Historian of Ancient Greece
After 1776, a difficult year, Mitford set about writing a five-volume history of Greece, which would later expand to ten volumes. He retired to Exbury for the rest of his life, and made the study of the Greek language his hobby and occupation. After 10 years his wife died, and in October 1776 Mitford went abroad. He was encouraged by French scholars whom he met in Paris, Avignon and Nice to give himself systematically to the study of Greek history.
It was Edward Gibbon, with whom he was closely associated when they both were officers in the South Hampshire Militia, who suggested to Mitford the form which his work should take. In 1784 the first of the volumes of his History of Greece appeared, and the fifth and last of these quartos was published in 1810, after which the state of Mitford's eyesight and other physical infirmities, including a loss of memory, forbade his continuation of the enterprise, although he painfully revised successive new editions.
The first volume was published in 1784, barely a year after the end of the American Colonies' War of Independence, although there are no direct references to this political event in the work. The volume spans from Homeric times to the invasion of the Persians, but it is perhaps in the second volume that the Persian Wars are given even less prominence in favour of an event to which the author attaches greater importance: the Peloponnesian War (c. 431-404 BC). It is not by chance that our author gives greater importance to this event, for throughout his work he will place too much emphasis on the credibility of Thucydides, even describing his own historiographical procedure as follows: "taking Thucydides as my lodestar and trusting that later writers (historians) only (set about) elucidating what he has left in obscurity".
Published in 1790, the second volume was to be riddled with references to revolutionary France, not only in the scholarly apparatus, but also in the body of the text itself. This situation seems to have taken him by surprise. Although by that year the Revolution was a fait accompli, for the British press and society, it was something that could still change course. The British educated society initially spoke positively of the conversion of the despotic French regime into a constitutional monarchy, similar to the one in power on the island, or at best continuing the course of the American Revolution, with which there were clear overlaps in many of the ideological and scientific backgrounds. From that year onwards there was a decade of political turmoil that altered the attitudes and mores of the British people. The protests, which were initially spontaneous and local in character, gradually lost their economic motivation and took on a new, eminently political character.
By the time volume three was published, the Revolution was already a fait accompli, the King of France had been executed, and although the period of Jacobin terror was over, by the year of its publication, 1797, the mandate of the Directory and its authority were contested. It was apparent that this government could again lose control to the mob at any moment. The Council of Five Hundred, a body that attracted attention, bearing the name already used in antiquity by the Athenian boulé of Cleisthenes, a continuation of Solon's Council of Four Hundred, summoned the huge armies that held the borders of revolutionary France when they had not yet managed to resolve the reaction of "La Vendée". There, the Directory had failed to recruit 300,000 men to face the first coalition on the Rhine frontier. Volume III is undoubtedly the most militantly anti-democratic and contains the most references to the contemporary political situation. Depending on the edition consulted, it generally covers the entire Peloponnesian War. The 1814/18 edition, which would cover Volumes III and IV. The remaining ones, Volume IV (1808), again depending on the edition, deal with the period of Athenian democracy and Spartan dominance, and especially Volume V (1810) are written during the Napoleonic Wars and refer especially to the Alexandrian period. In the 10-volume editions, from V to X, they deal only with the expansion of Alexander's empire, taking the facts from the time of his father Philip II.
The initial form of the work was changed as the political situation demanded of the author. To a certain extent, especially in the final volumes, a certain disorder in the arrangement of the chapters can be noted. During the author's lifetime, the work was published as volumes were published with the reprinting of earlier volumes, as well as printings of individual volumes. The first complete publication of which we have evidence was published between 1822 and 1823. In 1829 the first posthumous edition appeared with the inevitable biography and review by his brother Lord Redesdale. Although the work had five volumes in its first editions, Mitford then brought it to eight in 1823, always adding new chapters. In 1836 the definitive edition was published in ten volumes.
Mitford's work was published by Thomas Cadell from 1784 until the beginning of the 19th century with a significant continuity. It is therefore a part of English-language university libraries to this day. The publishing house was the most important in Britain at that time and was located in the Strand, i.e. in the centre of politics at that time. T. Cadell had also published the major works of British historiography, including Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Mitford starts as a historian with an acceptable knowledge of classical literary sources. Although his education was incomplete, he could read Greek and Latin, and many of his quotations in the body of the work are reproduced verbatim in their original language. He tries in the text to present himself as a reliable and objective enunciator, but he does not succeed. His work is not accepted in academic circles and is openly criticised by the liberal groups of the time, even more strongly after the author's death.
The young George Grote wrote a strong critique of Mitford's History of Greece in a review he wrote for the radical journal The Westminster Review, with the philosophical support of James Mill in April 1826, while Mitford was still alive. The last edition of Mitford's The History of Greece appeared in 1938. Since then, it has not been reprinted.
The literary characteristics of Mitford's work are typical of the period. The style is encyclopaedic and all-encompassing, and seeks to present the reader with the narrative of a seamless whole. The temporal order is precise and linear, although there is clear evidence of alteration of the time sequence, which allows for emphasis on events that help to establish links with the historical situation in which one lives. This is especially so in Volume III, where the author makes direct reference to events that had just taken place in France, which was in the midst of a revolutionary process. The language is flowery and makes use of words foreign to common usage, typical of the aristocracy of the time. As it is his first work, there is a clear intention, given that the author was not known in intellectual circles at the time, to demonstrate his erudition by making excessive use of footnotes and marginal notes, many of them in Greek. But his main use of quotations is undoubtedly to express an opinion, to denigrate a political rival, but above all also to praise members of society who share his political views. We can always notice improvisation in the way he approaches his themes and a certain redundancy in unprovable subjects, especially in the first volumes where the border between mythology and history seems to be blurred.
Mitford was criticised for his eccentric use of spelling. It earned him a place, and fervent criticism, in Thomas De Quincey's "Orthographic Mutineers".
