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REVIEW ESSAY
RE-MEMBERING THE PAST
| By David Levine |
OISE, University of Toronto |
The Likes of Us. A Biography of the White Working Class. By Michael Collins (London: Granta Books, 2004. 274 pp.).
The Long Sexual Revolution. English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800–1975. By Hera Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xiii plus 412 pp.).
Our Hidden Lives. The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain. Edited by Simon Garfield (London: Ebury Press, 2004. 536 pp.).
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. By Jonathan Rose (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, ix plus 534 pp.).
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| How do we know what we know? Or, to hew more closely to the historian's point, how do we know what we remember? Is what we remember, what we used to know? What relationship is there between what we remember and what we experienced? Or, is it just the residue of past experience filtered through the bumps of time? The four books under consideration here look at this thorny knot of interpretation from very distinctive viewpoints; and, not surprisingly, give the historian pause to reflect on the value of "primary" memory. |
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It is, of course, a commonplace of legal journalism that eye-witnesses do not always agree on what they saw; a series of televised, high-profile trials in the USA have made this abundantly clear. And, the nature of trial-evidence is that what gets argued in court is what the prosecution thinks fits its agenda; other evidence—alternate hypotheses of the issue-at-law—can only with great legal-gymnastics be brought into the record. If the prosecution of O.J. Simpson brought this partial construction of "evidence" into the public consciousness, the proliferation of alternative hypotheses on internet web-sites has been largely spawned by a kind of agit-prop dissatisfaction with the narrowness and partiality of the prosecutors' documentation. Historiographically, then, the issue of a knowable present is no less complicated than that of a knowable past.
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Jonathan Rose's splendid book on the British working-classes' intellectual life makes a magisterial contribution to educational history, highlighting the inadequacies of "social control" models that issued from the past generation of scholars' revision of the heroic story of gradual evolution and, to be sure, improvement. Or, to put the matter more clearly, Rose's arguments about the thirst for learning among students serves to contradict the supposed hegemony of the regulation of knowledge that administrators sought to impose of pliable young minds. Compulsory education might have been unsuccessful in reaching into the souls of the young and stirring their imaginations partly because it never tried to do that but mostly because such an attempt would have been contrary to the administrative mandates for a peculiarly-defined "moral education". |
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