ABSTRACT
In Theatres of Memory (1994) Raphael Samuel wrote that history – which he regarded as a ‘mass activity’ – was more popular than it had ever been in Britain. We live, he argued, ‘in an expanding historical culture, in which the work of inquiry and retrieval is being progressively extended into all kinds of spheres that would have been thought unworthy of attention in the past’.1 Theatres of Memory was a pioneering book. Samuel was the fi rst British historian to elaborate and welcome the many varied ways in which people incorporated references to the past into their social and private lives: visiting historic houses, buying period furniture and bric-à-brac, wearing vintage trainers, reading Sir Walter Scott’s novels, collecting old vinyl records, keeping boxes of photographs, watching period dramas on fi lm and television. History, he stated, was a collective form of knowledge, the work in any given instance of a thousand different hands rather than the exclusive property of the academic historian. Fifteen years after Theatres of Memory was published David Harlan noticed something similar about US contemporary culture. He observed that perhaps ‘Americans are more intensely interested in history now than they’ve ever been’.2 History, he pointed out, was now a staple of today’s entertainment and leisure cultures: museums are crowded, Hollywood produces several big-budget historical dramas every year, historical documentaries like Ken Burns’s works on jazz and baseball reach a mass television
audience and historical fi ction has rediscovered the kind of popularity it last enjoyed in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century. Cold Mountain (1997), a story set in North Carolina in 1864, was the most commercially successful novel of recent times. Following from this, in the last thirteen years historical novels have won six National Book Awards and seven National Book Critics Circle Awards in the USA.3 This literary trend is paralleled in Britain, where all six short-listed titles for the 2009 Man Booker fi ction prize had historical settings.4
