David-Lowenthal - The Past Is A Foreign Country - pdf-1-161

THE PAST IS A
FOREIGN COUNTRY – REVISITED
The past is past, but survives in and all around us, indispensable and inescap-
able. Three decades after his classic The Past Is a Foreign Country, David
Lowenthal re-examines why we love or loathe what seems old or familiar.
His new book reveals how we know and remember the past, and the myriad
ways – nostalgia or amnesia, restoration, replay, chauvinist celebration or
remorseful contrition – we use and misuse it. We transform the past to serve
present needs and future hopes, alike in preserving and in discarding what
nature and our ancestors have handed down.
Whether treasured boon or traumatic bane, the past is the prime source of
personal and collective identity. Hence its relics and reminders evoke intense
rivalry. Resurgent conflicts over history, memory, and heritage pervade every
facet of public culture, making the foreign country of the past ever more our
domesticated own.
The past in the Internet age has become more intimate yet more remote,
readily found but rapidly forgotten. Its range today is stupendous, embracing
not just the human but the terrestrial and even the cosmic saga. And it is seen
and touched and smelled as well as heard and read about. Traumatic recol-
lection and empathetic re-enactment demote traditional history. A clear-cut
chronicle certified by experts has become a fragmented congeries of contested
relics, remnants and reminiscences. New insights into history and memory,
bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and
remorse and contrition, make Lowenthal’s new book an essential key to the
past that we inherit, reshape, and bequeath to the future.
David Lowenthal is Emeritus Professor of Geography and Honorary Research

Fellow at University College London. He is a medallist of the Royal Geo-
graphical, the Royal Scottish Geographical and the American Geographical
Societies, a Fellow of the British Academy and honorary D.Litt. Memorial
University of Newfoundland. In 2010 he was awarded the Forbes Lecture
Prize by the International Institute for Conservation. His books include West
Indian Societies (1972), The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985), The Heritage
Crusade and the Spoils of History (1998), and George Perkins Marsh, Prophet
of Conservation (2000).
THE PAST IS A
FOREIGN COUNTRY –
REVISITED
David Lowenthal
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of

education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521616850
© David Lowenthal 2015
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Lowenthal, David.
The past is a foreign country - revisited / David Lowenthal.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-85142-8 (Hardback) – ISBN 978-0-521-61685-0 (Paperback)
1. History–Philosophy. 2. History. I. Title.
D16.8.L52 2013
901–dc23 2013000789
ISBN 978-0-521-85142-8 Hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-61685-0 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
TABLE O F C O NTENTS
List of illustrations page ix

List of permissions xiv
Acknowledgements xv
List of abbreviations xvii
Introduction 1
An authorial credo 2
How my past became foreign 3
Finding the foreign country 5
Frequenting the foreign country 8
Themes and structure 15
PART I WANTING THE PAST

Introduction 23
1 Nostalgia: dreams and nightmares 31

Nostalgia far and near 39
Looking back to Europe 42
Medical homesickness 46
Sentimental longing to retro irony 49
2 Time travelling 55
Goals in the revisited past 63
Explaining the past; Searching for the Golden Age; Self-aggrandizement;
Changing the past
Risks of revisiting the past 72
The past disappoints; Inability to cope with the past; Problems of
returning to the present; Endangering the temporal fabric
3 Benefits and burdens of the past 80

Benefits 82
Familiarity; Guidance; Communion; Affirmation; Identity; Possession;
Enhancement; Escape
Valued attributes 110
Antiquity; Continuity; Accretion; Sequence; Termination
vi Table of contents
Threats and evils 128

The grievous past; The stifling past; The menacing past
PART II DISPUTING THE PAST

Introduction 145
4 Ancients vs. Moderns: tradition and innovation 147

The Renaissance and the Classical heritage 152
Distance; Imitation and emulation; Revival as creation
From La querelle to the Enlightenment 163
Decay of nature; Effects of printing; The new science; Science vs. Art
Victorian Britain 172
Innovation and retrospection; Medievalism and neoclassicism; Dismay at
thraldom to the past; Whig history: reusing the past
American Founding Fathers and sons 184
Autonomy and generational freedom; The eternal youth of America;
The useless and crippling past; Ambivalence; Nostalgia for Old World
antiquity; The debt to the Founding Fathers; Centennial comforts of
the colonial past
5 The look of age: aversion 206

The organic analogy 211
Antipathy to age in humans and other beings 213
The decay of the world and its features 226
The superiority of youthful nations 230
Rejection of age and wear in artefacts 232
6 The look of age: affection 241

Old things should look old 247
Decay demonstrates and secures antiquity 254
The beauty of patina 259
Varieties and implications of aesthetic decay 268
Ideas evoked by decay 275
PART III KNOWING THE PAST

Introduction 289
Reifying the chimerical past 293
7 Memory 303
Habit, recall, memento, reverie 305
Personal and shared 310
Table of contents vii
Confirmability 315
Forgetting 318
Revising 320
Memory, memoir, and identity 324
8 History 333
History is less than the past 336
History is more than the past 340
Confirmability 343
Western and other histories 351
Chronology and narrative 353
Past vs. present: emergence of the foreign country 358
History, fiction, and faction 367
History and memory 378
9 Relics 383
Perceiving the tangible past 386
Virtues and defects of reliquary knowledge 389
Interconnections 398
Artefacts as metaphors in history and memory 401
Changing routes to the past 404
PART IV REMAKING THE PAST

Introduction 411
10 Saving the past: preservation and replication 413

Preservation 413
Identifying, displaying, protecting 429
Removal 440
Copying and replicating 448
11 Replacing the past: restoration and re-enactment 464

Restoration 465
Restorative cycles in human and terrestrial history; Restoration in the arts;
Recovering nature
Re-enactment 477
Varieties of replay; Enduring the past’s authentic hardships;
‘Period rush’ vs. rectifying the past
Conclusion 494
viii Table of contents
12 Improving the past 497

Fabricated pasts 499
Possessive and partisan pasts 502
Altering past scene and substance 514
Adaptations; Additions; Commemorations
Aggrandizing and abridging 534
The past embellished and amplified; The past concealed and expurgated;
The errant past deplored and displayed
Anachronizing the past 554
Antiquating; Modernizing; Conflation
Acceptability 576
Epilogue: The past in the present 585

The omnipresent past 586
The eviscerated past 588
The past made present 594
The past held to blame 598
Accepting the past 603
Collective responsibility for the past 604
Select bibliography 611

Index 639
ILLUSTRATIONS
1 The past all-pervasive: ‘Well, Emmeline, what’s new?’ (Barney Tobey,

New Yorker, 25/10/1976, p. 37) page 10
2 Rubbish into ‘Antiques’: Coventry, Vermont (David Lowenthal) 35
3 Tudor nostalgia: Charles Wade’s Snowshill Manor, Gloucestershire
(National Trust Images) 46
4 The lure of time travel: Jorvik Viking Centre ‘Time Car’, York (York
Archaeological Trust, Ltd) 66
5 Securing a national symbol: Market Square, Old Town, Warsaw, after Nazi
destruction, 1944 (J. Bułhak; National Museum of Warsaw) 97
6 Securing a national symbol: Market Square, Old Town, Warsaw, after Polish
reconstruction, 1970 (T. Hermanczyk; National Museum of Warsaw) 97
7 Lure of the primitive: Joseph-Benoit Suvée, The Invention of Drawing, 1791
(Groeningemuseum, Bruges) 117
8 Lure of the primitive: John Flaxman, ‘Agamemnon and Cassandra’,
Compositions from the Tragedies of Aeschylus, 1795 (Courtauld Institute
of Art, University of London) 118
9 Charms of continuity: Bury St Edmunds, dwellings set into the medieval
abbey front (David Lowenthal) 123
10 Charms of continuity: Avebury, medieval tithe barn athwart prehistoric
stone circle (David Lowenthal) 124
11 Decor of diachrony: Roman wall and interwar house, near Southampton
(David Lowenthal) 124
12 The past neutralized as display: agricultural and other bygones, Woodstock,
Vermont (David Lowenthal) 142
13 The look of antiquity: seventeenth-century manor house, Sibford Gower,
Oxfordshire, remodelled 1915 (David Lowenthal) 182
14 The look of antiquity: Ernest Newton, design for Fouracre, West Green,
Hampshire, c. 1902 (British Architectural Library/RIBA) 182
15 Elderly decrepitude: G.O. Wasenius, ‘Ages of Man’ 1831 216
16 The evils of age: Pompeo Batoni, Time orders Old Age to destroy Beauty,
1746 (National Gallery, London) 222
17 The perils of age: François Perrier, Time the Destroyer, 1638 (Warburg
Institute, University of London) 239
18 The noble patina of soot: Robert Smirke, St Philip’s, Salford,
Manchester, 1825 (David Lowenthal) 251
19 Renewing the old: Canterbury Cathedral cloisters, 1978
x List of illustrations
20 Imagined decay: Joseph Michael Gandy, Architectural Ruins: A Vision.

The Bank of England . . . 1832 (Sir John Soane’s Museum) 254
21 Picturesque misery: Gustave Doré, ‘Houndsditch’, London, 1872 (akg-images) 255
22 Ruins made tidy: medieval remains, Yorkshire (David Lowenthal) 256
23 Ruins left incomprehensible: medieval rubble, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
24 Age improves art: William Hogarth, Time Smoking a Picture, 1762
(Warburg Institute, University of London) 259
25 The grandeur of ruins: Giovanni Paolo Panini, Capriccio with Belisarius,
1730–5 (Warburg Institute, University of London) 262
26 The grandeur of ruins: John Constable, Stonehenge, 1835 (Victoria and
Albert Museum, London) 262
27 Henry Fuseli, The Artist Moved by the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins, 1778–9
(Kunsthaus, Zürich) 263
28 Pleasing decay: nature’s work. Lichen at Montacute, Somerset (Edwin Smith) 267
29 Pleasing decay: man’s work. William Chambers, ruined arch, Kew
Gardens, 1759–60 (David Lowenthal) 267
30 Fragments: the Elgin Marbles. Dione and Aphrodite (?), east pediment
(British Museum) 270
31 Fragments: paintings and ruins (courtesy of Sheldon Keck, Cooperstown,
New York; provenance unknown) 270
32 Ruin enlivens a landscape: Folly, Hodnet Hall, Shropshire, c. 1970 (David
Lowenthal) 273
33 Unpleasing decay: former cement works, near Snelling, California (David
Lowenthal) 273
34 Abandoned decay: Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1933 (Walker Evans; US Library
of Congress) 274
35 Arrested decay: Calico Ghost Town, moved to Knott’s Berry Farm,
Buena Park, California (David Lowenthal) 274
36 Skeletal death menaces its victim: Louis-François Roubiliac, Tomb of Lady
Elizabeth Nightingale, Westminster Abbey, 1761 (English Heritage) 278
37 Decay and resurrection: Girolamo della Robbia, rejected transi of
Catherine de’ Medici, 1566 (Louvre, Paris) 279
38 Death and resurrection: ‘Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum’:
inscription on slab tomb of Robert Touse, d. 1422 (E. H. Langlois, Essai sur
les danses des morts, Rouen, 1853) 280
39 Romanesque monumentality for America: H. H. Richardson, Cheney
Building, Hartford, Connecticut, 1875 (Wayne Andrews) 286
40 Freud’s Gradiva: archaeology, psychoanalysis, commemoration
(Chris Cromarty) 405
41 Removal excites protective legislation: Rood-loft from Cathedral of St John,
Hertogenbosch, Netherlands, c. 1610, purchased by Victoria and
Albert Museum, London, 1871 418
List of illustrations xi
42 The humble past acclaimed: Servants’ Hall, Erdigg, Clwyd, Wales

(John Bethell; National Trust) 421
43 Protection trivializes: Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, Arizona
(Richard Frear; National Park Service) 423
44 The present dwarfs the past: McKim, Mead, and White, Villard Houses,
New York City, 1886 (David Lowenthal) 424
45 The present dwarfs the past: Memory Lane Lounge beneath Detroit’s
Renaissance Center (David Lowenthal) 424
46 Restoring and signposting: old iron mine, Roxbury, Connecticut, before
renovation (David Lowenthal) 430
47 Same, after renovation (David Lowenthal) 430
48 Marking the invisible past: Revolutionary conflict, Castine, Maine (David
Lowenthal) 431
49 Marking the inconsequential past: accident, Harrow on the Hill, Middlesex
(Susannah Cartwright) 431
50 Marking the implausible past: plaque to Jacob von Hogflume, time traveller 433
51 ‘Yes, I remember Adlestrop’: this author beneath the railway platform sign
that inspired Edward Thomas (David Lowenthal) 434
52 Marking an intended past: restoring the aboriginal Kansas prairie (David
Lowenthal) 435
53 Marking a sentiment: honouring the reformer Shaftesbury, Harrow
School (David Lowenthal) 435
54 Display overwhelms: the Lincoln ‘birthplace cabin’ in its marble memorial
carapace, Hodgensville, Kentucky, 1911 (Walter H. Miller) 437
55 Display denatures: Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts (David Lowenthal) 437
56 Antiquity rearranged: Pompeo Batoni, Thomas Dundas, on the Grand
Tour, 1764 (Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London) 441
57 Antiquity dismembered: bisected copy of Trajan’s Column, Cast Court
(Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 442
58 National symbols of the Irish Celtic Revival: Pat McAuliffe, Central Hotel
facade, Listowel, County Kerry, Eire (George Mott; Thames & Hudson) 443
59 Antiquity multiplied and miniaturized: Classical replicas, Robert
Adam entrance hall, Syon House, Middlesex (akg-images) 450
60 Venus, after Clodion, in parian ware, c. 1862 (Richard Dennis) 450
61 St Basil’s Cathedral, Thorpe Park, Surrey (David Lowenthal) 451
62 Replication: the Nashville Parthenon, 1922–32 (David Lowenthal) 454
63 Replication: Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, Victoria, British Columbia (David
Lowenthal) 454
64 Mission models, San Gabriel Mission courtyard, California (David
Lowenthal) 456
65 The Last Supper, Bibleland, Santa Cruz, California (David Lowenthal) 456
66 Precious authenticity: seventy-year-old ‘Harry White’, deaf in one ear
(Museum of Lincolnshire Life, Lincoln) 457
xii List of illustrations
67 Updating the patriotic past: Archibald M. Willard, Spirit of ’76, 1876

(Library of Congress, Washington, DC) 462
68 Updating the patriotic past: Sheraton Hotels advertisement, 1976 463
69 Antiquity reconstituted: St Albans Cathedral west front, before restoration
(English Heritage) 469
70 Antiquity reconstituted: after restoration by Edmund Beckett, 1st Baron
Grimthorpe in 1879 (English Heritage) 469
71 Antiquity sustained: Arch of Titus, before restoration by Giuseppe
Valadier, 1820s: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Vedute dell’Arco di Tito, c. 1760 470
72 After restoration: Arch of Titus at the end of the nineteenth century
(akg-images) 470
73 Renewing antiquity: the ragged Roman regiment around the Sheldonian
Theatre, Oxford (1868 restorations of seventeenth-century originals),
photo 1965 (David Lowenthal) 471
74 The heads replaced, Michael Black, sculptor, 1972 (David Lowenthal) 471
75 Re-enacting the past: Plimoth Plantation as of 1627 480
76 Re-enacting the past: visitors to the Stone Age, Stockholm, 2006
(Gunter Schobel) 480
77 George Washington and the cherry tree: the original myth. Grant Wood,
Parson Weems’ Fable, 1939 (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas) 512
78 George Washington and the cherry tree: a modern explanation. ‘Give a kid
a hatchet, he’s going to chop things’ (Robet Kraus, New Yorker,
25/1/1969, p. 28) 512
79 George Washington and the cherry tree: technology tarnishes the fable.
‘Father, I cannot tell a lie’ (Dana Fradon, New Yorker, 13/5/1972, p. 45) 513
80 The classical: the Pantheon, Rome, 27 bc, rebuilt ad 117–125 518
81 Classical derivatives: John Soane, Dairy, Hamels Park, Hertfordshire,
1783 (demolished), sketch by G. Richardson (Victoria and Albert
Museum, London) 519
82 National Monument, Calton Hill, Edinburgh, by C. R. Cockerell and
W. H. Playfair, 1822–9 (Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical
Monuments of Scotland) 519
83 Forest Lawn Memorial Park mortuary, Glendale, California, 1920s (David
Lowenthal) 520
84 G. P. W. Custis residence, Arlington, Virginia, by George Hadfield,
1820 (Wayne Andrews) 520
85 Bank facade, Madison, Wisconsin, 1972 (David Lowenthal) 521
86 The Gothic: Bodiam Castle, Sussex, 1386 (National Trust) 522
87 Gothic derivatives: James Malton, design for a hunting-lodge, c. 1802
(British Architectural Library/RIBA) 522
88 Capitol, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by J. H. Dakin, 1847 (Wayne Andrews) 523
89 ‘Lyndhurst’, Tarrytown, New York, by Alexander Jackson Davis, 1838–65
(Wayne Andrews) 524
List of illustrations xiii
90 Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, by Horace Walpole, c. 1760

91 William Burges, design for Church of St Mary, Alford-cum-Studley,
Yorkshire, c. 1872 (British Architectural Library/RIBA) 525
92 Oxfordshire County Hall, by John Plowman, 1840–1 (David Lowenthal) 526
93 Salvation Army, Poole, Dorset (David Lowenthal) 526
94 Mortuary, Encinitas, California (David Lowenthal) 527
95 Post-modern classical: Charles Moore, Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans,
1978 (Alan Karchmer) 528
96 The eclectic past: Osbert Lancaster, ‘Bypass Variegated’ (Here, of All Places,
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958, p. 153) 529
97 Commemorative motifs from Egypt: Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven,
Connecticut, by Henry Austin, 1845–6 (Wayne Andrews) 530
98 Commemorative and contemporary: Milford, Connecticut
99 Unique and apposite commemoration: concrete and stone tent, mausoleum
of Richard F. Burton of The Arabian Nights, Mortlake, Surrey, 1890 (David
Lowenthal) 531
100 Collective and generic commemoration: monument to soldiers of successive
wars, Hartland, Vermont (David Lowenthal) 531
101 A turncoat returned to favour in London: Benedict Arnold, ‘American
patriot’ (David Lowenthal) 548
102 Cashing in on an evil past: witch postcard, Salem, Massachusetts 553
103 Cashing in on a fraudulent past: Viking logo in Alexandria, Minnesota
104 ‘Earlying up’ the past: G. E. Moody cartoon, Punch, 28 Sept. 1938, p. 344 558
105 Domesticating classical antiquity: Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Favourite
Custom, 1909 (Tate Gallery, London) 568
106 Manipulating the medieval: British recruiting poster, First World War
(Imperial War Museum) 569
107 The past as mélange: Disneyland, Anaheim, California (David Lowenthal) 573
108 Original and ‘authentic’: Harrow School building, by Mr Sly, 1608–15 (left),
modified by Samuel and C. R. Cockerell to conform with their matching
right wing, 1820 (David Lowenthal) 578
109 The culpable past (Charles Barsotti, New Yorker, 17/5/2010) 601
PERMISSIONS
1: © Barney Tobey / The New Yorker Collection / www.cartoonbank.com; 2, 9, 10, 11, 12,
13, 18, 19, 22, 23, 29, 30, 31, 33, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 61, 62, 63, 73, 74, 75,
83, 85, 90, 92, 93, 94, 98, 99, 100, 103, 107, 108: © David Lowenthal; 3: © National Trust
Images/Andreas von Einsiedel; 4: York Archaeological Trust, Ltd; 5, 6: National Museum
of Warsaw; 7: Musea Brugge © Lukas-Art in Flanders vzw, photo Hugo Maertens; 8: ©
Conway Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London; 14, 87, 91: The British
Architectural Library, RIBA, London; 16: © The National Gallery, London/Photo: akg-
images; 17, 24, 25: Warburg Institute, University of London; 20: © Sir John Soane’s
Museum; 21: © akg-images/British Library; 26, 41, 57, 81: © Victoria and Albert
Museum, London; 27: © Kunsthaus, Zurich; 28: Edwin Smith photo, Gordon Fraser
Ltd; 32: Walker Evans photo, Library of Congress Farm Security Administration – Office
of War Information Photograph Collection, LC-USF342- 001304-A [P&P]; 34: © The
Trustees of the British Museum; 36, 69, 70: Reproduced by permission of English
Heritage; 37: © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Stephanie Maréchalle; 39, 72,
73, 84, 88, 89, 97: © Wayne Andrews/Esto; 40: Chris Cromarty; 42: © National Trust; 43:
Richard Frear photo, U.S. National Park Service, Casa Grande Ruins National Monu-
ment; 49: Susannah Cartwright; 50: © Peter Berthoud, www.peterberthoud.co.uk; 54:
Walter H. Miller; 56: © Photographic Survey, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Private collection; 58: George Mott photo, © Thames & Hudson Ltd; 59: © akg/Bildarchiv
Monheim; 60: Richard Dennis; 66: Museum of Lincolnshire Life; 67: Library of Congress,
LC-DIG-pga-03609; 72: © akg-images; 76: © Gunter Schobel; 77: Amon Carter Museum,
Fort Worth; 78: Robert Kraus, New Yorker Magazine; 79: Dana Fradon, New Yorker
Magazine; 82: © RCAHMS; 86: © National Trust Images/Alasdair Ogilvie; 95: © Alan
Karchmer/Esto; 96: Osbert Lancaster; 104: Punch; 105: © Tate, London 2012; 106: ©
Imperial War Museums (Art. IWM PST 0408); 109: © Charles Barsotti / The New Yorker
Collection / www.cartoonbank.com
AB BREVIATIONS
Newspapers [Times, Guardian, Independent, Evening Standard, Telegraph, etc.]

all London
AASLH American Association for State and Local History (Nashville,

Tennessee)
AHA American Historical Association
AHR American Historical Review
CPW Freud, Complete Psychological Works
CW Collected/Complete Works/Writings
EH English Heritage
ELH English Literary History
GPO Government Printing Office, Washington, DC
ICOMOS International Council on Monuments and Sites
IHT International Herald Tribune
IJCP International Journal of Cultural Property
JHI Journal of the History of Ideas
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MLA Modern Language Association
MLN Modern Language Notes
NPS National Park Service, US Department of Interior
NYRB New York Review of Books
NYT New York Times
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association
SF science fiction
SUNY State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
TLS Times Literary Supplement
USM&DR United States Magazine and Democratic Review
Introduction
The past is everywhere. All around us lie features with more or less familiar antecedents.
Relics, histories, memories suffuse human experience. Most past traces ultimately perish,
and all that remain are altered. But they are collectively enduring. Noticed or ignored,
cherished or spurned, the past is omnipresent. ‘What is once done can never be undone
. . . Everything remains forever’, wrote Václav Havel, ‘somewhere here’.1 The past is not
simply what has been saved; it ‘lives and breathes . . . in every corner of the world’, adds a
historian.2 A mass of memories and records, of relics and replicas, of monuments and
memorabilia, sustains our being. We efface traces of tradition to assert our autonomy and
expunge our errors, but the past inheres in all we do and think. Residues of bygone lives
and locales ceaselessly enrich and inhibit our own. Awareness of things past comes less
from fact finding than from feeling time’s impact on traits and traces, words and deeds of
both our precursors and ourselves. To know we are ephemeral lessees of age-old hopes
and dreams that have animated generations of endeavour secures our place – now to
rejoice, now to regret – in the scheme of things.
Ever more of the past, from the exceptional to the ordinary, from remote antiquity to
barely yesterday, from the collective to the personal, is nowadays filtered by self-
conscious appropriation. Such all-embracing heritage is scarcely distinguishable from
past totality. It includes not only what we like or admire but also what we fear or
abominate. Besides its conscious legacies, the past’s manifold residues are embedded in
our minds and muscles, our genes and genres de vie. Of passionate concern to all, the
‘goodly heritage’ of Psalm 16 becomes ‘the cuckoo in the historian’s nest’, purloining the
progeny of Clio, the muse of history.3
None of the past definitively eludes our intense involvement. What we are now
indifferent to once meant much or may later do so. That being so, I survey the past
not only through lenses of memory and history but also through present-day perspectives
– impassioned views of right and wrong, good and evil, ownership and alienation,
identity and entitlement. We descry the past both for its sake and for our sake. Neither
historian nor layman is ever aloof or detached from it. To know is to care, to care is to
use, to use is to transform the past. Continually refashioned, the remade past continu-
ously remoulds us.
Embraced or rejected, lauded or lamented, remembered or forgotten, the whole past is
always with us. No one has not ‘said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so
unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it’. And yet one learns wisdom only by
1
Václav Havel, To the Castle and Back, (Knopf, 2007), 330 (my emphasis).
2
Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago, 2004), 16.
3
Graeme Davison, The Uses and Abuses of the Past (Allen & Unwin, 2000), 9–14, 110–30.
1
2 Introduction
passing through ‘all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations’, says Proust’s painter
Elstir. ‘The picture of what we were . . . may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be
pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we
have really lived.’ Indeed, however you try, ‘you can’t put the past behind you’, concludes
a scion of slavery. ‘It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard.’4 We
inherit a legacy no less inalienable when obscure or obnoxious. To be is to have been, and
to project our messy, malleable past into our unknown future.
An authorial credo
Relations with the past can neither be prescribed nor proscribed, for they infuse all our
ideas and institutions. Asked to add to a batch of historical manifestos, I demurred that
‘historians should disdain manifestos; they are contradictions in terms. To issue proc-
lamations and thunder denunciations is the duty of prelates and politicos. Our calling
is not to moralise or preach but to discern and reveal – to make manifest (from the
Italian manifestare) what deserves being evident’.5 But I could not resist the urge to
pontificate, avowing concern for the communal past and deploring its evisceration and
domestication.
Having previously vilified populist history, I was accused of ‘weeping in [my] beard’ for
lost academic felicity. For my faith in empirical objectivity I was taken to task as a
‘bittersweet’ nostalgist.6 I do affirm the existence of historical truth and laud its disclos-
ure. I do regret the modernist and postmodern breach with classical and biblical legacies.
Like Mary Beard, I hold these legacies inextricably integral to Western culture, its horrors
along with its glories.7 I do share Gordon Wood’s cheer that most historians still adhere
to coherent and causally related narrative.8 But I also consider invented heritage, no less
than revealed history, both inescapable and indispensable. In fabricating the past ‘we tell
ourselves who we are, where we came from, and to what we belong’.9
I have not exhaustively studied most of the topics this book surveys. Instead I have
sought to fashion a plausible synthesis out of extremely heterogeneous materials. Trespass-
ing beyond my own expertise, I am bound often to have misinterpreted the art and
architectural historians, psychologists and psychoanalysts, archaeologists and theologians,
medievalists and Renaissance scholars on whose research I rely. For this I beg their pardon
and readers’ forbearance. Apart from a few realms – nineteenth-century American history,
landscape perceptions, science fiction, historic preservation – my citations reflect no
comprehensive sampling, but selections whose aptness authorities generally attest.
4
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27; Penguin, 1983), 1: 923–4; Claudia Rankine, Citizen:
An American Lyric (Minneapolis, MN, Graywolf 2014).
5
See my ‘The past of the future: from the foreign to the undiscovered country’, in Keith Jenkins et al., eds.,
Manifestos for History (Routledge, 2007), 205–19 at 205.
6
David Harlan, ‘Historical fiction and the future of academic history’, 108–30 at 120, and Hayden White,
‘Afterword: manifesto time’, 220–31 at 231, both in Jenkins et al., eds., Manifestos for History.
7
Mary Beard, ‘Do the classics have a future?’ NYRB, 12 Jan. 2012: 54.
8
Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (Penguin, 2008), 40–61.
9
David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge, 1998), xvii.
How my past became foreign 3
Reversion to original sources reflects my well-founded suspicion of secondary sources,

need to reconcile variant readings, and efforts to ensure contextual accuracy.10
My syntheses tap the collective takes on the past of many disciplines. Save for
unlettered antiquity and recent popular culture, such insights are heavily weighted
towards literate elites who troubled to record their views and were most inclined to
speculate about the past. ‘The wisest men in every age . . . possess and profit by the
constantly increasing accumulation of the ideas of all ages’, noted John Stuart Mill, ‘but
the multitude . . . have the ideas of their own age, and no others’.11 My own conclusions
inevitably rely mainly on that influential minority, present and past. It is this knowledge-
able fraction to whom my ‘we’ and ‘our’ generally refers.
Present attitudes and those of our immediate forebears dominate this study, but
exploring them often led me back to ancient times. Quality of evidence, confidence in
sources, and comprehension of alien realms and cultures decline as the past recedes, but
I perforce move back and forth across centuries with what may seem casual disregard for
such differences. Spatially and culturally my conclusions are also parochial. Although
I focus broadly on Western culture and rely on pan-European classical and subsequent
scholarship, notably French, German, and Italian, I rely most heavily on anglophone
literature. For non-European cultures equivalent studies would reach radically different
conclusions.
A final caveat: I adduce such heterogeneous evidence – fiction, religious tracts,
psychological treatises, interviews, autobiographies, heritage marketing, the history of
ideas, polemics on preservation and restoration – as to seem wantonly eclectic or
absurdly disparate. I do so not because I suppose all these sources analogous or of equal
evidential value, but to make cogent what otherwise goes unnoted. Gleaned from things
recalled and culled over a lifetime, my trove resembles Henry James’s grab-bag of
memory more than J. H. Hexter’s coherence of history.12
How my past became foreign

‘The past is a foreign country’, begins L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between; ‘they do things
differently there’. From his 1950s’ memory of 1900, he sought to convey the ‘illusion of
stability . . . the confidence in life, the belief that all’s well with the world’. That seemingly
pervasive belief would soon be shattered by slaughter in the trenches and tumultuous
change in civil society.13
That they did indeed do things differently is a quite recent perception. During most of
history scholars scarcely differentiated past from present, referring even to remote events,
10
See my ‘The frailty of historical truth: learning why historians inevitably err’, AHA Perspectives on History
51:3 (March 2013): 25–6.
11
John Stuart Mill, ‘The spirit of the age, I’, Examiner, Jan.–May 1831, nos. I, IV, in CW (Toronto, 1963–91),
22: 227–34 at 234.
12
Henry James, The American Scene (1907; Indiana, 1968), 410; J. H. Hexter, ‘The rhetoric of history’,
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Macmillan, 1968), 6: 368–94.
13
L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953; NYRB Classics, 1962, repr. 2002), 17, and ‘Author’s introduction’
(1962 edn), 7–15 at 8–10.
4 Introduction
if at all, as though just then occurring. Up to the nineteenth century the historical past
was generally thought much like the present. To be sure, history recorded major changes
of life and landscape, gains and losses, but human nature supposedly remained constant,
events actuated by unchanging passions and prejudices. Even when ennobled by nostalgia
or deprecated by partisans of progress, the past seemed not a foreign country but part of
their own. And chroniclers portrayed bygone times with an immediacy and intimacy that
reflected the supposed likeness.14
This outlook had two particular consequences. Past departures from present standards
were praised as virtuous or condemned as depraved. And since past circumstances
seemed comparable and hence relevant to present concerns, history served as a source
of useful exemplars. A past explained in terms similar to the present also suited common
views of why things happened as they had. Whether unfolding in accordance with the
Creator’s grand design or with nature’s cyclical laws, towards decline or towards progress,
history’s pattern was immutable and universal.
From time to time, prescient observers realized that historical change made present
unlike past circumstances. But awareness of anachronism ran counter to prevailing needs
and perspectives. Only in the late eighteenth century did Europeans begin to conceive the
past as different, not just another country but a congeries of foreign lands shaped by
unique histories and personalities. This new past gradually ceased to provide comparative
lessons. Instead it became cherished for validating and exalting the present. This aroused
urges to preserve and restore monuments and memories as emblems of communal
identity, continuity, and aspiration.
During early-modern times archetypes of antiquity had dominated learning and law,
informed the arts, and suffused European culture. Antiquity was exemplary, beneficial,
and beautiful. Yet its physical remains were in the main neglected or demolished.
Architects and sculptors were more apt to mine classical vestiges for their own works
than to protect them against pillage and loss; patrons gave less thought to collecting
antique fragments than to commissioning new works modelled on their virtues. Only in
the nineteenth century did preservation evolve from an antiquarian, quirky, personal
pursuit into sustained national programmes. Only in the late twentieth did every country
seek to secure its own heritage against despoliation and decay.
Recognizing the past’s difference promoted its preservation; the act of preserving
accentuated that difference. Venerated as a fount of communal identity, cherished as
an endangered legacy, yesterday became less and less like today. Yet its relics and residues
are increasingly stamped with today’s lineaments. We fancy an exotic past by contrast
with a humdrum or unhappy present, but we forge it with modern tools. The past is a
foreign country reshaped by today, its strangeness domesticated by our own modes of
caring for its vestiges.
The past also accrues intentional new evocations. When I conceived this book’s
precursor in the 1970s the American scene was already steeped in pastness – mansarded
and half-timbered shopping plazas, exposed brick and butcher-block historic precincts,
14
Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960; Paladin, 1970), 108–13; Zachary Sayre
Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Johns Hopkins, 2011).
heritage villages, urban preservation. Previously confined to a handful of museums and

antique shops, the trappings of history festooned the whole country. All memorabilia
were cherished, from relics of the Revolution to teacups from the Titanic. Antiques
embraced even yesterday’s ephemera. Genealogical zeal ranged from Alex Haley’s Roots
to the retrospective conversion of Mormon ancestors. Newly unsure of the future,
Americans en masse took comfort in looking back. Historic villages and districts became
familiar and reassuring home towns.
As an American then transplanted to Britain I espied similar trends in a nation more
secure in its older collective identity. While disdaining a Disneyfied history, British
conservationists mounted guard on everything from old churches to hoary hedgerows,
deplored the drain of heritage across the Atlantic, and solaced present discontents with past
glories. Presaging the 2010s TV series Downton Abbey, the quasi-feudal country house
remained an icon of national identity even as death duties impoverished its chatelains.
‘Millions knew who they were by reference to it. Hundreds of thousands look back to it, and
not only grieve for its passing but still depend on it . . . to tell them who they are’, wrote
Nigel Dennis. ‘Thousands who never knew it . . . cherish its memory.’15 When the
European Parliament suggested renaming Waterloo Station, then Eurostar’s rail terminus,
because it perpetuated divisive memories of the Napoleonic Wars, Britons retorted that it
was ‘salutary for the French to be constantly reminded of Wellington’s great victory’.16
Fashions for old films, old clothes, old music, old recipes were ubiquitous; revivals
dominated architecture and the arts; schoolchildren delved into local history and grand-
parental recollections; historical romances and tales of olden days deluged the media.
Bygones of every kind were salvaged with ‘techniques of preservation that would have
dumbfounded our forefathers’, commented Dennis’s fictional nostalgist. So expert was our
‘taxidermy that there is now virtually nothing that is not considerably more lively after
death than it was before’.17
Finding the foreign country

This book has multiple points of departure and destination. The past bewitches all
historians. My enthrallment stems from a study, begun in 1949, of the American polymath
George Perkins Marsh (1801–82), who chronicled landscape history from the debris of
nature and the relics of human impact. Paralleling recent deforestation in his native
Vermont with earlier Mediterranean denudation and subsequent erosion by Alpine tor-
rents, Marsh gained unique insight into how humans had deranged – largely unintention-
ally, often disastrously – the habitable Earth. Marsh’s apocalyptic warning that ‘another era
of equal human crime and human improvidence’ would so impoverish the Earth ‘as to
threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species’, made his
1864 Man and Nature the fountainhead of the conservation movement.18
15
Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity (1955; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), 119.
16
John de Courcy Ling quoted in ‘British refighting Battle of Waterloo’, IHT, 29–30 Sept. 1984: 1.
17
Dennis, Cards of Identity, 136.
18
George P. Marsh, Man and Nature (1864; Harvard, 1965), 43. See my George Perkins Marsh: Versatile
Vermonter (Columbia, 1958) and George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Washington, 2000).
6 Introduction
Marsh sought to protect history as well as nature, to preserve artefacts of everyday

life along with great monuments of antiquity. Not the accoutrements of princes and
prelates, but the tools of field and workshop, the household implements and
customary trappings of their own forebears, would remind Americans of their
antecedents. Linked with the Romantic nationalism rooted in folklore and vernacu-
lar languages, Marsh’s concern with common material vestiges bore fruition a
generation later in Artur Hazelius’s Skansen in Sweden, precursor of today’s farm
and industrial museums.19 Marsh’s stress on the workaday past prefigured today’s
heritage populism.
Moving between the New World and the Old in the 1960s, I saw how differently
peoples depicted and reshaped communal legacies. English locales seemed permeated by
fondness for the old and traditional. All the arts and the whole built environment
reflected this bias. Delight in continuity and cumulation was integral to English appreci-
ation of genius loci, the enduring idiosyncrasies that lend places their essential identity.20
For Americans the past seemed both less intimate and less consequential. Far from
venerating inherited vestiges, they traditionally derogated them as reminders of deca-
dence and dependency. Admired relic features were either safely distant in Europe,
sanitized by patriotic purpose as at Mount Vernon and Williamsburg, or debased by
hucksters. Only a handful of wistful WASPs esteemed ancestry and antiques; to most
Americans the past was musty, irrelevant, corrupt.21
The early 1970s turned attention to historical preservation on both sides of the
Atlantic. The erosion of older city cores by urban redevelopment, the surge of nostalgia
in the wake of post-war social and ecological debacles, the mounting pillage of antiquities
for rapacious collectors led me to postulate that these trends had common roots and
common outcomes. Present needs reshaped tangible remains in ways strikingly analo-
gous to revisions of memory and history, as in Freud’s archaeological metaphors for
psychoanalytic excavation (Chapter 7 below).
Celebration of ethnic and national roots next engaged me. In the mid-1970s American
bicentennial memorabilia and re-enactments reshaped the Revolutionary past to present
desires. I traced the ways appreciation and protection transformed valued relics and
locales. I studied how and why age and wear affected viewers in ways unlike historical
antiquity. Dwelling abroad led me to compare Caribbean and Australian orientations
with North American. Each of these New World realms had shaped diverse ways of
defining, vaunting, and rejecting their various pasts.
Historic preservation, now a popular calling, next drew my attention. Sojourns among
preservation programmes in Vermont, Kansas, and Tennessee revealed the primacy of
architectural salvage and ensuing problems of gentrification. To learn what people cared
19
Edward P. Alexander, Museum Masters: Their Museums, and Their Influence (AASLH, 1983), 239–75;
Karin Belent et al., eds., Skansen (Stockholm: Sandvikens Tryckeri, 2002).
20
David Lowenthal and Hugh C. Prince, ‘The English landscape’ and ‘English landscape tastes’, Geographical
Review 54 (1964): 309–46 and 55 (1965): 186–222.
21
See my ‘The American scene’, Geographical Review 58 (1968): 61–88.
to save, Marcus Binney of SAVE Britain’s Heritage and I held a London symposium in
1979, followed by an Anglo-American conference on heritage management and legisla-
tion. Practitioners joined academics in discussing motives for saving everything from
heirlooms to hatpins and related problems of provenance, stewardship, public entitle-
ment, and the corrosive effects of popularity on fabric and ambience.22
The rage for time-travel fantasy led me to review imaginative journeys in science
fiction, folklore, and children’s literature. Their venturers yearned for and coped with
visits to remote or recent pasts. Not unlike time travellers, legacy-seeking nations craved
relics and records of fancied pasts. Formerly subjugated peoples deprived of precious
patrimony highlighted issues of ownership, restitution, safety, conservation, and exhib-
ition. The Elgin Marbles conflict was a prime instance of political passions aroused. A
1981 lecture of mine on heritage restitution figured in the confrontation between Greek
culture minister Melina Mercouri and the British Museum over the return of the
Parthenon frieze.
National efforts to fashion praiseworthy pasts resembled individual needs to construct
viable life histories. Students of nationalism, psychoanalysis, and literature realized that
states like persons confront competing pulls of dependence and autonomy, tradition and
innovation. Similar metaphors for managing both supportive and burdensome pasts
resounded across manifold disciplines and epochs. Attitudes towards the past, and
reasons for preserving and altering its residues, reflected predispositions common to
history, to memory, and to relics.
Publication of The Past Is a Foreign Country in 1985 led me to address curatorial
dilemmas among archaeologists and art historians at the British, the Victoria and Albert,
the Science, and Ironbridge Gorge museums. The historian Peter Burke and I led three
years of seminars on ‘The Uses of the Past’ at the Warburg Institute and University
College London. Growing concern over heritage authenticity and legitimacy was central
to the British Museum’s 1990 exhibition ‘Fake? The Art of Deception’, which I helped
Mark Jones to curate. And as post-imperial critique began to query Western domination
in archaeology, with Peter Ucko, Peter Gathercole, and others I helped mount the First
World Archaeology Congress in Southampton in 1986.
Growing global participation likewise broadened UNESCO’s World Heritage Site
designations, while cosmopolitanism spurred revision of the canonical 1964 Venice
Charter. That document had accorded prime value to western Europe’s surviving marble
monuments and stone and brick buildings. Less durable wooden architecture predomin-
ant in Norway and Japan led conservators to focus on rebuilt form rather than original
substance; I joined the 1990s Bergen workshop and the Nara conference that rewrote
criteria of authenticity accordingly. A decade later other cultural differences in heritage
fuelled a similar drive to celebrate and protect intangible heritage. Where structures and
artefacts soon decayed or were customarily replaced by new creations, what truly
mattered was the maintenance of traditional skills and crafts, arts, and genres de vie.
22
David Lowenthal and Marcus Binney, eds., Our Past before Us: Why Do We Save It? (Temple Smith, 1981);
David Lowenthal, ‘Conserving the heritage: Anglo-American comparisons’, in John Patten, ed., The
Expanding City: Essays in Honour of Jean Gottmann (Academic Press, 1983), 225–76.
8 Introduction
Publication of my earlier book intensified my own involvement in challenging new

approaches to history and heritage. In unifying Europe, felt needs for a consensual
historical memory coexisted uneasily with resurgent national and regional identities.
I addressed these history and heritage conflicts in advisory roles at the Council of Europe
and Europa Nostra and in Poland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Germany, Switzer-
land, and France. Pierre Nora, whose Lieux de mémoire began to appear at the same time
as my book, and I held discussions at French universities on cultural and linguistic
impediments to trans-national understanding of the past.
Growing globalization of history texts, heritage concerns, antiquities’ issues and
cultural tourism animated efforts to understand the past on a sounder philosophical
basis. History remained overwhelmingly nationalistic, heritage traditionally crisis driven,
its concerns dormant until activated by actual or threatened loss or damage. Various
academic initiatives – at UNESCO, ICCROM, the Getty Conservation Institute, and
elsewhere – foundered for want of institutional support, in a budgetary climate that
confined past-related benefits to immediate economic payoffs.
The dawn of the new millennium saw the erosion of heritage enterprise, including my
own teaching programmes at West Dean and Strawberry Hill, England. Meanwhile,
rising tribal and subaltern demands to return human remains and artefacts beleaguered
museums, nation-states, and international agencies. Restitution and repatriation con-
cerns and mounting antiquities theft and plunder made management of the past a moral
and legal minefield. Meanwhile the surge of traumatic memory and reconciliation issues
in the wake of the Holocaust, apartheid, and other crimes against humanity transformed
how the past was understood, blamed, and atoned for. This impelled my own return to
consequences of slavery and racism that had been my Caribbean concerns half a century
earlier. Together with the US National Park Service and colleagues in Norway, Italy,
Malta, Greece, and Turkey I sought to bridge stewardship of past and future, nature and
culture, protection and restoration in history, landscape, the arts and politics.
Frequenting the foreign country

‘Your book is twenty years old. Update it!’ my editor bade me in 2004. The idea was
alluring. I’d recently revised my nearly fifty-year-old biography George Perkins Marsh:
Versatile Vermonter. Two decades seemed a comparative snap.
Rereading sapped my euphoria. It’s one thing to update a life, especially one long gone.
It is quite another to modernize a book dealing with views of the past. Where to begin
and end? In 2002 my Russian translator asked me what certain early ’80s news items
meant. For many I could recall nothing. Should ancient trivia be ditched for fresh
ephemera? Some illustrations – notably the cartoons – seemed bizarrely outdated.
Nothing fades faster than humour.
Updating, moreover, demanded more than replacing old anecdotes and not-so-current
events. It meant recasting the book entirely, given the spate of recent work on history and
memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, facts and fakes, identity and
authenticity, remorse and contrition. Much had changed in how the past was envisioned.
Previously I had dealt with postmodernism only in its architectural context, with
restitution and repatriation hardly at all, and was wholly unprepared for the ensuing
spurt in everyday-memory studies and concomitant apologies for past crimes and evils.
Other newly salient stances towards the past included the shift from written to visual
portrayal, the rise of multi-vocal, reflexive narrative, polychronic flashbacks, Internet and
website effects, online quests for genetic, personal, family, and tribal pasts. A properly
comprehensive revision threatened to take the rest of my life. Ten years on, it has almost
done so.
Updating also risked surfeit. The Past Is a Foreign Country struck some as all too much
like the past itself – messy, inchoate, ‘just one damned thing after another’. One reviewer
faintly praised it as ‘a fantastic treasure-house, a Calke Abbey of a book’ – referring to the
English National Trust mansion acquired from Sir Harpur Vauncey-Crewe, who had
filled room after room with stuffed birds, seashells, rocks, swords, butterflies, baubles, and
gewgaws. My verbally inflated cabinet of curiosities resembled the Derbyshire baronet’s
obsessive amassing. ‘What could be alien’ to Lowenthal? my critic wondered. ‘Ballet?
Brewing? Bionics? Bee-keeping?’23
I had already penned a book that took off from where The Past Is a Foreign Country
ended.24 In it I distinguished the rising cult of heritage – partisan manipulations of the
past – from historians’ impartial and consensual efforts to understand it. Appropriating
the past for parti pris purposes, heritage purged its foreignness. The past’s growing
domestication now threatened to subvert this book’s premise. I weighed retitling in the
past tense. But The Past Was a Foreign Country lacked felicity. ‘What a great title’, said
many – often implying they had read no further. Yet for all the renown of Hartley’s
riveting phrase, it is often mangled. Reviewers with the book in their hands misnamed it
The Past Is Another, a Distant, Different, Strange, Lonely, even a Weird Country.
‘Well, Emmeline, what’s new?’ Tobey’s interlocutor asks her bygones-burdened hostess
in the 1976 cartoon (Fig.1). ‘We can be certain’, wrote one of my reviewers, ‘that the
1980s will come to be seen as the “good old days”’. The 1980s don’t yet have the appeal of
the 1950s, which ‘the extreme reaches of the Right, confirmed bachelors of a certain
vintage, drag queens and couturiers . . . wish had never ended’.25
So what else is new? Like nostalgia, the past ain’t what it used to be. Thirty years have
scuppered many previous outlooks. Mere passage of time made this inevitable. The ’80s
now moulder in the graveyard of the long-ago. What then seemed portentous or fateful,
helter-skelter or baffling, today seems obvious or trivial, blinkered and blind-sided.
Yesteryear’s consuming concern – the Cold War – is now passé, overtaken by events
and succeeded by anxieties then undreamt.
Many witnesses to that earlier past are now gone, and its survivors are a lot older:
age renders some forgetful, others more sceptical, less sanguine. The lengthened recollec-
tions of retired baby-boomers merge with the collectively chronicled stream, memory
23
A. H. Halsey, ‘Past perfect?’ History Today (Mar. 1986): 54; Colin Welch, ‘Gone before but not lost’,
Spectator, 23 Nov. 1985: 27; Martin Drury, ‘The restoration of Calke Abbey’, Journal of the Royal Society of
Arts 136 (1988): 490–9.
24
David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, (Cambridge, 1998).
25
Lincoln Allison, ‘Spirit of the eighties’, New Society, 25 Apr. 1986: 24; Lisa Armstrong, ‘Goodbye hippie chic
as Galliano turns hourglass back to the 50s’, Times, 7 July 2004.
10 Introduction
Figure 1 The past all-pervasive: ‘Well, Emmeline, what’s new?’

(Barney Tobey, New Yorker, 25/10/1976, p. 37)
dovetailing into a longer personal history.26 Meanwhile, oldsters confront the bizarre
takes on the past of youngsters not even born when this book’s precursor came out. Their
sense of history, like their memories, often seems to their elders trivial, curtailed,
amnesiac; History Channel viewers ask for ‘younger historians, with better hair’.27
Additionally, calendric happenstance imposes a fin-de-siècle sense of change – we are
no longer twentieth- but twenty-first-century people, denizens even of a new millennium.
Like post-French Revolutionaries of the early 1800s and fin-de-siècle survivors in the early
1900s, we feel marooned in fearsome novelty. The past is not simply foreign but utterly
estranged, as if on some remote planet. Our exile from it seems total, lasting, irrevocable.
‘The worst thing about being a child of the 20th century is that you end up an adult of the
21st’, remarked a caustic columnist. ‘It was natural to be nineteenth century in the
nineteenth century, and anyone could do it, but in the twentieth it takes quite a lot of
toil’, wrote English observers of 1960s America.28 In the twenty-first century being
nineteenth century seems appealing but impossible.
Irrelevant and irretrievable as the past may seem, it is by no means simply sloughed off.
To assuage the grief of loss, the pain of rupture, the distress of obsolescence, we cling
avidly to all manner of pasts, however alien or fragmentary. We also add to them in ways
evident and extraordinary. Newly augmented and embellished pasts cannot replace the
traditional ‘world we have lost’.29 But they comprise a complex of histories and memor-
ies, relics and traces, roots and reinterpretations, quite unlike our legacy a third of a
century back.
Self-evident is the past’s lengthening by the accretion of some thirty years. Every
quarter-century seems especially earth-shaking to eyewitnesses; recent years commonly
feel most momentous. It is a common fallacy to deem one’s own epoch singularly
significant or dire. Early theologians divined in contemporary annals portents of immi-
nent apocalypse; palaeontologists discerned from fossil sequences the anatomical perfec-
tion reached in their own time; moderns consider their era critical because millennial.30
Every present is specially salient to its self-centred denizens.
To be sure, recent decades have been eventful: the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the
Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and of apartheid, the disintegration of Yugoslavia,
genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, global warming, 9/11 and faith-based suicidal terrorism,
the decline of American hegemony, revolutions in electronic data and communications,
the spread of AIDS and Ebola, the demographic ageing of the West and the economic rise
of the East, Chinese and Indian growth, Mideast turmoil and the failed Arab Spring –
such events, sanguine or ominous, engender histories that no prognosis foresaw.
The last three decades were not uniquely dislocating – compare Revolutionary and
Napoleonic 1790–1815, or World Wars and Holocaust 1914–45. But they were differently
disruptive. Events spawned media persistently catastrophic in theme and tone, warning of
26
Andrew Sanders, In the Olden Time: Victorians and the British Past (Yale, 2013), 312.
27
Jim Rutenberg, ‘Media talk’, NYT, 5 Aug. 2002.
28
Alan Coren, ‘How I found myself in the wrong century’, Times, 10 Aug. 2004; Malcolm Bradbury and
Michael Oursler, ‘Department of amplification’, New Yorker, 2 July 1960: 58–62 at 59.
29
Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age (Methuen, 1965).
30
Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (Norton, 1989), 43–5.
12 Introduction
the end of history, the end of humanity, the end of nature, the end of everything.
Millennial prospects in 2000 were lacklustre and downbeat; Y2K seemed a portent of
worse to come. Not even post-Hiroshima omens of nuclear annihilation unleashed such
pervasive glum foreboding. Today’s angst reflects unexampled loss of faith in progress:
fears that our children will be worse off than ourselves, doubts that neither government
nor industry, science nor technology, can set things right.
The past has lengthened backwards far more than towards the present. Science shines
new light on events ever longer ago in human, hominid, terrestrial, and cosmic time, to
the first nanoseconds 13.7 billion years ago. Non-recurrent contingencies that have long
informed geological history now enliven astronomy and biology. History’s sweep came to
include galaxies, stars, comets, and atoms, the universe evolving like living beings and
human societies. All nature – plants, animals, continents, planets, stars, and galaxies – is
now historicized. Cyclical regularity and enduring equilibria no longer set natural history
apart from human annals. Genes, cells, organs, and organisms all change historically.31
Narrative awareness is integral to modern biology. ‘We cannot foretell a biosphere’,
instead, we ‘tell the stories as it unfolds’. Hence ‘biospheres demand their Shakespeares
as well as their Newtons’.32
Intentionality aside, biological and stellar histories rival human annals in unpredict-
ability. Cyclical regularity yields to chaotic temporal drift. Nature is seen to share
humanity’s turbulent, capricious career; geologists and biologists conjure like historians
with opposing forces of friction (custom or tradition) and of stress (innovation or
revolution). The episodic flows and fractures of the Earth’s crust are as contingent as
human history: nothing ever precisely repeats. In sum, ‘cosmic history. natural history,
and human history have come together in a single fabric’.33 The segregation of prehistoric
from historical archaeology, once de rigueur, is now virtually expunged, timeless prehis-
tory becoming eventful history. Biology, neurology, pharmacology, and linguistics com-
bine in tracing preliterate hominid and human annals.34
Mirroring mishaps of the recent past are disasters now shown to have punctuated
previous aeons. The newly enlarged and convoluted past arouses fears similar to those
unleashed by the nineteenth-century expansion of time. Then, Earth’s demonstrably
awesome antiquity cast disturbing doubts on Scriptural history. Today, ecological insights
dismay those once comforted by nature’s presumed constancy and regularity. Used to an
Earth undisturbed by remote cosmic events, they took heart in the benign succession
of seasons and in supposedly stable ecological equilibrium. But proof of episodic mass
31
Fred Spier, The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang until Today (Amsterdam University Press,
1996); Fred Spier, ‘Big history’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 33:2 (2008): 141–52; David Christian,
Maps of Time (California, 2004); David Christian, ‘A single historical continuum’, Cliodynamics 2 (2011):
6–26; Harlow Shapley, Beyond the Observatory (Scribner’s, 1967), 15–16; Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein,
The Uncertainties of Knowledge (Temple, 2004), 23, 115–16; Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of
Time (Chicago, 2005), 188–93, 642–51.
32
Stuart A. Kauffman, Investigations (Oxford, 2000), 22.
33
William H. McNeill, ‘Passing strange: the convergence of evolutionary science with scientific history’,
History and Theory 44:1 (2001): 1–15 at 5.
34
Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (California, 2008); Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord
Smail, eds., Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (California, 2011).
extinctions, sudden reversals of oceanic currents and climatic regimes, now leaves
nothing safe or certain, revealing natural history imbued with a ferocity more ominous
than any biblical harbingers.
Concurrently, human history is amalgamated into the extended terrestrial saga. No
longer mere prologue, ongoing natural history informs thought and action over the whole
of human history. As the biosphere ever alters our environs, so humanity’s ecological
impacts unfurl ever further back, disclosing Earth anciently humanized. Genetics link
human evolution with other species extinct and extant. Climate, soils, plants and animals,
including billions of symbiotic micro-organisms within us, incessantly remould and in
turn reflect human destiny. Everything human bears nature’s stamp; all nature now is
anthropogenic.
That human action has long irreversibly transformed the Earth, and now does so with
mounting intensity, is well known to environmental scientists and historians. But it newly
alarms the general public. With an Earth made fruitful by divine fiat, people felt at home;
an Earth despoiled and ruined alienates. That our unintended (let alone deliberate)
impacts could be lethal for life for aeons to come seems intolerable. ‘It is a kind
providence that has withheld a sense of history from the thousands of species of plants
and animals that have exterminated each other to build the present world’, noted Aldo
Leopold after Hiroshima. ‘The same kind providence now withholds it from us.’35
Oral accounts dwelt mainly on distant origins and recent events, only sketchily
referring to what happened in between, in the ‘hourglass’ pattern of the past described
by Jan Vansina.36 Recency and antiquity are again stressed at the expense of intermediate
eras. This makes the past in its entirety harder to grasp. Starts and ends are mythic,
befuddled, inscrutable. What comes first and last is literally unhinged – nothing prior
attaches to the primordial, nothing links beyond the latest, which is soon engulfed in the
present. At one end we are obsessed by primordial origins, for knowing how something
began seems to explain all. At the other end, we are engrossed in personal recall.
Electronic media privilege up-to-the-minute data, yesterday, not yesteryear. Historical
learning follows suit: twentieth-century events, notably the adrenalin-pumping Second
World War and the Holocaust, dominate curricula.
Ancient and recent alike are sexy, accessible – and murky. Great antiquity charms
because it is little known; the veriest tiro freely opines on prehistory. To write about ‘the
distant past’ (before the First World War), contends the novelist Hilary Mantel, is ‘to flee
to a world blurry enough so that men can behave like Vikings and not seem ridiculous,
and ladies can be ladies without being pathetic’.37 And any ignoramus can assert
knowledge of yesterday simply by virtue of being around when it happened. Yet sheer
recency leaves it incoherent. Hindsight cannot assimilate what has just happened into a
properly mulled chronicle. To sift and evaluate require the test of time. Hence we delay
nominating to halls of fame, designating historic sites, erecting memorials and
35
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949; Oxford, 1966), 50.
36
Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Wisconsin, 1985), 23, 168–9; Schiffman, Birth of the Past, 33–4.
37
Larissa MacFarquhar, ‘The dead are real: Hilary Mantel’s imagination’, New Yorker, 15 Oct. 2012: 46–57
at 46.
14 Introduction
monuments. It takes two or three generations to sieve a trustworthy collective past from
the muddled trauma and trivia of living memory, the nostalgia or amnesia of immediate
heirs. Emphasizing the very recent elevates fleeting fad and fashion over enduring culture.
Just as the past lengthens, so it expands in locale, in content, and in controversy. Once
commonly confined to ‘Western Civilization’, history now at least sketchily includes all
cultures everywhere. Once limited to the annals of kingship and conquest and the deeds
of great men, it now dwells on the everyday lives and aspirations of ‘people without
history’ – previously unsung women, children, workers, the poor, the enslaved, the
unlettered. Every facet of life is now historicized: a vast panoply of players, a multiform
narrative embracing annals of child-rearing, cookery, commemorating, tattooing, funer-
ary practices, music-making. Such history deploys kinds of evidence and modes of
analysis undreamt of by our precursors. But these accretions tend to occlude what history
previously promised – ordered coherence, causal continuity, consensual assurance, con-
textual clarity. The new bloated past is often too inchoate to absorb. History’s consumers
are fascinated by relics and remembrances, caught up in bygone splendours and horrors.
But they cheer or jeer at pasts they understand less and less. Our collective legacy is more
bewildering than enlightening.
New habits of seeing and thinking accompany the past’s temporal and topical enlarge-
ment. It is perceived with more of our senses, apprehended in alternative ways, self-
consciously memorialized, re-enacted, and empathized with. Since the late 1980s the
visual past has become all-pervasive. Pictures are not merely a sexy adjunct but a
preferred way of encountering the past. More and more, the public believe and children
are taught that the past is what they see, often contrary to the past they read or are told
about.
The visual turn in history popularizes the past in general. History seen rather than read
does not have to be translated into the mind’s eye or thought about in the context of
previous learning; it is immediately accessible to anyone, however unschooled. From a
past in large measure seamless, univocal, canonical, certified by experts, and reliant on
written texts, we nowadays confront a fragmented, dubious, ambiguous past open to any
and all interpreters. Historians still strive for unbiased consensual understanding. But
history is merely one among many versions of the past, and to most no more veracious
than any other. In common with all takes on the past, history is seen as moulded to
myriad personal and collective ends. Hence today’s public is encouraged to privilege its
own view of the past. Postmodernists preach that historians like all of us are partial and
selective; we should dismiss academics all the more for claiming to be above the fray. All
past views are biased. This is not altogether distressing; however defective, all pasts are
equally deserving of attention. Your past, my past, so-and-so’s past all have the populist
merit of being someone’s past. In this sense, the collective past is a collage, the crazy quilt
of humanity’s myriad individual memories.
But ‘truth’ in the old sense – a veridical account of the past based on consensually
agreed evidence – has become passé. A past that feels appropriate, that suits any ephem-
eral personal need, is accorded validity. Even frankly fictitious concoctions are respected
as some narrator’s historical happenstance. Non-judgemental today, we extend permis-
siveness to yesterday. Just as anything goes now, anything likewise went back then: no
version of the past is too far-fetched to ignore, too fantastic to lack insight. Since all pasts
are constructed to be self-serving, the more avowedly self-interested they are the more
honest and insightful we judge their narrators.
Precisely because such wannabe pasts as The Da Vinci Code are delectably persuasive,
these self-avowed fictions are denounced for purveying spurious facts. And the line
between fact and fiction does indeed blur. The contriver no less than the consumer of
historical fiction comes to believe his invented past to be what actually happened. ‘You
know that firefight in Chapter 9, where you and a wounded [Navy] SEAL hold off 100
insurgents for a week?’ says Garry Trudeau’s cartoon character. ‘Well, that was me. I was
that wounded SEAL!’ ‘Dude, I made it all up’, the author responds. ‘Oh . . . Are you sure?
It seemed so real.’38
Finally, the past is more and more bitterly contested, a prime arena of envious rivalry.39
Clamour over purloined paintings, antiquities smuggling, tomb rifling, the opening of
archives and the closing of libraries, demands for national and tribal restitution, court
trials over repressed and false memories, quarrels over memorials and monuments, wills
and bequests, make the past the world’s largest – and most costly – legal arena. Who in
the 1970s dreamed that nations would spend millions in bribes to accredit – or discredit –
UNESCO World Heritage Sites? That tribal spokesmen would need to mandate that
previous incarnation as an American Indian did not entitle one to tribal membership
today? That Israel would do battle with the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day
Saints over the posthumous conversion to Mormonism of hundreds of thousands of
Holocaust victims? ‘If you can’t get them while they’re alive, you’ll get them while they’re
dead.’40 Memory, history, and relics are no less spectacularly divisive today than when
Crusaders torched Constantinople or Napoleon sacked Rome.
Themes and structure

