The Age of Asa

‘Better than playing Philadelphia’, said W.C. Fields when faced with the terrors of death; and in the world of the historian we often see a similar trepidation about audience and the unknowable ‘general reader’. Asa Briggs neither felt, nor approved of, the fear. He spent a long life in trying to reach ‘the layman’ who, he thought, should not have to face difficult intellectual challenges when reading their histories. He trod this path, moreover, while remaining a professional and retaining the accolade of his peers: a signal achievement within a community always ready to patronise people who are able to communicate. This collection of essays celebrates that communication and amounts to a second Festschrift intended for Lord Briggs’s ninetieth birthday. It prints contributions to a one-day conference at the Institute of Advanced Study in London and owes its appearance and shape to the former Director, Miles Taylor. Briggs chose provincialism as a badge of honour. Always uncomfortable in Oxford, despite his time as a Tutorial Fellow and Provost of Worcester College, and content never to have resided in London, he left his imprint on three institutions: Leeds, Sussex and the Open University. The contributors to this volume reflect his orientation. Only one is based in Oxford, only one in London (apart from the editor), but each of the institutions Briggs dominated has an essay devoted to it, as does Australia (where he spent a formative moment), with others representing Briggs’s commitments: broadcasting and labour history. Strongest intellectually is James Raven’s valuable account of Briggs’s inspiration in a third domain, the early history of the book (triggered by Briggs’s commission to write the history of Longmans), though Raven’s footnotes in French and German prompt questions about his inspiration’s lack of them. (Why did Briggs remain so persistently Anglophone until his late commission to write the history of Haut-Brion?) Two other pieces dare to propose criticism. Martin Hewitt’s impressive analysis of Briggs’s relation to ‘Victorian Studies’, a capitalised field which Briggs could reasonably claim to have invented, is a model for a volume of this kind: controlled structure and scholarship married to a refusal to genuflect. Hewitt sees that ultimately Briggs failed, here as elsewhere, to overcome the ‘disciplinary divides’ that he believed to be meretricious. A different critique inhabits Malcom Chase’s immersion in the archives surrounding Leeds academic politics during Briggs’s tenure of the Modern History chair (such a pity that David Lodge was wasted on Rummidge) which shows Briggs battling impatiently against the forces of evil until he became too bored, frustrated and absent to persist, only to watch reversion-to-type triumphing in the succession to his chair. Other contributions have their insights and are well informed, but often feel as though the elephant is in the room, eavesdropping on what they have to say. They also repeat one another, which becomes irritating. Briggs did not set out to light up the sky with wit: the small catalogue of startling quotations invites wearisome duplication

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