The professionalization of history has been understood as one of the enemies of women's history and of female historians, a phenomenon originating in the Victorian period that, like the rise of obstetrics or novel reviewing, was designed to edge women out.Footnote 1 Just as Agnes Strickland, Elizabeth Penrose, and other women were becoming respected, or at least briskly selling authors of female biographies, court histories, and textbooks, “legitimate” historical scholarship removed to the exclusively male preserve of the universities.Footnote 2 Professionalization of a field of labor served to exclude female practitioners not only by means of institutional barriers but also by privileging methodologies that made women the silent, agentless, objectified other and appropriated for professionally credentialed men an exclusive claim to objective observation.Footnote 3 Through this process, as June Purvis puts it, “‘History’ had been professionalized as a discipline by white, heterosexual, middle-class men who taught the subject in British universities and shaped it in particular ways.”Footnote 4 The new “scientific” professional historian stood in relationship to his sources as did the scientist toward nature—in Elaine Showalter's image, a fully clothed man directing a “gaze of sexual mastery” toward “Nature unveiling herself before science.”Footnote 5
The import of this account of the professionalization of history is evident in much recent feminist historiography, which, concentrating only indirectly on the exclusion of women from employment in the academy, focuses its attention instead on critiques of empiricism and objectivism as “masculine” ways of knowing enshrined in professional standards of historical scholarship. It is not enough to assert that women's lives are the stuff of history as much as are politics or the military; after all, as Rosemary Ann Mitchell has argued, nineteenth-century female historians, by working on the very subject matter ignored by their male counterparts, were pioneers in new historical disciplines, such as social history and art history.Footnote 6 Rather, adopting tenets of poststructuralism, feminist historiography advocates methodologies aimed at privileging “feminine” ways of knowing by blurring the boundaries between fiction and historical narratives, by foregrounding the historian's investments in her subject, by stressing the contingency of historical interpretation and the indeterminacy of evidence.Footnote 7
For all their analytical power, the dominance of such arguments regarding professionalism, methodology, and gender may oversimplify Victorian practice or even lead us to rule out the possibility of exceptions on theoretical grounds.Footnote 8 What if “professionalism's high accomplishments” were attained—indeed, to a significant degree defined by—a Victorian woman? Many Victorian historians, government officials, and reviewers would have accorded that honor to Mary Anne Everett Green as the longest-serving and most substantively influential calendarer of state papers for the Public Record Office (PRO). And again, what if the very research skills and intellectual rigor that would earn her praise as a leading editor of state papers were developed in order to do justice to subject matter that could easily be dismissed as “feminine” or “amateur,” though Green thought that the underreported lives of women required particularly painstaking documentation and scrupulous argument? Green had published a two-volume edition of Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies and a six-volume Lives of the Princesses of England before she became the first external editor to be appointed at the PRO, and, to the extent she is remembered by feminist historians at all, it is largely through those works.Footnote 9 But it is on the basis of her position at the PRO that I wish to argue for her contribution to the professionalization of history. During a career at the PRO that spanned from 1855 to her death in 1895, she produced forty-one of the 800-page volumes of Calendars of State Papers, Domestic (CSP, Dom.) covering portions of the reigns of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, the entire reign of James I, the Interregnum, and the reign of Charles II. Green and her fellow editors pioneered the specialized knowledge required for calendaring documents, and, because her Calendars set the standard against which reviewers judged those of other editors, she preeminently was responsible for defining the Calendars as a genre of historical writing. Moreover, her Calendars remain authoritative sources for historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.
Green's position is undeniably unique. After all, the government named only four historians as external editors to be the leading figures in this key project. Though we may balk at the praise lavished on Green by contemporaries as examples of the tendency to treat intellectual women as “extraordinary” and thereby to relegate all other women to inferior status, our discomfort may betray more about our theoretical commitment to the gendering of professional history than it does about Victorian historians' and reviewers' sexism. They did, indeed, find her extraordinary, but there is little evidence that they did so because of her sex. Instead, they were rightly impressed by the almost unprecedented scholarly expertise demonstrated to a wide audience by the calendaring project and judged her against other Calendar editors, not other female historians. Nonetheless, not only her expertise, but the negotiations she had to accomplish because of her gender, are relevant to her lasting impact on historical practice. Green came to prominence at a time when, as Rohan Amanda Maitzen points out, historians “competed to dominate the historical field, an influential jurisdiction in an age coming, as much recent scholarship has confirmed, to place more and more faith in the past's explanatory power.”Footnote 10 Examining the forces that put Green at the forefront of this process enables us to reconsider the uneven development of the profession of history and of women as professional historians in the context of complex institutional and cultural histories. It suggests ways of opening up the discussion of gender and genre in historical writing, extending into the circumstances of history writing in the Victorian period some of the challenges to the “tidy” categorizations of masculine and feminine practices recently put forward by Devoney Looser with respect to the eighteenth century.Footnote 11 If history was first professionalized not in the universities but, as Philippa Levine has argued, in the publication projects of the PRO, then the prominence of a woman in the calendaring project helped to promulgate the concept of a “scientific” historian. Importantly, that historian's virtues would bear an uncanny resemblance to those Elizabeth Langland has attributed to the bourgeois woman—“unobtrusive yet central, unperceived yet all-seeing”—leading us to consider the feminine qualities that went into the making of professional historians.Footnote 12 Rather than Showalter's image of the masterful male scientist, Mary Anne Everett Green's relationship to historical documents might better be figured by Jane Goodall communing with the chimps. Indeed, Green's professional practices and the genre of historical writing she helped to pioneer seem rather closer to our own scholarly ideals than those of such lions as A. W. Ward. Surely, in light of her career, we should think of gender and historiographic method more flexibly. We might recover some feminist origins of professional history.
