A.G.Dickens


I spent part of yesterday evening (13th September, 2025) reading A.G.Dickens's interview with Robert Scribner on the IHR's website. It was much more interesting than I had expected dealing as it did with Dickens's development as an historian from his time in Yorkshire as a schoolboy, his studies at Oxford University as an undergraduate and then as a don, his experiences during the Second World  in the United Kingdom and later in Germany after its end, and then as head of the History Department at the University of Hull, in King's College, London and as Director of the Institute of Historical Research in Senate House, London. Scribner also explored Dickens's historiographical development as a student of the Reformations in England and in continental Europe. It was rightly a career of which Dickens could be proud. It was during the 1968-1969 academic year that I came across Dickens at the IHR. I did not find him very easy to talk to. Like many senior historians of his generation, he had the attributes of someone at the top of his profession and was not greatly interested in what I had to say. J.P.Cooper once said to me that Professors thought the order of the universe depended on their authority being upheld, hence their reluctance to criticise one another's works. There was something in this. But my impressions were misplaced. Dickens was much more interesting than I had realised. 

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