This book comprises four broad themes: wanting, disputing, knowing, and remaking the
past. Part I reviews how the past enriches and impoverishes us, and why we embrace or
shun it. Part II surveys competing viewpoints about things past and present, old and new.
How we become aware of and learn about the past, and how we respond to such
knowledge, occupies part III. Part IV considers how we save and change the received
past; why its vestiges are salvaged or contrived; and how these alterations affect the past
and ourselves. I show how the past, once virtually indistinguishable from the present,
became ever more foreign, yet increasingly suffused by present hopes and habits.
Chapters 1 and 2 explore age-old dreams of recovering or returning to the past.
Nostalgia (Chapter 1) transcends yearnings for lost childhoods and scenes of early life,
embracing imagined pasts never experienced. From an often fatal ailment nostalgia
38
‘Doonesbury’, IHT, 1 Dec. 2011: 12.
39
J. E. Tunbridge and G. J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage (Wiley, 1996); Helaine Silverman, ed., Contested
Cultural Heritage: Religion, Nationalism, Erasure, and Exclusion (Springer, 2011).
40
Rabbi Moshe Waldoks quoted in Mark Oppenheimer, ‘A twist on posthumous baptisms leaves Jews miffed
at Mormon rite’, NYT, 2 Mar. 2012: A12.
16 Introduction
became a benign and even healing response to dislocation, absence, and loss. Recent
disillusionments have expanded nostalgia’s remit over time, space and topic, but also
have provoked critical backlash against its regressive follies. Today unfeigned longing for
childhood or homelands or Golden Ages gives way to retro irony and retro product
marketing.
Faith in reincarnation and past-life regressions seems unquenchable. Fanciful
returns to bygone days allure millions of ‘Back to the Future’ fans. Surveys show
widespread desire to visit or relive some past period, recent or remote. The impossi-
bility of doing so deters few imaginative voyagers. To some, such returns promise
power, wealth, or immortality, to others a chance to undo errors or right wrongs, to
still others an escape from present woes. Would-be time travellers’ aims, surveyed in
Chapter 2, shed light on the conflicting goals commonly sought in bygone realms.
Some strive to remake the past what it should have been, others to protect past reality
against perversion. Like these time travellers, we all seek to profit from the past while
avoiding its trammels.
Chapter 3 surveys the benefits the past supplies and the fears its influence arouses.
Thanks to the past we recognize familiar faces and places, reaffirm beliefs held and
actions taken. The past provides exemplary guidance and personal and communal
identity. It lets us commune with admired precursors; enriches present-day experience;
and offers respites or escapes from the pace and pressure of the here and now. These
merits all stem from qualities uniquely past, not present or future. Our awareness of
antiquity, sequence, continuity, accretion, and above all termination decisively differenti-
ates the past from the present. Because the past is over, it can be summarized and
recapitulated as the present cannot. Nor is it subject to change as is the present.
Against these benefits must be set the past’s grievous, stifling, and menacing draw-
backs. We commonly seek but seldom manage to forget traumatic memory and to
obliterate malign or tragic history. Alternatively, bygone glory may sap present endeav-
our. Time-honored tradition may seem onerous even to worshipful inheritors. Collective
efforts to cope with a heritage at once revered and resented parallel individual needs both
to follow and to reject parental precepts. Perennial debates pit imitation against innov-
ation, ancient against modern prowess. Every inheritance is alike beneficial and baneful;
each society reweighing the balance.
How the past has judged achievements and deficiencies in four epochs – the Renais-
sance; early-modern England and France; Victorian Britain; Revolutionary and national
America – is reviewed in Chapter 4. In each of these epochs, the rival claims of past and
present elicited quite different passionate debates.
Humanist reverence for classical antiquity did not mean humanists judged the past
superior. Rather, it fostered Renaissance confidence that moderns might surpass ancient
greatness. Antiquity’s scattered and dismembered vestiges served as exemplars by being
resuscitated and made whole. Translating classical works into vernacular tongues,
readapting pagan motifs to Christian credos and iconography, reworking Greek and
Roman architectural principles, scholars drew sustenance from the distant past while
avoiding servile indebtedness. Yet doubts about emulative rivalry preoccupied humanists
from Dante and Petrarch to Erasmus, du Bellay, and Montaigne. They were well aware
that changing times and new audiences demanded new ideas and approaches. But the
heretical disrepute of novelty led them to hide their innovations even from themselves,
under the guise of reviving or restoring classical and patristic precedents.
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century quarrel between the Ancients and the
Moderns polarized past–present tensions. The relative worth of modern and antique
achievements hinged on several issues: the decline of culture presumed by the doctrine of
universal decay; the concept that moderns saw further only because they were ‘dwarves
on the shoulders of giants’;41 the felt contrast between science’s cumulative achievements
and art’s unique but isolated creations. Aided by the printing-press, multiple variant texts
enabled critical comparative analysis of now dubious past evidence. The triumphs of
experimental science and the new worlds discovered by the telescope, the microscope,
and geographical exploration magnified knowledge while calling into question sacred
verities. By the Enlightenment, the classical tradition ceased to be the ne plus ultra in
science but remained authoritative in the arts – a daunting legacy now aggravated by the
feats of recent as well as remote precursors.
Victorian Britain deployed past decorum as a refuge from a progressive but cheerless
present. Changes set in train by the French and Industrial Revolutions radically sundered
today from yesterday; pride in material advance mingled with dismay at its sordid and
brutal concomitants. Classical and medieval manners and mores were accorded the
pastoral, chivalric, and hierarchical pieties violated by modernity. Immersion in antiquity
and skilful replication spurred self-conscious eclectic revivalism but discouraged stylistic
innovation. Nostalgic sentiment revived pre-industrial ideals in the Arts and Crafts
movement, vernacular building, neo-Greek and Gothic architecture. Traditions backdated
to time immemorial sanctified all that was anciently best. Whig history invested consti-
tutional law and liberties with an Anglo-Saxon aura. But obeisance to old times, old
practices, old forms also begot efforts to shed a heritage lampooned as anachronistic and
irrelevant – iconoclastic impulses that exploded in fin-de-siècle despair and anti-historical
modernism.
Americans’ break from Britain generated parental and filial metaphors, both sides
citing the bonds and reciprocal duties of parents and offspring. A revolution in child-
rearing practices lent sanction to rebellions throughout the Americas that condemned all
past authority: the present generation must be sovereign, free from parental tyranny.
Taught to disdain inherited precepts, later generations were then torn between antipathy
towards authority and reverence for the Founding Fathers’ legacy. To emulate their
forebears they should throw off the shackles of the past; but to safeguard their inheritance
they must preserve, not create anew. These ideals were plainly incompatible. And the
lingering fondness of some Americans for Old World hierarchal order offended the
populist ethos that smelled evil and autocracy in such vestiges. The Civil War ultimately
resolved the dilemma over preserving or creating, but national unity was regained at the
cost of an amnesiac fiction of past amity. Tensions between progress and filial piety
41
Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965).
18 Introduction
thereafter shifted to WASP anxieties over immigration and urbanization, engendering

nostalgia both for British and for colonial forms and fashions.
Those in each of these four epochs thus confronted their inheritance with mingled
appreciation and resentment. Each sought in different ways to compromise or to choose
between reverence and rejection. And each invented past traditions that reflected these
painful dilemmas.
Chapters 5 and 6 explore responses to ageing, decay, and marks of use and wear, as
distinct from indicators of a historical past. Artefacts and institutions are commonly
assigned lifespans analogous to our own, their ageing likened to human old age – a
condition usually dismayingly repellent, as shown in Chapter 5. Decay suggests not only
enfeeblement and incipient demise, but corruption and evil, caricatured in venomous
portrayals of senile impotent geezers and withered witch-like crones. Although medical
advance has multiplied the numbers and political clout of the elderly, age-averse stereo-
types and nursing-home horrors show geriatric animus unabated. Bias against the fact and
look of age extends from humans to other creatures, natural features, nations and states,
and most artefacts. Almost all are beautiful and virtuous when young, ugly and depraved
when aged and decrepit.
Ageism is far from universal, however. Chapter 6 details how marks of age are felt to
enhance the beauty and value of certain artefacts – notably buildings and paintings. Long
ago admired in China and Japan, wear and tear became widely prized in Europe in the
sixteenth century, first for confirming and authenticating antiquity, then as attractive in
their own right. Monumental ruin and decay first acclaimed as memento mori later
betokened picturesque aesthetic. Age appreciation earlier progressed from long-buried
Chinese bronzes and neo-Romantic fondness for fragmented sculpture to time-softened
varnished paintings. Today it includes Cor-Ten structures and sculptures meant to rust,
artworks admired as they evanesce, and corroding industrial and military ruins. But the
public in general shuns the appearance of age. Teddy bears and retro pubs aside, most old
things should look new-made. But impassioned differences between friends and foes of
the patina of age surface in continuing controversy over cleaning buildings and restoring
paintings.
Chapters 7 through 9 survey how we become aware of and informed about the past.
The past itself is gone – all that survives are our memories, accounts by its denizens, and
a small fraction of its material residues. Such evidence can tell us nothing with absolute
certainty. For the past’s survivals on the ground, in texts, and in our heads are selectively
preserved from the start and continually altered by the passage of time. These remnants
conform too well with one another and with the known present to be denied all validity,
yet the past’s reality remains in doubt. There can be no certainty that the past ever existed,
let alone in the form we now conceive it. But sanity and security require us to believe that
it did exist, as its overwhelmingly accordant records and relics indeed suggest.
Access to the past via memory, history, and relics exhibit important resemblances and
differences. Memory, by its nature personal, and hence largely unverifiable, extends back
only to childhood, although we do accrete to our own recollections those told us by
forebears. By contrast, history is longer, more public, durable, and confirmable. History
extends back to or beyond earliest records Death extinguishes countless memories,
whereas recorded history is potentially immortal. Yet all history depends on memory, and
much recall incorporates history. And both are distorted by selective perception, inter-
vening circumstance, and hindsight.
The uses and misuses of memory (Chapter 7) are integral to human existence. The
remembered past endows us with habits and recognitions essential to present functions
and future anticipations. Various types of memory – bodily, semantic, episodic, autobio-
graphical, eidetic – combine to differently access the past, linking personal recall with
collective memory. Together they construct awareness of enduring identity. Yet the
passage of time continually alters old and creates new memories. Contrary to common
belief, no original memory survives in its initial form. Recording techniques from writing
to film and tape progressively displace or transform recollection. Forgetting is likewise
essential, lest a surfeit of often conflicting memory overwhelm us. Hence memory is
necessarily selective and continually sieved. Yet much of what we remember turns out to
be at best partly true, and sometimes entirely experientially false. The ease with which
false memories can be induced, with unhappy consequences for the deluded and for the
sake of justice, has become well understood as the result of several traumatic inquiries
into reported cases of fantasized abuse.
Psychological understanding of everyday and autobiographical memory has made
huge strides over the last quarter century. And public interest in memory is evident in
the proliferation (and problematic veracity) of memoirs; in traumatic accounts of the
Holocaust and other mass horrors; and in growing doubts about memory accuracy in
judicial proceedings. Indeed, memory bids fair to replace history as a more immediate,
personal, empathetic, and visceral response to the past.
Historical knowledge (Chapter 8) seems on a firmer footing than what is known from
memory alone, because it is consensually reached and shared, and to a large degree
verifiable. Yet history is shaped – and misshaped – by subjectivity, by hindsight, and by
an insurmountable gulf between the actual past and any account of it. Every chronicle is
both more and less than what happened – less because no account incorporates any entire
past, however exhaustive the records, more because later narrators are privy to subse-
quent outcomes. While hindsight adds to our understanding of the past, it distances us
from its denizens.
Historians necessarily narrate the past from the standpoint of the present, rearranging
data and revising conclusions in a modern manner. Shifting needs of narrators and
audiences shape history’s substance and rhetoric. So do changing notions of chronology
and narrative. Diverse Classical, Judaeo-Christian, and humanist perspectives on rela-
tions between past and present, time and eternity, chance and fate, divine and human
agency permeate Western history’s own complex history. Growing doubts about the
repetitive constancy of human affairs, growing acceptance of the inevitability of change,
and growing faith that change meant progress led to Eurocentric awareness of the past as
different from the present – a foreign country. Today as fiction and film trump academic
history, that foreign past seems increasingly multifaceted, discordant, and debatable.
Hence it gets domesticated.
Memory and history both derive and gain authority from physical remains (Chapter 9).
Tangible survivals’ vivid immediacy helps assure us there really was a past. Physical
20 Introduction
remains have limited evidentiary worth: themselves mute, they require interpretation.
Moreover, differing rates of erosion and demolition skew the material record. But however
depleted by time and use, relics crucially bridge then and now. They confirm or deny what
we think of the past, symbolize or memorialize communal links among generations, and
provide archaeological metaphors that illumine history and memory. Locales and relics are
objects of curiosity or beauty, historical evidence, and talismans of continuity reified by
visceral contact with the past. However ill-informed our responses, they bespeak our
concern with what has been. All knowledge of the past requires caring about it – feeling
pleasure or disgust, awe or disdain, hope or despair about its legacies.
Surviving relics and recollections undergo ceaseless change, much of it of our own
making. Even when we strive to save bygone things and thoughts intact, we cannot avoid
altering them. Some changes are made unconsciously, others reluctantly, still others
deliberately. Chapters 10 to 12 examine how and why we transform the past, and how
such changes affect our environs and ourselves.
Simply to identify something as ‘past’ affects its ambience: recognition entails marking,
protecting, and enhancing relics to make them more accessible, secure, or attractive.
Preserving things (Chapter 10) inevitably transforms them, often in unintended and
undesired ways. Appreciation if not survival may require moving relics from original
locales. Enshrined in historical precincts yet immersed in the trappings of present-day
management, vestiges of the past seem newly contrived. Present choices – whether to
retain relics in situ or to shift them, to leave them fragmented or to make them whole
again – vitally affect how the past is experienced.
Imitations, fakes, and new works inspired by earlier prototypes extend and alter auras
of antiquity. The fame or scarcity of originals begets replicas that copy, emulate, or echo
the old. Creations that hark back to or reflect some attribute of a bygone era have for two
millennia dominated the cultural landscape of the Western world. Modern awareness of
classical architecture derives from an amalgam of Hellenistic, Renaissance, Enlighten-
ment, Romantic, and Victorian works, in which extant Greek and Roman remains are
sparse. Frequently mistaken for originals, copies and replicas may be preferred to them
for their completeness, their freshness, or their accordance with modern taste and
expectations. Originals often seem less ‘authentic’ than current views of what things past
should have been.
When the past is gone beyond recovery, we often recall or re-enact its events and
lineaments. Chapter 11 discusses two pervasive modes of recapitulation. One is to restore
what is gone. An innate urge to restore is pervasive in every aspect of life. Restoration
takes different forms and confronts different dilemmas in politics and poetics, dentistry
and gerontology, architecture and painting, theology and ecology. Yet practitioners in
each of these realms borrow one another’s metaphors and methods. Time’s irreversible
arrow makes restoration an ultimately impossible ideal. But this is a stark reality that
restorers habitually deny or wish away, as seen especially in efforts to recover ‘original’
works of art and ‘natural’ landscapes.
Another common mode of recall is re-enactment, an ancient sacred practice now a
highly popular mode of secular commemoration. At historic sites and in battle replays, in
experimental archaeology and in cinema, re-enacting serves pedagogic, patriotic, and
recreational purposes. Those eager to relive the past, either by adopting its personae and
lifestyles or by engaging with others who enact it, strive to slough off their present selves.
But literal re-enactment would require unawareness of today’s circumstances as well as
now unendurable deprivations. Sailors who replay Captain Bligh’s voyages are not
flogged; soldiers who restage Civil War battles do not undergo unanaesthesized amputa-
tions, let alone die on the battlefield. All re-enactments are to some degree inauthentic,
just as no restorations are complete.
Chapter 12 surveys deliberate alterations of the past. We remould it to maximize the
benefits outlined in part I. Patriotic zeal or private pride conforms past remnants to
present needs and expectations. Accentuating past virtues enhances our self-esteem and
advances our interests. Hence we antiquate antiquity, contrive missing continuities,
invent ancestral prerogatives and achievements, ignore ignominy, and avenge defeat.
Many falsify past events and fabricate things that never happened. Most fakes and
hoaxes, however, aim not to deceive but to improve. We especially reshape the past to
make it our own, individually or collectively. As abstract entity the past has little merit;
as our own possession it provides identity, precedent, patrimonial pride. We manipu-
late the legacy given us to secure it as heritage, hyped improvements sanctifying it in
our eyes and distinguishing it from others.
Revising, enlarging, and commemorating each lend the past a host of improved new
lineaments. We embellish and amplify on the one hand, conceal and expurgate on the
other, or nowadays deplore and denigrate disapproved pasts. We also anachronize the
past, antiquating to claim precedence and justify possession, modernizing to make it
more exemplary. These ahistorical perversions are widely accepted by the general public
and in large measure unavoidable.
To be sure, knowing that we alter the past renders dubious our esteemed fixed and
stable heritage and undermines trust in our prospective role as faithful stewards. Yet
to be aware that we improve what we inherit has its compensations. Realizing that the
past is not just what happened back then but also what we and others have made of it,
we discard the mystique of an inflexible legacy. Remaking that legacy is not only
inevitable but salutary. Historically informed knowledge of our fabrication – both
conceiving and deceiving – enables groups like individuals to achieve a realistic,
liberating, and self-respecting past.42
The Epilogue appraises current views of bygone things and times. The lengthened and
deepened past has become almost omnipresent, engulfing the media and personal
memory. Yet at the same time collective memories have withered away. While historians
know more and more about the past, the public at large knows less and less, and what is
commonly known is increasingly recent, trivial, and ephemeral. Both in private prolifer-
ation and public demise, the past comes to resemble the present. Domesticated into
today, it is ever less a foreign country. Memory overwhelms history, and authoritative
understanding succumbs to untutored surmise. Cynical doubts assail the entire corpus of
42
Albert J. Solnit, ‘Memory as preparation: developmental and psychoanalytic perspectives’ (1984), in Joseph
Sandler, ed., Dimensions of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1989), 193–218 at 218.
22 Introduction
the past. ‘Just about everybody who was actually there is dead now, so who knows which
author got it right? If any of them did. It’s all a lot of bullshit’.43
A corollary of conflating the past within the present is failure to realize that bygone
people lived according to other codes, their modes of thought as well as genres de vie alien
to our own. Unable to conjure with inexplicably different norms, they blame ancestral
precursors for not thinking and behaving like themselves. But we are simultaneously
enjoined to make amends for precursors’ misbehaviour – injunctions rarely obeyed. All
the same rationales for historical accountability, from Erasmus and Burke to modern
jurists and philosophers, seem to me invaluable. Linking the living, the dead, and those to
come as a continuing community, we become responsible for the past in its entirety.
Informed tolerance toward our total legacy is a necessary condition of enhancing the
present and enabling the future.
43
Seventeen-year old in Sylvi Lewis, Beautiful Decay (Philadelphia: Running Press Teens, 2013), 107.
part i
WANTING THE PAST
The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, on this
familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today,
thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one
generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly
be gone. George Macaulay Trevelyan, 19491
There is only the past. The future hasn’t come into being yet, and the present is a
hairline thinner than the thinnest imaginable hair . . . Let us glory in having added
more and more to the past. Anthony Burgess, 19832
Someone asks a Greek cartoonist whether the country has a future. Well, he said, ‘we
have a past. You can’t have everything.’ Patricia Storace, 19973
The miracle of life is cruelly circumscribed by birth and death. Of the immense aeons, the
abyss of years before and after our own brief lives, we directly experience nothing.
Consciousness that blesses humans with knowledge of a past also curses us with aware-
ness of time’s awesome duration beyond our own evanescence. Why, asked Arthur
Schopenhauer, should we lament our future non-existence any more than our absence
from pre-natal eras?4 Some indeed do mourn both: viewing home movies filmed a few
weeks before his birth, Vladimir Nabokov was appalled by the rich reality of this past he
had not shared and where nobody had missed him. A brand-new empty baby carriage
had ‘the smug, encroaching air of a coffin . . . as if, in the reverse order of things, his very
bones had disintegrated’. Defying the prison of time present, he strove ‘to steal into
realms that existed before I was conceived’.5
Past and future are alike inaccessible. But though beyond physical reach, they are
integral to our imagination. Reminiscence and expectation suffuse every present moment.
Yet they attract – and repel – differently. Times ahead are fearsomely uncertain. We
depict desired futures but cannot foretell the outcomes of our own acts, let alone the fate
of posterity. And we do well to be careful what we crave. Future wishes are famously
subverted.
1
George Macaulay Trevelyan, ‘Autobiography of an historian’, in An Autobiography & Other Essays
(Longmans, Green, 1949), 1–64 at 13.
2
Anthony Burgess, End of the World News (McGraw-Hill, 1983), 216.
3
Patricia Storace, Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece (Granta, 1997), 159.
4
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), in Short Philosophical Essays (Oxford, 1974), 2:
268.
5
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951; Putnam, 1966), 19–20. See Brian
Boyd, ‘Nabokov, time, and timelessness’, New Literary History 37 (2006): 469–78.
24 Wanting the past
A Faustian yearning for posthumous fame (long condemned as diabolical) led Max
Beerbohm’s Enoch Soames, a fin-de-siècle poet deservedly neglected in his own day, to
sell his soul to the devil so that he could learn what posterity would think of him.
A century later Soames returns to the British Library, to find only one catalogue entry
under his name: ‘“an immajnari karrakter . . . a thurd-rate poit hoo beleevz imself a grate
jeneus” in a story by Max Beerbohm’.6 In another Faustian deal, the devil will make a
writer the best of his generation, nay, of the century, the millennium. ‘Your glory will
endure forever. All you have to do is sell me your grandmother, your mother, your wife,
your kids, your dog and your soul’. ‘Sure, where do I sign?’ Then he hesitates. ‘Just a
minute. What’s the catch?’7
Memorial prospects once seemed more secure, poetic perpetuity likely. Horace would
be ‘continually . . . renewed in the praises of posterity’. Robert Herrick would never
‘forgotten lie / [for his] eternal poetry / . . . / Unto the thirtieth thousand year, / When
all the dead shall reappear’. Literary creation vanquished mortality for Samuel Daniel,
confident ‘That when our days do end, they are not done, / And though we die, we shall
not perish quite, / But live two lives where others have but one’.8 Creative immortality
enriched sacred and then secular memorialization, through benefactions to churches,
hospitals, museums, and universities.9
Downsizing today – from your name on a building to just one brick, from a concert
hall to a single seat, from a library to a mere shelf – enables anyone to live on in future
memory for a paltry sum. In practice, however, even the most lavish donors are
soon shuffled off. For his $20 million gift Leon Levy would be memorialized at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Greek and Roman wing ‘in perpetuity’. ‘How long is
that?’ he asked. ‘For you, fifty years’, said director Philippe de Montebello. ‘For 20
million’, Levy countered, ‘make it seventy-five years’.10 Forever ends ever sooner. But
ever more sites and cornerstones, podiums and professorships, are nowadays embel-
lished with the names of wannabe immortals. Whatever their heavenly afterlife, the
deceased linger ever longer on earth, whether cryogenically or in copyright, cinematic
6
Max Beerbohm, ‘Enoch Soames’, in Seven Men and Two Others (1919; Oxford, 1966), 36. Soames devotees
witnessed his return to the reading room on 3 June 1997 ([Raymond Joseph] Teller, ‘A Memory of the
nineteen-nineties’, Atlantic Monthly 280:5 (Nov. 1997): 48–53). See David Colvin and Edward Maggs, eds.,
Enoch Soames (London: Maggs, 2001); on diabolical vainglory, Piero Boitani, ‘Those who will call this time
ancient: the futures of prophecy and piety’, in J. A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei, eds., Medieval Futures (Boydell,
2000), 51–65 at 62.
7
Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge, 2002), 101–2.
8
Horace, Works, (c. 23 bc; Cambridge, 1821), Ode 30, 1: 221; Robert Herrick, ‘Poetry perpetuates the
poet’ (1648), in Hesperides and Noble Numbers (New York, 1898), 82; Samuel Daniel, ‘Musophilus’
(1599), in A Selection from the Poetry of Samuel Daniel & Michael Drayton, ed. H. C. Beeching (London,
1899), 38.
9
Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson, ‘Symbolic immortality’ (1974), in Antonius C. G. M. Robben, ed., Death,
Mourning and Burial (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 32–9. See John Kotre, Outliving the Self (Johns Hopkins,
1984), expanded in his Make It Count: How to Generate a Legacy That Gives Meaning to Your Life (Free
Press, 1999).
10
Andrew Stark, ‘Forever or not?’ Wilson Quarterly 30:1 (Winter 2006): 58–61; Leon Levy with Eugene
Linden, The Mind of Wall Street (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 190.
Wanting the past 25
voiceovers, and commercial endorsements. Elvis Presley and John Lennon today rival
the Pharaohs in accrued post-mortem wealth.11
Utopian planners in the Modernist 1920s and 1930s envisaged the future as ‘another
country, which one might visit like Italy, or even try to re-create in replica’, recalled an
architectural historian. Futurism was ‘a period style, a neo-gothic of the Machine Age . . .
a city of gleaming, tightly clustered towers, with helicopters fluttering about their heads
and monorails snaking around their feet . . . under a vast transparent dome’.12 Post-war
hubris canonized ‘every new technology from nuclear power to plastic flowers. [Soon] we
would be inhabiting plexiglass bubbles and living on protein pills.’13 But that fancied
future faded in the 1960s with hippie flower children peddling ‘hand-lettered posters
[with] pictures of windmills’. The technological utopia became a wistful memory; what
lay ahead seemed ever less promising if not downright menacing. High-rise tower blocks
were ‘no longer the exciting future but the evil past’; Modernist architecture gave way to
postmodern retro pastiche.14
Every facet of life fled the failed future for some consoling past. Le Corbusier’s
avant-garde machine for living was forsaken for the blue remembered hills of Hous-
man’s heritage-worthy land of lost content. Historical city cores came to resemble
open-air museums, their restored facades offering ‘the illusion we are still living in the
eighteenth century’, carps a Dutch conservator, ‘embalmed like a mummy’ to meet
banal tourist expectations.15 Heritage engulfed not just the built legacy but film and
fiction. Memory obsession flooded autobiography, memoir, and retro styles of every
epoch, recalling times when the future still beckoned.
Unlike the scant and scary contours of times ahead, the past is densely delineated.
Countless vestiges in landscape and memory reflect what we and our precursors have
done and felt. More familiar than the geographically remote, the richly elaborated past
feels firmer than the present, for the here and now lacks the structured finality of what
time has filtered and ordered. The past is less disconcerting than the present because its
measure has already been taken.
Moreover, we feel quite sure that the past really happened, that its traces and memories
reflect irrefutable scenes and acts. The flimsy future may never arrive: man or nature may
destroy all; time may terminate. But the securely tangible past is seemingly fixed,
indelible, unalterable. ‘How much nicer to go back’, exclaims a fictional modern visitor
to the world of 1820; ‘the past was safe!’16 We are at home in it because it is our home –
the past is where we come from. Few have not wished, at least in fancy, to return to an
earlier time. The past is ‘Paris’ in a Russian’s lament, ‘I wish I were in Paris again.’ ‘But
11
Michael A. Kearl, ‘The proliferation of postselves in American civic and popular culture’, Mortality 15
(2010): 47–63.
12
Reyner Banham, ‘Come in 2001 . . .’, New Society, 8 Jan. 1976: 62–3.
13
Hannah Lewi, ‘Paradoxes in the conservation of the modern movement’, in Hans-Hubert Henket and Hilde
Heynen, eds., Back from Utopia (Rotterdam: 010, 2002), 350–7 at 357.
14
Banham, ‘Come in 2001’; Simon Jenkins, ‘Why reel life now depends on fantasy’, Times, 21 Dec. 2001.
15
A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896; London, 1956); Wim Denslagen, Romantic Modernism: Nostalgia
in the World of Conservation (Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 9.
16
Brian W. Aldiss, Frankenstein Unbound (Jonathan Cape, 1973), 26.
26 Wanting the past
you’ve never been to Paris’, says his friend. ‘No, but I’ve wished I was in Paris before.’ The
revisited past does not always satisfy, but it seldom disappoints so cruelly as the future did
poor Enoch Soames.
Yet we can no more slip back to the past than spring ahead to the future. Except in
imagined reconstruction, yesterday is closed; all we have of prior experience are attenu-
ated memories, dubious chronicles, fragmented and degraded relics. We dream of
escaping the confines of today, often to prefer it again when it becomes yesterday. Such,
wrote a friend, was the nostalgic torment of Tennyson, ‘always discontented with the
present till it has become the Past, and then he yearns towards it, and worships it’.17 In
recent decades such nostalgic yearning, like the cult of preservation, became pervasive
and addictive.
Present absorption with the past transcends partisan purposes. Popular history, biog-
raphy, autobiography, and historical fiction deluge the media. Re-enactments retrieve the
immediacy of all bygone aspects, mythic or mundane, heroic or quotidian. ‘Calendars so
full of memorial days for the remarkable events of the past [leave] almost no room . . . for
anything more to happen in the future’.18 DNA elevates genealogy from elite pursuit to
populist passion. Oral archives celebrate the annals of hitherto unsung masses, local
histories their most humdrum details, the narrator a ‘beachcomber among the casually
washed-up detritus of the past’, in Simon Schama’s phrase.19 Unexceptional memoirs by
ordinary people are ‘disgorged by virtually everyone who has ever had cancer, been
anorexic, battled depression, lost weight . . . Owned a dog. Run a marathon. Found
religion. Held a job.’20 We furnish our homes with things that consciously evoke the
past, adorn walls with family photos and mantels with memorabilia, convert city streets
into ‘Memory Lanes’, archive personal memories. The Internet flogs digital retention of
total recall from cradle to grave, every Facebook twitterer his own autobiographer.
Vestiges of the past, whole, dismembered, or discernible only in traces, lie everywhere
around us, yet until recently these remnants were seldom prized. Taking decay for
granted, people let antiquity disappear as the laws of nature and the whims of culture
dictated. Ancient Egypt entombed artefacts only for dead elites; early Christendom
treasured few survivals other than sacred relics. More oddities than antiquities filled
Renaissance cabinets of curiosities. Seventeenth-century cognoscenti admired archaeo-
logical finds but took few trophies. Victorian devotees of Walter Scott’s historical novels
and George Gilbert Scott’s historical architecture acquired tangible mementoes of previ-
ous epochs, but no past patron rivalled the magpie hoards of such modern accumulators
as William Randolph Hearst.
Saving the tangible, and lately the intangible, past is today a global enterprise. Nations
like individuals salvage things in greater quantity and variety than ever before, albeit often
17
James Spedding quoted in Philipp Wolf, Modernization and the Crisis of Memory (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2002), 100–1.
18
Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory (Princeton, 2003), 159.
19
Simon Schama, ‘The Monte Lupo story’, London Review of Books, 18 Sept. 1980: 23.
20
Neil Genzlinger, ‘The problem with memoirs’, NYT Book Review, 28 Jan. 2011.
Wanting the past 27
vicariously, as in BBC TV’s Restoration (2003–). To be sure, preservation is an age-old

enterprise. Mortal remains, religious relics, emblems of power and of endurance are
perennially cherished. But to retain a substantial portion of the past is signally a latter-day
goal. As recently as 1996 a heritage authority held culture ‘not really an active or primary
interest to the majority of people anywhere’.21 Only with the nineteenth century were
European nations defined by their material heritage; only in the twentieth were concerted
efforts made to protect it. Global programmes to ward off destruction and decay stem
from the past six decades.
That saving the past is of universal concern is now widely assumed. To possess the
tangible (and today the intangible) corpus of heritage is a sine qua non of collective
identity and well-being, as vital a nutriment as food and drink. ‘The marvels of human-
ity’s past, and the issues we face in understanding and conserving them’ are held to be
‘topics of concern as never before’.22
Buildings – prominent, durable, seemingly intrinsic to their surroundings – are a major
catalyst of collective historical identity. Disgust with modernism fuelled historic preserva-
tion from the 1960s. Before, ‘old buildings were universally understood to be less valuable
than new. Now’, said Stewart Brand of America in 1994, ‘it is almost universally understood
that old buildings are more valuable than new’. Most Britons, too, preferred old houses to
new, widely viewed as featureless, mean, and lifeless.23 ‘A new building is rarely anything
like as good as an old one because it is unique’; a London developer extols the neoclassical
white stucco ‘Regency facade’, with copied pillars and cornices, dear to foreign tycoons.24
But preservation also embraces manuscripts and motor cars, silent films and steam
engines. The valued past ranges from great monuments to trifling memorabilia, from
durable remains to mere traces. Virtually any old thing which would once have been
junked is now enshrined in popular memory and collectors’ hearts. Diverse motives
animate lovers of architectural relics, archaeological sites, ancient landscapes, antiques
and collectables. But the results have much in common.25 Relics saved confirm identity
and shed glory on nations, neighbourhoods, and individuals. Refuges from bewildering
novelty, historical sites and antique objects spell security, ancient bricks and mortar
assure stability. Like photo-laden mantels and antique parlours, hoary villages are havens
imbued with fond remembrance of some past. To halt demolition and stave off erosion
furthers a virtual immortality that defies the devouring tooth of time.
Preservation is also stridently collective. Every state strives to safeguard its historical
monuments. Antiquities are prized whether ancient and abundant, scarce or recent.
21
Peter Groote and Tialde Haartsen, ‘The communication of heritage’, in Brian Graham and Peter Howard,
eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (Ashgate, 2008), 181–94 at 183–9; Jeanette
Greenfield, The Return of Cultural Treasures (1989; 2nd edn Cambridge, 1996), 299.
22
Martin Filler, ‘Smash it: who cares?’ NYRB, 8 Nov. 2012: 24; John H. Stubbs, Time Honored: A Global View
of Architectural Conservation (Wiley, 2009), and John H. Stubbs and Emily G. Makaš, Architectural
Conservation in Europe and the Americas (Wiley, 2011), document such concerns.
23
Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (Penguin, 1994), 88, 109.
24
Ben Rogers, ‘The home of bad design’, Prospect, Dec. 2010: 38–42; Richard Holledge, ‘Modern
conveniences behind traditional facades’, IHT, 19 Nov. 2010: 14.
25
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the
Self (1981; Cambridge, 2002), 62–96.
28 Wanting the past
Myriad agencies – the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the International

Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the International Centre for the Study of
the Preservation and the Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), the International
Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (IIC), UNESCO’s World
Heritage Convention – enlist global preservation concern.
The urge to preserve is triggered by the pace of evanescence. Amid wholesale change
we cling to familiar vestiges. Things no longer useful are admired as obsolete. Saving
discarded objects gives them a genealogy, lends them temporal depth, makes up for
the longevity that casting them off foreclosed. Interest in each remnant mounts as it
threatens to disappear – steam engines, thatched roofs, pottery ovens inspire affection
seldom elicited when still plentiful. Nothing so quickens preservative action as foreboding
of imminent extinction, whether of a bird, a building, or a folkway.
Global warfare, technological innovation, rapid obsolescence, radical modernization,
massive migration, and increased longevity leave us in ever less familiar surroundings,
estranged even from our recent pasts. ‘Every man is a traveler from another time’,
said the publisher William Jovanovich, ‘and if the journey is long he ends up as a
stranger’.26 Attachment to buildings that were here before us reflects a rational hunger
for permanence. ‘The more rapidly society changes, the less readily should we abandon
anything familiar which can still be made to serve a purpose’, advised a sociologist.
However efficient or handsome the new, abrupt discontinuity inflicts intolerable
stress.27
Aerial bombing and deliberate destruction destroyed up to half the urban heritage of
Europe and Japan. Historic buildings and traditional scenes in Britain and Italy suc-
cumbed en masse to post-war developmental pressures. Losses in war-torn Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Syria are no less horrific.28 Iconoclasm and theft, fire and flood decimate
antiquities and archives the world over. The past generation is said to have destroyed
more prehistory than was previously known to exist. ‘The tempo of destruction is
presently so great’, warned Karl Meyer in 1973, ‘that by the end of the century most
remaining important archaeological sites may well be plundered or paved over’.29 The
four decades since have aggravated damage. In China as in Italy bulldozers and tomb-
robbers imperil ever-more-valued antiquities; thieves ‘know what they want, and they
destroy the rest’. Despite a twelve-fold increase in policing since 2005, archaeologists find
95 per cent of newly discovered tombs already emptied by a hundred thousand thieves. A
recently excavated pre-Inca complex in Peru was hailed as the first unlooted site found.
Beset by tourists as well as thieves, Third World global heritage sites face irreversible loss
and damage.30
26
Quoted in Henry Beetle Hough, Soundings at Sea Level (Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 206.
27
Peter Marris, Loss and Change (1974; rev. edn. Routledge, 1986), 150.
28
Francesco Siravo, ‘Historic cities and their survival in a globalized world’, Change over Time 1 (Spring
2011): 110–28 at 116.
29
Karl E. Meyer, The Plundered Past (Atheneum, 1973), xv.
30
Asif Efrat, ‘Protecting against plunder: the United States and the international efforts against looting
of antiquities’, Cornell Law Faculty Working Paper 47 (2009); Jim Yardley, ‘Bulldozers and thieves
imperil Chinese relics’, IHT, 6 Feb. 2007; Tania Branigan, ‘China’s tomb raiders laying waste to
Wanting the past 29
Such destruction is far from new. A Victorian antiquary noted the ‘rapid disappearance
and exhaustion’ of Celtic skulls and vases owing to ‘agricultural improvements, and the
ill-conducted pillage of idle curiosity’. Ancient monuments were ‘increasingly the prey of
the ignorant sightseer on the one hand or the needy owner of the soil on the other’, and
antiquaries were said to do more damage than the owners.31 But destruction has
accelerated. Modern machinery can metamorphose a city or a landscape virtually at a
stroke; urban skylines are transformed unrecognizably every few years, street scenes
altered in the blink of an eye. Trees are felled, hedgerows uprooted, buildings obliterated
unremarked, or vandalized to forestall an impending preservation order. Modern pollu-
tion erases masterpieces that have withstood centuries of travail. To safeguard the
Acropolis and The Last Supper against atmospheric sulphur would require ridding
Athens and Milan of automobiles and industry.
Military technology augments the toll. Bombs enable iconoclasts to expunge any
detested legacy. Popularity also speeds the past’s destruction. Mass tourism aggravates
theft and erosion at historical sites. Visitors no longer carry away slivers of Shakespeare’s
supposed chair at Stratford or hire hammers to chip keepsakes from Stonehenge,32 but
these gains in decorum are small compared with modern losses. Tourist footwear wore
out the turf around the Stonehenge sarsens; cathedral sightseers rub inscriptions to
illegibility; collectors promote illicit traffic that devastates ancient sites: Mayan temples
are hacked to pieces for clandestine export. Growing appreciation threatens survival in
situ; thieves posing as preservation officers pilfer old chimneypieces and banisters. The
high cost of protecting sites and relics speeds their doom. Effective safeguards are
expensive or onerous. Modern fire rules call for insulation and escape routes that
historical sites can ill afford. In applying height, lighting, and staircase rules mandated
for new structures to old buildings, England’s public-health officers habitually destroyed
their historic character. Insurance can bankrupt museums and galleries and is hence often
forgone, as with Edvard Munch’s The Scream, one version stolen in 1994 and another in
2004 from museums in Oslo.
Threatened by technology, pollution, and popularity, surviving vestiges command
protective attention as never before. The expertise that speeds demolition also locates
and salvages history hitherto hidden under the ground, beneath the sea, behind the
varnish of a painting. And new techniques mend old materials once beyond hope of
thousands of years of history’, Guardian, 1 Jan. 2012; Heather Pringle, ‘First unlooted royal tomb of its kind
unearthed in Peru’, National Geographic Daily News, 27 June 2013; Global Heritage Fund, Save Our
Vanishing Heritage: Safeguarding Endangered Cultural Heritage Sites in the Developing World (Palo Alto,
2010).
31
Thomas Bateman, Ten Years’ Diggings in Celtic and Saxon Grave Hills (London, 1861), v–vi;
‘Archæologia’, Edinburgh Review 154 (1881): 101–21 at 120–1; Simon Thurley, Men from the Ministry
(Yale, 2013), 40.
32
‘We cutt off a Chip according to the Custom’ (John Adams, ‘Notes on a tour of English country seats, &c.,
with Thomas Jefferson’, in Diary and Autobiography, 4–10 Apr. 1786 (Harvard, 1961), 3: 185). A piece
broken off Plymouth Rock by a descendant of Pilgrim founder William Bradford features in a 2013
museum display (William L. Bird, Jr., Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes and Curios from the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of American History (Princeton Architectural Press, 2013), 45–7. Svetlana Boym, The
Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), xvi.
30 Wanting the past
repair. Alternatively, what is gone stimulates devotion to its history and fondness for its
memories. Like a newcomer to an old town who seeks to acquire local roots, we become
nostalgically attached to the scenes and the songs, the things and the tastes, even the
turmoils and the traumas, of the pasts we once or even never had. However beyond
return our lost homeland, however irrecoverable our vanished past, today’s massive
uprooting and fearsome change, suggests Svetlana Boym, seats nostalgia ‘at the very core
of the modern condition’.33
33
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nastalgia, (Basic Books, 2002), xvi.
1
Nostalgia: dreams and nightmares
There once was a place where neighbors greeted neighbors in the quiet of summer
twilight. Where children chased fireflies. And porch swings provided easy refuge . . .
Remember that place? Perhaps from your childhood . . . That place is here again, in a
new town called Celebration . . . that takes you back to that time of innocence . . .
A place of caramel custard and cotton candy, secret forts and hopscotch on the streets
. . . A whole new kind of lifestyle that’s not new at all – just lost for a while. That fellow
who said you can’t go home again? He was wrong. Now you can come home.
Disney brochures, 19951
Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson. You find the present tense, but the past perfect.2
Everything is nostalgia. Everyone wants to live in the past. The present has no style.
The present is ugly. The present is gross . . . It’s part of the human condition to look to
the past, because if you look to the future you have to look forward to your own
death . . . So the past is where we all want to be. Jonathan Ames, 20053
Nostalgia is today’s favoured mode of looking back. It saturates the press, serves as
advertising bait, merits sociological study, expresses modern malaise. Obsolescence
confers instant bygone status – no sooner is the fire engine retired than it becomes a
precious relic. ‘Bring back proper kiosks’, yearned an English nostalgist. ‘Bring back
trolley-buses . . . Bring back cars with starting handles.’ A Britain addicted to
Victorian chivalry, neo-Gothic architecture, and the film Excalibur, surmised a
1981 critic, would ‘soon be appointing a Curator instead of a Prime Minister’.4
British curators are treasures in their own right, their heritage expertise exported
worldwide, while at home Brideshead Revisited redux became Downton Abbey,
today’s Edwardian triumph. Nostalgia ‘harks back to some rose-tinted past, of
Marmite and The Magic Roundabout [1965–77], when kids played in the street, it
was summer all year round, and Edrich was always 103 not out’.5 And before
1
Quoted in Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in
Disney’s New Town (Ballantine, 1999), 18; and Stephen Brown, Marketing: The Retro Revolution (Sage,
2001), 185–6; Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (Harper & Row, 1934).
2
Attributed to radio historian Owens Lee Pomeroy or speechwriter Robert Orben.
3
Jonathan Ames, ‘“Snobs”: the nonworking class’, NYT Book Review, 13 Mar. 2005.
4
Paul Jennings in Sunday Telegraph, 4 Feb. 1979: 16; J. Mordaunt Crook, ‘Honour and its enemies’, TLS,
25 Sept. 1981: 1102.
5
‘Heritage skills are worth billions’, Times, 18 Oct. 2004: 29; Patrick Foster, ‘Downton: you ain’t seen nothing
yet’, Times, 10 Nov. 2010: Arts 13–14; Ben Macintyre, ‘In with the bulldozers! Away with nostalgia!’ Times,
19 Nov. 2009: 35. John Edrich was a famed English cricketer.
31
32 Nostalgia: dreams and nightmares
Britain’s imperial decline. ‘We’re going back to the past’, James Bond tells M in
Skyfall, ‘where we have the advantage.6
But nostalgia is by no means uniquely British. America’s Nostalgia Book Club ‘put you
years behind the times – by choice’. Good Old Days, the ‘Magazine that Remembers the
Best’, fondly recalls porches, cedar buckets, hitching posts, woodsheds, showboats, ‘Casey
at the Bat’, Bonnie & Clyde, The Lone Ranger, the Second World War; subscribers collect
Zane Grey books, Sears Roebuck catalogues, McGuffey Readers, old sheet music.7
Looking Back offers ‘heartwarming wartime romances, old-time advertising. ‘Return to
the loveliness of yesteryear, an era of timeless charm, enduring quality, beauty and
elegance . . . a breath of relief from this fast paced world’, urges Victoria Magazine, while
Martha Stewart Living’s ‘Summer Supper’ provides ‘memories rich enough to last 1001
nights’.8
At the new millennium’s eve a critic moaned that ‘America has no now. Our culture is
composed of sequels, reruns, remakes, revivals, reissues, . . . recreations, re-enactments,
adaptations, anniversaries, memorabilia, oldies radio, and nostalgia record collections.’
His plaint itself echoed the 1980s, the founding decade of ‘replay, recycle, recall, retrieve,
reprocess, and rerun’ from more creative times.9 A recent paean to the vanished past
conveys its nostalgic appeal:
Before texts and tweets, when there was time. Before apps, when there were attention spans. Before
social media, when we were social. Before celebrities, when there were stars. Before identity theft,
when nobody could steal you. Before the Greens, when we faced the Reds. Before movies-on-
demand, when movies were demanding. Before dystopia, when utopia beckoned. Before Facebook,
when there was Camelot. Before reality shows, when things were real. Before attitude, when there
was apathy. Before YouTube, when there was you and me. . . . we managed just the same, without
passwords, even in black and white.10
Indeed, Britons now suggest that Americans are more nostalgic. In Britain, the Past
Times retro-themed chain of shops went broke in 2012. ‘We lost interest in its historically
themed knick-knacks. It could no longer flog us Henry VIII duvet covers, Black Death
vitamin pills and King Canute Lilos . . . We don’t want the past any more.’ Whereas
Americans adore everything retro. ‘Over there, everyone’s drinking tea and hiring butlers.’
To us, Downton Abbey is old news. It’s so 2011. We’re over it . . . Downton was, of course, popular
here too. But we watched it giggling. We knew it was a nonsensical confection of invented past. We
knew its tale of happy, cap-doffing plebs, slimy middle classes and angelic toffs . . . was a Henry
VIII duvet cover of a programme . . . Americans, however not only believe that England was just
like that in 1916, they think it’s like that now.11
6
Ben Macintyre, ‘007’s latest mission: restoring Britain’s pride’, Times, 2 Nov. 2012: 35.
7
Richard Stenhouse, ed., Live It Again: 1942 (Berne, IN: DRG, 2010).
8
1991 ads quoted in Barbara B. Stern, ‘Historical and personal nostalgia in advertising text’, Journal of
Advertising 21:4 (1992): 1–22 at 15, 18.
9
George Carlin, Brain Droppings (Hyperion, 1997), 110; Tom Shales, ‘The re decade’, Esquire (Mar. 1986):
67–70.
10
Roger Cohen, ‘Change or perish’, NYT, 5 Oct. 2010 (excerpted).
11
Victoria Coren, ‘Nostalgia is such old hat’, Observer, 22 Jan. 2012.
Nostalgia: dreams and nightmares 33
Once the solace or menace of the few, nostalgia now attracts and afflicts all. Myriad
ancestor-hunters scour archives; millions throng to historic houses; antiques engross hoi
polloi; every childhood past is souvenired. Reversing earlier ill-repute, nostalgia is
promoted as therapeutic, an aid to self esteem, a crutch for personal continuity, a defence
against reminders of mortality.12 A London hospital’s 1940s/50s Nostalgia Room encour-
ages elderly patients to reminisce while sipping tea from real china cups. Handling
heritage objects loaned by museums proved therapeutic for home-care residents.13 In
the BBC’s The Young Ones (2010), six geriatric celebrities were ‘rejuvenated’ by five days
immured in the 1975 trappings – decor, food, TV – of their heyday; the show sparked a
surge in retro furnishings among elderly viewers.14
Restaurants lead the nostalgia boom. Several Greenwich Village hostelries offer visions
of bohemian Old New York’s aspirational intimacy. Like ‘an old townhouse passed down
through generations without anyone throwing anything away’, ‘The Lion’ parades a
faux-past enhanced by photos of Al Capone, Babe Ruth, and Frank Sinatra, with a
Duke Ellington, Andrews Sisters, and 1960s Barbra Streisand soundtrack.15 Retro-1950s
English teashops artfully scatter old ‘Ordnance Survey maps [with] pipe-smoking ram-
blers on their covers over the kind of three-mirror dressing table that Celia Johnson
might have used to primp her hair’ in Brief Encounter (1945).16 In loving memory of the
Hard Rock Café and Planet Hollywood, the House of Blues Southern juke-joint themed
restaurants/nightclubs are ‘shellacked with layer upon layer of fake authenticity. The
windows weep with fake water damage; ersatz graffiti confronts you in the toilet; pretend
tobacco stains dot the ceilings’.17
Nostalgia fuelled the nascent film industry and suffuses modern cinema. Movies are
especially ‘vulnerable to fears of obsolescence’, suggests critic A. O. Scott, because ‘film is
so much younger than the other great art forms’. Born at the very onset of modernism,
movies exemplify its fleeting fragility. ‘We sense – and sorrow – that back then . . . the
stars were more glamorous, the writing sharper, the stories more cogent’. What ‘we used
to love is going away, or already gone’. Digitization dooms even cinema’s
old material hallmarks – the grainy swirl of emulsion as light passes through the stock,
the occasional shudder of sprockets sliding into place, the whirr and click of the projector . . .
12
Constantine Sedikides et al., ‘Nostalgia as enabler of self-continuity’, in Fabio Sani, ed., Self-Continuity
(New York: Psychology Press, 2008), 227–39; Clay Routledge et al., ‘Finding meaning in the past: nostalgia
as an existential resource’, in Keith D. Markman et al., The Psychology of Meaning (Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association, 2013), 297–316; John Tierney, ‘A stroll down memory lane has
benefits’, IHT, 10 July 2013: 8.
13
Jackie O’Sullivan, ‘See, touch and enjoy Newham University Hospital’s nostalgia room’, in Helen
Chatterjee, ed., Touch in Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 224–30; Healing Heritage exhibition, University
College London, July 2011.
14
Times, 14 Sept. 2010: 57. The show repeated Harvard psychologist Ellen J. Langer’s 1979 study; she had a
group of elderly men in a retrofitted 1959 setting pretend for a week they were twenty-two years younger
(Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise (Ballantine, 2009), 5–10).
15
Diane Cardwell, ‘In the Village, restaurants offer a vision of the city as it once was’, NYT, 20 May 2010: 21–2.
16
Ian Jack, ‘Sugar coats this hunger for the past’, Guardian, 17 July 2010: 15.
17
Joshua Glenn, ‘Fake authenticity: an introduction’, Hermenaut 15 (22 Dec. 1999).
Nostalgia . . . is built into moviegoing, which is why moviegoing itself has been, almost from the
beginning, the object of nostalgia.18
Not by chance, cinema’s quintessential locales are the Wild West and the Effete East.
As the death of the West coincided with the birth of the movies, the archetypal Western
was saturated from the start with nostalgia for ‘an older, rougher, simpler society’. Heroes
and villains knew they were ‘living not just in the West but also in a Western’, soon global
in locale, American cowboys morphing into samurai and spaghetti personae, at length
feminist, kung-fu and wallaby Westerns.19 Counterpoised to Hollywood’s savage saloon
shoot-outs are Britain’s snobbish Bridesheads and Downton Abbeys.
Revivals from ten, thirty, seventy years ago out-sell new shows and songs. In Holly-
wood ‘the hottest thing today is yesterday’.20 Since any recognition sells, sequels are made
to films that bombed. Hence forgettable remakes such as Cheaper by the Dozen (1950/
2003), The In-Laws (1979/2003), Stepford Wives (1975/2004), All the King’s Men (1949/
2006), Poseidon (1972/2006), When a Stranger Calls (1979/2006), The Bad News Bears
(1976/2006), Prom Night (1980/2008). Familiarity breeds contentment: with the top box-
office hits all sequels, a critic wondered ‘whether Hollywood should bother to have an
original thought’.21
Not only films are retro; recycling pervades theatre too. On Broadway, ‘the unfamiliar
tends to be as welcome as a bedbug’, so most shows are ‘revamped, reinterpreted
and, forever and ever, revived’.22 Set in the 1960s, John Waters’s ‘Hairspray in Concert’
(2013) – ‘a stage show of a movie of a stage show of a movie’ – is ‘a revival of a revival of a
revival’, notes marketing historian Stephen Brown.23 Meanwhile, new films treat the past
as a storehouse of problems resolved, including ‘films about boys who do not want to
grow up, ever, ever, ever’.24
Extreme nostalgic attachments are pathological. Some addicts suffocate in bygones,
unable to relinquish anything – the carefully husbanded ‘Pieces of string too short to use’,
the man who hoarded thousands of jars of his own excrement, the reliquary phials of
an old love affair, labelled ‘Dust from dress of R. Dust by bed of R. Dust near door of
R’s room’, the artist Ilya Kabakov’s dust archive in ‘The Man Who Never Threw
18
A. O. Scott, ‘Do movies matter? Right now they feel especially perishable’. IHT, 18 Nov. 2011: 10–11.
19
A. O. Scott, ‘How the Western was won’, NYT Magazine, 11 Sept. 2007: 55–8; John Exshaw, ‘Bury my heart
in Hill Valley’, in Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, ed., The Worlds of Back to the Future (London: McFarland, 2010),
91–111 at 97.
20
Andy Pemberton quoted in Chris Nelson, ‘The old days never looked so good’, NYT, 11 Sept. 2002: B1, 3.
21
Brian Tallerico, ‘The top ten remakes nobody asked for’, Movieretriever.com, 13 Mar. 2009; A. O. Scott,
‘Blockbuster 4: the same but worse’, NYT, 9 June 2010; Michael Cieply, ‘Familiarity breeds Hollywood
sequels’, NYT, 28 Dec. 2011; Katrina Onstad, ‘The case of cinematic déjà vu’, NYT, 14 Dec. 2012.
22
Ben Brantley, ‘Think you’ve seen it all? You have’, NYT, 12 Sept. 2010, Theater; Ben Brantley, ‘Revivals are
nice, but revel in the new’, NYT, 20 Feb. 2011: AR6. See Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s
Addiction to its own Past (Faber & Faber, 2011).
23
Stephen Brown, ‘Retro from the Get-go: reactionary reflections on marketing’s yester-mania’ Journal of
Historical Research in Marketing 5:4 (2013): 521–36, at 526.
24
Joe Queenan, ‘The worst movie year ever?’ Wall Street Journal, 28 July 2010; A. O. Scott, ‘What’s ahead:
more movies that look back’, NYT, 12 Sept. 2005.
Figure 2 Rubbish into ‘Antiques’: Coventry, Vermont
Anything Away’. Forced by health inspectors to clean the dust-cocooned wishbones