Good Housekeeping: Green Makes Her Home at the PRO
“Here, in the new Public Record Office,” declares Philippa Levine, was “to be found history's first truly professional class.”Footnote 13 Mary Anne Everett Green, the only woman in this class, was nominated by Sir John Romilly, Master of the Rolls, on the recommendation of Sir Francis Palgrave, Deputy Keeper of the PRO, as the very first member of the original team of four external editors of the Calendars of State Papers. The Public Record Office Act of 1838 had institutionalized a significant shift in historiographic understanding by which the troublesome and insalubrious detritus of governmental activities had, over the course of more than a century, been transformed into invaluable sources of truth about the past and guides to a democratic future.Footnote 14
However, “without Calendars and Indexes, the Public Records are as a sealed book, and comparatively useless,” wrote Palgrave, “for few persons who could spare the time have the skill to search them.”Footnote 15 While in passing the Public Records Act Parliament may have acceded to the argument that records should be gathered in one central location, it remained chary of publication schemes. Economy—as well as nationalism—was a key consideration, as F. J. Levy has argued.Footnote 16 Keen to restore the publication of public records after the financial debacle of the Records Commission led Parliament to halt its publication scheme, Romilly and Palgrave had to make the case that without published guides to the vast and inchoate body of national documents, they could not witness to history.Footnote 17 It was precisely because Romilly and Palgrave understood that for published Calendars to garner the respect of historians and the press, and thereby to vindicate their project to the Treasury, expertise well beyond that of the clerks of the SPO was called for and that editors had to be hired from among respected historians.
Mary Anne Everett Wood, named for her father's friend, the noted Wesleyan historian, James Everett, was early introduced to circles of nonconformist intellectuals both in Sheffield and in Manchester, where her family lived for nine years. It is likely to have been in this manner that she became acquainted with leading antiquarians.Footnote 18 Given an excellent education at home by her father, the Rev. Robert Wood, she began historical research when the family moved to Gower Street (London) in 1841 so that the Rev. Wood could take up a post at the Methodist chapel in Islington.Footnote 19 Working in the British Museum, Lambeth Palace library, the Tower Records Office, among other British archives, and in the collections of such notable antiquarians as Sir Thomas Phillipps and Dawson Turner (Francis Palgrave's father-in-law), she had by 1843 completed a draft of her Lives of the Princesses of England, which was accepted for publication by H. Coburn. It was in the course of conducting this research that Miss Wood came to the attention of Palgrave, then Deputy Keeper of Her Majesty's records, who had been greatly impressed with her scholarship, especially her knowledge of ancient and modern languages.Footnote 20
In 1846 she published a scholarly edition of Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies under her maiden name, though six months earlier she had married the painter George Pycock Green. Coburn delayed publication of Green's Princesses until after he had completed the publication of Agnes Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England, which appeared between 1842 and 1848. In the meantime, Green accompanied her husband to the Continent for his artistic studies, where she made use of French archives and private collections for revisions of her Lives. On her return to London, she presented Coburn with a revised manuscript of Lives of the Princesses, incorporating her new research, which was published in six volumes (1849–55). Lives of the Princesses was applauded for its intellectual rigor and original research.Footnote 21 Green assured her readers that she could “conscientiously affirm that no pains have been spared to render the biographies authentic. Authorities have not been taken second-hand, when it was practicable to revert to the originals. Much care has been bestowed upon the verification of names, dates, genealogies, and other points of historic importance; and when the paucity of information has left much to conjecture, the line between fact and probability has been carefully drawn.”Footnote 22 Yet, just as Agnes Strickland, once respected as a scrupulous researcher, is no longer considered authoritative, Green, too, would have failed to earn an enduring place in the professionalization of history on the basis of this work alone.Footnote 23 But the reputation she earned, and the connections she made, through her Lives of the Princesses would lead to a decisive shift in her professional identity.
As the acknowledgments of her Lives of the Princesses attest, Green was exceptionally well connected. She had dedicated the first volume of Lives to Turner, and thanked him—along with a veritable who's who of record keepers and collectors—for granting her access to collections.Footnote 24 In 1851, Green had added her name to those of Dickens, Carlyle, Macaulay, Agnes Strickland, W. H. Ainsworth, and S. R. Maitland who were petitioning for free access to the public records for literary researchers—as historical writers were called.Footnote 25 When, in 1854, Romilly approached her for the Calendars editorship, Green, aged 36, was editing the Diary of John Rous for the Camden Society.
