The History of England, Volume 1 by Peter Ackroyd - review

"Like Scrooge, Henry VII … tried to protect himself with a wall of money," Ackroyd says, reminding us that he is the biographer of Charles Dickens. And this is just the sort of popular history of which Dickens would approve. Ackroyd takes us from the mysterious prehistoric tribes who first walked upon England to the death of Henry VII, always emphasising the likeness of these people to ourselves ("They laughed, and wept, and prayed"). History, for Ackroyd, is all about "belonging", "permanence", "continuity", culminating in a conservative vision of "a deep, and almost geological, calm" at the heart of English life. At the same time he argues that "human history … is the sum total of accident and unintended consequence" (in the case of King Stephen, for instance, "an attack of diarrhoea determined the fate of the nation"). A product of both contingency and continuity, Ackroyd's England comes to resemble a continuous accident, which is not a bad description of any nation. There are five more volumes to come.