Hill conversation with his niece

 Talking about the intellectual biography of Christopher Hill, who probably needs no real introduction from me, but perhaps I can say: eminent historian of 17th-century England, Marxist, former master of Balliol, and extremely prolific writer and communicator. He won't like me to put it quite like this, but he's written and edited, or edited, at least 17 books, written notes and articles—over 110 at the last count—and reviews, adding in this morning's as the latest contribution, over 450, probably nearer 500. An enormous output, which would indicate a sustained interest in communication. But before we get on to that side of things, perhaps we should start out with your early career, Christopher, as a Yorkshireman. I'm sure you'd like to declare your earliest interest in terms of playing cricket. 

Yes, my highest ambition was to play cricket for the country for which I have a birth qualification. And in those days, playing cricket for Yorkshire was a much higher ambition than the one that Laurence Stone has recently owned after she wanted to play cricket for England, but I wanted to play for Yorkshire. And did you ever think anything as coherent as, “I will be a historian?” No. So how did you become one? Well, I couldn't find any other job, actually. I tried to get all sorts of other jobs when I took my degree. Going back to student days, going up to Oxford in 1931, did you find it then a very stimulating time and place to be? Oh yes, it was absolutely astonishing. I mean, I was first-generation university in my family, and 1931 was a very traumatic year, after all. England off the gold standard, collapse of the economy. One realized for the first time—at least I realized for the first time—that England had stopped being top nation and was rushing rapidly down to the bottom among the nations. This was a tremendously traumatic experience. And then the Depression, terrific unemployment. We were all very, very politicized very quickly. The 1920s was a very sort of unpolitical generation at university. Suddenly, the '30s became very political, and I was caught up in that.

[02:28]
Yes, and in terms of college days, who were influences upon you then? This was before you'd actually become a Marxist. Oh yes, a long time before. Well, mostly fellow undergraduates, I think. I suppose among my tutors, my favorite tutor was Vivian Galbraith, who was a medievalist, so he didn't actually stimulate me in the direction of history. But he had a skeptical, cynical, totally irreverent view of everything, and he encouraged one to debunk orthodoxies of any kind. He started by assuming that any orthodoxy must be wrong, which is a pretty good starting point, I think. And he was very encouraging and stimulating and kind and good. I mean, I owe a great deal to him. Not much to any others of my tutors, I don't think. Yes. And then, well, what led you up to becoming a Marxist and joining the CP? And are those two different processes? They're two quite different processes. Joining the CP was a long time after becoming a Marxist of sorts. I never know quite what one means by Marxist these days. Well, I think there are various components of that, and I've answered this question so often in so many different ways that I don't know which of them I believe, and I think probably there's a bit of something in all of them.

[03:55]
I was very much into metaphysical poetry, which excited me very much at the time, and so was T.S. Eliot, and one just—as the poetry of Eliot and Auden and Spender and so on seemed to us to have a direct relationship to the crisis of the '30s. So I'm not sure that Eliot encouraged me to do this, but it seemed to me perfectly obvious that metaphysical poetry had a relation to the crisis of the 17th century. So that got me into wanting to understand the 17th century in order to understand metaphysical poetry. Well then, as far as history was concerned, it's difficult to remember what history was like in those days, but it was all about constitutional history and how England was quite different from wicked nations on the wicked continent, and that English institutions, Parliament and the common law, went right back into the Middle Ages and indeed into the voice of Germany, if you were interested in that sort of thing. And there was this terrific continuity of history in which the little hicup in the 17th century was known as the Interegnum, or something that didn't ever happen at all. History went on happily to 1640, then pof, pof, a few unfortunate things, then it started again in 1660. Well, it seemed to me even then absolutely crazy and to be exploded and blown up, and I found a Marxist interpretation one of the ways of blowing it up. And the third thing, of course, was the economic crisis of the '30s, the obvious collapse of English civilization, the nastiness of it all, and of course the threat of war overhanging us increasingly as the '30s went on. So I looked for alternatives to the smug English attitude of England being a model for the world.