dangling over his bar, the proprietor of McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York
reverently preserved the sacred dust.25
To Nigel Dennis’s fictional ‘spiritual recapitulation’ pub throng devotees of
medieval calligraphy, puzzling the postmen with their renascent addresses . . . Some wore small,
curved bowler hats [and] drank their beer out of old moustache-cups. Many were gardeners, and
would grow only roses which had not been seen for some centuries [The pub] covered all periods
from Thomist to Edwardian, and rejected nothing but the malaise of the present.26
Dennis’s anachronistic haunt became reality in 1982 at Blists Hill Open Air Museum in
Ironbridge Gorge. To nearby ‘All Nations’ pub came museum guides ‘in sub-Victorian
garb; heavy hobnail boots, plain serge trousers, and mock Halifax corduroy gathered at
the waist with binder twine . . . Decrepit old jackets open to reveal grubby collarless
25
Bette Pesetsky, ‘The hobbyist’, in Stories up to a Point (Bodley Head, 1982), 35–43 at 42; Ilya Kabakov, ‘The
man who never threw anything away’ (c. 1977), in Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive (MIT Press, 2006),
32–7; Ilya Kabakov, The Garbage Man (1995), Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; Dan Barry, ‘Dust is
gone above the bar, but a legend still dangles’, NYT, 7 Apr. 2011: A19. See Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee,
Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (Harcourt, 2010). The artist Piero Manzoni sealed,
dated, numbered, and signed ninety cans of his own excrement (Jonathan Glancey, ‘Merde d’artiste’,
Guardian, 13 June 2007; Dave Praeger, Poop Culture (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2007), 151–9).
26
Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity (1955; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), 133.
workingmen’s shirts . . . These phantoms of the past-present quaff real ale, . . . liquid
history bearing silent witness against the present’.27
Present woes are drowned in Irish theme pubs, ‘commodifications of the Celtic Revival of
the late nineteenth century . . . itself a politically-motivated commodification . . . of half-
baked Irish pre-history’. Sheffield, England, hosts, a ‘Celtic-twilighted composite of little
people-peopled, faux fairyland-filigreed and peat-briquetted, begorrah-bespoken, bejabbers-
bejases’ adorned with pseudo shillelaghs, sham o’shanters, and plastic paddy paraphernalia
outfitted from kits made in Essex. For ersatz rustic ethnicity – ‘leather tankards dip from the
beamed ceiling, [and] a scythe balanced precariously on two (rusty) nails threatens to
guillotine you’ – the pub’s minstrelled conviviality fosters bleary-eyed déjà vus among
foreign students, summoning up homeland haunts in China, India, Greece or Peru.28
Present malaise and future mistrust fuelled nostalgia from the 1970s, when threats
of resource exhaustion, of ecological collapse, of nuclear Armageddon made the past a
haven from millennial angst. ‘The past looks like a keel to many people’, noted a
journalist, ‘so they’re trying to get a hook into it, pull it alongside, and fix it in place’.
Against dismays of Suez and Vietnam, oil and inflation, bygone times promised ‘that
life was once liveable and, yes, yes, if we looked long and hard enough at some right
thing in our past, it would be right again’.29 Against the killings of the Kennedys and
Martin Luther King, the crimes of Richard Nixon, and the impotence of Jimmy
Carter, the imperial presidency of Ronald Reagan, Hollywood’s ‘grand architect of
time itself’, restored ‘morning again in America’. In sync with Margaret Thatcher’s
resurgent Victorianism, Reagan revived mythic 1950s American family values and
upbeat optimism, like the country’s surrogate father Doc Brown in Back to the Future,
a Reagan icon.30
‘I can read your future’, offers a palmist, ‘or, as so many seem to prefer these days,
I can reminisce nostalgically about your past’.31 Until the 1970s, nostalgia trips were
‘surreptitious and ambivalent, because we didn’t want to relinquish our hold on the
present’. But as the present grew woeful, modernity lost its charm. The phrase ‘they
don’t make them like that any more’ shed its ironic edge and became a true lament.32
So prevalent became the backward glance that a British critic termed nostalgia
27
Bob West, ‘The making of the English working past: a critical view of Ironbridge Gorge Museum’, in Robert
Lumley, ed., The Museum Time-Machine (Routledge, 1988), 36–62 at 36–7.
28
Anthony Patterson and Stephen Brown, ‘Knick-knack Paddy-whack, give the pub a theme’, Journal of
Marketing Management 16 (2000): 647–62 at 656; Anthony Patterson and Stephen Brown, ‘Comeback for
the Craic: a literary pub crawl’, 75–93 at 76, 81, and Stephen Brown, ‘No then there’, 3–18 at 8, all in
Stephen Brown and John F. Sherry, Jr., eds., Time, Space, and the Market (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe,
2003).
29
Eric Sevareid, ‘On times past’, Preservation News 14:10 (1974): 5; Richard Hasbany, ‘Irene: considering the
nostalgic sensibility’, Journal of Popular Culture 9 (1976): 816–26 at 819.
30
Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies (Rutgers, 1994); Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, ‘Introduction: it’s about time’, in her
Worlds of Back to the Future, 6–8.
31
Ed Fisher, cartoon, New Yorker, 15 Mar. 1976: 39.
32
Michael Wood, ‘Nostalgia or never: you can’t go home again’, New Society, 7 Nov. 1974: 343–6; Gaby
Porter, ‘Putting your house in order: representations of women and domestic life’, in Lumley, ed., Museum
Time-Machine, 101–26 at 101–2.
‘a sickness that has reached fever point’, and an American feared ‘a future in which
people may again die of nostalgia’.33
Instead of death came rejuvenation. As a visitable realm of solace, nostalgia made the
past ‘the foreign country with the healthiest tourist trade of all’. Sepia photos of bygone
premises festooned bars and pubs, shops and schools. Offering ‘acres of nostalgia’,
Beamish Open Air Museum won the 1987 European Museum of the Year Award.
Realtors touted proximity to pasts however ersatz, from the Sussex monument to the
fraudulent Piltdown Man, to Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye in Jamaica.34 If some grumble at
being ‘a quaint romantic bygone in the local souvenir shop’, heritage tourism brings the
UK some 253,000 jobs and 30 billion pounds a year.35 Nostalgia’s 105 million Google hits
as of June 2013 plug everything from medieval battle games to dune buggies, handmade
goats’-milk soap to Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 film Nostalgia.
Personal links market nostalgia. Frith’s sepia-toned fin-de-siècle scenes are ‘Your
village, your town, your roots . . . your own personal piece of nostalgia’. The ‘Imperial
Tankard’ commemorated for Britons ‘the Empire they never knew, perhaps, but also the
Empire they should not be allowed to forget’. Most lucrative are celebrity collectables – an
O. J. Simpson glove, Buckingham Palace toilet paper, a glass shard from Princess Diana’s
fatal crash, jelly beans from Ronald Reagan’s desk, Sylvester Stallone’s urine, Miss
America’s saliva.36 Like saintly bones, hair and fingernails, and milk of the Virgin Mary,
physical remnants of modern celebrities command the highest prices, strands of Marilyn
Monroe’s locks fetching $400. Auctioned Jimi Hendrix memorabilia included a lavatory
seat used by Elvis Presley and a piece of toast half eaten by Beatle George Harrison.
Floridian Diana Duyser’s decade-old, miraculously mould-free ‘Virgin Mary Grilled
Cheese Sandwich’ – after taking a bite, she saw ‘Virgin Mary staring back at me’ –
fetched $28,000 at auction.37
Such was 1970s’ lust for the past that a satirist foresaw an eco-nostalgic shortage, with
past resources and revivals strictly rationed. So voracious were 1990s retro consumers
that ‘we may run entirely out of past as soon as 2005’.38 Happily, digital technology and
the Internet now ensure we will never be short of past, nostalgia endlessly fed by instant
access to an infinitely recyclable archive. We are promised digital scanning of 3.5 trillion
old photos.39
33
Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (Methuen, 1987), 10; Jay Anderson
quoted in History News 38:12 (1983): 11.
34
Sheridan Morley, ‘There’s no business like old business’, Punch, 29 Nov. 1972: 777; David Kirby, ‘Escapes’,
NYT, 26 July 2002.
35
Libby Purves, ‘In Moore’s America, we aren’t even worth a joke’, Times, 6 July 2004; Kareen El Beyrouty
and Andrew Tessler, The Economic Impact of the UK Heritage Tourism Economy, Oxford Economics, May
2013, and English Heritage, Heritage Counts 2014.
36
Barton Lidice Beneš, Curiosa: Celebrity Relics, Historical Fossils, & Other Metamorphic Rubbish
(Abrams, 2002).
37
David Sinclair, ‘Nostalgia? It’s gonna cost you’, Times, 20 Nov. 2004; George E. Newman et al., ‘Celebrity
contagion and the value of objects’, Journal of Consumer Research 38 (2011): 215–28; Peter Stiff, ‘How
much would you pay for one strand of Justin Bieber’s hair?’ Times, 6 Aug. 2011: 42.
38
Sheridan Morley, ‘There’s no business like old business’, Punch, 29 Nov. 1972: 777; ‘U.S. Dept. of Retro
warns: “We may be running out of Past”’, Onion 32:14 (4 Nov. 1997).
39
Mitch Goldstone, ‘Nostalgia, what’s old is new again at CES’, Scan.my.photos.com, 2 Jan. 2009.
People even plan ahead nostalgically. Like Kierkegaard, they look back in the midst of
enjoyment to recapture it for memory. One young woman imagined herself as a
grandmother recalling the infancy of her yet unborn daughters.40 ‘Just such a honey-
suckle filtered, sunny conversational afternoon’, a Margaret Drabble character subse-
quently remembered, would later cause ‘the most sad and exquisite nostalgia. She was
sad in advance, yet at the same time all the happier . . . creating for herself a past.’41 The
BBC producer of the 2000 reading of the first Harry Potter novel wanted ‘there to be
children now who say to each other in their twenties, “You remember that Christmas
when we all listened to Harry Potter on the radio?”’42 A nostalgia guru swooned over a
Hollywood designer’s antiques-and-retro-laden loft: ‘It was the kind of place I wish
I would be able to look back on having lived in. . . . I want to have lived in [it], when I’m
85. I want this to be part of my future – but only in memory, I sort of skipped over
actually experiencing it.’43 Her nostalgia is more for past thoughts than past things, ‘like
thinking we loved the books of our youth, when all we love is the thought of ourselves
young, reading them’.44
Nostalgia is worldwide. The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady and Brideshead
Revisited tapped global markets. Old oak beams from East Anglia (or glass-fibre copies)
solace homeowners in Helsinki and Osaka; Peter Rabbit lures hordes of Japanese pilgrims
to Beatrix Potter’s Hilltop Farm in the Lake District. Russian nostalgia for pre-
Revolutionary troikas, furs, and family samovars, epitomized in the Romanov-era novels
of Boris Akunin, coexists with wistful memories of imagined idealism and heroic sacrifice
in Stalinist times; Orthodox dreams of chaste civilization mingle with Art-Deco-cum-
fascist ‘Stalin Empire’-style interiors and the iconic sausage and fermenting sauerkraut
of sparse communist fare. ‘Russians are rushing backward because they see nothing
good in the future. . . . Only in the past, as in the womb, is it warm and safe; only in
the past are there symbols and victories that people can understand’.45 East German arts
and artefacts alike celebrate pre-unification culture. An ‘Ostalgia’ exhibition recalls
pre-perestroika eastern Europe, dire or dour memories fuelled by Blushing Babushka,
Siberian Sipper, and Kanon Kremlin vodka cocktails.46 Parisians prefer keeping their city
a decaying museum. Greeks’ mythicized classical past buttresses claims for heritage
restitution.47 Shanghai’s ‘time-honoured’ (2010) shopping mall peddles exclusively
40
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843; Oxford, 1944), I: 240–1; Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday (Free
Press, 1979), 12.
41
Margaret Drabble, Jerusalem the Golden (Penguin, 1969), 93.
42
Quoted in Stephen Brown, ‘Marketing for muggles: Harry Potter and the retro revolution’, Journal of
Marketing Management 17:5/6 (2001): 463–79 at 468.
43
Eva Hagberg in Eryn Loeb, ‘Rooms with a view to the past: Eva Hagberg’s “Dark Nostalgia”’,
TheFasterTimes.com.nostalgia, 29 Sept. 2009.
44
Amanda Cross, Poetic Justice (New York: Avon, 1979), 140.
45
Victor Erofeyev, ‘Imperial crutches’, IHT, 20 Nov. 2009: 6; Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel
(Routledge, 2010), 94–5; Andrew E. Kramer, ‘Back to the (’30s) U.S.S.R.’, NYT, 30 May 2013: D1, 6–7; Anya
von Bremen, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (Crown, 2013).
46
Anthony Enns, ‘Politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German film’, Screen 48 (2007):
475–91; Holland Cotter, ‘Out of the rust of the Iron Curtain’, IHT, 25 July 2011.
47
‘Parisians prefer city as a “museum”’, IHT, 24 Sept. 2004; John Boardman, The Archaeology of Nostalgia:
How the Greeks Re-created Their Mythical Past (Thames & Hudson, 2003).
pre-Revolutionary clothing and cosmetics. The Japanese popular song genre enka, recre-
ated to sound timelessly old, yearns for the past as lost home, as mother, as national
identity. In the enka Japan becomes ‘Japan’, much as the Isle of Wight exemplifies Olde
England in Julian Barnes’s England, England.48 In sum, nostalgic remembrance is a
burgeoning enterprise everywhere, and almost any era will do.
Nostalgia far and near

It’s never safe to be nostalgic about something until you’re absolutely certain there’s
no chance of its coming back. Bill Vaughn, 1975
Times beyond our ken can be as nostalgically comforting as times actually experienced.
Few who flock to Bogart films, enjoy Glenn Miller music, or throw 1960s parties are old
enough to recall them. Douglas Coupland deplores ‘forcing people to have memories they
don’t actually possess’ as ‘legislated nostalgia’. But longing for Depression-era or wartime
‘hardiness in the face of austerity’ today appeals to young and old alike.49 Web-guests to
Lisa’s Nostalgia Café enjoy ‘good old days’ from the 1910s to the 1990s. London
Transport’s 1980s Vintage Time Machine bus invited patrons to 1925, ‘when every day
seemed like high summer’. It was ‘summer all year round’ for an American longing to
‘take a Sunday walk the way we used to, with your silk parasol and your long dress
whishing along, and sit on those wire-legged stools at the soda parlor’.50
Old codgers remember ‘when beer was cheaper . . . and people had more respect’; the
Courage ale slogan ‘Fings are wot they used to be’ endeared the grubby 1930s. No matter
if those days were in fact wretched: ‘life was lovely back in the 1900s’, asserted elderly
Irish women raised in rural destitution.51 An American mutes Depression hardships and
wartime privations with memories of ‘the smell of new-mown hay and honeysuckle
wafting on the breezes’.52
Even horrendous memories can evoke nostalgia. A 1970s Londoner recalled wartime
bombing as ‘pure, flawless happiness’; seventieth anniversary Blitz parties in mock air-
raid shelters let period-garbed nostalgists ‘escape the drab safety of the modern world for
a time when Londoners defied Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombers from behind the blackout
curtains’.53 Britain’s current austerity drive fuels nostalgia for the moral fibre and
48
Jonna Dagliden, ‘Retro Chinese brands’, LifeStyle News, 17 Jan. 2011; Christine R. Yano, Tears of Longing:
Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song (Harvard Asian Center, 2000), 8, 14–17, 178–9; Julian
Barnes, England, England (Jonathan Cape, 1998).
49
Douglas Coupland, Generation X (St Martin’s Press, 1991), 41; Owen Hatherley, ‘Austerity nostalgia’, blog,
5 Feb. 2009; Dan Fox, ‘The bad old days. Again. And again . . .’, frieze Magazine, 6 Feb. 2009, website.
50
Ray Bradbury, ‘A scent of sarsaparilla’ (1953), in The Day It Rained Forever (Penguin, 1963), 192–8 at 193.
51
Michael Wood, ‘Nostalgia or never: you can’t go home again’, New Society, 7 Nov. 1974: 343; Richard
Milner, ‘Courage cockneys tap taste for nostalgia’, Sunday Times, 25 Apr. 1982: 49; Grant Woodward,
‘Fings are wot they used to be!’ Yorkshire Evening Post, 6 Sept. 2005; Mary Kenny, ‘When the going was
bad’, Sunday Telegraph, 19 Aug. 1979.
52
Frank C. Newby, His Name Was Amy Mable: A Lifetime of Memories (iUniverse, 2007), jacket.
53
Tom Harrisson, Living through the Blitz (Collins, 1976), 325, 1; ‘London partygoers reliving spirit of the
Blitz’, Reuters.com, 8 June. 2010. See Lara Feigel, The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second
World War (Bloomsbury, 2013).
make-and-mend mentality of ration-book powdered eggs and suet, beet-juice lipstick,

and Bisto bronzer. The home front’s dourest hour ‘has definitely got to come back’, says
diet guru Jamie Oliver. ‘Things weren’t so jolly back then, and by god, they shouldn’t be
too fun now, if only to ensure historical accuracy.’54
We all know the past was not really like our nostalgic memories. Back then seems
brighter partly because we lived more vividly and hopefully when young. Now less
able to savour intensely, we mourn a lost immediacy, even as spectators. A website
cheers the ‘monochrome glory’ of 1950s TV, as ‘everyone feels nostalgia for
the television they watched when very young’.55 Nostalgia excises the obnoxious and
the awkward. Childhood thus recalled excludes the family quarrels, the boredom, the
waiting in queues for grubby loos; it is memory with the pain removed, the past’s evils
and failures forgotten. We look back misty-eyed at a time ‘when doctors prescribed
Camels, Radium was on every wrist’.56 Nostalgists aim ‘to get out of modernity
without leaving it altogether; we want to relive those thrilling days of yesteryear, but
only because we are absolutely assured that those days are out of reach’.57
Nostalgia nowadays engulfs the whole past. Billy Collins’s ‘Nostalgia’ conveys the
temporal sweep:
Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade . . .
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today. . . .
Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade sonnet marathons were the rage. . . .
The 1790s will never come again Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills and
write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead. . . .
I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month . . .
Even this morning would be an improvement over the present . . .58
‘History’, observed art-historian Bevis Hillier in 1975, got ‘recycled as nostalgia almost as
soon as it happened’: just eight years later his own book had become a nostalgic memory.59
54
Quoted in Mireille Silcoff, ‘Austerity chic in the U.K.’, NYT, 11 Mar. 2011; Mireille Silcoff, ‘Pig swill and
bones and bottle caps and wire!’ NYT Magazine, 13 Mar. 2011: 41–2.
55
1950s British TV nostalgia, whirligig-tv.co.uk.
56
Roger Cohen, ‘Change or perish’, IHT, 5 Oct. 2010: 8.
57
Roger Rosenblatt, ‘Look back in sentiment’, NYT, 28 July 1973: 23.
58
Billy Collins, ‘Nostalgia’, in Questions about Angels (Morrow, 1991), 104–5.
59
Bevis Hillier, Austerity Binge: The Decorative Arts of the Forties and Fifties (London: Studio Vista, 1975),
187–9, 195; Bevis Hillier, The Style of the Century: 1900–1980 (London: Herbert, 1983).
Nostalgia for the very recent past began with the return to prelapsarian 1962 in George
Lucas’s iconic film American Graffiti (1973). By 1975 ‘the student anti-war demonstra-
tions of the late 1960s [were] already being sentimentalized as some great turbulent but
glorious phenomenon of a dead long-ago’. Russell Baker found Americans focused on ‘a
past so recent that only an 11-year-old could possibly view it as past’.60 In 1997 the US
Retro Clock stood at 1990, ‘an alarming 74% closer to the present’ than a decade earlier.
Life becomes heritage almost before it has a chance to be lived.’61
Recent absence gladdens the heart. ‘Welcome to the 90s’, offers a website. ‘Why 90’s
nostalgia already? As the lifespan of fads gets shorter and shorter, looking back gets easier.
. . . Rather than wait for the memory to fade, the best time to immortalize the decade is
now!62 A British observer concurs. ‘The big business now is decade nostalgia for decades
which have scarcely passed.’ Outworn by 2004 were the polyester ’70s, the shoulder-
padded ’80s, the materialist ’90s; the new rage was the Botox ’00s. ‘We love the Zeros’, was
a 2004 forecast for 2010. Ironists project nostalgia for today thirty years hence, digital retro
parties featuring primitive iPhones.63 Since the Noughties turned naughty, ‘nostalgia for
events which have yet to occur’ takes their place.64 Instant retro swamps the Old World
too. With the wheel of fashion revolving ever faster, ‘the interval between creation and
revival’ drops from centuries to seconds; past collapses into present.65
Once a grandparental privilege, nostalgia is now peddled to teenagers. Antiques
Roadshow attracts youngsters like the legacy-besotted thirteen-year-old who bought a
Degas.66 When nineteen-year-old footballer Wayne Rooney opted for a £3.5 million
Queen Anne-style mansion with ‘rusticated quoins’, he was lauded for ‘finding comfort
in echoes of the past’. Adolescent tastes for the clothes, hairstyle, music, cars, and home
decor of ten or fifteen years before one’s own birth persist in adult retro fancies. Hence
today’s ’40s to ’60s cults.67
Nostalgia evokes better-off as well as better times. ‘Take a magical step back in time’,
Goodwood Revival in 2013 lured visitors to join motor-racing toffs in tweeds and trilbies;
‘leave the modern world behind and immerse yourself in a bygone age of elegance and
sophistication’. A Maharaja-style trip around Rajasthan in saloon cars with porters in
period dress ‘brings back to life the vintage splendours’. One need hardly leave home; a
‘Venice–Simplon’ train trip through Kent earns ‘an Orient Express Certificate to
60
Russell Baker, ‘Shock of things past’, IHT, 2 May 1975: 14.
61
‘U.S. Dept. of Retro warns: “We may be running out of Past”’, Onion 32:14 (4 Nov. 1997); Barbara
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Intangible heritage as multicultural production’, Museum International, special
issue, Intangible Cultural Heritage, 56:1–2 (May 2004): 52–65 at 56.
62
www.inthe90s.com website.
63
Rod Liddle, ‘Rolling back the years’, Times, 10 July 2004; Joe Moran, ‘Decoding the decade’, Guardian, 14
Nov. 2009: 30.
64
‘U.S. Dept. of Retro warns: “We may be running out of Past”’, Onion 32:14 (4 Nov. 1997).
65
Gavin Stamp, ‘The art of keeping one jump ahead: conservation societies in the twentieth century’, in Michael
Hunter, ed., Preserving the Past: The Rise of Heritage in Modern Britain (Stroud: Sutton, 1996), 76–98 at 98.
66
Peter N. Carroll, Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History (Georgia, 1990), 179; Peta Bee,
‘The Peter Pan generation’, Times 2, 12 Nov. 2003: 6–7; Ralph Gardner, Jr., ‘Curators from the cradle’, NYT,
13 May 2004: House&Home 1, 8.
67
Simon Jenkins, ‘Rooney shows true taste’, Times, 26 Nov. 2004; Christina Goulding, ‘Exploratory study of age-
related vicarious nostalgia and aesthetic consumption’, Advances in Consumer Research 29 (2002): 542–6.
remember your nostalgic journey into the opulent past’. If not rich, the yearned-for past
is rustic, the urban countryman kitted out in ‘clothes worn back when we were horny-
handed sons of toil (bakers’ jackets, whalebone cord, hessian)’, tailored for young nobs
who’ve ‘handled nothing rougher than facial exfoliant’.68 Miners’ and labourers’ back-to-
back terraces, knickknacks and worn utensils are all part of the National Trust’s newly
aspic’d past.69
Descendants of serfs who now tour one-time masters’ stately mansions feed on a
nostalgia for visible social differences when ‘people knew where they stood, classes were
classes’.70 ‘Bring back Edwardian Britain’, mocked a journalist, ‘the lower classes doing as
they were bloody well bidden’. In the Royal Enclosure at Ascot hoi polloi fantasize ‘that
they are part of some vanished leisure class, that the world they mourn and admire and
pretend they would have belonged to if it still existed . . . is alive and well and living near
Windsor’. So wrote Julian Fellowes, who six years later reified that fantasy. A Downton
Abbey critic ‘can’t move for bumping into women in proto-flapper drop-waist shifts and
cloche hats, quadrilling out of a brougham after an afternoon shoot’.71
Cults of nobility, real and fake, flourish anew. Lord Nicholas Windsor wed a Croatian
princess whose aristocratic ‘Frankopan’ title the Almanach de Gotha adjudged ‘more
aspirational’ than inherited.72 Alongside ethno-nostalgia for bygone tribal ways,
Americans like Europeans look back longingly at vanished imperial patrician chic.
‘People are longing for things they don’t get out of the republic’, says a Hohenzollern
promoter, ‘looking for little princes and princesses’. Gilded Age Victorian dandyism is all
the rage, fedoras, derbies, and bowlers, brass-buttoned military coats, tweedy vests and
knee-britches recalling moustachioed macho blue-bloods sporting muzzle-loading rifles.
The elegance of aristocrats suffuses haute couture nostalgia for an era when ‘women
trotted through dressage, riding side-saddle, looking crisp but sensual under top hats’.
The allure of the past saturates luxury fashions, ‘heritage’ the buzzword in menswear.73
Looking back to Europe

In the absence of history one succumbs easily to its mutant form – nostalgia.
Peter N. Carroll, 199074
68
Luke Leitch, ‘Country kit is everywhere – but don’t cross the line between sheep farmer and sheep’, Times,
10 Nov. 2010: Arts 11.
69
A. A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English (London: Phoenix, 2006), 215.
70
Raphael Samuel, Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. I: History and
Politics (Routledge, 1989), xlix. On nostalgic fascination with servants’ quarters, see Lucy Delap, Knowing
Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2011), 206–34.
71
Rod Liddle, ‘Rolling back the years’, Times, 10 July 2004; Julian Fellowes, Snobs (Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2004), 17–18; Caitlin Moran, ‘Christmas TV’, Times SatRev, 31 Dec. 2011: 10.
72
John Kennedy quoted in David Brown et al., ‘Royal match that really is a fairytale’, Times, 30 Sept. 2006.
73
Rolf Seelmann-Eggebert quoted in Allan Hall, ‘It’s another royal wedding – then back to the day job’, IHT,
27 Aug. 2011: 49; David Colman, ‘This just in from the 1890s’, NYT, 11 Nov. 2009; Christine Haughney,
‘Getting the royal treatment’, NYT, 25 Apr. 2010: 22; Suzy Menkes, ‘Dior: Hand of history’, IHT, 26 Jan.
2010: 10 (dressage); Suzy Menkes, ‘Heritage luxury: past becomes the future’, IHT, 9 Nov. 2010: 9–12; Eric
Wilson, ‘Heritage shouldn’t reek of mothballs’, NYT, 14 Feb. 2011: D8 (‘buzzword’).
74
Carroll, Keeping Time, 179.
As first portrayed, in the Odyssey, nostalgia combined physical pain and mental grief with
the prospect of redemptive recovery. Despite the seductive beauty of his captors Nausicaa
and Calypso, Odysseus yearned to return home to Penelope: ‘he’s left to pine on an
island, racked with grief / . . . he has no way to voyage home [nostós] to his own native
land . . . / Wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish [alghós]’.75 Two
millennia later in Rome the poet Joachim du Bellay penned a classic Homerian reprise
in sonnets yearning for French childhood scenes.76 Later New World voyagers and
migrants pined for native lands. Homesickness brought back more than half the Italian
and one in three Danish overseas emigrants of the 1870–1914 exodus to America.
Expressions of nostalgia dominated Scandinavian-American writing.77 For a Romanian
immigrant only ‘the thought that some day I would go back . . . kept me alive’; but he had
dreamed of it so long that ‘the craving had come to seem more agreeable than the
realization’.78 Just as Homer’s successors made Europe classical, so being European now
means being ‘nostalgic for Europe’ – not today’s high-tech, fractious continent, but ‘good
old Europe’, recalls a Latvian, when people spent ‘a lot of time sitting and talking with
each other, writing letters, doing things with their own hands’.79
Old Europe’s nostalgic cue came from the heroic and pastoral pasts of Virgil’s Aeneid.
The fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch sought classical refuge from his own
‘wretched’ and ‘worthless’ age.
I have dwelt especially upon antiquity, for our own age has always repelled me . . . Had it not been
for the love of those dear to me, I should have preferred to have been born in any other period than
our own. In order to forget my own time, I have constantly striven to place myself in spirit in other
ages.80
A bittersweet Arcadian past suffused early modern poetry and the canvases of Claude and
Poussin. Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village charmed Goethe as a classically elegiac lost
paradise featuring schoolchildren, churchyards, and ruins.81
75
Homer, The Odyssey, (Penguin, 1996), 153–5, 169–74; Constantina Nadia Seremetakis, ed., The Senses Still
(Westview, 1994), 4.
76
Joachim du Bellay, ‘The Regrets’, in Three Latin Elegies (1558; PennPress, 2006); George Hugo Tucker,
Poet’s Odyssey: Du Bellay (Oxford, 1990).
77
Andreea Decíu Rítívoí, Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002),
102–7; Hildor Arnold Barton, A Folk Divided: Homeland Swedes and Swedish Americans, 1840–1940
(Southern Illinois, 1994), xi, 87, 189–96; Susan J. Matt, Homesickness: An American History (Oxford, 2011),
141–75; Dorothy Burton Skårdal, The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Experience through Literary
Sources (Nebraska, 1974), 264.
78
Marcus Eli Ravage (1923) quoted in Matt, Homesickness, 170.
79
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (1986; HarperCollins, 2000), 63; Alvis Hermanis with Bonnie
Marranca, ‘Poetry of things past’, PAJ 32 (Jan. 2010): 23–35 at 32.
80
Erik Gray, ‘Nostalgia, the classics, and the intimations ode: Wordsworth’s forgotten education’,
Philological Quarterly 80 (2001): 187–204; Petrarch to Livy, 22 Feb. 1349(?), in Petrarch’s Letters to Classical
Authors (Chicago, 1910), 101–2, and ‘Letter to posterity’ (c. 1372), in Petrarch: . . . A Selection from His
Correspondence (New York, 1898), 64.
81
Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (London, 1770); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und
Wahrheit (1821; Leipzig, 1881), 123. See Aaron Santesso, A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of
Nostalgia (Delaware, 2006), 11, 19.
Romantic poets followed Virgil in mourning lost childhood along with childhood
scenes. Wordsworth’s evocations of Grasmere moved millions to lament irrecoverable
youth, Housman’s ‘land of lost content, / I see it shining plain, / The happy highways
where I went / And cannot come again’. Aged thirty, the historian James Anthony Froude
yearned ‘but for one week of my old child’s faith, to go back to calm and peace again’.82
Radical upheaval linked nostalgia with national chauvinism. The French Revolution
sundered past from present; after the guillotine and Napoleon, the previous world,
above all the lost homeland, seemed irretrievably remote, hence doubly dear. ‘Those who
have not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution’, grieved the monarchist
Talleyrand, ‘know nothing of the sweetness of life.’83 Industrialization along with conflict
uprooted millions of Europeans into alien locales. People ‘who had only ever owned hand-
crafted objects’, daunted by mass-produced factory wares, took comfort in Wedgwood’s and
furniture makers’ familiar historical replicas. Exiles and romantics solaced devastating
change with half-remembered, half-invented bygone images. Crumbling mythic pasts
featured in Isidore Taylor and Charles Nodier’s twenty-three-volume Voyages pittoresques
et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (1820–78). From the nostalgists in Samuel Palmer’s
‘Arcadian’ Shoreham, to ‘medieval’ knights jousting at Eglinton, to railway travellers regret-
ting stagecoach days, Victorians hallowed the lost past.84 City dwellers mourned departed
rural life. Laments by ‘An Old Inhabitant’ and ‘Glimpses from the Past’ filled the press. Even
‘the huddles of wooden shacks, the ancient “dwellings of the labouring poor”’ in London’s
Kentish Town ‘were seen, once they had been swept away, with a sentimental eye’.85
At the turn of the twentieth century all Britain seemed bent on nostalgic quest. ‘Let us
live again in the past’, urged one celebrant, and ‘surround ourselves with the treasures of
past ages’.86 Poet Laureate Alfred Austin sought out ‘old England’s washing days, home-
made jams, lavender bags’, and took pride in uttering ‘none but the very oldest and most
out-of-fashion ideas’.87 Luxuriating in ‘Sussex medievalism’, Kipling banned the tele-
phone at Bateman’s, his seventeenth-century home. Ottoline Morrell’s ramshackle Tudor
Garsington Manor tempted D. H. Lawrence ‘to lapse back into its peaceful beauty of
bygone things, to live in pure recollection’.88
82
Virgil, Georgics (29 bc), 3. 66–8; Housman, Shropshire Lad, Poem XL; Christopher Clausen, ‘Tintern Abbey
to Little Gidding: the past recaptured’, Sewanee Review 84 (1976): 405–24 at 417; James Anthony Froude,
The Nemesis of Faith, 2nd edn (London, 1849), 28.
83
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, La Confession de Talleyrand (1891; abridged, Hamburg:
Tredition, 2012), 47. See also François Guizot, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps
(Paris, 1858), 1: 2.
84
Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Looking ahead by looking back’, IHT 6 Feb. 2012: 7; Steven Adams, ‘Space, politics and
desire: configuring the landscape in post-Revolutionary France’, Landscape Research 35 (2010): 487–509 at
506–7; Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (Yale, 1981).
85
Gillian Tindall, The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village (1977; Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2002), 174–5.
86
P. H. Ditchfield, The Story of Our English Towns (London, 1897), 34; but, he adds, ‘no wise man will wish to
bring back that past’.
87
Alfred Austin, Haunts of Ancient Peace (Macmillan, 1902), 18–19.
88
W. Thurston Hopkins, Rudyard Kipling’s World (London, 1925), 11; D. H. Lawrence to Cynthia Asquith, 3
Dec. 1915, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Viking, 1932), 283. See Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and
the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (1981; Cambridge, 2004), 45, 57, 62, 76.
Chivalric romance lured Americans ‘to leave the present, so weighted with cumber-
some enigmas and ineffectual activity, and go back’ to simpler times of straightforward
aims.89 Evoking Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality (1807), Henry Adams rued the
lost childlike innocence of the twelfth century.90 New England, left behind for greener
western pastures, re-emerged as nostalgic retreat, its scenery and surviving oldsters
redolent of cherished bygone ways. Half a century later, Americans looked back to the
early twentieth century as a Golden Age. In revisiting the 1900s, as the 1900s had the
1800s, visitors to Main Street, U.S.A. at Disneyland and other theme parks escaped
‘unnatural present-day cares . . . and become more like themselves’91 – that is, the
authentic selves they fancied would emerge in the reborn past.
‘Olde English’ vernacular buildings catered for such nostalgia. Like Tudorbethan for
late Victorians, Mock Tudor was the favoured interwar style. Praised as ‘quaint’ and ‘old-
fashioned; to be up-to-date now meant to look as old as possible’. The BBC’s immensely
popular ‘Our Bill’ lauded England’s ancient churches and wayside inns where one could
‘step aside into some small pool of history, to be lapped awhile in the healing peace of a
rich, still-living past’.92 To sate his Tudor nostalgia, Gloucestershire architect Charles
Wade at Snowshill Manor worked with period tools, ate in an antique kitchen, and slept
in a cupboard bed (Fig. 3).93 Why not be comforted by some past? ‘In England we may
choose from any of a dozen different centuries to live in’, said Kenneth Grahame; ‘and
who would select the twentieth?’94
Nostalgia was no less widespread in Europe. Goethe and the Grimm brothers
summoned up lost pasts in Germany, Victor Hugo and Viollet-le-Duc in France.
Severance from forebears’ worlds fuelled longing for manifold retrievals.95 French medi-
evalist nostalgia peaked after the defeat by German forces and the Paris Commune
debacle of 1870–1. As a refuge from social fragmentation, labour anarchy, and church–
state feuds, the Middle Ages became a time of unity, social cohesion, purity of faith. And
medievalism restored French pride: ‘Look, children’, enthused Léon Gautier, promoting
the classic Chanson de Roland, ‘how impressive France already was then and how much
she was loved eight centuries ago’. The Middle Ages permeated architecture, art, litera-
ture, and consumer goods. Pierre Loti hosted fifteenth-century parties in his medieval
dining hall; Émile Zola and Anatole France reclined on heraldically emblazoned Gothic
89
Agnes Repplier, ‘Old wine and new’, Atlantic Monthly 77 (1896): 686–96 at 696.
90
Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1912; Constable, 1950), 2.
91
Edward Harwood, ‘Rhetoric, authenticity, and reception: the eighteenth-century landscape garden, the
modern theme park, and their audiences’, in Terence Young and Robert Riley, eds., Theme Park Landscapes
(Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 49–68 at 59–61; Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the
Nineteenth Century (Smithsonian Institution, 1995), ch. 5; John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western
Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (California, 1992), 70.
92
Wiener, English Culture, 64–6, 74–6; Mark Girouard, Sweetness and Light: The ‘Queen Anne’ Movement,
1860–1900 (Clarendon Press, 1977), 5, 25–7, 60–2; Andrew Ballantine and Andrew Law, Tudoresque
(Reaktion, 2011).
93
H. D. Molesworth, ‘A note on the collection’, Snowshill Manor (London: National Trust, 1995; brochure),
30–1; Charles Wade, Haphazard Notes (National Trust, 1979).
94
Kenneth Grahame, First Whisper of ‘The Wind in the Willows’ (Lippincott, 1945), 26.
95
Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Harvard, 2004), 154.
Figure 3 Tudor nostalgia: Charles Wade’s Snowshill Manor, Gloucestershire
thrones. Joan of Arc dolls, souvenir dinner plates, cheese, chocolates, and toothpaste
linked fin-de-siècle consumers to feudal decor. Later epochs also figured; a 1900 Figaro ad
offered ‘historically accurate’ Henri II (1547–59) dining rooms and Louis XV (1715–74)
bedrooms.96
Medical homesickness
In the seventeenth century Odysseus’ nostalgia became a medical ailment with dire
and often lethal symptoms. Diagnosed in 1688 by a Swiss physician, it affected ‘fibers
of the middle brain in which the impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still
96
Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-Siècle France
(Ashgate, 2003), 209–12, 7–8.
Medical homesickness 47
cling’.97 Erasmus Darwin defined nostalgia as ‘an unconquerable desire of returning to

one’s native country, frequent in long voyages’. He termed it a ‘disease of volition’, like
excessive family pride.98 Enforced emigrants and soldiers abroad lapsed from ‘melan-
choly indifference toward everything [to] the near impossibility of getting out of bed, . . .
the rejection of food and drink; emaciation, marasmus and death’. To leave home for long
was fraught with peril. ‘I suffer homesickness’, wrote Balzac, away from Paris in Milan; ‘if
I remained this way for two weeks, I should die’. A young Swiss who left Berne to study in
Basel barely 40 miles away soon succumbed there.99
Swiss mercenary soldiers were nostalgia’s chief victims, especially in lowlands far from
their beloved Alps, their exile thought aggravated by change in air pressure.100 To hear a
familiar herder’s tune aggravated illness.
The intrepid Swiss, that guards a foreign shore,
Condemn’d to climb his mountain-cliffs no more,
If chance he hears the song so sweetly wild
Which on those cliffs his infant hours beguil’d,
Melts at the long-lost scenes that round him rise,
And sinks a martyr to repentant sighs.101
Because the melody haunted hearers with heartbreaking childhood memories, Swiss
soldiers abroad were forbidden to play, sing, or whistle alpine tunes.102
Medication included leeches, purges, emetics, blood-letting, ‘hypnotic emulsions’, and
opium. A Russian general in 1733 found terror efficacious: when soldiers laid up by
nostalgia were buried alive, homesickness soon subsided.103 But repatriation was the
only effective cure until Friedrich Schiller, a medical student before he became a poet,
cured a colleague in 1780 with a regimen of moderate exercise and poetry reading in a
peaceful rustic milieu. The notion of nature as therapy stemmed from Bernard de
Fontenelle’s praise of pastoral life and literary evocations of rural childhood. It initiated
nostalgia’s transition from malignant pathological trauma to pleasurable therapy. But
97
Johannes Hofer, ‘Medical dissertation on nostalgia’ (1688), Bulletin of the Institute of the History of
Medicine (Aug. 1934): 376–91 at 384.
98
Erasmus Darwin, Zoomania; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794; 3rd edn, London, 1801), 1: 82.
99
François Gabriel Boisseau and Philippe Pinel, ‘Nostalgie’ (1821), Leopold Auenbrugger, Inventum novum
(1761), and Honoré de Balzac to Eveline Hanska, 23 May 1838, in Jean Starobinski, ‘The idea of nostalgia’,
Diogenes 54 (June 1966): 81–103 at 97–8, 86; Hofer, ‘Medical dissertation on nostalgia’, 382. See Nicole
Mozet, Balzac et le temps (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Pirot, 2005).
100
Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, ‘Von dem Heimwehe’ (1705), in George Rosen, ‘Nostalgia: a forgotten
psychological disorder’, Clio Medica 10 (1975): 28–51 at 33–4; Andreas Schmidt, ‘Heimweh und
Heimkehr: zur Gefühlskultur in einer komplexen Welt’, in Silke Göttsch and Christel Köhle-Hezinger,
eds., Komplexe Welt (Münster: Waxmann, 2003), 36–48 at 39–40.
101
Samuel Rogers, Pleasures of Memory (1792; London, 1802), 26. See William Wordsworth, ‘On hearing the
“ranz des vaches” on the top of the pass of St. Gothard’ (1820), in Poetical Works (Clarendon Press, 1940–
66), 3: 178.
102
Starobinski, ‘The idea of nostalgia’, 93; Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 3, 73. But this frequently reported
prohibition is seldom documented (Guy S. Métraux, Le Ranz des vaches (Lausanne: 24 Heures, 1984),
53–7).
103
Hofer, ‘Medical dissertation’, 389; Starobinski, ‘Idea of nostalgia’, 95–6.
malign malady and curative aesthetics continued to commingle, as exemplified in Emily

Brontë’s sufferings and recourse to wild nature.104
Nostalgia lingered on as ailment. Said to kill as many as yellow fever in post-
Revolutionary wars, it decimated French prisoners in Germany after 1870.105 Homesick-
ness was a major cause of desertion among American Revolutionary soldiers, and it was
seen as a disabling debility among immigrant frontiersmen and slaves sold down the
river.106 In the American Civil War nostalgia was calamitous. With over five thousand
certified Union Army cases, ‘homesickness, the most pitiless monster that ever hung
about a human heart’, wrote a soldier, ‘killed as many . . . as did the bullets of the
enemy’.107 Whether ‘the cause, or the result’, of endemic diarrhoea, dysentery and
typhoid, nostalgia was ‘dreaded as the most serious [ailment] that could befall the
patient’.108 So popular was John Howard Payne’s ‘Home, Sweet Home’ that, as with the
Swiss ‘Ranz des vaches’, troops on both sides were forbidden to play it for fear of mass
desertion.109 As late as the Second World War the US Surgeon General termed nostalgia a
contagion that might ‘spread with the speed of an epidemic’. An eminent social scientist
held homesickness a possibly fatal ‘psycho-physiological’ complaint.110 Homesickness is
still a common ailment said to afflict most boarding-school and university students.111
But the malady was becoming mental rather than physical, its locus less in lost place
than in lost time, a longing more for childhood than for homeland. From fatal illness
nostalgia morphed into remedial recall. The transition in Jane Austen’s Sense and
Sensibility (1811) is stunning. Felled by a wasting regret at leaving home, Marianne
Dashwood is ultimately cured, exclaiming, ‘I love to be reminded of the past . . . Whether
it be melancholy or gay, I love to recall it.’ No longer crippling, nostalgia becomes a cure.
Unlike Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice (1813), who indulges in unpleasant
recollections, Elizabeth deploys the selective amnesia of subsequent Victorian nostalgia,
eliminating negative or disturbing memory. ‘Every unpleasant circumstance . . . ought to
be forgotten’, she tells Darcy; ‘think only of the past as its remembrance gives you
104
Linda M. Austin, Nostalgia in Transition, 1780–1917 (Virginia, 2007), 7–11, 29–45.
105
Fernand Papillon, ‘Nostalgia’ (1874), cited in Nauman Naqvi, The Nostalgic Subject, . . . (Messina:
Università degli Studi, 2007), 15–16.
106
Matt, Homesickness, 21–3, 75–7, 94–102, 275.
107
Donald L. and Godfrey T. Anderson, ‘Nostalgia and malingering in the military during the Civil War’,
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 28 (1984): 156–66 at 157; Matt, Homesickness, 77–101; Eric T. Dean,
Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Harvard, 1997), 129.
108
J. Theodore Calhoun, ‘Nostalgia, as a disease of field service’, Medical and Surgical Reporter 11 (27 Feb.
1864): 130–2; Frances Clarke, ‘So lonesome I could die: nostalgia and debates over emotional control in
the Civil War North’, Journal of Social History 41 (2007): 253–82 at 257.
109
Ernest L. Abe, ‘“Home, Sweet Home”: a Civil War soldier’s favorite song’, America’s Civil War, 9:2 (May
1996), historynet.com.
110
David J. Flicker and Paul Weiss, ‘Nostalgia and its military implications’, War Medicine 4 (1943): 380–7 at
386–7; Beardsley Ruml, ‘Some notes on nostalgia’, Saturday Review of Literature, 29 (22 June 1946): 7–9.
111
Linzee Kull McCray, ‘Not home sick’, University of Iowa ParentTimes online, 47:3 (Spring 2004);
‘Homesickness can affect anyone’, National Union of Students [UK], website; Christopher A. Thurber and
Edward Walton,‘Preventing and treating homesickness’, Pediatrics 119 (Jan. 2007): 192–201; and their
‘Homesickness and adjustment in university students’, Journal of American College Health 60:5 (July
2011): 1–5; Matt, Homesickness, 251–5.
pleasure’. Her percept echoes on in the pop lyric ‘Don’t let the past remind us of what we
are not now.’112 Photography encouraged Victorians to recapture beloved images for
memory. Enchanted by daguerreotype portraits, Elizabeth Barrett Browning longs ‘to have
such a memorial of every Being dear to me in the world’.113
Mortal malady lingered in France in the troubled wake of the Revolution. But by mid-
century social advance reduced homesickness; ‘we cling [less] to the tombs of our
ancestors and to the soil on which we were born’.114 An 1879 authority predicted that
‘mal de pays, already rare in our time, is destined to disappear before the progress of
hygiene and civilization’.115 But nostalgia endured in backward Auvergne and Brittany
and resurged among their migrants to urban centres; the ailment seemed rife among the
feeble-minded. The psychiatrist Karl Jaspers asserted that nostalgic despair drove semi-
savage rural servant girls to arson and infanticide.116
Still sometimes seen as a social crime, the illness mainly lingers on as fictional surmise;
Anthony Powell’s Hugh Moreland wondered whether nostalgia would suffocate him.
‘I can see the headline: MUSICIAN DIES OF NOSTALGIA, a malady to which he had
been a martyr for many years.’ But he would die not of grief, but of pleasure.117 For most
nostalgia is no longer affliction but affection for a rose-coloured past whose loss is
assuaged by bittersweet remembrance. And because that past, like Odysseus’, feels
ultimately recoverable, ‘the bitter is less potent than the sweet’.118
Sentimental longing to retro irony

