Arthur Bryant - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

J. H. Plumb, one of Bryant's detractors, wrote:

What Bryant longed for, his one abiding disappointment of life, was professional recognition. He would have given anything for an Hon. D. Litt at Cambridge, perhaps more for a Fellowship of the British Academy. He never had the slightest chance of either. Bryant of course had gifts. He wrote far better than nearly all professional historians. He over-wrote certainly, and there was often a note of falsity, even of vulgarity, but largely his failure was of intellect.

Plumb's verdict is that Bryant killed off 'patrician history':

Like Churchill, but unlike Trevelyan, Bryant inflated patrician history so much that he destroyed it. Indeed he vulgarised it to a degree that made it incredible.

Plumb cites Trevelyan's possible heirs as Wedgwood and A. L. Rowse.

Another detractor is the British historian Andrew Roberts, who gave this, his personal verdict:

Bryant was in fact a Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow-traveller, who only narrowly escaped internment as a potential traitor in 1940. He was also, incidentally, a supreme toady, fraudulent scholar and humbug.

Roberts's polemical essay, prompted by the opening of archive material on Bryant, has been followed (and rebutted) by Julia Stapleton's full academic study. Bryant's first biographer was Pamela Street, a neighbour of his in Salisbury, who on occasion had collaborated with Bryant in his historical works, and who was a daughter of farmer-author A. G. Street. Her book appeared during Bryant's lifetime.