I am reading, yet once again, G M Trevelyan’s delightful English Social History : a survey of six centuries Chaucer to Queen Victoria. He wrote it before the war (1939) but restrictions of paper and printing delayed its publication in Great Britain until 1944.
As I read I am aware of a certain prospect of Englishness presented to us in my schooldays and I sense it returning now and then to the more leisurely of our television screens. It’s that looking back to a past which may or may not be distant, which may or may not ever have existed in glaring reality. A past viewed, as they say, through rosy-tinted spectacles.
I see it in Michael Wood’s homing-in on a country town community, digging up its past, blowing the dust off somnolent rolls ledgers and charters which then magically ‘bring the past to life’. I see it in the elder Dimbleby’s unhurried dwelling on sceneries and artefacts which belong with bygone ages. I see it even in Michael Portillo’s quasi-misty-eyed railway journeys, Bradshaw always open in his hand.
My thoughts turn to the books and other reminiscences which make those re-creations possible. Trevelyan brings back to life Defoe’s London, still existing among the ghosts haunting the footpaths and alleyways of the City. Other books, when well conceived and well written can do the same. They are the material of visualisation, treading the spaces and enclosures of parallel universes where the in-tuned spirit may also meander at will.
Words set out on the page are the spellbooks of their authors.
Come with me and bathe and bask in parallel universes just as real as those once green hills and valleys now over-covered with manufacturies of stone timber brickwork and plastic. The boundaries are there to be stepped over. The veil between is no more than the flimsiest creation of our own imaginings.
francis cameron, oxford, 2 october 2010
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