What is History in a Box?

 

It was a few agonising days into my first move from my childhood home, and my parents had finally sorted through all of our "important" items: furniture, clothes, toiletries, pans, cutlery and so on. Just one box remained. The box was unassumingly brown and overzealously Cellotaped like all the others, but with one difference- instead of instructions, it only bore a large question mark scribbled hastily in a maker. 

As an imaginative child, I was so curious as to what exciting mysteries the box held: was it a treasure map to long forgotten riches? a long buried family secret in a code only I could crack? or could it be a perfectly preserved velociraptor egg? Excitedly asking my dad what could possibly be inside this box of mysteries, he replied, "It's just some old stuff people didn't have space for", followed with a "Don't touch it, it's very dusty". 

Well, that was hardly the thrilling adventure I thought it would be. 

Still, it did not stop me from sneaking into the room and rifling through its contents- perhaps there was a very small dinosaur egg hidden under all the yellowed wrapping. Whilst I did not find the dinosaur of my dreams, I did in fact find exactly what my dad said: "stuff". There were letters, pens, watches, broken jewellery, newspaper cuttings and coins scattered amongst each other in wooden boxes and cigar tins. All of these objects had stories, I thought. People had held them, folded them, wore them and cherished them, but now they were here. Not behind a glass screen at a museum where I had seen other "old stuff"- it struck me as something I should not have, I needed a real historian like the ones on TV to take a look. And thus, I closed them up and it remained a dusty box of "old stuff" for another decade.

Years later, as a historian of the long-nineteenth century, my mind kept returning to that growing box of "stuff" and how it could be used to explore the subjective and lived experiences of those who owned them. Having read extensively on material culture and modern archaeology for my courses on Victorian photography and objects, I set myself a target to categorise these items and, using my conservation knowledge and interest in the era, create a blog on a form of "amateur archiving". As Frank Trentmann argued,

People give [objects] distinct values and arrange them in assemblages, and these can change in the life of the same commodity.(1)

Although not all of the objects I will be looking at fall under the term of a "commodity", they do carry information or symbols of the values of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and can give us a unique perspective into the way objects can be imbued with importance; whether that importance lies in the emotion expressed by an individual's shaky letters on a page, or the constructed symbols of imperial power that pervade the vast majority of British popular culture at the turn of the century and beyond.

So, I hope you all enjoy this project into historical objects, literature and art, and that this little blog encourages you to take a dive into "attic antiquing" yourselves! The more broken, discarded and confusing the object is, the more interesting it often turns out to be.

 Next Monday, we will start with a deep dive into an incomplete piece of mourning jewellery I found in a tub of pennies. 

- Char x

1 Trentmann, Frank, "Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics", The Journal of British Studies (2009), Vol.48(2), pp.283-307 (p.289)