Romilly's offer of an editorship to Green suggests how early efforts at professionalization combined notions of expertise, economics, gentlemanly honor, domesticity, and nepotism. It was communicated through Green's sister, Esther Wood, and Green accepted, noting “my husband's sanction to express my cheerful concurrence.”Footnote 26 Palgrave wrote in reply, expressing Romilly's “great satisfaction that [she] has accepted an employment which he believes to be very useful to the Public and creditable to [her]self” and laid out the specifics of her duties and payment of ten guineas per sheet at the completion of each volume. In conclusion, he conveyed Romilly's belief that even in the absence of these “spoken conditions” Green would have carried on “the work in the most liberal and honourable manner.”Footnote 27 In recommending Green to Romilly, Palgrave must have been confident of Green's professional dedication as well since she had worked steadily through two pregnancies.Footnote 28
While the calendaring project was from the outset enmeshed in political, financial, and institutional struggles typical of an emerging professional activity, there is also an unexpected degree of domesticity in evidence. Indeed, among Palgrave's motives for supporting the publication of calendars and indexes to public records was a decidedly domestic one. “It was impossible to exaggerate the importance of expanding facilities for home study,” he wrote, “because a quiet hour spent by a student at his own desk was, in his opinion, worth a day in any public library.”Footnote 29 Palgrave, Romilly, and other male professionals—as much as Green—associated historical scholarship not with the quasi-monastic environment of the universities, but with the domestic settings of the private study and the social gatherings of antiquarians and other intellectuals.Footnote 30
Nevertheless, while Green may have in part represented a domesticating presence, she quickly asserted her authority, recommending substantive editorial changes to Romilly's plan. She proposed historical introductions to each volume, as well as “a list of appointments to offices of state, which might do something to supply the miserable defects and inaccuracies of Beatson & would be of material use in verifying the date of documents.”Footnote 31 Thus began a tug-of-war between Green, who, because of her expertise as an archival researcher and adherence to rigorous scholarly standards, knew what was required to make useful Calendars, and those administrators—torn between concerns of historical value, on the one hand, and politics and budget, on the other—who had sought her out precisely because her expertise could guarantee the success of the published Calendars. Romilly agreed to the inclusion of a list of state offices, “but with respect to the Historical Introduction,” Palgrave reported, “he is of the opinion that it is not within the purview of his office to direct the Publication of such a composition.” Instead, Romilly encouraged Green to publish “any Historical work or essay” based on her calendaring research as a “private speculation.” “He will be very glad,” Palgrave concluded, “if you shall be able to turn them to account.”Footnote 32 Though Green's future publications were limited almost exclusively to her Calendars, Romilly would eventually concede to “prefaces” explaining the nature of the documents calendared in a volume. Green ended up writing more than 700 pages of prefaces for her forty-one volumes, which taken together constitute a history of seventeenth-century England.Footnote 33
In 1856, Green began work along with three others who had been appointed calendar editors: the noted antiquarian Markham John Thorpe, John Bruce, a widely published founding member of the Camden Society, and the Rev. John Sherren Brewer, former Record Commission editor and professor at King's College London.Footnote 34 To her letter to Palgrave of 6 December, she had appended a postscript indicating ill health: “I am still a prisoner, but may have a drive out tomorrow, & on Monday hope to get down to the State Paper Office—although for the present, my physician limits me to 3 hours at a time for work.” But by 1 April 1856 she could report the following progress to Palgrave:
I have completed with the original documents, revised, and corrected the calendar of Domestic papers of James I from his accession, March 1603, to Nov- 1608. The former part of this period, from March 1603 to the end of 1605 I have gone over a second time. I prepared for the press, excepting a final revision of the undated papers, some of which I hope to place under more proximate dates. I am also compiling an index of my M.S. Calendar, in order that by the facilities it will afford of ready reference to any paper, before putting to press, I may be able to place more accurately some of my undated papers….
The Gunpowder Plot papers have required entirely recalendaring—of the two calendars which were in existence, one was too concise, the other too diffuse for publication. There are now chronologically incorporated with the other papers of the period.Footnote 35
This came in response to Palgrave's request for progress reports from all his editors for inclusion in his Deputy Keeper's report. Green's workman-like response contrasts interestingly with those of her fellow editors, John Bruce and J. S. Brewer.
Historians of the PRO have accepted the claims of Brewer and Bruce that the extraordinary disarray of the documents in their periods—Henry VIII and Charles I, respectively—justified their slower rate of production (though eventually, Green's and Bruce's progress would be used to counter Brewer's excuses regarding his slow pace on the Carew Papers). What is more, Green's fee had been reduced to £8.8s, to be brought in line with John Bruce's payment, though Green would afterward agitate for better pay along the lines of equal pay for equal work, arguing that she worked more rapidly and without paid assistance.Footnote 36 Setting aside the question of the relative difficulties of their tasks, one can clearly imagine why Green's editorial suggestions found favor with Palgrave and Romilly when we see what news they were receiving from other editors. John Bruce began his report with a mild cavil against reporting itself: “My work at the State Paper Office, although of the greatest importance with reference to the object to be accomplished, has not been of a kind which can be made to figure with advantage in a general report.”Footnote 37 With the assistance of Mr. Impey and W. D. Hamilton of the SPO, he had inspected and ordered some papers from different periods of the reign of Charles I, “chronologized and amalgamated” them. “Work of this kind,” however, he informed Palgrave, “is very laborious. It requires continuous and persevering attention. It gives rise to a multitude of minute but necessary inquiries. It takes a great deal of time and makes no show. But it is the foundation of the whole proceeding. Without it, and until it has been accomplished, nothing effectual can be done.”Footnote 38 Indeed, the Calendar of the reign of Charles I would not be finished until 1897, twenty-eight years after Bruce's death and under the editorship of Green's niece, Sophia Crawford Lomas.
Bruce's colleague, J. S. Brewer, undeniably faced extraordinary logistical difficulties in his work on the papers of Henry VIII. In his first report to Palgrave he listed the transfer of “117 bags, 8 loose bundles, unarranged, and unexamined, 11 portfolios and 20 boxes arranged, but not examined” to the SPO.Footnote 39 Brewer projected that at their current sorting rate of three bags per week, it would take at least a year merely to examine all the documents. But then Brewer was not working alone. He applauded the “sagacity of the workmen” who had been assigned to help him and noted as well the assistance of James Gairdner, who would himself go on to finish the Calendar of Henry VIII's reign after Brewer's death in 1879.
