James Anthony Froude

Abstract

Abstract James Anthony Froude is among the most frequently cited but gravely misunderstood figures in Victorian intellectual life. Known in part by students of historiography, literary scholars, theological students, specialists in nineteenth‐century theories of race, imperialism, and education, and historians of Ireland, his life and thought have been fragmented, and the significance of his often provocative writings and actions has been seriously underrated and misconstrued. This book is an attempt to redress this neglect. The first study to attempt a coherent survey of Froude’s intellectual life from his early days as an Oxford enfant terrible, to his final years as a pillar of the establishment and unapologetic reactionary, the book is based upon a close and critical reading of all his published work and his unpublished correspondence, many of which have been newly discovered. It reveals an underlying consistency in Froude’s convictions which, despite the multiple voices he employed to address a wide variety of audiences, rested on a deep sense of personal ethical obligation, derived in part from the traumas of childhood, and from his acute understanding of the implications of the failure of Protestantism. It offers a series of original readings of some of Froude’s most controversial works—his early novels of doubt, his histories of England and Ireland, and his scandalously intimate biography of Carlyle. But it also points to some profound tensions in Froude’s moral outlook which were to lead him to take great risks in the presentation of his message, which ultimately threatened to undermine the thrust of even his finest work and his own standing as a public moralist.

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