In Reimagining the Historian in Victorian England, Elise Garritzen shows how Victorian historians navigated their field's development into a discipline. She takes the innovative and committed approach of focusing on the easily overlooked book-parts that Gérard Genette labelled as paratexts (Paratexts [1987]): the title pages, contents lists, prefaces, footnotes, and advertisements. The research that underpins this monograph includes the building of a database of information about the paratexts of 500 history books mainly published between 1860 and 1900. Joep Leerssen evocatively describes paratexts as “these frayed edges of the text” (Remembrance and Imagination [1997], 7), and, as Garritzen shows, focusing on these frayed edges can elicit surprising insights. Garritzen argues for an expanded view of what paratexts can do. To Dorothea Birke's and Birte Christ's list of three major purposes for paratexts—“interpretative, commercial, and navigational” (“Paratexts and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field,” Narrative 21, no. 1 [2013], 67-68)—Garritzen adds a fourth, “authoritative” (18). This function was crucial for historians involved in a nascent scholarly discipline who were trying to carve out a way to justify and legitimate their contributions to the field.

The monograph builds on Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum's concept of the scholarly persona (“Introduction, Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16, no. 1-2 [2003]: 1-8), broadening the debate in four key ways: focusing on paratexts; examining English (rather than Continental) historians; considering these historians’ “overlapping responsibilities as scholars, educators, and entrepreneurs;” and including the contributions of non-expert commentators (6). The book reflects on the wide spectrum of possible roles and personae between the “seemingly opposite poles” of the “Rankean scholar” and the “public intellectual” (12). After introducing the dramatis personae in chapter 2, in chapter 3 Garritzen showcases the historian who was held up as a scholarly ideal by many mid-Victorian would-be scientific historians: William Stubbs. Other historians even misappropriated his name in their acknowledgements pages to over-claim Stubbsian endorsement of their projects (102-3).

In chapter 4, on the relationship between history and antiquarianism, Garritzen asks questions that are also grappled with in Phillipa Levine's The Amateur and the Professional (1986), Rosemary Sweet's Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2004), Mike Goode's Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 (2009), and my own Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past (2017). While I argued there that the dilemma of what to include or leave out of a narrative history is most acute when writing contemporary history (because of the overwhelming multitude of documents), Garritzen valuably foregrounds a slightly different challenge. The sheer volume of new sources about the medieval and early modern past being discovered, accessed, collated, and printed in the late nineteenth century led to the same excess. In their inaugural professorial lectures at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford in 1903 and 1906 respectively, John Bagnall Bury and Charles Oman each proposed that rather than trying to write definitive works, their generation of historians should concentrate on gathering sources for future generations to use. This approach showcases a surprising level of Edwardian self-consciousness about historiographical ephemerality.

Part 2 covers educational histories, including J. R. Green's A Short History of the English People (1874), which I similarly analysed in Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past. In chapter 5, Garritzen productively compares Green's work to a rival production, James Franck Bright's A History of England (1875), which Bright marketed as being better suited to schoolchildren, being event-driven rather than proto-social history, and being divided by reassuringly conventional regnal dates rather than adopting Green's thematic and social periodization. This attack demonstrates that the social history aspirations of Green's work, held up in studies like mine as a harbinger of a refreshing new approach, met substantial backlash at the time and were the exception rather than the norm.

The important issue of political engagement is addressed in chapter 7. We learn, startlingly, that Cambridge University Press turned down publishing the English Historical Review on the grounds that history was basically politics. Case studies of two Irish women historians—the unionist Mary Hickson and the nationalist Alice Stopford Green—show that while certain aspects of a history can adhere to “scientific” criteria (225), it might nonetheless be deeply partisan. Green was celebrated for her “mastery of primary sources” (254), but she wrote caustically: “We usually think people impartial who hold our own opinions” (100; The Old Irish World [1912], 188). Chapter 7 includes a valuable discussion about historians’ understanding of impartiality and how this differed from the objectivity that Daston and Peter Galison have argued was idealized in the late nineteenth century. Garritzen's introduction includes careful reflection (10–11) on her choice to leave aside the terms professional and professionalization and to opt for scientific history, but I would have valued more pervasive reflection on Garritzen's own attitude towards both the feasibility and the ideological affordances and drawbacks of so-called scientific history. Her prose maintains a careful (perhaps “scientific”) neutrality, and a consistent level of narrative proximity to its examples and personnel, but further variation between deeper immersion and broader overview might grant greater sense of place and individuality, or more opportunity to reflect on potential wider implications of her careful analyses.

In part 3, Garritzen turns to the commercial side of publishing. Book titles come under scrutiny in chapter 9. In the process of publishing Edward Freeman's General Sketch of European History (1872), Macmillan wanted to excise the delimiter “European” to appeal to markets in the British colonies and the United States, whereas Freeman's racist beliefs made him determined to explicitly exclude peoples of non-European descent (311). In chapter 10, about printing choices, Garritzen shows how printing histories too cheaply or expensively could undermine the historian's aims, and how historians negotiated with publishers on these issues.

Garritzen closes the book by valuably encouraging present historians to be more self-reflective, and therefore more upfront, about the scholarly personae that they—we—cultivate and present. This might allow the discipline's gatekeepers to be more honest about what they endorse and discourage, perhaps ultimately enabling the norms of those personae to shift.