Though Green had been given a room of her own in the SPO, she did not content herself with the materials easy to hand, but she, like Brewer, sought for relevant papers in other repositories. These searches, as Brewer's catalog of bags and boxes suggests, were not merely intellectually but also physically demanding and literally dirty work, though these are not features of Victorian archival scholarship that could be gleaned from Green's letters or reports; she seems to have taken these conditions in stride.Footnote 40 In the Chapter House she found hundreds of papers that she requested Romilly to have transferred to the SPO.Footnote 41 What is more, that Green was considered to be a full participant in the professional and institutional politics of the fledgling public records project is evident from Palgrave's response to her request. The papers would be transferred according to her instructions, but it was important, he cautioned her, that they remain in her room at the SPO at all times and not be turned over to Robert Lemon of the SPO. Green was a perspicacious and tactful agent for Palgrave in these matters. Her reply made clear she understood Palgrave's implicit concern that Lemon not be allowed to exploit the temporary presence of the calendaring work at the SPO to enhance that archive when he was already resisting orders from Romilly to turn it over to the PRO.Footnote 42 On the same day, Palgrave would reply to Robert Lemon's report on his calendar of the papers of Elizabeth I, the second volume of which remained incomplete, “Mrs. Green, as you are probably aware, is making rapid progress in her volume and a chasm will be inconvenient.”Footnote 43 Green's “rapid progress,” it should be noted, seemed unimpeded by the birth of a daughter, Evelyn, on 17 November 1856.Footnote 44
Green was proving valuable to Romilly and Palgrave not only for her scholarly skills but also for her efficiency and professional tact. And as the publication date of her first Calendar neared, her employers looked forward to cashing in on her proven market success. While Green—and her sister—were correcting proofs, Palgrave sent orders to Longmans, publishers of the Calendar volumes, for an advertisement to be inserted in the forthcoming Calendar, announcing the publication of CSP, Dom., King James I, 1603–1610, edited by “Mrs. Mary Anne Everett Green, author of The Lives of the Princesses of England.”Footnote 45 Clearly, Palgrave had not consulted with Green about this manner of identifying the editor. By early June, Green's first calendar was ready for publication. In a conciliatory tone she wrote to Palgrave, asking him to consult with Romilly about a matter that she would never know had been settled weeks earlier:
The only remaining query with which I have to trouble the Master of the Rolls, in reference to my forthcoming volume, is a very trifling one. It is whether on the title-page of the book, I should add to my name Author of the Princesses, editor of Letters R—I should rather the name simply, as I would avoid even the semblance of a puff, but if it is thought that a mention of my book will shew the reason why the task has been devolved upon me, or will be any other way advantageous, I will act as is thought advisable. Please let me know his honour's opinion at your early convenience.Footnote 46
Not surprisingly given the instructions he had already sent Longmans regarding the advertisement Palgrave replied: “The Master of the Rolls does not object to your adding your works to your name. He agrees with your friends that they are a creditable testimony to your labours and talents.” He closed by inquiring when Green hoped to begin her next volume.Footnote 47
In his Deputy Keeper's report of 1860, Palgrave noted that Green had completed the CSP, Dom., for the reign of James I, which “occupies four royal octavo volumes, each supplied with an Index of person, places, and leading subjects; and describes the contents of 213 volumes of State Papers containing upwards of 25,000 Documents, chronologically arranged…. The mass of historical matter thus rendered accessible to investigation is large and important.”Footnote 48 Palgrave listed the Priests' Plot, the Gunpowder Treason, the rise and fall of Somerset, the Overbury murder, the disgrace of Sir Edward Coke, Raleigh's final expedition, the constitutional movements of the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624, as well as “materials for topographical and biographical history, and the social life of the period, [which] abound in almost every page.”Footnote 49
Each volume of the Calendars sold at 15s.Footnote 50 For the quarter ending 30 June 30 1857, when the first volumes by Green and Bruce had gone into print, Green was paid £111.12.—, and Bruce £150, while Brewer received his quarterly salary of £87.10—.Footnote 51 By 1860, when Green had commenced work on the reign of Charles II, Bruce had renegotiated for a salary along the lines of Brewer's arrangement, while Green was still being paid by the sheet. Green wrote to Romilly in April, referring to a conversation they had had about payment and reminding him that whereas Brewer had been provided assistants, she had paid her own for more than a year.Footnote 52 Green had noted in her report to Palgrave on 11 March 1857 that her progress toward print was being substantially accelerated by the aid of her sister, who was making the index.Footnote 53 Romilly responded with a tally of her total payments for the past four years: £300 in 1856; £111.12 in 1857; £1,058.2 in 1858 and £71.14 in 1859 for a total of £1,541.8 for the four volumes of calendars of James I, or £385.7 per annum. This, he noted, was in line with Mr. Bruce, except in the matter of paid assistance, for which he would be prepared to request Treasury funds.Footnote 54 But Green's sense of fair play was unsatisfied; she argued that the nature of Charles II's papers required her to be compensated for her time as well as material product, as Brewer had been from the first. “After consulting with my husband,” Green wrote to Romilly, she wished to be “placed on the same footing as Mr. Bruce, that is to receive £200 a year salary and 5 guineas for each sheet produced. I have hitherto been regular in my office attendance,” she continued, “and have reason to expect that I shall continue so.” After reporting that she had paid about £200 for assistance with the Calendars of James I, Green concluded, “I hope I have stated these business matters clearly, but being little accustomed to them, I may have failed—Pray pardon me.”Footnote 55 Romilly remained unmoved.Footnote 56 In the final two quarters of 1860, Green was paid £250 and £160.12.0.Footnote 57 Green had lost this round of negotiations, and Romilly was taking advantage of her expertise and diligence—and the unpaid labor of her sister. Later rounds of battles with subsequent Masters went little better, though Green became the most prolific and highly regarded of the editors.
