Henry Thomas Buckle
Encyclopedia
Henry Thomas Buckle was an English
historian
, author of an unfinished History of Civilization.
merchant
and shipowner, he was born at Lee
in Kent
. His delicate health prevented him obtaining much formal education; he never attended university and was little at school. 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. 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.
At first he 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. Soon afterwards, 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
.
and Scotland
, the United States
and Germany
. The completed work was to have extended to 14 volumes; its chief ideas are:
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.
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
.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
, author of an unfinished History of Civilization.
Biography
The son of Thomas Henry Buckle, a wealthy LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
merchant
Merchant
A merchant is a businessperson who trades in commodities that were produced by others, in order to earn a profit.Merchants can be one of two types:# A wholesale merchant operates in the chain between producer and retail merchant...
and shipowner, he was born at Lee
Lee, London
Lee is a district of south London, England, located mostly in the London Borough of Lewisham and partly in the London Borough of Greenwich. The district lies to the east of Lewisham, one mile west of Eltham, and one mile south of Blackheath village...
in Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...
. His delicate health prevented him obtaining much formal education; he never attended university and was little at school. 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
Chess
Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...
player, being known, before he was twenty, as one of the best in the world. 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.
At first he planned a history of the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
, but by 1851 he had decided in favour of a history of civilization
Civilization
Civilization is a sometimes controversial term that has been used in several related ways. Primarily, the term has been used to refer to the material and instrumental side of human cultures that are complex in terms of technology, science, and division of labor. Such civilizations are generally...
. 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
Celebrity
A celebrity, also referred to as a celeb in popular culture, is a person who has a prominent profile and commands a great degree of public fascination and influence in day-to-day media...
. On 19 March 1858 he delivered a public lecture
Lecture
thumb|A lecture on [[linear algebra]] at the [[Helsinki University of Technology]]A lecture is an oral presentation intended to present information or teach people about a particular subject, for example by a university or college teacher. Lectures are used to convey critical information, history,...
at the Royal Institution
Royal Institution
The Royal Institution of Great Britain is an organization devoted to scientific education and research, based in London.-Overview:...
(the only one he ever gave) on the Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge, which was published in Fraser's Magazine
Fraser's Magazine
Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country was a general and literary journal published in London from 1830 to 1882, which initially took a strong Tory line in politics. It was founded by Hugh Fraser and William Maginn in 1830 and loosely directed by Maginn under the name Oliver Yorke until about 1840...
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
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
'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. Soon afterwards, he left England to travel for the sake of his health. He spent the winter of 1861-62 in Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
, from which he went over the deserts of Sinai
Sinai Peninsula
The Sinai Peninsula or Sinai is a triangular peninsula in Egypt about in area. It is situated between the Mediterranean Sea to the north, and the Red Sea to the south, and is the only part of Egyptian territory located in Asia as opposed to Africa, effectively serving as a land bridge between two...
and of Edom
Edom
Edom or Idumea was a historical region of the Southern Levant located south of Judea and the Dead Sea. It is mentioned in biblical records as a 1st millennium BC Iron Age kingdom of Edom, and in classical antiquity the cognate name Idumea was used to refer to a smaller area in the same region...
to Syria
Syria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....
, reaching Jerusalem on 19 April 1862. After eleven days he set out for Europe by way of Beirut
Beirut
Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon, with a population ranging from 1 million to more than 2 million . Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport, and also forms the Beirut Metropolitan...
, but at Nazareth
Nazareth
Nazareth is the largest city in the North District of Israel. Known as "the Arab capital of Israel," the population is made up predominantly of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel...
he developed typhoid fever
Typhoid fever
Typhoid fever, also known as Typhoid, is a common worldwide bacterial disease, transmitted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person, which contain the bacterium Salmonella enterica, serovar Typhi...
, and later died at Damascus
Damascus
Damascus , commonly known in Syria as Al Sham , and as the City of Jasmine , is the capital and the second largest city of Syria after Aleppo, both are part of the country's 14 governorates. In addition to being one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, Damascus is a major...
.
History of Civilization in England
Buckle's fame rests wholly 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,--SpainSpain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
and Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
, the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. The completed work was to have extended to 14 volumes; its chief ideas are:
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- That the advance of European civilization is characterized by a continually diminishing influence of physical laws, and a continually increasing influence of mental laws
- 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
- 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"
- 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
- That religion, literature and government are, at the best, the products and not the causes of civilization
- 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 HottenJohn Camden Hotten
John Camden Hotten was an English bibliophile and publisher.Hotten was born in Clerkenwell, London to a family of Cornish origins. He spent the period 1848–1856 in America and on his return opened a small bookshop in London at 151a Piccadilly, and founded the publishing firm later known as Chatto...
claimed that his series of flagellation
Flagellation
Flagellation or flogging is the act of methodically beating or whipping the human body. Specialised implements for it include rods, switches, the cat o' nine tails and the sjambok...
reprints The Library Illustrative of Social Progress
The Library Illustrative of Social Progress
The Library Illustrative of Social Progress was a series of pornographic books published by John Camden Hotten around 1872 . They were mainly reprints of eighteenth-century pornographic works on flagellation...
had been taken from Buckle's collection, but this was untrue, as reported by Henry Spencer Ashbee
Henry Spencer Ashbee
Henry Spencer Ashbee was a book collector, writer, and bibliographer, notorious for his massive, clandestine three volume bibliography of erotic literature written under the pseudonym of Pisanus Fraxi.-Life:...
.