First, I started to write an article about the emotional and affective experience of working with archives. This was published nearly a year ago in Rethinking History. It’s free to download at the moment as part of Routledge’s celebrations for Arts and Humanities Month, so do have a look!

Second, a book. This is based on my PhD research, which mainly focused on political parties and their relationship to the past, but reading back over this blog I see that a lot of the ideas I explored here have made it in there too – progressive nostalgia, the way the past is privileged in contemporary society, the heritage industry, the aesthetics of ‘pastness’. The book is called History, Heritage and Tradition in Contemporary British Politics: Past Politics and Present Histories and will be published in January 2012, but is available to pre-order now on Amazon. It’s rather pricey (even with the £3.25 discount!), but do please mention it to your libraries!

I am now working on a new project, looking at political and cultural ideas about progress in the long twentieth century (1888-2010) and also about the ways that people, and especially politicians, have talked about being ‘progressive’. It’s a very malleable word, with lots of contradictory meanings: moderate and radical; left-wing and centrist; pluralist and partisan. I’m trying to unpick the specific political associations it has from the more general statements it makes about progressing through time – but even these are complex and contradictory: does it mean moderate, gradual change or a radical rupture with the past?

I first started thinking about this in relation to the 2010 General Election when (I think for the first time), all three of the main parties were describing themselves as ‘progressive’, but with rather different assumptions about what that meant. David Cameron also described the Coalition as a ‘progressive partnership’, seemingly in a direct challenge to those who think that this is a term associated broadly with the values of the left and specifically with co-operation between Liberals and socialists dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

I’m now tracing these shifting meanings and uses back to the late nineteenth century, to put it all in a longer perspective and to find out where the boundaries are. Can anything be described as ‘progressive’? Are there particular core meanings which must be there? And, perhaps most importantly, how have the public understood the term? Does it have the same associations for them as for the politicians?

I’m currently trying to decide whether to start a new blog for this project (and if so what to call it – all suggestions welcome!), or whether to continue discussing it on here. Expect an update soon!

In the meantime, please download my article and pre-order my book!

It’s emphatically not a reconstruction. Severs occasionally takes great pleasure in undermining the museum effect, pointing out the anachronisms and inaccuracies. And of course the whole project revels in fictionalisation and trickery. It is about ‘aura’, not authenticity. Visual and aural effects are used to give the impression that the family are just out of reach, that they have just left the room: half eaten food, ruffled bedsheets, whispers.

Crucially though it seems that visitors are not expected to empathise with the characters in the personal way that would be expected in a more conventional Living History experience. The family are archetypes. We experience the mood of each period through them; we don’t try to relate their experiences to our own.

Something about it reminds me of Collingwood on re-enactment. It’s explicitly about rethinking the era, about recreating its thought processes. For instance, in the book Severs describes how he came to understand the Georgian mentality by rethinking the steps which had led them to move the fireplace to the centre of a wall. This seems to be close to what Collingwood meant by saying that history ‘is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind’.

According to my interpretation of Collingwood, thoughts can be ‘re-enacted’ or ‘re-thought’ because they are, in a sense, a-historical. Collingwood’s experience of rethinking Euclid’s thought that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal will be shaped by his own character, by his relation to Euclid and by his knowledge of the intervening centuries. Yet the thought: ‘the angles are equal’ remains the same. He cannot feel like Euclid but he can think like him.

Similarly, Severs’ discovery of Georgian aesthetics is mediated by his desire to communicate with the past, by late twentieth century taste and by the changed meanings of hearth, home and family. Yet something about it remains the same.

Despite this, something doesn’t quite fit. First, Collingwood specifically repudiates the idea that his kind of ‘historical knowledge’ could be gained by ‘some Wellesian machine for looking backwards through time’. And second, Severs is quite adamant that guests need to surrender to the experience, to feel, to be, not to think.

It may be that these are semantic points: 18 Folgate Street isn’t a time machine, it’s a thought experiment; and its visitors are being invited to rethink the past but not to analyse the illusion. Or it may be more than this. I’m still not sure. Has anyone been?

Oh, and on the question of why I haven’t been myself. To tell the truth, I’m scared. That whole boundary between past and present, reality and fiction does something funny to me. I know that’s the point, but it doesn’t help. I’m always a little bit scared in museums. One which is specifically about ‘unsettling’ our relationship with the past may be a step too far. Severs admitted that he tried to push his ‘guests’ to their limits. I think my limit might lie somewhere in the pages of his book.

I now have it as a screensaver to remind myself of all the problems associated with our everyday approaches to the past.

A recent conversation about atheism and the privileging of faith, made me think about the privileged status the past has in our society. Things are so often justified on the grounds simply that they are old. In a particularly irksome example, the standard defence of prostitution on the grounds that ‘it’s the world’s oldest profession’ has been trotted out again this week in response to the criminalisation of men who use controlled/pimped/trafficked prostitutes.

Slavery also has a long pedigree. It doesn’t make it right.

Enjoy!

Then, on Friday, someone pointed me in the direction of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust. It’s a wonderful book, which I unreservedly recommend to anyone who hasn’t read it. But there it is. A beautiful, playful, engaging encapsulation of everything I was trying to say. She even follows the same trails – Freud, Derrida, Michelet. But of course it is far more than that, she weaves together so many strands – from a social history of dust, to a meditation on the meanings attached to rag rug. And all with a lightness of touch I can’t imagine ever matching.

So where to go from here? Part of me is encouraged that I managed to arrive at (some) similar points on my own, part appalled by the gulf between my writing and Steedman’s. Of course I can revise my article, making it more of a reflection on her study. But my point – the point I thought was mine alone now seems so sad, so pointless. Essentially, my article has turned to dust.