[06:01]
Yes, I can imagine that. I can imagine that. Very nauseating. But how did that bring you specifically to Marxism? Did you talk to others or join any groups at that stage? Of course I talked to a lot of other people, yes. I belonged to the Labour Club and the October Club, which was the Communist Club of those days. I remember particularly a lecture—talks by G.D.H. Cole, who gave us, in my first term in 1931, a splendid lecture analyzing the collapse of the British economy and saying, “If we want to survive, we've got to do this, that, and the other.” Smash. And that was rather horrifying for a well-brought-up schoolboy to hear a grey-haired man whose books he read with respect—and he encouraged us to read with respect—saying he hoped the whole thing was going to smash. And then lots of people like that, Bernard Shaw and others, were really forcing us to think pretty deeply about what was happening to English society in the '30s, and it seemed pretty catastrophic.

[07:09]
Yes, yes. So in terms of interest in Marxism and in the 17th century, they sort of fused together. I mean, you couldn't say that the interest in the Civil War led you to Marxism or vice versa. I can't now work it out. No, I can't differentiate. Or poetry. I think that was an important part of it. But I just don't know. Too difficult. And then joining the CP, joining the Communist Party. I was told that there was some very good Russian work on 17th-century English history, which somebody ought to read. So as I had the chance, I went over to Moscow on all sales money and taught myself Russian and read all this stuff. Some of it was, I would now think, rather crude. Some of it was very, very good indeed, both pre-1917 and afterwards. A very good school of Russian historians. And it would all be new in terms of approach. Totally new to me, yes. The thing that the Russians had that was totally lacking in England at that stage was a strong sense of the importance of the agrarian sector of the economy and the connections of the agrarian sector to revolution. I mean, this was something that had impinged on English historians at that date. There's a man called Sarveen who had published a book on English agrarian history in a wonderful set of lectures on the English Revolution which had never been translated. It was one of the best books there is, I think, 1934, I think that was. And there wasn't any 17th-century agrarian history except Tawney, I suppose. Really? Who presumably you knew and were in contact with. Oh, I didn't know him personally at that time. I wasn't in personal contact, but I knew his books, of course, very well, I suppose. He would be one of the main printed influences on me at that stage.

[09:08]
Yes. Yes. And then you decided to do the research yourself and work on the 17th century. Yeah. That's how that started. I don't know. I got interested in Moscow in these Russian historians. I then thought that if I was to be any sort of a Marxist, I must be an economic historian, and rather painfully I tried to teach myself to be an economic historian. It was never very congenial and it didn't get very far, apart from having a large stack of cards with things about English agrarian history on them, which remained untouched from that date to now. And someday, someday perhaps... Can you say why it proved unconventional? I just wasn't very good at it. And I haven't got that sort of a mind. I'm much more interested in literature than economics. I'm... Why would I say I'm ashamed to say it? It's just a fact. I think I just am that way. And I realized after I'd slaved away at agrarian history for a long time that this wasn't the only Marxist approach to a civilization.

