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Twenty Years On Views and Reviews of Modern
Britain
Peter Stansky
Hillsborough,
CA: Pinehill Humanities Press, 2020 Paperback.
246 p. ISBN 978-0578700960. $16.69
Reviewed by Guy Ortolano New York
University Seven books; ninety-eight essays; a
bibliography spilling over eight pages. You might think this a career. Peter
Stansky calls it retirement. The Frances and Charles Field
Professor of History, Emeritus, at Stanford, Stansky has enjoyed a career coterminous
with the development of British Studies. In the early 1950s, when Stansky went
to Yale, modern British history in the United States was more a subject than a
field. Yet at that very moment, under the leadership of Samuel Clyde McCulloch
and Ruth Emery of Rutgers, the Conference on British Studies began
to meet at New York University. The fledgling organization included a number of
distinguished women: Mildred Campbell (Vassar), Madeline Robinton (Brooklyn
College), Margaret Hastings and Margaret Judson (Douglass College), and Helen
Taft Manning and Caroline Robbins (Bryn Mawr). Meanwhile, up the coast in
Cambridge, David Owen was supervising a clutch of Harvard dissertations on British
history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When these scholars filled
positions across the country, they took modern British history with them. They
included Philip Poirier (Ohio State), Richard Lyman (Wash U and Stanford),
Stephen Graubard (Brown), and John Clive (Chicago and Harvard). Arriving to
Harvard in 1956, Stansky was part – with Standish Meacham (Texas) and Fred
Leventhal (Boston University) – of a second wave of Owen’s postwar students. Upon
completing his dissertation in 1961, he taught at Harvard until 1968, by which
time Lyman’s move into administration had created an opening at Stanford. Today
Stansky remains a fixture at the North American Conference on British Studies
(as the CBS became in 1980), whose annual modern book prize is justly named for
him. Twenty Years On gathers twenty-five
lectures, essays, and reviews that Stansky has written or delivered in the two
decades since his previous collection, From William Morris to Sergeant
Pepper : Studies in the Radical Domestic (Palo Alto, 1999). The themes
span the characteristic array of Stansky’s interests, from the arts and crafts
movement to the Bloomsbury Group to George Orwell. Joining these longstanding preoccupations
are several pieces on a comparatively new entrant, the Blitz – the subject of
Stansky’s later career, which began with London’s Burning (with William Abrahams,
1994) and culminated in The First Day of the Blitz (New Haven, 2007). Together
these chatty, readable essays – none exceeding fifteen pages, most considerably
shorter – range across four literary generations: Edwardian realists,
Bloomsbury moderns, the Auden generation, and the Angry Young Men. Given the
occasional nature of many of the chapters, delivered as talks or included with exhibitions,
there is inevitably some repetition, as Stansky brings various non-specialist audiences
up-to-speed on the details of Orwell’s career or the membership of Bloomsbury. He
is in such command of his material that, at times, names and references tumble
over one another to create an effect at once disorienting and comic: “Leonard
had been devoted to his dog Charles in Ceylon and in 1926 they were given by
Vita Sackville-West a cocker spaniel, Pinka, who modeled for the frontispiece
of Hogarth Press’s first edition of Flush (1935), the autobiography of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog” [87]. But then, about halfway through the
volume, the reader is rewarded with the satisfaction of coming to share some of
Stansky’s easy familiarity with Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, Virginia and Vanessa,
Quentin and Angelica and Julian. So infectious is Stansky’s enthusiasm that, while
I began half-dreading the Bloomsbury chapters, I ended by proposing a new undergraduate
course on Bloomsbury. Appropriately for a volume that
inaugurates Stansky’s own foray into boutique publishing, the essay on the Woolfs’
Hogarth Press conveys that venture’s initial combination of aspiration,
innovation, and sheer exhaustion. The pair of chapters bookending this one offer
orientations to Bloomsbury’s public and private faces respectively. Chapter 9, adapted
from a lecture marking the hundredth anniversary of, in Virginia Woolf’s
formulation, human character having changed, introduces the group’s geography,
relations, and core ideas. Bloomsbury moved into what Stansky calls its “major
key” from 1910, prompted by the additions of E.M. Forster and Roger Fry to
their Thursday meetings [75]. Lest this capsule make Bloomsbury sound too much like
a seminar, though, it should be paired with Chapter 11’s exploration of the
circle’s domestic dynamics. Here Stansky focuses on the relations between
Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell’s children, Quentin, Angelica, and especially
Julian. Together they produced The Charleston Bulletin, a hand-written
“newspaper” the children circulated at their family’s house in Sussex, not far
from the Woolfs’ own Monk's House. From this perspective, history turns not on the
exhibition that prompted Woolf’s famous remark, but between a pair of tragic deaths:
Thoby Stephen in 1906, and Julian Bell in 1937. The final chapter, exhibiting Stansky’s
own ability to modulate between keys, reprints a tough-minded contribution to a
forum in the American Historical Review on Simon Schama’s television and
book series, A History of Britain (2000-2002). Stansky frames his reading
with reference to Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2004), asking whether
popularizing history inevitably betrays it. Referring to the play’s rival
teachers, the slick Irwin and eccentric Hector, Stansky puts the question
pointedly: “Is Schama Irwin or Hector?” [233]. Despite some bracing words for
the series's aesthetic choices, his judgment is on balance favorable: elements
of each, perhaps, but ultimately history – and Schama – make it through intact. But, with all due respect to Virginia
Woolf, George Orwell, and Alan Bennett, the main attraction here is Peter Stansky.
