C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Critical and Biographical Introduction
By John Richard Green (1837–1883)
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His health was fast breaking under the strain of his parish work; and this, combined with the growing spirit of skepticism, induced him to withdraw from active clerical work and accept an appointment as librarian at Lambeth, where he was able to give much of his time to historical study. He had at first planned a treatise on the Angevin kings, but was urged by his friends to undertake something of wider scope and more general interest. Accordingly he set to work on his ‘Short History of the English People.’ The task before him was difficult. He wished to make a book that would entertain the general reader and at the same time be suggestive and instructive to the scholar, and to compress it all within the limits of an “outline,”—a term usually associated with those bare, crabbed summaries which are sometimes inflicted by teachers upon the young and defenseless, but are avoided by general reader and scholar alike. How far he succeeded appears from the fact that with the exception of Macaulay’s work, no treatise on English history has ever met with such prompt and complete success among all classes of readers. The vivid, picturesque style made it exceedingly popular, while the originality of method and of interpretation won for it the praise of men like Freeman and Stubbs. As to its accuracy, there is some difference of opinion. When the book first came out (1874), sharp reviewers caught the historian in many slips, usually of a kind not to affect his general conclusions, but serious enough to injure his reputation for accuracy. Most of these errors were corrected in later editions, and are not to be found in the longer ‘History of the English People’ (4 vols.), which contains the material of the earlier work in an expanded, but as some think, in a less interesting form.
His next work was in a field in which none could refuse him credit for original research. The ‘Making of England,’ dealing with the early part of the Anglo-Saxon period, and the ‘Conquest of England,’ which carried the narrative down to 1052, show extraordinary skill in handling the scanty historical materials of those times. He was at work on the ‘Conquest’ at the time of his death, which occurred in 1883. During the last years of his life his illness had frequently interrupted his work; and but for the aid of his wife in historical research as well as in the mechanical labor of amanuensis, he would not have accomplished what he did. As it is, his friends regard his actual achievements as slight compared to what his talents promised had he lived. Still, these achievements entitle him to a high place among modern historians. In accuracy he has many superiors; but in brilliancy of style, in human sympathy, and above all in the power to make the past present and real, he has few equals. “Fiction,” he once said, “is history that didn’t happen.” His own books have the interest of novels without departing in essentials from the truth.
Besides writing the works above mentioned, he issued a selection of ‘Readings from English History’ (1879), and wrote with his wife a ‘Short Geography of the British Isles’ (1881).