[10:19]
And you said just a bit ago you weren't sure quite what Marxism meant now, but what did it mean sort of specifically to you as a historian then? Well then I think it meant seeing history as a whole, thinking of societies as dominated at different periods by different classes and the state as being by and large the property of the ruling class at the time, and not as the sort of mutual thing that it was then traditionally depicted as being. I mean, states did things and reforms happened because people were not wiser and better, instead of there being any interest groups involved. Yes, though possibly on the whole hasn't the tradition subsequently been to create much more interest in popular history and lower-class history other than actually working out how state machines then... Yes, I think that came rather later, and I suppose some of us are now coming under criticism for having concentrated too much on history from below. And after all, the major decisions about society are taken from on top. I think this is something that I at any moment have to answer criticism for. It seems so important to say something about the 80 percent of humanity who get left out of history, and women—I mean, they just weren't there in the history that I was brought up with. Yes, though of course subsequently they've been studied from a variety of points of view, not only from the Marxist tradition. Yes, not only, yes. One needn't necessarily consider them from a Marxist point of view, but consider that they matter. I remember when, I suppose in the late '30s, I was agitating to change the history syllabus in Oxford. One of the things I learnt was not a very profitable occupation. And Keith Feiling, then the professor of history—I mentioned the name of Gerard Winstanley, and I thought perhaps to have some of his writings on the syllabus would be a good idea. And he spoke of Gerard Winstanley's writings as half-baked. Now, whatever else they are, they're not half-baked. I mean, he disagreed with them, obviously, if he'd ever read them, which I very much doubt. But they were just pushed under the carpet. Nobody wanted to know about them. And it's very much from the '40s onwards, Sabine's edition of Winstanley's writings and Haller's edition of The Levellers, it's a relatively recent thing that historians have even been aware of the existence of these people. They just weren't there when I was an undergraduate. Yes, well, I suppose from that point of view it's quite impressive how that approach has swept such a long way. It has, hasn't it? This is mainly the work of the Americans. It's very interesting. It's American historians, isn't it? And this is mainly the work of the Americans. It's very interesting. It's American historians who did it, I think. Haller, Jordan, Suleyman. Well, and the tradition of the Communist group of historians. Well, that's true in England, I think, yes. But I think for non-Marxist historians, a very good job was done by American liberal historians. Not sort of Fisher-type liberals, but real radical liberals, like Haller.

[13:29]
Yes. Was leaving the Communist Party after Hungary in '56, '57, was that also an intellectual turning point, or is that something more to do with the history of the party specifically? Well, it was '57, it wasn't Hungary. It was the English Communist Party's failure to differentiate itself from the Soviet Communist Party. It was the issue on which I left. A group of us tried to persuade the English Communist Party that this was a wonderful opportunity for reassessing their role of being critical of the Soviet Union, critical aspect of it that we didn't like, and having a policy of our own, so to speak, and being lost on that, and I resigned then. Having left the Communist Party then, this coincided with the period, perhaps just a little after that too, when you began to write much more. Was that sort of in any way associated with some sort of intellectual liberation from leaving the party specifically? Well, when Laurence Stone said that, I pointed out that I published my first, I suppose, serious academic book in '56. I'd finished it by '54, which was three years before I left the party. It might have something to do with the breakup of my first marriage. I don't think it had anything to do with it. Economic Problems of the Church. Well, yes, okay. Well, Economic Problems of the Church is one chapter of a large volume. I proposed to write on the church as an institution in the 17th century; one chapter is going to be economic problems. Having launched on writing, you then began to write a great deal. Can you say anything about choice of subjects, or did one subject sort of follow automatically or naturally enough from the previous one?

[15:21]
Well, Economic Problems of the Church is one chapter of this book on the church. The next one, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolution England, is another chapter or chapters from that book. After that it becomes a bit eclipsed. Most of them were chapters of the book. Intellectual Origins was a chapter of the book. The Century of Revolution helped, I suppose. I wanted to do it. I mean, it obviously helped me a good deal, I think, to try and sort things out. And after that, I don't know. I mean, I've never had a plan, I don't think. And in terms of methodology, do you have any set plan or view of how you set out to write? No. Not at all? Well, I mean, I have a subject, but I think basically I collect a lot of material and I think it might make a book rather than the other way around. I was thinking of things like Hexter's critique, saying that I've got predetermined ideas and that because I started my files a long time ago, therefore I got stuck in them. Well, I don't think it's all I can say to you. Some of my files I kept for a very long time. Others, I started when New South Wales started to interest me. Things like the book that went into The World Turned Upside Down was entirely ad hoc work. I had a small file on radicals before that, but I had no idea what it was going to turn into. Yes, because in fact your references to those radicals have changed quite a bit. Your earlier comments were more dismissive, and then latterly you've been much more intent on taking them seriously. Yes, I think I found out an awful lot in writing that, which I didn't know at all. I was wondering how much there was actually a shift in your own writings, not necessarily to do with anything that the revisionist school had been putting forward, in terms of the nature of the events of the 1640s and '50s as a bourgeois revolution. In your earlier writing, you tend to assume that the political and social changes follow a century of vigorous economic development and change. But in the later writings, they tend to assume that the events of the 1640s and 1650s are the prelude to vigorous economic development and bourgeoisifying the economy in the century afterwards, which is actually reversing the causal flow.