If you own Journey to the Frontier (1966) or The Unknown Orwell (1972),
you will want to add this book to your collection. The chapters sparkle with
reminiscences of performances at the Royal Court Theatre in the 1950s and the
Roundhouse in the 1970s, and of frosty meetings with Leonard Woolf (which went
ok) and Sonia Orwell (which did not). The prefatory memoir reflects upon the factors
that conspired to make Stansky a historian of Britain. Born in Manhattan in
1932, he grew up in the New York of the 1930s and 1940s. When his family moved
to Brooklyn, proximity to the new, grand branch of the public library facilitated
his earliest encounters with British literary culture via Dr. Doolittle
and Mary Poppins. Though he never took a course in British history in
New Haven, Stansky found that Anglophilic Yale stimulated an interest in its history
and literature, as did his inaugural trip hitchhiking around England in the
summer of 1950. His senior essay examined four Englishmen and the Spanish Civil
War, pointing towards the very interests that still comprise the core of this
volume nearly seven decades later. From 1953 to 1955, he spent two years at
King’s College, Cambridge – a fantastical land of supervisions with Noel Annan
and Eric Hobsbawm, lectures by Herbert Butterfield and J.H. Plumb, and lunches
with the college’s most famous resident, E.M. Forster. Upon his return to the
States, after a false start in publishing, Stansky entered Harvard in 1956. In
1961, the year he completed his dissertation on late Victorian Liberal
politics, he met William Abrahams. Chapter 12, “Writing about Orwell,” picks up
the story from there. Returning to the subjects of that Yale senior essay, Peter
and Billy trundled around England meeting every associated figure they could
find – including, in addition to Leonard Woolf and Sonia Orwell, Quentin Bell,
Christopher Cornford, and Stephen Spender. Together they produced, among other fine
books, Journey to the Frontier (1966), The Unknown Orwell (1972),
and Orwell : The Transformation (1979). Of equal significance, though
it finds no place in a bibliography, has been the boundless and good-humored kindness,
generosity, advocacy, and collegiality that Stansky has extended to generations
of his graduate students and fellow scholars. “As a historian and biographer,”
Stansky writes, “my main interest is finding out more about England” [118]. The
clarity of purpose cuts through a thousand contortions about what we do and
why. One piece of writing not included in this book’s expansive bibliography is
the report of a committee that Stansky chaired in 1999, the NACBS Report on
the State and Future of British Studies. “The Stansky Report,” as it has
been known ever since, takes pains not to push young scholars into any subject
in particular. But it is, nevertheless, a report on a field uncertain of its
status in a changing university. Sensibly and shrewdly, the authors advise British
history’s advocates and aspirants to situate themselves in relation to the world
system that developed with Britain at its center. Sage counsel, to be sure – if
also, in its cold-eyed professionalism, a contrast with the serendipity, idiosyncrasy,
and ebullience that characterize these essays. Twenty Years On offers the occasion to spend time with a natural
teacher and gorgeous writer, and every page affirms the sheer pleasure of a life
devoted to the exploration of Britain’s past.
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