About Peter
He is a member of the Raphael Samuel History Centre at the University of East London and the Charles Booth Centre for Social Investigation at the Open University. He is currently preparing a co-authored undergraduate textbook on historiography commissioned by Pearson Longman and is editing a volume of Raphael Samuel's writings on the Lost World of British Communism for Verso.
The tales we tell ourselves
Screening the past
Related programme
We get some of our sense of what happened in the past from historians, but we get much of the rest from novels, drama, museums, gossip, and other forms of popular culture. Recently, some historians have begun to argue that we need to take popular forms of knowledge about history as seriously as we do those derived from academic research.
Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) deals with a real historical phenomenon: the sale of wives by their lawful husbands, a practice reasonably common in England between about 1700 - 1880. Wife sales are probably still best known through the opening scene in Hardy’s novel, but have been explored by the historian E.P. Thompson (1924 – 1993), who in an example of brilliant scholarship, explained the meaning of the wife sale - as a form of consensual divorce - within the wider context of plebeian or working class culture.
The Mayor of Casterbridge has also become part of popular history and the lost countryside of Wessex it evokes is also, like other Victorian settings, a favoured territory for television history. Take, for example, the 2003 adaptation of the novel directed by David Thacker, a £4 million ITV production which portrayed the opening sequence of Hardy’s novel reasonably faithfully.
Spectators to the wife sale looked shocked and expectant, the act itself appeared spontaneous, as was the ‘solemn and binding’ nature of the bargain. As a dramatic moment it was indeed a key, like it is in the novel, to the unfolding of the plot. The television version also presented ‘Hardy Country’ faithfully and proved to be everything we expect from a Victorian ‘heritage drama’; ‘realistic’ backdrops, ‘authentic’ costumes, and character types that meet our common expectations of what it meant to be Victorian.
The same could be said for the BBC television version of the Mayor in 1978 which was a high-budget affair written by Dennis Potter and filmed in Weymouth featuring Alan Bates as the character of Henchard. Whether we read the novel, watch television programmes, or seek ways to use history to place it into a deeper context depends very much on our perspective but also on some of our received notions of the past.
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