The long, long 19th century
Nineteenth-century photography is the closest we can get to seeing the actual past
Has the imagery of the 19th century – corsets, cowboys, cigars – become a wider visual shorthand for “the past”? The suggestion prompted a debate that ANNA WHITELOCK watched unfold
Historical consultant Hallie
Rubenhold (@HallieRubenhold) noted on Twitter in February that “a lot of people’s concepts of ‘the past’… are decidedly coloured by the 19th century… It’s like the century has become a visual shorthand for ‘the past’, and I wonder how this started. I feel [that] Hollywood, with its constantly reinforced tropes and clichés, is in part to blame… I can’t tell you how many cigar-smoking Georgians I’ve encountered in scripts, as well as people playing poker. Every corset seems to look like those worn in the 1880s. Lots of bad guys [were] packing revolvers in the 18th century, too, apparently.”
Her comments sparked a debate about the shadow cast over our view of the past by the 19th century. Historian and broadcaster Greg Jenner (@Greg_Jenner) agreed that the period has become blurred in the popular imagination with other centuries, noting that “many people see the 18th and 19th centuries as [having] fundamentally the same technology and culture, until the ‘steampunk’ aesthetic separates them”. University of Oxford historian Morgan Golf-French (@zeno_thankyou) made the interesting observation that “a large part of my teaching (on the 15th to 18th centuries) is untangling assumptions rooted in the 19th century… [including about] how political parties, empires, laws etc functioned.”
But why have the images and narratives of the 19th century struck such a chord? Self-described “contrarian” David Brady (@AntiProfessor) thinks that it might be in part due to “the explosion of illustrated publications – including romantic ‘historical’ ones – in the 19th century”, while Dr Jenny Lee (@Jenny_R_Lee) suggested that it could be because “in the (long) 19th century people started to conceptualise the past, from the professionalisation of history as an academic subject to the resurrection [and] invention of the past by nationalists. Our view of the past is mediated through imagery and imaginations.”
Other people pointed to the fact that the 19th century is relatively recent, historically speaking. Polly Dymock (@pollsstar) noted that “my grandparents were born in the late [19th century] and told me about their lives”. And Clare Kirk (@digupancestors) suggested that “19th-century photography could partly explain this. It is the closest we can get to seeing the actual past, and might mean that Victorian images become synonymous in our minds with how we imagine people who lived long before us.”
It’s fascinating to explore the forces that shape our view of the past – and worth considering how subsequent generations might view the culture of today.