Establishing the House Rules: Green's Contributions to Standards of Scholarship
Already with her Calendar of James I, Green's style of writing abstracts of documents was much more comprehensive and, as we shall see, came to be recognized as the standard to be followed by all editors. Robert Lemon gave exceedingly brief descriptions of documents in his first volume of CSP, Dom., Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, 1547–1580 (1856), and only slightly more extensive ones in his second volume, possibly after he had seen Green's practice. Reviewers certainly rewarded Green with praise. What begins to emerge with reviews of her Calendars of the reign of Charles II is the degree to which she could reshape readers' attitudes toward historical periods or materials through her method of abstracting. For example, her volume covering 1666 and 1667 prompted the Saturday Review to remark that “the interest of the volume consists in this—that it is like a file of newspapers of the time, in giving a picture of the country, and of what was going on, day by day…. We need hardly say that the volume is edited with Mrs. Everett Green's usual care and intelligence.”Footnote 58 Of Green's CSP, Dom., Charles II, 1667 (1866), the same reviewer expressed amazement that any volume in the series could have intrinsic interest, as this one did. “It is full at every stage of incidents often tragic, constantly dramatic,” wrote the reviewer, “and to such incidents the picturesque details of private letters and contemporary fragments lend the aptest and most vivid illustration. Mrs. Greene [sic] has well performed her editorial task.”Footnote 59
But the real significance of Green's scholarly judgment, empathy with researchers who would be relying on the Calendars, and powers of persuading successive Masters of the Rolls that her more costly approach to calendaring was essential, came to the fore after Robert Lemon's death in 1867. Green had been working on the reign of Charles II, of which she had published four volumes, when Thomas Duffus Hardy, who had succeeded Francis Palgrave as Deputy Keeper at his death in 1861, asked her to finish Lemon's calendar of the papers of Elizabeth.
Within the year, Green brought out her first volume of CSP, Dom., Elizabeth. In her preface she explained that “Mr. Lemon's volumes were compiled on the principle which resulted in the earlier State Paper Calendars, that of indicating rather than describing the contents of the papers. Experience has since proved the advisability of fuller descriptions, such as shall be exhaustive of the important contents of the papers, and shall in most cases preclude the necessity of consulting the originals themselves.”Footnote 60 So definitive did Green's practice become that when C. S. Knighton came to redo Lemon's Calendars in 1992, he denied to the very man who had defined “calendar” that designation for his own work: “it is far from being a calendar as that term has come to be understood and would now be known as a descriptive list.” Conversely, Knighton explains that this new Calendar does not include descriptions of Edwardine documents in CSP, Dom., Addenda, Edward VI to James I, “as they were well and fully described by M. A. E. Green in the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1601–1609; with addenda, 1547–1565 (London, 1870).”Footnote 61
How Green's practice rather than Lemon's came to be accepted as standard is apparent in such reviews as the following, and it was perhaps the accident of Green's taking over from Lemon, so that their work was juxtaposed, and also with that of the Rev. Joseph Stevenson, who was editing the foreign state papers of Elizabeth I, that enlightened reviewers and historians to her contributions. Reviewing Green's first volume of CSP, Dom., Elizabeth, 1581–90 (1867), the Examiner accused Lemon of “an error of judgment” as editor for producing abstracts so terse as to be virtually useless. This was a waste of expertise: “When an editor of these volumes,” the reviewer complained,
by the act of producing it, and by the knowledge that qualified him for his editorship, has become a highly-skilled witness as to the purport of all the paper he has been through, when he alone can lay his finger instantly upon the more significant parts of the whole mass, and enable other men to know in twenty minutes what is new and what is most notable in the particular body of the papers that he has been calendaring; it is surely a great error of judgment to suppose that he should publish his dry abstracts, and, by writing no Introduction to them, withhold his service as a skilled guide to their use by other students.Footnote 62
Green, according to the Saturday Review, had perfected the editorial process. Whereas Lemon had “sacrificed clarity for brevity,” and Mr. Stevenson had been too prolix, “it appears to us that Mrs. Greene [sic] has been happy in her choice of an intermediate scale of analysis, explicit as to the purport of each document, and not too ambitious in detail.” Of her preface, “nothing could place in a stronger light the peculiar value of such documents as illustrative of such a period.”Footnote 63
As this reviewer's final remark suggests, it was not only for her abstracts of individual documents that Green was proving a success but also for her prefaces. Recall that Romilly had rejected the suggestion she had made when she agreed take up an appointment, namely, that each volume include a historical introduction, encouraging her instead to publish “any Historical work or essay” that was based on her calendaring research as a “private speculation.”Footnote 64 Her volumes of the reign of James I followed Lemon's model insofar as they had no introductory material at all. But Romilly eventually conceded to prefaces limited to describing any peculiarities of the documents calendared in a volume. Bruce had provided his first volumes of the domestic papers of Charles I with prefaces on the grounds that the nature of the documents and their collection required explaining to be of use to any researcher, and with her Calendars of Charles II, Green followed suit.
