It was within this brew of academic and ideological culture that Viana came to occupy important posts in the administration of the Associação da Agricultura Portuguesa e das Cozinhas Económicas [Association of Portuguese Agriculture and Economic Kitchens], in the supervision of the Companhia das Lezírias [Lezírias Company], and as secretary of the Sociedade das Casas de Asilo da Infância Desvalida [Society of Shelters for Unprotected Children] for 24 years (indeed up until his death in 1931). This in fact proves that he had not become disillusioned “completely with the progress of public affairs” either during the Monarchy or the First Republic or the Military Dictatorship (António Baião, Op. Cit., pp. 13-14).

António Viana seems to have made the public, political and historiographical redemption of his grandfather, Silva Carvalho, one of the aims of his work as a commentator (more than as a historian). Like so many other graduates trained in Law during the second half of the 19th century, Viana eagerly ventured forth into the history and documental investigation of a field that was as yet not fully explored: liberal politics of the first and second Chartist movements (1823-26 and 1834-36).

Born in 1858, he might have possibly come across the first, relatively recent attempts to establish a balanced review of the facts, figures and sources of these troubled periods: Luz Soriano (1846 and 1849), Liberato (1855), the Despachos e Correspondência de Palmela (Orders and Correspondence of Palmela) (1851, 1854 and 1869). To these were added in the following years the Correspondência Oficial do conde da Carreira (Official Correspondence of the Count of Carreira) (published in 1871 and 1874), História de Portugal (History of Portugal) (1879) and Oliveira Martins’ Portugal Contemporâneo (1881). Document collections such as those of Borges de Castro and Júdice Biker (from 1856 on) and that of the future Baron of São Clemente (started in 1883) contributed in their turn to a documental abundance that could be deemed considerable.

Just like Gonçalo Mendes Ramires, the main character in Eça de Queirós’ A Ilustre Casa de Ramires (The Illustrious House of Ramires) (1900), Viana might have believed that family honour was at stake. Showing an open-mindedness still uncommon in Portugal today, he unlocked the family archive for public scrutiny, revealing a huge number of letters, memoirs and documents written by and to Silva Carvalho. But not only: he also dedicated a large part of the trilogy José da Silva Carvalho e o seu Tempo to correspondence and official papers of D. Miguel’s government, taking the intelligent and enlightened view of history that without such dual sources, coming as they did from both sides of the barrier that divided Portugal during the 1832-34 Civil War, it would be impossible to arrive at an integrated and balanced overview.

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