May we all be preserved from nostalgia, and still more from nostalgia for nostalgia.
Francis Hope, 1973119
The hipster is our archetype of ironic living. . . . Manifesting a nostalgia for times he
never lived himself, this contemporary urban harlequin appropriates outmoded
112
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811; London: Signet, 1997), 91; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813;
New York: Scholastic, 2000), 221, 384; Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Forgetting, Nostalgia, and British
Fiction, 1810–1870 (Oxford, 2001), 5–26; Stephen Stills, ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ (1969).
113
To Mary Russell Mitford, 7 Dec. 1843, quoted in Helen Groth, Victorian Photography and Literary
Nostalgia (Oxford, 2003).
114
Demais-Eugène Pilet, ‘De la nostalgie considerée chez l’homme de guerre’ (1844), quoted in Michael S.
Roth, ‘Dying of the past: medical studies of nostalgia in nineteenth-century France’ (1991), 23–38 at 32,
and ‘Remembering forgetting: Maladies de la mémoire in nineteenth-century France’ (1989), 3–22, both in
his Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past (Columbia, 2011). See Alice Bullard,
‘Self-representation in the arms of defeat: fatal nostalgia and surviving comrades in French New
Caledonia, 1871–1880’, Cultural Anthropology 12:2 (1997): 179–212.
115
V. Widal, ‘Nostalgie’ (1879), quoted in Roth, ‘Dying of the past’, 35.
116
Karl Jaspers, ‘Heimweh und Verbrechen’ (1909), and Hans Gross, Criminal Psychology (1911), in Naqvi,
Nostalgic Subject, 33–9.
117
Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings (Heinemann, 1973), 229–30; Nicholas Dames, ‘Nostalgia and its
disciplines: a response’, Memory Studies 3 (2010): 269–75 at 271.
118
Erica G. Hepper et al., ‘Odyssey’s end: lay conceptions of nostalgia reflect its original Homeric meaning’,
Emotion 12 (2012): 102–19 at 113–16.
119
Francis Hope, ‘My grandfather’s house’, New Statesman, 1 June 1973: 807.
fashions (the mustache, the tiny shorts), mechanisms (fixed-gear bicycles, portable
record players) and hobbies (home brewing, playing trombone).
Christy Walpole, 2012120
As nostalgia shifted from place to past – ‘Odysseus longs for home; Proust is in search
of lost time’121 – it went from medical malaise to chronic angst. How could anyone be
cured of the past? One can return to a place, but never to a past. But though time is lost
for good, Proust celebrates its vicarious recovery. And we now retrieve the past as virtual
reality at the click of a computer key. Reduplicated products and replicated processes
supply desired memories on instant demand. Surrogate images of home solace distant
émigrés and voyagers. Global sameness familiarizes remote locales. People will soon ‘no
longer need to . . . yearn for their yesterdays, because wherever they are they’ll see
the landscape of their youths’, suggests a psychologist. ‘When they remember
the Starbucks where they met the one they married or the Gap where they lost the
one they didn’t, they’ll be marinating in memories that happened everywhere . . . Let us
revel in our nostalgia, and long for the days when longing was easy’, back in the 1970s.122
Remember nostalgia? Remember when you remembered the 1950s? Remember remembering your
first kiss? Remember remembering your first prom? Remember remembering your first name? . . .
Yes, those were the ’70s – innocent days . . . simpler days, when all you had to do for a good time
was sit back and remember malt shops, doubledips, ponytails . . . You cherish the memory of
remembering these memories . . . Yes, you remembered it all in the ’70s, the Golden Age of
Nostalgia, . . . the most treasured memories you remember remembering . . . And now here’s your
own grandmother to tell you how to order.123
Like film remakes, ‘state of the art reproductions of past state of the art reproductions of
the past’ revive or reproduce products that traded on nostalgia to start with, such as Laura
Ashley’s remake of William Morris’s fabric and wallpaper patterns.124
Ironic putdown of nostalgia as the ‘most fashionable of palliatives for the spiritually
deprived’ long predates postmodern mockery.125 Don Quixote’s chivalric nostalgia con-
fused ideal for reality. Tristram Shandy’s Toby and Trim obsessively restaged old military
sieges.126 Thomas Love Peacock scoffed at poets who adored bygone ‘barbarous manners,
obsolete customs and exploded superstitions’.127 Thomas Hardy pitied villagers expected
‘to remain stagnant & old-fashioned for the pleasure of romantic spectators’.128 Appalled
120
Christy Walpole, ‘How to live without irony’, NYT, 17 Nov. 2012.
121
James Phillips, ‘Distance, absence, and nostalgia’, in Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman, eds., Descriptions
(SUNY Press, 1985), 64–75 at 65.
122
Daniel Gilbert, ‘Times to remember, places to forget’, NYT, 31 Dec. 2009: A25.
123
George W. S. Trow, ‘Bobby Bison’s big memory offer’, New Yorker, 30 Dec. 1974: 27.
124
Brown, Marketing, 6–8; Stephen Brown, ‘Once upon a marketplace’, in Brown and Sherry, eds., Time,
Space, and the Market, 293–312 at 307.
125
Barry Humphries, ‘Up memory creek’, TLS, 9 Apr. 1976: 418.
126
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759; Penguin, 2003), 184–90, 510–11.
127
Thomas Love Peacock, ‘The four ages of poetry’ (1820), in H. F. Brett-Smith, ed., Peacock’s Four Ages of
Poetry; Shelley’s Defence of Poetry (Blackwell, 1921), 1–19 at 16.
128
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Dorsetshire labourer’ (1883), in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice (Oxford, 2001), 37–56
at 49.
in 1919 by new-found fondness for early Victorian times, the critic Roger Fry assailed the
‘optimism of memory’ that built an ‘earthly paradise out of the boredoms, the snobberies,
the cruel repressions, the mean calculations and rapacious speculations of the mid-
nineteenth century’. Punch foretold future nostalgia for wartime hardship: ‘In about
thirty years’ time’, says a woman in an interminable shopping queue, ‘people will insist
on describing this as the good old days’.129 Seventy years after its wartime fame, Vera
Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’ topped the charts in 2009.
But as baby-boomers gave way to Generation X, retro fashion irony mocked the past it
copied, trivializing while exploiting it. Whereas Victorian revivals adulated bygone deeds
and lifestyles, and postwar nostalgists evinced unalloyed affection, retro recall lampooned
the past’s failings and ridiculed its absurdities.130 ‘Did you people actually listen to the
same decade I did?’ ‘scoffed a 1980s hater two decades later. ‘You had eight years of
Reagan. There was cocaine everywhere. There were yuppies.’ Marketing fostered ‘arm-
chair nostalgia’ devoid of historical memory.131 The postmodern Proustian madeleine
still evoked a flood of memories, but they now tasted more sour than bittersweet. Against
baby-boomer wistfulness, Generation X swore off nostalgia.132
Nostalgia ceased to be benign. No longer prized as precious memory or dismissed
as diverting jest, in post-Thatcher Britain it became a term of abuse. Diatribe upon
diatribe dismissed nostalgia as reactionary, regressive, ridiculous, a ‘spurious . . . uncrea-
tive miasma’. In America it became a political insult. Fearing the future and denying the
truth about the past, nostalgists were as pathologically warped as earlier melancholics. In
sum, nostalgia was vulgar, demeaning, inauthentic, retrograde, fraudulent, sinister,
morbid.133
Nostalgic pop culture spawned paranoid, even criminal, fantasy. Obsession with the
Beatles was held responsible for Charles Manson’s Sharon Tate massacre, with Taxi
Driver for John Hinckley’s assault on Reagan, with Dallas for the murder of ‘Bobby
Ewing’s’ parents – showbiz pasts more real than present reality. Revulsion against the cult
of heritage sparked nostophobic rants.134 Detractors exposed the downside of nostalgized
pasts. In the ‘good old days’ of 1947 (‘even the coffee tasted better back then’), ‘polio was
epidemic, Jim Crow was thriving, Europe was rubble and Hiroshima was a scorch mark
on the map’.135 Harold Macmillan’s 1957, when Britons famously ‘never had it so good’,
was a ‘law-abiding and trusting age . . . But boy, was it ever dull . . . dreary, smoggy,
deferential and prim . . . an authoritarian, illiberal, puritanical society . . . like today, in the
129
Douglas Lionel Mays, cartoon, Punch, 4 Oct. 1944: 295.
130
Elizabeth F. Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival (Reaktion, 2006), 10–14, 162–4.
131
Jeff Leeds, ‘We hate the 80’s’, NYT, 13 Feb. 2005; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minnesota, 1996),
77–8.
132
Carl Wilson, ‘My so-called adulthood’, NYT, 4 Aug. 2011.
133
Christopher Lasch, ‘The politics of nostalgia’, Harper’s Magazine 269 (Nov. 1984): 65–70; Christopher
Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (Norton, 1991), 112–19; David Lowenthal,
‘Nostalgia tells it like it wasn’t’, in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase, eds., The Imagined Past: History
and Nostalgia (Manchester, 1989), 18–32 at 20.
134
Hewison, Heritage Industry; Sven Birkerts, ‘American nostalgias’, in Readings (St Paul, MN, 1999), 22–41;
Austin, Nostalgia in Transition, 201.
135
Bob Garfield, ‘Maxwell House 1892 ad brews up bad memories’, Advertising Age 62:25 (17 June 1991): 50.
grip of an all-consuming but sterile nostalgia.’136 ‘You can praise times past’, mocks a
critic of the Swinging ’60s. ‘But do you really want to relive them, with Vietnam, class
warfare, strikes, Hula Hoops, beehive hairdos and pelmet skirts? And what about the
lousy food?’137 Deriding Margaret Thatcher’s Victorian values, Labourites shunned
highbrow classical arts; ‘in the public realm, nostalgia was nasty and the baggage of
history unwanted’. Being nostalgic meant being out of touch.138
Besides nostalgia’s starry-eyed view of wretched times, falsified history, kitschy com-
merce, and regressive elitism, it is faulted for foolish faith that issues were faced, action
taken, crises averted, and problems solved better and faster in the past. Americans wax
‘nostalgic for an era when presidents had big, bold, risky ideas that mostly worked out
OK’ (the New Deal), ‘when actual weapons of mass destruction were removed without
resort to actual invasion’ (Cuban missile crisis), ‘when Middle East wars lasted less than a
week’ (Iraq invasion 2003), and other ‘wars ended in less than three months and only
involved the British’ (Falklands).139
Unfazed by such critiques, manufacturers mine memories, touting new products to
nostalgic tunes that conform to the rosy view of former times consumers are supposed to
want.140 Volkswagen marketed its New Beetle – ‘the engine’s in the front, but its heart’s in
the same place’ – as a return to rugged individualism. In line with the free-spirited past
consumers are promised that ‘As long as liberty is alive, Maxwell House coffee will always
be good to the last drop’.141 Nostalgia adverts redoubled in the wake of 9/11. Because
‘America today is looking for institutions it can trust’, Sears peddled century-old
vignettes. People asked, ‘Where can I get a plow for the spring planting? . . . a radio to
listen to the game? . . . a new electric washing machine? . . . my wife a wig?’ At Sears: ‘it
was true then, and it’s true now’.142
Economic collapse in 2008 reinforced views that ‘tough times call for familiarity’, as
evinced in pitches for things past at Super Bowl XLIV: Cheap Trick and Kiss (1970s
rock bands) for Audi and Dr Pepper, toys such as 1930s sock monkeys, a teddy bear
for the 2011 Kia Motors Sorrento; Budweiser’s venerable Clydesdales. And these ‘were
pikers’ compared with memory-bank raiders at Super Bowl XLV.143 Across the
Atlantic Notting Hill publican Jesse Dunford Wood plugged ’70s muck – chicken
Kiev, deep-fried brie (‘for the full nostalgic rush, use cheap supermarket brie’), Arctic
Rolls, soup in battered old mugs. Rampant cupcake nostalgia caps the regressive craze
136
David Kynaston, Family Britain 1951–1957 (Bloomsbury, 2009), 529–31, 538–44.
137
‘A la recherche: nostalgia for the retro glamour of a previous generation’, Times, 17 Nov. 2006: 2.3.
138
Libby Purves, ‘Old Britannia has survived the war on nostalgia’, Times, 10 Aug. 2010: 17; John J. Su, Ethics
and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge, 2005), 2, 122. Despite mainly left-wing critiques,
radicals professed (or repressed) nostalgic yearning for lost working-class and anti-imperialist solidarity
(Alastair Bonnett, Left in the Past (Continuum, 2010)).
139
Bruce Handy, ‘Looking forward to looking back’, NYT, 5 Jan. 2007.
140
Motti Neiger et al., eds., On Media Memory (Palgrave Macmillan. 2011), 9.
141
Oren Meyers, ‘“The engine’s in the front, but its heart’s in the same place”: advertising, nostalgia, and the
construction of commodities as realms of memory’, Journal of Popular Culture 42 (2009): 733–55.
142
Stuart Elliott, ‘Sears, riding wave of nostalgia, emphasizes heritage in campaign’, NYT, 23 Aug 2002: C1, 4.
143
Stuart Elliott, ‘In Super Bowl commercials, the nostalgia bowl’, NYT, 7 Feb. 2010: B3; Stuart Elliott,
‘Between the touchdowns, ads go for nostalgia’, NYT, 7 Feb. 2011: B4.
for old infantile comfort foods.144 Likewise the scents of yesteryear are nostalgically
recalled by deodorized modernity.145
Remember that perfume you were crazy about in college, or on your honeymoon in Tunisia, or
when still married to your madcap first husband? Did you really love your mother’s Odalisque and
wish you could inhale it again? You can reach back in time to inhale fragrances from the past
through www.longlostperfume.com . . . lovingly concocted for anyone with a fragrance nostalgia
that won’t go away.146
Promising elusive permanence, electronic goods avidly embrace retro design. Artificial
shutter-snaps on digital cameras, USB keyboards masquerading as typewriters, iPod
docks dressed as juke boxes, iPod cases distressed to look like literary collectables. No
one has yet said, ‘It’s a nice Ferrari, but it would be cooler if it looked like a covered
wagon’.147 To overcome reluctance to surrender tried-and-true devices, nostalgia segues
into sagas of progress. Today’s Beetle and Nike sports shoes are both old fashioned and
newfangled, retro and techno. They combine unique, new, and exclusive performance
with old familiar appearance.148 But digital change comes faster than customers can bond
nostalgically.149 Citroen’s anti-retro campaign oxymoronically attributes ‘never look back
for inspiration’ to Marilyn Monroe (‘I don’t know why so many people live in the past . . .
Nostalgia isn’t glamorous’) and John Lennon (‘why all this nostalgia?’).150
Loss of faith in progress transmutes space-age retro-future nostalgia from swashbuck-
ling optimism to wistful escapism for uncertain times ahead. By contrast, interior
designers conceal modern efficiency behind ’60s and ’70s cosy naturalness in ‘high-tech
rustic’ wooden floors and furniture, terracotta dishes, folkloric decor.151 The bygone
clutter of taxidermy and antlers (candlesticks, coat hooks, chandeliers), combines Tory
chic with wilderness machismo.152
Debacles of the past decade – 9/11, Iraq, financial meltdown – evoke nostalgia akin to
the 1970s celebration of 1930s economic adversity and fascist threat. We yearn for a time
of purpose and a modicum of success.153 Once again past times are hauled back into
nostalgic consumption, not for their actual faith in the future, but for film and fashion
144
Tony Turnbull, ‘Anyone for Arctic Roll?’, Times Mag., 16 July 2011: 75, 77; Kathe Newman, ‘Tour de
cupcake: mapping the gentrification frontier, deliciously’, cakespy.com, 14 July 2009.
145
Constance Classen et al., Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Routledge, 1994, 2003), 84, 87–8.
146
Bonnie Kimberly Taylor, ‘Reincarnating the beloved lost perfume’, BeautyNewsNYC.com., Mar. 2005.
147
Roy Furchgott, ‘High-tech electronics dressed up to look old’, NYT, 22 Dec. 2010; Joshua Brustein, ‘Why
innovation doffs an old hat’, NYT, 18 Feb. 2011.
148
Stephen Brown, et al., ‘Teaching old brands new tricks’, Journal of Marketing 67 (July 2003): 19–33;
Brown, ‘Retro from the get-go’.
149
Janelle Wilson, Nostalgia (Bucknell, 2005); Vivian Sobchack, ‘Nostalgia for a digital object: regrets on the
quickening of quicktime’, Millennium Film Journal, no. 34 (Fall 1999): 4–23.
150
Tara Hanks, ‘Anti-retro and the “new” Marilyn’, tarahanks.com. 20 Feb. 2010.
151
Ruth La Ferla, ‘They’re out of this world’, NYT, 25 Mar. 2009; Kasia Maciejowska, ‘New year, new
nostalgia’, Times, 8 Jan. 2010: Bricks&Mortar 4.
152
Eric Wilson, ‘If there’s a buck in it somewhere’, NYT, 26 Apr. 2007; ‘The new taxidermy’, 4 Sept. 2009,
ravishingbeasts.com/domestic.adornments; Penelope Green, ‘The new antiquarians’, NYT, 29 July 2009:
Gardens; Eva Hagberg, Dark Nostalgia (New York: Monacelli, 2009).
153
Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (Basic Books, 1980), 298–9.
trappings from science fiction and space exploration. Like Disney’s Tomorrowland, the
phenomenal popularity of The Sims – 175 million copies of the interactive game sold by
2013 – is a relic of what the future used to hold. The only desirable past the public today
seem able to conceive simply rehashes an imagined 1950s of burgeoning barbecues,
pearly picket fences, happy-clappy nuclear families, and bright new tomorrows.154
No wonder sophisticates scoff. Who ‘does not repudiate nostalgia?’ asks a reviewer
of a neoconservative plea for bygone virtues. Yet ‘who does not end up, yearning, even
so, for various Golden Ages of yore?’155 Even Generation X succumbs to the lure of its
childhood, as its formative years merge into retro revivalism.
At first I shut my eyes to the slow reappearance of jean jackets, floral-print dresses, lace shirts and
platform wedges. . . . But denial waves a white flag when . . . this summer includes Third Eye Blind,
Limp Bizkit, Alice in Chains, Faith No More and the Stone Temple Pilots. . . . Meanwhile MTV is
exhuming ‘Beavis and Butthead’ and ‘Pop-Up Video’, while Nickelodeon is offering a 1990s-
themed block of . . . shows like ‘The Adventures of Pete & Pete’, presumably to help herbally-
sautéed 20-somethings regress in giggly reminiscence.
Even Generation X sentimentalizes its youth. So how ‘can an anti-nostalgic generation

honor its past without becoming the thing it hated?’ asks a critic. Only by keeping in
mind ‘that the time in question was hell as much as heaven’. And to be ‘nostalgic for a
time when we were not nostalgic’, warns Svetlana Boym, is to mistake longing for
belonging, and to fantasize ‘a phantom homeland’ – a past subject to our wildest desires.
To that wishful fancy I now turn. 156
154
Russell W. Belk, ‘The Sims and the retro future’, in Brown and Sherry, eds., Time, Space, and the Market,
35–53.
155
Paul Berman, ‘Irving Kristol’s brute reason’, NYT Book Review, 27 Jan. 2011.
156
Carl Wilson, ‘My so-called adulthood’, NYT, 4 Aug. 2011; Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic
Books, 2002), xv–xvi, 355.
2
Time travelling
Is it not possible . . . that things we have felt with great intensity . . . have an existence
independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be
possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? . . .
Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall;
and listen in to the past . . . Strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a
question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall
be able to live our lives through from the start. Virginia Woolf, 19381
What if you could live your life over again? and again? and again? and again? Most of
us would die for a chance to replay. Ken Grimwood, 19882
When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there. Augusto Monterroso, 19593
The pull of the past transcends nostalgic longing for a fanciful or surrogate yesteryear.
Revisiting some actual past has long been a fond desire. Many would pay handsomely to
relive a year of their personal lives, most to retrieve a day or an hour, especially from
youth.4 ‘O for one hour of youthful joy! / Give me back my twentieth spring! . . . / One
moment let my life-blood stream / From boyhood’s fount of flame!’5
The allure of time travel mirrors that of reincarnation. That the past should be irrevocably
lost seems unbearable. We crave its recovery. Is there no way to recapture, re-experience,
relive it? Some agency, some mechanism, some faith must let us know, see, sense the past.
We will feel afresh the daily life of our grandparents, the rural sounds of yesteryear, the
deeds of the Founding Fathers, the creations of Michelangelo, the glory that was Greece.
Woolf’s longing surmise, penned just before her own death, involves two linked
conjectures: that all memories survive, and that they can be retrieved. For things to be
brought back they have first to be preserved. Those who yearn to view the past often
conflate the two processes. A lengthy tradition of memory’s permanence, even immor-
tality, buttresses such hopes.
Many cite William Faulkner’s famed line that ‘the past is never dead. It’s not
even past.’6 It carries on an active afterlife, quickening objects that receive its
echoes, entering minds attuned to it. ‘We live in . . . the past, because it is itself alive’,
1
Virginia Woolf, ‘A sketch of the past’, in Moments of Being (Chatto & Windus, 1976), 61–139 at 74.
2
Ken Grimwood, Replay (New York: Arbor House, 1988), jacket blurb.
3
Augusto Monterroso, ‘El Dinosaurio’, in Complete Works and Other Stories (Texas 1995), 42.
4
Thomas J. Cottle, Perceiving Time: A Psychological Investigation with Men and Women (Wiley, 1976),
222–4.
5
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., ‘The old man dreams’ (1854), in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (Boston,
1859), 76.
6
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (Random House, 1951), 92.
55
56 Time travelling
Ivy Compton-Burnett’s fictional daughter cautions her father, who seeks to shed it.
‘Nothing ever dies.’7 Searching sources, a biographer can’t believe ‘the historic past was
extinguished, gone; surely it must simply be somewhere else, shunted into another plane
of existence, still peopled and active and available if only one could reach it’.8 Charismatic
figures and iconic relics persuade us that the past not only survives but resurfaces.
Mormon prophet Joseph Smith convinced disciples he had lived long ago, describing
ancient peoples and folkways ‘with as much ease . . . as if he had spent his whole life with
them’.9 The forger Tom Keating thought ‘the spirits of the old masters came down and
took over his work’; those who watched Alceo Dossena counterfeit classical paintings felt
he truly reincarnated the spirit of antiquity.10
Hopeful belief in memory retrieval is venerable and persistent. But the retention and
ultimate recovery of the historical past, in the mind or the cosmos, gained broad credence
only two centuries ago. Scientists and poets concurred that the past endured and might
somehow be resurrected. ‘Once an event has happened’, Thomas Hardy echoed Stoic
philosophy, it ‘enters a spacious realm containing all times where it goes on happening
over and over again forever’.11
Scholars postulated cosmic storage. Since all physical residues survived somewhere,
future science might open access to the whole historical record. The mathematician
Charles Babbage presumed that every past event reordered atomic matter, leaving ‘an
ineffaceable, imperishable record, just as tree rings revealed bygone climates. ‘No motion
impressed by natural causes, or by human agency, is ever obliterated . . . The air itself is
one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said . . . and the
more solid materials of the globe, bear equally enduring testimony of the acts we have
committed.’ Even unspoken thoughts must survive in the cosmic ether, where ‘stand for
ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, an ineffaceable, imperishable
record . . . from the birth of our first parent to the final extinction of our race; so that
the physical traces of our most secret sins shall last until time shall be merged in . . .
eternity’12 – a truly Judgemental archive. Since ‘a shadow never falls upon a wall without
leaving thereupon a permanent trace’, added an acolyte, ‘vestiges of all our acts, silhou-
ettes of whatever we have done’, remain ineffaceable.13
7
Richard Matheson, Somewhere in Time (London: Sphere, 1980), 37; Ivy Compton-Burnett, A Father and
His Fate (Gollancz, 1957), 164.
8
Penelope Lively, According to Mark (Heinemann, 1984), 110.
9
Joseph Smith to his mother, c. 1823–4, quoted in David Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of
The Book of Mormon, 2nd edn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 17.
10
Guy Rais, ‘Old Masters’ spirits took over, says Tom Keating’, Telegraph, 2 Feb. 1979; Donald MacGillivray,
‘When is a fake not a fake? When it’s a genuine forgery’, Guardian, 2 July 2005; Frank Arnau, Three
Thousand Years of Deception in Art and Antiques (Jonathan Cape, 1961), 223–5.
11
J. Hillis Miller, ‘History as repetition in Thomas Hardy’s poetry: the example of “Wessex Heights”’ (1972),
in Tropes, Parables, Performatives (Duke, 1991), 107–34 at 127. See Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time
(1949; Johns Hopkins, 1956), 185–200.
12
Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 2nd edn (1838), in Works (NYU Press, 1989), 9: 36–8,
elaborated in George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature (1864; Harvard, 1965), 464–5n.
13
John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Science and Religion (1873; Cambridge, 2009), 111.
Time travelling 57
A century later, Walter Benjamin echoed Babbage: ‘Nothing that has ever happened
should be regarded as lost for history, [but] only a redeemed mankind receives the
fullness of its past.’ Each lived moment is reanimated on Judgement Day.14 Yet the
resurrectional promise also embodied a Tristram Shandean menace. For ‘as we pass
eternally on, we shall have more and more to remember, and finally shall have gathered
in more . . . than is now contained in all the libraries of the world’, worried a Congre-
gational minister. Without divine mercy, overflowing memory would ‘drown all our
other faculties’, and the souls of the saved ‘would virtually cease to be any thing more
than registers of the past’.15
Science and science fiction recurrently renew promises of recovery. Relativity theory
revivified faith in an accessible past. Since memory survives the loss of cerebral matter
during life, held the astronomer Gustaf Strömberg, it might survive the dissolution of
brain cells after death, to ‘become an eternal part of the cosmos’.16 Indeed, in the distant
cosmos we actually see a more or less remote past instead of the present. Because ancient
terrestrial events are only now ‘visible’ in galaxies light years away and will later be
manifest still farther off, Earth’s history can in theory be seen somewhere over and over
again.
In a great many fields, researchers would give their eyeteeth to have an unfettered, direct glimpse of
the past. Instead, they . . . have to piece together a view of remote conditions [using] remnants —
weathered fossils, decaying parchments or mummified remains. Cosmology . . . is the one field in
which we can actually witness history.17
‘Every detail of life – and all other events – remains recorded in the matrix of space-
time’, held a hopeful scholar, and was potentially retrievable.18 H. G. Wells foresaw a day
when ‘recovered memories may grow as vivid as if we . . . shared the thrill & the fear of
those primordial days, . . . when we shall walk again in vanished scenes, stretch painted
limbs we thought were dust, and feel again the sunshine of a million years ago’.19 The
philosopher Ervin Laszlo posits a cosmic memory field that retains all human experi-
ences.20 Arthur C. Clarke forecast the storage of present thoughts ‘for eternity in frozen
lattices of light’.21 Envisioned ‘reruns, repeats, reproductions of every recorded fact and
feat in any time, [where] deceased stars perform with living ones’ already proliferate.22
Today’s e-memory revolution promises – or threatens – total recall. ‘Even our phobia of
14
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’ (1940), in Illuminations (New York: Schocken,
1969), 253–64 at 254.
15
Horace Bushnell, ‘The power of an endless life’ (Heb. 7.16), in Sermons for the New Life (New York, 1858),
304–25 at 310–11.
16
Gustaf Strömberg, The Soul of the Universe (1938; Philadelphia, 1948), 188–92; Stephen Kern, The Culture
of Time and Space 1880–1918 (1983; Harvard, 2003), 41–2. The belief is immortalized in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1897).
17
Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Lives of the Cosmos (Knopf, 2011), 48.
18
Michael Kirsch quoted in Peter Laurie, ‘About mortality in amber’, New Scientist, 3 Apr. 1975: 37.
19
H. G. Wells, ‘The grisly folk’ (1921), in Selected Short Stories (Penguin, 1979), 279–98 at 297–8.
20
Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2004).
21
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968; New American Library, 1999), 185.
22
Gary Kern, ‘News vs. fiction: reflections on prognostication’, in George E. Slusser et al., eds., Storm
Warnings: Science Fiction Faces the Future (Southern Illinois, 1987), 211–31 at 229.
58 Time travelling
forgetting cannot be forgotten. Even if we wished to forget, we couldn’t, as somewhere in

the cyberspace cloud engulfing us, the engrams of our old fears will live for eternity.’23
Memory is the undying past’s traditional receptacle. The ‘natural and mighty
palimpsest’ of the brain piled up ‘everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings’, in
Thomas De Quincey’s words. ‘Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before.
And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished.’24 To recall childhood excursions,
William Hazlitt had only to ‘unlock the casket of memory, and draw back the warders
of the brain; and there this scene of my infant wandering still lives unfaded, or with
fresher dyes’.25 Seemingly forgotten early childhood memories must still survive.
Even foetal memories were sought. Shelley startled a mother by begging her weeks-old
baby to describe life in the womb; surely a newborn had not already forgotten it!26
Swedenborg like opium-aided Coleridge and De Quincey retrieved vividly detailed pasts.
Fever heightened perception: in a delirium, George Gissing conjured up the thronged
processions, sepulchral marbles, and great vases of Calabria’s ancient Croton two millen-
nia before, reconstructing ‘to the last perfection . . . a world known to me only in ruined
fragments’.27
Belief in total memory retention underlay Freudian insight. ‘Impressions are pre-
served, not only in the same form in which they were first received, but also in all
their subsequent altered forms’, Freud maintained. ‘Theoretically every earlier state of
mnemonic content could thus be restored to memory again.’ Although many of
Freud’s views on memory changed, he consistently deemed it recoverable. ‘Not only
some but all of what is essential from childhood has been retained . . . It is simply a
question of knowing how to extract it.’28 Psychoanalysis confirmed that recollections
never perished. ‘Integral conservation of the past’, wrote Henri Bergson, was verified
by Freud’s disciples.29 Proust, Joyce, and Mann made the storehouse of unconscious
memory a stock literary theme. ‘Every action, every thought, every creative breath, . . .
every shovelful of mud, every motion that cleared a brick from the ruins’ had been
recorded; from the novelist Danilo Kis’s Borgesian archive one might retrieve memor-
ies of every moment in one’s life.30
Seeming confirmation came from 1950s neurosurgery. Through electrical stimuli,
Wilder Penfield claimed to locate patients’ complete and authentic memory: ‘A perman-
ent record of the stream of consciousness within the brain . . . is preserved in amazing
23
Yadin Dudai, ‘To forget or not to forget’, New Scientist, 24 Oct. 2009: 48–9. See Gordon Bell and Jim
Gemmell, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (Boston: Dutton, 2009).
24
Thomas de Quincey, Suspira de Profundis (1845–54; Constable, 1927), 246–7.
25
William Hazlitt, ‘Why distant objects please’ (1821), in CW (Dent, 1930–4), 8: 255–64 at 257.
26
Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1858), 1: 239–40.
27
George Gissing, By the Ionian Sea (1901; London: Richards, 1956), 82–4. See Georges Poulet, ‘Timelessness
and romanticism’, JHI 15 (1954): 3–22.
28
Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901; Benn, 1966), 275; Sigmund Freud,
‘Remembering, repeating and working-through’ (1914), in CPW (Hogarth Press, 1966–74), 12: 148.
29
Henri Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant (1907), in Oeuvres, 3rd edn (Presses Universitaires de France,
1970), 1316.
30
Danilo Kis, Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983; Faber & Faber, 1989), 56–7.
Time travelling 59
detail. No man can, by voluntary effort, call this detail back to memory. But, hidden in . . .
the temporal lobes, there is a key to the mechanism that unlocks the past.’ And ‘the
original record seems to be available . . . as long as a man may live and keep his wits.
Nothing is lost . . . the record of each man’s experience is complete’.31 Subsequent
research refuted Penfield. But his vivid image of memory’s quasi-immortal completeness
nonetheless endures. Well into the 1980s most psychologists still believed all memories
potentially retrievable. So does the general public to this day.32
Scientists speculated that memories persisted not only in individuals but in species,
even in stars. Freud attributed patients’ ‘primal fantasies’ to genetically inherited experi-
ence. Genetic affinities might transfer memory from a past to a present mind, suggested
J. B. S. Haldane.33 Such conjectures lent time travel scientific credibility. ‘The life
experiences of our not-too-distant ancestors are inherited in certain cells of the brain,
just as their physical characteristics are duplicated in our bodies’, supposed a 1930s
fantasist; hypnotism might induce one to relive ancestral experience.34 Daphne du
Maurier’s fictional biophysicist surmises that some drug might ‘enable us to see, hear,
become cognisant of things that happened in the past’ by reviving archaic brain
patterns.35 ‘Every time a user recalls a memory, he is not only remembering it’, suggests
a sci-fi author, ‘but also, from an electrochemical perspective, literally re-creating the
experience’.36
Reincarnation, a normative belief in Western culture although banned as heretical in
ad 553, is again increasingly popular, offering hope that death is not the end to those
lacking belief in a heavenly hereafter.37 From Pythagoras and Empedocles on, many have
‘remembered’ previous lives. The Irish poet Æ ‘recalled’ his past personae sailing in
galleys over the antique ocean, living in tents and palaces, lying in Egyptian crypts;
Salvador Dali ‘remembered’ being St John of the Cross in his monastery.38 As a child, the
archaeologist Dorothy Eady ‘recognized’ a picture of her ancient Abydos temple home
and ultimately returned to Egypt as Om Seti, the Nineteenth-Dynasty temple waif she
had once been. ‘Sometimes I wake up in the morning’, she told a visitor, ‘and can’t
31
Wilder Penfield, ‘Some mechanisms of consciousness discovered during electrical stimulation of the brain’,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 44:2 (15 Feb. 1958): 51–66 at 65; Wilder Penfield, ‘The
permanent record of the stream of consciousness’, Acta Psychologica 11 (1955): 47–69 at 67, 69. See Alison
Winter, Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (Chicago, 2012), 75–102.
32
Elizabeth F. and Geoffrey R. Loftus, ‘On the permanence of stored information in the human brain’,
American Psychologist 35 (1980): 409–20 at 410; Winter, Memory, 75–102. See Chapter 7.
33
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913), in CPW, 13: 1–161; J. B. S. Haldane, The Man with Two
Memories (London: Merlin, 1976), 137–9.
34
Amelia R. Long, ‘Reverse phylogeny’ (1937), in Groff Conklin, ed., Science Fiction Adventures in Dimension
(London, 1955), 31–43 at 33.
35
Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand (1969; London: Pan, 1979), 196.
36
Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon, 2010), 149.
37
Richard J. McNally, ‘Explaining “memories” of space alien abduction and past lives’, Journal of
Experimental Psychopathology 3:1 (2012): 2–16.
38
Æ, The Candle of Vision (Macmillan, 1918), 56–65, 143–7; Ben Martin, ‘Dali greets the world’ (1960),
quoted in Joseph Head and S. L. Cranston, eds., Reincarnation (1968; New York: Aeon, 1999), 102. The
vision inspired Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross (1951; Glasgow, Kelvingrove Museum).
60 Time travelling
remember whether it’s B.C. or A.D’.39 A graduate student of mine, convinced he had been
a seventeenth-century Romanian, made Bucharest his doctoral topic and married a
Romanian girl to forge links with his past (the dissertation never materialized, the
marriage collapsed).
Intimate details of past-life regressions stimulated public appetites: Joan Grant’s ‘far
memory’ of Egypt’s First Dynasty, of the Nomarch of Oryx, of Rameses II; Arthur
Guirdham’s previous selves in ancient Rome, Celtic Cumberland, Napoleon’s navy;
L. Ron Hubbard’s ‘rediscovered’ life as a Carthaginian sailor – Hubbard’s Scientologists
do not ‘recall’ but ‘relive’ previous existences.40 Accounts of past lives are fondly offered
as genealogical evidence. Hence American Indian tribes, swamped by applications for
inclusion, issue caveats that having been Indian in a previous incarnation is not a valid
ground of entitlement.
Hypnotism is a regular route to past-life retrieval. Memories unlocked by hypnotic
regression are persuasive because subjects remain unaware of the pastness of the
events they recount; to them they are happening now. The ‘previous life histories’
elicited by Helen Wambach or by Virginia Tighe’s alter ego Bridey Murphy seem to
yield historical knowledge and behaviour unknown to their subjects when con-
scious.41 But all such accounts are riddled with anachronisms that betray recent
origins – origins disclosed when subjects are ‘regressed’ to the occasions they first
read or heard about the remote past they have unwittingly absorbed. Thus, Jane
Evans’s hypnotically induced ‘memories’ of Roman times and twelfth-century York
embody Jean Plaidy’s Katharine, the Virgin Widow (1961) and Louis de Wohl’s The
Living Wood (1959).42 Hypnotists’ own suggestions also taint the memories. ‘Hypnosis
makes you more confident – and more inaccurate’, psychologists conclude. Yet, folk
belief that hypnosis can recover repressed memories persists, sustained by numerous
professional therapists who ‘retrieve’ memories back as far as birth.43
Retrieving the past was from the start a major concern of science fiction (hereafter
SF).44 From H. G. Wells to Doctor Who, sojourners in bygone times have riveted time-
39
Christopher S. Wren, ‘The double life of Om Seti’, IHT, 26 Apr. 1979: 14; Lawrence Lancina, ‘Watch on
the Nile’, IHT, 5–6 May 1979: 4. See Nicole B. Hansen, ed., Omm Sety’s Living Egypt (Chicago:
Glyphdoctors, 2008).
40
Joan Grant with Denys Kelsey, Many Lifetimes (1974); Arthur W. Guirdham, The Lake and the Castle
and The Cathars and Reincarnation (1991); Peter Moss with Joe Keeton, Encounters with the Past (1981);
L. Ron Hubbard, Have You Lived before This Life? (1960), Mission into Time (1973), and Dianetics:
The Modern Science of Mental Health (Los Angeles, 1950).
41
Helen Wambach, Reliving Past Lives, (Bantam, 1979); Morey Bernstein, Search for Bridey Murphy (1956;
Doubleday, 1989); Jeffrey Iverson, More Lives Than One? (Warner, 1977); Ian Stevenson, Children Who
Remember Previous Lives, rev. edn (Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2002); Ian Stevenson, Where Reincarnation
and Biology Intersect (Praeger, 1997); Winter, Memory, 103–24.
42
Ian Wilson, Reincarnation? The Claims Investigated (Penguin, 1983), 233–43, and Past Lives (Cassell,
2005); Paul Edwards, Reincarnation (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1996); Winter, Memory, 103–24.
43
Nicholas P. Spanos, Multiple Identities and False Memories (American Psychological Association, 1996),
135–40; Marcia K. Johnson et al., ‘The cognitive neuroscience of true and false memories’, in Robert F. Belli,
ed., True and False Recovered Memories (Springer, 2012), 15–52 at 24.
44
The Science Fiction Library, until 1995 at North East London Polytechnic, was an invaluable resource.
Peter Nicholls’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Granada, 1979; rev. edn with John Clute, Orbit, 1993):
Time travelling 61
travel aficionados. Few SF authors think actual time travel possible. Most accept the
logician Kurt Gödel’s view that ‘if it is possible, then time itself is impossible. A past that
can be revisited has not really passed.’45 But SF visions of what it would be like to see or
live in bygone times, of how to get back there, of the consequences of such visits cater for
widespread fascination with the promises and perils of a visitable past.
Besides SF tales explicitly set in the past, many that are future oriented feature nostalgic
or ironically retro themes, the futures themselves often primitive or pastoral. The huge
popularity of time travel in recent film and fiction reflects heightened distress about a
present felt depraved, debauched, done for. SF writers and fans look ‘ever more wistfully
toward the past’, not least SF’s own ’30s to ’60s Golden Age. As with much nostalgia, the
archaic and the antique are replacing high-tech futuristic SF.46
SF tales offer invaluable clues to our preoccupations with the past. They yield insights
into desires no less compelling for being impossible to consummate. Precisely because
unbridled by practicality, these fantasies bring passions for the past into sharp relief.
Time-travel metaphors transcend SF to denote all manner of bygone entertainment.
Heritage tourists ‘time trip’ back through the centuries. ‘My pupils were transported
directly into Tudor times’, an English teacher lauded a historic-house theatrical. ‘They
bridged 400 years or so almost as though they were time travellers.’ Time-travel termin-
ology saturates the museum world.47
‘Not a thing in the past’, an H. G. Wells figure remarks, ‘has not left its memories about
us. Some day we may learn to gather in that forgotten gossamer, we may learn to weave
its strands together again, until the whole past is restored to us.’48 The wish was father to
the thought for H. Rider Haggard’s protagonist, whose imagination ‘shot its swift shuttle
back across the ages, weaving a picture on their blackness so real and vivid . . . that I could
almost for a moment think that I had triumphed o’er the Past, and that my spirit’s eyes
had pierced the mystery of Time’.49
Ears as well as eyes transport us back in time. In the empty wastes of the Frozen
Sea, Rabelais’s Pantagruel hears cannon booming, bullets whistling, the clang of
armour, the thud of battle axes, horses neighing, warriors shouting and groaning –
battle sounds that had frozen in the air the previous winter were now tumbling noisily
down, melting into audibility.50 Munchausen’s winter is so cold that a postilion’s tune
‘Adam and Eve’, ‘Alternative worlds’, ‘Origin of man’, ‘Reincarnation’ (Brian Stableford); ‘Atlantis’,
‘Pastoral’ (David Pringle); ‘History in science fiction’ (Tom Shippey); ‘Mythology’ (Peter Nicholls); ‘Time
paradoxes’, ‘Time travel’ (Malcolm J. Edwards).
45
Quoted in Jim Holt, ‘Time bandits: what were Einstein and Gödel talking about?’ in Donald Goldsmith and
Marcia Bartusiac, eds., E ¼ Einstein (New York: Sterling, 2006), 250.
46
Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 195–218; Darren Harris-Fain,
Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction (South Carolina, 2005), 109.
47
Quoted in Lawrence Rich, ‘Ten thousand children in need of a sponsor’, National Trust Magazine, no. 35
(1981): 8–9; Robert Lumley, ed., Museum Time-Machine (Routledge, 1988), 6, 17, 143.
48
H. G. Wells, The Dream (Collins, 1929), 236.
49
H. Rider Haggard, She (1887; London: Macdonald, 1948), 199.
50
François Rabelais, The Five Books of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1535; Modern Library, 1944), bk IV, ch. 56
(649–51).
62 Time travelling
freezes in his horn, emerging after thaw as audible notes.51 Mystic identification with
past cultures enables Hermann Hesse’s itinerant minstrels ‘to perform the music of
earlier epochs with perfect ancient purity’.52 In a museum Thomas Hardy sees ‘the
mould of a musical bird long passed from light, / Which over the earth before men
came was winging’, and fancies that ‘the coo of this ancient bird / Has perished not,
but is blent, or will be blending . . . / In the full-fugued song of the universe
unending’.53
Occultists promote such surmises. ‘The faintest sound produces an eternal echo’, Mme
Blavatsky told her followers; ‘a disturbance is created on the invisible waves of the shoreless
ocean of space, and the vibration . . . will live for ever’.54 Old sounds linger until vacuumed
up by J. G. Ballard’s ‘Sound-Sweep’, walls and furniture throbbing for days with resonating
residues. To retrieve ‘the mating-cries of mammoths, the recitations of Homer, first
performances of the master-works of music’, a light beam reflects back sound that left
Earth thousands of years before. One might record Stone Age sonic history in reverse by
slowly evaporating stalactites in once-inhabited caves.55 To recover valued past scenes a
writer envisages ‘delay-glass’ through which light takes years to pass; beautiful past views
hide the hideous or humdrum here and now.56 At the Derbyshire house whence Mary
Queen of Scots vainly tried an escape, Alison Uttley’s time traveller senses ‘the vibrant ether
had held the thoughts of the perilous ruinous adventure, so that the walls . . . were
quickened by them, the place itself alive with the memory of things once seen and heard’.57
SF not only retrieves past sights and sounds but returns people bodily to previous
times. ‘We can’t see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it’s there’, says
Jack Finney’s physicist. Unified field theory ought somehow allow us to ‘walk back to one
of the bends . . . If Albert Einstein is right . . . the summer of 1894 still exists. That silent
empty apartment exists back in that summer precisely as it exists in the summer that is
coming.’ A time traveller could make his way ‘out of that unchanged apartment and into
that other summer’.58
Getting into the past is imaginatively achieved in myriad ways – drugs, dreams, knocks
on the head, pacts with the devil, lightning bolts, thunderclaps, and in the wake of
H. G. Wells and quantum theory, time machines, Tipler cylinders, black holes, Gödel
rockets, cosmic strings, space–time wormholes, and warp drives.59 As with memory,
evocative relics – votive axes, remnants of crosses, heirloom fans – trigger transit to the
past. A fossilized sword awakens ancestral memories in a Francis Ashton hero who
51
K. F. H. von Munchhausen, Travels and Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1785; London, 1941), 36–7.
52
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943; Penguin, 1972), 28.
53
Thomas Hardy, ‘In a museum’, in Collected Poems (Macmillan, 1948), 404.
54
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (New York, 1877), 1: 114.
55
J. G. Ballard, ‘The sound-sweep’ (1960), in The Complete Stories (Norton, 2009), 106–36; Ariadne, New
Scientist, 25 Mar. 1975: 816; 26 Jan. 1978: 264.
56
Bob Shaw, Other Eyes, Other Days (Gollancz, 1972), 48.
57
Alison Uttley, A Traveller in Time (1939; Puffin, 1978), 106. That ‘objects retain something of the eyes
which have looked at them’ Proust adopted as emotional truth (Remembrance of Things Past, 3: 920).
58
Jack Finney, Time and Again (Simon & Schuster, 1970), 52, 63.
59
Paul J. Nahin, Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction, 2nd edn (Springer,
1999), 110–23; Kip Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps (Norton, 1994).
‘recognizes’ it was long ago his own; a Celtic sword hilt found off the coast of Maine
transports Betty Levin’s twentieth-century children to Iron Age Ireland and early Christian
Orkney; a painted shield lures Penelope Lively’s fourteen-year-old back to the New Guinea
tribe that gave it to her ethnologist great-grandfather. In an old house battered by time and
use, a young visitor finds things that had long remained hidden. Places, like clocks, can be
made to stop ‘so that a moment goes on, as it were, forever’, letting one see into other
people’s time. To hold a Bronze Age aurochs’s vertebra gave ecologist George Monbiot
‘an electric jolt of recognition’ that revived ‘a genetic memory’ evolutionary past.60
To thus relive the past demands wholehearted immersion. Empathetic bonds, detailed
knowledge, profound familiarity with the chosen epoch are prerequisites. Time travellers
must avoid antagonizing – even perplexing – people they meet in the past. John Dickson
Carr’s historian knows the minutiae of seventeenth-century life well enough to seamlessly
return to it. Finney’s trainee time travellers live for months in simulated pasts that reproduce
the sights, sounds, and smells of their destinations, wearing the clothes, eating the food,
speaking the dialect of the time to make sure they will feel entirely at home back then.61
Such difficulties seldom deter the past-entranced whose craving is unassuaged by
memory, history, and relics. Memories are partial and fleeting, history is prosaic, physical
remains are decayed or hard to reach or interpret; historical enclaves, whether actual
backwaters or contrived reconstructions, seem tame and false. True addicts require
journeys that unlock gates to the past, let them see or roam there at will, and enjoy
full-blooded bygone communion.
Goals in the revisited past

If time came adrift . . . there’s no reason why everyone shouldn’t see things happen the
way they want them to . . . set free to live their lives to their deepest desires.
Peter Hunt, 198362
Sometimes I wish . . . the years could go the other way and you could end up knowing
all your dead relatives, like your grandmother, then your great-grandmother, then
your great-great-grandmother, and so on. Doreen Grainger, late 1970s63
Time travel’s temptations are manifold: to enjoy exotic antiquity, to inhabit a happier age,
to know what actually happened, to commune with forebears, to reap the rewards of
being modern among ancients, to correct the past or to improve the present. Some want
simply to relive past times, others to annul past errors.64 SF fantasies highlight the hopes
60
Francis Ashton, The Breaking of the Seals (London, 1946), 26; Betty Levin, The Sword of Culann
(Macmillan, 1973), and A Griffon’s Nest (Macmillan, 1975); Penelope Lively, The House in Norham
Gardens (Pan, 1977), and A Stitch in Time (Pan, 1978), 104; George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land,
the Sea, and Human Life (Penguin, 2013), 33–34, 207, and ‘Our ecological boredom’, NYT 18 Jan. 2015.
61
John Dickson Carr, The Devil in Velvet (Penguin, 1957), 9; Finney, Time and Again, 48, 65.
62
Peter Hunt, The Maps of Time (London: MacRae, 1983), 91, 123.
63
Quoted in Intimate Appraisals: The Social Writings of Thomas J. Cottle (UPNE, 2002), 66.
64
Jennifer Harwood-Smith and Francis Ludlow, ‘“Doing it in style”: the narrative rules of the Back to the
Future trilogy’, in Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, ed., Worlds of Back to the Future (London: McFarland, 2010), 232–54.
64 Time travelling
and dreams evoked by the past but thwarted by its felt inaccessibility. The time-travel
desiderata surveyed below illumine the polarized reactions to tradition and innovation
that the following chapters survey.
Impassioned feeling features in both the goals sought and the sacrifices time travellers
seem willing to endure. Like Faust or Enoch Soames, some would traffic with the devil to
go back. ‘The urge to see, to listen, to move amongst’ fourteenth-century folk was so
intense that du Maurier’s hero risks health and even life for his excursions back in time.65
‘To know that just by turning a few dials you can see and watch anything, anybody,
anywhere, that has ever happened’ makes a time-viewer ‘feel like a god’. To be his
seventeenth-century namesake at the court of Charles II, John Dickson Carr’s hero would
sell his soul.66
Fancied involvement ranges from glimpsing history in the safety of the present, to
entry unseen by the past’s inhabitants, to mutual contact, to meddling in past lives and
events, to ‘becoming’ some past personage. Du Maurier’s protagonist sees, hears, and
smells fourteenth-century Cornwall, but cannot interfere; ‘whatever happened I could do
nothing to prevent it’.67 An entrepreneur peddles tours to ‘daily life in ancient Rome, or
Michelangelo sculpting the Pietà, or Napoleon leading the charge at Marengo’; time
travellers can visit Helen of Troy in her bath or sit in on ‘Cleopatra’s summit conference
with Caesar’. In Gregory Benford’s future ‘Society for Dissipative Anachronisms’, a
Beatles-besotted nostalgist ‘lived increasingly in the Golden Age of the ’60s, imagining
himself playing side man along with Paul or George or John’. Tourists to prehistory seek
ever earlier epochs; they find the Cretaceous overcrowded, the safari-hunter Jurassic
‘more like a fair ground every year’, even the Devonian too popular.68
Explaining the past

To know how and why things happened is a compelling lure. ‘Most historians’, avers one,
‘would give a great deal to [be] actually present at . . . events they have described’. To
verify accounts of the Battle of Hastings, to hear Greek as spoken by Homer and Plato
drew Wells’s protagonists. Much scholarly trouble would be spared ‘if you could actually
see what took place in the past, without having to infer it’ from fragmentary records and
traces.69 But SF chroniclers mainly seek new data to solve old dilemmas. Envisaging ‘all
the treasure houses of history waiting to be opened, explored, catalogued’, Wilson
Tucker’s historian wants ‘to stand on the city wall of Ur and watch the Euphrates flood
65
Du Maurier, House on the Strand, 241.
66
Thomas L. Sherred, ‘E for effort’, Astounding Science Fiction, 39:3 (1947): 119–62 at 123; Carr, Devil in
Velvet, 13–14.
67
Du Maurier, House on the Strand, 40.
68
Keith Laumer, The Great Time Machine Hoax (Grosset & Dunlap, 1963), 35; Gregory Benford, ‘Doing
Lennon’ (1975), in David G. Hartwell and Milton T. Wolf, eds., Visions of Wonder (New York: Tor, 1996),
253–62 at 255; Brian W. Aldiss, An Age (Faber & Faber, 1967), 18.
69
Pardon E. Tillinghast, The Specious Past: Historians and Others (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1972),
171; H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895; Signet, 2002), 6; Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Time’s arrow’ (1950), in
Reach for Tomorrow (Corgi, 1976), 132–48 at 139. See Nahin, Time Machines, 35–7.
. . . to know how that story got into Genesis’. To reveal history’s secrets ‘back to the dawn
of time’ inspires Arthur C. Clarke’s and Philip José Farmer’s venturers.
Think of the historical mysteries and questions you could clear up! You could talk to John Wilkes
Booth and find out if Secretary of War Stanton was really behind the Lincoln assassination. You
might ferret out the identity of Jack the Ripper . . . Interview Lucrezia Borgia and those who knew
her and determine if she was the poisoning bitch most people think she was. Learn the identity of
the assassins of the two little princes in the Tower.70
To ascertain Mark Antony’s birth date, photograph paintings in Correggio’s studio,

and record ‘the sonorous voice of Sophocles reading aloud from his own dramas’ are
another histronaut’s ambitions. Fred Hoyle’s historian opts to visit classical Greece ‘to
settle all the controversy and arguments about ancient music’. Isaac Asimov’s ‘chrono-
scope’ inventor yearns to disprove the slander that the Carthaginians immolated children
as sacrificial victims. Many trust the actual past will refute conventional histories.71
Origins obsess time travellers as they do scholars. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
engenders many fictional visits to the dawn of mankind. Others search the inception of
fire, of agriculture, of Indo-European languages, motives for Alexander’s conquests or
Columbus’s voyages. A visitor seeks out an immortal world’s oldest inhabitants, for ‘if the
first of them are still alive then they might know their origin! They would know how it
began!’72
Personal curiosity actuates return to some key episode or figure in one’s own back-
ground. Clifford Simak’s genealogical clients interrogate ancient forebears. Like Shelley,
Scientology prods converts to recall foetal experience, even conception.73 Incestuous
fancy prompts many: Ward Moore’s time traveller confesses ‘a notion to court my
grandmother and wind up as my own grandfather’, but Marty McFly in Back to the
Future prudently fends off his flirtatious future mother.74
To revisit the past would vastly improve history. If historians ‘could go back in time
and see what happened and talk to people who were living then’, Simak’s character
conjectures, ‘they would understand it better’. Combining immediacy and hindsight,
Moore’s observer who knew how events turned out could ‘write history as no one ever
did before, with the detachment of the present and the accuracy of an eyewitness knowing
specifically what to look for’.75 But most time travellers are historically naive. They
assume the past is known only from what is observed as things happen and dismiss
70
Wilson Tucker, The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970; Boston: Gregg, 1979), 107; Philip José Farmer, To Your
Scattered Bodies Go (1971; Boston: Gregg, 1980), 44. See Nahin, Time Machines, 35–37; Clarke, ‘Time’s
arrow’, 143.
71
Wilson Tucker, The Lincoln Hunters (Hodder & Stoughton, 1979), 112; Fred Hoyle, October the First Is Too
Late (Penguin, 1968), 96; Isaac Asimov, ‘The dead past’ (1956), in Earth is Room Enough (Doubleday,
1957), 9–50 at 25. See Paul Seabury, ‘Histronaut’, Columbia University Forum 4:3 (1961): 4–8.
72
R. A. Lafferty, Nine Hundred Grandmothers (New York: Ace, 1970), 7–19 at 10.
73
Clifford D. Simak, Catface (1973; Methuen, 1978), 163; Hubbard, Dianetics, 266–8.
74
Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee (1955; London, 1976), 164; Andrew Shail and Robin Stoate, Back to the
Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 85–7.
75
Simak, Catface, 54; Moore, Bring the Jubilee, 159–60, 169.
66 Time travelling
Figure 4 The lure of time travel: Jorvik Viking Centre ‘Time Car’, York
subsequent insight as of little moment. They ignore the value of retrospection and see the
past simply as another present.
Searching for the Golden Age

Forget six counties overhung with smoke
The snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green William Morris, 186876
That the past was better is SF’s usual leitmotiv. Often pseudo-medieval, pastoral charms
reflect Luddite anguish. Some admire all epochs, finding any previous period ‘vastly
76
William Morris, The Earthly Paradise (London, 1868), 3.
preferable to [our] own regimented day’.77 Greens fancy a lush, unpolluted, pre-industrial
planet only lightly tenanted – America ‘before the white men came’, or better yet, ‘before
there were any men at all’, says a Simak character. ‘Give us the Miocene; we want another
chance’, cry today’s cramped slum-dwellers. Prehistoric 15,000 bc was paradise for
Farmer’s explorer: ‘damned few humans, and an abundance of wild life; . . . this is the
way a world should be’.78 Psychedelic mystic Terence McKenna concurred:
Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane
moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000
years ago . . . before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare
and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before.79
Environmental guru Edward Abbey found his ‘true ancestral home’ in America’s south-
western desert. Eager ‘to flex Paleolithic muscles’, Earth First! founder Dave Foreman
bade followers ‘restore the Pleistocene’, when ‘humans knew their rightful place . . . as
natural people’. To assuage Monbiot’s craving for a richer, rawer, wilder life than
‘ecologically boring’ modernity, he yearns to go wild in a thrilling primeval landscape.80
Others choose their unspoiled childhood era. Mary McCarthy’s 1940s utopian
commune went back to ‘the magical moment of their average birth-date’ and favoured
stage of mechanization (carpet sweepers not vacuum cleaners, ice boxes instead of
refrigerators). The 1910 buildings and furnishings ‘took them back to the age of their
innocence’.81 But not to austerity. ‘The quiet fifties [are] as early as I dare go without
sacrificing the cultural comforts I desire’, said a 1970s past-seeker.82 Back to the
Future leaves despoiled 1985 (graffiti, homeless drunks in littered parks, terrorists
stalking mean streets) for pristine, prelapsarian 1955. Many 1980s time-travel films
portrayed the present as ‘dehumanized, diseased, out of control, and perhaps
doomed’.83 Stephen King’s visitor to 1958 ‘saw people helping people’, an everyday
altruism unimaginable in 2011. King’s ‘Land of Ago’ had ‘a lot less paperwork and a
hell of a lot more trust’.84
Others prefer less recent pastoral pasts. Marking out on old maps areas that became
industrial slums – Dagenham, north Cardiff, much of Manchester – Peter Hunt’s 1980s
protagonist rubs away the ‘filth and squalor’ to restore the ‘pure, clean’ 1860s countryside.
America in the 1880s was far from perfect, realizes Finney’s hero, but ‘the air was still
77
Alfred Bester, ‘Hobson’s choice’ (1952), in Starburst (New York: Signet, 1958), 133–48 at 147–8; 43. Wilson
Tucker, The Lincoln Hunters (Hodder & Stoughton, 1979).
78
Simak, Catface, 54, 241; Philip José Farmer, Time’s Last Gift (Ballantine, 1972), 79, 137.
79
Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival (Harper & Row, 1992), and his Alien Dreamtime, deoxy.org/t_adt.
htm.
80
Edward Abbey in Eric Temple, A Voice in the Wilderness (documentary, Canyon Productions, 1993); Dave
Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Harmony Books, 1991), 63; Dave Foreman (1984)
quoted in Martha Frances Lee, Earth First! Environmental Apocalypse (Syracuse, 1995), 84; Monbiot, Feral,
xiii, 6, 8, 106, 139, 256.
81
Mary McCarthy, The Oasis (Random House, 1949), 42–3.
82
David Gerrold, The Man Who Folded Himself (Random House, 1973), 122.
83
Andrew Gordon, ‘Back to the Future: Oedipus as time traveller’ (1987), in Ní Fhlainn, ed., Worlds of Back to
the Future, 29–48 at 34, 30.
84
Stephen King, 11.22.63: A Novel (Scribner, 2011), 247, 368.
68 Time travelling
clean. The rivers flowed fresh, as they had since time began. And the first of the terrible
corrupting wars still lay decades ahead.’ In the play Berkeley Square, the quiet streets,
petrol-free air, and sedan chairs of 1784 London make taxi-laden, bustling 1928 noisome
and ugly.85
Recent or remote, the desired past is natural and simple, yet also vivid and exciting.
‘The old, gray, modern existence’ had little to offer Robin Carson’s hero after ‘the new,
colorful opulence’ of Renaissance Venice. A visitor who ‘becomes’ Cyrus in ancient Persia
finds early warfare more tolerable than modern foxholes. The fourteenth century was
‘cruel, hard, and very often bloody’, learns du Maurier’s protagonist, but it ‘held a
fascination . . . lacking in my own world of today’.86 Early Romans seldom lived long,
admits a returnee from antiquity, ‘but while they lived, they lived’. Old England’s ‘rough
plenty’ and ‘sauntering life’ compensated William Morris for ‘its cool acceptance of
rudeness and violence’.87 At first appalled by nauseous medieval squalor and casual
brutality, Ford Madox Ford’s Edwardian protagonist becomes besotted with its ways
(and women): ‘I thought the fourteenth century was the only bearable time in the history
of the world [and] when I came back . . . the modern world seemed to me a horribly mean
and dirty sort of place – worthless, useless, disgusting. I wonder now that I could ever
have lived in it. It appears little and grey and cold and unimportant.’88
Today’s faces seem ‘much more alike and much less alive’ to Finney’s time traveller.
‘There was also an excitement in the streets of New York in 1882 that is gone’. Back then
people ‘carried with them a sense of purpose . . . They weren’t bored . . . Those men moved
through their lives in unquestioned certainty that there was a reason for being . . . Faces
don’t have that look now.’ The grave and experienced faces carved in a medieval cloister
struck Stephen Spender as ‘more significantly alive’ than those of his own time. Today’s
time-travel fiction – Douglas Coupland’s Translit – discerns ‘a spirituality lacking in the
modern world that can only be squeezed out of other, more authentic eras’.89
SF golden ages little resemble any time that ever was, of course. Like nostalgists, time
travellers fantasize childhoods divested of sorrow and privation, glamour-drenched histories
devoid of squalor, and Edenic landscapes invested with all they feel missing in modernity.
Self-aggrandizement
Visitors to the past often fancy that technology and foreknowledge give them an
unbeatable lead; modern know-how will make them powerful, famous, or rich back then.
Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in medieval England expects to ‘boss the whole
85
Peter Hunt, Maps of Time (1983), 58, 123; Finney, Time and Again, 398; John L. Balderston with
J. C. Squire, Berkeley Square (Longmans, Green, 1929), 37–8.
86
Robin Carson, Pawn of Time (Holt, 1957), 437; Poul Anderson, Guardians of Time (Pan, 1977), 68; Du
Maurier, House on the Strand, 267.
87
Sam Merwin, Jr., Three Faces of Time (New York: Ace, 1955), 33; William Morris, ‘Hopes of civilisation’
(1885), in CW (Longmans, Green, 1910–15), 23: 59–80 at 62.
88
Ford Madox Ford, Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (Constable, 1911), 96, 150, 107.
89
Finney, Time and Again, 218–19; Stephen Spender, Love-Hate Relations: A Study of Anglo-American
Sensibilities (Hamish Hamilton, 1974), 191; Douglas Coupland, ‘Convergences’, NYT Book Review, 11 Mar.
2012: 10.
country inside of three months; for . . . I would have the start of the best-educated man in
the kingdom by . . . thirteen hundred years’. Being in the sixth century magnifies his
prospects:
I wouldn’t have traded it for the twentieth. Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge,
brains, pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest field that ever
was; and all my own . . . ; not a man who wasn’t a baby to me in acquirements and capacities;
whereas, what would I amount to in the twentieth century? I should be foreman of a factory, that is
about all.90
Like Robert Reed’s modern hero playing god in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, myriad
SF venturers follow in the Yankee’s triumphal wake. ‘All the treasures of the past would
fall to one man with a submachine gun. Cleopatra and Helen of Troy might share his bed,
if bribed with a trunkful of modern cosmetics’.91 Goodnight Sweetheart’s (BBC, 1993–9)
Gary Sparrow moves back and forth from wartime London, selling past artefacts as
antiques in today’s world, bringing modern luxuries to his 1940s lover.
Foreknowledge uniquely privileges modern visitors to finished pasts. Unlike the insecure
present, the past is safely mapped, its pleasures tried and tested, its perils located and
confined. The time traveller acts in a play whose outcome he alone knows. ‘Watching old-
timers’ jaws drop in amazement while people who are 40 years ahead of them toy with them
and give them the know-it-all treatment’, Russell Baker comments, ‘you are like a person
playing poker with a stacked deck’.92 Histronauts gain prestige at the expense of the past’s
true denizens. Their modern benefits resemble those of historians, for whom hindsight is
both inescapable and insightful. But the historian properly eschews anachronistic judge-
ment, whereas the judgemental time traveller may be fatally tempted to alter history’s
outcomes.
Changing the past

