The novelist E.M Forster understood the challenge pretty well.“The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave,” he wrote of Edward Gibbon in Abinger Harvest. “Otherwise,” he warned, “he will move in a world of the dead.” (judiciously avoiding a frightful world composed solely of dead historians)?
Of course, it cannot be done. Historians can only indirectly write of the “dead.” Inevitably, their work reflects their present, the world in which they live, and their connection with the dead is how their contemporary world, through its peculiar social, intellectual and emotional postures, viewd the past. That does not mean that the historian does not strive to recreate the past, to place himself or herself in the past, and to try and think and act not as an historian but as one who lived in the past. But at core the effort is fated to be imperfect, and for the historian and the reader alike, the writing of history remains...
Roger Hall is a member of the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario, a senior fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto and the general editor of the Champlain Society.
Advertisement
Advertisement