Jose Harris

The Victorians, who idealised work, nevertheless reserved the palm of social esteem for persons whose private means enabled them to lead lives of pleasurable idleness. We in the late 20th century make a fetish of leisure and pleasure: yet for most of us status, self-regard, identity and personal relationships are inextricably bound up with access to paid employment. The youthful rentiers of the Drones Club have not died out, but somnolent afternoons in billiard rooms have given way to frenetic action in the City; the Bertie Woosters of yesteryear are now dealers in bonds and traders in futures, clocking in from nine to five. Possession of a private income still carries cachet (it is, after all, money), but much more so if held in tandem with a recognised salaried profession. Work and play, brutally estranged from each other by the early stages of industrialisation, have now reconverged through the medium of rituals such as business lunches, office parties, professional conferences, and all the mundane conviviality of daily working life. Royal princes, married women and the very rich all increasingly reject the once-coveted option of remaining outside the labour market, and honourable idleness is now segregated into that stretch of life known as retirement. Even strenuous pursuit of intellectual truth, at which some at least of the leisured class once excelled, is now no longer trusted and admired unless practised on a salary with a research assistant in a seat of higher learning.

At a time when British national identity appears more fragile than it has been for a very long time, the National Health Service bids fair to become the only major national institution that expresses the unity and commands the undivided loyalty of all but a tiny minority of the people living in this country. Shorn of empire, of economic pre-eminence, of religious certainty and racial separateness, many of them have nevertheless come to see the NHS as something peculiar and intrinsic to the British way of life: a sort of utilitarian church, mediating the beliefs and presiding over the rituals of a society incapable of advancing any more metaphysical conception. For the past thirty years foreign observers cited in Charles Webster’s study have perceived the NHS as an ‘integral part of the total pattern of the British state’, as an ‘altogether natural feature of the British landscape’, and ‘almost a part of the Constitution’. In contemporary British mythology the NHS is perhaps the last institutional survivor of the fabled ‘Dunkirk spirit’. Even in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain most of us take comfort from the thought that, though individually we are required to be competitive and self-regarding, nevertheless somehow and somewhere our collective organic self is being caring and altruistic on our behalf.

No political transformation of the past hundred years has been more profound and far-reaching than the change in the canons by which British statesmen are judged. In the late 19th century it was almost universally regarded as a test of political virtue that a politician did not make promises; he did not have a programme, he did not make deals with foreign powers, he abstained from all but the barest minimum of policy-formation and legislative change. By contrast, the political culture of the late 20th century requires from its leading actors a commitment to incessant momentum: even the most dedicated rollers-back of state power expect to go to the electorate with an elaborate and detailed shopping-list of all the new things they are planning to do. This change of emphasis inevitably distorts and discolours popular judgment of the past. Undergraduates who write essays on ‘Palmerstonian diplomacy’ or ‘Gladstonian radicalism’ or ‘Disraelian social reform’ are continually disappointed to find that these high-sounding soubriquets involved doing virtually nothing: and certainly, if measured against the tireless activity of the governments of Wilson and Thatcher, the titans of British political history emerge as pretty small beer.

For the past thirty years Gertrude Himmelfarb has sounded a discordant and unusual note among writers on Victorian England. She defended a (small c) ‘conservative’ perspective long before conservatism became intellectually fashionable. She was deciphering ‘ideas in context’ more than a decade before such an approach became the new orthodoxy of academic journals: indeed, her stock-in-trade has been to show that the great minds of the past look quite different if viewed from their own setting rather than from the time-capsule of highbrow reputation. Yet, unlike many exponents of this school, she has also clung to the view that some at least of the great themes of history have a meaning and a moral power that transcends the finite boundaries of date and location. In an age in which much academic history has collapsed into monographs and minutiae she has made recurrent forays into grand, ambitious, open-minded subjects: liberty, the ‘idea of poverty’, the genesis, consequences and intellectual limitations of the Darwinian revolution. Most provocatively of all, she has sided with Lord Acton in believing that history ‘resounds eternally to the echoes of original sin’. All this makes her a fascinating example of a threatened species: the Enlightenment ideal of the ‘philosophic’ historian.

The abdication of Edward VIII belongs to a class of events that can never be adequately treated by historians, since both the act and the actors transcend the conventional boundaries of the historian’s craft. All the evidence suggests that Edward was a mediocre character of limited intelligence and scant scruple, remarkable only for his gigantic powers of self-deception. But no amount of academic documentation is likely to dissuade people a hundred years hence from seeing him as the very mirror of a tragic prince – an ikon of modern royalty as exemplified by Sickert’s dazzling portrait painted, at the time of his accession, for the Welsh Guards. And, after a due lapse of time, nothing will stay historical novelists from elevating Wallis Simpson, née Warfield, to the fictional pantheon of romantic heroines. Like the tale of Tristan and Isolde, the shabby details of the Abdication may one day attract the magical and distilling art of some great maestro of human experience, a Shakespeare or a Wagner as yet unborn. It seems safe to predict that future generations will remember the King’s great matter of the Thirties, long after they have forgotten Appeasement, hunger marches and the unemployed.’