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

Melman's The Culture of History is an astonishingly wide-ranging exploration 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, coveringa 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 – aswell 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 toan 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 present from an unruly past' (9), purveyed through vehicles of state and elite social control such as museums.

While much of this is, perhaps, more fully acknowledged in current scholarship than Melman allows, her call for us to counter our tendency to look at historical culture as 'something that is the clue to something else: a Liberal ideology and world-view, … the 'imagined' community, or the consolidation of the interests of the middle-classes' (8) is a timely admonition. Instead, Melman urges us to 'pay more attention to the actual dynamics of culture at work', recovering a past which is 'a place of danger, disorder, and degrees of violence' (11). This means acknowledging that 'production is only one part of the story', and validating and exploring the role of the individual consumer (some of the most original and effective parts of the book are case-studies of 'reader receptions'). This emphasis on the role of the varied audiences means for Melman that the exploration of modern historical culture involves reference to four 'modalities': 'the resonance of themes and images through various forms and genres and across classes', 'repetition in the patterns and dynamics of access to history and to knowledge about and usages of the past', 'democratization of the past', accompanied by a continued culture of 'distinction' between classes, and the globalization and 'cross-national' development of the national narrative(s) (20–2). Here she offers a coherent body of conceptual tools for developing a sharper and more sophisticated analysis of modern historical culture than many of us working in the same field have yet achieved.

Part I offers a case-study employing these methodologies: nineteenth-century representations of the French Revolution, beginning with Mme Tussaud's Revolutionary and Napoleonic exhibits. Melman argues that the display constituted...