Volume 28, Number 11 · June 25, 1981
The Way We Lived Then
By Ronald Blythe
Edwardian Childhoods
by Thea Thompson
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 232 pp., $27.50
Roses in December: Edwardian Recollections
by Amy Stewart Fraser
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 158 pp., $19.95
East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding
edited by Raphael Samuel
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 350 pp., $18.95 (paper)
The People's England
by Alan Ereira
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 285 pp., $24.95
The Victorian Countryside
edited by Gordon E. Mingay
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2 vols, 677 pp., $85.00 the set
The Gentleman's Country House and Its Plan 1835-1914
by Jill Franklin
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 279 pp., $40.00
Was there ever such a popular preoccupation with British history as there is at present, such a lusting interest in the past? If, as Tennyson maintained, 'all things are taken from us, and become portions and parcels of the dreadful past,' then we are now all hell-bent on retrieving them. It is as if we have no idea of what constitutes the present unless we dig up all that lies beneath it. Six miles from where I write, in Colchester, our market town, a place mentioned by Tacitus in his Annals, they are digging up the houses where the officers who commanded a Roman legion lived in the first century AD. Carrying our supermarket shopping, and in the pouring rain, we trail past the tesselated floors five feet down below the car park, listening enrapt to the muddy archaeologists. We see a lot of charring from the ferocious day in 61 AD when Queen Boudicca burned the place down, also the skeleton of a baby correctly arranged on a copy of the Daily Mail. A little girl touches the tiny bones without horror—already the cool historian. There is half a ton of broken pots. Everything is plentiful and unambiguous.
Review, 5009 words
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