In the Sixties J.H. Plumb euphorically announced the death of the 'past' - that comforting mythology conjured up to serve the present and make sense of things as they are - in the face of an advancing scholarship which was real 'history' and which depicted things as they actually were. The announcement was premature, and the distinction less clear-cut than Plumb assumed. Memory and the past weigh so heavily on each of us that their imaginary reassurances cannot be lightly disturbed, while the temptation for governments to appropriate and commandeer traditions for their own purposes is too tempting. The anniversaries of 1588, of 1688 and 1789 are constant reminders of this complicity of past and present, and the current celebration of 'inevitable' Thatcherism at the end of a rampantly ahistorical and whiggish decade, suggests that the historian, clustering as chronicler around the ascendant court, can also collaborate in the manufacture of fresh myths.

LRB 14 September 1989 | PDF Download