher. He had hoped to use his new publishing form as a challenge to sexism, and his ideas on feminism would have been appreciated by the Third Wave Feminists of today. He was also ahead of his time in having an intuitive sense of present-day social media vehicles. He would have embraced Facebook and Twitter, had he lived long enough, and would have seized upon the publishing opportunities provided by the internet. His ideas for new forms of publishing in some ways anticipated these developments and would have been facilitated by them.
The practice of history had a deeper underlying design for Turnbull. He did not envisage yet another book on the historian's craft but, rather, saw it as an important link in a wider rationale to apply publishing to social and political purpose. The remoter origins lie in Turnbull's interest in historical method. Turnbull intended The practice of history as the key volume of a series on the various social science and humanities disciplines. This found ultimate expression in the ‘Modern Masters’ series, a device by which big ideas could be expressed, given a mass audience, and thus contribute to debate and social change. Elton would have severely disapproved of his work being intended for utilitarian ends, given his insistence that ‘the past must be studied for its own sake’. Neither would Eric Hobsbawm have relished the thought that his TLS review was indirectly responsible for The practice of history.