In her prefaces to the ten volumes of Charles II Calendars, she wrote about the plague, the Great Fire, and conflicts with the Dutch, studding her analyses with “eye-witness accounts” excerpted, from, among other sources, the letters of intelligence written to Joseph Williams while he was editor of the London Gazette. Green could also convey the human significance of even the most bureaucratic of documents. Of petitions submitted to Charles II in 1660, she wrote that “after having been judged valueless, and proved fruitless, in their own day, they come down to us full of interest, from their retrospective character, and from the light which they cast upon the details of personal history during the civil wars.” From these petitions, Green was led to empathize with petitioners themselves: “To each individual the details of his own case were painfully present—estates sequestered, fortunes sacrificed in heavy loans, or in raising troops and keeping them on foot, relatives and protectors slain, health sacrificed, and life-long helplessness induced by wound or loss of limb in the royal cause.”Footnote 65 She reproduces several petitions, most from women, thereby allowing relatively obscure people to speak to new generations and take a place in “official” political history. Even her indexes to the Interregnum volumes, astonishingly listing every participant in committee activities, could be animating. Of them David Masson wrote that “the labor of Mrs. Green in these Calendars is nothing less than that of driving a whole population of the defunct before her from month to month, knowing all the chief of them familiarly by head-mark, and accurately noting the casual appearances and disappearances of the less well known.”Footnote 66
Importantly, Green also managed to suggest the political complexity of some of the most controversial events of English history—including the Interregnum and the Restoration—while avoiding any hint of polemics that might spark controversy.Footnote 67 The success of Green's prefaces, followed in part from the faith historians and reviewers had come to place in her abstracts as authentic representations of the past, undistorted either by incompetence or self-interest. Reviewers did not imagine that Green was without political sympathies, but they praised her for subordinating those judgments to the demands of historical accuracy. David Masson, who occasionally took Green to task over slight errors, remarked in reviewing Green's Calendar for the eventful year 1649–50 on the “very great pains” she had taken in the preface to represent the state of affairs following the king's death, “and the result is an increase of light on certain points, even for those who were best informed on the subject before. Of course,” he continued, “strict historical accuracy regulates every atom of statement; and it is only from a tone in the expression, here and there, that one gathers that the author of the Lives of the Princesses of England has no strong liking, personally, for the Commonwealthmen and their element, and with all her minute and laborious familiarity with the same, would rather dissuade any sympathy with that experiment or desire its repetition. For one thing, she seems to report with some satisfaction that Republicanism cannot have been, in all cases, so cheap as some have supposed.”Footnote 68
Green stated strong opinions regarding class and social disorder in her assessment of the plague. “Society had fallen into such a state of disorganization, through the callous recklessness of the lower classes and the selfish shrinking of the upper from those beneficent exertions needful to alleviate the general calamity, that the few persons of influence who had not absolutely abandoned the city found themselves beset with difficulties in attempting to grapple with the general misery.”Footnote 69 She then quotes Edmund Godfrey, writing to the earl of Newport, 19 December 1665, who “records that poor people ‘cry out upon the dearness of fuel and the want of employment, by reason of the King and Court having been so long out of town, and some of the courtiers, nobility, and gentry forgetting of their debts as well as their charity, which imputation we are sure can nowise concern your honour, who have been so transcendently eminent in both.’”Footnote 70 Thus does Godfrey's own indirection help to justify Green's condemnation of a shirking aristocracy. The excerpted letter continues to report the publication of an order that “all who have left town without paying rates and taxes due on Royal Aid shall have their houses broken open and their goods sold.”Footnote 71
In her next volume (CSP, Dom., Charles II, 1666–67 [1864]), the Great Fire as represented in Williamson's correspondence gave Green the opportunity to construct a dramatic “documentary” narrative, resembling Scott's depiction of the Porteus Riots in The Heart of Mid-lothian or Carlyle's of the storming of the Bastille in his French Revolution. Having described the fire and chaos that had left London in ruins, Green turns to the topic that would occupy her attention in many prefaces—the violent consequences of seventeenth-century religious intolerance. Despite the government's efforts to assure the people that the fire had resulted from “nothing … other than the hand of God upon us, a great wind, and the season so very dry,” nevertheless, “the popular excitement refused to be thus satisfied.” “Some scapegoat must be found to bear the blame of so unprecedented a disaster. Without shadow of proof, the Catholics were fixed upon; the House of Commons petitioned for and obtained the banishment of priests and Jesuits, the enforcing of the laws against Papists, and the disarming of all who refused the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy. They also passed a vote that all the members of the House should receive the Lord's supper, on penalty of being taken into custody.”Footnote 72 Perhaps because she was so skillful at presenting her commentary as if it emerged naturally out of documentary evidence, or because, as a Methodist she was an unlikely Catholic partisan—or, perhaps, because she was a woman—Green was never faulted for biased or controversial treatments of her prefaces, though surely they stretched the definition of simple descriptions of documents.
Green plays a crucial role in the professionalization of history because, as a female historian, she could plausibly embody the paradoxes of expert mastery without self-interested domination, of a heroic labor to bring forth others' voices. David Masson wrote of Green in 1876 that “it is impossible to think otherwise than with high and peculiar respect of a lady who has made the hard work of deciphering and calendaring these old records her daily duty, who has so perfected herself in the difficult art, and who, while possessing a fund of exact knowledge of English history, acquired in the process, that must enable her to detect errors and deficiencies in books of considerable pretence, is content with doing her best quietly to map out for all the means of better research.”Footnote 73
As is characteristic of Masson's remarks on Green, this assessment waivers between sincere respect and condescension. From it, we can predict how the disengendered M. A. E. Green, editor of state papers—a key player in the professionalization of history—has come to float free of Mary Anne Everett Green, author of The Lives of the Princesses of England. Footnote 74 Here we should recall Langland's account of the ideal bourgeois woman: “unobtrusive yet central, unperceived yet all-seeing.” It may be, in fact, that the professional ideal emerging at midcentury had much in common with the feminine ideal.