The past as known is partly a product of the present, for we continually reshape memory,
rewrite history, refashion relics. The nature of and motives for such changes are discussed
in part IV. But to alter what actually did happen, as distinct from reinterpreting it, is
impossible.93 Yet how ardently we often wish we could change the past! More persua-
sively than counter-factual history, SF offers imaginative release from the obdurate fixity
of the past.
Three main motives impel time travellers to tamper with history: to improve the past;
to undo its resultant evils; and to protect or restore historical stability against malign
interference.
90
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889; California, 1983), 17, 62–3.
91
Robert Reed, ‘Two Sams’, Asimov’s SF, May 2000; Larry Niven, ‘The theory and practice of time travel’,
in All the Myriad Ways (Ballantine, 1971), 123.
92
Russell Baker, ‘Time-warped power’, IHT, 30 Oct. 1981: 16.
93
Few theologians disputed Aristotle’s view that ‘not even God can make undone what has been done’.
(Nichomachean Ethics, c. 340 bc (Chicago, 2011), 117.
70 Time travelling
Faith in progress is implicit in most efforts to improve the past. Arthurian England’s
ignorance and superstition, illiteracy and fecklessness appal Twain’s archetypal improver,
convinced scientific technology will make life safer, happier, longer. His civilizing mission
envisions ‘the destruction of the throne, nobility abolished, every member of it bound out
to some useful trade, universal suffrage instituted, and the whole government placed in
the hands of the men and women of the nation’. Within three years England is
democratic and prosperous: ‘Schools everywhere, and several colleges; a number of pretty
good newspapers . . . Slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law . . .
The telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the type-writer, the sewing machine, and
all the thousand willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working their
way into favor.’94
Avant-garde novelties work wonders in most past epochs. Rider Haggard’s prehistoric
venturers save their tribe from starvation by inventing fire; Manly Wade Wellman brings
antiseptics and electricity to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Florence. But modernizing often fails or
boomerangs. Trying to avert the fall of the Roman Empire, William Golding’s prescient
envoy gives Caesar a steamship, gunpowder, and the printing-press, but the only modern
appliance the gourmet ruler adopts is a pressure cooker. Sprague de Camp’s reformer
imports Arabic numbers, newspapers, telegraphy, distillation, double-entry book-keep-
ing, and horse collars into sixth-century Italy in a vain effort to save Europe from
medieval retrogression.95
To accord bygone authors deserved homage is Benford’s historian’s aim. He goes back
to tell great writers, just before their death, how the future will esteem their works. But
this revivifies them; they recover and continue to write, thus changing literary history. Ian
Watson plans to ‘yank past geniuses out of time, . . . honor them so that they would know
their lives had been worthwhile in the eyes of the future. But then . . . tell them – oh so
kindly – where they had gone wrong or fallen short. And how much more we knew
nowadays.’96
Others aid the past by intervening at critical moments. To avoid the ‘mistakes’ that
destroyed Rome and corrupted the barbarians, Poul Anderson’s time traveller unites
fifth-century Saxons and Romans in a Christian faith ‘which will educate and civilize men
without shackling their minds’. Preventing the ambush of Charlemagne’s forces at
Roncesvalles in 778, R. A. Lafferty’s characters forestall the breach with Spanish Islam
and thus spare Christian Europe centuries of cultural isolation. Aghast at the impending
fate of Mary Queen of Scots, Uttley’s heroine strives to ‘put back the clock of time and
save her’.97 Such interventions are seldom solely altruistic; in ameliorating past condi-
tions, time travellers also better their own lot. One teaches Stone Age people ‘fishing – so
94
Twain, Connecticut Yankee, 300, 397–8.
95
H. Rider Haggard, Allan and the Ice-Gods (London, 1927); Manly Wade Wellman, Twice in Time
(New York: Galaxy, 1958); William Golding, ‘Envoy extraordinary’ (1956), in The Scorpion God
(Faber & Faber, 1971), 115–78; L. Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall (1939; London: Sphere, 1979).
96
Gregory Benford, ‘Not of an age’ (1994), cited in Nahin, Time Machines, 266; Ian Watson, ‘Ghost lecturer’
(1984), in Gardner R. Dozois, ed., Time Travelers (New York: Ace, 1989), 155–74.
97
Anderson, Guardians of Time, 46; R. A. Lafferty, ‘Thus we frustrate Charlemagne’ (1967), in Nine Hundred
Grandmothers, 171–84 at 172–3; Uttley, Traveller in Time, 108.
I could eat fish; raising beef, so I could eat steak – and, later on, painting pictures that
I could look at and making music for me to hear’. Another, nauseated by the slaughter of
ancient Rome, replaces sanguinary gladiatorial games with football.98
The most compelling motive for altering the past is to change the present and the
future – to make one’s own fame or fortune, impose a hegemony, right a wrong, avert a
personal tragedy, prevent global catastrophe. One time traveller retrospectively rescues
his fiancée from a bombing raid, another eliminates a modern rival by having
seventeenth-century buccaneers take him prisoner.99 Others preclude the birth of
enemies or invest for millionaire futures. ‘Just think!! One might invest all one’s money,
leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry on ahead!’100 Broader concerns animate
some. Sherred’s ‘time-view’ inventor publicizes nationalist evils and hence averts nuclear
war, by filming history’s wicked tyrants.101
The futility of trying to avert past catastrophe features the best-intentioned interven-
tions. To snuff out Soviet Communism at its inception, Paul Seabury’s Cold Warrior goes
back to assassinate Lenin in 1917. He succeeds – but returns to 1968 to find Washington
occupied by Nazis. Stephen Fry’s scientist precludes Hitler’s existence by killing his
grandparents; but the Axis powers win the Second World War. Stephen King’s hero
stops Oswald from assassinating Kennedy in 1963, triggering global nuclear war, radi-
ation poisoning, and earthquakes that threaten the whole planet.102 Other time travellers
find that while they cannot change the past, they have already affected it, usually for the
worse. Visiting from the twenty-fifth century, G. C. Edmondson’s ‘Misfit’ not only fails to
prevent the plague in 562 Rome or the Black Death in medieval Europe, but his visit
proves to be the cause of both.103
Others defend the present by preventing villains from warping the past. Poul Ander-
son’s Kublai Khan threatens to alter the course of history by conquering America in the
thirteenth century; ‘our own world wouldn’t exist, wouldn’t ever have existed’. Ander-
son’s ‘time patrol’ absorbs the invaders without a trace into Eskimo and Indian popula-
tions, thus conserving the present as we know it.104 The hero of the NBC series Quantum
Leap (1989–1993), ‘driven by an unknown force to change history for the better’, inhabits
different people of the recent past to ‘put right what once went wrong’ – saving young
Heimlich from choking and inspiring his medical career, preventing Oswald from killing
Jackie along with JFK, delaying Marilyn Monroe’s death so she could film The Misfits.105
Henry Harrison’s status-quo protector returns to the 1850s to forestall a Southerner’s
deployment of modern weaponry that would reverse the outcome of the Civil War.
98
Laumer, Great Time Machine Hoax, 198; Merwin, Three Faces of Time, 140.
99
Anderson, Guardians of Time, 41–5; Carr, Devil in Velvet; L. Ron Hubbard, Typewriter in the Sky (1940;
London: Fantasy, 1952).
100
Wells, Time Machine, 6. See Mack Reynolds, ‘Compounded interest’ (1956), in Judith Merril, ed., SF: The
Best of the Best (New York: Dell, 1967), 199–213; Henry Harrison, A Rebel in Time (New York: Tor, 1983).
101
Thomas L. Sherred, ‘E for effort’, Astounding Science Fiction, 39:3 (1947): 119–62.
102
Seabury, ‘Histronaut’; Stephen Fry, Making History (Hutchinson, 1996); King, 11.22.63, 709–14.
103
G. C. Edmondson, ‘The misfit’ (1959), in Stranger Than You Think (New York: Ace, 1965).
104
Anderson, Guardians of Time, 102, 120–60.
105
Robert Hanke, ‘Quantum Leap: the postmodern challenge of television as history’, in Gary R, Edgerton,
and P. C. Rollins, eds., Television Histories (Kentucky, 2001), 59–78 at 65–72.
72 Time travelling
To validate the New Testament, Michael Moorcock’s modern witness at the Crucifixion
takes on the Messiah’s role when he realizes the actual Jesus will fail to do so. Simak’s
fundamentalists seek to embargo visits to the time of Jesus, lest ‘probing back . . . destroy
the faith that has been built up through the ages’.106 Such fears reflect a wider apprehen-
sion, as we shall see, that what lies undisclosed in the graveyard of the past had best
remain buried there.
To change the past is nonetheless a revealing ambition. It sharply contrasts the only
outcomes we can have with those we might prefer. We rely on the fixed irrevocability of
what has transpired; but often wish it might have been otherwise. The desire to alter
what has happened is a recurrent reaction to our discomfiting awareness of happen-
stance: past events determined the world and ourselves as we are; yet we know that
these events were not preordained but simply contingent, that matters might easily have
turned out otherwise. From that might-have-been we fantasize reaching back to make
it so.
All these time-travel motives bear on actual attachments to the past discussed in the
next chapter. But just as time travellers’ desires are intense, the attendant dangers are
grave, involving risks not only to themselves but to all of us, if not to the cosmos.
Risks of revisiting the past

Devotion to the past [is] one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.
Susan Sontag, 1977107
Living in the past was a little like living underwater and breathing though a tube.
Stephen King, 2011108
Suppose you could go back? How would it feel? What would be the consequences? Even
those seduced by time travel are dubious about its outcomes, fearful that the past’s
dangers and griefs may outweigh its gains. They may be disappointed with the past they
find, unable to cope with its conditions, concerned lest they be forever marooned back
then, or appalled lest they imperil the actual fabric of history. Such surmises mirror
widespread feelings about risks inherent in favouring the past.
The past disappoints

History and memory so routinely glamorize the past that it is little wonder to find the
reality disillusioning. ‘I saw enough of the Depression’, says the embittered inventor of a
time machine that conveys him to the 1930s; ‘I don’t want to spend my old age watching
people sell apples.’ Such returns can betray fond memories. A nostalgic visit to
New York’s Lower East Side miserably dispirits former residents, some because they
106
Henry Harrison, Rebel in Time (1983); Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man (Fontana/Collins, 1980), 37;
Simak, Catface, 190.
107
Susan Sontag, ‘Unguided tour’, New Yorker, 31 Oct. 1977: 40–5 at 40.
108
King, 11.22.63, 100.
recognized too little, others too much.109 A day in Plimoth Plantation’s cramped,
dung-splattered 1627 pioneer village leaves tourists happy for modern hygiene. The
recent past can be a sorry eye-opener. ‘I have returned to the Sixties’, said a visitor of
the solstice-rite hippie encampment at Stonehenge, ‘and it stinks’.110
That the past literally stinks dismays many time travellers. Connie Willis’s histronaut is
told to cauterize her nose against incapacitating medieval stenches. A modern disgusted
by the late Roman Empire complains that nothing prepared him for ‘all the dirt and
disease, the insults and altercations’ of the past.111 A bedraggled seventeenth-century
village convinces Robert Westall’s hero he is in the actual, not a re-enacted, past: ‘Forget
Merrie England . . . These houses straggled down a mud track, and they not only had no
telly-aerials on the chimneys – most of them had no chimneys . . . The thatch looked old
black and mouldy, the half timber was sagging and rotten, and the people . . . were all
bloody midgets’.112
Encounters with famed historical figures likewise disillusion, their aura dispelled by
humdrum proximity. Lafferty’s time travellers are revolted by Aristotle’s barbarous Greek
and Tristan and Isolde’s bear-grease pomade; they find Voltaire’s wit a ‘cackle’ and Nell
Gwynn ‘completely tasteless’; hearing Sappho, they think it lucky ‘that so few of her
words have survived’.113 In ill-fitting breeches, a rust-speckled chain-mail shirt, and
moth-eaten fur cloak, Keith Laumer’s paunchy William the Conqueror yawns and
belches at news of the Battle of Hastings.114
Moderns in the past miss the comforts of their own time. Fame and fortune in
Renaissance Venice do not quench a visitor’s fierce nostalgia that came ‘with a snatch
of remembered music, with the desire for a cigarette, and in his memory of women of
his era’. An English girl back in ancient Rome is chagrined at the thought of waiting
fifteen centuries for a cup of tea.115 Henry James’s Ralph Pendrel, at first in love with
the past, ends by straining back to ‘all the wonders and splendours’ of his own once-
disdained Edwardian world, ‘of which he now sees only the ripeness, richness, attrac-
tion and civilisation’, the virtually flawless perfection.116 Voyeuristic slum-goers to
time-frozen diners, industrial sites, and rural villages are relieved to return to the
present. Yearning for a life with meaning, Douglas Coupland's rootless Craig is
shunted back to become a thirteenth-century peasant: ‘You’ll love it there! . . . You’ve
109
Marion Gross, ‘The good provider’ (1952), in Groff Conklin, ed., Science Fiction Adventures in Dimension
(London, 1955), 167–71 at 170; Richard F. Shepard, ‘About New York: old neighborhoods visited mainly
in memory’, NYT, 18 Aug. 1977: B15.
110
Jay Anderson, Time Machines: The World of Living History (AASLH, 1984), 52; Stanley Reynolds, ‘Stoned
henge’, Sunday Times, 28 June 1981: 35.
111
Connie Willis, Doomsday Book (Bantam, 1992), 10; L. Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall 1979, 13–14.
The pong of the medieval past is a literary byword (Mark Jenner, ‘Following your nose?’ AHR 116 (2011):
339–40).
112
Robert Westall, The Devil on the Road (Macmillan, 1978), 156.
113
R. A. Lafferty, ‘Through other eyes’ (1960), in Nine Hundred Grandmothers, 282–96 at 282–4.
114
Laumer, Great Time Machine Hoax, 36–7.
115
Robin Carson, Pawn of Time (Holt, 1957), 57; Merwin, Three Faces of Time, 13.
116
Henry James, The Sense of the Past (Scribners, 1917), 337–8.
74 Time travelling
got a role to fulfill! Just be sure to worship and defend whoever owns you! . . . We
crippled you a bit so you’ll fit in better.’117
Truly reliving the past comes at the cost of its accumulated agonies. The gruesome evils
of the slave trade led Babbage to muse on ineradicable memory that ‘irrevocably chained’
the criminal ‘to the testimony of his crime’.118 Memory is ‘in the atoms somewhere, and
even if we’re blown apart, that memory stays’, worries Willis’s time traveller. ‘What if we
do get burned up by the sun and we still remember? What if we go on burning and
burning and remembering and remembering?’119 The gift of seeing the past is ‘how
wisdom comes, and how we shape our future’, says the Receiver of Memory in Lois
Lowry’s dystopian refuge. Yet, to re-witness the whole world’s memories – the grief and
anguish, the horrors and terrors, of endless aeons of strife and suffering – proves
unbearably painful.120
Inability to cope with the past

Modern know-how might prove a handicap rather than a royal road to success in the
past. Lack of temporal nous and practical prowess would make today’s technology
useless, if one ‘can’t get the tools to make the tools to make the tools’. Few moderns
could quickly master the arcane skills of an earlier era, even if they escaped cholera,
smallpox, the gallows, and slavery. Poul Anderson’s ‘Man who came early’ lacks the
practical savvy needed for survival in tenth-century Iceland; Richard Cowper’s visitor to
1665 London dies of the plague before he can repair his damaged time machine; Twain’s
Yankee succumbs to his own electrical ingenuity.121 Up-to-date notions may prove
heretically fatal: ‘people of most historic communities would fear and suspect us,
imprison and interrogate us, perhaps even put us to death’. Laumer’s visitor to Llan-
dudno in 1723 is burned as a witch for sponsoring birth control, evolution, and psycho-
analysis. Anachronistic suspicion is now almost instant. ‘If you had mentioned food
combining or wheat intolerance back in 1992’, notes a visitor from 2005, ‘they might have
thrown you into a pond to see if you floated’.122
Unbridgeable disparities aggravate the risks of being in the past. ‘How much can you
learn in a totally strange environment’, asks Poul Anderson, ‘when you can barely speak a
word and are liable to be arrested on suspicion before you can swop for a suit of
117
Douglas Coupland, Generation X (St Martin’s, 1991), 11, and Generation A (London: Windmill, 2010),
268.
118
Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 38–9.
119
Connie Willis, Fire Watch (Bantam, 1985), 198.
120
Lois Lowry, The Giver (1993; HarperCollins, 2003), 99, 131.
121
Poul Anderson, ‘The man who came early’ (1956), in The Horn of Time (Boston: Gregg, 1968), 68–90;
Richard Cowper, ‘Hertford manuscript’, Fantasy and SF 51:4 (1976): 6–37; Twain, Connecticut Yankee;
Bud Foote, The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction
(Greenwood, 1991).
122
Stacy F. Roth, Past into Present: Effective Techniques for First-Person Historical Interpretation (North
Carolina, 1998), 67; Keith Laumer, Dinosaur Beach (New York: Daw, 1971), 100; Billy Frolick, ‘1992
house’, New Yorker, 17 Jan. 2005: 49.
contemporary clothes?’123 The most scrupulous schooling in bygone customs cannot

make up for the absence of myriad shared recollections. Back in 1820, James’s Ralph
Pendrel is caught out again and again for lacking memory of family and neighbourly
details. His knowledge, ‘almost as right as possible for the “period” . . . and yet so
intimately and secretly wrong’, can never match that of 1820s natives; anything he does
or says, even opening his mouth to reveal well-cared-for teeth ‘that undentisted age can’t
have known the like of’, is liable to betray him. It is ‘one thing to “live in the Past” with . . .
the whole candour of confidence and confidence of candour, that he would then have
naturally had’, concludes James, ‘and a totally different thing to find himself living in it
without . . . those preponderant right instincts’.124
The mere hope of moving back through time might prove lethal, were fantasy made
real. Communing with a sixteenth-century man through a ouija board, a twentieth-
century English woman became so besotted with him that she killed herself, ‘so that we
can go back to live as we used to’. Given all the threats, concludes a time-travel scholar, ‘it
would take a brave soul to do much more, while in the past, than just stand still and
breathe’.125
Problems of returning to the present

Perhaps the visited past’s worst peril is to be forever stranded there. Terror at being
unable to return, the horror . . . of ‘being in the past to stay, heart-breakingly to stay and
never know his own precious Present again’, corrodes Ralph Pendrel’s pleasure in 1820
and sours his sojourn there.126 Hubbard’s film-writer fails to escape from the diabolical
clatter of the deceased author’s typewriter imprisoning him in the seventeenth century.127
Marghanita Laski’s tubercular protagonist, trapped back in 1864, is unable to return to
medically enlightened modernity.128 Blackadder can’t remember how to reset his time
machine to return to 1999 from the Cretaceous. He ends up instead at the court of
Elizabeth I, to whom his gift of a Polo mint – which she finds ‘the tastiest thing in the
history of the world’ – saves him from beheading.129 Few are so fortunate as to travel back
‘with vaccinations, a wad of cash and a clean set of ruling-class garb’. Only with Translit –
novels that ‘cross history without being historical’ – do ‘we visit multiple pasts safe in the
knowledge that we’ll get off the ride intact’.130
Getting stuck in the past seems a just desert for trifling with its denizens. After
returning Madame Bovary to her own time and place, Woody Allen’s professor’s time-
machine misfires and plants him in a old textbook of remedial Spanish, pursued by a
123
Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (Sphere, 1979), 46.
124
James, Sense of the Past, 295–6, 301.
125
‘Mother killed by train “was obsessed”’, Times, 24 Apr. 1981: 4; Nahin, Time Machines, 51.
126
James, Sense of the Past, 294; William Righter, American Memory in Henry James (Ashgate, 2004), 201–5.
127
Hubbard, Typewriter in the Sky, 70, 75, 95.
128
Marghanita Laski, The Victorian Chaise-longue (Ballantine, 1953).
129
Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, Blackadder: Back & Forth (Penguin, 2000).
130
Douglas Coupland, ‘Convergences’, NYT Book Review, 11 Mar. 2012: 10.
76 Time travelling
large and hairy irregular verb.131 Each night, René Clair’s dispirited protagonist in Les
Belles de Nuit (1952) dreams that an old man tells him ‘It was much better in my day.’ So
he goes back another generation, only to repeat the same dream over and over, ending up
in the Stone Age still longing for the ‘good old days’.132 While some crooks seek time-
travel sanctuaries, incorrigible criminals may be permanently exiled to a prison-house of
the past. ‘Off to the reptiles’ a hundred million years back, ‘no one to talk with, boredom,
and in the end . . . an afternoon snack to a tyrannosaurus’.133
Others return to feel that sojourn in the past misfits them for present existence or to
find today unliveable. The intensity of fourteenth-century life alienates du Maurier’s
protagonist from the drab present. A stay in sixteenth-century Venice unfits Carson’s
hero for modern America; coming back ‘with a skull full of maddening memories . . .
I couldn’t even qualify as an assistant professor of Renaissance history’. Disgust with the
present spurs enervating addiction to visitable pasts; Aldiss’s future nostalgists seek only
to escape their advanced but dreary time.134 Alfred Bester’s disgruntled ‘time stiffs’ keep
‘bumming through the centuries . . . looking for the Golden Age’. Visitors from Finney’s
foredoomed twenty-first century elect to stay in the past, scattering back over the
preceding three millennia.135 But as Descartes warned, too much time spent frequenting
past centuries leaves one ignorant of one’s own.136
Endangering the temporal fabric

Subsequent interference imperils the past itself. Like historical restoration, an SF scholar
surmises, time travel makes the past thin and artificial and may one day wear it out
altogether. ‘Every operation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more makeshift,
and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that are our heritage’. Stephen King’s
time traveller goes back to undo his changes lest their dire consequences destroy ‘reality
itself’.137
Indeed, the slightest alteration of the past – a grain of dust misplaced – could
jeopardize all that follows. ‘The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an
earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through Time’,
warns a safari leader to the Jurassic. In that tale, crushing a butterfly 65 million years back
results in the election of the ‘wrong’ US president in 2055.138 Efforts to improve the past
131
Woody Allen, ‘The Kugelmass episode’ (1978), in Side Effects (Random House, 1980), 59–78.
132
Alwyn Eades, ‘Dream On’, New Scientist, 22 Sept. 2007: 25.
133
Sever Gansovsky, ‘Vincent Van Gogh’ (1970), in Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, eds., Aliens, Travelers, and
Strangers: The Best of Soviet SF (Macmillan, 1984), 51–118 at 100–1.
134
Du Maurier, House on the Strand, 267; Carson, Pawn of Time, 433; Aldiss, An Age.
135
Bester, ‘Hobson’s choice’, 146; Jack Finney, ‘Such interesting neighbors’ (1951), in The Clock of Time
(London: Panther, 1961), 5–20 at 16–18.
136
René Descartes, Discours de la méthode (1637; Paris, 1947), 5–6; Anthony T. Grafton, Bring Out Your
Dead: The Past as Revelation (Harvard, 2001), 194.
137
Fritz Leiber, The Big Time (1957; New York: Ace, 1961), 57; King, 11.22.63, 698–9.
138
Ray Bradbury, ‘A sound of thunder’ (1952), in R Is for Rocket (Pan, 1972), 73–86 at 77. The butterfly effect
is ascribed to chaos theory pioneer Edward Lorenz in 1963 (Robert C. Hilborn, ‘Sea gulls, butterflies, and
grasshoppers’, American Journal of Physics 72:3 (Apr. 2004): 425–7).
usually backfire. Owing to a time traveller’s antibiotics and anaesthesia in ancient Rome,
by the sixth century the city grows lethally overpopulated.139
One even risks erasing one’s future self. Undoing some previous act courts self-
annihilation if an ancestor perishes in the process. ‘If we once start doubling back to
tinker with our personal pasts, we’d soon get so tangled up that none of us would exist.’140
To minimize risks of interference, some time travellers go only to remote prehistory:
Sprague de Camp’s visitors to times before 100,000 bc; Simak’s to epochs ancient enough
to preclude meeting early humans.141
Others deny that any impacts could significantly alter the past. Time is a river into
which billions of events are dropped; no individual can affect their collective course. ‘You
can’t erase the conquests of Alexander by nudging a neolithic pebble’, reasons Fritz
Leiber, or ‘extirpate America by pulling up a shoot of Sumerian grain’. Similarly, ‘if I went
back to . . . the Middle Ages and shot one of FDR’s Dutch forebears, he’d still be born in
the late nineteenth century – because he and his genes resulted from the entire world of
his ancestors’.142 With all his twentieth-century resources and foreknowledge, Carr’s hero
still cannot change the past; he ‘might alter a small and trifling detail, [but] the ultimate
result would be just the same’. In fact, you can’t change anything, insists Larry Niven.
‘You can’t kill your grandfather because you didn’t. You’ll kill the wrong man if you try it;
or your gun won’t fire.’143
Still others suggest that the known present includes the effects of previous temporal
interventions. ‘If time travel was going to make any changes, it had already done so’,
asserts a Farmer character. ‘Whatever he was to do had been done, and events and lives
had been determined before he was born even if he had helped determine them.’ The firm
fixity of the past frustrates a husband’s retrospective revenge against his unfaithful wife.
Going back to kill her grandparents, he returns to the present to find her still in his rival’s
embrace. He alters history more radically, annihilating George Washington, Columbus,
Mohammed – all to no avail.144
‘If a thing has happened, it has happened’ philosophers agree, and ‘you cannot make it
not to have happened.’145 Were it alterable, no aspect of the past could be depended
upon. Any revisited past would be irreparably marooned. ‘Lacking a past in the past, and
having memories of the future’, Ralph Pendrel thereby destroys the past he so intensely
139
Frederik Pohl, ‘The deadly mission of Phineas Snodgrass’ (1962), in The Gold at the Starbow’s End
(Ballantine, 1972). See Foote, Connecticut Yankee, 101.
140
Anderson, Guardians of Time, 52.
141
L. Sprague de Camp, ‘Gun for dinosaur’, in Best of L. Sprague de Camp (Ballantine, 1978), 272–302;
Simak, Catface, 241–51.
142
Fritz Leiber, ‘Try and change the past’ (1958), in Robert Silverberg, ed., Trips in Time (Nelson, 1977),
93–101 at 94; Anderson, Guardians of Time, 130.
143
Carr, Devil in Velvet, 15; Niven, ‘The theory and practice of time travel’, in All the Myriad Ways (1971),
120.
144
Farmer, Time’s Last Gift, 12, 20; Alfred Bester, ‘The men who murdered Mohammed’ (1958), in The Light
Fantastic (Gollancz, 1977), 113–29.
145
Michael Dummett, ‘Bringing about the past’, Philosophical Review 73 (1964): 338–59 at 341. ‘Just to
visit the Past would be to change the Past, and this cannot be’ (Arthur C. Danto, ‘Narrative sentences’,
History and Theory 2 (1962–3): 146–79 at 160). See Nicholas J. J. Smith, ‘Bananas enough for time travel?’
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (1997): 363–89 at 374.
78 Time travelling
desires to belong to.146 In seeking to assimilate its details, he detaches its own inhabitants
from their moorings; his ‘very care had somehow annihilated them’, his uncanny
understanding turning them ‘to stone or wood or wax’. As a horrified eighteenth-century
lady tells her intrusive twentieth-century suitor, ‘You have been thinking of me in the past
tense, talking about me as though I were already dead!’147
Ancestor-worshippers fear forebears’ reprisals if their graves are neglected or mis-
treated. Time travellers similarly fear history will punish any interference with the past.
Hence they eventually abstain. ‘We shall never make the best of our present world’,
concludes a histronaut after a spell in the Middle Ages, ‘until we realize how false it is to
hanker after the ideals of a dead past’. Enthralled by medieval architecture, he was
appalled by much else in those days and returned ‘strengthened to the common routine
of life in our own soulless century’.148
People are normally aware that the actual past is irrecoverable. Yet memory and
history, relic and replica, leave impressions so concretely vivid that we feel nonetheless
deprived. Surely routes so enticing and well mapped should be open to us in reality! The
hopes and fears aroused by the past are heightened by the conflict between knowing it is
beyond reach yet craving it anyhow.
We feel the present alone inadequate, not least because it is continuously dislodged
to further enlarge the past. Disenchantment with an ever-dismembered today impels
yesterday’s recovery. That quest takes many forms: hallowing memories, cherishing
tradition, devotion to relics, treasuring antiques and souvenirs, simply valuing what is
old, rejecting change. These reactions lack the fantasy of time travel but reflect the same
yearning for bygone times.
It is easy to see what is amiss with such craving. ‘Through the vistas of the years every
age but our own seems glamorous and golden’, concludes Bester. ‘We yearn for the
yesterdays and tomorrows, never realizing . . . that today, bitter or sweet, anxious or calm,
is the only day for us. The dream of time is the traitor, and we are all accomplices to the
betrayal of ourselves.’149 Yet the enduring if quixotic quest to relive the past at least brings
history and memory vividly to mind, setting in sharp relief both the defects and the
merits of the present.
To live again in the past lends fullness and duration to the present. Coexistence in past
and present convinces du Maurier’s protagonist that ‘there was no past, no present, no
future. Everything living is part of the whole. We are all bound, one to the other, through
time and eternity.’ The vivid reality of fourteenth-century Cornwall ‘proved that the past
was living still, that we were all participants, all witnesses’. And temporal conjunction
made us more truly ourselves.150
146
Allan W. Bellringer, ‘Henry James’s The Sense of the Past’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 17 (1981):
201–16 at 210; J. Hillis Miller, ‘The “Quasi-Turn-of-Screw effect” . . . : The Sense of the Past’, in Literature
as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (Fordham, 2005), 291–326.
147
James, Sense of the Past, 213; Balderston, Berkeley Square, 80.
148
George Gordon Coulton, Friar’s Lantern (1906; London, 1948), 227, 34.
149
Bester, ‘Hobson’s choice’, 148.
150
Du Maurier, House on the Strand, 169–70.
The dreams and nightmares of revisiting the past are no less instructive for being
unlikely. They offer clues to what of the past we truly need and can accept or should avoid
and reject. And they throw light on deep-seated stances towards tradition and change.
Both sides in Britain’s 2010 election deployed the BBC’s Ashes to Ashes, whose wounded
protagonist reawakens in 1981. Depicting David Cameron lolling against the film’s luxury
Audi Quattro (then new), Labour warned against a return to the Thatcherian past –
‘Don’t let him take Britain back to the 1980s!’. ‘Fire up the Quattro. It’s time for change’,
Tory posters countered. ‘Millions of people . . . wish it was the 1980s’.151 Passionate
pursuit of the past is less debilitating than to lack concern for the past altogether.
151
Patrick Hennessy, ‘Labour’s Ashes to Ashes poster scores own goal’, Telegraph, 3 Apr. 2010.
3
Benefits and burdens of the past
Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past. Sigmund Freud1
Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye; forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.
Russian proverb
The future is dark, the present burdensome; only the past, dead and finished, bears
contemplation. Those who look upon it have survived it; they are its products and its
victors. Geoffrey Elton, 19672
We want to live in history, where all our ancestors and all our brethren live and die in
common . . . But we also desire to escape from history . . .We want to be chained in
history but we also want to be unlinked Alan Liu, 20083
Is the past a burden and a trap? Or an anchor and a springboard?

Penelope Green, 20104
Why do we need the past? What do we want it for? What risks does regard for it entail?
Does fondness for things past match the yearnings of nostalgia and time-travel fiction?
How we engage with our heritage is more consequential, yet the dilemmas that ensue
have much in common with those revealed in previous chapters. Here I survey attitudes
towards the past in general, the benefits it supplies, the burdens it entails, and the traits
that make it desirable or reprehensible.
We live in the present and see only what currently exists. What is to come is of obvious
moment; we are programmed to care about the future we’ll inhabit. But why be concerned
with things over and done with? Modernity threatens to strip the past of two hallowed values:
enlightenment and empowerment. Yet bygone times command attention and affection as
strongly as ever. An anthropologist finds ‘perduring belief in both the importance and
knowability of the past’ from the traces it has left – human remains, documents, artefacts,
psychic memories, genetic mutations.5
The past was once an indispensable guide. Only by studying former lives and learning
history could people understand present selves and circumstances and prepare for times
to come. The past was a fount of precepts for further use. Faith in its guidance rested on
1
Quoted in Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, ‘Freud and archeology’, American Imago 8 (1951): 107–28 at 111.
2
Geoffrey R. Elton, The Practice of History (1967; rev. edn Blackwell, 2002), 1.
3
Alan Liu, ‘Escaping history’, in Local Transcendence (Chicago, 2008), 258.
4
Penelope Green, ‘In a crumbling estate, creativity and history meet’, NYT, 21 July 2010.
5
Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Genealogical Science (Chicago, 2012), 221.
80
Benefits and burdens of the past 81
three assumptions: that the past was knowable and the future ordained; that change was
gradual, cyclical, or inconsequential; and that human nature was the same in all times and
places.
Because these certitudes are no more, the past has lost much of its pedagogic
function. Fears of repeating former errors remain widespread, but past knowledge
now foretells little about the future. Faith in a knowable past is likewise in tatters.
Although research continually throws new light on history, the actual past eludes us: all
we have is partial accounts of it, based on all-too-fallible memories, and fragments of
its much-altered residues – topics reviewed in part III. And the pasts constructed as
proxies for that lost realm are anything but fixed and solid: they vary from viewer to
viewer and year to year, as recent events crowd our chronological canvas, and later
perspectives supersede earlier.
The past was once of special import to those privileged by antiquity and precedence.
Ancient lineage and hallowed tradition conferred power, property, and prestige. But
today’s professedly egalitarian societies no longer license past-based privilege, save for
indigenous ‘first’ peoples. The rise of the proletariat and the waning of social hierarchy
extinguish prerogatives of lineage. ‘Ancestors are to be counted as a valuable asset’,
exclaims a pioneering Western heroine, ‘but not as working capital’.6 The past as a fount
of profit and power, like the pedagogic past, is becoming passé.
Yet loss of the past’s exemplary guidance and patronage of privilege has not dimin-
ished attachments to it. Many seem more than ever devoted to some past, of individual or
family, community or creed, village or nation. Past-based passions embrace every aspect
of existence: natural objects and living beings, artefacts and archives, folkways and
philosophies. And they spur campaigns to salvage rare or representative specimens of
past forms and features against accelerating decay and disappearance.
Reactions to the past are innately contrarian. Avowals of admiration or disdain conceal
their opposites; reverence for tradition incites iconoclasm; nostalgic retrieval foments
modernist clean sweeps. Revolutionaries exorcise recent evils with primordial exemplars
and end by reviving what they first rejected. Once avid to extirpate anciens régimes,
Russians and Chinese later waxed wistful for pre-Revolutionary customs and artefacts –
succeeded in turn by Stalinist and Maoist nostalgia.7 Diktats for and against the past
reflect vested interests; antiquity bolsters some claims, innovation others. Renaissance
chroniclers denigrated the recent past to exalt present patrons, whereas antiquarians
magnified past feats to present detriment. While museum curators safeguard outmoded
relics, sanitary engineers discard antiquated fittings.
With these caveats, I turn first to the past’s felt merits.
6
Harold Bell Wright, The Winning of Barbara Worth (Chicago, 1911), 131.
7
Andrew E. Kramer, ‘Back in the (’30s) U.S.S.R.’, NYT, 30 May 2013: D1, 6–7, Nikolay Koposov, ‘“The
armored train of memory”: the politics of history in post-Soviet Russia’, AHA Perspectives on History, Jan.
2011: 236; Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China
(Stanford, 2004), 212–13; Daniel Leese, Mao Cult (Cambridge, 2011).
82 Benefits and burdens of the past
Benefits
The past for Poets; the Present for Pigs. Samuel Palmer, 18628
It is a universal article of faith that the past was golden. Men were more manly,
women were faithful, ministers were godly, society was harmonious, whereas in the
present day . . . the wrong people have all the luck and nobody has good manners.
Hilary Mantel, 20099
Growing up here, you can’t help being obsessed with the past. Nothing ever dies in
this town. It’s like a bottle of wine, it just gets older and better.
Jamie Westendorff, Charleston, South Carolina, c. 199710
The time I would really beg for . . . would be time in the past, time in which to
comfort, to complete and to repair – time wasted before I knew how quickly it would
slip by. Iris Origo, 197011
The past’s desiderata far exceed nostalgia. ‘The most Polite part of Mankind’, wrote
architect–playwright John Vanbrugh three centuries ago, agree ‘in the Value they have
ever set upon the Remains of distant times’.12 Today the plebs share the penchant of the
polite. A taste so widespread may be a necessity. But why is the past necessary? And what
qualities make it so?
Reasons advanced for admiring the past are usually imprecise; its desirability is
simply taken for granted. The ‘charm of the past is that it is the past’, says Oscar
Wilde’s Henry Wotton.13 Victorians prized the past less for specific traits than for
general ambience. Today we are likewise all-embracing: almost anything old, olde, or
old-fashioned may be desirable. ‘I love anything old, it’s so proper’, says a barrister of
his clothes. Many who wear vintage, asserts a vendor, ‘want to look back to another era
altogether’.14 So eclectic a past includes whatever is wanted. The newest things soon
seem ‘immemorial’, like Andrew Meikle’s threshing machine (1784) within a few years
of its appearance in England. ‘Remember’, says a stroller on a street lined with fitness
studios, ‘when all this was yoga centers?’15
Equally ineffable is the medley of beloved national pasts. British heritage embodies
‘certain sights and sounds . . . a morning mist on the Tweed at Dryburgh where the magic
of Turner and the romance of Scott both come fleetingly to life . . . a celebration of the
8
To Laura Richmond (1862), in A. H. Palmer, Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter & Etcher (London,
1892), 249.
9
Hilary Mantel, ‘Dreams and duels of England’, NYRB, 22 Oct. 2009: 8–12 at 12.
10
Quoted in Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic (Pantheon, 1998), 61.
11
Iris Origo, Images and Shadows (Boston: Godine, 1999), 258.
12
To the Duchess of Marlborough, 11 June 1709, in John Vanbrugh, CW (London: Nonesuch, 1925–8), 4: 29.
13
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; London: Dent, 1930), 153.
14
John Hilton quoted in Sally Brampton, ‘Their strongest suits’, Observer Magazine, 18 Apr. 1982; Graham
Cassie quoted in Tom Bottomley, ‘Old, obscure objects of desire’, Times2: 25 Oct. 2004.
15
Richard Jefferies, The Life of the Fields (1884; London, 1948), 151; David Sipress, cartoon, New Yorker 14/21
Feb. 2011: 38.
Benefits 83
Eucharist in a quiet Norfolk church with the medieval glass filtering colours’. And in a
prime minister’s pastoral idyll, ‘long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer . . .
and, as George Orwell said, “old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning
mist”, and Shakespeare’.16 The authors of England’s 1983 National Heritage Act ‘could no
more define [it] than we could define, say, beauty or art . . . So we decided to let the
national heritage define itself’. It was not just the Tower of London but agricultural
vestiges visible only in air photos, ‘not only the duke’s castle and possessions but . . . the
duke himself’.17 Ensuing decades make it still more miscellaneous. After the first dozen
icons of Englishness – Stonehenge, the King James Bible, the Spitfire, the anthem
‘Jerusalem’, Hans Holbein’s Henry VIII, Punch and Judy, Antony Gormley’s Angel of
the North, the Routemaster bus, SS Empire Windrush, a cup of tea, the FA Cup, Alice in
Wonderland – others enthroned by a 2006 online survey included Morris dancing, pubs,
Big Ben, cricket, the St George flag, HMS Victory, the Domesday Book, Hadrian’s Wall,
Blackpool Tower, Pride and Prejudice, The Origin of Species, the Globe Theatre, and
Constable’s Hay Wain. Respondents in 2008 added fish and chips, Dr Who, the Glaston-
bury Festival, black cabs, Land Rovers, chicken tikka masala, and queuing.18
Americans are little less besotted by their indiscriminate collective legacy. American
Heritage magazine celebrates 4,000 places and 140,000 artefacts, from flags and muskets
to naval paintings, swords, quilts, uniforms, and spittoons. A typical issue featured the
Civil Rights movement, Mark Twain’s board games, Abraham Lincoln, the 1876 Battle of
Little Big Horn, the Pony Express, Benjamin Franklin, Satchel Paige, the Second World
War, the Mexican War, and historical sites in Colorado; the sixtieth anniversary issue
added Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and FDR to Emanuel Leutze’s iconic 1851 painting
Washington Crossing the Delaware.19
Treasured pasts transcend national legacies. Childhood memories, chats with grandma,
seaside souvenirs, family photographs, family trees, old trees, old money are prized
everywhere. The World Soundscape Project has recorded a vanishing sonic legacy that
includes the ring of cash registers, washboard scrubbing, butter-churning, razor strop-
ping, a hissing kerosene lamp, the squeak of leather saddlebags, hand coffee-grinders,
milk cans rattling on horse-drawn vehicles, heavy doors clanked shut and bolted, school
hand bells, rocking-chairs on wooden floors.20
What endears depends on who and where one is. Some live in patently ancient
countries, others in lands with newer lineaments. The latter seek out the former:
16
Patrick Cormack, Heritage in Danger (Quartet, 1978), 14; John Major, speech, 22 Apr. 1993, misquoting
George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, 4 vols.
(Secker & Warburg, 1968), 2: 56–109.
17
Lord Charteris of Amisfield, ‘The work of the National Heritage Memorial Fund’, Journal of the Royal
Society of Arts 132 (1984): 325–38 at 327; J. P. Carswell, ‘Lost for words on “the heritage”’, Times, 8 Sept.
1983: 11.
18
‘New icons of Englishness unveiled’, BBC News, 27 Apr. 2006; Robert Henderson, ‘English icons – an
exercise in Anglophobic NuLabour propaganda’, englandcalling.wordpress.com., 21 Nov. 2010; Georgi
Gyton, ‘Icons – a portrait of England reveals the next instalment’, 1 Apr. 2008, culture24.org.uk/history.
19
American Heritage 60:1 (Spring 2010): cover; 59:4 (Winter 2010).
20
R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT:
Inner Traditions, 1993), 209.
Americans come to Europe to feel at home in time. Or they dwell on other aspects
of heritage, antiques or arrowheads or ancestral locales. ‘Where newness and brevity of
tenure are the common substance of life’, Henry James wrote of nineteenth-century New
England, ‘the fact of one’s ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a
single spot . . . become[s] an element of one’s morality’.21
Massive migration and the loss of tangible relics intensify appetites for ancestors. ‘The
more the ancient landmarks are destroyed, the more many of us hunger for a firm
anchorage in time and place’, held England’s Herald of Arms half a century ago.
‘Through genealogy the transient flat-dweller of the cities can join himself to the peasant
rooted in ancestral soil’, for his lineage stems from that older world. ‘Cut off from his
roots by profound changes in ways of living, by migration from home and by loss of
contact with his kindred, modern man seeks . . . to reconstruct human links.’22
The rising appeal of roots is phenomenal. ‘In the early 1960s there would be a handful
of people looking through the census returns at the Public Record Office’, recalled the
then Rouge Dragon Pursuivant. ‘Now they’ve got a special search room with 100
microfilm readers, and in the summer there’s a big queue.’ Today the queue is much
longer. Most want to know more about their ancestors; family-tree websites promise
access to billions of records.23 Who Do You Think You Are, You Don’t Know You’re Born,
Faces of America, and Ancestors in the Attic are among TV’s most popular series. The
English National Trust’s 4.2 million members evince ‘unprecedented appetite for [the]
cultural and natural heritage; . . . all looking for our enduring roots’. Genetic tracing
potentially back to ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ and ‘Y-Chromosomal Adam’ makes personal
archaeology the world’s fastest-growing hobby, myriad DNA kits at the ready.24
‘Not long ago genealogy was a hobby for aristocrats, maiden aunts, and eccentrics’,
noted a 1988 survey, and ‘most Europeans would have stared blankly if asked to give their
great-grandmother’s name’. With humble origins newly chic, all forebears become
ancestral worthies.25 ‘When I was a boy at Harrow School in the 1920s’, the architectural
historian Sir John Summerson told me sixty years later, ‘I did all I could to prevent
anyone finding out my grandfather was a common labourer. Today I’d make sure
everyone knew.’ No longer content with ‘simple, honest, law-abiding’ forebears, many
roots-seekers now relish ancestral rogues.26 Jonathan Raban relates his Anglican vicar
father’s switch from genteel to rougher roots. His 1950s ‘antique truffle hunt [for] an
unbroken arc of . . . Anglo-Saxons in mead halls’ down through army officers and minor
gentry gave way in the 1980s to digging up ‘our criminal past’. Ancestors ‘engaged in
21
Henry James, Hawthorne (Macmillan, 1879), 14.
22
Anthony Richard Wagner, English Genealogy (1960), 3, and English Ancestry (Oxford, 1961), 6.
23
Patric Dickinson quoted in Martyn Harris, ‘Mark the heralds’, New Society, 9 Feb. 1984: 198.
24
Fiona Reynolds, National Trust Annual Review 2002/2004: 1; Chris Johnston, ‘Forget dark, silent archives
and an academic elite – this is a global internet phenomenon’, Times, 26 July 2010: 37; Jennifer Alsever,
‘DNA kits aim to link you to the here and then’, NYT, 5 Feb. 2006: BusinessSec5; Jerome de Groot,
Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (Routledge, 2009), 73–87.
25
‘Europe’s genealogy craze’, Newsweek, 7 Mar. 1988, 58–9. See André Burguière, ‘La généalogie’, in Pierre
Nora, comp., Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92), III.3: 18–51 at 20.
26
Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (Random House of Canada, 1993), 166.
Benefits 85
smuggling, privateering and the slave trade’, showed that ‘rapine, plunder, fiddling the
books and dealing under the counter ran in our blood’. Convict forebears who once
disgraced Australian descendants now lend them racy chic.27
Access to ancestors fosters visceral connection with previously unknown or shadowy
pasts, although often, as with Sebastian Coe’s discovery of slavery and illegitimacy, an
emotional rollercoaster. Scores of Internet firms – ‘23andMe’, ‘Mygenome’, ‘Mycellf’ –
promote identity quests. These purely mitochondrial and y-chromosomal ancestries
are misleadingly fragmentary, however, for they identify only two of a thousand
forebears ten generations back.28 But those bereft of ancestry – ‘branches without
roots’, like many descendants of slaves – feel that ‘even knowing some tiny part of
your history is better than knowing zero’.29 Biology certifies desirable identities.
Awareness of genetic relationship ‘not only tells us who we really are’, claims a
genealogical determinist, but ‘requires that one actively embrace’ that knowledge,
‘transforming ancestry into identity’.30
Eagerly adopted, these biologically certified identities are variously desirable. ‘I’m born
of Songhai – queen, artist, warrior and wise’, exults an African American. ‘I’ve never felt
more Irish’, crows an Irish-American testee; ‘my next tattoo is going to incorporate the
Red Hand of Ulster in honor of my O’Neill kin’. Others glory in descent from famed
ancestors, ‘ascrib[ing] greatness to themselves because it’s inscribed in their genes’.31
Many fondly boast royal antecedents, unaware that practically everyone is ‘descended
from one royal personage or another’. The African-American producer of ‘Faces in
America’ is chuffed to find that ‘we are all mulattos’.32 Going way way back, suggested
an astronomer, we might ‘get in touch with our cosmic roots’. Since most atoms in our
bodies stem from ancient supernovae, ‘we are, in a very real sense, children of the stars’.33
Many lovers of the past focus on its physical or spiritual retention, seeking enclaves
for anachronistic remnants and traditions. Lacking roots of their own, newcomers to old
villages spearhead militant defence of ancient landmarks against bulldozers usually
manned by unsentimental old-timers. Others adopt yesteryear’s forms and styles in
27
Jonathan Raban, Coasting (CollinsHarvill, 1986), 152, 172; Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of
Australian History (Allen & Unwin, 2000), 80-109; Christopher Koch, ‘Archival days’, in Gillian Winter,
ed., Tasmanian Insights (Hobart: State Library of Tasmania, 1992), 227–31; Tom Griffiths, Hunters and
Collectors (Cambridge, 1996), 223–5.
28
Sebastian Coe, ‘There’s no running away from your past’, Times2, 24 Aug. 2011: 11; Anders Nordgren and
Eric T. Juengst, ‘Can genomics tell me who I am?’ New Genetics & Society 28 (2009): 157–72 at 162.
29
Zora Neale Thurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; HarperCollins 1991), 21; Gina Paige quoted in
Jennifer Marshall, ‘Genes, money and the American quest for identity‘, New Scientist, 11 Mar. 2006: 10–11.
30
El-Haj, Genealogical Science, 114.
31
Kimberly Elise, Africanancestry.com/testimonials; Larry Slavens quoted in Amy Harmon, ‘Love you, K2a2a,
whoever you are‘, NYT, 22 Jan. 2006; Amy Harmon, ‘Greatness in your genes?’, NYT, 11 June 2006. See
Henry T. Greely, ‘Genetic genealogy’, in Barbara A. Koenig et al., eds., Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age
(Rutgers, 2008), 215–34 at 225; Eviatar Zerubavel, Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and
Community (Oxford, 2012), 6, 71.
32
Matt Crenson, ‘Genealogists discover royal roots for all’, Washington Post, 1 July 2006. See Richard Tutton,
‘They want to know where they came from’, New Genetics & Society 23:1 (2004): 105–29.
33
Frank Winkler, ‘Stardust memories’, NYT, 5 May 2006. See Daniel R. Altschuler, Children of the Stars
(Cambridge, 2002).
revival architecture and reproduction furniture, or connect with remoter antiquity at