[18:04]
If I've been saying that, I don't—I don't think I want to do it. I think what I've been on the defensive a bit about—well, not on the defensive—but I think a lot of people like Lawrence Stone assume that the concept of bourgeois revolution implies a group of, what my first wife used to call “bugerwazzes,” a group of bourgeois sitting down and saying, “Let's have a revolution, let's do this, that, and the other, in order to prepare the way for capitalism.” Now, this is absolute nonsense. That's not the way any revolution happens. And if you look at it ex post facto, you can think perhaps that Lenin had some sort of idea like that in 1917, but here he got his chance because the Russian state collapsed. He didn't overthrow it. The Bolsheviks didn't overthrow the state, and certainly in the French Revolution there was no group of people who made the revolution. So in England the government collapsed in 1640, and lots of people tried to fill the gap with very little success, and what ultimately emerged was the consequence of economic pressure groups which had emerged in the society over, if not the century, the two generations before 1640, such as the pressure groups which in the 1620s had been calling for a Navigation Act, which in 1651 got a Navigation Act. The Providence Island Company—sorry, do you want to? No, so you mean it all fueled in and then pulled on and it... Well, it's there and building up, and then it takes over at the center in the course of the revolution, through the Navigation Act, through the new foreign policy, through the Navy, powerful enough to implement the new foreign policy, which James and Charles couldn't ever have done. They could never have got the money to pay for things like Cromwell's Western Design. And similarly, the abolition of feudal tenures, the other absolutely epoch-making event in English history, had been being discussed in Parliament from 1610 onwards. It couldn't be put into effect until the Civil War had been virtually won in 1646. It was confirmed by Parliament in 1656 when it looked as though you were getting a re-stabilization under perhaps a Cromwellian monarchy. It's confirmed again in 1660, and significantly that confirmation was the first business the House of Commons turned to after listening to the Declaration of Breda, in which Charles said, “Well, I'm coming back, chaps.” So it obviously was of very great importance. Yes. And this, well, we don't have to go into all the details here, it made possible long-term agricultural planning and so made possible the agrarian evolution. Yes, so you don't in fact see it as a reversal of your earlier argument, as a confirmation.

[21:14]
But actually just ranging on from that, in terms then of the stance of modern Marxism, you're going back very much to the economic causes and outcome. Don't you think much of modern Marxism in terms of social history has in fact become very close to a sort of liberal humanism without much concern for long-term economic change? Well, I don't know who you're thinking of. I would have thought some of the best Marxist history—well, not necessarily Marxist—the best history of England today is being written by literary critics and literary historians because they are aware of the cultural crisis in England, depicting a deeply divided society long before 1640, and all the people who say that what happened in 1640 was just an accident and a series of coincidences. Don't read the literature. You've only got to look at the literature to see this sense of crisis and sometimes of doom hanging over the society. Read Jonathan Dollimore. Yes, perhaps what I'm getting at is there's such a fusion or a diversity of approaches. I mean, you could read some economic historians without getting a sense of crisis, or some other political historians who are tending to brush everything away. I'm wondering what the specifically Marxist input these days is. Well, the Marxist input—what is it? To see the society as a whole, and to say that you can't isolate the Constitution or what goes on in Parliament or what's going on in the country.

