In 1980, the Clarendon Press published the first volume of a projected multi-volume biography of the Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s foreign minister who is often blamed for France’s catastrophic defeats in the Seven Years’ War, and therefore for a major share of the governmental failures of the Ancien Régime which precipitated the French Revolution in 1789. Weighing in at over 1,100 pages, the appearance of this extraordinary door-stopper of a book seemed to promise a monumental reassessment of Choiseul’s life and significance. But no other volume ever appeared. The author, Rohan Butler, a distinguished civil servant, died before completing another one. And the hubris of the exercise is probably demonstrated by the subtitle of the one volume which did appear, Father and Son, 1719-1754. Choiseul’s first diplomatic appointment was in 1753. He died in 1785. Butler’s vast effort dealt only with Choiseul’s life up until the start of his political and diplomatic career.
I’ve often thought about this sobering example of scholarly over-ambition. And I was reminded of it again recently, when papers came into my hands which displayed a similar failure to realise a project which had become hopelessly over-extended. When my friend Jim Garrard, Precentor at Ely Cathedral, died suddenly last December, he had the papers of Alan Stephenson, church historian, in his possession. Stephenson, who died in 1984, is probably best known as the historian of the first Lambeth Conference, and of Anglican Modernism. He was certainly able to finish books – he published three. He died at the height of his scholarly career, at the age of 56, leaving behind an unfinished biography of Charles Longley, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1862 to 1868, and the convening Archbishop for the first Lambeth Conference of 1867. No biography of Longley had ever been written, not even the standard two-volume Victorian ‘life and letters’ hagiography, so Stephenson was on to something.
Longley was a significant figure in the mid-Victorian Church of England. He deserved – deserves – serious assessment, and Stephenson was seemingly well placed to produce that. He seems to have begun work on Longley sometime in the late 1950s, before he became a staff member of Ripon Hall, a theological college of a Liberal reputation, which later merged with Cuddesdon. He did actually produce a BLitt thesis of some 290 pages in 1960, covering Longley’s tenure of the See of Ripon (the Oxford SOLO catalogue has this as an MLitt, but I presume it was subject to the usual seven-year ‘enhancement’). Longley was the first Bishop of Ripon. The diocese, created in 1836, included Leeds and other rapidly-industrialising communities of West Yorkshire. So this was a great opportunity to study how one, new diocese responded to the challenges the Church of England faced in industrial and modern urban conditions. Stephenson’s thesis is a significant piece of work in its own right, based on a very thorough trawl through national, diocesan and local archives. It is a pity he did not publish it largely as it stood, as it would have made a valuable monograph, appearing as it could have done hard on the heels of Ted Wickham’s pioneering (if flawed) account of the churches in Sheffield, Church and People in an Industrial City (1957), and before the explosion of the social history of religion and industrialisation in the 1960s and 1970s. But he didn’t do that. Instead he seems to have conceived of a much bigger project, a full critical biography of Longley, plugging the gap in the Victorian historiography, and (presumably) taking account of rapid advances in historical methodology and argument.
He had already gathered a lot of material in the course of his BLitt research, and clearly he thought he could add to that. Around the time he was working on his BLitt, he was lent a large collection of Longley papers by a descendant, a Bishop Wilfrid Parker (1883-1966; he was a grandson of Longley through the maternal line), who seems to have let him have them on the understanding that they would eventually go to Lambeth Palace. So, fortified by this good luck – any historian will tell you that having a lot of the relevant papers directly to hand in your own study rather than a library is a real boon – he got to work. And how he worked. He copied out in full the papers he had to hand, in large notebooks, in huge spidery handwriting. He did the same with the Longley papers which had been put in the archive at Lambeth when Longley died. He then seems to have started typing out in full – again – the letters and papers he had already copied out by hand. The work went on for years, presumably in-between other projects after an initial period of concentration. He collected a vast amount of material on Longley’s family background and early years. He took his BLitt thesis, split it into two, then bound each half interleaved with blank pieces of paper so that he could add to or revise his thesis. Fresh pieces of evidence were pasted into the two volumes. When photocopying became possible – I think sometime in the 1960s – he began to photocopy sources too.
In the end he accumulated over one hundred files and notebooks, replicating sources in full in hand-written and typed form, compiling huge lists of individuals under various headings, and adding to it all copious amounts of press cuttings. I worked out that he had used at least four different classification systems for all this, not one however approaching anything like completeness for all his papers, so far as I could see. And was there a draft of the biography, even an incomplete one? No, not really. There are some fifteen pages in a file marked ‘text’ which appear to cover a small portion of the family background, although they are numbered from 107 to 122 and so suggest there may have been another one hundred plus pages written merely on the family. Of course, in the middle of all of this, Stephenson did at least produce his books on the Lambeth conferences. Those were evidently a by-product of his research. In fact, the research on Longley enabled him to complete an Oxford DPhil in 1964, on the first Lambeth Conference, which became the book for which he is probably best known when it was published in 1967, largely unchanged from the thesis. This was a not inconsiderable achievement.
