Failing to throw his mind back into the past : the reception of David Hume’s History of England in early nineteenth-centruy British historiography

• Main Author: Miles, David
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/9745

From narrow partisan attacks on his political and religious views to more sophisticated discussions of his mode of historical writing, British writers in the first half of the nineteenth-century responded in various ways to David Hume's History of England. The response to Hume's history represented both continuity and change. Nineteenth- century writers introduced a new dimension to the discourse on Hume's history while continuing the political and religious controversies that began with the publication of Hume's work in 1754. Nineteenth-century Whigs continued to question Hume's account of the political struggle in England during the seventeenth century while maintaining that Hume was a mere royal apologist. Critics of Hume's religious views persisted in reproaching Hume for his impiety and continued to object to his alleged unfair treatment of religious groups in history. Nineteenth-century criticism of Hume's history added attacks on Hume's historical method and his narrative style to these political and religious challenges. Hume's historical method was criticized for being ahistorical and anachronistic; Hume was cited for writing "conjectural" rather than "authentic" history. Hume's narrative style was reproached for lacking vividness and for being too remote and distant. This paper investigates the meanings of these various criticisms and argues that they represented a new mode of historical consciousness that emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth-century. Hume's history was an important influence on the thinking of British writers in the first half of the nineteenth-century. This paper contends that an examination of the response to Hume's history provides an important way of understanding the historical consciousness of that period.