| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Rosemary Mitchell. Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830–1870. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 314. $85.00.

Rosemary Mitchell's impressive study of nineteenth-century popular history and historical fiction provides a welcome reminder of their significance in the formation of contemporary British national identity. Historians of British political culture have tended to ignore the impact of popular history on the construction of the Victorian vision of the national past, but Mitchell convincingly argues that the existence of a broader readership for history—in both factual and fictional forms—led to the "development of a historically-minded mass audience" by century's end (p. 2). We must, she asserts, approach Victorian perceptions of the past in a more "catholic" way, looking at illustrations as well as texts, fiction as well as nonfiction, low-brow books as well as high-brow ones, if we are truly to understand how ordinary middle-class people saw the evolution of their nation. This approach allows Mitchell to give new stature to works such as William Harrison Ainsworth's The Tower of London (1840) and Windsor Castle (1843), which served as the advance guard for the heritage and historic preservation movements. Charles Knight's Popular History of England (1855–1862) and Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland's The Lives of the Queens of England (1840–1848), meanwhile, become precursors to the development of social history and women's history respectively. . . .

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