When I was a teenager in the early 1990s, one of my teachers told me to read Orwell’s essays in the hope—forlorn, at least in the short term—that doing so might prompt me to rein in my prose. I liked them very much, and remember being struck by their demolition of a historian named Christopher Hill, whose account of the 1640s in England was, for Orwell, spoiled by its doctrinaire Marxism: “If no man is ever motivated by anything except class interests, why does every man constantly pretend that he is motivated by something else?” A year or two later, another teacher directed me to Hill’s The Century of Revolution as extra reading for my A-level work on the civil wars and interregnum; fortified by Orwell and some half-understood passages of Hugh Trevor-Roper, my engagement with this material was probably not of the kind that he had anticipated.
I read no more Hill for a while, but when researching a doctorate that had much to do with radical ideas about language in the mid-17th century, I had cause to return to him in earnest. This time, I was struck by Hill’s deep scholarly accomplishment. The volume, detail and synoptic vision of his work were just this side of incredible. There was, however, much to argue with. Nobody could describe a book like Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution as straightforwardly Marxist, but after several hundred pages in Hill’s company one is invariably left with the impression that a dazzling assortment of facts has been presented to suit a thesis—rather than a thesis having been crafted to illuminate the facts. (Compare and contrast this with the experience of reading Hill’s greatest pupil, Keith Thomas.)
Perhaps dwelling on all of this seems self-indulgent. I do so because my encounters with Hill seem to me emblematic of his changing status. A prominent public intellectual in the 1960s and 1970s, he remained the dernier cri for politically committed schoolteachers through the 1980s and into the 1990s. But by the time the new millennium was a few years old, he was yesterday’s man—of interest only to specialists and a rump of those on the hard left. Michael Braddick’s admirable new biography, Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian, seeks to put this right—and to recover Hill for the 2020s.
In some respects, Hill’s formation was typical. Arriving at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1931 from a well-to-do family of Yorkshire Methodists, Hill found that his religious beliefs were unequal to personal, interpersonal, political and geopolitical realities as he was coming to see them. Hill was drawn to communism but, unlike many others, it was not in response to the conditions of working-class life in the industrial north or to the threat of Francoist fascism in Spain. Instead, he became a communist after visiting the Soviet Union in 1935 and 1936 and concluding that it was a model of political, cultural and sexual “authenticity”.
Travel between Christianity (equality before God) and communism (equality between men) goes in both directions, but for Hill communism was more than an assurance that the past, present and future of human history were shaped by an order of progressive truth—and more even than an assurance that avowed communists were on the right side of this history. In Braddick’s words, the crucial factor was that communism provided Hill with a “a harmony of head and heart, a means of both personal and societal renewal”. Renouncing the dissenting faith of his upbringing was one thing, but abandoning the feelings of righteousness that went along with it would have been quite another. Perhaps this is why, when Hill came to leave the party in May 1957, it was not on account of the Holodomor, the purges great and small, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the postwar subjugation of central and eastern Europe by Velikaya Rus or any of the other brutalities for which you might condemn the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes. Rather, it was because he felt curtailed in his freedom to debate such matters with his comrades.
Communism provided Hill with a ‘a harmony of head and heart, a means of both personal and societal renewal’
On returning to the UK in 1936, then, Hill committed himself to two causes: communism and an academic career. After a couple of years teaching in Cardiff, he returned to Balliol. In 1940, he published the long piece—“The English Revolution 1640”—that would arouse Orwell’s ire (tellingly, Hill regarded Orwell’s attack on it as “wicked”) and joined the army’s Intelligence Corps. He was, in due course, promoted to major before being seconded to the Foreign Office with a view to improving Anglo-Soviet relations. Once the war was over, he resumed his Oxford fellowship and rose to become master of Balliol from 1965 to 1978. Painful though 1957 undoubtedly was, it opened the door to what would become three and a half decades of remarkable scholarly productivity: the energies that had gone into the communist struggle were redirected to the 17th century.
The early 1960s saw two books and countless reviews in the London weeklies, as well as several BBC broadcasts. Things slowed down for a few years after Hill assumed the mastership of his college, but another four monographs appeared in the 1970s. These included biographies of Cromwell and Milton and what may be his most enduring work, The World Turned Upside Down (1972). His emphasis here was less on Marxist schematics than on the recovery of voices from below: the Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Quakers and others who advanced radically non-hierarchical visions of social, political, sexual and religious order during the 1650s. Hill continued churning out books, essays and opinion pieces in the same vein until his health began to fail in the mid-1990s, even as the cultural climate turned hostile to his way of doing things.
There is much to enjoy in this book. Braddick does excellent work disentangling Hill from the attempts—ignorant, scurrilous or both—that have been made to suggest he was a wartime Soviet agent. Braddick also has Hill’s corner more broadly. There is no shortage of colourful detail, not least on the young Hill’s Lawrentian attitudes towards sex. The problems, such as they are, have their origins in the nature of the materials with which Braddick had to work. Hill left no personal archive, only a professional one, and Braddick’s preface tells us that “what follows therefore is more an intellectual life than a biography”.
In fact, the life he has written is almost exclusively documentary: one that is bound to the traces of Hill’s time on Earth as they happen to have been preserved on paper, and that shows vanishingly little interest in thinking beyond them. Given that Braddick’s first five chapters are extremely personal, this might seem an odd thing to say. But, with few exceptions (most notably, a bundle of love letters now in the Bodleian), these chapters’ intimacy is the gift of MI5: after travelling to the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, Hill was on their radar. His file, now in the National Archives, contains surreptitiously made copies of his correspondence, transcripts of bugged phone calls and the observations (generally quite perceptive) of the officers charged with monitoring his activities. Once Hill left the party, he was no longer of interest to MI5, and consequently the remainder of Braddick’s biography suffers. It describes the publication and reception of Hill’s books, the challenges of college governance at a time of student unrest and social change, the unpleasantness of historiographical debate in the 1980s and so on. Hill is, of course, present in all of this, but there is little or no sense of what it meant to him—of what was at stake for him in confronting the challenges of the day.
Braddick cleaves so assiduously to his sources that he seldom pauses to consider the bigger picture
A certain failure of biographical intelligence also mars the earlier chapters. Braddick cleaves so assiduously to his sources that he seldom pauses to consider the bigger picture. Some of this is straightforward. Had Braddick read more Leavis and Eliot he would have been better able to account for the distinctive features of Hill’s conversion to communism. But there are places in which I began to think that his perspective had gone fundamentally awry. The chapter that describes Hill’s turmoil as he abandoned communism contains page after page describing the before, during and after of the split. Then, towards the end, we are told in passing that “in August 1957 the Hills were involved in a tragic car accident near Doncaster, in which their eleven-month-old daughter Kate was killed”. Two pages later, Hill is quoted reflecting that he and his second wife were, as would-be parents, going to have to “start again”. In response, Braddick contents himself with the observation that “following their resignations from the party they were also, in a way, starting again politically”.
I suspect that Hill’s MI5 file does not have much to disclose about the crash or how Hill and his wife felt in its aftermath. But Hill was a man committed to “a harmony of head and heart”. His anguish at losing his baby daughter cannot simply have been an analogue of his discomfort at leaving the party; it must have helped to shape the path that he would follow over the decades to come. His biographer, howsoever intellectual or documentary his focus, ought to be able to say something about this.
