History of Civilisation In England [Christmas Summary Classics]

HENRY BUCKLE
Henry Thomas Buckle was born at Lee, in Kent, England, Nov. 24, 1821. Delicate health prevented him from following the ordinary school course. His father's death in 1840 left him independent, and the boy who was brought up in Toryism and Calvinism, became a philosophic radical and free-thinker. He travelled, he read, he acquired facility in nineteen languages and fluency in seven. Gradually he conceived the idea of a great work which should place history on an entirely new footing; it should concern itself not with the unimportant and the personal, but with the advance of civilisation, the intellectual progress of man. As the idea developed, he perceived that the task was greater than could be accomplished in the lifetime of one man. What he actually accomplished--the volumes which bear the title "The History of Civilisation in England"--was intended to be no more than an introduction to the subject; and even that introduction, which was meant to cover, on a corresponding scale, the civilisation of several other countries, was never finished. The first volume was published in 1857, the second in 1861; only the studies of England, France, Spain, and Scotland were completed. Buckle died at Damascus, on May 29, 1862.