Gertrude Himmelfarb

• Born: August 8, 1922
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: December 30, 2019
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

American historian and philosopher

Biography

Gertrude Himmelfarb, one of the most renowned intellectual historians of her generation, grew up in New York City. She studied history and philosophy at Brooklyn College, where she earned a BA in 1942. That same year she married the writer and editor Irving Kristol, with whom she had two children, William and Elizabeth. Himmelfarb pursued further studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Girton College, Cambridge, and at the University of Chicago, where she studied with Louis Gottschalk, a historian of the French Revolution and biographer of the Marquis de Lafayette. Gottschalk, who had himself studied under Carl Becker at Cornell University, offered his students rigorous and demanding seminars on historical method. Himmelfarb earned a PhD in 1950, and she revised her dissertation on Lord Acton for publication two years later.

Himmelfarb went on to teach at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where she was named Distinguished Professor in 1978. In the 1960s Himmelfarb produced intellectual biographies of noted Victorians and essays on key Victorian topics such as Darwinism and parliamentary reform. Many of these were published as parts of anthologies or in The New York Review of Books. After extensively revising some of these essays, she republished them in Victorian Minds, the book that fully established her reputation as an intellectual historian. This work included two very different sketches of Sir Edmund Burke, one denigrating him as a philosopher and another, written a decade later, praising his work in this field; a comparison of these two essays reveals how Himmelfarb’s thought evolved. Victorian Minds includes a new view of John Stuart Mill’s life, as well, arguing that for much of it he was dominated by Harriet Taylor, his intellectual soulmate and, eventually, wife. Himmelfarb also reveals a previously ignored aspect of Jeremy Bentham, his advocacy of the “Panopticon,” a bizarre and frightening model for prisons and poorhouses that never became a reality. Victorian Minds concludes with essays about the role of evangelicalism in the formation of the Victorian mentality and on the Reform Bill of 1867.

After Victorian Minds Himmelfarb continued her work on the intellectual history of the Victorian age and broadened its scope by discussing how it related to social issues of that era and her own. She expanded her previous work on Mill and published it in 1974 as On Liberty and Liberalism. She then examined how Victorians reflected on the plight of the less fortunate in her next major work, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age. Here, Himmelfarb discusses how Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus viewed the poor, and how Malthusian thinking, which treated political economy as a science freed from the constraints of moral philosophy, shaped the controversial Poor Law Reform of 1834. Himmelfarb notes that the reaction against this reform came from both the conservative and radical camps. She concludes the book with an examination of how Friedrich Engels viewed the poor in his works and how Charles Dickens and Benjamin Disraeli treated them in their novels.

Like Victorian Minds, The Idea of Poverty is well researched and splendidly written. Though no popularizer, Himmelfarb, through her excellent style, gained an audience extending beyond specialists in her field and the academic world itself, and her works were widely reviewed.

After retiring from the City University of New York in 1988, Himmelfarb moved to Washington, DC, where she continued to write and publish. In 1991 she gave the Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). That year, an issue of the NEH journal, Humanities, was dedicated to discussion of her work. She then published On Looking into the Abyss and The De-Moralization of Society, both of which tie the history and thought of Victorian England to social problems of Himmelfarb’s own day. In these works Himmelfarb expresses concern about the decline of morals and virtue in public life, a concern echoed in One Nation, Two Cultures. The latter book, however, aroused much controversy as yet another entry in the “culture wars” of the 1990s in her division of American society into a virtuous, republican strain and a liberal, counterculture strain.

Himmelfarb's first two works published in the twenty-first century focus more on morality, with 2004's The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments comparing and contrasting the philosophies of Enlightenment thinkers in the United Kingdom, France, and early America, highlighting what she saw as the moral sentiment that characterized British and American Enlightenment thinking, and 2006's The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling, which is a collection of previously published essays considering the moral perspectives of various prominent figures such as novelist Jane Austen and politician Winston Churchill. In her 2009 book The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, Himmelfarb examines why the British author, who was not Jewish, decided to center her last fictional work, Daniel Deronda (1876), around the concept of Jewish national identity. After publishing The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, from Cromwell to Churchill (2011), she published her final book, Past and Present: The Challenges of Modernity, from the Pre-Victorians to the Postmodernists, in 2017.

Himmelfarb received many awards for her work. She was granted honorary degrees by Rhode Island College (1976), Smith College (1977), Lafayette College (1978), and the Jewish Theological Seminary (1978). She was chosen a fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of American Historians. She served on the editorial boards of numerous journals, including the American Historical Review and the American Scholar, and she served on the board for the National Endowment of the Humanities and on the Council of Scholars for the Library of Congress. In 2004, she received the National Humanities Medal.

Himmelfarb died of congestive heart failure in Washington, DC, on December 30, 2019, at the age of ninety-seven.

Author Works

Nonfiction:

Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics, 1952

Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, 1959

Victorian Minds, 1968

On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill, 1974

The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, 1984

Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians, and Other Essays, 1986

The New History and the Old, 1987

Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians, 1991

On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society, 1994

The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, 1995

One Nation, Two Cultures, 1999

The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, 2004

The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 2009

The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, from Cromwell to Churchill, 2011

Past and Present: The Challenges of Modernity, from the Pre-Victorians to the Postmodernists, 2017

Bibliography

Beum, Robert. “Gertrude Himmelfarb on the Victorians and Ourselves.” Sewanee Review 105, no. 2 (1997): 260-267. Review essay assessing the reissue of Victorian Minds in the light of the evolution of historical theory over thirty years.

Boxwell, D. A. “Kulturkampf, Then and Now.” War, Literature, and the Arts 12, no. 1 (2000): 122-136. Comments on One Nation, Two Cultures, along with other books, in the context of “culture wars.”

Dintenfass, Michael. “Truth’s Other: The History of the Holocaust, and Historiographical Theory After the Linguistic Turn.” History and Theory 39, no. 1 (2000): 1-20. Densely theoretical article that addresses the historiographical assumptions implicit in Himmelfarb’s writing, along with several other historians.

Feuer, L. S. “Gertrude Himmelfarb: A Historian Considers Heroes and Their Historians.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 23, no. 1 (1993): 5-26. Analyzes Himmelfarb’s history of philosophy.

Hollahan, Eugene. “Himmelfarb’s Culture of Poverty and Hopkins’s ‘poor Jackself.’” Clio 25, no. 1 (1995): 43-62. Uses Himmelfarb’s writings on Victorian attitudes toward poverty to analyze the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Humanities 12 (1991). An NEH publication; the entire issue is devoted to Himmelfarb.

Martin, Douglas. "Gertrude Himmelfarb, Conservative Historian of Ideas, Dies at 97." The New York Times, 31 Dec. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/books/gertrude-himmelfarb-dead.html. Accessed 28 Aug. 2020.

Tuttleton, James W. “Rehabilitating Victorian Values.” Hudson Review 48, no. 3 (1995): 388-397. Review of The De-moralization of Society.