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Romancing the Past
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Message 1.Β
Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Thursday, 6th October 2011
Following on from a comment made on another thread and a similar discussion on another board, is the romanticisation of the past a modern trend generated by the TV and film industries or is it something man has always tended to do. To view the past with sentimentality or with rose tinted spectacles, if you will?
I feel it is a combination of both, one feeding off the other but how much damage does the tendancy to romanticise the past do to our ability to learn of/from the past and to historical accuracy? Surely we owe a debt to those who went before, to preserve their story (whatever it may be) in it's entirety and for the future? -
Message 2
Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Thursday, 6th October 2011
The Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ drama series 'Lark Rise to Candleford' is probably a case in point. Supposedly set in the 1890s it could equally by taken to be in almost any decade between 1870 and 1910. It is also determindly rural but depicts precisely the time when the majority of the population in England had become urban. I suppose, however, that that is the whole point. It's an escapist drama. The UK's Sunday evening audiences probably don't really want to watch 'EastEnders' in period costume.
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Message 3
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 6th October 2011
Flora Thompson's book which was mined for the series is not romantic, When I first read it and on subsequent readings I discovered very much the dark hardyesque world that my mother had grown up in.
I recall being horrified by the first programmes with such a vague generica "rural burr" for speech instead of the incredible North Oxfordshire speech which is almost slow yodelling..
I did notice, however, that the early scripts at least were written by someone with a Scottish name like Gallagher so I could understand where the "tartan romance" of Scottish storytelling came from.. In particular the Dawn French character with a husband always off at sea was an invention just for "light relief"- seemingly borrowed from the Scottish Highlands and Islands.
But having suggested to the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ in 2001 that it was a good source for a series reminding people about that disappearing English world that Flora Thompson tried to fix for posterity as we drifted into the Second World War- I suppose I can not complain.
Cass -
Message 4
Posted by somewhatsilly (U14315357) on Thursday, 6th October 2011
Oh for heaven's sake Cass, is this is something new to blame the Scots for! I don't want to start tossing national stereotypes about and try to define anyone's personality and abilities on the basis of their name but if you insist, Gallagher is an Irish name so perhaps the 'light relief' comes from Cork , Galway or Kerry.
Sometimes you leave me speechless and that's quite an achievement. -
Message 5
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 6th October 2011
ferval
Well at the time there was a thread on the MB about history as "Tartan Romance" and you are perhaps familiar with the ]views of both T.B. Macaulay and George Macaulay Trevelyan that Sir Walter Scott perfected a whole new art of storytelling based upon a Highland Culture where every individual had real character that came right up out of the page.
In this case as it was a travesty of my own family's life and times as faithfully recorded by Flora Thompson I felt the pain more acutely- but reasoned that probably the people from the NE had felt the same about "When the Boat Comes in"..
Why is everyone else entitled to take issue over their worlds being messed up and messed about but not the English people?
Cass -
Message 6
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Friday, 7th October 2011
It doesn't matter how the TV producers try to dress it up, the past was anything but romantic for people of colour....
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Message 7
Posted by TwinProbe (U4077936) on Friday, 7th October 2011
Hi ferval
There is something in what Cass says about 'Lark Rise to Candleford' which is of interest to historians. Let us leave out the Scottish element which I'm sure is irrelevant to this discussion.
The creators of this hugely successful, and I must say quite enjoyable series, clearly wish to end each episode with an optimistic 'what did we all learn' message. This has the inevitable result of making the TV series much less 'dark' that the books.
The series has major problems with anachronism. It seems to be set in the 1890s, yet a major character is imprisoned for debt which ceased in the 1860s. Most episodes have minor problems of this type.
Worse still there are three major themes of 19th century life that are completely untouched. There is no hint of non-conformity in religion. There is no reflection of the movement of agricultural labourers off the land into urban based industries, and there is no hint of trade unionism or the emergence of socialist (as opposed to Liberal) politics. A sturdy free-thinker like Robert Timmins would certainly be following the outcome of the Bradford Manningham Mills strike and be reading the speeches of Keir Hardie, even in a Borsetshire village!
Best wishes,
TP -
Message 8
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 7th October 2011
Round about the time that Flora Thompson was writing the "Lark Rise" books, G.G. Coulton published "Medieval Panorama. The English Scene from Conquest to Reformation" (1938) which set out to tackle the challenge posed by Thomas Carlyle that historians rarely tell us how our forefathers actually lived and thought.
Probably both writers were influenced by the fact that Britain had finally really abandonned free market capitalism and all political parties had become socialist, and therefore interested in what I have called "The Rediscovery of Social Man"- a theme of articles like "Economic Man and Social Man" by Dr. Julian Huxley.
