The Buried Life of Things
How Objects Made History in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Simon Goldhill offers a fascinating new perspective on the material culture of nineteenth-century Britain.

Simon Goldhill (Author)

9781107087484, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 December 2014

268 pages, 34 b/w illus. 8 colour illus.
25.3 x 18 x 1.8 cm, 0.72 kg

Simon Goldhill offers a fresh and exciting perspective on how the Victorians used material culture to express their sense of the past in an age of progress, especially the biblical past and the past of classical antiquity. From Pompeian skulls on a writer's desk, to religious paraphernalia in churches, new photographic images of the Holy Land and the remaking of the cityscape of Jerusalem and Britain, Goldhill explores the remarkable way in which the nineteenth century's sense of history was reinvented through things. The Buried Life of Things shows how new technologies changed how history was discovered and analysed, and how material objects could flare into significance in bitter controversies, and then fade into obscurity and disregard again. This book offers a new route into understanding the Victorians' complex and often bizarre attempts to use their past to express their own modernity.

Introduction: the buried life of things
1. A writer's things: Edward Bulwer Lytton and the archaeological gaze
2. When things matter: religion and the physical world
3. Imperial landscapes, the biblical gaze, and techniques of the photo album: capturing the real in Jerusalem and the holy land
4. Building history: a mandate coda
5. Restoration
Coda: a final dig
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Material culture [JFCD], Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]