Advice from a Poor History Student
How I trick History into remaining in my history-resistant brain!
In school, History was always my worst subject, except for Physical Education. My ability to retain names, dates, and events was only eclipsed (in weakness) by my absolute inability to climb a rope or throw a ball well. I could usually manage a high B in History class, by working hard to store historical data into my short-term memory … long enough to pass the test. But history was not sensible, like Mathematics. In Math, if I forgot a formula, I simply re-derived it. But you cannot start with the Louisiana Purchase and do a few simple calculations to get you to the Crittenden Compromise. I chalked it up to simply having a bad memory. I still don’t know what the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was!
But as an adult in his sixties, I have found a way to make history stay with me; at least what I now consider the important parts of history. It came to me first through reading biographies of people I cared about. A recent example is the bio of Lewis Carroll, (Lewis Carroll: A Biography, by Morton N. Cohen). Cohen’s telling of the life of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Carroll’s given name) changed the way I understood the author and his motivations for writing. It was highly revelatory about his mathematical mind. It certainly (in a rather creepy way) changed how I understood his relation to his young female friends. But further, it revolutionized the way I looked at Victorian life. I had always heard it said that Victorians were thoroughly and abidingly prudish. And, in some senses that was correct. Lewis Carroll highly approved, apparently of the Bowdlerisation of Shakespeare. The Family Shakespeare, with versions of Shakespeare’s plays sanitized for reading by women and children, had been published in 1807. So, that’s the prudery.
But on the other had, through his skill in the new art of photography, Dodgson was able to convince quite a few parents to allow him to take nude pictures of their daughters. If I recall, his favorite age range for the girl models was 9 through 11. After puberty began, the developing female curves apparently ruined the enterprise for Dodgson. So, this was a new window for me into Victorian society. History was able to get into my head and stay there for a change.
More recently, a biography of French painter Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, by Julia Frey, taught me much about fin de siècle France, including the loss of importance of “the nobility.” Toulouse-Lautrec’s chronic ill health taught me about the state of medical practice in that period (sulfur baths cure everything!), but also about the bawdy dance halls and sexual ethics of the Montmartre district of Paris.
More recently still, I have started the book Sound, Sin, and Conversion in Victorian England ,by Julia Grella O’Connell. Among other themes, O’Connell explores the urgency for personal renewal and redemption in Victorian England, giving examples from (among others) the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. One learns early on that the way William Holman Hunt painted a “fallen woman” was diametrically opposed to the way Henri Toulouse-Lautrec would paint the same woman. Or nearly diametrically, since one can point out some similarities in outlook between the two painters. But my point here is that reading the books in a row, ironically by two authors name Julia, is helping me to understand the differences between France and England in the 19th Century. This is a vastly superior method, for me, to get History to settle down for a longer stay inside my skull. And I am thankful to have found it, though late in life.