Slipping through time

Time and the historian

I recently encountered, from a non-historian, the claim that historians are limited by a perception of time as linear, and by a pedestrian conception of causality. This is true at first glance, I suppose. History is one damn thing after another. But a moment’s reflection on what historians do should reveal that, regardless of individual historians’ views of causality and the past, the process by which history itself comes to be is far from linear. A kind of reverse causation takes place in historiography, especially in ancient and medieval history, whereby the accidents of survival determine the sources that survive and therefore the stories that are told about the eras preceding such accidents. Furthermore, the editors and translators of sources determine which sources, and therefore which stories, are accessible to historians. So it is almost trivially true that it is not just past events themselves that determine the history of a given period, but also people living in the present and in the more recent past who retroactively determine what history gets written.

But I think there’s a deeper sense in which historians don’t have as straightforward a relationship with time as some non-historians suppose. The work of the historian is a rebellion against time, an insurrection against oblivion. All things being equal, the past is forgotten – unless someone takes the trouble to record it, and then a succession of other people take the trouble to preserve that contemporaneous record of events; and even then, the insurrection has not yet begun. It is the historians who ransack the archive and not only recover old sources, but use those old sources to reconstruct an entire narrative of a period – recovering biographies of the long dead, reawakening the experiences, lives and loves of the long since forgotten. This is not in accordance with nature; it defies entropy. The dead should not live again.

Perhaps other historians do not feel it as I do, but I have always had a strong desire to recover long-forgotten lives that borders on a sense of obligation. I think I felt this keenly, for the first time, when researching my 2015 book The Gages of Hengrave and Suffolk Catholicism, 1640–1767, which is an intimate study of one English gentry family (and the local Catholic community that was dependent on their patronage) over a century and a quarter. I relied on letters, diaries and even contemporary collections of local poetry to trace individual members of the family, a process which revealed rather more of their individuality and character than mere genealogical data and official documents like wills and indentures. When I reached the smallpox epidemic of 1732–33 and some of the key characters in the story died suddenly, in early adulthood, it felt somehow like a shadow of a real bereavement. I had become invested in these long-dead people and their lives, an investment that was intensified by my consciousness that I was probably the first person who had thought about them as individual human beings for centuries, and certainly the first to piece together their story. I wasn’t a mere reader of their stories, but their teller. It seemed an awesome responsibility, as well as a subversive act. There was nothing special about them – no particular historical interest or greatness to be told (apart from the fact, interesting enough in its own right to me, that they were Catholics); and it is easier to get closer to people of the past who are basically ordinary than it is to penetrate the mystery of some ‘great’ man or woman.

I remember standing in Rattlesden church one evening, looking at the ledger stones in the sanctuary that covered the final resting places of two women – sisters – who died of smallpox in January 1733, aged 27 and 30. In the 1720s, as teenagers, they were lively personalities in a contemporary diary (known by various nicknames), and in a series of poems written by a local retired major who fancied himself as a poet. I had never even seen a portrait of either of these women, but they seemed alive to me. And it dawned on me that they had been dead for nearly three centuries. What had they contributed to world? What had I contributed to the world by reviving their memories? Somehow, such questions didn’t seem to matter. The very act of sedition against oblivion, by reviving them in all their insignificance, seemed worthwhile in itself.

Children seem to be gifted with a particular urge to rebel against the apparent linearity of time. At least, the theme of defying linear time is a recurring feature of children’s literature – the undying fantasy (if it is fantasy?) of the timeslip. Lucy M. Boston, Philippa Pearce, Alison Uttley, Penelope Lively and others brought out a stream of timeslip novels for children in the post-war era that held out the possibility that the arrow of time was somehow an illusion – that there was a sense in which the past, and the people in it, continued to exist and might interact with the present. I was completely addicted to this sort of fiction. It went without saying that being interested in history meant imagining, and wishing, that it was possible to go back into it. I used to dress up as an Anglo-Saxon when I visited my local reconstruction of an Anglo-Saxon village, and became disappointed whenever I was reminded I was in the present and it was only make-believe. When my aunt gave me a silver penny of Edward II for my thirteenth birthday – the first medieval coin I had owned, and unbeknownst to me at the time, a product of the Bury St Edmunds mint – I immediately began to fantasise that owning a piece of the past might somehow give me access to the 14th century.

But is this kind of thinking make-believe? Wanting it to happen, and hoping it might happen if we want it enough, might be in the realm of imaginative play. But people do seem genuinely to experience timeslips where they find themselves suddenly inside, or looking at, the past. At university a friend told me about a timeslip experience he had in Orchard Street in Cambridge, a road of very pretty Regency-era cottages close to the Grafton Centre. Early one morning he was walking past the entrance to Orchard Street and glanced down it. Although the morning was a dull one, it was as though part of the street was cut out like a vignette, and within the vignette it was a bright spring or summer day. A horse-drawn dray had stopped in front of one of the cottages and a man was handing a milk churn to a young woman who came along the path out of one of the cottages wearing a white linen cap, white apron and blue check dress. He blinked, and the next time he looked the street was normal again.

Is the past somehow still alive behind the veil of the present, like a series of layers all happening at the same time? To the historian especially, the idea that the past is simply obliterated – and even that the arrow of time moves in only one direction – seems instinctively inadequate. It might be too much to call it wrong – after all, we have no alternative model of physics to propose that could account for timeslips – but the notion that the past is wholly dead feels (to me at least) not only mistaken but also, perhaps, excessively hopeful. For it is not an altogether comfortable thought that the past lives on, and we slip here from the realm of the timeslip into the realm of the ghost story and the unwelcome, unquiet past. It is easy to say that the unquiet past is just a metaphor for guilt, or trauma, or the unresolved consequences of past events – but I can’t help thinking that sometimes something rather stronger and more literal than that is at work. That the past actually is alive – or at least undead – and has the capacity, very occasionally, to break into the present.

Perhaps this is all subjective twaddle. I’m a historian, of course I want to feel close to the past. I want to believe in timeslips and ghosts. But while I am committed to the historian’s insurrection against time (time, or rather the common perception of it, is unqualifiedly my enemy), I can’t say I feel consoled by alternative conceptions of time as layers to be peeled back, all happening at once. Because the dead should not live.