Journal of Mormon History Volume 14 Issue 1 Article 1 1988 Journal of Mormon History Vol. 14, 1988 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/mormonhistory Part of the Religion Commons Recommended Citation (1988) "Journal of Mormon History Vol. 14, 1988," Journal of Mormon History: Vol. 14 : Iss. 1 , Article 1. Available at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/mormonhistory/vol14/iss1/1 This Full Issue is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Mormon History by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Journal of Mormon History Vol. 14, 1988 Table of Contents • --The Popular History of Early Victorian Britain: A Mormon Contribution John F. C. Harrison, 3 • --Heber J. Grant's European Mission, 1903-1906 Ronald W. Walker, 17 • --The Office of Presiding Patriarch: The Primacy Problem E. Gary Smith, 35 • --In Praise of Babylon: Church Leadership at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London T. Edgar Lyon Jr., 49 • --The Ecclesiastical Position of Women in Two Mormon Trajectories Ian G Barber, 63 • --Franklin D. Richards and the British Mission Richard W. Sadler, 81 • --Synoptic Minutes of a Quarterly Conference of the Twelve Apostles: The Clawson and Lund Diaries of July 9-11, 1901 Stan Larson, 97 This full issue is available in Journal of Mormon History: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/mormonhistory/vol14/iss1/ 1 Journal of Mormon History , VOLUME 14, 1988 Editorial Staff LOWELL M. DURHAM JR., Editor ELEANOR KNOWLES, Associate Editor MARTHA SONNTAG BRADLEY, Associate Editor KENT WARE, Designer LEONARD J. ARRINGTON, Consulting Editor Board of Editors MARIO DE PILUS, University of Massachusetts at Amherst JEAN BICKMORE WHITE, Weber State College CLAUDIA L. BUSHMAN, Newark, Delaware W. GRANT MCMURRAY, RIDS Church, Independence, Missouri JAMES B. ALLEN, Brigham Young University DAVIS BITTON, University of Utah CAROL CORNWALL MADSEN, Brigham Young University Journal of Mormon History is published annually by the Mormon History Association, P.O. Box 7010, Univer- sity Station, Provo, Utah 84602 (phone 801-378-4048), and distributed to members upon payment of annual dues: Student, $7.50; Regular, $10.00; Sustaining, $20.00; Friend of Mormon History, $100.00; Mormon History Association Patron, $500.00 or more. Single copies $8.00. ISSN 0094-7342 Typesetting and Production: Deseret Book Company Journal of Mormon History Volume 14, 1988 Contents The Popular History of Early Victorian Britain: A Mormon Contribution John F. C. Harrison 3 Heber J. Grant's European Mission, 1903-1906 Ronald W. Walker 17 The Office of Presiding Patriarch: The Primacy Problem E. Gary Smith 35 In Praise of Babylon: Church Leadership at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London T. Edgar Lyon Jr. 49 The Ecclesiastical Position of Women in Two Mormon Trajectories Ian G Barber 63 Franklin D. Richards and the British Mission Richard W. Sadler 81 Synoptic Minutes of a Quarterly Conference of the Twelve Apostles: The Clawson and Lund Diaries of July 9-11, 1901 Stan Larson 97 FRONT COVER: Parade in front of the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition in London, 1851. BACK COVER: Franklin D. Richards, who was a missionary in Great Britain from 1846 to 1848 and later served three terms as British Mission president and member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. (Photo courtesy of Church Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) ©1988 Mormon History Association Tanner Lectures on Mormon History The Mormon History Association is grateful to Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner for funding the Tanner Lectures on Mormon History. Mr. Tanner has given the Asso- ciation an endowment, from which the interest will be used each year to pay for the annual Tanner lecture. Mormon History Association Endowment Fund The Mormon History Association invites contributions to a special endowment fund to further the Association's goal of promoting the understanding of Mormon history and scholarly research and publication in the field. Tax-deductible donations to the fund are invested in a trust fund established at Zion's First National Bank in Salt Lake City. Interest from the account helps defray publication costs of the Journal of Mormon History. For further information, contact Susan L. Fales, executive secretary of MHA. The Popular History of Early Victorian Britain: A Mormon Contribution John F. C. Harrison It is a daunting prospect for a non-Mormon to address a gathering of the Mormon History Association, where virtually everyone in the room knows more about Mormon history than the speaker. I shall not have the impertinence to lecture you on that subject. Rather, I would like to speak about my own recent enthusiasms and my discovery in Mormon archives of some (for me) very exciting material. For some time now I have been