Indeed, for Deputy Keeper T. D. Hardy, the Calendars constituted a uniquely valuable, uniquely English genre of historical writing, precisely because they were not authored by men but seemed to be the progeny of English history itself: “A Chronicle may be said to be perfect in itself,” Hardy wrote in 1870,
but it must be remembered it is only the view of an individual author. We have in our days a Hume, Macaulay, Mackintosh, Lingard and a Froude, as we formerly had a Bede, Malmesbury, Hovenden and Matthew Paris; each writing on the same subject, and from the same materials, and we know how differently those materials are used by each—each gives his individual opinion of events and transactions from the State Papers of the period.
The Calendars … on the other hand are a species of historical literature peculiar to this country—exclusively of English birth and growth—for no other nation as yet has attempted anything of the kind though both France and Germany are now commencing works of the same description and on the same plan.Footnote 75
Surely Green did much to realize Hardy's aspirations for the Calendars, and while we may find his celebration of their transcendence of “individual opinion” naive, the genre Green helped to create merits greater attention. Committed to discovering and representing every piece of documentary evidence and organized only by the arbitrary structure of chronology, the Calendars are remarkably decentered, particularistic, and context sensitive.
By the 1880s, when nearly one hundred volumes had been produced and historical researchers as well as the press had had decades to familiarize themselves with the project, the Calendars had made an indelible mark on history writing. In an omnibus review of recently published Calendars, including Green's Domestic Series, 1653–54 (1879), the Times exclaimed, “Toil and thought have been so generously lavished upon each installment of the work that no pains should be grudged in order to facilitate and even compel attention to a body of national monuments which have rendered it necessary to re-write Tudor and Stuart history.”Footnote 76 Two years later, in their Introduction to the Study of English History, S. R. Gardiner and J. Bass Mullinger wrote of the calendar series that “the service it has rendered to historical research, whether by facilitating the consultation of the original documents, or, as is often the case, rendering such consultation unnecessary, can hardly be over-rated.”Footnote 77Calendars had become the indispensable tool of the “professional historian.”
Right up to her death in 1895, Green remained a visible presence—both in print and in Chancery Lane. After completing the papers of Elizabeth's reign, Green was asked to take up the Interregnum papers, so that when the papers of Charles I were finished, there would be a complete run of Calendars from Henry VIII. As she turned out her twenty-three volumes of Interregnum state and committee Calendars in the seventeen years between 1875 and 1892, she became something of a legend for her unflagging accuracy, energetic analyses, and diligence—the qualities we have come to associate with professional dedication. Reviewers would marvel at her continuing attention to detail and ability in her prefaces to infuse even the most bureaucratic of materials with some measure of historical interest. “It is not Mrs. Green's fault,” wrote the Saturday Review about the Calendar for 1649–50 (1876), “that this is the dullest volume of State Papers that has yet been issued.”Footnote 78 Yet, with his review of Green's next volume in this series (CSP, Dom., 1650 [1876]), the reviewer was complaining about the Master of the Rolls' newly published page restrictions on prefaces. This “will deprive the reading public of a great deal of pleasure, and seriously interfere with the ease and profit with which they may read the accounts of the documents calendared in these volumes.”Footnote 79
Indeed, Green had become something of a celebrity. Allibone's Critical Dictionary of English Literature reproduces this unattributed sketch of Green from 1870:
In the State Paper Office in London, it is reported, there may be seen a lady with copying clerks under her control, engaged in deciphering, epitomizing, and cataloguing the important parchment state papers and records of several centuries back. This lady, about twenty-five years ago, published a work entitled “Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies,” which attracted the attention of competent judges for the patient care in selecting authorities and the extensive range of historical research displayed by the authoress. Subsequently, in visiting the State Paper Office, to examine papers, the lady exhibited unusual skill in deciphering old manuscripts, and all the above qualifications combined to point her out as a suitable person to pursue antiquarian researches. She was, therefore, appointed by the British Government as a clerk in the State Paper Office, and she is the only female on the staff of that Department. The above instance has been cited to show that women are qualified to fill positions heretofore supposed only suitable for men.Footnote 80
The several errors in this sketch—locating Green's work at the SPO, rather than the PRO, where operations had moved in the 1860s, designating Green as a “clerk,”—suggest its author was a journalist and not an “insider” of historical or antiquarian circles. He found Green a curiosity, an “extraordinary woman,” and his remarks partake just a bit in that critical double standard about which George Eliot was complaining; that is, critics praising an “authoress” because they were astonished she could spell. But clearly, thanks to Green the picture of a woman employed by the government for her intellectual talents was entering the public imagination.
Behind the scenes during this period, she would continue to produce quarterly reports for the Deputy Keeper, as she had first done for Palgrave in 1856, then for Hardy, and, after his death in 1878, for Maxwell Lyte. And she would battle with successive Deputy Keepers over payment, as they—and successive Masters of the Rolls—clashed with the Treasury over the alarming increase in the length, detail, and scope of the Calendars, all consequences of Green's standard of practice. She would feed pigeons on the steps of the Officers' Chambers.Footnote 81 Above all, directly and indirectly, she would assist in establishing new Civil Service rules for the hiring of clerks, which probably did as much as the progress of professionalization in the universities to ensure that Green's example was not followed by a host of female historians.
