ABSTRACT
History is an act of interpretation. Historians have all kinds of records about what happened in the past. Why things happened, what their significance was, and how to best understand what happened is another matter. Historians are, as might be expected, affected by the dominant ideas of the period in which they write. Not only does Johan Huizinga stress the symbolic significance of objects, he also believes that "the true character of the spirit of an age is better revealed in its mode of regarding and expressing trivial and commonplace things than in the high manifestations of philosophy and science". Fifty years after Huizinga wrote about the importance of the commonplace, the great French historian Fernand Braudel wrote a three-volume study of "Civilization and Capitalism" whose first volume was titled The Structures of Everyday Life. Briggs is using material culture to understand the Victorian age as it saw itself.
