The Spaces of Writing the Past: Historicising the Nation

Writing the past begins with history. Writing British history began before Britain was Britain. When Herodotus provided the first formal inquiry into the past, he was castigated for drawing on myth and imagination. The model provided by Thucydides focused instead on factual events and their analysis. The later Anglo-Saxon histories contributed to a different kind of retelling of the past that sometimes veered to the miraculous and the legendary. With the histories that followed fused with the Thucydidean model what emerged was the official account of the British nation. The turning point was during the post-war period when Clement Attlee’s Labour government created a more socialist vision of Britain. One of the areas this was reflected in was in the writing of history, and as the revised Marxist approach rejected the existing top-down model it asserted itself as the new reliable narrator. What it re-established, however, was the same template, albeit from a different perspective which is when we do history, we already know the end. This chapter begins therefore by looking at the history of history, concerning how it developed and impacted on writing the British narrative. It explores how when there was a shift to Modernism there was a counter-offensive to preserve the past. Where this was demonstrated was in the historic environment and in the post-war country house novel. What these changing attitudes reflect is that the past is not a settled agenda. The question is, if we are to continue with this model of history, how might we begin to do it better?