I have periodically been harping on about the great benefits of studying history in these blogs – and I stick by all of them. Perhaps, though, I haven’t been quite so clear about the disadvantages that sometimes accompany being an historian.

In the past few years, for example, I have been experiencing a certain level of minor social embarrassment when watching plays at the theatre. Not always – I stress – and not caused either by any repellent physiological problem. It occurs solely when I am watching a play written at some time before the last decade or so, and it generally becomes more acute the further back in time the piece was composed.

And the simple fact is that I laugh (or, on one occasion, gasped) when practically nobody else in the audience is laughing (or gasping). This is, I assure you, no inexplicable nervous tic, but rather is entirely down to my profession. Because the thing is that I’m able to contextualize the writing within the period in which it was composed, as I suppose relatively few of the audience can. At The Importance of Being Earnest, this exchange (amongst others) between Jack Worthing and Lady Bracknell struck me – and no-one else – as splendidly ticklish:

Lady B: What are your politics?
Jack: Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.

"Hahaha," I laughed, amid the silence. Thinking: "That would have been very funny in 1895." Later, however, I was mortified to imagine my fellow audience members wondering of each other who the bloke with the inappropriate cackle was.

This was not a one-off, however, as I have also descended into solo guffaws at The Revenger’s Tragedy, HMS Pinafore, and The Cherry Orchard. And whilst it helps that all of the above (yes, even the Chekhov) have comic moments, that advantage is largely cancelled out if one laughs at the "unfunny’"bits.

Image courtesy of Thomas Hawk, covered under Creative Commons Licence

At a Shakespeare play this is not quite such a trial. An unaccompanied chuckle at Shakespeare is more like boasting to the audience. As if to say, "I understand the complex language here, that you – poor sap – do not." When the language is much simpler, much more akin to how we speak in the twenty-first century, the solo giggler is immediately marked out as an idiot.

All the same, I wouldn’t be without the understanding that underpins my social faux pas. It has enriched my enjoyment of all art forms hugely. This is not merely a matter of being the jovial twit at the theatre: I could say the same of various poems, songs, paintings, films, or novels. The essential point is that it is history that has opened up such things for me. It is just regrettable that it can cause social side effects of such a laughable kind. 

Taking it further

• The arts past and present
• Film and television history
• Shakespeare: text and performance 
• Repetition and Deviation
  
  
   

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

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Naturalists, and especially botanists, are a strange breed. In Kew Gardens there is a well-known Victorian tropical plant collection and the largest tree in there is named after my great-grandfather, the Reverend William Williamson Newbould.

The tree is a genus of Bignoniacea, named Newbouldia, but my ancestor never set eyes on it. It is well known to the staff in the Palm House at Kew and, indeed, it is a bit of a favourite – especially in February each year when it flowers with long, purple, trumpet-shaped flowers. It is a beautiful and colourful plant and can be found in the tropical rain forests of Central Africa or South America – or in garden centres in Florida, USA.

William Newbould interests me, not just because I am descended from him, but because he and his great friend and collaborator Babington, were contemporaries of Darwin at the University of Cambridge and in the various scientific circles of the time. Looking at how they worked and how they did science then is a case of “what the Victorians did for us”.

Newbould’s interest in botany, dating from his time at a preparatory school near Doncaster, deepened when he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1838, the year after Queen Victoria took the throne. There he attended the lectures of Professor J. S. Henslow, and became friendly with Charles C. Babington and Frederick Townsend, who were to be among the leading field botanists of his generation. After graduating in 1842 he embarked on a series of plant-hunting trips to various parts of the British Isles, five of them with Babington. During these he consolidated his expertise as a taxonomist.

Babington, also known as “Beetle” Babington, because – like Darwin, he had an obsession for collecting beetles – was involved in a dispute with Darwin when both used the services of a beetle collector to provide them with samples for analysis. Clearly, it was a highly specialised role in nineteenth-century Cambridge! Darwin retained the services of “his” beetle collector and went on to other things, as we are celebrating this year.