[22:51]
Going back to theme of re-synthesizing, something else that we've touched once or twice, and that is specifically the Puritan or the nonconformist tradition. You were brought up, of course, in what I think one could call a strict, or at least firm, Wesleyan Methodist household. Yes. What sort of influence did that have? Well, of course, I reacted against it rather violently as a teenager, as one does. In this respect, I'm very grateful to some aspects of it. For instance, I was brought up with a total, I think, lack of any sense of racial distinction and discrimination. And when I first heard anti-Semitic joke at school, I totally failed to understand it, but totally. When I went home and asked my parents to explain it to me, I was very profoundly shocked. It really upset all my sort of natural feelings. A sort of basic egalitarianism. A sort of basic egalitarianism. Or one in the eyes of the Lord. Yes, which had to do with their devotion to foreign missions. I mean, there were souls to be saved in Africa and China and India who were just as important as souls in England. So this basic egalitarianism, I'm very happy that I was brought up with. It was also, I think, they had the same feeling about sexual equality. As soon as I got admitted to a university, it was assumed that my sister was going to a university. That wasn't common form in the '30s, not at all. Boys were very different. So my parents, I think, had these very good things which went with their nonconformity, but weren't of the gaudy part of it. You see what I mean? I reacted rather against the gaudy part of it. There were certain basic instincts which I'm very glad I was brought up with, the sort of things that the nonconformists did in English history, of which I suppose the outcry against the Syrians in 1956 was one of the last occasions on which the nonconformist conscience really spoke out and influenced politics. Yes, and you went to chapel yourself. Yes.

[25:05]
Talking about the chapel there, you've mentioned to me once before the influence of T.S. Gregory. Would you like to comment on that? Yes, well, he was a minister at a chapel who was a tremendous influence on me, yes. He made it his duty to denounce the smugness and hypocrisy of his largely bourgeois congregation, and to preach to them the political consequences of their belief in the equality of all souls. And he said, after all, what about their bodies, too? How did they take to that? Well, they didn't like it at all. They didn't like it. But he was a very eloquent and very good preacher. I mean, he just was, as a technician, he was superb. My mother was rather devoted to him, I think, just because she was a bit shocked. But she liked his eloquence. My father, I think, thought it was all a bit much. But he was certainly rather strong meat for the congregation, which was a very small, lower-middle-class congregation who didn't like to be told that the unemployed were just as holy and valuable in the eyes of God as they were. They didn't like it at all. So he had a very great influence on me, yes. Yes. Yes, you wrote at one point, he was the person who first showed you that all accepted truths, just because they are accepted, tend to become lies. Yes, I put in the words “tend to become lies” because he insisted on it. But yes, that was a very good thing to be taught in one's teens when one's brought up in that sort of environment.

[26:48]
And in terms of the Puritan tradition, I mean, obviously, to some extent, too, this must have influenced your concentration on the church, the role of the church, the role of Puritanism, and also individual writers, Milton, Bunyan. And also individual writers, Milton, Bunyan. Well, on the role of the church, I mean, you can't be a 17th-century historian without being aware of the role of the church. I mean, it isn't a church among many; it's the church, it's part of society. So I suppose the reaction against the church in the 17th century was of interest to me as a nonconformist, but I don't think there's anything very exceptional in saying that religion was important. Well, not everyone who works on the 17th century would start from that. Well, then they'd be wrong, wouldn't they? If you see what I mean. Yes. Well, and what about the interest in, well, say Milton, for example? Why Milton? Why write a book about Milton?

[27:41]
Well, I was thinking about that the other day, actually, when I recall that when I was in the Soviet Union in 1936, I was at a party of Russians at which revolutionary songs were being sung, and I said, “I'm not very good at singing.” They asked me for an English revolutionary song. I said, “I'm not very good at singing,” which is true, “but I recite a revolutionary poem.” And I recited, “Avenge, O Lord, Thy Slaughtered Saints,” Milton's thing on the late massacre in Piedmont. Obviously, then I saw Milton as a revolutionary poet. I'm rather pleased with that in retrospect. It wasn't a sudden idea in 197. I don't know. What is there to explain? Well, I wondered if you were particularly interested also in the ideas of intellectuals in politics, or the contribution in the sense you've been talking about your commitment, but in terms of writing and teaching rather than direct political activism. The other way is it had to do with my desire to blow up, which certainly goes back to the 1930s, the idea of continuity in English history and the respectable via media which all Englishmen, all good Englishmen, have always accepted, and there's no wicked extremism. And here's Milton, a very respectable and then the sort of standard Puritan poet, who was as extreme as you could possibly be, defending regicide, defending divorce for pleasure, defending complete freedom of the press in those days when it was very extreme. So I think it was part of my interest in Milton because he was so passionately against the middle way and against fudging compromise and against the English tradition. Yes, and against sort of embalming the 17th century, losing the sense of the achievable. Yes, and I suppose, I don't know how early I got onto the fact that Milton had himself been embalmed by Edison and others, but I must have got onto that rather earlier than I'd realized, I think, if I was singing his revolutionary sonets in Moscow in 1936.