Almost certainly both writers were also aware of the looming shadow of World War: and the first of Coulton's 52 chapters is entitled "The Cauldron of God's Wrath". It opens:
"We cannot deal with the civilization even of a single country at a definite period without a preliminary glance at the world-culture upon which it was grafted. Thus the Middle Ages can be rightly understood only as a period of convalescence..from the worst catastrophe recorded in the whole history of the Western World"...
It was perhaps because of this awareness that the book was reprinted in 1939,1940 and 1943- when that "worst catastrophe" was being knocked off its "pedestal"..
And no doubt English people found some consolation in such revolutionary times in his assertion that his period was one in which "everything is in process of becoming" "medieval society was not static but organic" and as such it evolved from 1066 to 1536.
Hence setting an over-view he wrote:
"Roughly speaking, the Conquest made William into the Universal Landlord of England; the Battle of Hastings gave him the right of transfering confiscated Saxon lands to his Norman followers. But Anglo-Saxon law, on the whole, suffered no violent interruption; though it was necessarily patched and amended and added to as time went on, yet it is still the foundation of English Common Law, upon which, again the United States of America founded its own. Thus, when Abraham Lincoln saw that, to win the war, he must needs follow the example of the South and conscript all able-bodied men for his armies, this was done in virtue of the obligation which had been part of English Common Law from time immemorial, before the Conquest and afterwards.
With such important basis of law in common, the conquering minority and the conquered majority had practically coalesced within three generations. They were now strong and united enough to resist further invasion, and to work out their own political salvation undisturbed by forcible interference from interested outsiders. King and barons, here as on the Continent, struggled for supremacy: but the balance was nice enough in England to make both parties appeal for popular support; and thus the generally beneficent despotism of the earlier kings-altogether beneficent as compared with the anarchy which was then the only alternative- was gradually modified by those constitutional checks which are the foundations of modern democracy.."
And- at the end of his overall sketch for a Britian "Living in a Revolution" (as Dr. Huxley wrote in another article) - he signed off:
"Everything, therefore, is ripe for revolution in English thought by the time we come to 1536; and on the verge of that revolution we stop. The defeat of Roman Catholicism in this country, and the follies and crimes with which the revolutionaries sullied their victory, and the subsequent alternations of success or failure in a war of ideals which is not yet fought out, would belong to quite another story. In this volume, it is enough to attempt a picture of the social drama as it was acted between two crucial events- the Norman Conquest and the Reformation."
Cass -
Message 9
Posted by somewhatsilly (U14315357) on Friday, 7th October 2011
Hi TP,
I hadn't any disagreement with Cass on the programme, I watched half of the first episode before becoming irritated with the hazy, golden, bucolic glow that was being cast over the whole scene, a kind of less realistic, 19th c. Ambridge, and then switching off and abandoning it. Certainly therefore I'm in no position to discuss the content. Anyway I usually find Dawn French unwatchable .
No, it was the construction of a whole conspiracy theory on its shortcomings based on a knee jerk reaction to the perceived ethnic background of a writer on account of his name that riled me. And I was in a very bad mood!
On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed 'Cranford' which was probably just as sanitised and romantised.
ferval -
Message 10
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 7th October 2011
TP
I agree .with much of that .. In fact - however- Mr Timmins like the Dawn French character both seem to have been added to FT's world- though I have not re-read it for over a decade and it is actually written more thematically than as any kind of story..
As you say it did not really bring out the Great Depression in English agriculture that forced 200,000 workers off the land within not much more than a decade and left places like Lark Rise very much lost and out of time.. Lark Rise time was ten minutes slower than Candleford. Once when my mother was complaining about city life in her sixties I asked her why she did not go back to country life.. "I would be bored stiff"- she replied.
But she also one day showed me a picture of the farm house where her family had been housed. It had been renovated and was then worth a million.. But in 1914 when she was born farm real-estate was worthless and lots of buildings were left to rack and ruin. As my grandfather was a horseman during my childhood I remember my grandparents living in a modest farmhouse next to the stables so he was close at hand.. I do not know whether the house my mother showed me had also been next to the stables.
But she had still not been able to talk about what was possibly the most single important event for my life. When she was about 3 years old in that house that was not built to be a farmworkers cottage, she started to play with a younger sister who was just a toddler. Chasing her around the large farm kitchen. The toddler fell into the open fire and was burned to death.
I do not think that my mother ever recovered.
Romantic enough.
Cass -
Message 11
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 7th October 2011
ferval
I think that Cranford, however, was written very much in a "political way" .. Mrs Gaskell was very definitely a Southerner looking at the North of England and trying to identify what it lacked, and like her characters in Cranford she saw it as part of her duty as an educated lady to try to bring civilization.. Some of the important early public health documents for the Lancashire region- leading on to Acts of Parliament that attacked those evils- were written by Dr. Gaskell.