Newbould and Babington collaborated for nearly half a century. There had been, since around 1845, a Cambridgeshire Naturalists’ Club of which John Stevens Henslow, the only senior man from whom Charles Darwin had got any encouragement and who was Professor of Botany till 1861, was a mainstay. To this Club, which seems to have been small and informal, Babington in his Journals constantly refers in regard to the meetings and expeditions organised by it and which he regularly attended, along with W. W. Newbould, then curate of Comberton, described as the “father of Huntingdonshire botany”.

Despite a growing family (eventually five sons and a daughter), he nevertheless refused at least one living on conscientious grounds and about 1860 resolved to take advantage of his private means to leave the service of the church and devote his days to his scholarly interests. He moved to London and thereafter spent almost all of each winter in the botanical department or reading room of the British Museum, where his lithe, spare figure was a familiar sight. In 1863 he was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society.

According to his biographer, D. E. Allen,

“Newbould now made a unique role for himself as a disseminator of early plant records to the increasingly numerous botanists who were compiling local or county floras. Every one of those issued in the years 1860–91 owed far more to his editorial and scholarly assistance than he allowed their authors to acknowledge; in the words of one of his obituarists, he was

‘the very incarnation of self-abnegation … nothing was to him a source of greater happiness than to place his time, his brains, his critical experience freely at the disposal of some younger man who seemed in need of them’ [Hillhouse].

Deeply averse to having anything published in his name, he insisted on disclaiming all responsibility for the fifth volume of the Supplement to English Botany, which was credited to him on the title-page. He was persuaded in his last years to allow his name to appear on the second edition of H. C. Watson's great compendium, Topographical Botany – on which he had bestowed much labour. The silent presence of a kind of all-pervading ghost was always more to his taste. Eighteen volumes of manuscript lists in the botany library of the Natural History Museum testify to his unwearying diligence, as did his herbarium, later incorporated in that museum’s general collection.”

Allen writes that, at one time, Newbould had contemplated taking up residence at Oxford, but was deterred by the inaccessibility of that university’s early herbaria, which were then housed in a loft reached only by a shaky ladder. In 1886 he was knocked down by a cab and died at Kew on 16 April, aged 67; he was buried in Fulham cemetery on 20 April. The number of obituaries that appeared, several of them of exceptional length, reflected a general wish that the scale of his anonymous services should at last be publicly acknowledged, and how widely he had been revered for his unfailing helpfulness.

Newbould’s altruism and diligence are typical of his time and continue the tradition set by Gilbert White, whose Natural History of Selborne was the evidence of a lifetime dedicated to understanding his environment and recording his observations for posterity. As further memorials, his name is borne by two species of blackberry and by the beautiful genus of Bignoniaceae, Newbouldia.

About the author

Dominic Newbould is Director of External Relations at OU Worldwide, the international division of The Open University. He lives and works in Milton Keynes, which is famous for its 4000 acres of parks and 20 million trees, although they do not include a Newbouldia.

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Snow and ice. Britain grinding to a halt. Unofficial strikes. Unemployment rising to its highest level in over a decade. A culture of complaint in the media. Doubts over Britain’s relationship to Europe. A Prime Minister widely seen as out of touch. The British government seemingly exhausted after twelve years in office. A general election less than two years away. If this all sounds familiar then either you have an exceptional memory or you’ve temporarily forgotten that this is a history blog. Because, of course, I’m talking about 1963.

Now, because of the superficial parallels between 1963 and 2009, you might well think that this blog is going to harp on the common maxim that history always repeats itself. In fact, I don’t think that is true in the great majority of cases. However, the reason I started with that list is to show just how seductive the idea is, and how difficult to challenge. Because, on seeing those ostensibly startling parallels, there emerges a temptation to map the trajectory of 1963-64 onto 2009-10 and to make some predictions based on what happened in the past. Forty-six years ago, the government apparently became mired in ‘sleaze’, antagonised its core supporters, scuppered its relations with the EEC, and subsequently lost the 1964 election to a rejuvenated opposition. All too easy to see how that pattern might repeat itself, right?

Alec Douglas-Home, Prime Minister (1963)

Wrong. Whilst that’s one possibility – it is very possible that the Labour Party will lose the next election, for instance – I sincerely doubt that it’s a likely one. If it does, though, then it will be caused by contemporary circumstances; it will not be because history circles around in an unending groove. To understand why, we need two things essential to the historian: intimacy and distance.

