INTERVIEW / PENELOPE J CORFIELD
“The Georgian era was a time of experimentation and invention”
Rhiannon Davies: The subtitle of your book is The Deeds and Misdeeds of 15th-Century Britain. Can we call the actions of the past “misdeeds”?
Penelope J Corfield I certainly don’t think, as historians, we should be patting the past on the head and saying, “Oh, this is the good old days”, but neither should we criticise and pronounce: “These are the bad old days.” We should be trying to look at the picture in the round and assess both what people thought at the time, and what we think now, looking back retrospectively.
Obviously, we have to allow that some standards change, but at the same time, just as in international law, we can say that some things are beyond the bounds of acceptable behaviour between fellow humans. The clear example of that is the trade in enslaved Africans that came to an end in the Georgian era. In 1789, the abolitionist and reform campaigner William Wilberforce made a wonderful speech in parliament saying that it wasn’t a case of just blaming individuals directly involved in the process; we are all guilty, he said, because the whole of society is based on this trade.
Why did attitudes towards slavery change in the Georgian era?
I don’t think we should praise the Georgians too much for abolition. I mean this in the sense that it took quite a long time for opinion to change, after quite a lot of education and effort from various groups, including the Quakers, who
