‘The Pathos of Conservation’: Raphael Samuel and the politics of heritage

Abstract

When Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture was published in 1994, it was critically received. Yet, the book has not had the impact of other key works such as Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) or Hewison’s The Heritage Industry (1987). A number of factors have contributed to this, such as Theatres essentially being an unfinished project, and ‘heritage’ in the book having multiple personas – the net result being that Samuel’s arguments can at times be hard to pin down. Yet with interest in his approach to heritage now growing, this article seeks to unravel Samuel’s core ideas and arguments pertaining to heritage, and to give an historical background to their evolution. With the central tenets of Samuel’s argument essentially being a case for the democratisation of heritage; the validity of what we might today call ‘unofficial’ narratives and discourses; and to challenge the dominant view that heritage was ultimately history’s poor cousin, I argue that Samuel’s ideas have much to offer contemporary research agendas in heritage.

Keywords:

• heritage theory
• Raphael Samuel
• heritage values
• politics of preservation

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alison Light, Anna Davin, Steven Yeo and John Urry for their feedback and comments on aspects of this paper.

Notes

1. As of early August 2014 the figures Google Scholar gives are:

2. A criticism of this could be that Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country and Hewison’s The Heritage Industry, were published earlier than Theatres, however, this has been taken into account, with searches in Ngram Viewer being run from 1994, when Theatres was first published. Google and Yahoo searches were conducted using author surname in combination with book titles as a phrase.

3. While the second volume was completed under the leadership of Samuel’s widow – the social historian and literary scholar Alison Light – she did so with the lightest of touches, with the final published work consisting essentially of essays in various states of completion. Subtitled Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, the primary theme of this volume was the wildly different versions of the British national past on offer at any given point in time. The final volume, which was still being conceptually sketched out when Samuel died, was going to explore ‘memory work’, with a focus on commemoration, progress and nostalgia, with its central argument being that subjectivity, like history, was fundamentally socially constructed. At the time of his death, Samuel was also considering a forth volume, which would focus on historical thinking and sense of place (Private communication with Alison Light, 18 November 2013).

4. For more on this see Gentry (2013).

5. For ‘the real Christminster life’ see Thomas Hardy (1896), part II ‘At Christminster’.

6. An important earlier exploration of the growth of nostalgia in post-war Britain can also be found in Hewison’s (1981).

7. In the revised 2009 edition of On Living in an Old Country, Wright acknowledges that the argument associating ‘heritage’ with decline has failed to thrive. p. xiv.

8. See Samuel (1981) for Samuel’s early work in this area.