In this original and widely researched book, Billie Melman explores
the culture of history during the age of modernity. Her book is
about the production of English pasts, the multiplicity of their
representations and the myriad ways in which the English looked at
history (sometimes in the most literal sense of 'looking') and made
use of it in a social and material urban world, and in their
imagination. Covering the period between the Napoleonic Wars and
the Coronation of 1953, Melman recoups the work of antiquarians,
historians, novelists and publishers, wax modellers, cartoonists
and illustrators, painters, playwrights and actors, reformers and
educationalists, film stars and their fans, musicians and
composers, opera-fans, and radio listeners. Avoiding a separation
between 'high' and 'low' culture, Melman analyses
nineteenth-century plebeian culture and twentieth-century
mass-culture and their venues - like Madame Tussaud's Chamber of
Horrors, panoramas, national monuments like the Tower of London,
and films - as well as studying forms of 'minority' art - notably
opera. She demonstrates how history was produced and how it
circulated from texts, visual images, and sounds, to people and
places and back to a variety of texts and images. While paying
attention to individuals' making-do with culture, Melman considers
constrictions of class, gender, the state, and the market-place on
the consumption of history. Focusing on two privileged pasts, the
Tudor monarchy and the French Revolution, the latter seen as an
English event and as the framework for narrating and comprehending
history, Melman shows that during the nineteenth century, the most
popular, longest-enduring, and most highly commercialized images of
the past represented it not as cosy and secure, but rather as
dangerous, disorderly, and violent. The past was also imagined as
an urban place, rather than as rural. In Melman's account, City not
green Country, is the centre of a popular version of the past whose
central Images are the dungeon, the gallows, and the guillotine.
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