But the biography remained elusive. It’s true that Stephenson died relatively young, and that he might well have gone on to produce the biography he’d been planning for thirty years, had he lived longer. But I think he got stuck, somehow. Think about the chronology I’ve mentioned already. Stephenson produced his BLitt thesis on Longley’s tenure of the See of Ripon in 1960, when he was 32, and his DPhil thesis on the first Lambeth Conference in 1964, when he was 36. In other words, he had already completed work on two of the most important aspects of Longley’s career by then. The momentum was there, surely, to roll on and complete an authoritative survey of Longley’s life and work. But that didn’t happen. Why, I have no idea. Other things certainly got in the way – his teaching, his pastoral work, his directing of the Lambeth Diploma in Theology, which he did for fourteen years until his death, doubtless other things. He had cancer at the end, that much I know. But I suspect there was another reason, too. His method of working was exhaustive. He seems not to have compiled notes as such, highlighting particular, selected points for use in the writing as most of us would have done, but to have copied out sources in full, by hand and then by typing. He also then corrected his typed copies of letters. The few pages of text on family background which have survived suggest a monster work, Butler/Choiseul-like, swollen out of all proportion to the subject matter. I suspect he began to lose all sense of perspective, and to find that it was difficult, if not impossible, to re-immerse himself in the vast pile of material he was building up when he did find those times for study in the midst of a busy life. There’s a Borges short story – I’m grateful to Alec Ryrie for pointing this out to me – called ‘On Exactitude of Science’, a satire on historical explanation which posits the idea of a cartographical practice so determined to capture everything that it produces a map on a scale of 1:1, which is of course completely useless. The idea in turn builds on a jest of Lewis Carroll. Alan Stephenson somehow – at least so it seems to me – had so much material to hand he had lost the ability to stand back from it and to make a judicious selection of it. Historical writing is a foray into the art of judgement. Even when the evidence for something is very compelling, almost invariably it has to be summarised and abbreviated before anything can be made of it. A life – and I’m firmly of the view that biography is but a branch of history – in all its complexity and plenitude has to be streamlined and condensed to be written.
But the Stephenson story doesn’t end there. After his death, his widow hung on to his papers. But sometime in the early 1990s, so far as I can tell, she approached Geoffrey Rowell, at that point still Chaplain of Keble College, to ask what she should do about the unfinished biography (which, as we’ve seen, probably didn’t really exist in any usable form). Geoffrey was then supervising Jim Garrard’s doctoral research on William Howley, Longley’s predecessor but one. Jim would have been approaching the end of his research, and Geoffrey apparently suggested that he might take on the project after completing his thesis. So all the papers came Jim’s way. He already had them when we overlapped at Westcott House in 1992-3 (I went to Westcott in 1990), and I was green with envy, thinking what a gift it would be to have all this material to hand for another research project. Little did I know. Jim’s excellent doctorate was eventually to appear in print as the first, and so far only, critical scholarly study of Howley, an important figure in nineteenth-century Anglicanism. And he did begin to work through some of the Stephenson papers. He wrote the entry on Longley for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He signed a contract with a publisher for a volume on Longley in a book series on the Archbishops of Canterbury. But Jim too was a busy man, with a demanding and successful pastoral and then cathedral ministry. I wonder if he held on to the papers with the thought that a biography of Longley might be a retirement project?
By 2004 Jim clearly had concluded that writing on Longley was not an imminent project, and that the original papers in his possession – the nineteenth-century material – should go to Lambeth Palace Library. He took the precaution of photocopying it all, so that he had his own set of copies – that’s why I think he hadn’t given up on the idea of returning to the project some day. But his sudden death in December last year prevented that. And that’s how I came to see what the Stephenson papers comprised, for Jim’s widow Ros asked me what should be done about them, and I offered to contact Lambeth Palace Library to see if they would be interested. At that point I assumed that the papers would consist almost entirely of Stephenson’s own notebooks and files, and that it might be a moot point whether the Library really wanted them. So I worked through them, drawing up a rough list, which is how I came to see what they really contained, and to get a sense of Stephenson’s working method. That’s when I started to make other discoveries. In amongst the files were some 150 original nineteenth-century letters and papers, including over 30 letters to Longley from members of the royal family (including Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales) during his tenure of the See of Canterbury, and a dozen letters from five different Prime Ministers, as well as many letters from and to members of Longley’s family. These were all scattered through the files and notebooks. I do not know if Jim was aware of their existence. Nor do I know why they weren’t handed over to Lambeth in 2004 with the main body of material. So far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything there that would fundamentally change generally settled views of Longley’s archiepiscopate. But there were some important letters, and it was quite startling to find that these had been in Stephenson’s possession (perhaps on loan from Wilfrid Parker) without, presumably, anyone else – especially at Lambeth – knowing of their existence. The letter Lord Palmerston, the PM, sent to Longley on 24 September 1862, when he was Archbishop of York, offering him the See of Canterbury was one. It reads, simply, ‘My dear Lord, I have been authorized by The Queen to offer you the Archbishopric of Canterbury and I hope it may be agreeable to you to accept that important post. Yours faithfully, Palmerston.’ The brevity, casualness and seeming secularity of that is striking, to me, and it smacks of all we know of Palmerston’s view of religious matters. The letters from, or on behalf of, the Queen were equally interesting, including a sequence in which she tried, via the Dean of Windsor, to persuade Longley to have a marriage service shortened to spare her nerves – this was five years after Albert’s death. The most moving letters were those Longley sent to his family on his death bed.
Well, all these are now at Lambeth, as they should be. It’s such a pity Jim didn’t get to do more work on Longley; with the requisite time, he would have done a superb job, as he did with Howley. But now someone else one day – when this fresh instalment of papers has been properly catalogued – will have the opportunity to start again on a study of Longley. It’s possible – this is why the Stephenson papers are important even apart from the nineteenth-century original letters – that amongst Stephenson’s copies are things which the Library is unaware of, and for which no original survives. That’s why they have to be worked through carefully. But I don’t for one moment think that a future biographer can simply pick up where Stephenson left off. For me, the lesson of this is always to keep an eye firmly on the intended final text, and not to get sidelined into amassing material needlessly.
Ad fontes 