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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 May 2014
This article examines the figure of Boudica (or Boadicea), with a specific focus on Thomas Thornycroft's Westminster Bridge statue, and on the work of the seventeenth-century antiquary, Edmund Bolton. By synthesizing historiography which investigates the idea of ‘historical culture’ in the modern and early modern periods, this article attempts to bridge chronological and generic divisions which exist in the study of the history of history. It argues that to fully understand the genealogy of popular historical ideas like Boudica, it is imperative that historians of such subjects take a longue-durée approach that situates individual artists and writers, and the historical-cultural works they produce, within their broader political, cultural, and social contexts while simultaneously viewing these works as part of a long, discursive process by which the past is successively reinterpreted. As a consequence, this article eschews an analysis of Boudica which labels her an ‘imperial icon’ for Victorian Britons, and argues that the relationship between contemporary context and the re-imagined past is not as straightforward as it might initially appear.
I wish to express my gratitude to Ludmilla Jordanova, Colin Kidd, Peter Mandler, Ian McBride, Paul Readman, the attendees and organizers of the Modern British History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, and the anonymous reviewers at the Historical Journal. I am especially grateful to Leeds Museums & Galleries, Henry Moore Institute for access to the papers of the Thornycroft family, collection reference 1986.4; to the Churchill Archives in Cambridge for access to the papers of William Bull (BULL 2/12, Churchill Arcvhies Centre); and to the staff at the London Metropolitan Archives.
1 Birmingham Mail, 18 Jan. 1898.
2 The illustrated magazine Black and White carried an artist's impression of Victoria's visit as its cover image on 5 Mar. 1898.
3 For a discussion of the evolution of Boudica's name see Jackson, K., ‘Queen Boudicca?’, Britannia, 10 (1979), p. 255CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I will use ‘Boudica’ except when referring to Thornycroft's name for his statue or otherwise quoting from original sources.
4 Thornycroft, E., Bronze and steel: the life of Thomas Thornycroft, artist and engineer (London, 1932)Google Scholar. There is no recent biography of Thornycroft but see M. Stocker, ‘Thornycroft, Thomas, 1815–1885’, Oxford dictionary of national biography (ODNB), online edn, Oct/ 2006, www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/view/article/27369, accessed 5 Nov. 2013.
5 Tacitus, Annals, histories, agricola, Germania, trans. A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb (New York, NY, 2009), pp. 313–16. For Dio Cassius, see E. Cary, ed., ‘Epitome of Book LXII’, Dio's Roman history (London, 1961), viii, pp. 83–105.
6 Kendrick, T. D., British antiquity (London, 1950), ch. 6Google Scholar.
7 For example, Webster, G., The British revolt against Rome ad 60 (London, 1999)Google Scholar; Sealey, P. R., The Boudican revolt against Rome (Princes Risborough, 2004; 1st edn 1997)Google Scholar.
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11 Warner, M., Monuments and maidens: the allegory of the female form (London, 1985), p. 51Google Scholar.
12 Ibid. For a similar perspective see Hingley and Unwin, Boudica: Iron Age queen, pp. 147–74. Hingley and Unwin also use this phrase, ‘imperial icon’, as the title for their chapter on Boudica's Victorian reputation. The idea of ‘inventing’ figures such as Boudica owes much to Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T., eds., The invention of tradition (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar.
13 Macdonald, S., ‘Boadicea: warrior, mother, myth’, in MacDonald, S., Holden, P., and Ardener, S., eds., Images of women in peace and war: cross-cultural and historical perspectives (Basingstoke, 1987), pp. 40–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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15 For an overview of this process in the Victorian period, see Levine, P., The amateur and the professional: antiquarians, historians and archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar. On the English Historical Review, see Howsam, L., ‘Academic discipline or literary genre: the establishment of boundaries in historical writing’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 32 (2004), pp. 529–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On history in universities, see Slee, P., Learning and a liberal education: the study of modern history at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, 1800–1914 (Manchester, 1986)Google Scholar.
