The Presence of the Past: Memory, Heritage, and Childhood in Postwar Britain (review)

Valerie Krips. The Presence of the Past: Memory, Heritage, and Childhood in Postwar Britain. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000.

The Presence of the Past: Memory, Heritage, and Childhood in Postwar Britain, by Valerie Krips, is a wonderfully engaging and intriguing literary and social history of British children's fiction since World War II. Specifically, Krips examines what at first appear to be two mutually exclusive elements of that literary and social history. First she looks at children's fiction in postwar Britain, especially that of Philippa Pearce, Rosemary Sutcliff, Susan Cooper, and Alan Garner (and, earlier, Beatrix Potter and Arthur Ransome), writers whose plots typically revolve around a child stumbling across an artifact from the past and, over the course of the novel, trying to understand the relevance of the artifact to the present. Second, Krips notes that this motif coincided with the appearance of the heritage movement in Britain. Aspects of Britain's once glorious past such as its abandoned and decaying country houses, for example, were restored to their former glory, opened to the public, and proudly presented as part of the nation's otherwise lost history. Krips then argues, convincingly in my opinion, that the emergence of a past lost and found in postwar Britain's children's fiction, and the concomitant emphasis within the heritage movement of preserving the past, had the "remarkable quality of bringing the past into the present"(1) in ways that were a timely reflection upon Britain's sense of identity in post-World War II Europe.

Krips grounds her thought-provoking thesis in the theoretical work of Maurice Halbwach and Pierre Nora, as well as Freud, Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, Jacqueline Rose, Jean Baudrillard, and others. For Halbwach and Nora, objects over time come to function as sites of memory, or lieu de memoire. Simply put, this happens when the memories of individuals, or the collective memories of an entire nation, begin to fail. As the individuals who lived through seminal moments in history such as World War II begin to die, for example, personal objects such as a pet, a book, and a child or child character, and national objects such as a monument or memorial begin, synecdochically speaking, to stand in for that lost past. These objects function, personally and nationally, as representative parts of a whole, visible reminders of a disappearing past that form part of a nation's psychic past.

As these ideas imply, the vastness of history does not disappear altogether. Rather, history gets to be shrinkwrapped, trapped forever in the present in the objects with which we surround ourselves. These objects form a symbolic matrix, if you will, a powerful set of personal landmarks on a nation's historical map that give the nation its sense of personal and political identity. We can see the past because we see the objects that are representative of that past. Put another way, we are what we remember, though we are also, of course, what we choose to forget--hence the value of memory in recreating the past in the present through a network of objects that remind nations of what has been lost and thus what needs to be preserved.

Krips develops her ideas about lieux de memoire and their relation to memory and history in chapters on Philippa Pearce, Rosemary Sutcliff, and Alan Garner, those postwar writers who belong to "the second golden age of British children's fiction . . . which stretches from the late 1950s to the 1980s" (25). For example, chapter 4, entitled "Forgetting the Past," links two books by Pearce, Minnow on the Say and Tom's Midnight Garden, to the work of the National Trust and the role of the postwar heritage movement in conservation-minded Britain circa the 1950s. Krips argues that Britain's 1951 Festival of Britain and Pearce's two works of fiction were events that...