Stafford, William 1945–

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Stafford, William 1945–

(Bill Stafford)

PERSONAL:

Born October 8, 1945. Education: Oxford University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—University of Huddersfield, School of Music, Humanities, and Media, West Bldg., Queensgate, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire HD1 3DH, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, historian, biographer, and educator. University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England, professor of history, 1972—, School of Music and Humanities, former director of research.

WRITINGS:

Socialism, Radicalism, and Nostalgia: Social Criticism in Britain, 1775-1830, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1987.

The Mozart Myths: A Critical Reassessment, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1991.

Mozart's Death: A Corrective Survey of the Legends, Macmillan (London, England), 1991.

John Stuart Mill, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1998.

English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s: Unsex'd and Proper Females, Manchester University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to books, including The Representation & Reality of War, edited by K. Dockray and K. Laybourn, Stroud, 1999; and the Cambridge Companion to Mozart, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Contributor to periodicals and journals, including History, Politics, Journal of Political Ideologies, and Historical Journal.

SIDELIGHTS:

Author, historian, biographer, and educator William Stafford is a professor of history at the University of Huddersfield in England. He has been at Huddersfield for more than three decades, first coming there in 1972. As an administrator, he was deeply involved in the creation of the popular and successful part-time M.A. program in history offered by the university. Stafford, commented a biographer on the Huddersfield University Web site, is a "historian of ideas, especially of social and political ideas," with a particular interest in British thought of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As an educator, he teaches foundation level classes as well as courses on the classics of political philosophy and on women writers and philosophers in Western thought.

In The Mozart Myths: A Critical Reassessment, Stafford "offers description and evaluation of various theories put forward during the last two centuries about Mozart's death and the years immediately preceding it," commented Linda Tyler in a Notes review. He looks at the various characterizations of Mozart that have emerged, including that of emotionally immature genius, brilliant but scattered composer, childlike vessel containing preternatural talent, and simple madman. He also looks at various theories regarding Mozart's death: that he was assassinated, poisoned by fellow Masons, murdered by jealous rivals, killed as part of a Masonic sacrifice, and other unlikely scenarios.

Stafford seeks to revise and rehabilitate the sometimes fanciful and often incorrect image of Mozart that has evolved over the years through popular culture, biographies, movies, and occasionally through shoddy scholarship. In revising this long-held popular picture of Mozart, Stafford is also interested in "how scholars continually react to, steal from and revise their predecessors' findings, selecting and amplifying material that may support their own theories while reinterpreting or ignoring facts that may point in another direction," noted New York Times Book Review contributor Michiko Kakutani. "Again and again, Mr. Stafford stresses the importance of going back to original documents and testimony," Kakutani stated, as he considers how earlier biographers and historians of Mozart often relied on each others' work without verifying facts for themselves. Through this type of unrestricted borrowing, an exaggerated and erroneous picture of Mozart emerged. "Most often Stafford finds that biographers have built cases for their theories about Mozart's life and death by picking and choosing material from the four earliest biographers of Mozart—Friedrich Schlichtegroll, Franz Xaver Niemetschek, Friedrich Rochlitz, and Georg Nikolaus Nissen," Tyler reported. Even these writers, according to Stafford, "often borrowed liberally from each other," Tyler stated. These exaggerations may have originated in the eighteenth century where "gossip and intrigue functioned as important strategies for advancement in eighteenth-century court society," and in Romantic-era notions of the eccentricities associated with genius, Tyler commented.

Stafford finds evidence supporting a more realistic interpretation of Mozart, even to the point of suggesting a likely reason behind his death: not ritual sacrifice or heinous murder, but infective endocartis or rheumatic fever. In the end, Kakutani concluded, Stafford has produced a "provocative and fascinating book that is as much a study of the complex (and often subjective) machinery of history as it is a study of Mozart's tragically short life."

John Stuart Mill contains Stafford's intellectual biography of the influential nineteenth-century philosopher, economist, and civil servant. Stafford looks at Mill's life, influence, and reputation, and how his thought still affects modern-day politics and economics. He considers Mill's own interpretation of his life, in terms of Mill's autobiography. Stafford also assesses other of Mill's writings and publications; his self-claimed identity as a socialist; and portions of Mill's life when he functioned as a journalist, political activist, and politician. "William Stafford's recent book is the best short introduction to the thought of John Stuart Mill I have come across," stated critic Nicholas Capaldi, writing in the Independent Review. Joseph Coohill, assessing the book in Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, wrote: "Every chapter is extremely well informed about Mill's work and the commentaries on it and presents a clear and compelling analysis of Mill's thinking. In a word, this is an excellent short study of Mill and his work."

In English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s: Unsex'd and Proper Females, "Stafford's aim is to explore women authors' views on access to politics and economics, on concepts of gender and subjectivity, by summarizing the contents of a wide spectrum of texts," reported Antje Blank in Albion. The book is "both useful and important: important because it intelligently disentangles many misperceptions about ‘Jacobins’ and ‘anti-Jacobins’ among British women writers of the Romantic era, and useful because it suggests insightful approaches to the writings" of several late-eighteenth-century female authors, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West, Amelia Opie, Hannah More, Mary Robinson, Mary Hays, and Charlotte Smith, commented Stephen C. Behrendt in a Wordsworth Circle review. Stafford "convincingly demonstrates that his subject is more complicated than the usual simple polar dualisms like ‘Jacobin’ and ‘anti-Jacobin’ or, to use the subtitle, the ideological distinction between what Richard Polwhele's facilely called ‘unsex'd females’ and what Mary Poovey more searchingly termed ‘proper ladies.’ Indeed, Stafford's clever use of the nomenclature associated with Polwhele and Poovey demonstrates that no age is immune to the consequences of reductivist labeling," Behrendt remarked. Stafford further assesses the role and effect of social and political factors of the day, as well as how the early "feminism" of the authors under study contributed to their political strength as well as sometimes deep criticism aimed at them. The "great contribution of Stafford's book lies in the intellectual breadth and critical sophistication of his analysis of texts and authors alike, as well as in his judicious examination of authors (and texts) that have frequently been painted in black-or-white terms by critics who categorized and characterized without reading carefully," Behrendt observed. The book contains "much of immediate value" for both the "classroom teacher" and the "advanced scholar," Behrendt stated.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Albion, summer, 2004, Antje Blank, review of English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s: Unsex'd and Proper Females, p. 312.

Independent Review, spring, 2001, Nicholas Capaldi, review of John Stuart Mill, p. 614.

New York Times Book Review, December 3, 1991, Michiko Kakutani, "Books of the Times: Debunking Some Myths about Mozart's Life," review of The Mozart Myths: A Critical Reassessment.

Notes, March, 1994, Linda Tyler, review of The Mozart Myths, p. 957.

Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, fall, 2004, Joseph Coohill, review of John Stuart Mill, p. 94.

Wordsworth Circle, fall, 2003, Stephen C. Behrendt, review of English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s, p. 190.