The past was different from today. This might sound pretty damn obvious, but it’s surprising how many people don’t take it into consideration. Explaining just how it was different is one of the historian’s jobs; unsurprisingly, we get a bit peeved when journalists and various other commentators seek to do it for us by looking for lazy parallels like the 1963 one. By intimacy, I meant that we must look very closely at the past, to show how it was unlike today. Let’s take some of the points I made above. The winter in 1963 was actually more severe and the snow lasted longer than it is likely to now. Most of the major wildcat strikes in that period were the result of the government’s attempt to impose an incomes policy – they were principally about wages, not jobs. Relations with the Common Market were scuttled by General de Gaulle, not by anything done by administration or public on this side of the channel. Unemployment was generally not tolerated to the extent that it is in 2009: in fact, the figure for those out of work was barely over 600,000. The Prime Minister was replaced, through ill health, later in 1963. And finally, though the government lost the election of 1964, a four-seat majority was hardly a lively endorsement of the opposition. That’s a snap-shot, of course, but nonetheless even from this list we can see that 2009 is far from being a mirror of 1963, whatever the superficial resemblance. Symptoms, to put it another way, are not causes.

Distance, too, is important, because by standing back and viewing the whole vista of the past, we can see how the neat congruence of factors that offer parallels across time may be obscuring other realities. A media culture of complaint, for example, has been a fairly constant escort to British society for a very long time. It may have reached rather shrill peaks in 1963 and again now, but, frankly since the Reformation, Britain has been off to hell in a handcart so often that it is somewhat surprising that the country has conspicuously failed to reach its destination. Other examples come readily to mind. Bar the severe winter and the imminence of a general election, practically every aspect that I outlined to begin with was present in 1981. The Falklands conflict resurrected Margaret Thatcher, but prior to the war the public generally saw her as out of touch, and she undoubtedly presided over a strike wave, a huge surge in unemployment, and magnificently frosty relations with the EEC. And, speaking of frost, Britain has ‘ground to a halt’ under a spell of bad weather pretty regularly in the past – 1947, in the midst of savage rationing and production problems, springs to mind – but it has never generated the level of criticism that would fatally wound a government. The phenomena with which I started have appeared periodically throughout history, at least in the democratic age. Sometimes a handful of them have occurred simultaneously, but they have never brought about exactly the same outcomes.

But I like to be even-handed, and I wouldn’t want to leave you with the impression that historical parallels are at all times bunkum. One thing that recurs consistently in history is the sort of generic lunacy that occasionally grips the human character. Cupidity is a good stimulant of this – so, in a way, the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the railway mania of the 1840s, and the dot.com boom of the 1990s are instances, in a broad sense, of history repeating itself. But even in those cases, we must understand that the circumstances, and the outcomes, of each were somewhat different.

Perhaps a rather more useful way of employing historical parallels is to challenge those policymakers, and I do not mean only politicians, who would serve us up re-heated pottage. So, if a long forgotten policy is suddenly revived by a bright young thing, keen to make his or her mark on the world, it is incumbent upon the historian to ask, ‘if it didn’t work in 1952 (or whatever date), then why should it work now?’ There may be reasons why it could work now – nothing in history is inevitable and, as we’ve seen, it rarely repeats itself – but the question is important to ask nonetheless.

Ultimately, the point I’m trying to make here is to watch out for the easy analogy and the casual comparison – and to shoot them down when spotted. An onerous task, no doubt, but nevertheless one that allows the barely concealed show-off in every historian to shine.

Taking it further

If the above blog has interested you, you may also find the following resources from the Open University to be of interest:

Power, dissent, equality: understanding contemporary politics
This course invites you into the world of politics in a fresh and accessible way, using a wide variety of case studies drawn from the UK and beyond. It sheds light on the inner workings of power, decision making, and protest. It covers politics from parliament to the street, and the politics of ideas as well as institutions.

History Lessons: Parts One & Two

My earlier blog covers other common history ‘howlers’.

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

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