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17 For Scott, see Rigney, A., Imperfect histories: the elusive past and the legacy of romantic historicism (London, 2001), pp. 13–58Google Scholar. For the quality of mid-nineteenth-century historical culture and the growing sense of distinction between ‘romantic’ and ‘scientific’, see Mandler, P., ‘“In the olden time”: Romantic history and English national identity, 1820–1850’, in Brockliss, L. and Eastwood, D., eds., A union of multiple identities (Manchester, 1997), pp. 78–92Google Scholar; Mitchell, R., Picturing the past: English history in text and image, 1830–1870 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 34–55Google Scholar.
18 Hesketh, Science of history, p. 2.
19 There have been few studies of broader historical culture in eighteenth-century Britain, but see Phillips, M. Salber, Society and sentiment: genres of historical writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Brien, K., ‘The history market’, in Rivers, I., ed., Books and their readers in eighteenth-century England: new essays (London, 2003), pp. 105–33Google Scholar. See also Hicks, P., Neoclassical history and English culture: from Clarendon to Hume (Basingstoke, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which provides useful insight and sensitive commentary on the content and intellectual context of eighteenth-century histories. Okie, L., Augustan historical writing: histories of England in the English Enlightenment (Lanham, MD, 1991)Google Scholar, seeks to unmask the political biases of individual authors and has little to say on questions of historical development.
20 In Boudica's case, a debate raged around Richard Glover's production, Boadicia, a tragedy, which debuted at David Garrick's Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1753. Glover's play followed the broad arc of Boudica's story as it was known, but with imaginative additions. For opinion in Glover's favour, see Pemberton, H., Some few reflections on the Tragedy of Boadicia (London, 1753)Google Scholar. For a more critical view of Glover's innovations, see anon., Female revenge or the British Amazon: exemplified in the life of Boadicia (London, 1753)Google Scholar.
21 Readman, P., ‘The place of the past in English culture, c. 1890–1914’, Past and Present, 186 (2005), pp. 147–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 For a more extensive, but by no means exhaustive, study of historical pageants, see Yoshino, A., The Edwardian historical pageant: local history and consumerism (Tokyo, 2010)Google Scholar. For later twentieth-century pageants, see Freeman, M., ‘“Splendid display, pompous spectacle”: historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain’, Social History, 38 (2013), pp. 423–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Mitchell, Picturing the past.
24 Melman, B., The culture of history: English uses of the past, 1800–1953 (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar.
25 For a discussion of the idea of erudition and its relationship to historical knowledge in England during the early modern period see Woolf, D., ‘Erudition and the idea of history in Renaissance England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987), pp. 11–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Fussner, F. Smith, The historical revolution in English historical writing and thought, 1580–1640 (London, 1962)Google Scholar; Peardon, T. P., The transition in English historical writing, 1760–1830 (New York, NY, 1966; 1st edn 1933)Google Scholar; Levy, F. J., Tudor historical thought (San Marino, CA, 1967)Google Scholar; Butterfield, H., Man on his past: a history of historical scholarship (London, 1969)Google Scholar; Levine, J. M., Humanism and history: origins of modern English historiography (Ithaca, NY, 1987)Google Scholar; Woolf, D. R., The idea of history in early Stuart England: erudition, ideology and the ‘Light of Truth’ from the accession of James I to the Civil War (London, 1990)Google Scholar. All of the above focus on the Tudor and Stuart periods, with varying degrees of interest shown in European intellectual trends and their impact on English history writing. For a wide-ranging survey of history's development from antiquity, see the excerpts and discussion in Kelley, D. R., ed., Versions of history from antiquity to the Enlightenment (London, 1991)Google Scholar. Levine, J. M., The autonomy of history: truth and method from Erasmus to Gibbon (Ithaca, NY, 1999), pp. 3–24Google Scholar, provides an interesting discourse on when and how ‘history’ became distinguishable from fiction.
27 Woolf, D. R., ‘Disciplinary history and historical culture: a critique of the history of history: the case of early modern England’, Chromohs, 2 (1997), p. 2Google Scholar, www.cromohs.unifi.it/2_97/woolf.html, accessed 12 Oct. 2011.
28 William Cowper's poems were among the most widely read in nineteenth-century Britain. See Clair, W. St, The reading nation in the Romantic period (Cambridge, 2004), p. 207Google Scholar.
