Personal history
Hallie Rubenhold is taking on “Great Man” theory by presenting stories of real people — and her own family
Sarah Blake
- Anna Jones
Published: Thursday, 30 October 2025 at 6:01 pm
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Historian Hallie Rubenhold has the builders in. She and her lawyer husband Frank removed some woodchip paper in their London home, only for the ceiling to collapse. Their trusted decorator was able to pinpoint exactly when the unwanted decor had been put up from a 1991 newspaper lurking beneath. Despite the dust and rubble, this DIY disaster has made Rubenhold smile. It speaks to her core belief that history is all around us: in our homes, our heirlooms, our memories of deceased family and friends.
Over the course of her career as a historian, Rubenhold has been determined to present the stories of “ordinary” people, not focus on national leaders, military heroes or monarchs – aka “Great Man” history, a theory attributed to the 19th-century philosopher Thomas Carlyle who argued that our shared history has been created by the superior intellect or great courage of individuals, pretty much all of them male.
“Carlyle wasn’t the first person to conceptualise history as the great deeds of great men,” she says. “This is a very conservative, very Victorian, very inflexible way of viewing history. That’s why people have turned away – it feels distant, alien, unrelatable.” On the contrary, Rubenhold’s acclaimed books – including The Five, The Covent Garden Ladies and, most recently, Story of a Murder – are about the people who have been overlooked in history, primarily women.
Lesley Manville as a brothel madam in Harlots. Sven Arnstein/Hulu
The Covent Garden Ladies was used as the inspiration for TV’s Harlots, for which she was historical consultant. Adapting her words in the interest of “drama” was a learning process, but she’s clear that the kind of factual inaccuracies witnessed in series like BBC One’s King & Conqueror (which she didn’t watch) are not acceptable: “A lot of the stuff that we’re seeing is an erasure of the reality of people’s lives. We erase racism and sexism in many cases, or we tone it down to make it more palatable for us. But what’s the point of even making a period drama if we only want to see another reflection of our modern selves on screen?”
So, how do we engage younger students or people who feel disconnected from the “Great Man” approach? “I call it bottom-up history,” says Rubenhold. “What is the point of making kids learn when laws were enacted or wars were fought? Start with the human story and people will connect with it. It’s full of empathy and humanity. It’s real people’s history.”
The five Radio 4 essays she’s presenting differ from her established work. Each has its roots in Rubenhold’s life. They are personal, autobiographical: from her thoughts on the vital role the past has in understanding our present, to her own home and the death of her mother.
If any readers are inspired to find out more about their homes or families, where’s a good place to start? “Sites like Ancestry.com and Find My Past are fantastic. Other wonderful places online are the British Newspaper Archive or Old Bailey Sessions Papers. I found my great-grandmother in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers. I was absolutely shocked! She’d been falsely accused of using counterfeit coins when buying fish on Brick Lane. My cousin still doesn’t believe that it was her. You can find amazing things.”
Start with the human story and people will connect with it
Hallie Rubenhold
Given the current state of the world, does she believe we ever learn from history? Rubenhold pauses before answering, speaking of how everyone at her school was made to read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, or both. “This enormous project to inoculate us against authoritarianism failed. We have had an obsession in this country with World War Two for so long, you’d think we’d have learnt so much and we have learnt nothing!” She pauses again. “Well maybe some of us have. Quite a lot of us are alive to this, perhaps more so than they would have been [in the build-up to the Second World War], and maybe that’s a good thing.”
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Like a collapsed ceiling, we may be teetering on the brink of destruction – but Hallie Rubenhold finds hope for humanity through our direct connection to our pasts.
Authors
Anna Jones
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