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  • Editorial
  • Catherine Hall and Bill Schwarz

In her introduction to the feature on the historical imagination which we carried in the last issue, Barbara Taylor sought to understand what happens in the historian's mind when he or she is in the archive. 'Every historian', she suggests

knows that moment when, marching determinedly through the sources, a byway, a detail, grips our attention and becomes a fascination, even an obsession. Anxiety sets in; assumptions begin to crumble; prejudices sway. An excited, fearful sense of receptivity pervades us: we are no longer in control of the evidence, masterful interpreters of our findings, but instruments tuned to alien frequencies.

She continues:

In place of digging and grasping and hauling to the surface—common metaphors for historical work—we find ourselves holding something that we didn't know was coming. One reaction to this, I've found, is to burst out laughing—as if the truth were ticklish—a nice reminder perhaps of Freud's explication of the unconscious dynamics of joking.

In this issue James Hinton opens his wonderfully insightful analysis of British corporatism with these words:

Some years ago I came across a jingle in a 1947 factory newspaper which made me laugh out loud. My laughter was quickly suppressed, inappropriate not only because professionals don't behave like this in the archives, but also because the joke, such as it was, revolved around a rather nastily sexist scenario of domestic violence. Getting the joke is a necessary part of the historian's craft; a potentially fertile route into the networks of meaning, the web of associations and assumptions through which historical actors constructed their understanding of the world. At first sight, however, the insight to be wrung from this particular joke was scarcely original.

Yet as Hinton goes on to demonstrate this inappropriate, momentary outburst of laughter did lead him to rethink what, in a sense, he thought he already knew. From it came a new, if ticklish, truth.

Suzanne Raitt returns to the early history of psychoanalysis in Britain. She doesn't record her experiences in the archives—whether there were these flashes of recognition and misrecognition—but she does bring alive for the reader an understanding of the vibrant, heterodox elements in the [End Page v] past which have since been overridden by a more rectilinear historiography. As a result, she allows us to understand this well-worn history anew, not simply in its details but in its very foundations. In a similar manner Miri Rubin ponders the meanings of the image of Mary, creating the possibilities for us to step outside our own given temporal frameworks. David Higgins and Marilyn Lake offer important readings of the history of racial power. Higgins considers the early nineteenth-century paintings of Benjamin Robert Haydon, while Lake argues that we need to consider the arrival of the phenomenon of the white man's country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a properly global event. Our concerns with the more formal aspects of historiography are continued in Penelope Corfield's exploration of the place of religion in Christopher Hill's historical imagination, which follows the obituary written by Geoff Eley in HWJ 56, and in Julien Vincent's welcome comparative mapping of social history in the French and British contexts, reminding us of the inestimable significance of Pierre Bourdieu.

We also carry in this issue a short themed section on 'The Caribbean in History'. We were delighted to be joined in this venture by a guest co-editor, well-known to many HWJ readers, Mary Chamberlain.

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