interested in exploring the history of the common people of Britain. This is a type of history that presents peculiar problems, among them the difficulty of sources. Imagine therefore my delight when I came upon the rich collection of Mormon journals and autobiographies and found that they contained a great deal of material relevant to my purposes. Here is a source, scarcely known outside Mormon circles, just waiting to be exploited by historians of nineteenth century Britain. I would like to suggest some ways in which these sources might be used for purposes wider than strictly Mormon history. I hope that this will be in the spirit of the Tanner lectures, to whose trustees I am greatly indebted for making possible this lecture today. The writing of histories of the common people is not new.1 Indeed, the tradition stretches from J. R. Green and Thorold Rogers in the later nineteenth century, through Cole and Postgate, and Mitchell and Leys, to the present.2 Most of this John F. C. Harrison is emeritus professor of history at the University of Sussex in England. This paper, read at the Twenty-third Annual Meeting of the Mormon History Association at Oxford, England, on July 6, 1987, was made possible through the generosity of Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner. 4 Journal of Mormon History work, however, has been either primarily economic history or social history of the "men and manners" variety. My concern is somewhat different. It is to write history from below, as it were; to start from the perceptions of the people themselves, rather than accept the views of what others, whether contemporary reformers and sympathizers or later historians, thought about working people. These are the people who have usually been left out of history, and to write their history is to encounter formidable problems of chronology, theme, and sources.3 We cannot, for instance, ignore the historian's basic requirement of chronology, for history is essentially the study of change over time. But the chronology of popular history will not necessarily be the same as is appropriate for other types of history. Probably the traditional chronology and periodization of English history, being based on the political and economic decisions of the ruling classes, distorts or confuses the history of the common people, whose lives were largely determined by other considerations. We need an alternative periodization based on changes in popular experience and perceptions. Unfortunately, the danger of forcing popular history into a procrustean bed of traditional historiography cannot be entirely avoided. Until we have much more evidence to work on, we have to take some of the accepted historian's categories and periods, even though they may not be truly relevant. Moreover, although the history of the common people should not be submerged in general history, the two are obviously interrelated. The common people have always been faced with the problem of living in a world they did not create. History of the common people is also different in its selection of themes. All history is a pattern made by interweaving chronological and thematic evidence from the records of the past; and for the common people, the themes will be those which seem to show most closely how they lived and what they made of their lives. This means (at least ideally) that the history of the common people will not be simply traditional history with highlights on the contributions of ordinary men and women, but a completely different pattern, starting from different assumptions and ideas of what is important and what is not. Historians will never be able to recreate, no matter how sympathetic or imaginative they are, anything more than a tiny fragment of the experiences and sentiments of that infinite host of men and women "which have no memorial, who are perished as though they had never been born." But if we start by asking the right questions and looking for answers in new directions, we may at least stand a chance of uncovering more than has been discovered about the common people in the past. The starting point must be those things which were central in the life of laboring people. Here we come up against one of the greatest problems in writing the history of the common people: the scarcity of sources. We are dealing with that part of the community which was largely inarticulate. They did not, for the most part, leave written records in which they described their thoughts and feelings and the events in which they were involved. The literary sources upon which historians rely so heavily do not at present exist in the same form and quantity for the common people as for their social superiors. This, more than any other, has been the argument advanced by professional historians against the possibility of writing a Harrison: Early Victorian Britain 5 history of the common people.