Cass -
Message 12
Posted by Thomas (U14985443) on Friday, 7th October 2011
In reply to islanddawn:
... is the romanticisation of the past a modern trend generated by the TV and film industries or is it something man has always tended to do. To view the past with sentimentality or with rose tinted spectacles, ...Β
Such things happened also in the past by some sort of "patriotic books" with heroic pictures in it. There is a tendancy to do so back to the ancient times. Nowadays, these kind of (hi)story is easier receivable to a wider public than it was in the past, without TV and a professional film industry.
... how much damage does the tendancy to romanticise the past do to our ability to learn of/from the past and to historical accuracy?Β
Depends on what one takes as historical accuracy and where to draw the line between myth and reality on the historical topic concerned. This is even more difficult as the TV and film industry has to put into their account the marketing aspect and a film that doesnΒ΄t sell, isnΒ΄t worth the money spent. ThatΒ΄s anoying for some historians, but itΒ΄s also anoyong to read a history book that fails to provide a description of the historical period which it is written about.
The other point is, that it is very difficult in some ways to cover all what happened in the particular period. So one has to select the events and put a focus in some ways, otherwise the extent of the topic would be too vast.
Surely we owe a debt to those who went before, to preserve their story (whatever it may be) in it's entirety and for the future?Β
Agreed. -
Message 13
Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Friday, 7th October 2011
Why is everyone else entitled to take issue over their worlds being messed up and messed about but not the English people?Β
Hardly true Cass. But, at the very least, when taking issue one should check the facts of the matter before (mistakingly in this case) blaming others for the mess and causing offence. A simple apology may go further than the petulance of the above also. -
Message 14
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 7th October 2011
id
The "facts of the matter" is that my most intimate world was being described by someone whose name suggested that they had no personal knowledge of it... and had taken liberties with the original work of someone who did.
And who says I blamed anyone.. I was hurt and dismayed- but in the most important element of Flora Thompson's "Lark Rise"- "I didna flinch".. I recognised the "way of the world" with true Hardyesque fatalism... I realise that is the way that the Media works these days as has been observed already on this thread. Mere vicarious emotional stimulation of the most basic kind.
I really matters not which of those cultures that are generally credited with being more cultured, civilized, artistic poetic and romantic than the English was indicated by the name.. . I will not bore everyone by going back to Matthew Arnold's accounts of the superior nature of the Celtic imagination.
Cass -
Message 15
Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Friday, 7th October 2011
Larkrise and Cranford are both good examples, although after reading the comments here I'm almost too embarrassed to say I enjoyed both as light entertainment .
Downton Abbey is a romanticisation of it's period also. A fairly liberal (for the times) Lord and Lady of the manor and servants who don't have much to worry about except their romantic lives. The shallowness of the trenches in the war scenes usually have me ducking for cover though!
Is there any period piece that hasn't been romanticised then? I can't think of one and those that do come to mind happen to be documentaries. -
Message 16
Posted by Thomas (U14985443) on Friday, 7th October 2011
Is there any period piece that hasn't been romanticised then? I can't think of one and those that do come to mind happen to be documentaries.Β
The films about Stalingrad. No romanticisation at all, just death and slaughter. Well, this is hardly to be taken as a historical period, for it was too short for this kind of timeline, but it was brutal enough to be taken as an example for depicting the cruelty of war.
Larkrise and Cranford are both good examples, although after reading the comments here I'm almost too embarrassed to say I enjoyed both as light entertainment Β
ItΒ΄s a difference, islanddawn, to read some romanticised books or films for leisure or to build up and keep an attitude to deal with history on a basis from historians from the 19th Century and attempt to convince others that this view is right (even if not deliberately). ThereΒ΄s no need that you are embarrassed at all. -
Message 17
Posted by Silver Jenny (U12795676) on Friday, 7th October 2011
island dawn, film makers recently have latched on to costume drama filmed through a romantic haze. Viewing figures seem to prove they have found something which audiences enjoy. The only way to watch a series like 'Larkrise' is to forget the Flora Thompson trilogy and enjoy the romantic nonsense.
Surely we owe a debt to those who went before, to preserve their story (whatever it may be) in it's entirety and for the future?Β
The series 'Who do you think you are' is linking the lives of ordinary people tin times past to the wider world in which they eked out a living, or prospered. Using official records does impose some historical accuracy on the series*.
*On the down side it gives no idea of the sheer tedium and cost of tracing records and teh length of time taken to ensure the correct ancestor has been discovered.
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