archaeological digs. Colonial American sites attract a hundred million visitors a year,
drawn by nostalgia for organic community, artisanal relics and recipes, and intimacy with
nature and neighbours.34
Below I group past fulfilments under the terms familiarity; guidance; communion;
affirmation; identity; possession; enhancement; and escape. No boundaries delimit these
desiderata, and their benefits often dovetail. A sense of identity also enriches; familiarity
provides guidance. Revival-style building simultaneously justifies the present and sug-
gests a refuge from it. Tradition sanctified such 1970s innovations as pedestrian shopping
enclaves, high-rise condos, ‘heritage’ villages, gated communities (said to derive from
Puritan settlements), Southern plantations, Western missions, pioneer encampments.
Yet, like Disney’s Celebration and the Prince of Wales’s Poundbury, retro heritage also
panders to dreams of escape from the soulless stress of modern milieus.
Familiarity
Attachment to the past is inescapable. Dependence on recognition is universal. Concern
with what has been is built into our bones and embedded in our genes. Sheer survival
calls for facility of habit and faculty of memory; without them we could neither learn nor
long endure. Habit lets us repeat actions without conscious effort; memory recalls known
features, negotiates familiar routes, and harks back to familiar experience. Recall and
repetition dominate daily life.
The past renders the present recognizable. Its traces on the ground and in our minds
let us make sense of current scenes. Without past experience, no sight or sound would
mean anything; we perceive only what we are accustomed to. Features and patterns
become such because we share their history. Every object, every grouping, every view is
made intelligible by previous encounters, tales heard, texts read, pictures seen. Habitu-
ation unveils what lies around us. ‘If you saw a slab of chocolate for the first time, you
might think it was for mending shoes, lighting the fire, or building houses.’35 Perceived
identity stems from past acts and involvements. In Hannah Arendt’s words, ‘the reality
and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by
things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced’.36
Things that lack familiar elements or configurations remain incomprehensible. On
C. S. Lewis’s fictional planet a newcomer at first perceives ‘nothing but colours – colours
that refused to form themselves into things’, because ‘he knew nothing yet well enough to
see it’.37 No terrestrial scene, however, is totally novel except to a newborn infant: a life-
long urbanite dropped into a tropical jungle would still find day predictably alternating
with night, rain with sunshine; would recognize trees, sky, earth, and water, and respond
34
James C. Makens, ‘The importance of U.S. historic sites as visitor attractions’, Journal of Travel Research 25
(Winter 1987): 8–12; Catherine M Cameron and John B. Gatewood, ‘Excursions into the un-remembered
past: what people want from visits to historic sites’, Public Historian 22:3 (2000): 107–27.
35
John Wyndham, ‘Pillar to post’ (1971), in The Seeds of Time (Penguin, 1975), 140–69 at 148.
36
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958; 2nd edn 1998), 95–6.
37
C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938; Scribner, 2003), 43.
Benefits 87
to up and down, back and forth much as on city streets. Every earthly locale connects at
least marginally with everybody’s experienced past.
Not only is the past recalled in what we see; it is incarnate in what we create.
Familiarity endears surroundings; hence we keep memorabilia and favour new things
whose decor evokes the old. Electric fireplaces simulate Victorian coal or Tudor burning-
log effects; plastic cabinets and vinyl-tile floors come with a wood-grain look; leaded
lights painted on windows feign ancient cosiness; electric fixtures recall candles. Such
embrace of the past is often subconscious. Designers intend the anachronism of concrete
hearth logs or candle-drip light bulbs, non-functional spokes on car wheels, analogue
features on digital devices, book-like Kindles – ‘you just make it look like what was there
before’ – but for customers these skeuomorphs (material metaphors) seldom evoke
memories of the prototypes that lend them familiar charm.38 Obsolete artefacts live on
unobserved in parlance: newsmen make up pages ‘on the stone’ though that technology is
long defunct; horsepower applied to steam engines continues in cars; we still ‘dial’
numbers on cell phones; tarmac-flattening machines are ‘steamrollers’, graphite sticks
‘lead pencils’, computer printouts ‘manuscripts’. Few users are aware of computer
‘worms’ and ‘viruses’ biological antecedents.
Surrogate and second-hand experiences further infuse present perception: we conceive
of things not only as currently seen but as heard and read about before. My image of
London is a composite of personal exploration, recent media, and historical vignettes
from Hogarth and Turner, Pepys and Dickens. Despite the initial novelty of the English
scene, the American Charles Eliot Norton felt on arrival that an ‘old world look’ gave
‘those old world things . . . a deeper familiarity than the very things that have lain before
our eyes since we were born’.39 Past imprints that suffuse a place occlude first-hand
impressions. Constable’s Suffolk has become ‘the countryside’ for us all, even if we have a
quite different landscape outside our windows’, notes an art historian. ‘We have grown up
. . . with jigsaws and illustrated biscuit tins showing that little boy on a pony beside the
river with the mill in the distance . . . England was like that, [and] we convince ourselves
that his country is . . . still surviving today’.40 Hardy’s Wessex, Wordsworth’s Lake
District, Samuel Palmer’s North Downs, ‘ghost features kept in existence by nostalgia’,
take over the actual landscapes, imposing ‘a vanished past over a palpable present’. Monet
so ‘shaped our notion of the Ile de France’ as to remain its ‘complete, definitive and
everlasting’ rendition.41
Not just habituation leaves such impressions enduring. Hindsight makes better sense
of past scenes than the incoherent present; yesterday’s comprehensible perceptions
outlast today’s kaleidoscopic images. But the past we depend on to fathom the present
is mostly recent; it relies mainly on our own few earthly years. The farther back in time,
38
Bill Moggridge quoted in Joshua Brustein, ‘Why innovation doffs an old hat’, NYT, 18 Feb. 2011:
WeekRev.2. See Bill Moggridge, Designing Interactions (MIT Press, 2006); Nicholas Gessler, ‘Skeuomorphs
and cultural algorithms’, in V. W. Porto et al., eds., Evolutionary Programming (Springer, 1998), 229–38.
39
To James Russell Lowell, 30 Aug. 1868, in Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (London, 1913), 1: 306.
40
Nicholas Penny, ‘Constable: an English heritage abroad’, Sunday Times, 11 Nov. 1984: 43.
41
Hugh Prince, ‘Reality stranger than fiction’, Bloomsbury Geographer 6 (1973): 2–22 at 16; John Russell, ‘In
the mythical Ile de France’, IHT, 15 July 1983: 9.
the fewer the surviving traces, the more they have altered, and the less they anchor
contemporary reality.
Familiarity thrives on continuity in our selves and surroundings. Habit and memory
are effective and efficient only if things around us are stable enough to recognize and act
on with expectable results. Rare cataclysms aside, most aspects of the natural scene –
skies, seas, terrain, plants, animals – commonly endure little altered, changing slowly
enough to remain indubitably themselves. Thus, the ‘ancient permanence’ of his Dorset
Egdon Heath as ‘it always had been’ comforted Thomas Hardy:
Ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress [varied only
by] an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow . . . themselves almost crystallized to natural
products by long continuance . . . To know that everything around and underneath had been from
prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and
harassed by the irrepressible New.42
Even urban routes and facades generally persist in identifiable form. Nowadays,
however, novelty in things built and made comes on apace. And longevity and emigration
leave ever fewer in the locales, let alone the houses, of birth or youth. With so much
perforce left behind, what surrounds us in later life is seldom what we grew up with. But
biology ill equips us to cope with continually unfamiliar scenes. Stranded by swift and
massive displacement and seeking anchorage in some familiar sanctuary, we cling to
whatever survives from or reminds us of the past. We indulge habit and memory not
simply out of nostalgic yearning, but from a vital need for security in perilously novel
milieus.
In short, attachment to the past is both innate and essential. Amnesiacs unable to
recognize or retrieve memories, residents of realms transformed beyond recognition, and
refugees ejected from life-long locales are grievously bereft of cherished linkages –
cherished because familiar, and familiar because cherished. And those dispossessed seek
out substitute pasts.
Guidance
Faith that past instructs present dates to the dawn of history and animates much of it. For
Greeks history was useful because the rhythm of its changes promised ongoing repetition.
Study of the past might foretell, though not forestall, the future. Past example showed
sufferers how to bear cruel fate.43
The timeless truths of medieval and Renaissance historians taught morals, manners,
prudence, patriotism, statecraft, virtue, piety. Classical sources illumined present con-
cerns. A Carolingian historian summarized the Roman emperors’ deeds so that Charles II
42
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878; London, 1912), 6–7.
43
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 24, 35–6; Charles William Fornara, The Nature of
History in Ancient Greece and Rome (California, 1983), 106–15; John Marincola, Greek Historians (Oxford,
2001).
Benefits 89
of France might ‘readily observe from their actions what you should imitate or what you
should avoid’.44 Knowing the classical past enhanced humanist confidence in the rele-
vance of its lessons. In early-modern England ‘knowledge of history helped one to rise in
the world, and knowledge of God’s providence in history solaced adversity’.45 Such
guidance was morally elevating. Like pilgrimages to sacred sites, the study of history
improved character and inspired fealty.
The past’s exemplary power and purpose remained an Enlightenment certitude:
The usefulness of history . . . is a truth too generally receiv’d to stand in need of proof . . . The
theatre of the world supplies only a limited number of scenes, which follow one another in
perpetual succession. In seeing the same mistakes to be regularly follow’d by the same misfortunes,
’tis reasonable to imagine, that if the former had been known, the latter would have been avoided.46
Knowing the follies of the past, one might predict and perhaps avert those to come.
Scholars who found history exemplary likened all past and present. ‘Mankind are so
much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange’,
stated David Hume. ‘Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal
principles of human nature.’47
This authoritative aim suffused Western thought well into the nineteenth century. But
the kind of guidance the past provided was now quite different. Earlier scholars had
assumed that classical models exemplified eternal virtues: they saw antiquity’s honour,
patriotism, stoicism, and tribulations mirrored in their own times. But even in the
seventeenth century, some were showing pasts unlike one another, undermining history’s
utility as guide; viewing the past historically scuttled its timeless truths.48 Growing
distance from antiquity and awareness of its diversity severely tempered its authority.
For Victorians history ceased to provide explicit precedents or moral exemplars. Instead,
parallels with past circumstances alternated with past–present contrasts as instructive
lessons. History was about change as well as stasis.
Despite postmodern scepticism, the past is still invoked as cautionary lesson, on the
hoary maxim that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.49 Popular history
continues to deploy past wisdom for present perplexities. The advice of legendary heroes
is eagerly solicited; pundits ever asked what Lincoln or Washington or Henry Ford would
do today. ‘How to be boss – learn from a past master’ extols management maxims of
Moses, Elizabeth I, Attila the Hun, and Machiavelli. Jesus is consulted on everything from
44
Lupus of Ferrières to Charles the Bold (844), quoted in Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the
Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004), 275–6.
45
F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought 1580–1640 (Routledge,
1962), 59. See Myron P. Gilmore, Humanists and Jurists (Harvard, 1963), 37; Paulina Kewes, ‘History and
its uses’, 1–30, and Daniel Woolf, ‘From hystories to the historical’, 31–68, both in Paulina Kewes, ed., The
Uses of History in Early Modern England (California, 2006).
46
Charles Duclos, History of Louis XI (Paris, 1745), 1: ii. I pruned Duclos’s translation.
47
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), in The Philosophical Works (repr. edn
1886; Aalen: Scientia, 1964), 4: 3–135 at 68.
48
Anthony T. Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007).
49
George Santayana, The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress (London, 1905), 1: 284.
the rectitude of invading Iraq to Sarah Palin’s presidential candidacy.50 Popular films
depicted modern Chinese going back to gain insights from historical figures, until in 2011
the government, vexed that this implied a superior past, banned time travel for fomenting
fatalism, feudalism, and reincarnation.51
Even a postmodernist contends that history provides ‘moral lessons’. Not the old
lessons, however. ‘The past really is sometimes, past’, warns an anthropologist; ‘after a
while it runs out of lessons to teach us’. Yet to ‘effectively inhabit’ the present one must
‘learn how the past made it what it is’, holds a littérateur.52 If no longer a model, it
remains a guide; if it cannot tell us what we should do, it tells us what we might do;
ominous or auspicious, it prefigures the present.
Communion
Empathy with precursors reanimates exemplary pasts. Archetypal is communion of the
living with the dead in the eucharistic consumption of Christ’s body and blood. Commu-
nion expressed in re-enactment is popular in secular like sacred ceremony, as detailed
in Chapter 11.
Anachronistic rapport used to be literally evoked: ‘Alexander walked in the footsteps of
Miltiades’, and Caesar ‘took Alexander as his prototype’.53 Renaissance and Enlightenment
worthies engaged in intimate converse with classical poets and philosophers. Petrarch
felt himself among Roman authors as he read them: ‘It is with these men that I live at such
times and not with the thievish company of today’, he ‘told’ Livy.54 Exiled Machiavelli
relished the past’s immediacy. He spent evenings in ‘the ancient courts of ancient men,
where, being lovingly received I . . . speak with them . . . and they courteously answer me. For
hours . . . I give myself completely over to the ancients.’55 A later Vatican curator talked to his
classical statues ‘as if they were living’, reported John Evelyn, ‘kissing & embracing them’.56
This love was at best symbolically requited. Intimate converse with ancient Romans
was incompatible with their historical distance, of which the ancients’ failure to respond
kept humanists poignantly aware. Their felt empathy with great classical authors was
not reciprocated. The beloved ancients ‘maintained a marble or a bronze repose that
could break hearts’, in Thomas Greene’s phrase. ‘The pathos of this incomplete embrace’
left humanist adoration unrequited.57
Eighteenth-century philosophes wrapped themselves in the togas of Cicero and Lucretius
to re-enact ancient converse. ‘Continuously preoccupied with Rome and Athens’,
wrote Rousseau while reading Plutarch, ‘living . . . with their great men, . . . I pictured
50
Stanley Bing, What Would Machiavelli Do? (HarperCollins, 2002); Adam Cohen, ‘Consulting Jesus on tax
policies’, IHT, 11 June 2003: 9.
51
Ian Johnson, ‘Studio city’, New Yorker, 22 Apr. 2013: 48–55 at 53.
52
Alan Munslow, The New History (Longman, 2003), 177; Clifford Geertz, ‘Morality tale’, NYRB, 7 Oct. 2004:
4–6; Edward Mendelson, ‘Post-modern vanguard’, London Review of Books, 3 Sept. 1981: 10.
53
Thomas Mann, ‘Freud and the future’ (1936), in Essays of Three Decades (Knopf, 1947), 411–28 at 424.
54
22 Feb. 1349 (?) in Petrarch’s Letters to Classical Authors, 101–2.
55
To Francesco Vettori, 10 Dec. 1513, quoted in Zachary Sayre Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Johns
Hopkins, 2011), 8–9.
56
Diary of John Evelyn, 27 Feb. 1644 (1818; Oxford, 1959), 150, referring to Hippolito Vitellesco.
57
Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (Yale, 1982), 43.
Benefits 91
myself as a Greek or a Roman.’58 The philosopher Baron d’Holbach was days on end
enthralled by ‘the ever-charming conversation of Horace, Virgil, Homer and all our noble
friends of the Elysian fields’.59 Ancient heroes permeated Enlightenment consciousness.
‘He has all the eloquence of Cicero, the benevolence of Pliny, and the wisdom of Agrippa’,
wrote Frederick the Great in 1740 after meeting Voltaire, who retorted that Frederick
‘talked in as friendly a manner to me as Scipio to Terence’.60 Napoleon identified first
with Alexander, then with Charlemagne – not that he was like Charlemagne or that ‘“My
situation is like Charlemagne’s”’, but quite simply: ‘“I am he.”’61
In Anne-Louis Girodet’s 1801 canvas, ghosts of Ossian’s characters welcome Napoleon
and other French heroes in an Elysium, spirits of dead ‘in inspirational and amicable
cohabitation with the living’.62 At Victor Hugo’s 1850s seances, his guest-list
included Cain, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah, Sappho, Socrates, Jesus, Judas, Mohammed, Joan of Arc,
Luther, Galileo, Molière, the Marquis de Sade, . . . Mozart, Walter Scott, some angels, Androcles’
Lion, Balaam’s Ass . . . The language was mid-nineteenth-century French, though . . . Hannibal
spoke in Latin, and Androcles’ Lion . . . a few words of lion language.
Hugo was pleased to find that all the great minds of the past spoke more or less like
himself.63
Fantasized communion lingered into modernity. Bartold Georg Niebuhr meant his
history of Rome to shed such a light that the Romans would stand before his readers’
eyes, ‘distinct, intelligible, familiar as contemporaries, with their institutions and the
vicissitudes of their destiny, living and moving’.64 Colloquies among classical heroes
animate Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations (1824–36): ‘To-day there came
to visit us . . . Thucydides . . . Sophocles left me about an hour ago . . . Euripedes was with
us at the time.’ His ‘conversations’ involved figures who could never have met, conflating
centuries in the fashion Gibbon had mocked.65 ‘How much instruction has been
conveyed to us in the form of conversations at banquets, by Plato and Xenophon and
Plutarch’, exclaims Thomas Love Peacock’s Dr Opimiam.66 Fancying himself an ancient,
many a Victorian had an insistent ‘urge to buttonhole one of those old Greeks and
Romans and tell him what the future had in store’.67 But retrospective prophecy did not
spare them humanist pathos; as Hazlitt wistfully put it, ‘We are always talking of the
Greeks and Romans; – they never said any thing of us.’68
58
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1781; Penguin, 1973), 20.
59
To John Wilkes, 3 Dec. 1746, in Max Pearson Cushing, Baron d’Holbach (New York, 1914), 9–10.
60
Wayne Andrews, Voltaire (New York: New Directions, 1981), 42, 47.
61
Mann, ‘Freud and the future’, 424.
62
Girodet painting, L’Apothéose des héros français mort pour la Patrie pendant la guerre de la Liberté (1802);
Simon During, ‘Mimic toil’, Rethinking History 11 (2007): 318.
63
Graham Robb, Victor Hugo: A Biography (Norton, 1999), 334; Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian
Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford, 2002), 246–7.
64
Bartold Georg Niebuhr, The History of Rome (1811–12; Cambridge, 1831), 1: 5.
65
Walter Savage Landor, Pericles and Aspasia (1836; London, 1890), letters 141, 145, 154, 2: 28, 36, 53;
Edward Gibbon, Index Expurgatorius (c. 1768–9), No. 30, in The Miscellaneous Works (London, 1814), 5: 566.
66
Thomas Love Peacock, Gryll Grange (London, 1861), 168.
67
Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Blackwell, 1980), 52.
68
William Hazlitt, ‘Schlegel on the drama’ (1816), in CW (Dent, 1930–4), 16: 57–99 at 66.
Communing with great figures from the past remains a popular lure. PBS’s Meeting
of Minds (1977–81) welcomed the ‘historically illiterate’ to hear the bygone famed – Plato,
Socrates, Aristotle, Cleopatra, Aquinas, Luther, Bacon, Shakespeare (and some of his
characters), Voltaire, Marie Antoinette, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Karl Marx, Florence
Nightingale – talk with producer Steve Allen ‘in their own words’ (mostly). ‘Newton,
Cromwell, Byron, Milton, Tennyson, Pepys, Darwin: You ought to try living with them some
time’, tempts American students to come to Cambridge. ‘Sit under the same apple tree that
gave Sir Isaac Newton a headache – and the world the theory of gravitation. Stroll through
the courts, quads, and pathways that inspired Milton, Pepys and Tennyson.’69 Hearing
late twentieth-century Virginians talking as though Thomas Jefferson ‘might, at any
moment, train his telescope on them from Monticello’, a British historian realized that,
for Americans, long-dead precursors were their heirs’ and successors’ still living property.70
A few moderns still claim actual contact with precursors. Wilmarth Lewis, who spent
most of his life immortalizing Horace Walpole, at times felt literally in touch with him.71
But such empathy is much rarer nowadays. Few are steeped enough in the classics to
claim Horace or Livy or Homer as intimates. And historical relativism distances even the
most admired exemplars. Only reincarnates and unschooled naives now achieve whole-
hearted communion with folk from any past.
Affirmation
More than rapport, the present seeks reaffirmation. The past endorses present views and
acts, showing their descent from or likeness to former ones. Previous usage sanctions
today’s. Precedent legitimates current practice as traditional: ‘This is how it’s always been
done.’ What has been should continue to be or become again.
Validation often dates from time immemorial. Traditionalists presume that things are
or should be the way they always have been. Oral transmission readjusts the past to fit its
idealized fixity. Literate peoples less easily sustain that fiction, for written records reveal
pasts unlike the present; archives expose traditions eroded by time and corrupted by
novelty, anything but faithfully adhered to. Yet societies nonetheless invoke supposedly
timeless values and unbroken lineages. French rulers recurrently identify with the Gallic
hero Vercingetorix, Napoleon to stress continuity with ancient Rome, Pétain to legitimize
the Vichy regime, Mitterrand to proclaim French parentage of the European Union.
Glorying in, yet greater than, previous Caesars, Mussolini favoured a celestial trinity:
‘Homer, the divine in Art, Jesus, the divine in Life, and Mussolini, the divine in Action’.72
Whig historians claimed Victorian Britain as the heir of legal and political forms
essentially faithful to medieval origins. Fundamentalist Christians cite biblical authority
69
University of California, Los Angeles, advertisement, NYRB, 22 Jan. 1981, 20.
70
J. R. Pole, ‘The American past: is it still usable?’ Journal of American Studies 1 (1967): 63–78 at 63.
71
Geoffrey Hellman, ‘The age of Wilmarth Lewis’, New Yorker, 15 Sept. 1975, 104–11.
72
Michael Dietler, ‘Tale of three sites’, World Archaeology 30 (1998): 85, and ‘Our ancestors the Gauls’,
American Anthropologist 96 (1994): 584–605; Asvero Gravelli, Uno e molti: interpretazione spirituali di
Mussolini (1938), quoted in R. J. B. Bosworth, Whispering City: Rome and Its Histories (Yale, 2011), 195.
Benefits 93
for perdurable creeds and values. Modern Greeks look back to Hellenic precursors for
grandeur not only Greek but globally classical.73
Recovering lost or subverted institutions legitimates the present order against subse-
quent mishap or corruption. Renaissance humanists looked behind dark ages of evil and
oblivion to descry classical glories. Revolutionary innovators, noted Marx, evoke ancient
exemplars:
In creating something that has never yet existed, . . . they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the
past . . . and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene
of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned
the mask of Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman
republic and the Roman empire.74
So did the Pre-Raphaelites invoke ‘pure’ Gothic, Tea Party libertarians the Founding
Fathers. Whig historians’ claims of unbroken continuity alternated with adjurations to
restore traditions interrupted by ‘foreign’ innovations.75
Endlessly salutary, Founding Fathers remain uplift fixtures. ‘His humanness will fit you
like a glove’, the History Channel touted its Benjamin Franklin. ‘You’ll be reminded of the
best that’s in you . . . The man who inspired a revolution in 1776, will leave you inspired –
in 2004 – by your own personal revolution.’ More mundane, or earthy, is the Elvis Presley
link promised purchasers of ‘a few precious drops of Elvis’s perspiration . . . Elvis poured
out his soul for you, and NOW you can let his PERSPIRATION be your INSPIRATION.’76
A past improved on betokens advance from dear but dread times. Those who sur-
mount a deprived youth enjoy looking back to measure their progress, like The Five Little
Peppers whose ‘dear old things’ at the beloved little house in Badgertown confirm their
rise from rags to riches.77 We cherish the bad old days as proof of our improvement,
conserving its remnants as evidence ‘that life was really awful for our ancestors’, hence a
lot better for us.78 But improvers, no less than traditionalists, revere organic roots. The
former reject ‘the narrative of nostalgia [that] looks longingly to a past presumed to be
simpler and better than . . . the present’; the latter regret ‘the narrative of progress . . . that
has removed us from it’.79 Moderns for whom antiquity or childhood validates either
tradition or progress neither envy the past’s felicities nor scorn its deficiencies; instead,
they identify with people of the past.
73
P. B. M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978); J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent:
Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981); Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation
of History (London, 1931); Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and
National Imagination in Greece (Oxford, 2007).
74
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852; New York, 1972), 245–6.
75
J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (Methuen, 1972), 245–60.
76
History Channel ad, NYT, 5 Dec. 2004; 1985 greeting card; John Windsor, ‘Identity parades’, in John Elsner
and Roger Cardinal, eds., Cultures of Collecting (Reaktion, 1994), 49–67 at 56.
77
Margaret Sidney, Five Little Peppers Midway (Boston, 1890), 148; Betty Levin, ‘Peppers’ progress’, Horn
Book Magazine 57 (1981): 161–73 at 170.
78
Dave Barry, ‘Why I like old things’, Historic Preservation 35:1 (1983): 49.
79
Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial
Williamsburg (Duke, 1997), 99, 130.
In short, the past is a route to self-realization; through it we become more our

selves, better selves, reinvigorated by our appreciation of it. The healing power of
popular history – especially film – makes the past ‘a source of reflection and recuper-
ation about ways of perception, habits of thought and ways of being that, could we but
recover them and hold them in memory, might help us to become the kind of people
we have always wished to be’.80
Identity
The past is integral to our sense of self, ‘I was’ requisite to being sure that ‘I am’. Ancient
Greeks equated individual existence with what was memorable; Renaissance humanists
found the past essential to personality. Rousseau’s Confessions and Wordsworth’s lyrics
inaugurated modern consciousness of cumulative identity. Even painful memories
remain essential emotional history. Constructing a coherent self-narrative, as discussed
in Chapter 7, is widely held crucial to personal integrity and psychic well-being.
Many maintain touch with their past in natal or long-inhabited locales. Places need not
be magnificent to be memorable. The genius of the place is identifiable ‘more by the
tenacity of its users than by its architecture’, wrote an English architect-planner. ‘It may
even be ugly, will generally be shabby, will invariably be overcrowded . . . Civic societies
passionately defend its every cobblestone’, but they guard ‘more than bricks and mortar;
it is the need for . . . rootedness’.81 In London’s mundane Kentish Town, a chronicler
time and again noticed how important to residents were memories of their physical
habitat.82 Helen Santmyer’s childhood Ohio town, ‘shabby, worn, and unpicturesque’,
was cherished nonetheless.
The unfastidious heart makes up its magpie hoard, heedless of the protesting intelligence. Valen-
tines in a drugstore window, the smell of roasting coffee, sawdust on the butcher’s floor–these are
as good to have known and remembered . . . as fair streets and singing towers and classic arcades.83
As Adam Nicolson writes of his childhood Sissinghurst, ‘a place consists of everything that
has happened there; it is a reservoir of memories and . . . a menu of possibilities . . . Any
place that people have loved is . . . drenched both in belonging and in longing to belong.’84
Some need the tangible feel of native soil; for others the faintest emanations suffice.
The endurance even of unseen relics can sustain identity. ‘Many symbolic and historic
locations in a city are rarely visited by its inhabitants’, noted planner Kevin Lynch,
but ‘the survival of these unvisited, hearsay settings conveys a sense of security and
continuity’.85 Those bereft of ancestral locales forge identities through other pasts. ‘Of all
the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks’ struck
80
David Harlan quoted in Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘The reel Joan of Arc: reflections on the theory and practice
of the historical film’, Public Historian 25:3 (Summer 2003): 61–77 at 70.
81
Lionel Brett, Parameters and Images: Architecture in a Crowded World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), 143.
82
Gillian Tindall, The Fields Beneath (1977; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002), 212.
83
Helen Santmyer, Ohio Town (1962; Harper & Row, 1984), 307, 50.
84
Adam Nicolson, Sissinghurst (Harper, 2008), 73.
85
Kevin Lynch, What Time Is This Place? (MIT Press, 1972), 40.
Benefits 95
Willa Cather as ‘the most depressing and disheartening’.86 Lack of links in new lands
leads many emigrants to romanticize remote homelands. Emotional ties with Wallace
Stegner’s ancestral but never-visited Norway mitigated his history-starved boyhood on a
New World frontier prairie.87
Portable emblems lend needed continuity. For exiled Jews after the destruction of
the Jerusalem Temple it was the Torah, Heinrich Heine’s ‘portable Fatherland’. Forced
out of their ancient homeland, the East African Masai ‘took with them the names of their
hills, plains and rivers and gave them to the hills, plains and rivers in the new country,
carrying their cut roots with them as a medicine’.88 Many who sunder home ties furnish
new landscapes with replicas of scenes left behind. Azoreans in Toronto reproduced
the flagstoned patios, wine cellars, and household saints of their island homes; English
suburb and High Street features embellish towns in Australia and Ontario, Benares and
Barbados. An Indian’s homesickness in London is solaced by familiar street furniture – the
imperial British having previously brought it to India to palliate their own homesickness.89
Keepsakes substitute for surrendered sites. Loading jalopies for the trek to California,
Steinbeck’s uprooted Okies are told there is no room for such souvenirs as old hats and
china dogs, but cannot bear to leave them behind – ’How will we know it’s us without our
past?’90 The elderly need mementoes and memories to assuage the loss of long-loved
places. Hoarding visual reminders, some are harder hit by the loss of family photos than
of money or jewellery. Keepsakes anchor precious memories. Jean Paul’s schoolteacher
devoted an hour daily to recalling his childhood. He kept things from each stage of youth
– a taffeta baby bonnet, a gold sequined whip, a tin finger ring, a box with old booklets, a
grandfather clock, a perch for finches – and on his deathbed surrounded himself with
these souvenirs.91
In China, reminders of vanished sites and structures are apt to be poetic rather than
pictorial, the past treasured less in things than in words. Revering ancestral memory and
calligraphy, the Chinese traditionally held the past’s material traces in small regard.
Memory of art, not its physical persistence, suffused consciousness and spurred new
creations.92 China lacks such ruins as the Roman Forum or Angkor Wat, not for want of
skills ‘but because of a different attitude about how to achieve an enduring monument’.
Ancient cities became sites of heritage through ‘a past of words, not of stones’. Suzhou’s
Tang dynasty Maple Bridge is famed as a locus, not for its looks. No poem describes the
stones forming the span: what mattered was their literary associations. The city’s essential
legacy was ‘a past of the mind’. Memory is prized less in perishable monuments than
86
Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913; Houghton Mifflin, 1941), 19.
87
Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow (1962; Penguin, 2000), 112.
88
Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings, ed. Terry
Pinkard (1833-5), xix, 213; Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], Out of Africa (Putnam, 1937), 402.
89
Deryck Holdsworth, ‘Landscapes and archives as texts’, in Paul Groth and Todd Bressi, eds., Understanding
Ordinary Landscapes (Yale, 1997), 44–55 at 54; Lynch, What Time Is This Place?, 39.
90
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (Heinemann, 1939), 76, 79.
91
Jean Paul Friedrich [Richter], Leben des vernügten Schulmeisterlein Maria Wuz in Auenthal (1790; Munich:
Goldmann, 1966).
92
Wang Gungwu, ‘Loving the ancient in China’, in Isabel McBryde, ed., Who Owns the Past? (Melbourne:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 175–95; Pierre Ryckmans, ‘The Chinese attitude towards the past’ (1986),
in [as Simon Leys], The Hall of Uselessness (NYRB, 2013), 285–301.
in imperishable words that recall a vanished past.93 Only lately has wholesale demolition
sparked efforts to salvage venerated sites and replicate structures, just as wealthy Chinese
pay astronomical sums to repatriate ancient treasures. Sales in China’s art auctions
rose ten-fold between 2003 and 2012.94
Prized pasts legitimate tribes and nations. ‘A collectivity has its roots in the past’, wrote
Simone Weil. ‘We possess no other life, no other living sap, than the treasures stored up
from the past and digested, assimilated, and created afresh by us.’95 Rootless groups are
like orphaned children. In Iceland family and communal lore make the past all-pervasive,
equating history with identity.96 Parallels between personal and national identity, a
powerful stimulus to nineteenth-century nationalism, likened family icons and heirlooms
to national monuments.97 ‘Antiquity stands . . . revealed before our eyes’ exulted Danish
archaeologist Jens Worsaae.
We see our forefathers . . . We hold in our hands the swords with which they made the Danish
name respected and feared . . . The remains of antiquity thus bind us more firmly to our native
land; hills and vales, fields and meadows become connected with us . . . Their barrows and
antiquities constantly remind us that our forefathers lived in this country, from time
immemorial.98
Reverence for the collective patrimony suffused nineteenth-century French identity.

Clovis, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, pilgrimages, and cathedrals figured like stained glass in
fictive reconstructions. Bygone spirituality, chivalry, and troubadour traditions embodied
pre-industrial, faith-based folkways against urbanization, migration, dialect degeneration.
Pilgrims and primitifs preserved relics, mounted neo-medieval festivals, embellished
today with yesteryear. ‘The men of these ancient times are really our fathers’, declared
medievalist Gaston Paris. ‘Nothing touches me more than knowing what my faraway
ancestors were like.’99
The recovery of things past allays present loss. Subjugated peoples enshrine historical
comforts. The neglect of Welsh history ‘hath eclipsed our Power, and corrupted our
Language, and almost blotted us out of the Books of Records’, lamented a chronicler; to
93
F. W. Mote, ‘A millennium of Chinese urban history: form, time, and space concepts in Soochow’, Rice
University Studies 59:4 (1973): 35–66 at 49–53; Zongjie Wu, ‘Let fragments speak for themselves:
vernacular heritage, emptiness, and Confucian discourse of narrating the past’, International Journal of
Heritage Studies 20 (2014): 851–65.
94
Paola Demattè, ‘After the flood: cultural heritage and cultural politics in Chongoing municipality and the
Three Gorges areas, China’, Future Anterior 9:1 (Summer 2012): 49–64; Ian Buruma, ‘The man who got it
right’, NYRB, 12 Aug. 2013: 68–72 at 72; Madeleine O’Dea, ‘How China went from art-market afterthought
to world auction superpower’, Art & Auction, May 2012; David Barboza and Amanda Cox, ‘Art and fraud
in China’, NYT, 28 Oct. 2013: 1, 3–4.
95
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (1949; Harper, 1971), 8, 51.
96
Kirsten Hastrup, ‘Uchronia and the two histories of Iceland, 1400–1800’, in her Other Histories (Routledge,
1992), 102–20 at 114–17.
97
Max Dvořák, Katechismus der Denkmalpflege (Vienna, 1916).
98
J. J. A. Worsaae, The Primeval Antiquities of Denmark (1843; London, 1849), 149–50.
99
Anne-Marie Thiesse, Ils apprenaient la France: L’exaltation des régions dans le discours patriotique
(Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1997); Gaston Paris, La Poésie du Moyen Age (1885), quoted in
Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-Siècle France
(Ashgate, 2003), 218–19.
Benefits 97
Figure 5 Securing a national symbol: Market Square, Old Town, Warsaw,

after Nazi destruction, 1944
Figure 6 Securing a national symbol: Market Square, Old Town, Warsaw,

after Polish reconstruction, 1970
mitigate these calamities, scribes and antiquaries salvaged and magnified family lore –
giving rise to Vanbrugh’s portrayal of Wales as ‘a realm where every Man is born a
Gentleman, and a Genealogist’.100 Nineteenth-century Irish glorified iconic artefacts –
cross, harp, brooch, round tower – against English aspersions of primitive savagery.
Governor-General Lord Durham’s 1839 slur that French Canadians were ‘a people
with no history, and no literature’ roused Québécois militancy. Twentieth-century
Turks reconfigured their Ottoman past to reflect their title to present greatness.101
Beleaguered states guard unto death legacies that embody their communal spirit.
Rather than see their city destroyed, Carthaginians beseeched Roman conquerors to
kill them all.102 Hence iconoclasts – Saracen, Tudor, Communard, Nazi, Taliban –
uproot tangible emblems of foes’ identity. The Nazis sacked historic Warsaw to cripple
the will of the Poles, who quickly rebuilt the old centre (Figs. 5 and 6). ‘It was our
duty to resuscitate it.’ ‘We wanted the Warsaw of our day and that of the future to
continue the ancient tradition.’103 Many states today nationalize their tangible past,
outlawing pillage or excavation by foreign archaeologists and demanding the return of
antiquities previously taken as booty, sold, or stolen. ‘Whatever is Greek, wherever
in the world’, asserts a Greek culture minister, ‘we want it back’. ‘Whoever took our
stuff’, echoes a Peruvian culture minister, ‘we want it back because it is here where it
belongs.’104
Like pilfered antiquities, lost or stolen identities are coveted by those deprived of them.
Yearning for ancient connections marks current retrievals of long-hidden Jewish ancestry
by Africans, as Israel’s lost tribes, and by Latin Americans, as descendants of conversos
expelled from Iberia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Many reconvert to Judaism.
Myriad clues manifest the ‘inescapable’ ancestral pull.
There were the grandparents who wouldn’t eat pork, the fragments of a Jewish tongue from
medieval Spain that spiced up the language, and puzzling family rituals such as the lighting of
candles on Friday nights. ‘The Jewish spark was never quenched, and . . . they are taking
back the Jewish identity that was so brutally stolen from their forefathers.’ They felt history
coursing through their veins as they . . . put together pieces of a puzzle that pointed to a Jewish
ancestry.105
100
Thomas Jones, The British Language in Its Lustre (1688; Scolar Press 1972); John Vanbrugh, Aesop (1697),
in CW, 2: 1–65 at 33.
101
Jeanne Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival 1830–1930 (Thames & Hudson, 1980);
Richard Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Wisconsin, 1988), 19–20; Tekin Alp,
‘The restoration of Turkish history’, in Elie Kedourie, ed., Nationalism in Asia and Africa (Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1971), 207–24 at 211.
102
‘Punic Wars’, in Appian’s Roman History (before ad 165) (Harvard, 1912), bk. 8, pt. I, ch. 12, 1: 545.
103
Stanislaw Lorentz, ‘Reconstruction of the old town centers of Poland’, Historic Preservation Today (1966),
43–72 at 46–7.
104
Giorgios Voulgarakis quoted in Helena Smith, ‘Greece demands return of stolen heritage’, Guardian, 10
July 2006; Luis Jaime Castillo Butters quoted in Rachel Donadio, ‘Vision of home: returned antiquities’,
NYT, 20 Apr. 2014: AR 21.
105
Juan Forero, ‘Colombian evangelical Christians convert to Judaism, embracing hidden past’, Washington
Post, 24 Nov. 2012, quoting Michael Freund of Shavei Israel.
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Even lacking clues to any linkage, ‘many Jews by choice are descendants of Jews’, drawn
by ‘subconscious historical memory’, contends an advocate.106 ‘It was like our souls had
memory’, said a Colombian evangelical pastor who led dozens of his flock back to
Judaism.107
Possession
Proclaiming ownership greatly augments the past’s benefits. Possession enhances self-
possession. ‘Everyone loves his country, his manners, his language, his wife, his children,
not because they are the best in the world’, held Herder, ‘but because they are absolutely
his own, and loves himself and his labors in them’. Posthumous control over children,
memory, fame feeds craving for virtual immortality.108
Whether personal goal or collective cause, possessing the past is self-interested. ‘When
the child begins to say, “Mine!” it is to state that it is not yours’. What’s mine is thereby
endeared. Similarly selfish is the collective legacy. ‘All heritage is someone’s heritage and
therefore logically not someone else’s.’ And because it is ours, adds a philosopher, ‘stories
of our past’ carry more weight ‘than stories of other people’s pasts’.109 As Yigael Yadin
exhorted Israeli army recruits at the fabled Dead Sea fortress of Masada, ‘When Napoleon
stood among his troops next to the pyramids of Egypt, he declared: “Four thousand years
of history look down upon you.” But what would he not have given to be able to say:
“Four thousand years of your own history look down upon you.”’110 The prior ‘Minoan’
past contrived for Cretans by Arthur Evans enabled them to view Hellenes ‘from a
position of superiority, as the direct descendants and thus rightful owners of the past’.111
Such claims – usually invented or exaggerated, as discussed in Chapter 12 – buttress
ruling elites everywhere.112
Ownership links heirloom possessors to original makers and intervening owners,
augmenting self-worth. An American in John Cheever’s story gloats over his inherited
antique lowboy ‘as a kind of family crest . . . that would vouch for the richness of his past
106
Jonina Duker, ‘Genealogy on a grand scale’, in Karen Primack, ed., Jews in Places You Never Thought of
(Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1998), 273–5 at 275.
107
Juan Carlos Villegas quoted in Juan Forero, ‘Colombian evangelical Christians convert to Judaism’,
Washington Post, 24 Nov. 2012.
108
Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschkeit (1784–91), quoted in
Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country (Clarendon Press, 1995), 122; Steffen Huck et al., ‘Learning to like
what you have’, Economic Journal 115 (2005): 689–702; Jerome C. Wakefield, ‘Immortality and the
externalization of self: Plato’s unrecognized theory of generativity’, in Don P. McAdams and Ed de St
Aubin, eds., Generativity and Adult Development: How and Why We Care for the Next Generation
(American Psychological Association, 1999), 133–74 at 166–7.
109
J. E. Tunbridge and Gregory J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage (Wiley, 1996), 20–1; Jeffrey Blustein, The
Moral Demands of Memory (Cambridge, 2008), 196–7.
110
Quoted in Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (Penguin, 1971), 288.
111
Yannis Hamilakis, ‘The colonial, the national, and the local: legacies of the “Minoan” past’, in Yannis
Hamilakis and Nicoletta Momigliano, eds., Archaeology and European Modernity: Producing and
Consuming the ‘Minoans’, Creta Antica 7 (Padua: Bottego d’Erasmo, 2006), 145–62 at 158–9.
112
J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (1969; Penguin, 1973), 26.
and authenticate his descent from the most aristocratic of the seventeenth-century
settlers’.113 Others’ legacies incite covetous lust. Collectors annex exotic relics without
compunction and soon convince themselves they are rightfully their own. From the ruins
of Palmyra, Robert Wood ‘carried off the marbles wherever it was possible’, complaining
that ‘the avarice or superstition of the inhabitants made that task difficult – sometimes
impracticable’.114 Taking fragments of Melrose Abbey for his own ‘Gothic shrine’, Walter
Scott exulted in ‘that glorious old pile [as] a famous place for antiquarian plunder. [With]
rich bits of old-time sculpture for the architect, and old-time story for the poet, there is as
rare picking in it as in a Stilton cheese, and in the same taste, – the mouldier the better’.115
Digging for antiquities at Saqqara in the 1870s, Amelia Edwards felt remorse at being a
party to plunder, but
soon became quite hardened to such sights, and learned to rummage among dusty sepulchres with
no more compunction than would have befitted a gang of professional body-snatchers . . . So
infectious is the universal callousness, and so overmastering is the passion for relic-hunting, that
I do not doubt we should again do the same things under the same circumstances.116
A psychiatrist termed the craving for relics ‘a passion so violent that it is inferior to
love or ambition only in the pettiness of its aims’. Accumulation afflicts us all. ‘Life is
about acquiring STUFF, acquiring more STUFF, . . . storing STUFF, acquiring even more
STUFF’, notes a journalist, ‘and then you die with STUFF all’.117 As Sartre’s Antoine
Roquentin asserts, ‘You don’t put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. The
past is a landlord’s luxury.’118 Cumulation nourishes the collector’s sense of self. ‘“I am
what I own”, whether cattle or coin, concubines or Canalettos, has been the guiding
principle of the technically ignorant throughout the ages’.119 And of the knowledgeable as
well. ‘A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his’, wrote William James,
including ‘his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his
lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account’.120
Historians commonly deny the charge that their expertise entitles them to own the
past.121 Yet they not uncommonly covet the archives they research, though few match the
callous greed of a Connecticut chronicler who culled what he wanted from his town’s
oldest newspapers and then burned the rest. ‘The history of the Town of Bethel is my own
113
‘The lowboy’, in The Stories of John Cheever (Knopf, 1978), 404–12 at 406.
114
Robert Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise Tedmore, in the Desart (1753; London, 1773), 2.
115
Quoted in Washington Irving, Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey (London, 1835), 54. Scott’s rape of Melrose
incurred John Ruskin’s rebuke that he loved Gothic only because it was old, dark, picturesque, and ruinous
(Modern Painters (1856), pt. IV, ch. 16, para 22 (New York, 1886), 3:265).
116
Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877; London: Century, 1982), 51.
117
Henri Codet, Esssai sur le collectionnisme (1921), quoted in Brian M. Fagan, The Rape of the Nile (1977;
3rd edn. Westview, 2004), 154; Martin Kelner, ‘The importance of STUFF’, Independent, 15 May 1993.
118
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (1938; New York: New Directions, 1959), 91.
119
John Windsor, ‘Identity parades’, in Elsner and Cardinal, Cultures of Collecting, 62. ‘I am what I own
I know ’cause I saw the commercial. / I am what I owe I signed and I made it official’ (Rob Szabo, ‘That
cold hard sell’, Life & Limb CD Album, 2008).
120
William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York, 1890), 1: 291.
121
James B. Gardner, ‘History, museums, and the public’, Public Historian 26:4 (Fall 2004): 11–21 at 14.
Benefits 101
personal business’, he rebuked residents seeking data for the bicentenary. ‘It’s all mine
now. Why should I tell you or anybody else? A man has a right to what is his.’122
Having a piece of the past fructifies connection with it. ‘My own fierce joy on acquiring
a Roman coin at the age of 15, and my frenzied researches into the dim, fourth-century
emperor portrayed on it’, recalled Auberon Waugh, ‘served a far more useful purpose than
it would in the county museum’.123 Honorary curator of one such museum, John Fowles
defended public access to Dorset’s fossiliferous cliffs against ‘vigilante fossil wardens. What
[people] pick up and take home and think about from time to time is a little bit of the
poetry of evolution.’124 The 2013 Grand National Relic Shootout at Virginia’s Flowerdew
Hundred Plantation, one of many advertised on television’s ‘Dig Wars’, netted nine
thousand pre-1865 artefacts, rewarding fascination with the (lucrative) past. Avowedly
salted sites, such as Paul’s Famous Fossil Dig at Wisconsin Dells, ‘where artifacts from all
over the world can be unearthed for free’, likewise reward acquisitive curiosity.125
Far from being free, much of the past is in costly conflict, its treasured remains
contested by rival states, tribes, creeds, and kinfolk. Paris auctions of Hopi masks in
2013 violated tribal sanctity. Yet even those spiritually attached to their past may choose
to sell it. Defying national heritage diktats, Tuscan tomb-robbers claim communion with
and sanction from Etruscan forebears who tell them when and where to dig. They then
market their finds to Swiss dealers. Tombaroli skills, along with proceeds from smuggled
antiquities, are passed on to communal and family descendants.126
Newly cherished is our specific genetic legacy. Genes accrue the awe once accorded
immortal souls, An invisible yet real substance, the genome – like the True Cross – can
replicate without being depleted. The Human Genome Project is both Scripture and Holy
Grail; finding DNA in E.T.’s dying hero was likened to finding the King James Bible in a
Martian spaceship.127
The germ-plasm notion of identity that defined and exalted nationhood from 1800 on
became racist anathema in the post-Nazi world, but remains potent in popular con-
sciousness. Half a century after Hitler’s Blut und Boden ideology, an official German
spokesman insisted that all that really mattered were ‘aspects of culture you are born
with’, an English writer extolled the ‘mystical, atavistic’ rural Arcadia embedded ‘in our
genetic memory bank’, and Americans were charged with having ‘a misanthropic gene’
ingrained in their DNA code.128
Ancestor-hunting genetic tool-kits reinforce the mystique of inherited ethnic and
national traits. Despite stressing that ‘race’ is a myth and that we are all mixed, geneticists
122
‘Chief has corner on town history’, NYT, 18 July 1958: 4.
123
Auberon Waugh, ‘A matter of judgment’, New Statesman, 17 Aug. 1973: 220.
124
‘Fowles defends fossil collectors’, Times, 10 Sept. 1982: 6.
125
Taft Kiser, ‘Open season on history’, NYT, 3 Aug. 2013; Aedh Aherne, ‘Travels in retroreality’, in Brown
and Sherry, eds., Time, Space, and the Market, 158–70 at 162.
126
Diura Thoden van Velzen, ‘The world of Tuscan tomb robbers’, IJCP 5 (1996): 111–26.
127
Dorohty Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee, The DNA Mystique (1995; 2nd ed., Michigan, 2004), 38–42, 50, 57.
128
Jane Kramer, ‘Neo-Nazis: a chaos in the head’, New Yorker, 14 June 1993, 52–70 at 67; Auberon Waugh, ‘It
is often a mistake for exiles to return’, Spectator, 29 Oct. 1994; Andrew Kohut quoted in IHT, 2 May 1995;
David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge, 1998), 192–206.
reinforce stereotypes of genetic determinism. Aimed at distinguishing origins of and

regional differences among manifold components of early Britons, the People of the
British Isles project excludes recent migrant strains on the implicit assumption that ‘the
history and heritage of Britain belongs to . . . British people of native descent and that
other people – ‘ethnic minorities’ – have their own equally valid but different heritages’.
In short, culture is a biologically inherited group possession. Hence ‘the ancient and early
history of Britain is naturally only of interest to those of native descent . . . a heritage that
belongs to them. Other people have their own stories and heritages’, but we have no
interest in theirs, nor they in ours. Commonality and ownership derive from a group’s
genetic ancestry.129
Yet the legacy that moulds us is not only our own but the whole of the past, exotic as
well as domestic, alien along with familiar. Awareness of legacies and histories beyond the
confines of our own kinfolk, our own community, our own country, enlarges empathetic
understanding. Through foreign pasts we view our own past – indeed, our own being – in
comparative context. We learn that how we used to be, and became what we are, were
contingent on myriad external happenstances. Ecumenical concern with the memories
and relics of others mitigates the narrow chauvinism that typically adulates – or execrates
– our own heritage.
Indeed, awareness of the past as realms distinct from the present promotes compara-
tive stock-taking. Having conquered almost the whole of the world then known to them,
ancient Romans were said to have found distinctive differences not in geography but in
history, notably in admired Greek precursors. In a sense, the past was their only foreign
country. Romans were the first avid collectors of another culture, whose relics served as
poetic metaphors and material insignia of their own power and connoisseurship.130
Renaissance humanists augmented the Roman tradition of collecting with Roman reli-
quary and literary riches. Subsequent European booty from the Levant, the Far East, and
pre-Columbian America brought manifold pasts into patrons’ and then public view,
educating and enlivening the Western present.131
The popularity of museums and historical sites, of biography and autobiography, of
historical romance and sagas of former lives, betokens growing interest in pasts beyond
our own purlieus. Other’s relics and ruins lubricate cultural tourism, far-flung pasts
illumining awareness of our own. Indeed, just as our own past is never solely our own,
so in myriad ways do we share the pasts of others. But such pasts must be seen to belong
to somebody, suggests a Haitian anthropologist; they cannot be unclaimed or forsaken.
‘History did not need to be mine in order to engage me. It just needed to relate to
someone, anyone. It could not just be The Past. It had to be someone’s past.’132 But
whether someone’s past can also be everyone’s remains, as discussed in Chapter 12, highly
problematic.
129
Catherine Nash, ‘Genome geographies: mapping national ancestry and diversity in human population
genetics’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38 (2013): 193–206 at 203–4.
130
Alexandra Bounia, The Nature of Classical Collecting (Ashgate, 2004), 58–64, 310–12.
131
Susan Pearce and Rosemary Flanders, eds., The Collector’s Voice, vol. 3: Imperial Voices (Ashgate, 2002).
132
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon, 1997), 142.
Benefits 103
Enhancement
Boundless time enriches thin quotidian life. ‘The present when backed by the past is a
thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing
else’, held Virginia Woolf.133 The past lengthens life’s reach by linking us with scenes,
events, and people former to ourselves, as well as to our prior selves. William Morris
likened ancient buildings to family heirlooms, both keys to personal memories vital for
passionate engagement with life.134 We transcend the brevity of our own span and gain
surrogate longevity by reading history, inhabiting an old house, communing with
antiquities, wandering in an ancient city.
Stretching present feelings back in time also augments the immediate moment. Benja-
min Constant’s lovers strengthen mutual devotion in asserting they have always loved
each other.135 Projecting present experience back magnifies it; recalling the past absorbs it
into a magnified present. The contemplation of her cherished antiques assures Henry
James’s Mrs Gereth to feel that
everything was in the air – every history of every find, every circumstance of every struggle . . . The
old golds and brasses, old ivories and bronzes, the fresh old tapestries and deep old damasks threw
out a radiance in which the poor woman saw in solution all her old loves and patiences, all her old
tricks and triumphs.136
Treasuring his recollections, Proust’s Marcel likens himself ‘to an abandoned quarry . . .
from which memory, selecting here and there, can, like some Greek sculptor, extract
innumerable different statues’.137
Past treasures enrich literally as well. Preservatives made mummies merchandise;
Chinese bronzes, made potent by age, ward off evil spirits. Antiques become investments,
ancient creations modern riches. From Troy to the Titanic divers rifle shipwrecks. The Da
Vinci Code’s hidden cache made Rennes-le-Château a two-million-dollar bonanza,
hundreds of thousands of tourists viewing medieval sites while munching Crusty Christ
and Papal Pepperoni pizzas.138 Past profits dominate heritage television: five antiques
shows – Flog It!, Cash in the Attic, Bargain Hunt, Antiques Road Show, and Car Booty –
accounted for 61 per cent of Britain’s 13,000 heritage programmes’ nine million annual
viewing hours in 2005–6.139
The Old World’s uplifting past became a stock trope among New World visitors who
at home felt nothing but the present. ‘The soil of American perception is a poor barren
133
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (Chatto & Windus, 1976), 98.
134
Chris Miele, ‘Morris and conservation’, in his, ed. From William Morris: Building Conservation and the
Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity, 1877–1939 (Yale, 2005), 30–65 at 59–61.
135
Benjamin Constant, Adolphe (1816; London, 1924), 64–5. See Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time
(1949; Johns Hopkins, 1956), 205–22.
136
Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (1897; Penguin, 1963), 43.
137
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27; Penguin, 1983), 3: 921.
138
‘“Da Vinci Code” fans besiege French village in quest’, IHT, 29 Oct. 2004; Christiane Amiel, ‘L’abîme au
trésor, ou l’or fantôme de Rennes-le-Château’, in Claudie Voisenat, ed., Imaginaires archéologiques (Paris:
Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2008), 61–86.
139
Angela Piccini, A Survey of Heritage Television Viewing Figures, Council for British Archaeology Research
Bulletin 1 (2007): 4.
artificial deposit’, exclaims Henry James’s expatriate artist in Florence. ‘Our silent past,
our deafening present [are] void of all that nourishes and prompts and inspires.’140 For
John Ruskin, landscape came to life only amid ancient architecture, which ‘we may live
without, but we cannot remember without’. He thought America a cultural void, its
denizens blind to the past. ‘The charm of romantic association can be felt only by the
European. It rises . . . out of the contrast of the beautiful past with the frightful and
monotonous present; and it depends . . . on the existence of ruins and traditions, on the
remains of architecture, the traces of battlefields, and the precursorship of eventful
history. The instinct to which it appeals can hardly be felt in America.’141
In fact, some Americans felt they alone truly savoured Olde England. So indifferent to
antiquity seemed the English that Nathaniel Hawthorne proposed exiling them ‘to some
convenient wilderness’ and replacing them with awestruck Yankees.142 Henry James
adored English palimpsests dense with pastness, even the socially regressive squire and
parson and ancient almshouses and asylums ‘so quaint and venerable that they almost
make . . . poverty delectable . . . Written in the hedgerows and in the verdant acres . . .
imperturbable British Toryism’ deepens the very colour of the air.143 Unlike American
soil, ‘not humanized enough’ to interest Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘in England so much of
it has been trodden by feet’ as to thoroughly civilize it.144 Even ghosts ‘took their place by
the family hearth’, wrote Hawthorne while American consul at Liverpool, ‘making this
life now passing more dense . . . by adding all the substance of their own to it’.145 A day in
a thirteenth-century English house, his own tread hollowing the floors and his own touch
polishing the oak, let James share its six living centuries.146 Deploring the dearth of
ancestral homes in America, Charles Eliot Norton likened their merits to time-enhanced
tones of antique instruments. ‘As the vibrations of the music constrain the fibres of the
violin till, year by year, it gives forth a fuller and deeper tone, so the vibrations of life as
generations go by shape the walls of a home . . . The older it is the sweeter and richer
garden does it become.’147
The English continue to exalt their past, alike for tourists and themselves. England’s
‘quiet villages, peaceful homes and pleasing prospects’ are praised for ‘the stamp of
centuries of . . . builders, farmers, gardeners, the village blacksmith, the rich wool
merchant, the parson, the squire and the yeoman’.148 Adam Nicolson felt Sissinghurst’s
past ‘everywhere around me, co-existent with present and future, soaked into this soil, . . .
140
Henry James, The Madonna of the Future (1879; London, 1883), 7.
141
John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1848), ch. VI, sec. I (New York: Noonday, 1961), 167–9;
Ruskin, Modern Painters, pt 4, ch. 17, para. 21, 3: 292.
142
Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘Leamington spa’ (1862), in Works (Ohio State, 1962–80), 5:41–64 at 64.
143
Henry James, ‘In Warwickshire’ (1877), in English Hours (Heinemann, 1905), 197–223 at 210.
144
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, Our Hundred Days in Europe (Boston, 1887), 288–9.
145
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret (Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 230.
146
Henry James, ‘Abbeys and castles’ (1877), in English Hours, 225–43 at 235.
147
Charles Eliot Norton, ‘Waste’, Nation 2 (8 Mar. 1866): 301–2, and ‘The lack of old homes in America’,
Scribner’s Magazine 5 (May 1889): 638–40 at 638. See James M. Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England
(Oxford, 1995), 15–25.
148
Reg Gammon, One Man’s Furrow: Ninety Years of Country Living (Exeter: Webb & Bower, 1990), 176.
Benefits 105
in a bobbled scurf of things, the embedded quirk, the wrinkle in a face’. He saw fellow
grandees, likewise bereft of National-Trusted ancestral domains, as ‘inheritance consult-
ants, . . . experts in buried meaning, in the unfolding of the past into the management of
the future.’149 And these patricians ascribed supreme worth to their familial ‘order in
time’, as their chronicler recounts.
The walls of their houses were adorned with ancestral paintings; the pages of Burke and
Debrett catalogued and chronicled their forebears; their homes were usually in the style of an
earlier period. They planted trees that only their descendants would see in full splendour;
they granted building leases for ninety-nine years in the confident hope that their grandchildren
would enjoy the reversion; and they entailed their estates so as to safeguard them for as long as
possible.150
The enveloping past most enriches those ancestrally familiar. Australian Aborigines
‘feel the spirits of generations of the dead in the surrounding land’ as European settlers
cannot. The saturations of time made rooted Gaelic Ireland far more cherished than the
English Pale, perched in a thin and isolated present that disregarded the Celtic past.
‘Those O’Connells, O’Connors, O’Callaghans, O’Donoghues . . . were one . . . with the
very landscape itself’, wrote their chronicler.
To run off the family names . . . was to call to vision certain districts – hills, rivers and plains; . . . to
recollect the place-names in certain regions was to remember the ancient tribes and their
memorable deeds. How different it was with the [English] Planters. . . . For them, all that Gaelic
background of myth, literature and history had no existence . . . The landscape they looked upon
was indeed but rocks and stones and trees.151
Family history similarly suffuses rural Normandy; every field and path recalling some
event. Lacking such memories, newcomers inhabit merely a meagre, monochrome
present.152
Escape
Rather than enhance the here and now, the past may replace the intolerable present
altogether. When ‘we cannot bear to face today’s news’, suggests a reporter, ‘we want to
believe the past is another, more respectable country’. What we miss today we find in
yesterday – a time for which we have no responsibility and when no one can answer back.
‘The way out is back.’ The true faith of the twentieth century was not modernism, exulted
California mystic Terence McKenna, but ‘nostalgia for the archaic’ pervading ‘body
piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll, and catastrophe theory’.
Cavemanforum.com rejects couch-potato modernity for Stone Age hunter-gatherer
149
Nicolson, Sissinghurst, 328, 318, 161.
150
David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Yale, 1990), 24.
151
Howard Morphy, ‘Landscape and the reproduction of the ancestral past’, in Eric Hirsch and Michael
O’Hanlon, eds., The Anthropology of Landscape (Clarendon Press, 1995), 184–209 at 185–6; Daniel
Corkery, The Hidden Ireland (1924; Dublin, 1970), 64–6.
152
Lucien Bernot and René Blanchard, Nouville, un village français (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1953).
barefoot sprinting, berries and raw meat, and a Paleo domestic lifestyle.153 To escape the
tyranny of today’s lock-step, high-tech world and regain a sense of purpose, weekend
warriors re-enact medieval revels or Civil War encampments (Chapter 11). SF nostalgists
rhapsodize ‘reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages, even the old troubles’
against today’s oppressive regimens.154
Preference for the past is age-old. ‘Many would have thought it a happiness to have had
their lot of life in . . . ages past’, noted Sir Thomas Browne in the seventeenth century, and
‘he that hath . . . rightly calculated the degenerate state of this age, is not likely to envy
those that shall live in the next’.155 Reading the Greek classics while composing Lohengrin
in dreary Dresden, Richard Wagner felt himself ‘more truly at home in ancient Athens
than in any conditions which the modern world has to offer’.156 Some would decamp
permanently to the past. Revulsion against the present grew apace after the Second World
War. ‘Never before’, wrote a novelist, ‘have I heard so many people wish that they lived
“at the turn of the century,” or “when life was simpler,” or “worth living,” or simply “in
the good old days.”’157
Longing for the past was a widespread postwar refrain. From hippie American
communes to austerity-rationed Britain to communist-ridden Poland, many were des-
perate to leave the present.158 ‘I hate the guts of the modern world’, grumbled Elizabethan
scholar A. L. Rowse, ‘everything about it, even its good points’. He reiterated the architect
Edwin Lutyens’s moan that ‘the old was good, the new could but be worse’. The plaint
continues to resound. ‘The best is all behind us’, laments a British critic. ‘We will never be
able to live as marvellously as our ancestors.’ Many dreamt ‘of wishing you were a dead
person, from a dead time, because it would be better than living now’.159 Demonized in
the media, today’s drawbacks seem omnipresent. ‘Given all that you hear now in the
news’, says a German schoolgirl, ‘I would rather have been on the earth during a former
age.’160 People long to treat ‘history as though it were geography’, wrote Stephen
Spender, ‘themselves as though they could step out of the present into the past of their
choice’.161
But whatever its allure, the past offers permanent escape only for committed reincar-
nates. Although his ‘heart and mind were fixated on a shifting and fugitive past’, a recent
153
Charles Isherwood, ‘Theatrical stumbles of historic proportions’, NYT, 10 Dec. 2010; Terence McKenna,
Archaic Revival (Harper & Row, 1992), and Alien Dreamtime, deoxy.org/t_adt.htm. Marlene Zuk,
Paleofantasy (Norton, 2013) confutes this primitivist fallacy.
154
Jay Anderson, Time Machines (AASLH, 1984), 183–5; Cordwainer Smith, ‘Alpha Ralpha Boulevard’
(1961), in Robert Silverberg, ed., The Ends of Time (Gillette, NJ: Wildside, 1970), 1–40 at 2.
155
‘A letter to a friend on the death of his intimate friend’ (1656), in Miscellaneous Works of Sir Thomas
Browne (Cambridge, 1831), 233–70 at 257.
156
Richard Wagner, My Life [1870s] (New York, 1911), 416.
157
Jack Finney, ‘I’m scared’ (1951), in Clock of Time (London: Panther, 1961), 24–37 at 36–7.
158
Barbara Szacka, ‘Two kinds of past-time orientation’, Polish Sociological Bulletin 1–2 (1972): 63–75 at 66.
159
The Diaries of A. L. Rowse, ed. Richard Ollard (Allen Lane, 2003), 368; Robert Lutyens, Sir Edwin Lutyens
(Country Life, 1942), 31; A. A. Gill, The Angry Island (Phoenix, 2006), 214–15.
160
Cornelius J. Holtorf, From Stonehenge to Las Vegas: Archaeology as Popular Culture (AltaMira, 2005),
110.
161
Stephen Spender, Love–Hate Relations: A Study of Anglo-American Sensibilities (Hamish Hamilton, 1974),
121.
Benefits 107
American Historical Association president knew himself doomed ‘to live in the all too
obtrusive present’.162 Most settle for occasional escape. Even if today is tolerable and the
past no golden age, immersion in history can alleviate contemporary stress. ‘Come to
Williamsburg . . . Spend some time in gaol’, a brochure depicts tourists grinning in
eighteenth-century stocks: ‘it will set you free’ – free from workaday cares. ‘Step into
our village and watch something magical happen’, offers Historic Naperville, Illinois.
‘Your pulse slows. You breathe . . . easier. The hassles of everyday life are forgotten.’163
Cades Cove National Park, in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains, lured visitors to a
past century when life ‘proceeded at a pace rarely faster than a walk . . . This allowed time
to see and hear the world one lived in. Cowbells in the pasture . . . the wind coming up
and the sun going down. A decent “howdy” while walking past a neighbor’s house’, and
natural beauty stemming from a deeply felt partnership with nature. (This idyllic
community was in fact uprooted to establish the park.)164
In disheartened 1970s Britain, some saw the country’s future as an enclave of the past,
going from making to curating history. ‘Shudder as we may, perhaps the creation of a
living history book in this clutch of islands is not so bad a prospect’, said Labour
politician Andrew Faulds. He envisioned Britain as ‘a sort of Switzerland with monu-
ments in place of mountains . . . to provide the haven, heavy with history, for those
millions . . . who will come seeking peace in a place away from the pulsating pressures
and the grit and grievances of their own industrial societies’.165 By the late 1980s, groaned
heritage critics, Britain had indeed become ‘an escapist theme park that stretches all the
way from Dover to John o’ Groats’.166
Arcadian longing has classical and Renaissance antecedents, but became de rigueur in
the early nineteenth century. As revolutionary change distanced customary tradition,
yearning for the past lovingly depicted by novelists and painters, historians and architects
suffused European imagination. Poet–historian Robert Southey (1774–1843) ‘found in
the past, in the study of huge folios and long dead chroniclers’, the peace denied him in
the shifting present.167 In art and rural scenes many like Walter Pater sought relic epochs
sequestered from modern progress. Places that lagged behind the modern maelstrom,
half-forgotten enclaves of bygone worlds, kept the flavour of Thomas Hardy’s ‘street for a
medievalist to revel in, [where] smells direct from the sixteenth century hung in the air in
all their original integrity and without a modern taint’.168 That taint was hard to avoid
162
Jonathan Spence, ‘Fugitive thoughts’, AHA Perspectives, Jan. 2004: 5.
163
Naper Settlement web site. See Stephen Gapps, ‘Mobile monuments’, Rethinking History 13 (2009):
395–409 at 402.
164
NPS, Cades Cove Auto Tour (1972), quoted in Terence Young, ‘Virtue and irony in a U.S. national park’,
in Terence Young and Robert Riley, eds., Theme Park Landscapes (Dunbarton Oaks, 2002), 157–81 at
172–5.
165
Andrew Faulds, ‘The ancient assets that may be our salvation’, Times, 19 Jan. 1976: 12.
166
Stephen Pile, ‘Waving a white flag at nostalgia’s army’, Sunday Times, 27 Aug. 1989: A10.
167
Thomas Preston Peardon, The Transition in English Historical Writing, 1760–1830 (Columbia, 1933),
243–4 .
168
Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 2nd edn (London, 1885), 1: 109; Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (1881;
London, 1912), 444.
even in Venice, Ruskin grumbled. ‘Modern work has set its plague spot everywhere – the
moment you begin to feel’ that you have truly escaped to the past, ‘some gaspipe business
forces itself upon the eye, and you are thrust into the 19th century; . . . your very gondola
has become a steamer’.169
Gas pipes and steamers notwithstanding, islands of the past still serve as refuges from
modernity. Antiquated Australians conjure up gnarled codgers in Victorian numbers of
Punch; ‘these delightful dodos, extinct in England, are still extant in the former colonies’.
Singapore preserves Edwardian dress and demeanour in retro-fitted Raffles Hotel. Spa
retreats revert to Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais’s 1961 evocation of aristocratic
pre-war Europe, itself narrated wholly in the past tense.170
The charm of such anachronistic places – and their fidelity to the past whose aura they
convey – requires unawareness. Their denizens are not moderns being quaint, but locals
leading normal lives. Were their datedness deliberate, such places would become period
stage sets knowingly purveying the past. ‘Fifteen years ago I could go into any muddy
village in the Near East and step backward in time’, remarked an art curator in 1970;
‘today, in the tiniest Turkish town, you walk into the local merchant’s and see tacked to
the wall a list of Auction prices current issued by Sotheby’s’.171 Forty-five years on, that
town may be self-consciously neo-Ottoman.
Even a contrived past, however, may alleviate present dismay. As ‘refuges for those
bewildered by the normal pace of change’, a planner suggested retarding certain ‘back-
ward regions’ by banning modern improvements.172 Rest cures in time-frozen Amish or
simulated colonial villages might be antidotes to the frenzy of modern life, proposed
Alvin Toffler. ‘The communities must be consciously encapsulated . . . Men and women
who want a slower life, might actually make a career out of “being” Shakespeare or Ben
Franklin or Napoleon – not merely acting out their parts on stage, but living, eating,
sleeping, as they did.’173
Enclaves that sooth exhausted moderns may enable their descendants’ sheer survival.
Like genetic stocks of endangered plants and animals, ‘banks’ of bygone folkways might
‘increase the chances that someone will be there to pick up the pieces in case of massive
calamities’. Robert Graves’s fictional Scottish islanders and Catalans reproduce Bronze
and early Iron Age life in a new ‘ancient’ community in Crete, sealed off for three
generations from the misguided post-apocalyptic world.174
Classical Greece and medieval Britain were the main loci of Victorian imaginative
escape, Celtic and medieval times of the French. Today’s escapist pasts are more often
169
John Ruskin, 14 Sept. 1845, in Ruskin in Italy: Letters to His Parents (Clarendon Press, 1972), 201.
170
Peregrine Worsthorne, ‘Home thoughts from Down Under’, Sunday Telegraph, 25 Feb. 1979: 8–9; Daniel
P. S. Goh, ‘Capital and the transfiguring monumentality of Raffles Hotel’, Mobilities 5:2 (May 2010):
177–95; Thomas Beltzer, ‘Last Year at Marienbad’: Senses of Cinema, issue 10 (Nov. 2000); Richard Brody,
‘Last Year at Marienbad’, New Yorker, 21 Mar. 2011, blog; Marguerite Valentine, ‘Time, space and
memory in Last Year in Marienbad’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 93 (2012): 1045–57.
171
Cornelius Clarkson Vermuele III quoted in Karl E. Meyer, The Plundered Past (Atheneum, 1973), 57.
172
Lynch, What Time Is This Place?, 77–8.
173
Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (Pan, 1971), 353–4.
174
Robert Graves, Seven Days in New Crete (Cassell, 1949), 41–2.
Benefits 109
grandparental or great-grandparental, ‘far enough away to seem a strange country’,