Breaking Up Housekeeping: The End of an Era at the PRO
In 1893, Green was 75.Footnote 82 With the Interregnum papers finally completed, Green returned to finish the task of calendaring the reign of Charles II. “In presenting to the public the continuation of a work of which the last volume was published in 1866,” her preface begins,
an explanation seems to be needed of the long interval of twenty-seven years. In 1866 the completion of the Calendar of Queen Elizabeth's reign, begun by the late Mr. Robert Lemon, was placed in my hands, which, with addenda, filled six volumes, and was completed in 1872. After this the onerous task of calendaring the Commonwealth papers devolved upon me. Of these, twenty-one volumes have been published, the latest of which appeared in November 1892. My instructions then were to resume my former Calendar of Charles II.Footnote 83
A good soldier to the last, Green resumed work on the series that had first brought her critical notice for her prefaces, with no apparent failure of enthusiasm. Her vivid, detailed preface draws attention to the “Parliament Joan” scandal, the activities of the Royal Society, and evidences of popular culture, drawn from Williamson's letters.Footnote 84
In 1894, Green's assistant W. D. Hamilton committed suicide, and Green took on her niece, Sophia Crawford Lomas, as her assistant. With Lomas's aid, she would continue to bring out a Calendar volume a year, as she had been doing for nearly forty years without interruption—while raising her children, and burying her only son (1876) and husband (1893). Indeed, she died while attempting to finish the project begun by her colleague, John Bruce, almost forty years earlier: calendaring the state papers of Charles I. This project would be left to Lomas to complete. Green died on 1 November 1895, while working on the final volume of this series.Footnote 85 No doubt, Green would have been pleased that the last volume of CSP, Dom., Charles I appeared with minimal delay and under the editorship of her niece.
Yet, after Green's death, Sophia Lomas, a few part-time cleaners, and the ladies' attendant would be the only women employed at the PRO.Footnote 86 John Cantwell remarks that what was most surprising about PRO staffing at the turn of the century “was that the office remained a largely male preserve.”Footnote 87 Why, when Green contributed so much to the professionalization of history as an editor for the PRO, was she unable to accomplish the final hallmark of professional culture—the ability to reproduce herself? Green's methodologies, her subject matter and materials, her work habits, her financial arrangements, her sense of “honor,” her celebrity, all contribute to what we understand as the culture of professional historians. The motives and mechanisms for male exclusivity are more subtle, and the record of the Victorian period more complex and indeed more inclusive than we might expect. With all the political and institutional anxieties that beset the calendaring project, especially at the outset, no one seemed disturbed by the fact that so much authority was invested in the talents of a woman.Footnote 88
In the case of the PRO, we must focus attention on the evolving culture of the civil service. Green, along with the other external editors, enabled Deputy Keepers to make the case to the Civil Service Commission that records officers working at the PRO required special skills, and history of England, handwriting and orthography, Latin translation, and related examinations were accordingly instituted. Gradually, this meant that instead of receiving their training through an apprenticeship in a record office, records keepers were increasingly drawn from universities.Footnote 89 The more professionalized the PRO staff became, the more they resented the external editors.Footnote 90 At the same time, their work was becoming more routinized. Thanks to Green, Brewer, Bruce, and Stevenson, standards and methods of calendaring had been firmly established, and under pressure from cost-conscious Deputy Keepers, less scope for discovering and incorporating new caches of documents was allowed to regular staff. Finally, as Levine points out, promotion was already a fraught issue in the severely class-stratified organization of the PRO, but governmental economies in the final decades of the century constricted opportunity even further and exacerbated tensions between the records keepers and the “gentlemanly” class of Calendars editors.Footnote 91
The monumental status of the Calendars and the heroic work of their editors, as expressed in this 1880 Times review of Green's CSP, Dom., 1653–54 (1879) and several other Calendars, could eclipse both original inquiry and historical documents:
When at last the public records were recognized as national property, to be used for the national enlightenment, the buried treasures could not have been utilized without the plan by which the mass has been sifted, and the results summed up in this wonderful library of Calendars. One indexcompiler does thus once for all that work which hundreds of inquirers would else have had to do separately for himself [sic]. Acquired instinct enables him or her to accomplish it, moreover, with a perfection which for as learned by less practiced minds would have been simply impossible. As a consequence, the historian has but to choose his portion of English history; he can put his finger almost in an instant upon the exact materials of which his structure is to be built.Footnote 92
Green's contribution is registered with the feminine pronoun for the “index-compiler,” whose very perfection makes her reproduction unnecessary: the historian—exclusively male—now goes to work making history out of her materials. The unique quality of the “index-compiler's” practice means that he—or she—need not be reproduced. In this respect, the university as an institution surpassed the PRO as a site for the reproduction of professional historians, which ensured that they would be male.Footnote 93
As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, dispossession increases as a
field of ideological production has increased its autonomy with the appearance of the great political bureaucracies of full-time professionals and with the appearance of institutions … whose function is to select and educate the professional producers of the schemes of thought and expression of the social world—politicians, political journalists, high-ranking civil servants, etc.—at the same time as they codify the rules according to which the field of ideological production functions and the corpus of knowledge and practical skills indispensable for them to conform to these rules.Footnote 94
The preeminent representative of this phenomenon in the field of history is Green's friend, A. W. Ward, founder of Manchester's School of History and editor of the Cambridge History of England. Significantly, Ward wrote Green's entry for the Dictionary of National Biography, in which he celebrated her learning. But it is in a private communication that his capacity to absorb Green's scholarship into his own professional identity by condescension is evident, clearly suggesting how Green's female heirs were aborted by the institutional authority of male historians. Writing in 1918 to the librarian of Peterhouse, Cambridge, regarding the preservation of notes Green had given him for a biography of the Electress Sophia, Ward suggested that, “though of no original value,” “to have them ready as put together by a very careful and conscientious student, like Mrs. Green, would save a great deal of trouble to an historian.”Footnote 95
We, however, might restore Green's status as a professional historian. In so doing, we can look beyond strict divisions of labor, subject matter, and methodology along gendered lines, enhancing our sense of both male and female practitioners and of the various sites of professionalization and their diverse institutional cultures. We may not only celebrate the work of amateur historians, but appreciate more fully the role women and women's history played in creating the discipline we practice today.