[29:58]
Yes. I was wondering also if there's any attraction in the, as it were, the voice speaking out. I mean, he talks repeatedly because he goes through the periods of success and triumph and also coping with failure and defeat, or just the principle of bearing witness, which goes back to an element of the dissenting tradition, not necessarily theological, and the sense of just speaking up for what you believe to be the cause. I mean, hoping that everyone is listening to you, but if not, at least speaking. I think I became more conscious of that aspect of Milton when I got writing books with titles like The Experience of Defeat. I think earlier I was more interested in the optimistic Milton and Areopagitica. And The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, I think I became aware of... I knew, of course, that he'd been defeated and that he'd had a bad time after 1660, but I felt it on my pulses, perhaps, a bit more after the end of the student revolution and after that all died away.

[31:02]
So, I mean, are you optimistic in the long run about the prospects for radicalism? Well, that depends on whether there's a world to be optimistic about, doesn't it? And radicals haven't at the moment got very much say in whether we do all blow ourselves up or not. I mean, I'm very pessimistic about that one, of course. One doesn't feel that the people who are taking the decisions necessarily have sound nonconformist principles influencing them. And really it is, I find this sort of so worrying, I can't be optimistic about the long run. Well, that's rather pessimistic. Well, it is, I'm afraid, a pessimistic thing to end on. Well, don't let's end on it then. I mean, overall, over all the world, I think—but England, they blow me about. And the Third World, a tremendous possibility, I think. How they're going to escape from America and say—one thing that makes one pessimistic about England is anything we do will be vetoed by the Americans, and don't know how one gets around that. They're just stronger than we are, and they'll use their strength. So I'm not optimistic about England. I think the Third World as a whole could take on America. Well, finish off on a personally optimistic note. Tell us about your next book.

[32:28]
Well, I'm writing a book about Bunyan, and I suppose he leads on a little bit from the things I've been writing recently, in that, although after 1660, he was one of the defeated he'd been associated with. Well, he served in the New Model Army. He was one of the defeated. He'd been associated with—what is it? He served in the New Model Army, and his connections were very much with the radical sects, though not with the extreme way-out ones. But after 1660, he spent 12 years in jail and had a pretty rough time. But he discovered he could write. And in Pilgrim's Progress, he produced one of the great popular books of the world. And what seems to be the essence of Pilgrim's Progress is that you win through not by anything except sheer, doged, bloody-minded determination. It's Christ who saves you, but in order to be saved, you've never to give up hope. That's the real thing. You must never surrender, never give up hope. And this occurs again and again, not only in Pilgrim's Progress, but in others of Bunyan's works. The word “stand,” the phrase “he never came back, he never drew back,” Mr. Standfast—they all are images of standing under whatever horrible pressures and persecutions. Yes, indeed, Bunyan's generation of nonconformists were undergoing horrible pressures and persecutions. There's something universal in Bunyan which I think needs bringing out, because somehow I think he was molding the popular tradition. All his writing, both prose and verse, is very much unfashionable. It's not courtly. It's not... He doesn't fit into any of the fashions, and he's not trying to write metaphysical verse and failing. He's writing popular verse in the ballad tradition. And he somehow brought this back, ultimately, into English literature as the idiom of the people, as against the idiom of the courtiers. And this is closer, in fact, I think, to modern English literature than the writings of the Drydens and the Rochesters and so on. Marvelous though they are, Bunyan's got a basic vocabulary and a basic humanity, too, and content as well as form, which I find productive of optimism. Yes, so which brings us back to radicalism, the 17th century, re-synthesis, and that, I think, is a good note to end on. Thank you. Thank you.