In Liberal Epic, Edward Adams analyzes a literary genre that is captured by the book’s seemingly oxymoronic title that names a genre of heroic tales of military history, at once celebrating war while sanitizing its necessary violence. Adams establishes this genre not by beginning with Gibbon, as is suggested by the book’s less successful subtitle (more on this below), but with Alexander Pope and his “sanitized” translation of Homer’s Iliad. Under Pope’s neoclassical style, Homeric violence is essentially purged of its pleasurable characteristics, thereby conforming to contemporary “enlightened” views that were reimagining war as an unfortunate but necessary evil that must, at times, be put to use for liberal purposes. It is in this way that Pope’s Iliad is a product of a fundamental “tension between epic and liberalism,” between the need to celebrate simultaneously “murderous heroic power and liberal self-determination” (8), a tension that Adams traces in his own journey from the Enlightenment and Romantic eras through to the Victorian, Edwardian, and interwar periods examining the work of historians, poets, novelists, and economists and their shared “effort to transcend war narrative” (2).

There are very few heroes in this tale who manage to break free from the constraints of liberal epic. Indeed, all of Adams’s subjects are read through the prism of the Homeric-Popian duality—with the vast majority eventually turning away from the Homeric theme of epic terror in their representations of war by adopting Pope’s “civilized style of poetic diction,” which is “the key formal device for liberalizing the violent content” (10). So Gibbon, for instance, under the sway of both the Enlightenment and what Adams variously calls Pope’s “civilizing humanity,” cannot bring himself to share with his humane audience the true horrors of war. Macaulay, too, even while being horrified by the Indian mutiny and under no obligation to any enlightened forebears, cannot help but revert to “Gibbonian neoclassicism when depicting heroic violence” (276). The genre continues into the Edwardian period in the work of Macaulay’s great nephew G. M. Trevelyan, whose history of Garibaldi fails to follow its own “Iliac cue,” thereby refusing to allow “his ‘poetic’ subject to rise to the detail of ‘realism’” (239). The First World War put an end to the kind of sanitized violence described during the height of liberal epic’s power, but the genre is rescued by “the capable hands of Winston Churchill” (246), who proves to be a remarkable apologist for the war that clearly did not end all wars. In his own version of the genre, Churchill is less uneasy than other prisoners of liberal epic about narrating the Homeric reality of war while embracing “the full heroic rhetoric of admiration so common in the Victorian age” in seeming total ignorance of the modernist revolution that rendered such heroic histories out of touch with the time (267). Having survived the interwar backlash, Adams admits that continuing his analysis of liberal epic beyond the Second World War would be “superfluous,” given that “1939–40 rendered epic’s task so much easier” (283).

Any brief summary of the book cannot do it justice, as Adams covers immense ground both in terms of chronology and in terms of the many literary figures examined throughout the approximately three hundred pages of text. I found the section on Henry Thomas Buckle particularly valuable. He was a self-professed “scientific” historian who would have surely scoffed at being characterized as an author of an “epic” history. But anyone who has read beyond the oft-cited introduction to Buckle’s work knows that what follows is not exactly the promised colorless statistical analysis of the progress of civilization but rather an intellectual history of great men. Buckle may openly eschew the “drum and trumpet” histories of his mid-Victorian contemporaries, but he cannot help falling back into the familiar tropes of an epic narrative as he writes about intellectual heroes and villains, clashes, and wars not of the battlefield but of the mind. Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (London, 1857–61) is a liberal epic if there ever was one. Unfortunately, this section could have used a more thorough editing. A single page not only gets the title of Buckle’s book wrong but also changes Buckle’s first name to “William” (186), a mistake repeated on at least two other occasions (2, 196). Adams also quotes from a pair of Lord Acton’s reviews of Buckle, but one of the reviews was actually penned by Acton’s Rambler coeditor, Richard Simpson, although Acton probably helped.

Such errors are truly minor when set against the decision to subtitle this book the “Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill.” Not only is Liberal Epic not really about the practice of history, but there is no attempt made to explain in what sense the book is about the specifically Victorian practice of history when its analysis stretches from the Enlightenment to the Second World War, to say nothing of the way in which “Pope and Gibbon stand at the center of [Adams’s] claims about liberal epic” (30). Even the cover art is pre-Victorian, an 1808 Antoine-Jean Gros painting Napoleon on the Battlefield at Eylau. Perhaps by “Victorian,” Adams means some cultural worldview or concept that actually transcends the period itself, but no explanation of such kind is offered, and it is up to the reader to make sense of it. Those looking through the index hoping to find reference to a discussion that was somehow missed will be sorely disappointed. The only subjects to appear are “liberal” and “epic,” suggesting, perhaps, that “Victorian” and “history, practice of” really were not that central to the book after all.