8th October 2005
Letting the sources speak for themselves (with selection and guidance from the historian) can be a powerful form of historical writing.
A recent work where, to my mind, this has been done with great success is Simon Garfield’s “Hidden Lives, the remarkable diaries of post-war Britain.”
Rather than state his own views or interpretation, Simon Garfield interweaves extracts from the post-war diaries of five individuals who contributed to the Mass Observation project from 1 May 1945, immediately before VE day, to 7 July 1948. Apart from a brief prologue and epilogue there is no commentary and no explicit interpretation. He lets the diarists tell their own story, with careful selection and juxtaposition of entries to bring out common themes.
Anthony Aldgate in his survey of British Cinema in the Second World War (Britain Can Take It, Basil Blackwell 1986) says of the Mass Observation studies:
“The information they provided was often born of random sampling and unsystematic techniques. But for all their limitations these reports are indispensable. They are, as Paul Addison comments ‘a source for which there is no parallel or substitute in understanding wartime Britain,’ and as Angus Calder concurs, ‘probably the richest source of material available to the social historian of the period.’” (Paul Addison The British People and World War II: Home Intelligence Reports on Opinion and Morale, 1940 – 1944 Brighton Sussex, 1983 and Angus Calder The Peoples’ War)
“Hidden Lives”, is history “as it really was” told by five very different people. None of them could be said to be typical of society of the times, and collectively they can not be said to be representative. But they all tell a very human, and very moving, story of what they did, what they thought, and their observations of other people around them.
Leopold von Ranke said: “the role, commonly attributed to History, is to judge the Past, to instruct the Present, for the benefit of the Future; such a high and noble role is not claimed for this essay: it aims simply to show how it really was.”
Education lies not in telling people what to think, but in helping them to think for themselves.
Perhaps history is not the historian’s interpretation; its role is simply, insofar as we can, to help the reader see for themselves, how it really was.
The reader (or listener, or TV watcher) living in the present, and not the historian, can interpret and judge the past, if they wish. Maybe some readers will even learn something, for the benefit of the future.
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