WTUD at 50 by ?

 I do hope I will make the 60th anniversary. But, as I said then, and as Josie hinted anyway, The World Turned Upside Down, to be frank, is not my favourite Hill book. And it was interesting at that Sheffield conference that all that there were, there were literary scholars, all the literary scholars were incredibly enthusiastic, and the historians were more critical to a greater or lesser degree. And I suppose what I want to say, in a sort of more sociological than intellectual way, is similar to John really, is to talk about Christopher Hill's life and achievements more generally. I've worked with Christopher at the Open University, I've benefited much from his kindness and support. But my favourite book is not The World Turned Upside Down, but is, well, I do the Jackie Eels, how old we are, and I'm even a mile older than Jackie. Puritanism and Revolution, which was published in 1958, and which I have the 1968 Panther paperback edition, which I bought when I was at school. So, what I really want to talk about is, this is a book that's published, first of all, very shortly after he left the Communist Party. So, I want to talk about the sort of environment of the Communist Party historians' group, and just almost a booklet, why you should read the range of really interesting articles in Puritanism and Revolution. And Lawrence is citing Stonemichael because Roger Craft, the article on Roger Craft, the vegetarian hatter, is published in 1958. It's not published in The World Turned Upside Down. Hatter is published in 1958. It's not published in The World Turned Upside Down. I should say, this is just, I last came across Christopher Hill because, as was suggested, I was doing very particular work that Hill would have thought was very boring, I think, but I came across a volume in the Bodleian Library, a collection of fast sermons, I'm interested in Puritanism, Presbyterian preaching, which had been owned by Christopher Hill, which is described by the person who probably stole it from the library in Birmingham, as sermons preached at different times by different godly ministers on different occasions. It's a bit more interesting than that. It's about Paso's long father. It's, in fact, a volume from the library of Thomas Hall, who's one of the people that Ed was talking about who hated lay preachers. I think Christopher, and it should be in Birmingham Reference Library, I think I'm going to start a campaign to give it that. Birmingham Reference Library, not the book. Christopher bought this in 1948. He bought it on April 10th, 1948. Part of demonstrating my own antiquarian tendency, I think it's interesting for the range of material he had. If you use the very interesting provenance search you can do in the Bodleian Library, you find that amongst the books donated by Christopher's heirs, not to Birmingham Reference Library but to the Bodleian, there are what you would call mainstream Puritan royalist stuff. There's William Perkins' works in Gift from Ivan Roots, Thomas Fuller, Richard Bancroft, John Hackett on John Williams. He also, though, has Christopher's copy of Stalin's Letters to Molotov, 1925-1936, which I didn't call up. And a book called Scientists and the Development of Nuclear Weapons. So what I'm to say, basically, is that Christopher's intellectual attitudes and his work were nurtured in a variety of contexts. Oxford University, obviously, but also the Communist Party's Historians Group, which was the most popular energetic section, was the early modern section, worked from the late 40s to when most of them left in 1956 or 57. And also in a sort of environment which we don't quite have today, or we don't have quite in the same way, an environment of education, of Radio 3 programmes, of the Third Programme programmes, and of different publishing. This is a Panther book, and it cost ten shillings and six pence. And it has, so I'm to say a little bit about the Communist Party's Historians Group, which is based really just on the extracts published by David Parker, Mark Sister and David Parker. Now, John was sort of disagreeing with it, quite rightly, but Christopher was often criticised, and I think I've done it myself, for a lack of overt theoretical perspectives, or developed theoretical perspectives, in some of his books. They're taken for granted. But actually, of course, he was doing it elsewhere, because he's the dominant figure in David Parker's collection, Ideology, Absolutism and the English Revolution, developing notions of the English Revolution very broadly as a bourgeois revolution. And being much more, I suppose, polemical, if you've been in situations where calling someone a comrade is a term of abuse, you know, you'd be done with disdain on your back that you can sit there. There are long, perfectly to say this was controversial and divisive, in a sort of productive way within Marxism. They were debating what was happening. They didn't have lines, or they ended up with lines. But particularly in here, the division is between Christopher Hill, who's arguing for a bourgeois revolution in all sorts of broad ways, and Victor Kiernan, who I've become more affectionate towards, really, over the last ten years, I think. Victor Kiernan was arguing that the bourgeois revolution was too simple, and that the Tudor state was more progressive than Christopher was arguing. And there's phrases like him, and say, oh, you know, the Earl of Essex of 1601 was no more a feudal magnate than is Lord Rothermere. But Christopher Hill was very opposed to it. Kiernan was basically arguing there was no stage of absolutism in English history. There was Tudor's word for feudal state. And he says, this is Kiernan, the work compressed into a few months in 1789 or 1917 was in England spread over several centuries. 