George Sidney Roberts Kitson Clark (14 June 1900 – 8 December 1975)[1] was an English historian, specialising in the nineteenth century.

Historian

George Kitson Clark was educated at Shrewsbury School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He lived the life of a bachelor don as Fellow of Trinity from 1922 to 1975. He was Reader in Constitutional History from 1954 to 1967.[2]

He is known as a revisionist historian of the Repeal of the Corn Laws.[3][4][5] G. D. H. Cole identified a "Kitson Clark" school of historians revising the assessment of the Anti-Corn Law League and the Chartists.[6] He delivered the Ford Lectures in 1959–60, speaking on "The Making of Victorian England".

Jack Plumb, who disliked Kitson Clark, describes him as a reformer of the History Tripos[7] and obstacle to Lewis Namier,[8] with various swipes.

Family

He was the son of the engineer Edwin Kitson Clark and brother of Mary Kitson Clark.[9] His paternal grandfather was E. C. Clark, Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Cambridge.[1]

Works

  • Guide for Research Students Working on Historical Subjects (1958)
  • Making of Victorian England (1962)
  • Peel and the Conservative Party (1964)
  • An Expanding Society: Britain 1830-1900 (1967)
  • The Critical Historian (1967)
  • Churchmen and the Condition of England 1832–1885 (1973)
  • Portrait of an Age (1977) editor

References

  • Robert Robson (editor) (1967), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in honour of George Kitson Clark

Notes

  1. 1 2 "Clark, George Sidney Roberts Kitson (1900–1975), historian". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 10 January 2013. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31317. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (1980), p. 197.
  3. G. S. R. Kitson Clark, The Electorate and the Repeal of the Corn Laws, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Ser., Vol. 1, 1951 (1951), pp. 109-126.
  4. G. Kitson Clark, Hunger and Politics in 1842, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 25, No. 4 (December 1953), pp. 355-374.
  5. E. Sreedharan, A Textbook of Historiography, 500 B.C. to A.D. 2000 (2004), p. 249.
  6. Paul A. Pickering, Alex Tyrrell, The People's Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (2000), p. 4.
  7. J. H. Plumb, The Making of An Historian I, p. 164-5.
  8. Plumb, pp. 98-9.
  9. Obituary, Mary Kitson Clark
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