This morning’s activities demonstrate some of the difficulties of “rabbit hole” research. This is searching that starts from a single point, and ends up going off into different trails. Sometimes it leads to enlightening information or interpretations. Other times it doesn’t.
This began with (Chrome! Show full history!) an email announcing new history book reviews in Cercles: Review Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone (that’s me, unfortunately). In particular, this review caught my eye: The Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 by Sir David Cannadine, reviewed by Charles Giovanni Vanzan Coutinho of New York. In the last paragraph, the reviewer says that near the end of the book
“…Sir David brings the reader to the late Victorian era, in which the dominant political figure was Lord Salisbury, whose important essay in the Quarterly Journal in 1883, suitably titled ‘Disintegration’, the author explicates for the reader as providing a leitmotif of the entire era: one in which the one-time certainties and confidence of the high-Victorian period no longer seemed to be true…”
Well, this sounded like something I should read, a leitmotif for the entire era I’m studying. Damned handy, I thought.
So I tried a search for “disintegration salisbury” on DuckDuckGo and Google search. Only two links, one to an article in The Spectator, but I couldn’t access it because I’m not a subscriber (more’s the pity, but it’s too expensive to post to the U.S.). The other was a reference, so I tried Google Scholar with “lord salisbury disintegration 1883”) and got the full reference from another paper:
Salisbury, Lord, ‘Disintegration’, Quarterly Review, Vol. 156, 10 1883, p. 594
but not the paper itself. Two more articles referencing it were also blocked by paywalls. I tried my college library, EBSCOHost and JSTOR, and only a couple of articles referenced it, neither of which had a better citation than this.
One reference said the article is in another book, Paul Smith’s Lord Salisbury on Politics. Tried Google Books. It was here but there is no preview, search, or ebook. Tried Amazon to Look Inside. Nope, on this one you cannot look inside.
So I tried my old standby for old journals, Hathi Trust, and found several sets of full-text listings. I tried the first one, 1883. Not in the first one, then I realized that was only through summer, and ended before page 594 anyway. “10” might be October. Tried the second one, found an item that included page 594 and was October 1883. It said “Disintegration” at the top. But then I went up to the first page of the article (dreading that it was so long since once can only print one page at a time). Here’s what I found:
Well, that doesn’t say Lord Salisbury. Was his name W.E. Forster? Who is that?
No trace of a W.E. Forster by Googling or on DuckDuckGo. Tried another set of Quarterly Review for 1883. Same thing.
So I started tracking down Lord Salisbury. His name was Robert. Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, aka Lord Robert Cecil and at one point Viscount Cranborne. He would become Prime Minister two years after this article. In photos he looks rather humorless. According to Wikipedia, Paul Smith’s book describes him as depressive, neurotic, and competitive, among other quirks. Everyone said he wrote “Disintegration”. Except my primary source.
So I tried The Spectator again. In the flash of the article before it was blocked by the paywall, I saw something that suggested that there is no doubt that Salisbury wrote it. That might imply there should be some doubt. How frustrating!
So I tried a trick. I got my screen capture program ready, then clicked again on the article and took a quick snap before the paywall came up. So devious. I got:
Ridiculous. Deceitful. I feel so bad. Not.
Soooo…it looks like the W.E. Forster is a deceit. Rather, conceit. I do love Victorian writers, but in periodicals important people (or not very important, like HG Wells writing as Septimus, or complainers about Cambridge writing as Cambridgensis) often use assumed names.
Back to the article. It’s very long. It has things in it that might be useful to my research, and even more useful to our current times, such as “Hack phrases are a dangerous snare to an age too hurried and too busy to think” (p. 566). Salisbury was conservative, but liked America: “The Constitution of the United States was framed by men, deeply mistaken, as we think, in that they were hostile to monarchy, but yet fully sensible of the dangers that attended the democracy that they chose…” (p 568). He liked the empire, and was fearful that elements in England at the time, including the expansion of the franchise and political solutions for Ireland, would end it entirely.
He thinks educating the working man was dangerous, at least as it was being done (p 358):
I would certainly put the invention of “race” as a calm teaching of science that corresponds with dangerous passions.
But for me, what’s here is not so much a lietmotif of the era, as one for the Tory position of the era, clearly articulated but not of much help. I keep my tracking, so if I do suddenly need a Tory explication of empire and conservatism by a future PM I know where it is.
And that’s a morning doing research. Many times, things are not what one expects. And sometimes it’s quite difficult to follow the rabbit.
