The Sound of Stubbs *
Robert Brentano · 2023
“The biscuit is certainly exceedingly dry; but at any rate there are no weevils in it,” Lytton Strachey wrote, praising slightly one “scientific” historian that he might more thoroughly attack another. 1 Strachey’s amusing, contorted, perceptive, and sometimes ignorant burlesques of Victorian behaviour have lost favor; but they remain, more brightly outlined and self-mocking versions of common prejudices. Certainly the belief that the “scientific” historians produced dry biscuit is still commonly held even among those who one would suppose had read them; and the belief is probably held more clearly and widely about William Stubbs than about either Man-dell Creighton or S. R. Gardiner, because as an historian his name is more eminent, more people have heard of him, or more people who have heard of him know that he is a “scientific” historian from the authoritative, the “dry” period. He was born in 1825 and died in 1901.