By Paul Readman
It has become a truism to say that for many people, the experience of coronavirus has blurred the boundaries between work and home. My work moved indoors, parking itself on my kitchen table, periodically being driven off on to the sofa (or floor) at mealtimes, at the weekends and at moments of frustration. Stray ‘to-do’ lists are now encountered alongside the plates of pasta, provoking dyspepsia. In the grand scheme of the havoc wrought by COVID-19, it is a minor inconvenience, but still, it makes me uncomfortable.
Perhaps it shouldn’t do. I am an academic, and don’t academics work from home all the time? This is certainly the case with many of my colleagues. And isn’t this as it should be, a reflection of the interblending of our lives and our work? We scholars are always telling people that we never leave our work behind, that it is just something we do, that it is an integral part of who we are… etc., etc. For all that I think such claims are overstated, I suppose all this is true enough for me, too, but the effect of changing the place of my work has nevertheless been dislocating and disorienting.
It has also been disembodying. Or, to put it a different way, my experience of work has become increasingly alienated from my sensory perception of the physical world, and the landscape of that world. In recent months, my daily routine of meetings has not been punctuated by walks from building to building in and around King’s College London’s Strand campus, dodging buses on the Aldwych, occasionally getting drenched in untimely showers of rain. I haven’t been getting lost looking for seminar rooms in underground corridors; I haven’t decamped to a local coffee shop in an attempt to reboot my brain. I haven’t been to libraries to rummage in their stacks; I haven’t browsed on the shelves of Bloomsbury booksellers; indeed, I have scarcely used a physical paper-and-stitches-and-glue book at all, at least not for the purposes of research.
Instead, most of the time I’ve been staring at a screen, my sensory experience of work mediated by my computer, and the digital realm to which it gives access. Perhaps this doesn’t matter all that much, but it has made me think more about the relationship between the writing of history and the physical experience of the material world. In particular, it has made me think about how we know and understand the past through embodied encounters with landscape.
I’m not just thinking of landscape history in the tradition of Maurice Beresford or W.G. Hoskins, though of course it is relevant here. Indeed, I’m not really thinking of how the experience of landscape might help with the writing of landscape history. I have in mind, rather, the role played by the sensory experience of landscape in the writing of history in general—in the writing of any and all forms of history. This is the subject of my next book project, it is the reason for my involvement in this network, and it is a subject I will return in later blog posts.
I look forward to hearing more! Having spent much time on the Romantics in recent years, I wonder where the imagination fits into this. I think in my case, I am rarely prompted to write History except where something has stirred my imagination – sometimes this is textual but often it a landscape encounter. The article on the history of village halls I wrote back in 1999, for example, can be traced back to a walk on the Leicestershire wolds several years before. Passing through a village, we saw that a fete of some sort was taking place in the hall, and on entering, discovered a daffodil festival in full swing. It had never occurred to me that such a thing existed before but by the time we left I was better informed about the niceties of trumpets, doubles, Ducketts and the rest. I suppose the vivid sensory impression – the burst of yellow – and the scent partly account for why this experience stayed with me although it was then transmuted through my imagination, and the main thing that interested me as I wrote the article was the role village halls had played in fostering that elusive ghost in the machine, ‘rural community’.
The imagination is central to this, Jeremy. I think that landscape has exerted a very strong pull on the imaginations of many historians – and not just those who have written about landscape. In fact this will be a major theme of my book. I’ve been thinking a bit about Hugh Trevor-Roper in this respect (Border landscapes, Walter Scott, much else).
There seems to be a (very welcome in my view) shift here from the idea of history as emerging from an interpretive encounter with the archive to it being a far more experiential and phenomenological act or engagement. I’ve always struggled with the disciplinary separation between anthropology and history, and likewise between historical discourse and literary output. It strikes me that much of your shared thinking sits at these awkward – or perhaps opportunistic and serendipitous – intersections and overlaps. The implication here is that historians can be participant-observers, creative practitioners, and can also research and write history. Many would see these different modes as conflicting but I think you can never be entirely situated in any one of these methodological silos. The best historians are good writers. They are also capable of observing, engaging with, and reflecting the social and cultural world around them.
As a Borderer and the son of a farmer-poet, I’m also very pleased to see mention of the same spaces that schooled me in the various arts, acts, and tricks of understanding, imagining, interpreting, and communicating the world around me. In my work as a curator of English collections (gathered to reflect and record rural ways of life), I constantly come back to experiences situated firmly in landscapes that sit just over the march, in the Scottish Borders. It definitely takes a small, creative and imaginative leap to justify my drawing on these experiences as inspiration and as point of reference to explain life in England. However, in my defence, it’s a simple physical step across that border, and the people on both sides share a great deal. The imagination is a powerful tool that enables me to fill in some of the problematic gaps. The museum user or visitor brings their own imagination to fill in whatever spaces remain.
Interesting points, Ollie. I wonder whether ‘borders’ might turn out to be an important theme for our network. Some of the chapters I found most interesting in Paul’s ‘Storied Ground’ were about borders (Northumberland/Dover) – I suppose borders tend to intensify and foreground issues relating to identities, while also promoting cross-border flows and facilitating/necessitating multiple identities. I think this is true of researchers working at/across disciplinary borders, as we hope to do in our network, as much as it is of geographical borders. As it happens, I’m currently doing some research on the history of fences, which relates very much to these issues. And the pandemic of course is having major effects here, making some borders (e.g. getting into New Zealand!) harder to cross while lowering others – see my previous blog post on the ‘discovery of the countryside’ during lockdown.