1642-60 is not a decisive turning point, but only an important incident in the history of capitalism in England. Insofar as it is composed of specifically bourgeois interests and activities, it is a sordid and dingy incident. I can't explain how he managed to do this. Hill was very unhappy and denounced such ideas as a mixture of reformism and Trotskyism. It actually is a bit like what I suppose we think about revisionism. VGK's view is dangerous because it plays into the hands of those bourgeois economists and historians who push the origins of capitalism further and further back into the past in order to show that it is really an eternal category. And secondly, because it plays up to and is in fact identical with the old bourgeois heresy that English development is in some sense peculiar, peaceful and non-revolutionary. And the crucial point which is very relevant to a lot of us in this room working today is the notion that what happens in the 1640s and 50s is a revolution. It may not be precisely Hill's revolution. Hill said it, and all the things that we perhaps see more simply now, it produced remarkable creative developments in science, philosophy and the arts, it made possible the agrarian industrial revolution. But the infant born in 1649, for all its bourgeois limitations, had a very powerful influence in world history. It showed the ways of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The forces in the new model army and the leather movement that were defeated in our revolution constituted the most vigorous and self-confident assertion of popular democracy ever known in the world up to that time and not seen again until 1789 when Stanley and the Diggers, a communist theory, was for the first time associated with the democratic movement. And I think that notion that it's a revolution, but also that it matters for your political purposes, I also think is something we should sometimes be less squeamish about saying. So the Communist Party history group was creative and very interesting. John has mentioned Donna Torr. And I think it's in this context that I want to just mention why we should all be reading Purism and Revolution as well as The World Turned Upside Down. First is the range of things. Perry Anderson, I think he's quoted in Harvey Kaye's book on English Marxism, that's saying that history from above matters as well as history from below. And I think he means that you need to have some understanding of general developments as well as picking out the people that you would have liked to be reading in the olden days. So there's a very famous article called Recent Interpretations of the Civil War, which is about the gentry controversy, but is still worth reading. There are essays on the agrarian legislation of the revolution, the English Revolution and the Brotherhood of Man, and perhaps most famously, the Norman Yoke, 70 pages, which people still reference. James Harrington and the People, which is still interesting. But there are also these things which you think might have come out of The World Turned Upside Down. The mad hatter Roger Crabbe, who wanted to make himself perfect, so became a vegetarian. And there's a very simple point that Hill makes about Crabbe, and it's putting it in a very broad framework where he says, oh, it's a bit like Francis of Assisi who was tied to Annie Lawson's book. But he says it also looks forward to non-conformist Labour movement figures like Keir Hardie and Tom Mann. And there's an overriding Marxist framework, but there is also this activist thing that you've met these fabby people in your meetings, as well as in your history. And I think that's worth saying. I'm running out of time, probably. I'm a very bad timekeeper. So I want to say that this was a movement of intellectuals. Most of the people who were active in these discussions were around or linked to universities. But they also did all these day schools on capitalism, and there was a genuine adult education broader context in which they worked. They're also published in a variety of forms. The one I need to check, because Chris went deep, he did revise things, but the agrarian legislation of the revolution, which the first sentence says that the English Civil War was more of a class war than orthodox English theory allows, was published in the English Historical Review of 1940, whether that was the first sentence there. Many of them were published in History Today. James Harris and the People began as a talk on the radio. And the crudest, I think, is William Perkins and the Poor, which is in issue 2 of the Parsons Crescent, ironically. So some of the crudest stuff is in the academic journal, and some of the more adventurous stuff is on the radio, in the Marxist journals, that's it. I'm worried that this was very much an old person's paper, and I'm not a naive old person at that, and I do understand that the nature of the labour movement, the nature of higher and adult education has changed, the nature of the relationships between academic publishing and general or popular publishing have changed, although there's some interesting things going on there. But I do think that when we think about Christopher Hill's career, I think we have to think of the man who was politically engaged, politically active, wasn't crudely in his writings, but it gave him a sort of sympathy for social movements that was not part of his historical method at all. You know, Jackie Cawley didn't do the sort of stuff that Ed Ligon was doing earlier in social history, but that there was the thought that his scholarship that linked the Mad Hatter to general views of revolution was a scholarship that was founded not only in Balliol College, in the Communist Party of Great Britain, in adult education, and a commitment to communicating.