Rosemary Mitchell

The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953 (review)

Melman’s The Culture of History is an astonishingly wide-ranging explor ation of Victorian and twentieth-century historical culture. She defines this culture as ‘the productions of segments of the past, or rather pasts, the multiplicity of their representations and the myriad ways in which the English – as individuals and in groups – looked at this past ... and made use of it’ (4). The breadth of the project is ambitious, covering a span of more than 150 years, and drawing on a wealth of sources – ranging from waxwork displays and historical novels to advertisements and operas – to construct a rich analysis of the construction of three significant historical sites/sights: the Paris and London of the French Revolution, the Tudor Tower of London, and the ‘two bodies’ of Queen Elizabeth. Melman presents us with a Victorian counter-culture of history, which is populist and urban, cross-class and cross-national, and transgressive in terms of genre and gender. Dangerous, disjointed, and dark, it is the history of revolutionary conflict and crime, of the dungeon and the prison. This is then overlaid with a commercial and democratic twentieth-century culture which offers apparently more comfortable and inclusive versions of the Tudor and Revolutionary pasts. Melman’s introduction contextualizes her work within an expanding scholarship on Victorian and twentieth-century historical cultures which owes its genesis to works such as Stephen Bann’s The Clothing of Clio (1984). She challenges three approaches and theses which, in her opinion, restrict this research field. Popular historical culture – as well as academic and high profile historical writing – needs to be researched, she argues, to allow us to explore ‘cross-class exchange between and through different yet interacting genres’ (12). She stresses that scholarly focus on the representations of the rural landscape to construct English national pasts needs to be balanced by attention to an historical culture which was ‘strongly urban and metropolitan’, and promoted a past which was neither ‘comfortable nor cosy’ (11). Similarly, she argues for a challenge to our tendency to view Victorian historiographies as predominantly ‘comfortable Whig interpretations’, which stressed continuity and gradual improvement and ‘distanced the Reviews