The Culture of History

Near the beginning of The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800-1953 (2006), Billie Melman defines  the "culture" in question 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 (sometimes in the most literal sense of 'looking') and made use of it, or did not, both in a social and material world and in their imaginary" (4).  Melman uses the plural "pasts" quite deliberately, to indicate her dissatisfaction with Foucauldian and Gramscian "control and hegemony narratives" (9); her turn to the production and consumption of history, including the production of history by its supposed consumers, critiques approaches to historical writing that insist on reducing it to straightforward ideological machinery.  She proposes instead that we consider historical culture as a dynamic process, sometimes collaborative and sometimes antagonistic, that occurs in multiple media (ranging from amateur history to waxworks to cinema) and in multiple concrete spaces (particularly urban spaces).  We can track this culture, Melman suggests, through four "modalities": 1) the percolation of "themes and images" through both the available media and the various social strata; 2) the "repetition in the patterns and dynamics of access to history and to knowledge about and usages of the past," in which the production and consumption of historical genres is itself historicized; 3) the "democratization of history," which, as Melman points out, went hand-in-hand with ongoing restrictions on who could access history, and where; and 4) the "scope and possibility for a national history," particularly the role of supposedly un-English figures in shaping ideas about Englishness (20-22).

Melman works with two significant historical eras in particular--namely, the Tudor era (especially the Elizabethans) and the French Revolution, both of which proved fertile grounds not just for narrative history, but also for novels, movies, plays, operas, paintings, museums, and waxwork exhibitions.  Moreover, these two eras proved deeply appealing, aesthetically, intellectually, and politically, to producers and consumers across the social spectrum.  And, as Melman argues, both eras lent themselves to "history as a chamber of horrors," as she titles one chapter.  History wasn't safe; instead, it could be "uncomfortable" and "terrifying," but deeply "titillating" for precisely that reason (65).  In the nineteenth century, Melman traces this unsettling energy through a combination of canonical texts (Carlyle, Dickens), non-canonical texts (Ainsworth's The Tower of London and the Newgate tradition), and different types of spectacle (Madame Tussaud's, the Tower of London, the panorama).  In the twentieth, she turns to Tudor films and their appropriation for advertisements, souvenirs, and so on; the return of the French Revolution in the Scarlet Pimpernel series; and the cultural productions surrounding Elizabeth II's coronation, including the televised coronation itself and Benjamin Britten's controversial opera, Gloriana.  That last functions as an example of what Melman terms "failed versions of the past" (286), which, as she points out, tell us as much about historical thinking as the more successful versions do.

What can literary scholars learn from Melman's work? At the most basic level, Melman demonstrates just how hard it is to make arguments about any work's cultural effect, because treating consumers as producers means that we are no longer discussing how an audience receives a given text, but instead how an audience uses it (recirculates it, tells stories about it, plagiarizes it, appropriates it, etc.).  In that sense, she falls into line with historians of reading like Jonathan Rose, who have shown that class and gender operate in unpredictable ways when it comes to reading material, as well as with Roy Rosenzweig, whose point about Wikipedia (see my last post) is that all of its users are doing some kind of historical work themselves, no matter what the professionals might say about it. 

More to the point, literary critics--even of the historicist variety--are generally trained to pursue only the first of Melman's modalities.  Most of us, for example, would have no problem studying the relationship between the Newgate novel and the Tudor historical novel, or perhaps even drawing larger connections between the vogue for prison Gothic and the vogue for the Tower of London.   Such genre topics/methods are very much part of the literary historian's basic arsenal--and the literary historian would probably offer a far more detailed close reading of the texts in question.  But even historicist studies still tend to be both text-centric and heavily reliant on the "one or two texts per chapter" model, whereas Melman draws on the production and consumption of material culture (including the economics), demographics, parliamentary debates, magazine circulation, tourist regulations, oral history, and unpublished archival material (essays, historical manuscripts, memoirs, etc.).  Despite the turn to archival work in recent literary scholarship, most of us are still not trained to either handle such material (especially anything involving numbers!) or to synthesize it successfully with textual analysis.  A historicist critic's work still does not look like a historian's.

That being said, one of Melman's points is that historical culture survives, to a very great extent, on the basis not of ideological warfare, but of pleasure.  (The "pleasure of horror" [101], as she repeatedly notes.)   Although she rarely belabors the point, with the exception of the Gloriana chapter,  debates over various forms of historical representation were as likely to draw on the language of aesthetics (formal properties, quality, construction of effect, evocation & management of emotional response, beauty, etc.) as on the language of politics.  In some cases, the aesthetic theories brought to bear, whether elite or popular, drew heavily on political assumptions; in other cases, the theories in question drew more generally on ideas about the function of art, what constituted a good representation of history in an artistic medium, and so forth.    Again, as Melman indirectly notes, aesthetic judgments were often not simply in the service of an assumed ideological status quo, but nor were they independent of beliefs about what historical representation should or should not do.  In that sense, she does suggest how one might think about aesthetics and historytogether...