New figures in our national story

In the first two volumes accompanying his History of Britain television series, Simon Schama had a clear framework in which to work. Essentially he told of the dynastic struggles of kings, queens and pretenders, adding a little bit of plague here and a touch of religious fervour there as and when it became necessary to discuss lesser mortals. In Professor Schama’s hands, the technique worked well, but there was no prospect that he could sustain such an approach in this third and final volume, covering the period between the dawn of an independent America and midnight’s false bonhomie on the Greenwich peninsula.

Instead, Schama had a few options. He could have followed a Marxist/materialist interpretation of the last two-and-a-quarter centuries, discerning the economic forces that drove change. Or he could have dusted the busts in the Whig pantheon, admiring the uniqueness of our parliamentary government. He might even have tried to combine these two schools, ending up with a wall chart of those acts of Parliament that raised the social and economic condition of the people to their current state of grace.

Happily he has avoided these possibilities, choosing instead to stick to his original strategy of telling British history through the collision of its personalities but widening the gene pool. The Jacobites having been dispatched, he switches from focusing on the players in the dynastic struggles to those thinkers and reformers who reflected or confronted their age. What is more, many of those he pays attention to – especially women like Mary Wollstonecraft, the mulatto nurse Mary Seacole or the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron – never merited so much as a mention when the national story was articulated by such past-masters as G. M. Trevelyan or Keith Feiling. Schama’s account, on the other hand, does not find space for George Canning, Cardinal Newman or the Earl of Shaftesbury.