The book’s premise is simple: Pepys and Evelyn were curious
individuals and keen observers of Restoration England, with diaries that
provide charming glimpses into a vibrant era. While this follows the typical
bourgeois-antiquarian pattern, it is also historically unjustifiable.
Pepys and Evelyn lived “through and after the greatest
social upheaval England had ever experienced.”² They were not mere floating
personalities in a timeless Restoration scene. Instead, they were actors—though
minor—who revealed much in the aftermath of the English bourgeois revolution.
To dismiss them as eccentric hobbyists, as Willes does, undermines their
historical significance and reduces the Restoration to a depoliticised space of
wigs, gardens, coffee houses, and domestic trivia. This shift is more than an
interpretive mistake; it is an act of ideological shaping.
The Academic Abdication: Class Removed, Revolution Denied
Modern historians have mostly set aside the Marxist ideas
that once fuelled serious research on the 17th century. Today, Christopher
Hill’s work—often seen as outdated by many scholars—still stands as the only
comprehensive framework for understanding that era. Hill showed that the mid-17th-century
crisis dismantled one social class’s dominance and installed another.³ This is
not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of historical fact.
Yet Willes, like her peers, writes as though the English
Revolution never occurred. The Civil War becomes background noise. The
Commonwealth is reduced to a curiosity. The Restoration is treated as a return
to normality rather than a class compromise forced upon a frightened
bourgeoisie. The Glorious Revolution is barely acknowledged as the culmination
of capitalist consolidation.⁴ This is not ignorance. It is avoidance.
Pepys and Evelyn: Not Curiosities, but Class
Representatives
Pepys was not a gossiping flâneur. He was a bureaucrat of
the capitalist state. His diary is saturated with the machinery of
empire—shipbuilding, naval contracts, colonial administration. As the
accompanying document notes, this was “the apparatus of a nascent capitalist
state projecting its power across the globe.”⁵ Pepys’s rise through the
Admiralty reflects the increasing importance of administrative competence in a
society transitioning from feudal personal rule to capitalist state
rationality.
Pepys exemplifies what Ellen Meiksins Wood has described as
the “political form of capitalist social relations,” in which the early modern
state becomes increasingly central to the organisation of economic life.⁶ His
diary reveals the emergence of bureaucratic rationality, contract management,
and logistical planning—key features of the developing capitalist state.
Evelyn was more than just a gentleman gardener; he was an
innovative scientist whose Sylva was created to fulfil the navy’s timber
needs. His interests in pollution, architecture, and horticulture mirrored the
bourgeoisie's rationalist ideals. As a Royal Society member, he played a key
role in shaping bourgeois science. Engels recognised this well: contemporary
science arose from the breakdown of the medieval worldview under the pressure
of capitalist progress.⁷ Willes perceives the Royal Society as a charming
assembly of inquisitive individuals, reflecting the commonplace liberal view.
However, in actuality, the Society served as a tool for maintaining class
dominance. Its focus on empirical research, experimentation, measurement, and
progress aligned with the interests of a growing capitalist elite. Fields such
as navigation, metallurgy, ballistics, forestry, and colonial mapping were not
merely genteel hobbies but the technical backbone of capitalist growth.⁸ To
present the Royal Society as an apolitical intellectual salon is to falsify its
historical function.
Bourgeois Antiquarianism: The Ideology of Contemporary
History Writing
Willes’s book exemplifies “bourgeois antiquarianism.”⁹ This
is not simply a methodological flaw; it is an ideological stance. It is the
refusal to acknowledge that history is shaped by class struggle. It is the
displacement of social conflict by personality, of revolution by anecdote, of
material forces by domestic interiors.
The World Socialist Website (WSWS) has criticised this trend
repeatedly, most recently in its appraisal of Lucy Worsley, whose work
“consistently displaces class antagonism, economic crisis, and mass political
struggle, fixating on monarchs, courtiers, domestic interiors and historical cosplay.”¹⁰
Willes belongs to the same school: history as entertainment, history as
escapism, history as depoliticised spectacle. This is not accidental. It
reflects the ideological needs of the present bourgeois order, which seeks to
naturalise itself by erasing the revolutionary processes that created it.
