The Glorious Greens

How John and Alice Green wrote themselves into the history books

Plaque at 4 Beaumont Street, Marylebone, London

Whatever the worth of the present work may be, I have striven throughout that it should never sink into a “drum and trumpet history.”

JR Green

The publisher Alexander Macmillan took a personal interest in all of his principal authors, hosting them at his house or his club, introducing them to family and to other friends, travelling with them, and guiding and encouraging their writing careers; but there was one individual with whom the friendship would become particularly intimate - the man who reinvented how English history should be written. John Richard Green was Macmillan’s protégé, a man with an unconventional pedigree, on whom the publisher was prepared to take a risk because the writer’s passion for his subject, and his ambitious programme for communication of that passion, matched Alexander’s own ideas of what publishing should be about. Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf and one of the historian’s close friends, would say that JR Green had written ‘the first history of England which would enable his countrymen to gain a vivid and continuous perception of the great processes by which the nation had been built up.’ For the Victorians of the 1870s, more conscious than any previous generation of the might and glory of their country and of the British Empire, this was the history they most wanted to read.

Green was born in Oxford in 1837, the son of a skilled tailor, the maker of academic silk gowns. He was educated at Magdalen College School until the death of his father, when he was 14, and thereafter he was tutored privately and successfully, winning one of the first open scholarships to Jesus College, Oxford when he was just eighteen. However, despite this promising start, he was very unhappy at Jesus, only managing a pass degree. He felt that the academic historians of the day had little to inspire him, and he fell under the spell of Arthur Stanley, then a Fellow at Christ Church, and a preacher of the Christian Socialist gospel of FD Maurice. In what he later referred to as a ‘fit of enthusiasm’, Green took orders in the Church of England. His first curacy was in the East End of London, a very poor parish, where he lived in the house of the Ward family (one of the Ward sons, Humphrey, who became his good friend, would later marry Mary Arnold, better known as the popular novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward). But the mark of consumption was already upon him.

From 1861 to 1869 he struggled with increasingly poor health, eking out a living as a parish priest in Hoxton by writing articles for the Saturday Review, and gradually building a reputation as a talented historian.  He was by all accounts an exemplary parish priest, a successful preacher who began to fill his church on Sundays with sermons that appealed to the particular needs of his parishioners, and who campaigned for improvements in their living conditions, writing many articles lamenting the poverty of the East End. He often said that it was this exposure to human life at its most desperate and honest that coloured his ability to write meaningful social history.

He was first introduced to Alexander Macmillan by a mutual friend, the geologist Boyd Dawkins, in 1862. He had written to Dawkins when the latter joined the Geological Society ‘Pray introduce me to Macmillan when you arrive, if such a thing be possible. You never made a better hit. Among the Stanley and Kingsley set Macmillan is the “pet publisher of the day”.’ The brilliance of Green’s conversation, his encyclopaedic knowledge of so many and varied topics, and his ability to bring them all to play in torrents of wit and erudition soon made him a regular guest and dining companion in Tooting, loved equally by publisher and the family. Among the Macmillan set, who were impressed by his endeavours in the East End, he was generally known as ‘Bethnal Green’.

By 1869 he was contributing to Macmillan’s Magazine, and developing his ideas for a comprehensive, easily readable history of England, aimed at the general reader and the senior school student. This was something he had been thinking about since 1862, yet had found no time to write, struggling as he was with terrible health and the need to make a living from the regular Review pieces. However, 1869 was the year when it became clear that this way of life was not sustainable, and an eminent physician diagnosed terminal lung disease. He would need to spend every winter in a warm climate if he was to survive.  This grim prognosis forced him to make a change – after all he was only thirty-two. He resigned his parish, taking an unpaid post as Senior Librarian at Lambeth Palace, and Macmillan took him under his wing –the two men sat up late into the night on several occasions, discussing a range of projects from a history of France, to a Historical Review journal, to school primers, to a series on Men of History.

Alexander invited Green to spend Christmas of 1869 at Tooting, but he declined, as his doctor had required him to stay in the quiet of his home. Instead he sent a detailed proposal to his preferred publisher:

I propose to condense into a volume of 600 pages the history of the English People which I contemplated undertaking on a far larger scale. The work would serve as a school-manual for the higher forms and as a handbook for the universities, which in a more general sense it might I think supply a great want in our literature – that of a book in which the great line of our history should be fixed with precision, and which might serve as an introduction to its more detailed study. The book would be strictly a history of England in which foreign wars and outer events would occupy a far more subordinate position than they generally do, and in which the main attention would be directed to the growth, political, social, religious, intellectual of the people itself. Thus men like Aiden and Bede would claim more space than the wars of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, and Spenser and Shakespeare and Bacon would stand as prominently forward as the defeat of the Armada or the death of Strafford. The style of such a book…ought to be more picturesque in the true sense of the term, than if it were on a larger scale… If such a work is worth anything to you it is of course worth a good deal, and for myself I must consider it as representing not merely a ‘pass’ good work but the result of ten years’ reading and thought. I do not think £450 an excessive sum for the copyright, but of this of course you are a better judge than I, and I am sure, my dear Macmillan, that there will be no disappointment on my part if you feel yourself unable to pursue the negotiation any further. I will only say frankly that I would rather publish the book with you than any other London house.

Macmillan loved the idea, although the canny Scot negotiated the fee to be paid in advance down to £350, with another £100 payable if sales broke two thousand copies. But the Short History, eventually published at the end of 1874, would be unlike any of the ‘drum and trumpet history’ of other writers. At first Green found it hard to break away from the style of his Review articles, feeling that his book was just a series of essays, and he had to contend with patronising advice from friendly historians like Freeman who felt there were not enough facts or dates. Leslie Stephen felt it must have taken extraordinary courage and energy to persevere with so little support.   But Macmillan, who always had a pitch perfect sense of what the market wanted, unwaveringly backed him and his authorial decisions.

