About This Blog

Image: British History Online

This blog is about two things: the ways that history stays with us in the present, and the ways that history is represented and discussed in popular culture.

It is is inspired by two figures from literature that remind us that the past is always with us.

Who is Anne*?

Anne of Oxford Street appears in Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 memoir, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. According to De Quincey, she was a real woman—so young, that today she would be called a teenager—he befriends after leaving boarding school for London. Having never known her last name, in its place he gives us the street where they spent time as impoverished youths. Anne is a woman of the streets, a kind-hearted prostitute who cares for the author. He vows to return to her and repay her kindness, but on returning to London, is unable to find her. With only her common Christian name, he wanders hopelessly through the streets of London in search of her. He imagines her coming to some bad end at the hands of “ruffians,” but also intimates that she has consumption (i.e., tuberculosis), which would have killed her if the ruffians did not. Whether she was real or a figment of the writer’s imagination, we’ll never know. She died as she lived: unknown. Her pathetic story haunts De Quincey’s never-ending tale of woe. His memoir is riddled with guilt and remorse over past mistakes and despair over the loss of time, but his greatest regret of all is losing Anne.

Regret leads to speculation about what could have been anticipated: how could we have avoided this with better planning?

In the sequel to Confessions, Suspiria de Profundis (sighs from the depths), De Quincey contemplates history from the perspective of the past rather than the present. What if, he asks, “life could throw open its long suits of chambers to our eyes from some station beforehand, if from some secret stand we could look by anticipation along its vast corridor.” If only we could see things that have already happened from the vantage point of their beginning: “The past viewed not as the past, but by a spectator who steps back ten years deeper into the rear, in order that he may regard it as a future.”

I think this is a useful thought experiment.

Too often history is depicted as a path to progress, instead of containing the seeds of past mistakes that will continue to grow in the future.

De Quincey’s questions about time may have been influenced by his famous addiction to opium, which reportedly alters the user’s perceptions of time, expanding and contracting it. Time also escaped him as he lost it through these protracted highs, missing deadlines, and struggling to finish even those projects he did (such as the famous Confessions). His early experience with death also must have brought his attention painfully to time and its loss. De Quincey’s melancholy preoccupation in all his work with the passage of time reminds us that life moves, not through revolutions, but through dragging, regretful moments we never know until they are behind us.

Anne is anonymous, unimportant, one who is lost and whose experience and insights died with her. Whether she really lived, or whether she was a representation of every obscure woman London produced remains unknown. Anne is the subject of history we can never know, except through imagination and empathy. Let us lend an ear to the silent passage in time and all who reside there. Listen for their sighs from the depths.

*The “e” is mine. De Quincey probably never knew how she spelled her name anyway. Could she even write her own name?

What is this blog about?

If Anne is the subject of history, Spiridion Trepka is the historian who falls in love with the subject of his research.

“Passages from the Diary of Spiridion Trepka” is the subtitle of Vernon Lee’s short story, “Amore Dure” (enduring love.)

It is the tale of a frustrated young scholar, Spiridion Trepka. Surrounded by misinformation and inaccurate portrayals of history, Trepka is obsessed with righting the reputation of his dream woman who seduced him through time in a portrait. Not only does it annoy him that everyone misunderstands his goddess, who lived centuries before him, but he wishes more than anything to get closer to the source of his research, to travel through time and touch his beloved. He believes everything written about the woman is wrong, and it is only his direct experience with her bewitching portrait that feels true. He knows her like no other—certainly not the men who failed to appreciate her in life, nor the “Dryasdust” scholars who write of her in death. Trepka’s passion for history leads him to leave his contemporary setting behind, and through his imagination, step into the world of the portrait to experience the life of its subject.

Trepka, who “had longed . . . to come face to face with the past,” gets his wish. Through his tireless research, he revives his beloved and is consumed by her. The portrait is a vampire lying in wait to return again and devour us.

Vernon Lee was also in some sense a fictional scholar: her real name was Violet Piaget, and she was compelled to publish her writings on history, as well as her fiction, under a male pseudonym. Her fiction very often contains her feelings on history.

Lee’s historical fiction sets a trend in lesbian writing: that of casting queer love into a further past where lack of identification leaves it free to remain unlabeled (future post to come). Lee questioned the masculine bias of history, and like her character Trepka, often travelled through time in her imagination to rescue fictional women.

De Quincey, too, contemplates a portrait: one that marks a time. The portrait of the Queen that defines the period as “Victorian.” He references the portrait of Queen Victoria as an example of an object that we might perceive differently in the past: “the portrait that on the day of her Majesty’s coronation would have been admired by you with a pure disinterested admiration, but which if seen to-day would draw forth an involuntary groan”

Anne of Oxford Street and Spiridion Trepka are victims of history. For their creators, Thomas De Quincey, a man who identified with women, and Vernon Lee, a woman who created a male persona, the past was an obsession. Each contemplated the relationship between the historian and the subjects of history, and between history and its futures. They asked us to imagine ourselves in history to truly understand it—and ourselves.