R.G. Collingwood's Autobiography: One Reader's Response
| Author | William Twining |
| Published date | 01 December 1998 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00105 |
| Date | 01 December 1998 |
Once upon a time a workshop on legal and political theory was held at a
famous hotel in Scotland. I was among those who allowed curiosity to trump
potential political scruples about the provenance of the funding. Perhaps
academics have a right to stay at Gleneagles once in a lifetime. And maybe
such workshops need some ideological balance. Forget the dubious rational-
izations. I was there.
The oldest and most eminent presence was Michael Oakeshott. In an
interval before lunch he courteously invited two younger persons, both
jurists, to join him. He started the conversation by turning to my colleague
and asking: ‘What work was seminal in your intellectual development?’ John
Finnis’ response was immediate: ‘R.G. Collingwood’s autobiography. I read
it when I was about twelve’.1Oakeshott turned to me with the same question.
Resisting the urge to say ‘snap’, I replied almost as crisply: ‘Collingwood’s
autobiography. I read it when I was almost twenty-one.’2
This series is an invitation to autobiography – in this instance, an unreli-
able memoir about reading the autobiography of a philosopher who warned
of the dangers of relying on memory. Your importunate editor has made me
reflect on this exchange. Why from many possibilities choose Collingwood?
One thing is clear: I had been making the same claim for years, so this was
not imitation nor was it necessarily a complete coincidence.3
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
* Research Professor of Law, University College London, 4 Endsleigh Gardens,
London WC1H OEG, England
I am grateful to John Finnis, Phil Thomas, and Karen Twining for helpful suggestions.
603
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 25, NUMBER 4, DECEMBER 1998
ISSN: 0263–323X, pp. 603–20
R.G. Collingwood’s Autobiography: One Reader’s Response
WILLIAM TWINING*
1R.G Collingwood, An Autobiography (1939). References are to the Oxford reprint of 1970
(hereafter A.)
2This was an actual event. I have had to use what Collingwood called ‘interpolation’ to recon-
struct the details – for example, I do not recall whether Oakeshott used the word ‘work’ or
‘book’. Collingwood believed that it was the task of an historian to reconstruct the past on
the basis of evidence, complemented by disciplined imagination. Whether he would have
approved of the ‘faction’ of, for example, Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties (1991) is unclear,
but Schama’s approach to history could be interpreted as an extension of Collingwood’s ideas.
3 See, below, n. 16.
SOME POTENTIAL RIVALS
So why Collingwood? The first step is to consider some potential rivals.
I fell in love with literature, especially Victorian novels, when my godmother
read to me from The Pickwick Papers.4This was in Mauritius in 1940. Evelyn
DuBuisson had come to stay with us for a few weeks, but was marooned
there by the war for nearly five years. Her reading to me was a great treat,
especially when I was allowed in her bed for the purpose. I fell for Mr Jingle,
Sam Weller, Mr Tracy Tupman, and Mr Snodgrass – their names, the
humour, and the language as much as the stories. Over the next four years
she gently extended the range. We read to each other, but I much preferred
being read to. I cannot remember what else we consumed, except that
I developed a penchant for stories about desert islands, The Swiss Family
Robinson, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and above all The Coral Island5
– perhaps not inappropriate in an island cut off by U-boats and the setting
for Bernardin de St Pierre’s romance, Paul et Virginie, which we did not
read.6My parents thought it a bit precocious for a five year old to have a
taste for Dickens, but they treated the practice with amused tolerance. Later
my father introduced a rival programme by bringing home from the office
one at a time volumes of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
printed on rice paper and bound in shiny worn black leather. These I was
allowed to browse through during tantalizingly short thirty-six-hour periods
before each one had to be returned to the office. My systematic grounding
in eclecticism started with ‘A-Aus’.
In September, 1944 we braved the U-boats and escaped to Durban, which
was not ‘in the war’. I remember two things. First I was scornful of Durban’s
beaches which did not compare with Flic en Flac and Blue Bay; and, second,
I saw my first book shop. During the war Mauritius had shops, but they
did not rise to window displays, certainly not displays of books. That day
I bought my first books that did not have to be stamped: ‘Passed by the
Censor of Mauritius’. Ever since I have spent my pocket-money on books
rather than on cars or horses.
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© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998
4I still have the same copy: C. Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The
edition was published in Wakefield by William Nicholson and sons. It is undated and has
tiny print.
5R.M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island (1857). The introduction to the Puffin Classics edition
says that Balllantyne ‘was one of the first writers to allow children their own adventures,
free from adult control.’ What I remember best was nude bathing, which was a novel and
intriguing idea, but clearly taboo in my family; whether this symbolized liberation or was
merely prurient curiosity is unclear. In the 1980s I did some work on localizing legal literature
in small jurisdictions, that is jurisdictions with too small a market to sustain a local legal
literature – a potentially lifelong project about an almost insoluble problem. It took me to
many congenial places, including the Isle of Man, Barbados, Papua New Guinea, Australia,
and back to Mauritius. I used to refer to it jokingly as ‘my coral island project’, but at the
time did not make the connection with my childhood fantasies.
6Mauritius was cut off by the war, but hardly deserted. It later became one of the most highly
populous countries in the world, see V.S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972).
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