The Marxism of Horrible Histories Terry Deary delighted in subverting children's minds

Imperialism, it seems, is just as awful as the monarchy. “Brutal Britannia” was, along with Belgium, “one of the most evil empires in the world”. Barmy Britain (2008), his most impassioned book, chronicles the “dreadful deeds down under”, the decimation of the entire population of Tasmania — some 20,000 aborigines — by British guns and germs in the nineteenth century. This at a time when more Brits than not were “proud” of empire. In Deary’s account, empire was not about saving souls or preaching progress but rather “money, money, money”. The Royal Navy’s victory in the Opium Wars made “Brit drug dealers very rich … and the Chinese very dead”.

Crucially, Deary’s history isn’t just a dreary tale of oppression. He emphasises native agency. We get a life story of, for instance, the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, whose gut-wrenching memoir — liberally quoted in Barmy Britain — went a long way in securing abolition. Kids, by contrast, are taught an altogether different story in school, one that the economic historian Eric Williams encapsulated when he wryly remarked that it is “almost as if Britain introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it”. Deary takes a dig at “batty Boswell”, who defended slavery on the ground that slaves were a “cheerful” lot that liked their station: “Of course, Mr Boswell wasn’t a slave, was he?”

Deary’s distaste for the establishment derives from his own personal history. Born in post-war Sunderland — father a butcher in a slum, mother a shop manager — Deary is from “a terribly poor background”. He recalls an unhappy childhood, being “beaten, bullied, and abused at school by the teachers, not the pupils”. His hostility to authority and formal schooling was carried into adulthood. Indeed, it can be felt throughout Horrible Histories. The series’ conceit — always — is: here’s the “real history” your teachers have kept away from you.

Deary has elaborated on the theme in interviews, describing schooling as “an ancient Greek idea that the Victorians borrowed to get kids off the street. It’s fundamentally wrong.” These days, “a bunch of clueless muppets in Whitehall are determining what children learn”. To what end? To “pass your exams so you can get a job and make money and be happy. What a lot of codswallop.” He would rather not be read than wind up on a reading list: “I shudder when I hear my books are used in those pits of misery and ignorance.”

Deary’s ideal reader, then, is a child rather like him: a sceptic tired of being hoodwinked, and talked down to, by the establishment. Both the style and substance of Horrible Histories reflect his penchant to stick it to condescending elites. “I’m not a historian…I want to change the world,” he says, echoing Marx. “Attack the elite. Overturn the hierarchy. Look at my stories and you’ll notice that the villains are always, always, those in power. The heroes are the little people. I hate the establishment. Always have, always will.”

This, needless to say, is particularly refreshing in a land whose popular historians are overwhelmingly of aristocratic stock, excepting the odd Home County and North London subaltern — public schoolboys to a man. Think Hugh Thomas, David Gilmour, and John Julius Norwich. Deary, meanwhile, was apprenticing as a butcher from the age of three, and spent his mid-twenties touring rural Wales with a theatre troupe. Acting, however, was not his calling. He settled in Suffolk, teaching drama and moonlighting as a writer. Fifty titles appeared in half as many years. Success came late.

It was only in his late-forties, in 1993, that the first Horrible Histories were published: Terrible Tudors and Awesome Egyptians. Fame and fortune followed two years later, with Blitzed Brits, timed for the 50th anniversary of VE Day. The story of blunders from on high with devastating consequences for ordinary people, children agreed, was bracing when contrasted with the blimpish jingoism of conventional histories. Its pendant, The Woeful Second World War (1999), tackled the Holocaust, substituting instruction for humour — never a key ingredient in Deary, for whom politics comes first. Indeed, quips and gags are secondary in Horrible Histories.

Beyond the pale in Thatcher’s time — a time of riots in Brixton, Section 28, and imperial adventurism in the Malvinas — Deary’s politics are not unusual, and in fact fairly palatable, nowadays. For the last 30 years have witnessed an astonishing liberalisation of social attitudes. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious belief, support for the monarchy — all are on the decline. The years bookended by the publication of the first and most recent Horrible Histories have been marked by nothing less than the collapse of social conservatism. There’s a correlation here; of course, a causation mustn’t be assumed. It is, all the same, fair to suggest that, on account of his impressively robust sales and impressionably young audience, Deary has played a greater part in shaping public opinion than most public intellectuals have. Indeed, he belongs in the company of Christopher Hitchens and Anthony Giddens.

For some hundred years now, Marxist historians have preoccupied themselves with, in E.P. Thompson’s celebrated phrase, rescuing the lower orders from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. A few of them have done so with remarkable success. Eric Hobsbawm’s histories of brigands and peasants, for instance, are read in garrets and grandes maisons from São Paulo to Shanghai. Yet a truly mass following has been wanting: not a million readers scattered across capitals but tens of millions in a single country. It is the latter that counts for impact.

Ruled for all but 31 of the last 100 years by the Tories, Britain is unquestionably a conservative country. This is reflected in historical tastes: the lower sort of biography turning on the lives and wives of great men; sporting and starlet hagiographies; an instinctive suspicion of social history. For the Left and its historians, breaking into bestseller lists has always been a Sisyphean task.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci used to carp about the “cultural hegemony” of the ruling elite, which gave it an edge in class conflict, shepherding mass aspirations through the tamer channels of politically disengaged entertainment. In his homeland, this became dispiritingly true in the age of Berlusconi, by which time the Left was vanquished and a television audience hooked on watching seemingly demure housewives take their clothes off on his networks.

Britain has been somewhat luckier. No, the Left has never enjoyed cultural hegemony in this sceptred isle, but it has one rather formidable champion of mad, bad, and dangerous Brits in Terry Deary, a Marxist culture warrior avant la lettre. Who knows, perhaps someday the English Civil Wars will more widely be known as the English Revolution.

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Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

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