Abstract
In April 1992, in an article for Newsweek entitled ‘Don’t Undo Our Work’, Margaret Thatcher claimed that during her terms as prime minister ‘we reclaimed our heritage’ (Thatcher, 1992). As we have seen, her platform after 1984 was built upon the slogan of ‘Victorian values’, a catchphrase that concealed an expansive programme for quite revolutionary change behind the reassuring visage of a return to old-fashioned values and an all-but-lost national heritage. Her campaign fed into a wider cultural anxiety over the preservation of the nation’s legacies, centring upon the tangible relics of the past such as antiques, country houses, and ‘period’ homes. These homes were opened to the public but, consonant with New Right ideology, now charged an entrance fee. Similarly, industrial museums multiplied but also charged for admission. As Harold Malchow observes, ‘English Heritage, if it could not be shunted into the private sector, was expected to pay its way, to impose admission charges’ (Malchow, 2000: 201). In short, English heritage was to become a commodity, preferably one bought and sold by the private entrepreneur. As Thatcher’s idea of ‘reclamation’ perhaps unwittingly suggests, this obsession with Victorian collectibles, and with the preservation of stately homes, invokes the idea of heritage as property. ‘History’ becomes its tangible objects, which are bought and sold to decorate homes, or to boost tourism. The past becomes a possession.
The work of the human mind, with its meandering and its logical and fantastic inventions, was literature’s field of observation until first natural and social philosophy, then, in the last century, specialized scientific disciplines dispossessed literature of them.
(Safir, Margery Arent, Melancholies of Knowledge, 1999)
Tell me you know — and that it is not simple — or simply to be rejected — there is a truth of Imagination.
(A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance, 1990)
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© 2010 Kate Mitchell
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Mitchell, K. (2010). (Dis)Possessing Knowledge: A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance . In: History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283121_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283121_5
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