Central to the story of how history became a professional discipline in the nineteenth century is the contentious debate over the nature of historical knowledge and whether the study of the past could become scientific. This book fleshes out that debate with a sharp focus on the academic historians who strived to push history as a discipline in the direction of science while doing the “boundary work” of distinguishing it from its traditional association with literature. Ian Hesketh has usefully gathered in one place many of the interesting moments in the careers of the “Rankean society” of historians (Seeley, Stubbs, Freeman, Acton, Green, and a few others) who articulated visions of what the scientific study of the past should entail and the foils they used to help them clarify what they meant. The picture that emerges clarifies a familiar tension that attended the rise of professional, academic history, that is, the presumed opposition between the hugely popular, readable histories written by amateurs (represented here by Buckle, Froude, and Kingsley) and the “real” and accurate history written by the “inductive” historians. The thesis furthermore identifies the incongruities within and incoherence of the “scientific” view of history among the leading exponents and shows that most of them compromised their hard-edged tenets in the works they actually produced.

One of the more engaging chapters in this account highlights the controversy between E. A. Freeman and J. A. Froude, Freeman's successor as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, which played out in several periodicals. Froude's popularity as a historian derived from an appealing, dramatic writing style that rankled the Rankeans as much as his claim (first made in 1864) that history could not be a science. Freeman took up the burden of exposing Froude's errors in a way that now seems excessive and perhaps obsessive. According to Freeman, Froude suffered from an “incurable defect” that made it “impossible for him to make an accurate statement about any matter.” Because this “evil is inherent … inborn,” Froude could not be a historian as Freeman conceived of it (87–88). Froude's efficacious responses suggest that Freeman's attack itself contained the exaggerated passions and incurable ills with which he accused Froude, that is, he was projecting. Freeman and his Rankean friends nevertheless all shared in the denigration of Froude as the essential other in their boundary work that sought to establish scientific principles and suppress “Froude's disease” or anything that smacked of literary flair. J. R. Seeley took that perspective to its logical extreme by suggesting that good historical research be deliberately dry so that it remained free from any taint of flourish that distracts from the work of historical research. He explicitly rejected all attempts to popularize history “for history only becomes interesting to the general public by being corrupted … with sweet, unwholesome stuff to please the popular palate” (73).

The latter chapters of the book provide a view of the interesting shifts and fractures within the history-as-science camp. The main tension animating these chapters is still that between popular, “readable” history and the kind of history that demanded scientific clarity that was written for other historians. But it turns out that the scientific historians themselves engaged in painful boundary crossing in order to please publishers and write shorter, introductory works for students. Freeman's and J. R. Green's “little histories” and other primers appear to undermine some of their earlier positions that nonprofessional audiences should not be exposed to their professional history or that professional history could not be written for the uninitiated. Perhaps their consciences found relief in the newly introduced English Historical Review (EHR; 1886), in which “historical workers” could publish their findings without the pressure of making it understandable to a general audience. Mandell Creighton, EHR's first editor, made this clear enough when he called it “almost impossible” to combine “readableness and research” (115). We also learn that Lord Acton, who came to symbolize the new scientific thrust of history because only he among the English vanguard had actually studied with Ranke, never wrote a book. Apart from his popular lectures, his view of history emerges only in the ways he praised and criticized the work of others. Amusingly, his friends said that he was too learned to write a book, incapable of narrowing his focus enough to sustain a historical study on any one topic. And in an interestingly close reading of the obituaries of history-as-science heroes, Hesketh notices that they were all at least partially remembered for their “style” of history writing, which would have seemed to them ironic.

Overall, the book deepens our understanding of a topic tangentially explored by Thomas Heyck, Reba Soffer, and Chistopher Parker, among a few others. One could wish for a larger scope than offered here. The debate on the nature of historical knowledge was not confined to the speeches and introductions of the various regius professors of history. Philosophers, especially J. S. Mill, and historical novelists like George Eliot, also participated in the great Victorian rethinking of how we know about the past and how or whether that should entail exclusively inductive methodologies. Also, the book is less about the nature of historical knowledge itself and more about the boundary work done by one side of the debate. In other words, it is about what Freeman, Seeley, Stubbs, and Acton thought history should not be. So, while it shies away from engaging the philosophical questions about knowledge and the past and does not treat “Romantic history” except as a foil, it is an excellent, careful account of the antiliterary, anti-Romantic perspectives of those well-known founders of academic history. Furthermore, the final chapter and epilogue together compellingly draw our attention to the fact that the long-term answer to the question, “Is history a science or an art?” is that the exponents of the extremes were all wrong because we have tacitly accepted within the profession that it is both.