A tribute to Roy Porter, one of the greatest historians of our time
Roy Porter died tragically young in his mid-50s. This month he would have been 75, and deserves a tribute as one of Britain’s outstanding post-war historians.
Porter was part of that extraordinary generation of British historians born in the 1940s, that included Quentin Skinner, Ian Kershaw, Simon Schama, Linda Colley and many, many more. More specifically, he was one of that group of historians who studied with JH Plumb at Christ’s, Cambridge. Perhaps what he learned most from Plumb was a clear, accessible style. Porter wrote on some arcane subjects, but he always reached out to the general reader and was a gifted media performer and journalist as well as academic historian.
Porter was astonishingly prolific. Starting with the publication of his PhD thesis, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain, 1660–1815 (1977), a subject he taught as a special subject at Cambridge in the late 1970s, he wrote or edited over a hundred books in little more than twenty years. This was on top of a heavy teaching load, first at Cambridge, then at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. He didn’t seem to need any sleep. His appetite for work was voracious.
Porter’s range was equally astonishing. He wrote on the history of science, on the history of medicine and madness, on the Enlightenment and on social history. He wrote popular works on the history of London and English Society in the 18th century, as well as authoritative works like The Cambridge History of Medicine. More important, he was part of the new wave of social history in the late 20th century, opening up new areas of historical inquiry, perhaps especially, in the history of medicine and madness, often seen from the patients’ point of view. He was part of that generation who were influenced by the French historian of ideas, Michel Foucault, but mixed this influence with a robust British empiricism, clear writing style and a keen eye for metaphor and imagery.
The centre of his preoccupations, from his PhD, was the long 18th century. At his memorial service, his long-time colleague Michael Neve mentioned how many copies of Tristram Shandy Porter possessed. Porter wrote on Gibbon and the Enlightenment, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Disease, Medicine and Society in England: 1550-1860 and, my own favourite, a brilliant book, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency. This book is typical of Porter at his best, moving effortlessly from the history of confinement, including the rise of the early asylums, to the history of mad-doctors and, above all, the historical context of madness in Georgian England. A particularly brilliant section explores how the new emphasis on reason was, in part, a reaction to the huge upheavals of the mid-17th century and the Glorious Revolution, when political and religious zeal became stigmatised as a form of madness. The breadth of learning is impressive: it synthesises the scholarship on the subject, drawing effortlessly on a 40-page bibliography.
Porter thought big. He was a key figure in the reinvention of the long 18th century, his books were full of fascinating detail, but never lost sight of the larger picture: the making of geology, the rise of the asylum, the history of medicine during the Enlightenment. He was no mere monograph man. In Mind-Forg’d Manacles he makes clear his subject will include “political pressures, reorientations of religious temper, new philosophies of mind and medical researches.”
All this was written with a healthy scepticism. When he started at the Wellcome, the history of medicine and psychiatry was still dominated by a Whiggish story of progress: medicine and psychiatry got better and more humane, conquering illness and psychiatry, part of a larger story of progress. Porter undermined this Panglossian view, showing that such progress was often more a story of politics and social change than scientific improvement and that, tragically, there were often many casualties along the way. He was equally sceptical, though, of the excesses of the anti-psychiatry movement and the myths of the new historians of psychiatry. There was no “Age of Confinement”, as Foucault’s followers insisted. The totals of the confined in the early modern period “remained miniscule.” Different countries had very different experiences; France was no model for what had happened in England. Generalisations must be treated with caution. “Pre-19th century practice was characterised by diversity and individualism.”
Roy Porter was a kind and generous teacher, a warm and humane man, and one of the great historians of our time.