The necessity to travel extensively every winter for months at a time, to San Remo, Mentone, or Capri, meant that his hours of library time were limited and his task was not aided by the absence of many primary documents. The result was that his conclusions leapt far in advance of the facts at his disposal and when the first edition finally emerged at the end of 1874 it was not perfect. Nevertheless, as the distinguished historian Bryce wrote in his obituary of Green ‘The success of the Short History was rapid and overwhelming. Everybody read it. It was philosophical enough for scholars, and popular enough for schoolboys. No historical book since Macaulay’s has made its way so fast or been read with such avidity. And Green was under disadvantages which his great predecessor escaped from. Macaulay’s name was famous…’ After 8000 copies had been sold, Alexander sent for the contract in which Green had assigned his copyright, tore it up and substituted a royalty agreement massively to the advantage of the author. Thirty-five thousand copies were sold in the first year.

Over the next six years the whole book was completely revised and gradually extended into a four volume work. Throughout Green remained determined to stick to his easy, conversational style: ‘I give English History in the only way in which it is intelligible or interesting to me.’ In his Preface he insisted that this was ‘a history not of English Kings or of English conquests but of the English people’.

In 1877 Green found a true helpmate in his labours, when he married Alice Stopford, a highly-educated and strongly opinionated Irish woman, daughter of the Archdeacon of Meath, who in later years would become a historian in her own right, and a campaigner for Home Rule and Women’s Suffrage.

For six years Alice worked alongside her husband as amanuensis and researcher, and he trained her in his methods. John and Alice were regular visitors to the Macmillan home in Tooting, South London, and Alice wrote lovingly of their time there:

The persistent hospitality of Knapdale can never be forgotten. No friend, so long as he lived, was I think ever set aside or allowed to fall out of the circle. If he was sick or solitary, so much more the reason for drawing him into the family group, and the welcome had always the same freshness and heartiness, which won even the most recalcitrant to good humour and contentment. Certainly Mr Macmillan had an unfailing tenderness and sympathy behind his cheerful welcome: the warmth of his kindness drew together all the diverse elements of his group. I have known no house since Mr Macmillan’s where there was so single-minded a desire to welcome men absolutely on their own merits, whatever might be their work or their persuasion or their position.

Green continued to take on more work for Macmillan, acting as a reader of manuscripts. One of his lasting legacies would be a series of primers in History and Literature that he commissioned and edited for Macmillan. The publisher firmly believed that the only people who could be trusted to write the most basic of textbooks for children were the authorities on the subject, hence Archibald Geikie wrote on geology (with a box of geological specimens available to complement the text) and physical geography, Hooker on botany, Jevons on political economy and Lockyer on astronomy. Thomas Huxley himself wrote a general introduction to the series in 1880. When the baton was handed on to Green to produce lists for history and literature, he secured some of the greatest historians and classicists of the day: Mandell Creighton wrote on Rome, Edward Freeman on Europe, Charlotte Yonge on France, Mahaffy on Greece, and Gladstone himself wrote the primer on Homer, much to Macmillan’s incredulous delight. Alexander had taken responsibility for the wooing of Gladstone, explaining that though the usual fee for a primer was £50 on publication of ten thousand copies, and tuppence per copy sold over ten thousand, he would offer the Grand Old Man £100 in advance.

Fanciful imagining of Green dictating to his wife ‘as his life ebbs to a close’

Predictably, Green’s health continued to deteriorate, and although he said that he only hoped to live to be with Alice, his ‘little wifie’, he died in France in March 1883, at the age of 46. Of his last days, Alice wrote:

On hearing how grave the danger was, Mr and Mrs Macmillan left London by the very next train, leaving themselves scarcely an hour for preparations. At Mentone [Alexander] came over every morning from his hotel, and remained practically all day in my sitting room, waiting for any occasion when he might possibly be of use. I was too much occupied to be able to see him for more than a few moments occasionally, for many days indeed not at all – and I need not tell you how deeply touched I was then, and am now, when I think what it meant to an impatient man to sit thus waiting in gloom. Nothing I suppose could have been more trying to such a temperament as his, so ardent, so impetuous. But not once did the shadow of impatience appear upon him.

Alice Stopford Green would live for another forty isx years, and would have a whole new life as a political campaigner for Irish rights. She continued to research and write history as her husband had encouraged her to do, publishing volumes on Henry II and Town Life in the Fifteenth Century. At her home in Kensington Square she hosted a circle of political, literary and creative luminaries such as Beatrice Webb, the actress Elizabeth Robins, and old friends from her Macmillan acquaintance such as Henry James and John Morley. But she became increasingly drawn into the world of Irish politics and the campaign for independence. She published increasingly controversial works of history, such as The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1908) and Irish Nationality (1911) which became keystones in re-imagining a national consciousness in preparation for independence. As the Irish Times writes ‘The Ireland she described was united, at peace and culturally connected to Europe, rather than enslaved to the British empire.’

By 1913, she was conspiring with Home Rule nationalists to run guns into Southern Ireland. After the Easter Rising, she relocated to Dublin and her new home at 90 St Stephen’s Green hosted many revolutionary discussions and was regularly raided. In 1922 she was one of the first women elected to the newly-formed Irish Senate. She wrote: “No real history of Ireland has yet been written. When the true story is finally worked out – one not wholly occupied with the many and insatiable plunderers – it will give us a noble and reconciling vision of Irish nationality.”

---