explained American Heritage’s founder-editor, ‘yet close enough . . . to bring a tear to
the eye’.175 Much historical fiction re-creates eras sixty to a hundred years back, beyond
memory’s reach but intimately linked with people and places still held dear. Recon-
structed Stonefield, Wisconsin, was set up to remain always seventy-five years old, in a
time ‘which hasn’t yet become dim’.176
One lure of that vintage is that it barely antedates ourselves. ‘The time just before our
own entrance into the world is bound to be peculiarly fascinating to us; if we could
understand it, we might be able to explain our parents, and hence come closer to
know[ing] why we are here.’ In contrast, the nearer past can often seem too close for
comfort. Parental pasts often still impinge as irksomely admonitory, or embarrass us as
out of date, whereas grandparents are supposed to be passé: their world survives less in
our mental sets than in their mementoes. That is why it often seems quaintly anachronistic –
a touching, unthreatening past beyond our purview. Parents are not ‘quaint; more like
so last year!’177
James Laver’s dress-style terms corroborate preference for the not-too-recent past.
Clothes a year old are ‘dowdy’, those 10 and 20 years back ‘hideous’ or ‘ridiculous’.
Fashions are ‘amusing’ at 30, ‘quaint’ at 50, ‘charming’ at 70, ‘romantic’ at 100, ‘beautiful’
150 years after their time. Before most old stuff can be properly admired, it has to outlive
a ‘black patch of bad taste’ associated with parental times.178 Nostalgia for the ’90s still
elicits hesitant approval at most.
Past benefits vary with epoch, culture, individual, and stage of life. Different pasts –
classical or medieval, national, or ethnic – suit different purposes. Once morally edifying,
the past has become more a source of sensate pleasure than of educational or ethical
instruction. But all the benefits discussed above remain viable in some context. More than
for any functional use, we treasure old things, old thoughts, old ways of being for the
pastness inherent in them; they reflect ancestral inheritance, recall former friends and
occasions, and vivify remembrance.179 Fondness for the past feels innate.
We read history for the same reason we listen to old songs: we all believe in yesterday. That we
might not learn anything from them doesn’t alter our taste for old music. Life is a long slide down,
and the plateau just passed is easier to love than the one coming up. The long look back is part of
the long ride home.180
175
Oliver Jensen, comp., America’s Yesterdays: Images of Our Lost Past Discovered in the Photographic
Archives of the Library of Congress (New York: American Heritage, 1978), 11.
176
Ray S. Sivesind, ‘Historic interiors in Wisconsin’, Historic Preservation 20:2 (1968): 74–7.
177
Robert B. Shaw, ‘The world in a very small space’, Nation, 23 Dec. 1978: 706; Jervis Anderson, ‘Sources’,
New Yorker, 14 Feb. 1977: 112–23; Andy Borowitz, ‘Real-estate note’, New Yorker, 24/31 Jan. 2005: 48.
178
James Laver, Taste and Fashion from the French Revolution to the Present Day (1937; Harrap, 1945),
202–8.
179
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things (1981; Cambridge, 2002);
Edmund Sherman and Joan Dacher, ‘Cherished objects and the home’, in Graham D. Rowles and Habib
Chaudhury, eds., Home and Identity in Late Life (Springer, 2005), 63–80.
180
Adam Gopnik, ‘Decline, fall, rinse, repeat’, New Yorker, 12 Sept. 2011: 40–7 at 47 (phrasing reordered).
Valued attributes
We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it
familiar. Henry James, 1888181
Just wait until now becomes then. You’ll see how happy we were.
Susan Sontag, 1977182
People in olden times drank too much, had wild sex, got naked and wrestled in the
streets, and on special days dressed up as barnyard animals and summoned the god of
hellfire. Now, we sit at work all day looking at stuff on the internet, then go home and
look at stuff on the internet. This is called ‘progress’.
Alex von Tunzelmann, 2010183
The past is obviously much easier to turn into good telly than the present, because the
cars were prettier, the clothes were better, there was no boring climate change and we
know how everything turned out. Giles Coren, 2011184
What traits make the past beneficial? What aspects of bygone times help us confirm and
enhance identity, acquire and sustain roots, enrich life and environment, validate a
pleasing or escape a repugnant present? Inheritors value the same legacies in various
ways. Enumerating the benefits of classical antiquity, George Steiner notes that the
Greeks were
to Cicero and his successors . . . the incomparable begetters of philosophy, of the plastic arts, of the
cultivation of poetic and speculative speech; . . . to the Florentine Renaissance . . . the abiding
model of spiritual, aesthetic, and even political excellence and experience; [to] the Enlightenment
. . . the architecture of Monticello and of the porticoes of our public edifices, . . . the canonic source
of beauty itself; [to] the modern imagination . . . the archaic, the Dionysian Hellas, with its ecstatic
immediacy, [and Freud’s] mapping of the unconscious.185
This list of particulars is not, however, translatable into general traits – traits that would
reckon also with the perceived virtues of Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and
every epoch’s later devotees the world over, and with the numbing diversity of individual
as well as collective heritages. Perhaps the plethora of historical, cultural, and personal
variables nullify any effort to classify the past's valued traits. But for the sake of discussion
I subsume them below under antiquity (being old), continuity (seeming unbroken),
accretion (the past as cumulation), sequence (being ordered over time), and termination
(being over).
181
Henry James, The Aspern Papers (1888; Scribners, 1936), Preface, x.
182
Susan Sontag, ‘Unguided tour’, New Yorker, 31 Oct. 1977: 40–5 at 42.
183
Alex von Tunzelmann, ‘Becoming Jane: a novel take but still lost in Austen’, Guardian, 20 May 2010.
184
Giles Coren, ‘Wicked stovepipe hat you’ve got there, bruv’, Times, 8 Jan. 2011: 26.
185
George Steiner, ‘Where burning Sappho loved and sung’, New Yorker, 9 Feb. 1981: 115–18 at 115.
Antiquity
‘I just love history: it’s . . . it’s so old’, enthuses an American tourist in Olde England.186
Antiquity roots credentials in the past; ancestral possession makes things our own,
valorizing claims to power, prestige, property, propriety. Antecedence lends authority
to things that precede us. ‘These trees are older than I am and I can’t help feeling that
makes them wiser’, wrote England’s New Forest chronicler.187 Knossos as reconstructed
by Arthur Evans gave Cretans welcome proof of ‘the most ancient social regime of law
and order in Europe’.188
Those with shallower roots envy Old World ancientness. A Philadelphian in 1837 held
it useless to preserve American relics because ‘our antiquities are too modern to excite
veneration’.189 English patina still humbles Americans. ‘Is this college pre-war?’ asks a
tourist. ‘Ma’am’, says the Cambridge porter, ‘it’s pre-American’. When a British journalist
interviewed on American TV called his monarchy obsolete, Barbara Walters was
shocked: ‘Mr Hitchens, how can you say such an awful thing in that lovely old English
accent?’ The American who tells his aide, ‘I’m off to Britain on Friday; remind me to turn
my watch back 500 years’, terms British fealty to the past ‘a virtually genetic trait’.190 The
absence of such fealty in Australia animated a Slovene migrant to guide me around
Victorian neo-Gothic Melbourne. ‘I’m from Europe’, she explained. ‘The Australians are
new. Only we Europeans appreciate the past.’
Antiquity comprises at least four distinct notions: precedence (being first); remoteness
(being far back in time); primordiality (being the source); and primitiveness (being
unspoilt by modern ‘progress’). Claims of priority suffuse every realm of life. People
fervently insist that their lineages, languages, faiths, fossils, even rivers and rocks are
previous to those of others. Why is being first so ardently claimed and, when lacking,
invented? ‘First come, first served’ sounds impartially just. It is also a law of nature: like
early birds, first-comers feed best. Precedence is legendary in legacies. Double portions
were allotted Old Testament firstborn sons; primogeniture gave the eldest all.
Not every firstborn legacy is enviable. Old Testament readiness to sacrifice eldest sons
won those sons a reward in heaven, but on earth the second-born took over. The first in
line have been at grave risk since Jehovah smote the eldest sons of Egypt and took unto
himself all Israel’s firstborn. (Spared the trap, the second mouse gets the cheese.) But
precedence generally implies superiority and confers supremacy. Matthew’s (20:16) ‘the
first shall be last, and the last shall be first’ quixotically inverts near-universal experience.
Priority’s benefits colour every use of first. First fruits, first class, first prize, first violin,
first of all, first and foremost, primate, prime minister are expressions so customary we
forget their ordinal implications. The first blow is half the battle. Caesar would rather be
186
Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford, 1979), 57.
187
Peter Tate, The New Forest: 900 Years After (Macdonald & Jane’s, 1979), 14.
188
Stephanos Xanthoudides (1904) quoted in Hamilakis, ‘The colonial, the national, and the local’, 149.
189
Philadelphia Public Ledger (1837) quoted in Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory (Knopf,
1991), 53.
190
Thomas J. Colin, ‘Heroic efforts’, Historic Preservation (Nov.–Dec. 1989): 4. See Christopher Hitchens,
The Monarchy (Chatto & Windus, 1990).
first in a village than second at Rome.191 Metaphors of priority pervade patriotic maxims.
‘First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen’ was Washington’s
archetypal accolade. Where you initially come from, says Oliver Goldsmith’s Traveller, is
what finally counts: ‘The patriot’s boast, where’er we roam, / His first, best country, ever
is at home’.192 In myriad Books of Firsts precedence is the spur. The first to find a cure or
a continent, to detect hidden treasure, to walk on the moon, to cry ‘Bingo!’ inherit fame
or fortune; few note who came next. As Alfred Russel Wallace and next-at-the-patent-
office telephone and auto-assembly inventors found to their cost, Darwin, Bell, and Ford
alone got the kudos. Monuments and memorial albums in American towns commemor-
ate the first couple to marry there, the first child locally born, the first funeral. North
America’s initial (1979) World Heritage sites were chosen as primordial: Canada’s L’Anse
aux Meadows for the ‘first’ European structures in the New World, Mesa Verde as the
‘earliest’ surviving Indian dwelling.
Precedence evokes pride and proves title. ‘The most important point about English
history’, crowed an eminent Victorian, ‘is that the English were the first people who
formed for themselves a national character at all’.193 A cult of Gaulish antiquity exalts
France as ‘the oldest of the mature European nations’. Descent from ‘first peoples’
certifies tribal rights in Anglo-America and the Antipodes. Ethnic French in Manitoba
demand autonomy because ‘we were here as a nation before there was a Manitoba’.194
Pre-Trojan origins, held Alfonso de Cartagena at the Council of Basle in 1434, entitled
the Spanish monarch to ceremonial precedence over England’s king. Czech, Hungarian,
and Balkan students in Vienna each scoured medieval charters to prove their people’s
prime antiquity; ‘no nation within the [Habsburg] monarchy wanted to have a younger
history than its neighbour’.195 Ulster Protestant vie with Catholic antiquity claims:
‘British Israelites’ contend that the prophet Jeremiah carried the Ark of the Covenant
to County Antrim and liken the siege of Derry to Jericho and Marathon; Orangemen
term seventeenth-century Scots-Irish the rightful heirs of original Britons ousted by
Gaelic intruders.196 When told that African rock art dated back thirty to forty thousand
years, Tanzanian children joyfully hugged the archaeologist for finding their culture older
than the British. The British had earlier embraced their own ancient geology, naming
the oldest strata then known ‘Silurian’, after a local tribe famed for resisting Roman
191
Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Life of Alexander/Life of Caesar, c. ad 75 (Harvard, 1919), 469.
192
Henry Lee, George Washington! A Funeral Oration on His Death, 26 Dec. 1799 (London, 1800); Oliver
Goldsmith, The Traveller (1764; London, 1868), 10.
193
Mandell Creighton, The English National Character (London, 1896), 8.
194
Pierre Chaunu, La France (1982), quoted in Peter Burke, ‘French historians and their cultural identities’, in
Elizabeth Tonkin et al., eds., History and Ethnicity (Routledge, 1989), 157–67 at 162; Gilberte Proteau
quoted in Michael T. Kaufman, ‘Ethnic French give Manitoba a language test’, IHT, 3 Nov. 1982: 4. See
Raymond M. Hébert, Manitoba’s French Language Crisis (McGill–Queen’s Press, 2004), 3–8.
195
Sabine MacCormack, ‘History, memory and time in Golden Age Spain’, History & Memory 4:2 (1992):
38–68 at 49; Walter E. Leitsch, ‘East Europeans studying history in Vienna (1855–1918)’, in Dennis
Deletant and Harry Hanak, eds., Historians as Nation-Builders (Macmillan, 1988), 139–56 at 145.
196
T. B. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II (London, 1848), 3: 256; Anthony
Buckley, ‘“We’re trying to find our identity”: uses of history among Ulster Protestants’, in Tonkin et al.,
eds., History and Ethnicity, 183–97.
invaders.197 The 1995 Chinese quarry fossil find of Eosimias sinensis, the ‘first’ proto-
human, launched Peking’s proud claim to anthropoid primacy, much as the 1920s
discovery of Peking Man made China the cradle of all humanity.198
Claims to priority derogate rivals. Early Christians deployed the Old Testament to
antedate upstart pagans’ claims; ‘the antiquity of these writings ensures their trustworthi-
ness, for they are more ancient than your oldest records’. And Moses surpassed in
antiquity all other gods and oracles by several centuries.199 Subsequent replacement of
Roman by Judaeo-Christian forebears made the Holy Roman Empire more holy than
Roman.200 ‘Jerusalem was Israel’s capital a thousand years before the birth of Christi-
anity’, retorted Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in 1950 when the Vatican rebuked Israel
for declaring Jerusalem its capital.201 ‘What other nation’, bragged a Japanese educator,
‘can point to an Imperial family of one unbroken lineage reigning over the land for
twenty-five centuries?’202 The English preen themselves on royal antiquity: unlike other
lands’ ‘Mickey Mouse leaders, “our” monarchs have biological lines stretching back in
their purity to the dawn of history’. Whereas ‘some guy’ in Spain just ‘set himself up as
King, ours can look right back to Ethelred the Unready’.203 ‘The most noticeable thing
about our history is that we have more of it than any other country’, says an English
columnist. ‘Rome is older, but Italy is a nineteenth-century upstart. The length of time,
the depth and richness of our island story, gives us . . . pre-eminence.’ Touting Stone-
henge, Dover Castle, and Hadrian’s Wall, English Heritage gloated that ‘it will take
another 3000 years before America can run an ad like this’.204 When America is
disparaged as ‘new’, encomiasts retort that the United States is the world’s oldest extant
republic, with the oldest written constitution.
Since in the mists of time men were ruled by gods, ancient priority signalled divine
intercession. A fifteenth-century papal nuncio assured the French they were ‘the first to
be planted on earth by God’. Divine royal attributes promised myriad peoples they were
God’s elect nation. Puritans saw England as a second Israel succoured by Jehovah against
197
Emmanuel Anati, ‘Parks and museums at rock art and archeological sites’, in International Perspectives on
Cultural Parks (Washington, DC: US NPS, 1989), 107–14 at 107–9; Robert A. Stafford, ‘Annexing the
landscapes of the past: British imperial geology in the nineteenth century’, in John M. MacKenzie, ed.,
Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990), 67–89 at 71–6.
198
K. Christopher Beard, Hunt for the Dawn Monkey (California, 2004), 11, 79, 193; Sigrid Schmalzer, The
People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China (Chicago, 2009),
17ff., 207, 249–56.
199
Tertullian, The Apology of Tertullian for the Christians (c. ad 208; London, 1890), 61–3. See Arnaldo D.
Momigliano, ‘Pagan and Christian historiography in the fourth century a.d.’, in his, ed., The Conflict
between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Clarendon Press, 1963), 79–99 at 83, 85, 91.
200
Matthew Innes, ‘Teutons or Trojans? The Carolingians and the Germanic past’, in Yitzhak Hen and
Matthew Innes, eds., The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2000), 227–49; Hayden
White, ‘What is a historical system?’ (1972), in The Fiction of Narrative (Johns Hopkins, 2010), 126–35.
201
Quoted in Amos Elon, Jerusalem (Little, Brown, 1989), 242.
202
Baron Dairoku Kikuchi, ‘The claim of Japan, by a Japanese statesman’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th
edn (1910–11), 5: 273. See George Macklin Wilson, ‘Time and history in Japan’, AHR 85 (1980):
557–71.
203
Security guard quoted in Michael Billig, Talking of the Royal Family (1992; Routledge, 1998), 51–2.
204
Bernard Levin, ‘Shakespeare – the history man’, Times, 18 Sept. 1989: 16; EH ad, Times, 24 June 2004.
its foes; that God first revealed His new great age to ‘his English-men’ was the message of
Foxe’s Martyrs (1563).205
‘Antique is above ancient, and ancient above old’, judged a French medievalist; he put
the old at one hundred, the ancient at two hundred, the antique as more than a thousand
years back. The more ancient the more admirable a lineage. Sheer age lends romance to
times gone by, and ‘the more remote were these times’, held Chateaubriand, ‘the more
magical they appeared’.206 Wordsworth’s ‘secrets older than the flood’ and Shelley’s
‘thrilling secrets of the birth of time’ express fascination with hidden distance.207 Distance
purges the past of personal attachments and makes it venerable, lending the remote
majesty and dignity. That ‘our ancestors and elders speak to us in the wisdom of
thousands of generations’ gives Cree indigeneity a primordial imprimatur. The same
mystique promotes tourism. ‘I am ancient’, beckons a Mexican ‘Mayan’ maiden, ‘I was
born thousands of years ago’.208
Being ancient makes things precious by proximity to beginnings. After a Knesset
hullabaloo over aspersions against King David and the accuracy of Exodus, Israelis
bragged that theirs was the only ‘state where events of three thousand years ago can
cause such a heated controversy’.209 Defending his choice of the Maison Carré in Nîmes
as the model for Virginia’s Capitol in Richmond, Jefferson argued that ‘it has obtained the
approbation of fifteen or sixteen centuries, and is, therefore, preferable to any design
which might be newly contrived’.210
Divine nature, ancient in preceding history, is much acclaimed as fons et origo. ‘The
first men, having the unsullied purity of Nature for their guide’, declaimed Giorgio
Vasari, perfected the arts of design.211 ‘New’ countries like the United States and
Australia compensate for civic recency by celebrating primordial nature. Florida’s shores
struck Henry James as older than the Nile, previous to any other scene.212 Yellowstone
deserved World Heritage status for ‘ancient volcanic remnants . . . going back to Eocene
time’.213 Nature’s ancientness solaces Australians for their shallow European past. The
205
Liah Greenfield, Nationalism (Harvard, 1992), 94, 76; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘England’, in Orest Ranum, ed.,
National Consciousness, History, and Political Culture in Early-Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins, 1975),
98–117 at 105–10.
206
J.-B. de la Curne de Ste-Palaye, Dictionnaire des antiquités françaises (c. 1756), quoted in Jacques Le Goff,
History and Memory (1977; Columbia, 1992), 25; François-René de Chateaubriand, The Genius of
Christianity (1802; Baltimore, 1871), 385.
207
William Wordsworth, ‘To enterprise’ (1832), variant l. 84, in Poetical Works (Clarendon Press, 1940–66),
2: 280–6 at 283; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alastor (1815), l. 128, in Complete Poetical Works (Clarendon Press,
1972–5), 2: 43–64 at 48.
208
Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism (California, 2003), 175–6; Mexican Mundo Maya ad, in Traci
Ardren, ‘Where are the Maya in ancient Maya archaeological tourism?’ in Yorke Rowan and Uzi Baram,
Marketing Heritage (AltaMira, 2004), 103–13 at 111. See Alejandro J. Figueroa et al., ‘Mayanizing tourism on
Roatán island, Honduras’, in Sarah M. Lyon and A. J. Figueroa, eds., Global Tourism (AltaMira, 2012), 43–60.
209
Magen Broshi, ‘Religion, ideology and politics and their impact on Palestinian archaeology’ (1987), in
Bread, Wine and Scrolls (Sheffield: Academic Press, 2003), 14–38 at 33.
210
To James Madison, 1 Sept. 1785, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, DC, 1907), 5: 110.
211
Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550/1568; London,
1850), 1: 15–16.
212
Henry James, The American Scene (1907; Indiana, 1968), 462.
213
‘World Heritage List established’, Parks, 3:3 (1978), 14.
1994 find of Jurassic-era pine trees revealed awesome Aussie antiquity. That living fossil,
the ginkgo, offers a ‘glimpse of Father Time as a boy’. The common horsetail (Equisetum
arvense) is ‘Nature’s living ancient monument, whose primeval patina . . . is so much
more exciting than the heap of stuff up on [Salisbury] Plain’, Stonehenge, built only
yesterday.214 Purveyors of Victorian nostrums cribbed fictitious origins from the timeless
wisdom of Mother Nature or of native ancients – ‘Indian root pills’, snake-oil liniment.
Especially worthy are indigenous legacies still rooted in ancestral locales. To be sure, all
ancestral roots are ultimately of equal age. Welsh and French, Polish and Romanian
heritages hark back to Celtic and Gaulish, Sarmatian and Dacian ‘first nations’. The
phrase ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ transmutes primitive ethnicity into French legend. But
the charisma of prehistoric occupance endorses Maori, Aboriginal, Native American,
Inuit, and other ‘First Nation’ claims. Ancestral occupance makes modern Hopis and
Navajos rightful stewards of their tribal lands. This mythic stability ignores the tribal
upheavals and environmental changes that have utterly transformed them. Mistaken
for unchanged ancestors, Hopis and Navajos are venerated by themselves and others as
hoary traditionalists whose ‘customary law dates back to the tribe’s very origin’.215
Once a stigma of backwardness, indigenous antiquity is now hijacked by post-
Columbian newcomers. Traces of extinct Arawaks become Creole heritage emblems in
West Indian nations. North Americans discover a usable past in Indian relict landscapes.
Midwesterners now can ‘walk out along Main Street and look about and say, “Oh, that’s
two thousand years old. That’s as old as the Emperor Augustus.”’216 Aboriginal ‘Dream-
time’ legacies similarly deepen white Australian roots.
Emigrants likewise appropriate mystiques of native antiquity. Relative newcomers to
modern Israel, Yemenites are accorded ancestral status. Initially patronized as exotic
primitives, they gained acceptance as custodians of ancient Jewish dress and dance. They
became seen as the authorized source of basic dance steps ‘directly descended from the
most ancient prayer movements’. ‘Israel is a Biblical land, so . . . its dance company
should be Yemenite’, argued a dancer. ‘The Yemenites are a Biblical people. We even
dressed Biblically in Yemen.’217
Antiquity varies in age according to ancestry, to materials, to construction, to style, or
to traditional usage. An ‘ancient’ stone labyrinth on Stora Makholmen, western Sweden,
was revealed in 2001 to have been built by two eleven-year-old boys in the 1970s. By law,
Swedish ancient monuments had to be the product of ‘human activity in olden times’. Yet
the labyrinth was authentically ancient, archaeologists argued, ‘the latest expression of
214
Angela Milne, ‘Ancient monuments’, Punch, 8 Aug. 1962; Peter Crane, Ginko: Tree That Time Forgot
(Yale, 2012).
215
Kristen A. Carpenter et al., ‘Clarifying cultural property: a response’, IJCP 17 (2010): 581–98 at 587.
216
Jane Brown Gillette, ‘A conversation with Roger Kennedy’, Historic Preservation (Nov.–Dec. 1994): 49–51;
Roger G. Kennedy, Hidden Cities (Simon & Schuster, 1994); Howard Creamer, ‘Aboriginal perceptions of
the past’, in Peter Gathercole and David Lowenthal, eds., The Politics of the Past (Unwin Hyman, 1990),
130–40.
217
Quoted in Shalom Staub, ‘Folklore and authenticity’, in Burt Feintuch, ed., The Conservation of Culture
(Kentucky, 1988), 166–79 at 175–6.
thousands of years of tradition’. So it remains displayed as a reflection of ‘customs of old

times’.218 Even material remoteness is, after all, only relative. Household goods that date
back a mere two generations are treasured for longevity. A cup’s survival attests care
against the tooth of time: ‘My grandmother brought it back from Newfoundland . . . 65–
70 years ago. That’s how long I’ve had it, and it’s not even cracked. It’s so old [I’m] proud
that I’ve still got it’.219
What’s primitive is admired for innocence and purity uncorrupted by sophistication. It
takes many forms: preference for untouched wilderness over human occupance; for pre-
industrial Arcadian pastoral scenes over cities and factories; for tribal cultures and
folkways over civilized artifice. Green nostalgia in England conjures up warm, wooded,
well-watered Neolithic harmony seven millennia back. Americans found divine primor-
dial nature morally superior to degenerate Old World history. ‘What is the echo of roofs
that a few centuries since rung with barbaric revels . . . to the silence which has reigned
in these dim groves since the first Creation?’220 Most fantasize some equable past, ‘a
time when everything about us – body, mind, and behaviour – was in sync with the
environment’.221
Convinced that modern technical skills cheapened and corrupted art, eighteenth-
century European primitifs abjured architecture after the Doric, literature later than
Homer, sculpture beyond Phidias, as mannered, false, ignoble. Pre-Raphaelites expunged
subsequent artifice by reverting to the quattrocento’s ‘primitive’ and ‘natural honesty’.222
Modernists exalted archaic art for its elemental unconsciousness. Primeval nature and
prehistory inspired artists at odds with high technology. Affinity with contemporary art
validated ancient artefacts’ archetypal appeal: displaying them as works of art implies that
they are beautiful because primitive.223 So too in the jewellery shop: Garrard, ‘the oldest
jeweller in the world’, touted stone arrowheads, blades, awls, and microliths from the
Sahara, ‘relics of man’s remotest past’, as ‘mute testimony of the dawn of man’s striving to
derive aesthetic pleasure from his own handiwork . . . each painstakingly formed with a
lost expertise’. Here converge all the virtues of antiquity: great age, uniqueness, scarcity,
ancient irrecoverable skills, and assumptions that primitive man lived in harmony with
nature and conjoined utility with beauty.
218
Nanouschka Myrberg, ‘False monuments? On antiquity and authenticity’, Public Archaeology 3 (2004):
151–61.
219
Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, Meaning of Things, 60, 82.
220
Charles Fenno Hoffman, A Winter in the West (New York, 1835), 1: 195–6.
221
Zuk, Paleofantasy, 270. No such moment ever existed; we’ve ‘always lurched along in evolutionary time . . .
always facing new environments, and always shackled by genes from the past’ (270, 227).
222
Ernst Gombrich, ‘The dread of corruption’, Listener, 15 Feb. 1979: 242–5; Michael Greenhalgh, The
Classical Tradition in Art (Duckworth, 1978), 214; Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth
Century Art (Princeton, 1967), 140–60.
223
Lucy C. Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (Pantheon, 1983); Frances S.
Connolly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics (PennPress, 1995);
Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (Harvard, 2003); Christopher Green and Jens M. Daehner,
eds., Modern Antiquity (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011).
Figure 7 Lure of the primitive: Joseph-Benoit Suvée, The Invention of Drawing, 1791
Continuity
The worth of many things past is weighed by their durability. Endurance shows that a
heritage is no ephemeral fancy but a rooted verity. Personal continuity is psychically
rewarding, providing certitude and agency; social continuity extends mortal lives into the
communal past and future. ‘It’s lasted that long’, Prince Philip defended Britain’s
thousand-year-old monarchy, ‘it can’t be all that bad’.224 Nor need it be especially good.
Like Thomas Hardy’s Paula Power, we display ‘veneration for things old, not because of
any merit in them, but because of their long continuance’.225
224
Philip quoted in Stephen Robson, ‘Instalment 512 of the British soap opera’, GLW [GreenLeft], issue 64,
26 Oct. 1994; John Darnton, ‘A new royal squabble: Charles vs. father’, NYT, 18 Oct. 1994.
225
Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (London, 1881), 305.
Figure 8 Lure of the primitive: John Flaxman, ‘Agamemnon and Cassandra’,

Compositions from the Tragedies of Aeschylus, 1795
Pride inheres in perpetuity – unbroken connections, permanent traits and institutions.

Maintaining such links reaffirms their lasting reliability. Since any breach in a lineage
might jeopardize a legacy’s transmission and a people’s loyalty, stewards exalt unbroken
linkage. The late Roman Empire deployed names of ancient illustrious families as
credentials of imperial continuity.226 Perpetuation of royal blood from Franks to Valois
lent prestige to the French monarchy. Seamless apostolic tradition, ‘neither broken nor
interrupted but continuous’, held a Vatican historian, preserved ‘the visible monarchy of
the Catholic Church’ forever.227 Duty to founders ‘whose principles we inherit’ required
Americans to leave ‘no gaps in the record’.228 Proof of continuity is crucial to today’s
tribal Indians: to secure federal benefits and claim ancestral lands, tribes must show
identity unbroken since European contact – a daunting task, given that tribal identity was
long ruthlessly expunged.
Boasts that eighty-seven generations of collective experience sustain two millennia of
German history merge longevity with continuity. The French claim to be uniquely
unabridged: ‘all other history is mutilated, ours alone complete’, held historian Jules
Michelet; ‘Italy lacks the last centuries, the Germans and the English lack the first’.
226
Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002), 118–19.
227
Cesare Baronio, Annales Ecclesiastici (1588–1607), quoted in Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and
History in Tridentine Italy (Cambridge, 1995), 283.
228
Southern Historical Society (1873) quoted in Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 111.
The Revolution was no breach but a bridge from regal protector of Christendom to
champion of secular liberty.229 France remained for Mitterrand culturally peerless. ‘From
the time that our ancestors the Gauls, so fond of lively colours and sonorous words, were
initiated into . . . Greco-Roman culture’, summed up an art historian. ‘Practice of the
visual or literary arts has scarcely been interrupted in this country’.230 A Lascaux cave
painting in a 1995 France Telecom ad joins persistence to priority: ‘20,000 years ago we
were on the cutting edge of communications. And we’ve been there ever since.’ The
French got there first and are still the best.
Inconvenient breaches are ignored or passed off as ‘anomalous discontinuities’, such as
Czech eras of autocracy, or unnatural parentheses in republican continuity, as in repres-
sive Vichy and fascist Italian regimes. Turning a blind eye to lengthy Byzantine and
Ottoman lacunae, Greeks claim unbroken continuity of demotic modern Greek with
classical forebears. Whig celebrants of ‘enduring’ Anglo-Saxon virtues resurgent in the
seventeenth century minimized lamentable intervening centuries as a now-healed lapse in
continuity. The inter-war revival of English folk music, little sung for many centuries,
aimed to assert ‘that the vital rhythms of English music had been continuous across the
ages’. Since marks of any breach may imperil accustomed loyalties, states like churches
become bastions of constancy in the midst of turbulent upheaval.231 The 1941 slaughter
of Jews at Jedwabne was termed an aberrant ‘moment’ in long-standing amity said to
have made Poland a ‘paradise for Jews’.232 Slavery was ‘a 4,000-year-old African insti-
tution that affected us [Americans] a mere couple of hundred years’.233 The reunification
of Germany revived ideals of historical continuity that required much forgetting both of
Nazism and of East German communism.234
229
Alexander Kluge (1983) cited in Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film
(Harvard, 1989), 133–4; Jules Michelet, Le peuple, 3rd edn (Paris, 1846), 327.
230
François Mitterrand (1989) cited in Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (Yale, 1994), 112; Georges
Lafenestre, Les primitifs (1904) quoted in Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past, 12. See Suzanne
Citron, Mythe national: L’histoire de France en question revisitée, rev. edn (Paris: L’Atelier, 2008); Pierre
Nora, ‘Lavisse, instituteur national, 1: 247–89, and ‘L’Histoire de France de Lavisse’, II.1: 317–75, both in
Nora, Lieux de mémoire.
231
Ladislav Holy, The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation (Cambridge, 1996), 84, 120–4; De Gaulle and
Mitterrand cited in W. James Booth, Communities of Memory (Cornell, 2006), 150, 54; Eric Conan and
Henry Rousso, Un passé qui ne passe pas (Paris: Fayard, 1994); Bosworth, Whispering City, 229; Peter
Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976 (Oxford, 2009), 73, 104–7, 145, 330–4.
See Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History, 345–56; Christophe Charle, ‘Les grands corps’, in Nora, Lieux
de mémoires, III.2: 194–235 at 230.
232
Lucy S. Davidowicz, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (1967; Syracuse,
1996), 268; David Engel, ‘On reconciling the histories of two chosen peoples’, AHR 114 (2009): 914–29 at
926–7. Debates over Jedwabne have reminded Poles of the darker aspects of Polish-Jewish relations
(Antony Polonsky and Joanna Beata Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the
Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, 2004); J. B. Michlic and Malgorzata Melchior, ‘The
memory of the Holocaust in post-1989 Poland’, in John-Paul Himka and J. B. Michlic, eds., Bringing the
Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (Nebraska, 2013), 402–50 at
424–35.
233
Said to Campbell Robertson, ‘Making a stand for the Confederacy, 150 years later’, NYT, 21 Mar. 2011.
234
Michael Petzet, ‘Der neue Denkmalkultus am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Die Denkmalpflege 52:1 (1994):
22–32 at 31; Michael Petzet, International Principles of Preservation (Paris: ICOMOS, 2009); Rudy
Britons laud their malleably steadfast living history. ‘Almost uniquely among European
nations, we are at ease with our past’, boasted a Tory Cabinet minister in 1994. ‘We have
not had to tear down our royal palaces or convert them to soulless museums. We have
not had to bulldoze our great churches or convert them into warehouses. We have not
had some great constitutional rupture in our affairs [like] the French, Germans and
Italians . . . Here is a nation proud of its past.’235 Perpetual linkage is the ritual refrain.
‘No existing institution or right or claim can be explained without going back a long way’,
Bishop Mandell Creighton averred, ‘no [other] nation has carried its whole past so
completely into its present’. Herbert Butterfield felt such continuity comforting. ‘Because
we in England have maintained the threads between past and present we do not, like
some younger states, have to go hunting for our own personalities.’ English Heritage
reasserts this ‘sense of entity and continuity, of evolution as a nation over more than ten
centuries’.236
English stability is enshrined in landscapes that bear the stamp, its champions fondly
say, of centuries of countrymen and women – even of surviving aboriginal cattle. Hardy’s
Casterbridge is haunted by ghosts ‘from the latest far back to those old Roman hosts /
Whose remains one yet sees, / Who loved, laughed, and fought, hailed their friends,
drank their toasts / At their meeting-times here, just as these!’237 A Tory environment
chief lauded stewardship that left much of rural England ‘as she was: changeless in our
fast-changing world’.238 Reassurance that ‘some things remain stable, permanent and
enduring’, a sociologist contends, is a rural desiderata. Rurality sanctions the status quo.
Exalting rustic roots, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin wanted ‘the tinkle of the hammer
on the anvil in the country smithy’ to continue to ring in English ears. He conjured up
the last load at night of hay being drawn down a lane as twilight comes on, . . . and above all, most
subtle, most penetrating and most moving, the smell of wood smoke coming up in the autumn
evening, . . . the wood smoke that our ancestors, tens of thousands of years ago, must have caught
on the air when they were coming home from a day’s forage.
These were the ‘eternal values and eternal traditions from which we must never allow
ourselves to be separated’. Baldwin’s countryside atavism made him not ‘the man in the
street . . . but a man in a field-path, a much simpler person steeped in tradition and
impervious to new ideas’.239
J. Koshar, ‘On cults and cultists: German historic preservation in the twentieth century’, in Max Page and
Randall Mason, eds., Giving Preservation a History (Routledge, 2004), 45–78 at 74–5.
235
John Redwood, ‘Why Jack Straw should be reading King Lear’, Times, 12 Dec. 1994: 7.
236
Creighton, English National Character, 14–15; Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and His History
(Cambridge, 1944), 113–14; ‘All our yesterdays’, EH Magazine, 3 (Oct. 1988): 3.
237
Harriet Ritvo, ‘Race, breed, and myths of origin’ (1992), in Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on
Animals and History (Virginia, 2010)), 132–56 at 144; Thomas Hardy, ‘At Casterbridge Fair’ (1902), in
Collected Poems, 4th edn (Macmillan, 1948), 223–6 at 226.
238
Michael Heseltine, ‘Wales, and a yard-square blaze of colour long ago’, Field 272 (May 1990): 78–9;
Howard Newby, ‘Revitalizing the countryside’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 138 (1990): 630–6.
239
Stanley Baldwin, ‘On England’ (1926), 1–10 at 7, and ‘The Classics’ (1926), 99–118 at 101, in On England
(1927; London, 1971); and his ‘The love of country things’ (1931), in The Torch of Freedom (London,
1935), 120.
Obdurate adhesion to precedent is immortalized in Francis Cornford’s satire of

Cambridge academic life, making the past a rock on which all novelty should founder.
Any proposed change could be rejected as having been tried and found wanting, needing
revisions for which the time was not yet ripe, or exciting demands for further reform.
From this it followed that ‘Every public action which is not customary, either is
wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should
ever be done for the first time.’240
The English still cleave to Cornford’s precept. To keep Her Majesty’s Stationery Office
just as it is, a Tory MP in 1996 hailed the hoary dictum that ‘if it is not necessary to change,
it is necessary not to change’.241 In the Codrington Library of All Souls College, Oxford,
I was shown Sir Christopher Codrington’s will. ‘By the by’, asked the librarian, ‘have you
used our library before?’ ‘No’, I said, ‘I haven’t.’ ‘Oh, then I’m afraid you can’t use it now.’
(An All Souls Fellow was torn away from afternoon tea to vouch for me.)
The sense of enduring succession is manifest in storied locales. Looking out from a
Saxon boundary bank, W. G. Hoskins found it immensely satisfying
to know which of these farms is recorded in Domesday Book, and which came . . . in the great
colonisation movement of the thirteenth century; to see on the opposite slopes, with its Georgian
stucco shining in the afternoon sun, the house of some impoverished squire whose ancestors
settled on that hillside in the time of King John . . . ; to know that behind one there lies an ancient
estate of a long-vanished abbey where St Boniface had his earliest schooling, and that in front
stretches the demesne farm of Anglo-Saxon and Norman kings; to be . . . part of an immense
unbroken stream that has flowed over this scene for more than a thousand years.242
The unbroken stream is a peculiarly English virtue. Community of descent connects

earliest folk with later, first with latest artefacts and surviving traces of intervening
epochs. British Teutonic settlement became ‘more of a living thing’ to E. A. Freeman
when he found ‘that the boundary of the land which Ceawlin won from the Briton abides,
after thirteen hundred years, [as] the boundary of his own parish and his own fields’.243
Hardly another country, claimed a celebrant of British royal tradition in 1937, had so
continually adapted its medieval institutions ‘as to avoid their complete overthrow or
their entire reconstruction’.244
Rejoicing in our own continuity, we delight in espying it elsewhere. ‘Faces are facts’,
declared a 1925 English visitor to St Peter’s in Rome, ‘and the true Middle Ages arrive
with . . . the countenances of the princes, prelates, priests and monks of the Church.
For these faces do not change . . . There is not one . . . that one has not seen before,
in this picture or that’.245 Photo captions assure National Geographic readers that
‘though kingdoms rise and fall, these Kurdish fishermen carry on’ (1938), and that
‘across the gulf of countless generations, the Minoan love of dance still finds
240
Francis M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica (1908; Cambridge, 1953), 15.
241
Patrick Cormack, House of Commons, 18 Mar. 1996, Hansard, pt. 31, column 107.
242
W. G. Hoskins, Provincial England (Macmillan, 1963), 228.
243
Edward A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England (Oxford, 1867–79), 5: ix–x.
244
Percy Ernest Schramm, The History of the English Coronation (Clarendon Press, 1937), 105.
245
E. V. Lucas, A Wanderer in Rome (1926; 3rd edn Methuen, 1930), 40–2.
expression in Crete’ (1978). Galilee fishermen are posed in postures evoking Jesus as
fisher of men.246 Continuity is extolled as organic tradition in our own culture but
perceived as quaintly changeless abroad.
Accretion
Each year and every generation add their own traces to the scene, giving the past a sense
of cumulative creation. Time’s accretions generally surpass its dissolutions. No single
member of ‘the obscure generations of my own obscure family . . . has left a token
of himself behind’, muses Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in the ancestral hall, ‘yet all,
working together with their spades and their needles, their love-making and their
child-bearing, have left . . . this vast, yet ordered building’.247 Residues of successive
generations betoken partnership, harmony, and order. Accumulation enriches.
Accretions of enduring occupance enchant those from lands that lack them.
Hawthorne’s American visitor admired an English estate because ‘the life of each
successive dweller there was eked out with the lives of all who had hitherto lived there’;
the past lent ‘length, fulness, body, substance’.248 In his ancestral London house James’s
American enjoys ‘items of duration and evidence, all smoothed with service and charged
with accumulated messages’; permeated with antiquity, the very air seemed ‘to have
filtered through the bed of history’.249
A single generation may suffice. Back in her birthplace, Santmyer found it ‘immeasur-
ably richer than when I was a child. It is the added years that make it so . . . the town is
richer by the life of a generation. Since I last stood here with a sled rope in my hand there
has been that accretion: the roofs of the town have sheltered an added half-century . . .
Humdrum daily life . . . has given to the scene that weight and density.’250
Indeed, mere contiguity of two distinct pasts may convey accretion, like the medieval
tithe barn athwart Avebury’s prehistoric stone circle (Fig. 10) or the seventeenth-century
dwellings hollowed into the west front of Bury St Edmunds medieval abbey church
(Fig. 9). A Trevelyan family display at Wallington adds ‘a distinct nineteenth-century
chapter to a seventeenth-century house with an eighteenth-century interior’.251 Roman
and medieval walls link on to twentieth-century terraces in many English towns, merging
past traces with one another and the present in diachronic proximity (Fig. 11). Sixteen
centuries of classical and Gothic adaptation and revival, consciously drawing on the
forms and motifs of antiquity, give European landscapes an organic density unmatched in
246
Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago, 1993), 56; Joan Gero and
Dolores Root, ‘Public presentations and private concerns: archaeology in the pages of National
Geographic’, in Gathercole and Lowenthal, eds., Politics of the Past, 19–37 at 31.
247
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928; New American Library, 1960), 69.
248
Hawthorne, Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret, 229.
249
Henry James, The Sense of the Past (Scribners, 1917), 64–5.
250
Santmyer, Ohio Town, 309.
251
Robin Fedden, ‘Problems of conservation: the Trust and its buildings’, Apollo 81 (1965): 376–9; John
Cornforth, ‘Some problems of decoration and display’, National Trust Newsletter, no. 4 (Feb. 1969): 6;
Brian Edwards, ‘Avebury and other not-so-ancient places’, in Hilda Kean et al., eds., Seeing History in
Britain Now (London: Boutle, 2000), 65–79.
Figure 9 Charms of continuity: Bury St Edmunds, dwellings set into the medieval abbey front
lands where an ancient past nakedly jostles a modern present. Thus in Egypt ‘stand
pharaonic temples and concrete apartment houses, and nothing links them’, observed a
Cairo lecturer. ‘What is missed and missing is the middle distance . . . Saladin is
juxtaposed to cinemas, and To-day, having no ancestry, is uncertain of itself.’252
Continuity expresses the conjunction of various pasts, accretion their continuance into
the present. ‘The flitting moment, existing in the antique shell of an age gone by’, felt
Hawthorne in Rome, ‘has a fascination which we do not find in either the past or present,
taken by themselves’.253 For Cardinal Wiseman, Rome exhibited ‘no distinction of past
and present. Ancient Rome lives yet in modern Rome, so as to appear indestructible; and
modern Rome is so interlaced with ancient Rome, as justly to seem primeval’ – a
classical–clerical amalgam of old and new that later morphed into imperial–fascist.254
Could we but ‘join . . . our past and present selves with all their objects’, wrote art critic
Adrian Stokes, ‘we would feel continually at home’.255
252
Robin Fedden, ‘An anatomy of exile’, in his ed., Personal Landscape (London: Editions Poetry, 1945), 9–10.
253
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1859), in Works, 4: 229.
254
Nicholas Wiseman, The Perception of Natural Beauty by the Ancients and the Moderns: Rome, Ancient and
Modern (London, 1856), 38.
255
Adrian Stokes, The Invitation in Art (London: Tavistock, 1965), 61.
Figure 10 Charms of continuity: Avebury, medieval tithe barn athwart prehistoric stone circle
Figure 11 Decor of diachrony: Roman wall and interwar house, near Southampton
Intimate bonds of recall permeated William Maxwell’s boyhood home:

There were traces everywhere of human occupation: the remains of a teaparty on the wicker teacart
in the moss-green and white living room, building blocks or lead soldiers in the middle of the
library floor, a book lying face down on the window seat, an unfinished game of solitaire, a piece of
cross-stitching with a threaded needle stuck in it, a paintbox and beside it a drinking glass full of
cloudy water, flowers in cut-glass vases, fires in both fireplaces in the wintertime, lights left burning
in empty rooms because somebody meant to come right back. Traces of being warm, being
comfortable, being cozy together. Traces of us.256
Du Maurier’s ‘Manderley’ drawing room bore similar ‘witness to our presence. The
little heap of library books marked ready to return, and the discarded copy of The Times.
Ash-trays, with a stub of a cigarette; cushions, with the imprint of our heads upon
them, lolling in the chairs; the charred embers of our log fires still smouldering’. We
want animate shelter, not ‘a desolate shell . . . with no whisper of the past about its staring
walls’.257 Love lavished on inherited relics bespeaks needs for a living past. Daily tending
her long-dead husband’s shaving kit and watering her long-gone daughter’s hanging
plants, an elderly widow keeps her past warmly alive.258
Commemorative rites commingle past with present. A talismanic shield confers
symbolic immortality on a New Guinea tribesman: ‘Accepting death, and yet denying
it, he is not separated from his grandfather or his great-grandfather. They live on,
protective and influential, represented by objects.’259 Each stone or wooden churinga
worked by the Aranda of central Australia ‘represents the physical body of a definite
ancestor and generation after generation, it is formally conferred on the living person
believed to be this ancestor’s reincarnation’. To Lévi-Strauss ‘the churinga furnishes the
tangible proof that the ancestor and his living descendant are of one flesh’. He likens
them to archival papers whose loss would be ‘an irreparable injury that strikes to the core
of our being’. And he likens the initiation pilgrimages of Australian Aborigines, escorted
by their sages, to conducted tours to the homes of famous men.260
Accretive continuity enhances the whole lifespan; we see people not only as they are
but also as they were, layer atop previous layer. ‘We are none of us “the young”, or the
“middle-aged”, or “the old”’, comments Penelope Lively. ‘We are all of these things.’261
Growing up, maturing, ageing accompany awareness that the present develops from an
inherent past. ‘Maturity means cultivating that past, integrating former experiences –
previous ways of being – into the ongoing psychic activity.’ Household goods and memen-
toes quicken temporal awareness. ‘We have my great grandparents’ bed which my daughter
sleeps on’, recounted an old woman. ‘It’s very small for a double bed and it amazes me that
3 sets of parents slept in it and conceived children in it!’ Such links with ancestors
256
William Maxwell, Ancestors (Knopf, 1971), 191.
257
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938; Pan, 1975), 7.
258
Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, Meaning of Things, 103–4.
259
Penelope Lively, The House in Norham Gardens (Pan, 1977), 51.
260
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), 238–44. See T. G. H.
Strehlow, Aranda Traditions (Melbourne University Press, 1947), 16–18, 55–6, 84–6, 132–7, 172.
261
Penelope Lively, ‘Children and memory’, Horn Book Magazine 49 (1973): 400–7 at 404.
and descendants mitigate mortality, much as vitrifying the dead in commemorative medal-
lions once lent permanence to transient lives and instilled ancestral memories in
descendants.262
The ultimate in diachronic accretion was Jeremy Bentham’s proposal for landscaping
the dead (his own clothed cadaver is permanently displayed at University College London):
‘If a country gentleman had rows of trees leading to his dwelling, the Auto-Icons
[embalmed bodies] of his family might alternate with the trees.’ With ‘their robes on their
back – their coronets on their head, . . . so now may every man be his own statue’.263
A later benefactor, to ‘be of some use again one day’, more modestly asked that his
cremated ashes go into an egg-timer.264
Celebrating accretion, as distinct from antiquity, is implicitly progressive. The past is
appreciated not just for its own sake but as the portal to the present, its cumulations
culminating in our own time.265 The accretive palimpsest is a living past bound up with
the present, not one exotically different or obsolete.
The virtues of continuity often conflict with those of antiquity. Preservation and
restoration are similarly opposed. Those who hold antiquity supreme would excise
subsequent additions and alterations to restore ‘original’ conditions; those devoted to
continuity would preserve all time’s accretions as witnesses to their entire history.266
Sequence
The present is an indivisible fleeting instant, whereas whatever duration we assign the
past, it is a length of time. Length lets us order and segment the past and hence begin to
explain it. The histories of all things start in some past and go on until they cease to exist
or to be remembered. Sequential order gives everything that has happened a temporal
place, assigns the past a shape, and sets our own brief lifetime memories into the lengthier
historical saga.
As commonly experienced, sequential awareness involves four temporal properties:
diachrony, recurrence, novelty, and duration. Time is felt as a series of events that precede
or follow each other; the past is a multitude of happenings, some earlier, others later,
though many overlap. Their relation is one of potential cause and effect: what happens
first may affect what happens later, but never vice versa. Diachronic consciousness has
inestimable value: to recognize that certain things happened before and others after
enables us to shape memory, secure identity, generate tradition, and prepare for the
future.
262
Quoted in Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, Meaning of Things, 100, 215–16; Philippe Ariès, The
Hour of Our Death (1977; Penguin, 1983), 513–16.
263
C. F. A. Marmoy, ‘The “auto-icon” of Jeremy Bentham at University College London’, Medical History 2:2
(1958): 1–10; Jeremy Bentham, ‘Auto-Icon: or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living’ (1817), quoted in
Martin A. Kayman, ‘A memorial for Jeremy Bentham’, Law and Critique 15 (2004): 207–29.
264
Tom Gribble quoted in ‘Old timer’, Times, 3 June 1983: 3.
265
Francis Haskell, ‘The manufacture of the past in nineteenth-century painting’, Past & Present, no. 53
(1971): 109–20 at 112, 118.
266
See Chapters 10 and 11.
Recurrence involves the repetition of events within which life is lived: the waxing and
waning, ebbing and flowing of diurnal, lunar, and seasonal rhythms; our own breathing
and heartbeats, sleeping and waking. Along with these cyclic happenings we experience
others that are singular, unique, unrepeatable – the flow of individual careers and
collective histories. These two modes of being are known as time’s circle and time’s
arrow.
Time’s arrow flies only once from the irrecoverable past towards the unmapped future,
never again the same. The targets of time’s arrow are the contingent events and sporadic
vagaries of human and natural history, a temporal dimension distinct from natural law’s
recurrent clockwork time. The interplay of circle and arrow continually shapes our lives.
Habitual customs – law-like, regular, predictable – interact with the uncertainties of
history’s directional events.267
Awareness of duration lets us measure time into comparable lengths. Standardized
seconds and minutes and hours, weeks and months and years, pattern our routines, tasks,
and relationships. Agreed chronologies let us segment the past into equal or unequal
intervals, analyse events across cultural and geographical divides, and calculate paces of
change. We celebrate anniversaries, count up days since important dates, and base
expectations on calendric regularities. Duration places things in temporal context, points
up past resemblances and differences, and fixes bygone events within firm temporal grids.
Links between chronology and history are explored in Chapter 8.
Termination
The past is cherished in no small measure because it is over; what happened
has happened. Termination gives it an aura of completion, of stability, of permanence
lacking in the ongoing present. Back then ‘tensions and contradictions were ultimately
reconciled . . . Everybody knew what to do and what to believe’.268 Nothing more can
happen to the past; it is safe from the unexpected and the untoward, from accident or
betrayal. Nothing in the past can now go wrong; said a Henry James character, ‘the past is
the one thing beyond all spoiling’.269 Some feel it cleansed of evil and peril because no
longer active, now impotent. To Carlyle all the dead were holy, even those who had been
‘base and wicked when alive’.270
Being completed also makes the past comprehensible; we see things more clearly after
their consequences emerge. To be sure, the past has new consequences for each successive
generation and so must be endlessly reinterpreted. But these interpretations all benefit
from hindsight available only for the past. We are able to sum up yesterday far better than
today. The benefits and burdens of hindsight are discussed in Chapter 8.
Because it is over, the past can be arranged and domesticated, given a coherence
foreign to the chaotic, ever-shifting present. Each age looks back enviously at the
267
Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (Harvard, 1987), 196–8.
268
Holtorf, From Stonehenge to Las Vegas, 109.
269
Henry James, The Awkward Age (1899; Penguin, 1966), 150.
270
Thomas Carlyle, ‘Biography’ (1832), in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1888), 2: 245–60 at 256.
fancied quiet integrity and comforting certainties of the past, the Victorians to medieval
times as more stable and coherent than their own, modern nostalgists to Victorian
times for the same virtues.271 ‘Men had fixed beliefs in those days’, wrote the historian
J. A. Froude. ‘Over the pool of uncertainties in which our generation is floundering there
was then a crust of undisturbed conviction on which they could plant their feet and step out
like men.’272 This Victorian encomium to the eighteenth century echoes in every succeeding
era. The relative simplicity and transparency of bygone things and processes makes them
seem easier to comprehend. Yesteryear’s forms and functions were integral to our youth
when we learned how things worked, whereas today’s innovations are baffling save to
computer nerds and eight-year-olds. Hence the appeal of old tools and machinery: the
steam engine is more intelligible than the computer chip not only because its working
parts are visible, but because it fits into an order of things familiar from childhood.273
Childhood remembered shares this sense of pastness: in contrast to life’s later stages
it is finished, completed, summed up. Unlike our present incoherent mess, childhood is
framed by a beginning and an end. Its saga has the shape of fable: ‘once upon a time’, it
starts, and formulaically ends ‘happily ever after’.274
A past too well ordered or understood loses some of its appeal, however. Hence we
prefer survivals (and revivals) to seem haphazard and organic, like the architect Blunden
Shadbolt’s rambling, ‘wibbly-wobbly’ neo-Tudor dwellings.275 To feel secure from pre-
sent control or interference, the past should feel both completed and uncontrived.
The cherished traits I ascribe to the past are seldom consciously identified. Nonethe-
less, each of these attributes – antiquity, continuity, accretion, sequence, termination – is
an experienced reality. Together they give the past a character that shapes both its
inestimable benefits and its inescapable burdens. To the latter I now turn.
Threats and evils

Every past is worth condemning. Friedrich Nietzsche, 1874276
In the Past is no hope . . . the Past is the text-book of tyrants.

