A golden age?

Simon Schama's call for historians to walk in the paths of "Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle" has prompted a number of thoughtful responses from The Invisible Adjunct, Timothy Burke and Kieran Healy. I'm all for more narrative history and good popular history in general, but...shouldn't a golden age have more than three golden people in it? In my more A. O. Lovejoy-ish moments, I feel vaguely skeptical about attempts to define trends by their most spectacular exemplars. It's a long fall from Gibbon (and David Hume and William Robertson) to William Alexander the Younger. It's an equally long fall from Macaulay to Charles Knight or Harriet Martineau. (Martineau has plenty of virtues, but her History of the Thirty Years' Peace doesn't really qualify as thrilling prose narrative.) J. R. Green has nearly vanished from the collective historiographical unconscious. Let's not go near Agnes Strickland* (and I'm speaking as someone who has written about Strickland). Moreover, despite being written almost entirely outside the academy, nineteenth-century scholarly history is not necessarily reader-friendly; the leading figures are usually competent enough as prose stylists, but they aren't really engaged in novelistic or, as in Carlyle's case, epic storytelling. J. A. Froude, John Lingard, E. A. Freeman, S. R. Gardiner, Connop Thirlwall, George Grote, Henry Hallam, Thomas Arnold, Henry Hart Milman, J. R. Seeley, A. P. Stanley, James Mill, William Stubbs, Archibald Alison, W. E. H. Lecky...these writers certainly commanded respect across a wide spectrum of educated readers, but they weren't attempting to compete with fiction in the literary marketplace (as Macaulay was) or even trying to make a living (as Carlyle was).** And their sense of scholarly community would have been far different, given that so many of them were either gentlemen of independent means--the novelist, essayist and occasional historian Margaret Oliphant wrote an interesting article for Blackwood's about just this point--professionals, or clergymen.*** Lower down the scale, much nineteenth-century popular history works parasitically off the backs of the major figures listed above--I say "parasitically," since there's a whole lot of plagiarism going on. No doubt much to his amazement, Hume the atheist keeps getting resurrected. At the same time, anyone who reads through the various critical reviews soon realizes that there's quite a bit of very technical work going on, especially in ecclesiastical history and classics, almost none of which would have appealed to anyone other than specialists in the same field.****

In other words, I'm not sure that the nineteenth century really possesses any more--or, for that matter, any fewer--historians with truly "popular" appeal. (And what do we mean by "popular"? Did John Q. Public enthusiastically read Carlyle's French Revolution? How many historians were in the same position as Stephen Hawking--bought to be shown off on the coffee table, not read?) Take a look, for example, at the current catalogue of the History Book Club, which features a combination of full-time academics with crossover appeal and full-time writers trying to make a living. That being said, I think that there's a real discrepancy between current academic interests and the popular demand for military history, especially WWII and the Civil War.

*--Actually, Strickland casts an interesting shadow over contemporary popular women's history. She's a kind of "bad foremother" figure for writers like Antonia Fraser.
**--Another actually: actually, it's a bit puzzling that nobody has mentioned just how many of those historians wore their political intentions on their sleeves; in fact, the major quarterlies and other literary journals often reviewed people like Macaulay or Froude according to expressly political criteria. Indeed, Stubbs argued that the study of modern history (a term with far more chronological expansiveness in his usage than in ours) was inescapably politicized. I'm not sure where I'm going with this point, other than to note that in our own age of hypersensitivity to political "agendas," it's a bit odd not to mention that nineteenth- (and eighteenth- ) century historians had similar issues.
***--While looser than our contemporary academic communal structures, this "open" community still came with all sorts of political pitfalls and no-go areas, especially if you were a clergyman-scholar.
****--As readers of this blog have noticed, I'm interested in Victorian religious fiction, especially historical novels. If you use the novelists as a barometer for "which ecclesiastical historians were popular," you'd come up with a sampling of writers who were, by and large, so far off the cutting edge as to be occupying the nearby cutting board; the only contemporary historian who appeared with any recognizable reliability was the Calvinist J. H. Merle d'Aubigne, a real evangelical shibboleth.