history appeared and sold in serious numbers his career took off.
His more significant publications had started very slowly partly because of his frustrated dalliance with novel-writing; partly because of his distractingly anguished love life of the 1930s; partly because of what he always called “the wasted war years”; and partly because, when he finished his Penguin history of the eighteenth century in early 1948, there was such a chronic post-war paper shortage that it was not published until 1950.
After those initial delays, there was an explosion of publications. For in spite of all his college commitments, Jack proved to be a most productive researcher and a hugely prolific publisher.
By the time of my undergraduate days in Cambridge he had had a hand in eight separate publications. Books, articles and reviews had started to pour from his pen. When he supervised me in the mid-1950s he was mainly preoccupied with his forthcoming first volume on Walpole and rightly so because it was that project which established him as a significant scholar. He gave it to me to read in page proof, saying “this has already been checked in galleys and in page proofs by experts”, but said that it might be a salutary experience for me to realise how meticulous one has to be in preparing a major history book for publication. It did teach me one important lesson: errors are far more likely to slip through the net in the most unlikely places. When I handed back the final page proofs just before they were to be sent to the printers, I was able to tell him that his title page announced the publication of “Sir Robert Wallope”. My last minute contribution may have been very tiny but I used to boast that it saved him from a lot of gleeful mockery from reviewers.
It was good to be reminded of the amount of meticulous attention to detail that was involved in those years of prolific publication. All his work for the next quarter of a century was written in long hand, then typed, then corrected and re-typed, then corrected in galleys, and then corrected in page proofs. It makes it all the more impressive that between 1950 and 1973, he produced twenty-three books and that does not include the twenty-one books that he edited – the nine volumes he edited and introduced for The History of Human Society or the four volumes he edited and introduced for Signet Classics or the eight volumes of the Fontana History of Europe that he edited in those years. These were the decades when he was at the height of his powers and this was the period when he published his two great volumes on Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman (1956), Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister (1960), his Penguin History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1950), his life of Chatham (1953), his study of The First Four Georges (1956), his Ford Lectures on The Growth of Political Stability 1675-1725 (1967) and The Death of the Past (1969). These are the books that made his scholarly reputation, but Plumb wanted to be more than simply a scholar. He wrote to be read, and hungered to reach a large audience and it was with The Renaissance (1961) and in particular with Royal Heritage (1977), which sold 250,000 copies in its first edition, that he did so. These two books sold in massive numbers and together with his collected essays – Men and Places (1963), In the Light of History (1972), The Making of a Historian (1988) and The American Experience (1989) – established him as one of the few English historians to reach a wider public.
He must surely be the only British historian for whom the American flag was flown from the flagpole of the American Capitol by express request of the President of the United States after a unanimous vote in Congress on 20th of August 1991. It was flown to mark his 80th birthday. It was a remarkable tribute to an English historian’s ability to carry the lessons of history to a wide American public and, in doing so, to do so much to foster Anglo-American relations.
He loved the freedom his American journalism offered him. It gave him the opportunity to expatiate on whatever topic took his fancy and the fact that he chose to pontificate on many of his rivals’ chosen territory only added to their fury and resentment. The idea of this widely read, highly literate historian musing interestingly on a great range of centuries, societies and subjects was not popular in the world of narrow academic professionalism in England. So Plumb writing on China or India or Africa, or sounding off on slavery and the American Constitution, or speculating on sex and childhood and the family, or cheerfully propounding the virtues of Fanny Hill and Lucretius, all proved intolerably provocative to many of his more narrowly gifted colleagues back in Cambridge.
It did not help that he was only too happy to discuss their manifold shortcomings in print. He seemed delighted to do so. Where a critic such as Cyril Connolly managed to sound elegantly regretful when he described reviewing books as “the thankless task of drowning other people’s kittens”, Jack gleefully described the task as “the noble and necessary duty to slaughter other people’s sacred cows”. Since he did so in memorable prose, his words of condemnation and mockery were much and lovingly quoted – most especially, of course, to those who had been most mercilessly mocked.
He opened his review of UNESCO’s “History of Mankind” with the following words: “I don’t often wish I were as rich as Paul Getty. Today I do. I want to buy time on every commercial radio and TV from Patagonia to the North Cape, to hire sky-writing planes in all the world’s capitals, to take pages of advertising in all the world’s press, just to say how awful, how idiotic is this second volume of UNESCO’s projected six-volume “History of Mankind”.
Of the editor of what he called “this appalling volume”, he wrote “Luigi Pareti seems to have been a scholar of monumental incompetence” with “a mind of startling silliness”. Of the illustrations he wrote, “The illustrations are as bad as the book; ill-chosen, ill-arranged and ill-produced, they would have been shameful 50 years ago”. Of the book as a whole he wrote, “What is so infuriating is not the vast waste of money and time but that such a signal failure should be possible in a history of one of the most exciting dramatic and important epochs in the life of man. This is neither history nor encyclopaedia, but an incoherent stream of detritus, hacked out of a score of pedestrian textbooks”. There was much more in the same vein about the three-quarter of a million words composed at huge expense by an international team of scholars overseen by “ancient and learned men” such as Joseph Needham, Bertrand Russell and the deceased Ernest Barker who “tottered at the world’s expense, to Mexico City or New Delhi to sit in solemn conclave in proliferating committees to plan the un-plannable or comment on the unreadable”. In a single review, Jack must have managed to enrage a tidy proportion of the world’s leading scholars. They were dismissed with near contempt. Even less palatably, they were memorably mocked as being boring, hugely incompetent and profoundly silly.
And there were plenty more reviews of the same ilk and the same ire from the same intrepid reviewer. It did not make for universal popularity.
It did, however, make for a certain welcome notoriety. It did not do his editorial ambitions any harm comprehensively to clear the field of most of his eminent rivals. It did not do his ambition to become an academic guru any harm to denounce the grand old men of the profession as superannuated incompetents completely out of touch with current scholarship and research. So Jack was increasingly in demand to pontificate on the nature of history and he was only too eager to do so. He wished to spread his wings and to explore new areas of historical interest.
He did much to encourage those willing to engage in exciting new historical disciplines.
Plumb’s major long-term scholarly standing will surely rest securely on his work as a political historian of “the long eighteenth century”. His great biography of Walpole has already stood the test of nearly fifty years’ scrutiny and has still not been bettered; his Penguin history survived as the best general introduction to eighteenth-century England for forty years until it was finally surpassed by the work of Roy Porter (Plumb perceptively chose Porter to be his last supervision pupil whilst he was still formally in charge of History at Christ’s); and his Ford lectures have permanently changed our attitudes to late Stuart and early Georgian England.
But Plumb recognised very early in his career that other historical disciplines were increasingly coming to the fore. He wrote in Studies in Social History (which he edited in 1955) that “social history, in the fullest and deepest sense of the term, is now a field of study of incomparable richness and the one in which the greatest discoveries will be made in this generation. Its purpose has long ceased to be merely evocative”. His prediction has long since been borne