Herman Melville, 1850277
The past is useless. That explains why it is past. Wright Morris, 1963278
271
Raymond Chapman, The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 13.
272
J. A. Froude, ‘Reminiscences of the High Church revival’, Good Words 1 (1881): 18–23 at 21.
273
Many mourn machines that can be seen, heard, and felt – steam locomotives, gramophones, and
typewriters (Rosecrans Baldwin, ‘The digital ramble: machinery nostalgia’, NYT, 19 June 2008; Tom
Hanks, ‘I am TOM. I like to TYPE. Hear that?’ IHT, 8 Aug. 2013: 7).
274
See my ‘The past is a childlike country’, in Travellers in Time (Histon, Cambridge: Green Bay, 1990),
75–82.
275
Donald Campbell, ‘Blunden Shadbolt’, Thirties Society Journal, no. 3 (1982): 17–24; Clive Aslet, ‘Let’s stop
mocking the neo-Tudor’, Times, 11 June 1983: 8; Dan Carrier, ‘Calls to protect “wibbly-wobbly” Shadbolt
home’, Camden New Journal [London], 2 Dec. 2010.
276
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (1874; Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 21.
277
Herman Melville, White-Jacket (1850; Northwestern, 1970), 150.
278
Wright Morris, Cause for Wonder (Atheneum, 1963), 53.
Forget history. Now is all that matters. Nissan car ad, 2010279
We should build a monument to Amnesia and forget where we put it.

Edna Longley (at 26th Bloody Sunday anniversary, Londonderry, 1998)280
The past not only aids and delights; it also saddens and threatens. All its advantages have
drawbacks, all its benefits subsume risks. This section reviews the evils felt to inhere in the past
and the burdens it imposes, and shows how such pasts are exorcized or neutralized.
Traditionally, the past was as much feared as revered – indeed, feared because revered.
Fateful events and tragic victims dominated its doom-laden teachings. Following St
Augustine, medieval scholars viewed Adam’s fall as the origin of history, the record of
human alienation from God, a litany of sins and tribulations, and a morally contagious
malady.281 Like nostalgia, the past as communicable illness is a recurrent metaphor. Walt
Whitman warned Americans heading for the Old World that ‘there were germs hovering
above this corpse. Bend down to take a whiff of it, and you might catch the disease of
historic nostalgia for Europe’.282 The sorry past still lingers on to endanger the present, its
influence malign, its relics corrupting. ‘Where men have lived a long time’, J. B. Priestley
surmised, ‘the very stones are saturated in evil memories’.283 The evils are threefold: the
concomitant griefs that the grievous past saddles on the present; the burdensome weight of
the past’s duration and unmatchable achievements; and the menace of its continuing
potency.
The grievous past
The problem with the olden days . . . is that life was so unimaginably vile . . . Mud.
Hens. Huge facial sores. Women getting raped. Children falling down wells. Hot
mercury poured into open wounds. Horses having their heads cut off on battlefields.
Rain for 500 years, non-stop, leading to whole countries getting wiped out by mildew.
And everyone stinking of lard, pigs, urine and weasel. Caitlin Moran, 2010284
History is quintessentially seen largely as a recapitulation of crimes and calamities, as for

Robert Browning:
I saw no use in the past: only a scene
Of degradation, ugliness and tears
279
New Scientist, 14 Aug. 2010, inside front cover.
280
Edna Longley, ‘Northern Ireland: commemoration, clergy, forgetting’, in Ian McBride, ed., History and
Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), 223–53 at 230–1.
281
Robert K. Markus, ‘History’, in Allan D. Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine through the Ages (Eerdmans, 1999),
432–6 at 433.
282
Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871; Iowa, 2010), 72, paraphrased in Spender, Love–Hate
Relations, xi.
283
J. B. Priestley, I Have Been Here Before (London: Samuel French, 1939), 41.
284
Caitlin Moran, ‘It’s like Grand Designs, but with witches and Ian McShane in a Betty Boo wig’, Times,
23 Oct. 2010: SatRev., 14.
The record of disgraces best forgotten

A sullen page in human chronicles
Fit to erase.285
Observers looked back aghast at countless evils and errors. ‘In the five progressive
centuries that preceded’ presidential historian Edward Eggleston’s nineteenth, ‘there was
never a bad, that was not preceded by a worse’. The past’s ‘fixed essences and hierarchies’,
agreed a successor a century later, make it ‘a world we are fortunate to have lost and
properly continue to flee’.286 Often enough, the more we learn about it the less we like it.
Miseries of recent pasts overwhelm previously lauded glories. ‘The past which haunts us
is not a golden age’, observes a historian of twentieth-century modernity, ‘but rather an
iron age, one of fire and blood’. It is the memory of Auschwitz.287
Indiscriminate admirers of the past mistake changes in themselves for changes in the
world, their own ageing ills for those of society in general. ‘Commending . . . those times
their younger years have heard their fathers condemn, and condemning those times the
gray heads of their posterity shall commend’, misanthropic oldsters ‘extol the days of
their forefathers and declaim against the wickedness of times present’, wrote Thomas
Browne.288 Nostalgic Luddites forget that every generation has lamented the loss of
bygone felicity, morality, seemliness, argues psychologist Steven Pinker. ‘“What is the
world coming to?” they ask when a terrorist bomb explodes, a sniper runs amok, an
errant drone kills an innocent’.
The world in the past was much worse. The medieval rate of homicide was 35 times the rate of
today, and the rate of death in tribal warfare 15 times higher than that. . . . The Crusades, the slave
trade, the wars of religion, and the colonisation of the Americas had death tolls which . . . rival or
exceed those of world wars. In earlier centuries . . . a seven-year old could be hanged for stealing a
petticoat, a witch could be sawn in half, and a sailor . . . flogged to a bloody pulp.289
A résumé of life in bygone Britain presents a picture ‘so painful that it instantly improves
the present. We all know that the Middle Ages were frightful, dirty, smelly and danger-
ous, but it comes as a surprise how awful the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were.’290
Power cuts in the wake of Hurricane Sandy (2012) left a New York historian dirty, cold,
frustrated by candlelight reading, and vowing ‘to spend more time in the present and a
little less time wishing I was living at some time in the past’.291
Once-subjugated peoples claim uniquely parlous pasts. Centuries of Irish bards have
keened ‘agony the most vivid, the most prolonged, of any recorded on the blotted page of
285
Robert Browning, ‘Paracelsus’ (1835), pt. 5, ll. 814–16, in CW (Ohio, 1969–81), 1: 59–266 at 261–2.
286
Edward Eggleston, ‘The new history’, in Annual Report of the AHA (Washington, DC, 1901), 1: 35–47 at
47; Steven E. Ozment, Ancestors (Harvard, 2001), 1.
287
Henry Rousso, The Haunting Past (1998; PennPress, 2002), 17.
288
Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), in Miscellaneous Works, 271–304 at 274–5.
289
Steven Pinker, ‘If I ruled the world’, Prospect Nov. 2011: 9. See Steven Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature
(Viking, 2011).
290
Leslie Geddes-Brown, review of David N. Durant, Living in the Past, Sunday Times, 29 May 1988: G11.
291
Susan Ferber, ‘Falling out of love with living in the past’, AHA Perspectives on History 51:3 (Mar. 2013):
26–7.
human suffering’. A. M. Sullivan’s canonical Story of Ireland (1867) showed it ‘like no

other country in the world . . . in cruelties of oppression endured’.292 The Irish Free State
long continued to MOPE, as the ‘Most Oppressed People Ever’.293 The poet Adam
Mickiewicz personified Poland as ‘the Christ among nations’, crucified for others’ sins.
Stripped of autonomy, scarred by dismemberment, and plundered of cherished heritage,
Poles keep a calendar of grievous reminders: Polish National Day mourns the stillborn
eighteenth-century constitution.294 ‘There is only one nation of victims’, an Israeli
journalist contends. ‘If somebody else wants to claim this crown of thorns for himself,
we will bash his head in.’295 Other claimants to that crown include the United States,
Germany, Ulster, and Colombia.296 A recent study finds Britain a ‘nation of victims’,
because 73 per cent of all Britons – the disabled, women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals
– are officially oppressed, some (black lesbians, for example) trebly impaired.297 At
California history textbook hearings in 1987, group after group demanded that the
curriculum show ‘its forebears had suffered more than anyone else in history’.298
Stressing past misery has its benefits. Bunker Hill, Gallipoli, and Pearl Harbor
reinforced losers’ bonds more than their subsequent victories. ‘Suffering in common
unifies more than joy does’, Renan consoled the French for their surrender to Prussia in
1870. In national memory ‘griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties
and require a common effort’.299 The Chinese Communist Party deploys gory reminders
of China’s victimization in the ‘century of humiliation’ from the First Opium War (1839–
42) through the 1945 Sino-Japanese War to reinforce patriotism.300
Yet evil pasts can devastate those constrained to recall their dreadfulness. The antique
lowboy in Cheever’s story mires its inheritor in a miserable yesteryear. Conjuring up the
mishaps of the chest’s previous owners and ‘driven back upon his wretched childhood’,
292
A. M. Sullivan, The Story of Ireland (New York, 1892), 474, 563; Roy Foster, The Story of Ireland
(Clarendon Press, 1995), 11; Declan Kiberd, ‘The war against the past’, in Audrey S. Eyler and Robert E.
Garratt, eds., Uses of the Past: Essays in Irish Culture (Delaware, 1988), 24–54. See Roger Cohen, ‘The
suffering Olympics’, IHT, 31 Jan. 2012: 6.
293
Liam Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies,
1996), 121.
294
Adam Mickiewicz, Books of the Polish Nation and of the Polish Pilgrims (1832), quoted in Robert Bideleux
and Ian Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2007), 298; Ladis K. D. Kristof, ‘The image and
the vision of the Fatherland: the case of Poland in comparative perspective’, in David Hooson, ed.,
Geography and National Identity (Blackwell, 1994), 221–32; Norman Davies, ‘Poland’s dreams of past
glories’, History Today, 32:11 (Nov. 1982): 23–30.
295
Uri Avnery, ‘Mourning becomes Israel: the role of victimhood in the Jewish psyche’, Washington Report
on Middle East Affairs 23:3 (Apr. 2004): 16–17.
296
Charles J. Sykes, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character (St Martin’s Press, 1992);
Reanna Brooks, ‘A nation of victims’, Nation, 22 June 2003; Helmut Schmitz, ed., A Nation of Victims?
Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present (Rodopi, 2007); Brian Lennon,
‘A nation of victims? Northern Ireland’s two minorities’, Commonweal 124:5 (14 Mar. 1997): 12–14;
Clifford Krauss, ‘An aimless war in Colombia creates a nation of victims’, NYT, 10 Sept. 2000: A1.
297
David G. Green, We’re (Nearly) All Victims Now! (London: Civitas, 2006), 5–7.
298
Diane Ravitch, ‘History and the perils of pride’, AHA Perspectives, Mar. 1991: 13.
299
Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? ed. Philippe Forest (1882; Paris: Bordas, 1991), 38–9, 50.
300
Zheng Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign
Relations (Columbia, 2012).
he succumbs to the past’s horrors.301 Many a parent strives to spare children knowledge
of family skeletons or bygone collective calamity. The global past in Lois Lowry’s post-
catastrophe Community is so demoralizing that its memory is banned, save for a solitary
Receiver tasked to recall the whole of human history. ‘The worst part of holding the
memories [of] the deep and terrible suffering of the past . . . is not the pain. It’s the
loneliness’ – an anguished isolation endured by traumatized Holocaust survivors and
shamed victims of sexual abuse.302
Old wounds still fester. Inherited pain persists. Ancient injuries sap the pride, shrink
the purse, cripple the power, and constrain the will even of remote putative posterity, who
‘too easily accept the story that they and their kind were always good for nothing’, and
blame themselves for their subordination. ‘Grief is passed on genetically’, a Lakota/
Dakota Indian says of the legacy of trauma, shame, fear, and anger handed down to
Native Americans. ‘It has been paralyzing to us as a group.’303 Endemic racism and
accrued inequities hamper slave descendants to this day. Scarred by ‘post-traumatic slave
syndrome’, some remain haunted by ancestral bondage. Ancient injustices are ingrained
in the posterity of victims (and transgressors). ‘Passed down to children almost with their
mothers’ milk’, such mindsets endure for generations.304 Persisting reminders of victim-
hood enhance tribal and national identity at psychic and therapeutic cost.
The stifling past
I am getting lost in my childhood memories like an old man . . . I’m being devoured
by the past. Gustave Flaubert, 1875305
A past need not be evil or unhappy to poison the present. It is a common complaint that
yesterday outshines today – a superiority that discourages creativity and makes the
present mediocre. That each new generation is inferior to the last is a traditional
truism.306 A past too esteemed or closely embraced saps present purposes and engenders
apathy. In adoring antiquity, warned Sir Thomas Browne, men ‘impose a thraldom on
their times, which the ingenuity of no age should endure’.307 The forger Alceo Dossena’s
compulsion to imitate Renaissance masterpieces exemplified the burden of ‘Rome’s great
and overwhelming past, at once a curse and a blessing’ that could never be shaken off.308
301
Cheever, ‘Lowboy’, 401–11.
302
Lois Lowry, The Giver (1993; HarperCollins, 2003), 99, 131, 139, 190.
303
Jeremy Waldron, ‘Superseding historic injustice’, Ethics 103 (1992): 4–28 at 6; Rebecca Tsosie, ‘The BIA’s
apology to Native Americans’, in Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn, eds., Taking Wrongs Seriously
(Stanford, 2006), 185–212 at 203.
304
Joy DeGruy Leary, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (Milwaukie, OR: Uptone, 2005), 13–14; Leif Wenar,
‘Reparations for the future’, Journal of Social Philosophy 37 (2006): 396–405 at 404. See P. E. Digeser,
Political Forgiveness (Cornell, 2001), 53.
305
Shoshana Felman, ‘Flaubert’s signature’ (1984), in The Claims of Literature (Fordham, 2007), 248–74 at
273.
306
Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago, 2004), 16–18.
307
Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica, in Miscellaneous Works, 273–4.
308
Frank Arnau, Three Thousand Years of Deception in Art and Antiques (Jonathan Cape, 1961), 222.
The preservationist slogan ‘They don’t build them like they used to. And they never will
again’ presumes today’s inherent mediocrity.
The sheer persistence of past routine can dim the present. It saddens a Hawthorne
protagonist ‘to think how the generations had succeeded one another’ in a venerable
English village, ‘lying down among their fathers’ dust, and forthwith getting up again, and
recommencing the same meaningless round, and really bringing nothing to pass . . . It
seemed not worthwhile that more than one generation of them should have existed.’309
Hardy’s Tess rejects such history as self-demeaning: ‘Finding out that there is set down in
some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part’ would
deny her personal agency.310
Obsession with roots and relics, heirlooms and mementoes, pre-empts concern for the
present. In Marx’s phrase, ‘the tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon
the brain of the living’.311 Pasts too revered inhibit change, embargo progress, dampen
optimism, stifle creativity. ‘Your worst enemy’ is faith ‘in a happy prehistoric time’, wrote
Cesare Pavese, when ‘everything essential has already been said by the first thinkers’.312
The classic indictment is Nietzsche’s. Men ‘sick of the historical fever’, dilettante
spectators born old and grey, are ‘withered shoots of a gladder and mightier stock’ mired
in lethargic retrospection. Nietzsche cites two retrogressive follies. One is ‘hatred of
present power and greatness masquerad[ing] as an extreme admiration of the past.
Despising the present without loving the past’, the ‘monumental’ historian invokes past
authority to ensure present failure, as if to say, ‘Let the dead bury the living.’ The other is
indiscriminate antiquarianism, ‘raking over all the dust heaps of the past’. Mummifying
life with insatiable lust for everything old paralyzes the new.313
Antiquarian regress – and complaints about its stultifying effects – are perennial.
Second-century self-contempt ‘prostrated itself before Greek models, and educated
Romans grew ecstatic over ruins’, writes Peter Gay.314 Classical authority ‘transmitted
with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another’, in Gibbon’s criticism,
‘precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the
human mind’.315
Classical antiquity’s monumental relics remain ubiquitous reminders of matchless
virtues. Since the past stands for purity, the present is ipso facto polluted; ancient
glory breeds modern decadence. In Kostas Mitropoulos’s cartoons the classical past
imprisons modern Greeks.316 ‘I woke with this marble head in my hands’, wrote the
309
Hawthorne, Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret, 220.
310
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891; Penguin, 1978), 182.
311
Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 5.
312
Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living, 25 Aug. 1942 (1952; London, 1961), 132.
313
Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History, 29, 48–51, 17–20.
314
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment (Knopf, 1966), 1: 120.
315
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88; Allen Lane, 1994), 1:
51–2.
316
Suzanne Saīd, ‘The mirage of Greek continuity’, in William V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean
(Oxford, 2005), 268–93 at 277–89; Yannis Hamilakis, ‘No laughing matter: antiquity in Greek political
cartoons’, Public Archaeology 1 (2000): 57–72.
poet Seferis; ‘it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down’.317
Curated hordes of fragmented statues bespeak the support exacted from the living
to prop up the dead. ‘For modern Greek artists’, confesses one, ‘the ancient forebears
are a tough act to follow’.318 The past is too grand to live up to. ‘Greeks aren’t what
they used to be’, concludes a survey, for the sense of national identity relies mainly on
precursors two-and-a-half millennia ago. ‘The most powerful individuals in this
country’, complains a curator, ‘are the archaeologists’.319
Ancestral marvels demean modern heirs who cannot create but only husband and
copy. Italian painters and draughtsmen – Panini, Piranesi – so immortalized Roman
decay and dissolution that tourists closed their eyes on everything modern for defiling the
aura of antiquity.320 Romantic poets who flocked to Italy were besotted by its past and
dismissive of its present. ‘Rome is a city of the dead, or rather of those . . . puny
generations which inhabit and pass over the spot . . . made sacred to eternity’, wrote
Shelley in 1818.321 He echoed Petrarch’s own regret, in recalling his wanderings there,
that contemporary Romans were blind to the city’s past – ‘nowhere is Rome less known
than in Rome’ – and the Romanticist Ugo Foscoli’s obsessive remembrances of the
neglected dead. Lapped in sentimental adoration of Dante and Petrarch, the Brownings
and their expatriate successors disparaged modern Italians as inept custodians of their
ancient legacy.322
Casting off this demeaning heritage was the cri de coeur of Italian Futurists. The late
nineteenth century left Italy deprived of all but its past. Faced with Risorgimento failures,
Italians took refuge in harking back to imperial Rome. Scorning the past as a obstacle to
progress, Futurists termed Italy ‘the country of the dead’, Rome and Venice mired in
mouldy relics, Florence a graveyard of antiquarian rubbish for transalpine tourists, their
inhabitants slavish lackeys purveying fake antiques. Why ‘this eternal and futile worship
of the past?’ thundered Marinetti. He sought ‘to free this land from its smelly gangrene of
professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians’. The real Italy lay in modern
machine-age Milan and Turin, not the Baedekered, dolce far niente, fetid necropolises.323
317
George Seferis, ‘Mythistorema’ (1935), in Collected Poems 1925–1955 (Jonathan Cape, 1969), 1–59 at 7, 53.
318
Quoted in John Carr, ‘Modern Greece aims to step out of the shadow of its glorious past’, Times, 23 May
2005: 47.
319
Survey in ekathimerini.com 2005; Fani Palli-Petralia quoted in John Carr, ‘Culture clash over cash for the
arts’, Times, 23 May 2005: 47; Argyro Loukaki, Living Ruins, Value Conflicts (Ashgate, 2008), 137, 142.
320
Tarnya Cooper, ‘Forgetting Rome and the voice of Piranesi’s “speaking ruins”’, in Adrian Forty and
Susanne Küchler, eds., The Art of Forgetting (Berg, 1999), 107–8; Jonah Siegel, Haunted Museum: Longing,
Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition (Princeton, 2005), 2–4, 28.
321
To Thomas Love Peacock, 22 Dec. 1818, in Peacock’s Memoirs of Shelley. With Shelley’s Letters to Peacock
(London, 1909), 154.
322
Petrarch to Giovanni Colonna, 20 Nov. 1341, in Ronald G. Musto, Apocalypse in Rome (California, 2003),
56; Joseph Luzzi, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale, 2008), 3–9 [Foscoli], 16, 49, 53–76, 80–1;
Roderick Cavaliero, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (I. B. Tauris, 2005), 207–23.
323
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘The founding and manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), in Umbro Apollonio,
comp., Futurist Manifestos (Viking, 1973), 19–23 at 22. See Clarence Rainey et al., eds., Futurism (Yale,
2009), 52, 63-4, 74, 105, 218, 260, 274.
Many Futurists soon morphed into fascists. Italians must ‘quit living off . . . the past’,
declared Mussolini, cease being ‘degenerate and parasitic’, and ensure ‘past glories are
surpassed by those of the future’.324
‘For something genuinely new to begin’, Mircea Eliade sums up zealots’ root-and-
branch cleansing of the past, ‘the vestiges and ruins of the old cycle must be completely
destroyed’. Cistercians, Puritans, Futurists, and Modernists all sought to remake a world
that owed nothing to recent tradition.325
Adulation of the past inhibits the present not least because its cumulations engorge
finite space and energy. Were the ‘enormous hosts of the dead . . . raised while the living
slept’, exclaims Dickens’s ‘Uncommercial Traveller’, ‘there would not be the space of a
pin’s point in all the streets and ways for the living, [and] the vast armies of the dead
would overflow the hills and valleys far beyond the city’.326 So too with their artefacts. ‘As
each generation leaves its fragments & potsherds behind’, observed Hawthorne at the
British Museum in 1855, ‘the world is accumulating too many materials for knowledge’.
Admiring the Parthenon frieze, the Elgin Marbles, Egyptian sarcophagi, he nonetheless
feared their incapacitating impact:
The present is burthened too much with the past. We have not time . . . to appreciate what is warm
with life, and immediately around us; yet we heap up all these old shells, out of which human life
has long emerged, casting them off forever. I do not see how future ages are to stagger under all this
dead weight, with the additions that will continually be made to it.327
Like many Americans, Hawthorne was simultaneously fascinated and appalled by the
European past. Roman antiquity left ‘a perception of such weight and density in a by-
gone life’ as to press down or crowd out the present. Next to the massive Roman past ‘all
matters, that we handle or dream of, now-a-days, look evanescent’.328
More menacing than our museumized past is the discarded past, detritus that never
truly disappears. In Italo Calvino’s ‘Leonia’, everything is new-made daily, all the used
artefacts, from sheets and soap to boilers and pianos, are consigned to garbage every
night, to be dumped outside the urban walls.
But as yesterday’s sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before, . . . a fortress of
indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, . . . the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that
cannot be removed. . . . The greater its height grows, . . . the more the danger of a landslide looms,
324
Jan Nelis, ‘Constructing fascist identity: Benito Mussolini and the myth of romanità’, Classical World 100
(2007): 391–415 at 403, 409. See Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, eds., Donatello among the
Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Cornell, 2005); Bosworth,
Whispering City, 166–7, 173; Borden Painter, Mussolini’s Rome (Macmillan, 2005); Emilio Gentile,
Fascismo di pietra (Rome: Laterza, 2007); John Agnew, ‘“Ghosts of Rome”: the haunting of Fascist efforts
to remake Rome as Italy’s capital city’, Annali d’italianistica 28 (2010): 179–98.
325
Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (Allen & Unwin, 1964), 51; David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and
Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (MIT Press, 2000), 101–4.
326
Charles Dickens, ‘Night walks’ (1860), in The Uncommercial Traveller (Macmillan, 1925), 109–17 at 114.
327
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, 29 Sept. 1855 and 26 Mar. 1856 (New York: [P]MLA, 1941),
242, 294.
328
Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 6.
. . . an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the
city in its own past.329
The menacing past

The past not only appals by its crimes or cripples by its grandeur; it threatens by its
lasting potency. ‘We live entirely in the past, nourished by dead thoughts, dead creeds,
dead sciences’, moaned Henry Miller. ‘The past . . . is engulfing us.’330 As followers of
Freud and Nietzsche are aware, ‘the past is old stuff, and like depleted and worn out
objects, it just clogs up our lives’. But though ‘spent, banished, used up and made void, . . .
the threat of the uncanny’ implacably persists.331 James Fenimore Cooper’s tale of the
Swiss hereditary hangman who ‘can neither inherit or transmit aught but disgrace’ spells
out the fearsome consequences of an inescapable legacy, the Roman damnosa hereditas.332
‘Any normal child’, concludes a biologist, ‘hates what he inherits’. We must dispute
the philosopher’s dictum that ‘we only dread the future, but not the past’.333
A miserable childhood and utopian Marxism turned the philosopher Ernst Bloch
firmly against reminiscence. ‘Nothing past should be sought so faithfully that one goes
back, truly back. . . . The desire for it is depraved, and one will pay for it too. . . . The
return disappoints; . . . life then and life now have no connection, or merely one in
melancholy’, towards things dead or broken. ‘Separating oneself from one’s past is a test
of one’s adaptation to fate.’334
Previous others live on to haunt us. In cemetery and charnel house, song and story, the
dead oppress and cajole the living, who cannot exorcise their ghosts. Sheer survival may
mandate concealing or expunging ancestral remains. Transgressors’ bodies were staked
into bogs to make sure they would not rise from the dead to bedevil the living; Bronze
Age burials were obliterated to expunge posthumous powers.335 Academics ‘who could
slaughter their intellectual ancestors’ are more apt to prosper than those who adored
them.336 As the progeny of past generations, Nietzsche reminded readers, ‘we are also the
products of their aberrations, passions, and errors, and indeed of their crimes’.337 They
329
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972; Vintage, 1997), 114–16.
330
Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (1946; New York: New Directions, 1956), x.
331
John Scanlan, On Garbage (Reaktion, 2005), 162–3.
332
James Fenimore Cooper, The Headsman (London, 1833), 2: 50.
333
Midas Dekkers, The Way of All Flesh (1997; London: Harvill, 2000), 61; Craig Bourne, A Future for
Presentism (Oxford, 2006), 17.
334
Ernst Bloch, ‘Reunion without connection’, in Traces (1910–26; Stanford, 2006), 62–3.
335
Allan A. Lund, Mummificerede moselig (2002), cited in Karin Sanders, Bodies in the Bog and the
Archaeological Imagination (Chicago, 2009), 6–8, 238 n17; Sarah Semple, ‘A fear of the past: the place of
prehistoric burial mounds in the ideology of middle and later Anglo-Saxon England’, World Archaeology
30:1 (1998): 109–26; Klavs Randborg, ‘Impressions of the past: early material heritage in Scandinavia’,
Acta Archaeologica 70 (1999): 185–94.
336
Anthony Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Harvard, 2001), 293.
337
Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History, 102.
still threaten. ‘Those who venture too close . . . risk being pulled back into a past of fixed
essences and hierarchies’ ruled by princes and prelates.338
Japanese who find the weight of tradition unbearable break entirely with long-
worshipped ancestors. Wretched inheritors of ancestral woes and misfortunes, they
sever karmic bonds to escape forebears’ malign grip.339 Convinced that ancestral char-
acter resurfaces in descendants, a Yoruba villager seeks to erase a forebear’s grievous
life from collective tribal memory, lest inherited disgrace wreck his descendants’
prospects.340
Like the ancestral past, inherited property can be a dubious blessing. Not every relic is
seemly or desirable. Along with the ‘the Old Master over the carved surround of the
saloon fireplace’ in the stately home comes ‘the peeling wallpaper in the servant’s
bedroom’.341 Adored survivals may be also detested. Among the cabbages, diesel six-
wheelers, and theatre props in old Covent Garden, one’s delight in ‘this tight-packed,
smelly, rakishly scruffy and vital corner of London is equalled by a deep conviction . . .
that the whole bloody lot ought to be bulldozed’.342 Clinging to Lancashire’s old indus-
trial monuments was held sheer masochism, yet ‘in fighting to remove the greyness of its
economy, it would be a pity to tamper with its soul’. But even the soul may perish in such
surroundings. Dank Mancunian greyness so depressed one lover of the past that she felt
inclined to eradicate everything Victorian and Edwardian.343
Many strive to forget or banish baneful recall. To prevent sorrows being ‘kept raw by
the edge of repetitions’, Thomas Browne termed it mercifully beneficial to be ‘forgetful of
evils past’.344 Memory must be curtailed or obliterated, advised Nietzsche, lest the past
become the gravedigger of the present. ‘No artist will paint his picture, no general win his
victory, no nation gain its freedom’ without forgetting the past.345 Zionist pioneers in
Palestine ‘cultivate[d] oblivion. We are proud of our short memory. The more rootless we
see ourselves, the more we believe that we are more free, more sublime. It is roots that
delay our upward growth.’ After the Holocaust horror, some Jews wanted to consign
Jewish history to oblivion.346 Cambodia’s prime minister urged his countrymen to ‘dig a
deep hole and bury the past’.347
338
Ozment, Ancestors, 1.
339
Karen Kerner, ‘The malevolent ancestors: ancestral influence in a Japanese religious sect’, 205–17, and
Takie Sugiyama Lebra, ‘Ancestral influence on the suffering of descendants in a Japanese cult’, 219–30, in
William H. Newell, ed., Ancestors (The Hague: Mouton, 1976).
340
J. D. Y. Peel, ‘Making history: the past in the Ijesha present’, Man 19 (1984): 111–32 at 125.
341
Patrick A. Faulkner, ‘A philosophy for the preservation of our historic heritage’, Journal of the Royal
Society of Arts 126 (1978): 452–80 at 455.
342
Tom Baistow, ‘The Covent Garden to come’, New Statesman, 19 Apr. 1968: 511.
343
Dennis Johnson, ‘Masochism in Lancashire’, New Statesman, 1 Mar. 1968: 262; Anne Angus, ‘What’s
wrong with the North?’ New Society, 13 July 1967: 55.
344
Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia: Urn Burial (1658), in Miscellaneous Works (1852), 3: 1–50 at 45.
345
Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History, 9.
346
Berl Katznelson quoted in Zerubavel, Time Maps, 93; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History
and Jewish Memory (1982; rev. edn Washington, 1996), 97.
347
Hun Sen quoted in Seth Mydans, ‘Cambodian leader resists punishing top Khmer Rouge’, NYT, 29 Dec.
1998.
The need for exorcism impels Naipaul’s post-colonial Africans:

We have to learn to trample on the past . . . to get rid of the old, to wipe out the memory of the
intruder . . . There may be some parts of the world . . . where men can cherish the past and think of
passing on furniture and china to their heirs . . . Some peasant department of France full of half-
wits in châteaux; some crumbling Indian palace-city, or some dead colonial town in a hopeless
South American country. Everywhere else . . . the past can only cause pain.
Naipaul was equally dismissive of the ‘ecstatically contemplated . . . golden Indian past . . .
a religious idea, clouding intellect and painful perception, numbing the stress in bad
times’.348 So too the Russian in Thomas Harris’s Archangel warns that the past still
menaces: ‘this isn’t England or America, the past isn’t safely dead here. In Russia, the past
carries razors and a pair of handcuffs’.349
Demolition is the common fate of despised and dangerous legacies. As with distressing
memories, out of sight, out of mind. Iconoclasts down the ages expunge detested
reminders. Dreaded, oppressive, shameful pasts spawn iconoclastic frenzy. Each Chinese
dynasty made an auto-da-fé of its predecessor’s precious relics. Roman emperors regu-
larly removed images of rivals, destroying or displacing portraits, razing or substituting
new heads on statues.350 During English monastic dissolution, Protestants aimed to wipe
out every Catholic icon, to make ‘utterly extinct and destroy all shrines’, in a 1547 Tudor
injunction, ‘so that there remain no memory of the same’.351 An Egyptian jihadist would
demolish the pyramids and the Giza sphinx: ‘All Muslims are charged . . . to remove such
idols, as we did in Afghanistan when we destroyed the Buddha statues.’352 The mission-
ary founder of Berea College, Kentucky, Dr John Fee, so loathed slavery that he literally
knifed out every Scriptural reference to servitude. Fee’s mutilated Bible, on display in
Berea’s library, attests his faith that evil can be undone by being literally excised.353
Oblivion is a parallel remedy: expunging all mention of the now-detested man or
matter and enjoining amnesia. Two aims animate injunctions to forget: to doom a sinner
by blotting out his name (Deuteronomy 29:20); to blot out the sin, ‘forgive their iniquity
and . . . remember their sins no more’ (Jeremiah 31:34).354 Forgetting is a common
prelude to forgiving: amnesia facilitates amnesty. To restore amity after Odysseus’
vengeance against Penelope’s suitors, Zeus purges antagonists’ ‘memories of the bloody
slaughter of their brothers and their sons’. To foster a myth of uninterrupted ancestral
freedom, and to antiquate Solon’s laws and thus make them unassailable, public amnesia
348
V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (Knopf, 1979), 152–53, 33; V. S. Naipaul, ‘India: paradise lost’, NYRB, 28
Oct. 1976: 10–16 at 15; V. S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (Knopf, 1977).
349
Thomas Harris, Archangel (Hutchinson, 1998), 167.
350
Ryckmans, ‘Chinese attitude towards the past’, 285–301; Peter Stewart, Statues in Roman Society (Oxford,
2003), 261–99.
351
Order in Council quoted in Martin S. Briggs, Goths and Vandals: A Study of the Destruction, Neglect and
Preservation of Historical Buildings in England (Constable, 1952), 34–5. See Margaret Aston, England’s
Iconoclasts (Oxford, 1988), 2, 10, 256.
352
Quoted in ‘“Destroy the idols”, Egyptian jihadist calls for removal of Sphinx, Pyramids’, Al Arabiya, 12
Nov. 2012.
353
I saw Fee’s Bible in the Berea College library in 1988.
354
Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Harvard, 2002), 188–90.
was decreed when Athens regained democracy in 403 bc. Citizens were forbidden to
discuss recent sufferings or to seek revenge against traitors who had aided the oligarchs.
Recall was forbidden precisely because the recent past was remembered all too well; it was
put out of mind because dangerously painful.355
The ancient Athenian example proved serviceable in early-modern Europe, when
religious conflicts imperilled social stability and state exchequers. To enable reconcili-
ation, former foes had to forget past injuries. The 1598 Edict of Nantes required memory
of quarrels ‘be extinguished and put to rest’.356 Ending the Thirty Years War, the Treaty
of Westphalia (1648) imposed ‘perpetual oblivion and amnesty’ on all parties.357 Mindful
of Restoration England’s festering sores, Thomas Hobbes pronounced forgetting the
basis of a just state, amnesia the cornerstone of the social contract. Disregarding ‘the
evil past’ for the sake of ‘the good to follow’, offences should be pardoned, not
punished; wrongs forgotten, not avenged. Remedial oblivion became a vital tool of
English statecraft, Civil War antagonists adjured to forget. ‘Acts of Oblivion’ in 1660
pardoned men who had borne arms against Charles II and in 1690 those who
had opposed William III. Suppressing memory of grievances defanged enduring
resentments.358
French revolutionaries decreed oblivion integral to freedom; écrasez l’infâme exhorted
reformers to expunge all traces of the base past. After the Terror of 1794, citizens were
ordered to ‘forget the misfortunes inseparable from a great revolution’.359 Amnesia was
essential to the national heritage, taught Ernest Renan in 1882. ‘Every French citizen has
to have forgotten the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the massacres in the 13th century
Midi’: only by smothering such crimes could France flourish.360 A century later the
genocidal ruptures of Vichy France had in turn to be forgotten. ‘Are we going to keep
open the bleeding wounds of our national discords forever?’ chided President Georges
Pompidou in 1972; it was time ‘to forget those times when the French didn’t like each
other’.361 Selective amnesia also promoted Anglo-French amity. English consent to let
Napoleon’s corpse be taken from St Helena for reburial in Paris would ‘wipe out all traces
355
Homer, Odyssey, bk. 24, ll. 535–6, 483; Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in
Ancient Athens (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 40–1; Andrew Wolpert, Remembering Defeat: Civil War
and Civic Memory in Ancient Athens (Johns Hopkins, 2002), 29–30, 118.
356
Bernard Cottret, 1598 L’Édit de Nantes: pour en finir avec des guerres de religion (Paris: Perrin, 1997), 363;
Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory (Princeton, 2003), 163; Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting
(Chicago, 2004), 454–5.
357
Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (1997; Cornell, 2004), 171–2; Jörg Fisch, Krieg
und Frieden im Friedensvertrag (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979).
358
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. 15, 7th Law of Nature, 94. Thomas Hobbes, Dialogue between
a Philosopher and a Student on the Common Laws of England (1681; Chicago, 1971), 26–7, 157–8; Georges
de Scudéry, Curia Politiae: or, The Apologies of Severall Princes: justifying to the world their most eminent
Actions (London, 1654), 98; Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past (Johns Hopkins, 1989), 142. See my
‘Memory and oblivion’, Museum Management & Curatorship 12 (1993): 171–82 at 175.
359
Citron, Mythe national, 183; Bertrand Barer de Vieira, ‘Report by the Committee of Public Safety’, An II
[1794], quoted in Gildea, Past in French History, 32.
360
Renan, Qu-est-ce qu’une nation? 38.
361
Quoted in Ronald Koven, ‘National memory’, Society [New Brunswick] 32:6 (Sept.–Oct. 1995): 52–8, on
52, 55; Michael Curtis, Verdict on Vichy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002), 7.
of a sorrowful past’, envisaged a French worthy.362 Of Canada’s bitter Anglo-French

battles Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier in 1900 urged that ‘the memory of those conflicts
of the last century be forever forgotten’.363
American colonists expunged from memory Old World evils to realize the blessings
of the New. Immigrants shed noxious European traditions to embrace American novelty.
‘Forget your past, your customs, and your ideals’ to speed Americanization, a Jewish
immigration guidebook advised in 1890. ‘We had to try to obliterate centuries’ worth of
memory’, an Italian-American agreed, ‘in just two or three generations’.364 President
George H. W. Bush invoked the statute of limitations against the festering wounds of
Vietnam; Americans must forget it, for ‘no great nation can long afford to be sundered
by a memory’.365
It may be true that ‘some measure of neglect and even forgetting are the necessary
condition for civic health’, as Tony Judt concluded. But ‘a nation has first to have
remembered something before it can begin to forget it’. The French had to remember
Vichy as it was – not as they had misremembered it; so too the Poles with the Jews, Spain
with its Civil War.366 Yet the hoary maxim that ‘to know all is to forgive all’ seems no
more valid in private than public affairs. Rather, as Ivy Compton-Burnett’s discreet butler
observes, ‘to forgive, it is best to know as little as possible’.367 To exorcise corrupt
memory, once-cherished keepsakes are banished. ‘Out they go – the Roman coins, the
sea horse from Venice, and the Chinese fan. Down with the stuffed owl in the upstairs
hall and the statue of Hermes on the newel post! . . . Dismiss whatever molests us and
challenges our purpose.’ Throwing out souvenirs, ‘getting rid of all the physical and
emotional blockages in your home’, promises to restore one’s health.368
Neutralizing its relics tames the past. ‘By displaying what had gone before and making
an ornament of it’, writes Lively, ‘you destroyed its potency. Less sophisticated societies
propitiate their ancestors; this one makes a display of them and renders them harm-
less.’369 We subdue an overbearing past by sequestering it. Once memorialized, it loses
power to harm the present – as with Nabokov’s narrator who ‘transformed everything we
saw into monuments to our still nonexistent past . . . so that subsequently when the past
really existed for us, we would know how to cope with it, and not perish under its
burden’.370
362
Interior minister Charles, Comte de Rémusat (12 May 1840), quoted in Ida Minerva Tarbell, A Life of
Napoleon Bonaparte (New York, 1901), 297.
363
Wilfrid Laurier, speech, 20 Aug. 1900, quoted in B. A. Balcom et al., ‘1995 – a year of commemoration’,
Heritage Notes [Louisbourg], no. 4 (Feb. 1994).
364
Michael Kammen, ‘Some patterns and meanings of memory distortion in American history’, in In the Past
Lane (Oxford, 1997), 199–212 at 202, 333; Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, 157.
365
George H. W. Bush, inaugural address, 20 Jan. 1989.
366
‘From the house of the dead’, NYRB, 6 Oct. 2005: 12–16.
367
Ivy Compton-Burnett, A Heritage and Its History (1959; Virago, 1992), 110.
368
Cheever, ‘Lowboy’, 411–12; Dawna Walter and Mark Franks, The Life Laundry: How to De-Junk Your Life
(BBC Books, 2002).
369
Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield (Heinemann, 1977), 178.
370
‘The Admiralty spire’ (1933), in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage, 2006), 348–57 at 352.
Satire is another way to neuter the past. An SF tale portrayed Napoleon as obsessively
touchy about being short and Robin Hood as a Mafia-type lout; thus made risible they
ceased to be figures of dread.371 A cartoonist’s dialogue demystifies the autobiographical
past:
‘I almost drowned yesterday, and my whole life flashed in front of me!’
‘That must have been exciting!’
‘Not really; I’d seen it before.’372
The scholar confronts the past’s evils is to understand it better. ‘If the Past has been an
obstacle and a burden’, Lord Acton advised, ‘knowledge of the Past is the safest and surest
emancipation’.373 History’s emancipatory role is the main burden of J. H. Plumb’s 1969
The Death of the Past. ‘Nothing has been so corruptly used as concepts of the past’ in
ideologies designed mainly to justify ruling elites.
[But this] old past is dying, its force weakening, and . . . the historian should speed it on its way, for
it was compounded of bigotry, of national vanity, of class domination . . . History has burrowed
like a death-watch beetle in this great fabric of the past, honeycombing the timbers and making
the structure ruinous . . . This critical, destructive role is still necessary, [given persisting]
illusions about the past . . . and historians [must] cleanse . . . those deceiving visions of a purposeful
past.374
But Plumb’s vision of the enlightened historian cleansing bygone times of delusive
myths and errors, plumbing the past for its hidden unsavoury secrets, threatens both
inquirer and the past. Zealous curiosity is traditionally feared as a danger to the fabric of
the past. Equating the search for forbidden lore with greed for hidden treasure, Chris-
tianity blamed the Fall on impious lust for knowledge. Augustine held ‘lust of the eyes’
the besetting sin of pagan priests, philosophers, and heretics. Worse than the desire for
riches was the quest for prideful renown that bred diseased craving for arcane secrets,
notably the evil arts of astrology and alchemy. Beyond knowing God, all human know-
ledge was sheer vanity. Not until long after Francis Bacon did unfettered curiosity cease to
be a diabolical vice.375
Efforts to divine the future were most anathematized, but inquiries into the past,
especially the pagan past, were likewise censured. Medieval treasure hunters who craved
the fabled riches of antiquity found their transgressions regularly thwarted. In William of
Malmesbury’s tale, the magically versed Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II, 999–1003)
seeks Octavian’s treasures in subterranean Rome, near a statue inscribed ‘Strike Here’.
Unlike previous seekers, Gerbert hits not the statue but the spot shadowed by its pointing
finger – a trope taken from St Augustine’s commentary on fathoming the subtext of Holy
371
Charles Alverson, Time Bandits (London: Sparrow, 1981), 28–32, 44–6.
372
Johnny Hart, ‘B.C.’, IHT, 12 July 1979.
373
Lord Acton, ‘Inaugural lecture on the study of history’ (1895), in Lectures on Modern History (Macmillan,
1906), 1–30 at 4.
374
Plumb, Death of the Past, 16, 83, 115.
375
Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge, 2007), 34–45; Roger Shattuck,
Forbidden Knowledge (St Martin’s Press, 1996), 64–75, 306–8.
Figure 12 The past neutralized as display: agricultural and other bygones, Woodstock, Vermont
Scripture. Digging discloses a golden king and queen dining off golden dishes in a vast
golden palace. But they are beyond reach; when Gerbert tries to touch them ‘all these
images . . . leap into life and rush at the offender’, plunging the whole scene into darkness;
Gerbert barely extricates himself. The admonitory lesson is nihil erat quod posset tangi
etsi posset videri – ‘what is unveiled is only to be understood by the eyes, and is never to
be transformed into tangible riches’.376
To penetrate the past is perilous. Dante’s infernal underground brimmed with the
glories of pagan antiquity, but its denizens were damned for all eternity – the past was
‘the Devil’s greatest whore’, in Luther’s phrase. While the future was known only to God,
knowledge of the past was a mystique shared by Satan and his hybrid offspring, such as
Merlin, who knew all things that had been said and done.377
376
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum (1125), cited in Monika Otter, ‘Functions of fiction in
historical writing’, in Nancy Partner, ed., Writing Medieval History (Hodder Arnold, 2005), 109–30 at
116–17, and quoted in David Rollo, Glamorous Sorcery: Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages
(Minnesota, 2000), 16, 18.
377
Martin Luther, ‘Last sermon in Wittenberg, Romans 12:3, 17 Jan. 1546’, in Werke (Weimar, 1914), 51:
123–34 at 126; Jennifer Hockenbery Dragseth, ed., The Devil’s Whore: Reason and Philosophy in the
Lutheran Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011); Robert de Boron (attrib.), Merlin and the Grail: Joseph
of Arimathea, Merlin, Perceval: The Trilogy of Arthurian Romances . . . (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001), 45–114
at 55, 92; Stephen Knight, Merlin: Knowledge and Power through the Ages (Cornell, 2010). See Shattuck,
Forbidden Knowledge, 1–47.
While both divination and retrospection were forbidden, the future was ‘higher’, the
past ‘lower’, with the added opprobrium of pagan artifice.378 Malmesbury’s Gerbert is a
stand-in for the historian-chronicler, announcing that what is surmised of the past never
existed or, still worse, that those who seek possession destroy its very reality. Adjurations
never to look back, as in the dire warnings addressed to Lot’s wife and to Orpheus, apply
to time as well as place. Insistence on knowing his past devastates Oedipus. ‘The past is
seen as a separate place, . . . or ambiguously undead’, writes a medieval historian. ‘It is
untouchable, sequestered’ from the observer by mechanical and magical barriers, ‘and
utterly irretrievable’.379
Yet it is ever at risk of violation. Merely examining the past can be fatal to it. In
archaeological excavation ‘We murder to dissect’.380 ‘The antiquarians had felled the tree
that they might learn its age by counting the rings in the trunk’, commented a nineteenth-
century observer in Rome. ‘They had destroyed, that they might interrogate.’381 The
mummified head of Ottokar II of Bohemia rapidly disintegrated when his thirteenth-
century tomb, in Prague’s St Vitus Cathedral, was reopened to see what could be learned
from it.382 Reminiscent of Gerbert is Herbert Winlock’s account of penetrating the
Meket-Rē’ tomb at Thebes in 1920. Turning on his flashlight, the explorer fancied that
he momentarily glimpsed the little green men coming and going in uncanny silence –
who then froze, motionless, forever. ‘Winlock had looked into a cavity and seen the past
in motion, and stilled it with his torch’.383 The risk is more than fanciful: ‘Shine a light
bright enough to see an object’, a conservator warns, ‘and it will fall apart before your very
eyes’. Assured that ‘nothing will change’ when the National Trust exhibits her beloved
shabby stately home, Alan Bennett’s chatelaine retorts, ‘the looking will change it.
Looking always does.’384
The evils attributed to the past are as manifold and complex as the benefits in whose
wake they often follow. Malignant compulsions and coercive injunctions offset the past’s
attractions; excessive devotion to it dims confidence and thwarts enterprise. To deny the
past is less usual than to rejoice in it, but its demerits are nonetheless consequential. The
past’s virtues may distress us no less than the vices. ‘It is not just bad experiences we want
to protect ourselves from but good experiences as well, and for some of the same reasons’,
notes a reporter. ‘It scares us to turn over a rock and find some worm of history we
thought dead still crawling about; it scares us too, though, to find the darkened present
illuminated by some flickering light from the past.’385
378
Carlo Ginzburg, ‘High and low: the theme of forbidden knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries’, Past & Present 73 (1976): 28–41.
379
Otter, ‘Functions of fiction’, 118. See Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, 329–32.
380
William Wordsworth, ‘The tables turned’ (1798), l. 28, in Poetical Works, 4: 57.
381
George Stillman Hillard, Six Months in Italy (Boston, 1853), 4: 299.
382
Malcolm W. Browne, ‘Prague protects its medieval architecture’, IHT, 25 Jan. 1977: 3.
383
Herbert Winlock, ‘Digger’s luck’ (1921), in Models of Daily Life in Ancient Egypt (Harvard, 1955), 9–16.
Loren Eiseley, All the Strange Hours (1975; Nebraska, 2000), 104.
384
Jonathan Ashley-Smith, ‘Conservation and information’, lecture, Art Historians’ conference, London, 26
Mar. 1983; Alan Bennett, People (Faber & Faber, 2012), 33.
385
‘Notes and comment’, New Yorker, 24 Sept. 1984: 39.
Only a past seen as truly over ceases to be a threat. While still alive, Henry James’s
cousin Minny Temple was both beloved and menacing, once dead ‘a bright flame of
memory’ worshipped in complete safety.386 At the Hangchow tomb of Sung dynasty hero
Yueh Fei, kneeling effigies of his betrayers were traditionally stoned by tourists; they are
now protected objects of historical worth. Images of pagan gods smashed by early
Christians now shelter in the Vatican Museum, no longer dangerous rivals but historical
curiosa of aesthetic merit.387 A century after Culloden, Victoria trivialized the long-gone
Stuart threat as masked-ball theatre, and with Albert at Balmoral danced the Highland
Fling in tartan plaids.388 But once-dead pasts may return to intimidate the present.
A Confucian temple restored in China in 1965 was burnt two years later. ‘When they
had confidence in historical progress . . . Communists could patronize their Chinese
cultural past. But if the pastness of the past was not so certain, . . . and regress was the
spectre, crisis . . . stripped the national cultural heritage of its protective historical
color.’389
In sum, the past ‘is a time bomb, and its fuse burns brightest in the half-light of
competing versions’ of founding myths of national identity. We inherit the obsessions
of the dead, ‘assume their burdens; carry on their causes; promote their mentalities,
ideologies, and . . . superstitions; and often we die trying to vindicate their humiliations’,
writes Robert Pogue Harrison. ‘Why this servitude? We have no choice. Only the dead
can grant us legitimacy.’390
386
Leon Edel, Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843–1870 (Lippincott, 1953), 325.
387
Frederic E. Wakeman, Jr., ‘Foreword’, in Joseph R. Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The
Western Stage and the Chinese Stages (California, 1971), i–xxxi at xiv–xvi.
388
Andrew Sanders, In the Olden Time (Yale, 2013), 212–13.
389
Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism, 53–4.
390
Alan Cowell, ‘The perils of history as politics’, IHT, 31 Jan. 2012: 2; Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion
of the Dead (Chicago, 2003), x.

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THE PAST IS A

FOREIGN COUNTRY – REVISITED

David Lowenthal is Emeritus Professor of Geography and Honorary Research

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of

© David Lowenthal 2015

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

ISBN 978-0-521-85142-8 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

List of illustrations page ix

PART I WANTING THE PAST

1 Nostalgia: dreams and nightmares 31

3 Benefits and burdens of the past 80

Threats and evils 128

PART II DISPUTING THE PAST

4 Ancients vs. Moderns: tradition and innovation 147

5 The look of age: aversion 206

6 The look of age: affection 241

PART III KNOWING THE PAST

PART IV REMAKING THE PAST

10 Saving the past: preservation and replication 413

11 Replacing the past: restoration and re-enactment 464

12 Improving the past 497

Epilogue: The past in the present 585

Select bibliography 611

1 The past all-pervasive: ‘Well, Emmeline, what’s new?’ (Barney Tobey,

20 Imagined decay: Joseph Michael Gandy, Architectural Ruins: A Vision.

42 The humble past acclaimed: Servants’ Hall, Erdigg, Clwyd, Wales

67 Updating the patriotic past: Archibald M. Willard, Spirit of ’76, 1876

90 Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, by Horace Walpole, c. 1760

Newspapers [Times, Guardian, Independent, Evening Standard, Telegraph, etc.]

AASLH American Association for State and Local History (Nashville,

Reversion to original sources reflects my well-founded suspicion of secondary sources,

How my past became foreign

heritage villages, urban preservation. Previously confined to a handful of museums and

Finding the foreign country

Marsh sought to protect history as well as nature, to preserve artefacts of everyday

Publication of my earlier book intensified my own involvement in challenging new

Frequenting the foreign country

Figure 1 The past all-pervasive: ‘Well, Emmeline, what’s new?’

Themes and structure

thereafter shifted to WASP anxieties over immigration and urbanization, engendering

vicariously, as in BBC TV’s Restoration (2003–). To be sure, preservation is an age-old

Myriad agencies – the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the International

Nostalgia: dreams and nightmares

Figure 2 Rubbish into ‘Antiques’: Coventry, Vermont

Anything Away’. Forced by health inspectors to clean the dust-cocooned wishbones

Nostalgia far and near

make-and-mend mentality of ration-book powdered eggs and suet, beet-juice lipstick,

Looking back to Europe

Figure 3 Tudor nostalgia: Charles Wade’s Snowshill Manor, Gloucestershire

cling’.97 Erasmus Darwin defined nostalgia as ‘an unconquerable desire of returning to

malign malady and curative aesthetics continued to commingle, as exemplified in Emily

Sentimental longing to retro irony

Even Generation X sentimentalizes its youth. So how ‘can an anti-nostalgic generation

forgetting cannot be forgotten. Even if we wished to forget, we couldn’t, as somewhere in

Goals in the revisited past

Explaining the past