29 For the life of Hamo Thornycroft, see Manning, E., Marble and bronze: the art and life of Hamo Thornycroft (London, 1982)Google Scholar.
30 Read, B., Victorian sculpture (London, 1982), pp. 49ffGoogle Scholar, relates the difficulties of working as a sculptor in Victorian Britain. Sculptors’ materials were expensive and a sculptor could waste years modelling figures that never saw the light of day, let alone received commissions.
31 All letters refer to Leeds Museum & Galleries (Henry Moore Institute Archive), papers of the Thornycroft family (collection reference: 1986.4). Thomas Thornycroft (TT) to W. B. Dickinson (WBD), undated, but certainly written in March or early April of 1851, T II-C (TT) 2.
32 TT to WBD, 15 Nov. 1851, T II-C 152/1–2. The original review appeared in the Times, 15 Apr. 1851. Thomas Thornycroft's reading of its subtext may or may not have been accurate, but the review itself was excoriating.
33 Stocker, ‘Thornycroft, Thomas 1815–1885’, ODNB online edn.
34 TT to WBD, 15 Nov. 1851, T II-C 152/1–2.
35 Read, Victorian sculpture, pp. 297–8.
36 Thornycroft, Bronze and steel, p. 53. A ‘Memorial of British sculptors’ appeared in the Daily News, 31 May 1856, which expressed dismay at the perceived prejudice against British sculptors and pleaded that public commissions be granted only after fair, open, public competitions had been held. Thomas Thornycroft was among the signatories.
37 TT to WBD, 15 Nov. 1851, T II-C 152/1–2.
38 Ibid.
39 Getsy, D., ‘Introduction’, in Getsy, D., ed., Sculpture and the pursuit of the modern ideal in Britain, c. 1880–1930 (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 1–10Google Scholar. Others have shown this tension between the ideal and the real characteristic of ‘national’ sculpture in Britain, as early as 1840. See M. Greenwood, ‘Victorian ideal sculpture’ (D.Phil. thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1998), ch. 1.
40 W. M. Rossetti, ‘British sculpture: its conditions and prospects’, Fraser's Magazine (Apr. 1861), pp. 493–505, at p. 503. See also F. T. Palgrave, ‘Historical art in England’, Fraser's Magazine (June 1861), pp. 773–80.
41 TT to WBD, 26 June 1860, T II-C(TT) 22.
42 Priddle, L., The history of the ‘Boadicea group’ (London, 1902)Google Scholar.
43 Hoselitz, Imagining Roman Britain, p. 36 n. 34. Hoselitz does not provide a source for this report.
44 Manning, Marble and bronze, p. 38.
45 TT to WBD, 10 June 1859, T II-C (TT) 21.
46 TT to WBD, 26 June 1860, T II-C (TT) 22.
47 TT to WBD, n.d. (Mar. 1861), T II-C (TT) 102.
48 TT to WBD, 9 Apr. 1861, TT464. Emphasis in original.
49 TT to WBD, n.d. (Mar. 1861), T II-C (TT) 102.
50 Times, 21 July 1871.
51 Quoted in Manning, Marble and bronze, p. 62.
52 E. I. Carlyle, ‘Thornycroft, Sir John Isaac (1843–1928)’, rev. A. G. Jamieson, ODNB, online edn, 2004, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36512, accessed 8 Nov. 2013. Townsin, A., Thornycroft (Hersham, 2001)Google Scholar, gives a history of Thornycroft's engineering firm and Boudica's small part in it.
53 Townsin, Thornycroft, p. 9.
54 The suggestion was first raised in July 1894, see London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), London County Council, Presented Papers, LCC/MIN/08818, 11 July 1894. All LCC documents refer to the LMA collections.
55 Parks and Open Spaces Committee, North-West District Subcommittee Minutes, LCC/MIN/08738, 3 Oct. 1894.
56 North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 23 Oct. 1894. For Read's life, see D. M. Wilson, ‘Read, Sir (Charles) Hercules (1857–1929)’, ODNB online edn, May 2012, www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/view/article/35693, accessed 5 Nov. 2013.
