Henry Thomas Buckle

Henry Thomas Buckle
Henry Thomas Buckle
Born	(1821-11-24)24 November 1821 Lee, London, England, UK
Died	Damascus, Syria
Nationality	British
Occupation	Historian, chess player

Henry Thomas Buckle (24 November 1821 – 29 May 1862) was an English historian, the author of an unfinished History of Civilization, and a very strong amateur chess player. He is sometimes called "the Father of Scientific History".

Early life and education

Buckle, the son of Thomas Henry Buckle, a wealthy London merchant and shipowner, was born at Lee in London (Kent County). His delicate health prevented him obtaining much formal education; he never attended university. However, he received a high degree of education privately, and the love of reading he felt as a child was given many outlets. He first gained distinction as a chess player, being known, before he was twenty, as one of the best in the world. In matchplay he defeated Kieseritsky and Loewenthal. After his father's death in January 1840, he inherited an ample fortune and a large library, and travelled with his mother on the continent (1840–1844). He had by then resolved to direct all his reading and to devote all his energies to the preparation of some great historical work. Over the next seventeen years, he is said to have spent ten hours a day on it.

Career

At first, Buckle planned a history of the Middle Ages, but by 1851 he had decided in favour of a history of civilization. The next six years were occupied in writing, altering and revising the first volume, which appeared in June 1857. It made its author a literary and social celebrity. On 19 March 1858 he delivered a public lecture at the Royal Institution (the only one he ever gave) on the Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge, which was published in Fraser's Magazine for April 1858, and reprinted in the first volume of his Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works.

On 1 April 1859, his mother died. It was under the immediate impression of his loss that he concluded a review he was writing of John Stuart Mill's Essay on Liberty with an argument for immortality, based on the yearning of the affections to regain communion with the beloved dead—on the impossibility of standing up and living, if we believed the separation were final. The review appeared in Fraser's Magazine, and is to be found also in the Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works (1872).

The second volume of Buckle's history was published in May 1861. In October, he left England to travel for the sake of his health. He spent the winter of 1861-62 in Egypt, from which he went over the deserts of Sinai and of Edom to Syria, reaching Jerusalem on 19 April 1862. After eleven days he set out for Europe by way of Beirut, but at Nazareth he developed typhoid fever, and later died at Damascus.

History of Civilization in England

Title page of the first edition of History of Civilization in England.

Henry Thomas Buckle at the age of 24

Buckle's fame rests mainly on his History of Civilization in England. It is a gigantic unfinished introduction, of which the plan was, first to state the general principles of the author's method and the general laws that govern the course of human progress—and secondly, to exemplify these principles and laws through the histories of certain nations characterized by prominent and peculiar features—Spain and Scotland, the United States and Germany. The completed work was to have extended to 14 volumes; its chief ideas are:

1. That, owing partly to the want of ability in historians, and partly to the complexity of social phenomena, extremely little had as yet been done towards discovering the principles that govern the character and destiny of nations, or, in other words, towards establishing a science of history
2. That, while the theological dogma of predestination is a barren hypothesis beyond the province of knowledge, and the metaphysical dogma of free will rests on an erroneous belief in the infallibility of consciousness, it is proved by science, and especially by statistics, that human actions are governed by laws as fixed and regular as those that rule in the physical world
3. That climate, soil, food, and the aspects of nature are the primary causes of intellectual progress,--the first three indirectly, through determining the accumulation and distribution of wealth, and the last by directly influencing the accumulation and distribution of thought, the imagination being stimulated and the understanding subdued when the phenomena of the external world are sublime and terrible, the understanding being emboldened and the imagination curbed when they are small and feeble
4. That the great division between European and non-European civilization turns on the fact that in Europe man is stronger than nature, and that elsewhere nature is stronger than man, the consequence of which is that in Europe alone has man subdued nature to his service
5. That the advance of European civilization is characterized by a continually diminishing influence of physical laws, and a continually increasing influence of mental laws
6. That the mental laws that regulate the progress of society cannot be discovered by the metaphysical method, that is, by the introspective study of the individual mind, but only by such a comprehensive survey of facts as enable us to eliminate disturbances, that is, by the method of averages
7. That human progress has been due, not to moral agencies, which are stationary, and which balance one another in such a manner that their influence is unfelt over any long period, but to intellectual activity, which has been constantly varying and advancing: "The actions of individuals are greatly affected by their moral feelings and passions; but these being antagonistic to the passions and feelings of other individuals, are balanced by them, so that their effect is, in the great average of human affairs, nowhere to be seen, and the total actions of mankind, considered as a whole, are left to be regulated by the total knowledge of which mankind is possessed"
8. That individual efforts are insignificant in the great mass of human affairs, and that great men, although they exist, and must "at present" be looked upon as disturbing forces, are merely the creatures of the age to which they belong
9. That religion, literature and government are, at the best, the products and not the causes of civilization
10. That the progress of civilization varies directly as "scepticism," the disposition to doubt and to investigate, and inversely as "credulity" or "the protective spirit," a disposition to maintain, without examination, established beliefs and practices.

Buckle is remembered for treating history as an exact science, which is why many of his ideas have passed into the common literary stock, and have been more precisely elaborated by later writers on sociology and history because of his careful scientific analyses. Nevertheless, his work is not free from one-sided views and generalisations resting on insufficient data.

John Camden Hotten

The pornographic publisher John Camden Hotten claimed that his series of flagellation reprints The Library Illustrative of Social Progress had been taken from Buckle's collection, but this was untrue, as reported by Henry Spencer Ashbee.

References

Notes

Bibliography

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: 

• See his Life by A. H. Huth (1880).
• See also Ian Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain, esp. Ch. 1 on "The Enlarging Horizon: Henry Thomas Buckle's Science of History".
• " Buckle, Henry Thomas". A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. Wikisource. 1910 

Further reading

• Dalberg-Acton, John Emerich Edward (1907). Historical Essays & Studies. London: MacMillan & Co., pp. 305–343.
• Coupland, William Chatterton (1890). "Henry Thomas Buckle." In: The Gain of Life, and Other Essays. London: T. Fisher Unwin, pp. 201–225.
• Robertson, John Mackinnon (1895). Buckle and his Critics: A Study in Sociology. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
• Semmel, Bernard (1976). "H. T. Buckle: The Liberal Faith and the Science of History," The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXVII, No. 3, pp. 370–86.
• St. Aubyn, Giles Rowan (1958). A Victorian Eminence: the Life and Works of Henry Thomas Buckle. London: Barrie.
• Stephen, Leslie (1880). "An Attempted Philosophy of History," The Fortnightly Review, Vol. XXXIII, pp. 672–695.
• Stephen, Leslie (1900). The English Utilitarians, Vol. III. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, pp. 344–375.
• Stirling, J.H. (1872). "Henry Thomas Buckle, His Problem and his Metaphysics" The North American Review, Vol. CXV, No. 236, pp. 65–103.
• Taylor, Helen (1872). "Biographical Notice." In: Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry Thomas Buckle, Vol. I. London: Longmans, Green & Co., pp. ix–lv.
• Wedgwood, Julia (1909). "Henry Thomas Buckley." In: Nineteenth Century Teachers and Other Essays. London: Hodder & Stoughton, pp. 362–370.

External links

• Works by Henry Thomas Buckle at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Henry Thomas Buckle at Hathi Trust
• Biography and quotes on Perceptions.com
• Entry on Encyclopedia.com