Tucking into History

His eye was on the model of Marat as assassinated in a bath and with this before him he could eat an under-done pork pie! It is the last straw that breaks the camel's back; it was this last horror that sent your eyewitness out of Madame Tussaud's as fast as his legs would carry him!

(Melman, p. 62)

Perhaps inspired by the uncouth pork-pie eating youth espied by Charles Dickens in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, Billie Melman's book is an account of the changing consumption of the past from the French Revolution to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It is a consciously vernacular depiction of historical engagement (frequently recalling the more supple cultural investigations of Raphael Samuel) which seeks to go beyond the instrumental analysis of social control and imagined communities, as well as the reductive dichotomy of high and low culture. Instead, through an impressive range of media from histories to novels to plays to films to operas to historical monuments, Melman seeks 'to "write into" our interpretations of the role of the past in modernity the narratives, spectacles, and usages which deviated from and evolved alongside the secure, comfortable, Country version of English history and sometimes contradicted it' (p. 330). Instead of retreating into a comforting idea of the past in the wake of the French revolutionary trauma, Melman traces how contradictory narratives of the past functioned and blossomed equally prolifically.

Quite rightly, she focuses her work on the multiple layers of history: the differing, competing, overlaying strata of media which brought the Victorians and Edwardians toward the past. She thinks this process is best described, Walter Benjamin-like, as 'accretion . . . in which newer layers of urban forms of representation and genres, evolving in relation to new technologies, practices of looking, and modes of multiple and chain consumption of historical texts and objects were grafted on to older forms and technologies which did not disappear' (p. 319). Central to that interpretation is a visual confrontation with history – one of the ironies of progress being that ever more literate societies consume popular histories in ever more visual fashions – which she begins with an account of Thomas Carlyle as 'ocular impresario'. In a close if familiar reading of The French Revolution, Melman analyses the role of diorama, panorama and spectator-ship in Carlyle's epic account. In contrast to the pedestrian vista of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Carlyle's scenic canvas of the 1790s is a textual reflection of the historical vogue for cycloramas, padoramas, even octoramas – which allowed for a theatrical, sensory immersion in the historical experience (with battles and naval engagements a speciality) from up to eight different angles.

Melman takes up the theme again, in terms of the early heritage industry, with a critique of nineteenth-century Tower of London guides as well as an investigation of the audience drawn to the site itself: in effect, how the repertoire of urban historicism offered a metonym for various moments of the past, 'often competing with and effectively winning over both the official attempt at control and the agenda of rational reformism by introducing into them the sense of pleasurable horror'. The Tower – viewed as dungeon, palace, fortress, armoury, torture chamber and London icon – was appropriated and reappropriated by numerous, competing, paying audiences until by the latter half of the nineteenth century it was regarded as an essential component of national history, which had to be 'seen'. As such, powerful lobbies demanded that entrance be free since universal access to the Tower would not only educate the eyes and senses of the gazer, but turn them into active participants in the national culture. The propaganda of the Society for Free Admission consistently associated free access to history with, on the one hand, the democratization of consumption and, on the other, inclusion in the nation.

Fascinatingly, the visual study of history then appears to transform itself from a popular...