June 24, 2013

Finest Hour 137, Winter 2007-08

Page 55

Older Titles Recalled: HESP on a Grand Scale

By James R. Lancaster

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A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, by Winston S. Churchill. London: BPC-Purnell, 1968, 23 volumes, 3598 pages, published in magazine format and hardbound in red leatherette. Frequency: scarce in hardbound format.

In April 1956 Winston Churchill sent President Eisenhower the first volume of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, writing, “I am afraid the Americans do not come into this volume because it was only in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus over the ocean flew.” The fourth and final volume was published in 1958, to be followed by many different editions, abridgements, excerpted works and translations.

One variant of HESP that stands out is the Purnell edition, published in 1968. It is neither an excerpt nor an abridgement. It is instead an expanded edition of HESP where all the chapters in the original edition are supplemented, each one in turn, by additional chapters from other writers. Originally serialized in magazine format (seven large, clumsy binders were provided to house the collection), it appeared later as a complete set in red leatherette, with a rampant lion in gold on the cover. This is the edition which is reviewed here. If you are lucky you might find a set in a second-hand bookshop, and prices have not been forbidding. If you see a copy and have a foot of shelf space, do not pass it by.

Everything about this edition is on a grand scale, starting with the format: 8V2 by 12 inches. The 101 chapters of the original text are supplemented by no fewer than 489 chapters contributed by other writers. All volumes are lavishly illustrated with thousands of prints, photographs, cartoons and maps, in colour and monochrome. And in the last volume there is a 65-page pictorial tribute to Sir Winston Churchill, followed by a comprehensive index to the whole work.

Is this nothing more than a glossy attempt to popularize HESP with illustrations? Far from it. The publishers set up an editorial board comprised of three leading historians of the day—Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Hugh Trevor-Roper and A.J.P. Taylor. To complement Churchill’s original and unabridged text, the board commissioned chapters from eminent writers and historians such as G.E. Aylmer, Asa Briggs, Bruce Catton, Norman Davis, C.S. Forester, John Galbraith, Norman Hampson, Christopher Hibbert, John Roberts, A.L. Rowse and George Rude.

All volumes follow a simple and effective pattern. Each of Churchill’s 101 chapters is followed by four or five chapters from other writers. On die American Civil War, for example, Churchill’s “Victory of the Union” chapter (Book XI, Chapter VII in the Cassell edition) is followed by Bruce Catton on “Atlanta to the Sea,” John Terraine on the “Collapse of the Confederacy,” Peter Young on “The First Modern War?,” David Mason on “The Southern Conspiracy,” and James P. Shenton “Damage and Reparations.” This is a very thorough work.

Many of these added chapters are outstanding. For example, Churchill’s chapter on “Washington, Adams and Jefferson” (Book IX, Chapter VIII in the Cassell edition) is followed by Marshall Smelser on the “Louisiana Purchase,” which must be one of the best short accounts of an extraordinary story—how America doubled in size at a cost of only $15 million, “the finest bargain in American history,” as Churchill puts it.

Smelser supplies fascinating details to the story, complete with maps and illustrations, concluding with one of its long-term implications: “Ominous portents passed unnoticed: the habitants of Louisiana had a guarantee of slave property, and more Southerners than Northerners, in 1804, were interested in settling West of the Mississippi. The question of slavery in the Louisiana Purchase was to provoke the Civil War.”

Many chapters by other writers cover social and economic aspects of the history of the English-speaking peoples—a good editorial decision, since one of the criticisms of Churchill’s original was that he neglected these areas. Thus we are able to read, in the appropriate place, chapters such as “The March of Science,” “Industrial England,” “Art in America,” “The Great Missionaries,” “The Meaning of Reform,” “The Impact of Dickens,” “Victorian Education,” “The English Romantics,” “Religious Emancipation,” “Handel and his Music” and “Language from Shakespeare to Johnson.”

In this last article, those of us who are orthographically challenged are reminded of those glorious days when spelling was not important. For example there are twice as many instances of “honor” than “honour” in Shakespeare’s first folio edition of 1623. Norman Davis describes admirably how the English language— “copious without order, and energetic without review,” to use Dr. Johnson’s words—was put into shape and form with the publication of the great doctor’s Dictionary of the English Language in 1755.

Having started with Churchill’s comment about Columbus, let us go back to an earlier comment of his about Edward the Confessor. One of Churchill’s literary assistants, Bill Deakin, is describing a scene at Admiralty House in April 1940:

It was for a brief spell Sir Winston’s practice as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1940, while conducting the grave affairs of the Royal Navy during the North Sea battles of the Norwegian campaign, to spend an hour or so in the afternoons or the early morning completing his chapters on the Norman Conquest and mediaeval England in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

Naval signals awaited attention, admirals tapped impatiendy on the door of the First Lord’s room, while on one occasion talk inside ranged round the spreading shadows of the Norman invasion and the future of Edward the Confessor, who, as Sir Winston wrote, “comes down to us faint, misty, frail.” I can still see the map on the wall, with the dispositions of the British fleet off Norway, and hear the voice of the First Lord as he grasped with his usual insight the strategic position in 1066.

“Comes down to us faint, misty, frail”: these are simple, well-ordered words from a master craftsman. In the Purnell edition of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill’s inimitable prose stands alongside that of many other talented writers, each with their own way of telling the remarkable story of the English-speaking peoples. The eminent editorial board set the bar high. None of these chapters will let you down.