The Academic and Media Establishment: A Catalogue of
Evasion
Let us speak plainly. The contemporary historical
establishment has abandoned the English Revolution. It has abandoned class
analysis. It has abandoned materialism. It has abandoned the very concept of
historical causality. Worsley’s output—generously funded, heavily promoted, and
ever-present—embodies the essence of bourgeois-antiquarian kitsch. As the WSWS
pointed out, her work repeatedly shifts focus away from class conflict,
economic crises, and large-scale political struggles, instead emphasising
monarchs, courtiers, domestic settings, and historical cosplay.¹¹ Willes’s book
belongs to precisely this tradition: history as costume drama. Other historians
follow a similar path. One being David Starky.
Starkey’s extensive career has centred on the idea that
history is primarily shaped by monarchs, courtiers, and individual
personalities. He is widely known for his disdain for social history. His
impact has been damaging, as he contributed to fostering an intellectual
climate where a book like Willes’s could be published without shame.¹² Antonia
Fraser’s Restoration biographies are elegant but politically vacuous. They
treat the 17th century as a theatre of personalities rather than a battleground
of classes. Her approach has shaped public expectations of the period,
encouraging precisely the depoliticised reading Willes reproduces.¹³ Simon
Schama stands out as the most polished in the group, but his work ultimately
portrays a liberal-bourgeois narrative that highlights continuity, compromise,
and national identity. His perspective on the English Revolution is somewhat
vague and sentimental, and it sidesteps class analysis.¹⁴ He has helped
normalise the idea that the Revolution was a cultural moment rather than a
social rupture.
These historians are not purely neutral chroniclers but
ideological architects. Their influence has cultivated a cultural setting in
which the English Revolution is either minimised or overlooked, thereby
enabling Pepys and Evelyn to be seen as charming eccentricities rather than as representatives
of a burgeoning class consolidating its authority.
The shift from viewing history as heritage is more than a
cultural trend; it’s a political move. When historians avoid addressing class
issues, they make the past incomprehensible and the present fixed. This creates
a world where social conflicts vanish, revolutions are unthinkable, and the
bourgeoisie seems timeless. Pepys and Evelyn become mere charming curiosities
instead of symbols of a class whose victory transformed England and established
modern capitalism. Willes’s book isn’t just lacking; it reflects a wider
intellectual surrender.
Restoring History to History
It is time to say openly what many historians privately
acknowledge: the field has been intellectually captured by a bourgeois‑antiquarian
sensibility that is hostile to social analysis and allergic to class. The
English Revolution has been domesticated. Pepys and Evelyn have been
trivialised. The Restoration has been aestheticised.
A Marxist critique restores what Willes and her peers omit:
class, revolution, contradiction, and the emergence of the capitalist state.
Pepys and Evelyn were not eccentric diarists. They were functionaries and
intellectuals of a class consolidating its power after a revolutionary
upheaval.
Their diaries are not curiosities. They are instruments of
history. Contemporary historians who refuse to confront this reality are not
writing history. They are producing ideology.
Footnotes
- For
the concept of “heritage history,” see Robert Hewison, The Heritage
Industry (London: Methuen, 1987).
- Previous
Draft, p. 2.
- Christopher
Hill, The English Revolution 1640 (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1940), 7.
- J.
H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725
(London: Macmillan, 1967).
- Previous
Draft p. 3.
- Ellen
Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1999).
- Friedrich
Engels, Dialectics of Nature (1883).
- Steven
Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
- Previous
Draft p. 4.
- WSWS,
“Lucy Worsley and the Politics of Heritage History,” accessed 2024.
- Ibid.
- See
David Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII (London: Vintage, 2002).
- Antonia
Fraser, King Charles II (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979).
- Simon
Schama, A History of Britain: The British Wars 1603–1776 (London:
BBC Books, 2001).
