Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory is one of the books I’ve held on to. It was published in 1994 and I bought it in those pre-amazon times by writing to the publisher (not emailing) and sending a sterling bank draft. God be with the days.
I learned a lot more about Samuel later, from his widow Alison Light’s memoir (she’s another favourite of mine) but all I knew about him then was that he was associated with History Workshop Journal (which I admired), and that he edited a book I ordered on inter-library loan when I was a postgraduate in the early 1980s, called People’s History and Socialist Theory. His writings revealed him to be an enthusiastic, playful historian, by no means a stern ideologue. Theatres of Memory, published two years before his untimely death, is a big, baggy book underpinned by a wealth of scholarship – after reading every chapter, it is well worth reading the endnotes, which contain additional discussion as well as references. The book has been criticised for poor organisation. ‘It’s all over the place!’ an enthusiastic young oral historian said to me once, and I see his point, some of the chapters could have done with more editing. But a writer with as many ideas and insights as Raphael Samuel can wander as freely as he likes as far as I am concerned. And anyway, he sustains his argument throughout the book.
And his argument is this: history is ‘the work of many hands’. It doesn’t ‘belong’ to academics and it isn’t a subject or ‘discipline’, as much as an activity. Most human beings ‘do’ history quite often even if only by having household furnishings or ornaments passed down through the family (he doesn’t use this example but he could); watching period drama on TV; passing old buildings on our way to work, or looking at old family photo albums, and, he could also have said, visiting graves and observing anniversaries. We might decorate our homes in an old-fashioned style or wear clothes that are vintage. We go to museums or art galleries or ‘interpretive centres’, especially when we’re on our holidays. The fact that all those places are tourist attractions, geared at the visitor, doesn’t trouble Samuel in the slightest. If people want to engage with the past as a leisure activity, what is wrong with that? He is scathing about the people he calls ‘heritage-baiters’, among them poet Tom Paulin and historian David Cannadine, who criticise heritage centres and theme parks and battle re-enacters because they seem to promote a belief that everything was better in the past, a kind of rosy conservatism. But popular historical presentations don’t necessarily promote this view, Samuel insists, or if they do, who are Paulin, Cannadine and others to suppose that the visitors/spectators lack a critical faculty? Samuel refers to a nasty 1994 exhibition called Flogging A Dead Horse and a coffee-table book based on it, which took photographs of people – specifically north of England working-class people – at heritage sites, lit from below, misshapen and grotesque. The message in the book/exhibition is that ‘uneducated’ people (by which is meant, people without PhDs) consume ‘heritage’ as they would eat a bar of chocolate. This is grossly elitist.
The historical imagination is stimulated every bit as much by the illustrations in Ladybird historical books (whose English queens, he memorably comments, look like either Anna Neagle or Julie Andrews), as by articles in scholarly journals. Antiquarians, collectors, antique dealers, and librarians, not to mention biographers and writers of historical novels, and of course teachers who get pupils at all levels to do oral history projects or historical plays, are all ‘doing’ history. Academic historians don’t forge documents, he says, ‘(b)ut by the nature of our trade we are continually having to fabricate contexts’. We decide what fact goes where to support our argument, giving an ordered sequence to events which ‘to the participants themselves, might have seemed quite random.’ It is humbling for me, a former academic, to be reminded (because I always kind of knew it) that academic historians’ version of the past is valued above all others only by other academic historians.
My favourite part of the book is when he veers a bit off-topic to discuss adaptations of Dickens for stage and screen. He didn’t like the 6-hour Christine Edzard film of Little Dorrit, which came out in 1987, because he thought it omitted the darkness and disorder of the book. So what, he says, if it took seamstresses 2 years to hand-sew all the costumes to get them just right? Amy Dorrit was almost hidden inside her poke bonnet, her poor friend Maggie was dressed in Laura Ashley and everything and everyone was just too clean and bright, even the streets. After he expressed this opinion publically, a lifelong friend never spoke to him again. (Imagine!) On the other hand, he praises a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Nicholas Nickleby which left out some characters and invented some dialogue, because he thought it was true to the spirit of the original. He loves (as do I) the David Lean Great Expectations (1946)and Oliver Twist (1948), though he’s unkind about John Mills as adult Pip -‘a tennis-club blade’, he calls him.Unlike many admirers of Lean’s Oliver Twist, he also likes Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver! (1968) which, he argues, vividly captures the heart of the story. Fagin is made into a comic figure, it is true, but Sikes is as evil as ever, Nancy as lovable, Oliver and his workhouse friends as pitiable, and the flower girls ‘making a harmony of the old London street cries..[‘Who will buy?’]…. turn by degrees into sinister outriders of the underworld’.
There is lots more in this brilliant book and I haven’t done it justice here at all. For instance, he tells us that when he first came across nineteenth-century photographs, it dawned on him, for the first time, that people then were not that different to people today – ‘In place of the flaming gin palaces of Doré’s chiaroscuro [in photographs of a Whitechapel pub]…a mixed group of men, women and children chatting amicably to each other in the sunshine, seated on an outside bench.’ Gustave Doré was an engraver whose lurid images of mid-to-late-nineteenth-century English (and French) working-class life are taken by many to be historically accurate.
Last June on holidays I read Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter . It was very good, though I found Frank Bascombe a sleazy character and I had the feeling I wasn’t meant to. Anyway, at one stage Bascombe teaches in a university but he gets out as fast as he can because his fellow-academics are ‘anti-mystery types right to the core – men and women both- all expert in the arts of explaining, explicating and dissecting ….It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth’. Thankfully, this is not true of all academics and it certainly wasn’t true of Raphael Samuel. This big book of his is devoted to restoring the joy, the wonder, the mystery to history.
Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory Vol 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso 1994). There was a volume 2 I think (Island Stories?) but for some reason I didn’t take to it as much. I think it was published posthumously and edited by Gareth Stedman Jones and Sally Alexander (both fine historians too).
_________People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1981). I first read this when doing my MA on nuns in nineteenth-century Ireland. Anna Davin’s short but brilliant article in it on women’s history was a rallying-cry for me: ‘The study of struggle should look for where women did struggle, instead of blaming them for their absence from male-dominated organizations.’
Richard Ford, The Sportswriter (London: Collins Harvill 1986).
Alison Light, A Radical Romance: a memoir of love, grief and consolation (London: Fig Tree/Penguin 2019, 2020.)
Leave a Reply