From Amateur to Professional: The Case of the Oxbridge Historians

Abstract

“What was wrong with the historical reaction at the end of Victoria's reign, was not the positive stress it laid on the need for scientific method in weighing evidence, but its negative repudiation of the literary art, which was declared to have nothing whatever to do with the historian's task.” Writing in 1945, G.M. Trevelyan was overly pessimistic in assuming that this “negative repudiation” had completely destroyed “literary” history in an age of professionalization; John Osborne uses Trevelyan's own success to convince us of the continued vigor of the belletristic tradition in the twentieth century. Both Trevelyan's anxieties and the fact that they proved unfounded are significant, however, for they help us to focus on important issues in the emergence of professional historiography in England.