Nelson & His World

Just read this; not exactly on topic, but I think we all can appreciate it.

From a 1991 interview with Simon Schama:

"I do think there are certain moments in history when one dwells in
the past which do affect one physically," Schama goes on. "One really
is very exhausted or preposterously elated. It sounds absurdly
romantic, but history for me has never really been a particularly or
purely cerebral thing."

Schama recalls a touching experience he had while researching Patriots
and Liberators in Holland. He was investigating the papers of a
politician and soldier who was killed during a battle in 1799. "He'd
had a presentiment of his death, and had sent the packet back to his
wife, but his wife had died, too, before she could get the letters.
They were never opened. I opened them, feeling a tremendous sense of
eavesdropping on this personal moment. There were all the bits and
pieces of this man's life. The thing that was most moving was a love
letter to his wife with a lock of hair he had obviously pulled out of
some sort of locket and put into the envelope--his wife's hair, with a
ribbon, and the hair had never been exposed to the air, so the ribbon
was a brilliant blue, and the hair still held 18th-century perfume.

"This was a devastatingly ghostly moment--direct contact, and I was
quite trembly. That hardly ever happens, yet something like that has
happened to all the historians I know. You have to correct somewhat
for these visceral transports, you know, but if you just read history,
basically, as New York Times editorials of the past, it's never going
to come alive. People read history, from Homer or Herodotus onward,
to be put in touch with the dead. It's a form of memory-witness, I
think."

Thank you for posting that. I have always felt rather ashamed of my unacademic, totally romantic approach to history, the delight in the trivial and unremarked, the small things that are almost forgotten, yet make the imagination leap. This can be a casual entry in a diary, a letter, an object or, as you say, a lock of hair. But I feel absolved, knowing that Simon Schama has validated this emotional response.

I was at the NMM some months ago when I came upon a letter written by Lady Hamilton to George Rose. On the spur of the moment, she had taken a small lock from the larger one Nelson had sent Horatia and wrapped it in a piece of paper on which she had written ‘Nelson’s hair’. I opened the folded paper and held in my hand a lock of Nelson’s hair! It was such a shock – not dry and dead looking – caught in the sunlight, it shone, soft and clean and fresh as a child’s.

There was a sentence in the accompanying letter that, for me, sharpened Emma’s grief and loss: the lock of hair she had taken from a letter she had just opened, but, she continues: ‘I have not had the courage to open the other which Hardy brought me, but next week, I shall’. The letter is undated, but probably written in mid-December 1805, so she had waited, this spirited, dauntless woman, preparing herself to face the awful finality of that last letter.

Strange too, how time and distance validate our intrusion into the private moments of others’ lives. A friend showed me a letter her great-grandfather had written to his girl-friend from the battlefields of the First World War. The language was stilted and the sentiments unremarkable; but he had enclosed a violet from ‘Plug Street Wood’. This was Ploegsteert Wood, a bloody and terrible place, and this little flower had grown there and still remained, its tiny petals pale, barely echoing its original vivid hue – it seemed particularly poignant to see this just at the moment when we are on a cusp of time - that cataclysm is slipping now from living memory and will soon be history.

G.M Trevelyan (1876-1962) Regius Professor of History at Cambridge and later Chancellor of Durham University, is regarded as a rather an old-fashioned historian now, but his writing is always passionate, insightful and poetically partisan - and he too took delight in 'touching history':

I take delight in history, even its most prosaic details, because they become poetical as they recede into the past. The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like a ghost at cockcrow. This is the most familiar and certain fact about life, but it is also the most poetical, and the knowledge of it has never ceased to entrance me, and to throw a halo of poetry round the dustiest record that Dryasdust can bring to light.'

G.M. Trevelyan: Autobiography of an Historian