Our book today is a biggie, a doorstop: it’s the combined volume Modern Library did of William Hickling Prescott‘s The History of the Conquest of Mexico and his The History of the Conquest of Peru. Prescott finished the first in 1843 and the second in 1847, and neither is exactly skimpy in terms of heft – and as a result, this big old Modern Library volume is 1300 pages long, a wonderful round solid feel in the curled hand, exactly the kind of satisfying weight that e-books, for all their manifest superiorities, can’t provide. I carried that satisfying weight around quite a bit during Boston’s ice-bound, snow-buried February; I brought it to the library with me (even though they have a presentation copy); I brought it to lunch; I curled up with it in bed while the blizzards screamed outside the walls.

It’s immensely consoling reading, which is curious, since it narrates unrelievedly awful stuff. Prescott was the scion of deep Boston money and wasn’t expected to work for a living – and working for a living would have been a real challenge in any case, since Prescott was half-blind due to a tragic injury to one of his eyes while he was at school. He faced a lifetime lived in near-total darkness, but he wanted to accomplish something great in the field of literature, and after a little casting-around for a suitably meaty subject, he decided to concentrate on the litany of bloodshed and conquest that has characterized Mexico and South America for the whole length of time that humans have lived there.

The more he dug into histories of the area (and especially histories of the first contacts European explorers and conquerors had with the native peoples of the areas), the less satisfied he grew with the efforts of all earlier historians. So, through a vast international network of scholars and writers, he set about doing hugely groundbreaking research in primary sources, many of which no historian had ever consulted before.

He had no idea who The History of the Conquest of Mexico would be received; he was as surprised and pleased as anybody when Boston bookstores couldn’t keep it in stock. And every time I re-read the thing, that surprise always puzzles me; the thing is thunderously grand reading, and Prescott himself must surely have felt that while writing it. He strikes a particular rolling cadence and never loses the pitch of it, not in all these pages, and many more pages besides, since these weren’t the only two books he wrote. When he builds the moment when Cortes is temporarily stymied before “the ancient walls of Tenochtitlan,” we can feel the tension crowding up for release:

The ferocity shown by the Mexicans seems to have been a thing for which Cortes was wholly unprepared. His past experience, his uninterrupted career of victory with a much feebler force at his command, had led him to underrate the military efficiency, if not the valor, of the Indians. The apparent facility, with which the Mexicans had acquiesced in the outrages on their sovereign and themselves, had led him to hold their courage, in particular, too lightly. He could not believe the present assault to be any thing more than a temporary ebullition of the populace, which would soon waste itself by its own fury. And he proposed, on the following day, to sally out and inflict such chastisement on his foes as should bring them to their senses, and show who was master in the capital.

Prescott was encouraged, of course, by the success of The Conquest of Mexico, although anybody who knew him would have agreed such encouragement was an added frill. Once his mind was made up to write this enormous multi-part epic of Spanish power, dismals sales would hardly have paused him for an afternoon. As it was, he set about the equally grueling research and drafting for The History of the Conquest of Peru, and when it appeared in 1847, it was an even bigger success, both with the general reading public browsing in Park Street bookshops and also with book critics in Boston and London, who loved the book and happily pointed out that the beautifully stately prose line of the previous volume was if anything even grander in the present one:

The news of the great victory was borne on the wings of the wind to Caxamalca; and loud and long was the rejoicing, not only in the camp of Atahuallpa, but in the town and surrounding country; fro all now cam in, eager to offer their congratulations to the victor, and to do him homage. The Prince of Quito no longer hesitated to assume the scarlet borla, the diadem of the Incas. His triumph was complete. He had beaten his enemies on their own ground; had taken their capital; had set his foot on the neck of his rival, and won for himself the ancient sceptre of the Children of the Sun. But the hour of triumph was destined to be that of his deepest humiliation. Atahuallpa was not one of those to whom, in the language of the Grecian bard, “the Gods are willing to reveal themselves.” He had not read the handwriting on the heavens. The small speck, which the clear-sighted eye of his father had discerned on the distant verge of the horizon though little noticed by Atahuallpa, intent on the deadly strife with his brother, had now risen high towards the zenith, spreading wider and wider, till it wrapped the skies in darkness, an was ready to burst in thunders on the devoted nation.

To put it mildly, historians tend not to attempt rhetorical periods like that anymore. The German school of more scientific rationalism that came to dominate the field of history-writing in the generation after Prescott’s death in 1859 set different standards and did a liberal amount of frowning, and suddenly works of history intentionally written to thrill and elevate their readers in addition to informing them were characterized as somewhat down-market, as mere pandering. Even now, historians whose book-sales earn them the label ‘popular’ run the risk of being politely eviscerated for that very popularity in the pages of the TLS.

Still, not all the frowning in the world can make these marvelous books – or this fat Modern Library volume – disappear (there will be a corner of the Boston Athenaeum that is, as it were, forever Prescott), and this last February, while unprecedented storms howled outside, I was mighty glad of that fact.