57 Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London, 15 (22 Nov. 1894), pp. 233–55, at p. 241.
58 Morning Post, 2 Nov. 1894.
59 Townsin, Thornycroft, p. 9.
60 There is no biography, or even ODNB entry, for William Bull, but his son wrote an entertaining memoir of his father's later career as MP and paterfamilias. See Bull, P., Bulls in the meadows (London, 1957)Google Scholar.
61 This story is related in a letter to the Times from William Bull, Times, 2 Mar. 1896, as part of an appeal for public subscriptions.
62 Letter from Singer and Sons to William Bull, 28 Sept. 1896, Bull papers, 2/12, Churchill Centre, Cambridge.
63 General Purposes Committee, Presented Papers, LCC/MIN/06323, 22 Dec. 1896.
64 Singer and Sons to William Bull, 28 Sept. 1896, Bull papers, 2/12.
65 Times, 2 Mar. 1896; it was also printed in the Globe, 29 July 1896.
66 Echo, 19 Jan. 1898.
67 Morning Post, 19 Jan. 1898.
68 London Argus, 22 Jan. 1898.
69 Highway Committee, signed minutes, LCC/MIN/06726, 10 June 1902.
70 Hingley and Unwin, Boudica: Iron Age queen; Warner, Monuments and maidens, pp. 47–51; MacDonald, ‘Boadicea’, p. 53.
71 Irish Independent, 18 Jan. 1898.
72 For a discussion of ‘facts’ and history in the seventeenth century, see Shapiro, B., A culture of fact: England, 1550–1720 (London, 2000) pp. 34–62Google Scholar.
73 D. Woolf, ‘Bolton, Edmund Mary’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2800, accessed 20 Nov. 2012.
74 Bolton's most intriguing work was a study of historical practice entitled Hypercritica or a rule of judgment for writing or reading our histories, begun as early as 1596 and finally published in Nicolai Triveti Annalium continuation … Edmundi Boltoni Hypercritica (Oxford, 1722), pp. 193–242.
75 It is not possible to engage with the importance of Lipsian Neostoicism in Jacobean England in any depth here, but see Salmon, J. H. M., ‘Stoicism and Roman example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 50 (1989), pp. 199–225CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCrea, A., Constant minds: political virtue and the Lipsian paradigm in England, 1583–1650 (London, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the role of the works of Tacitus in its development, see Burke, P., ‘Tacitism’, in Dorey, T. A., ed., Tacitus (London, 1962), pp. 149–71Google Scholar.
76 Bolton, E., Nero Caesar; or monarchie deprav'd (London, 1624), p. 151Google Scholar. Emphasis in original.
77 Ibid., p. 143.
78 Ibid., pp. 132–3.
79 Ibid., p. 131.
80 Ibid., p. 146.
81 The manuscript had been held for some years at the Guildhall, causing confusion. It is now at the London Metropolitan Archives, CLC/270/MS03454.
82 Bolton, Nero Caesar, pp. 181–4. He reiterated this point in a poem, London, King Charles his Augusta, or, City Royal (London, 1647), often attributed to William D'Avenant, but certainly Bolton's. See Blackburn, T. H., ‘Edmund Bolton's “London, King Charles His Augusta, or City Royal”’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 25 (1962) pp. 315–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This conjecture about Stonehenge would have embroiled Bolton in a prominent antiquarian debate of the period. Inigo Jones famously surveyed the monument at the behest of James I and declared it of Roman construction. See Jones, I., The most notable antiquity of Great Britain, vulgarly called Stone-Heng, on Salisbury Plain (London, 1655)Google Scholar. Antiquarian opinion remained divided throughout the ensuing centuries. For the best modern account, see Hill, R., Stonehenge (London, 2008)Google Scholar.
83 Read's notebooks are held in the British Museum's Prehistory and Europe Department study room.
84 Mela is Pomponius Mela, whose The Chorography dates from around the time of Claudius's invasion of Britain in 43 ad. Little is known about the man or the work, but see Romer, F. E., Pomponius Mela's description of the world (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially ch. 1.
85 Bolton, Nero Caesar, p. 171.
86 MacDonald, ‘Boadicea’, p. 53.
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