Hannah Skoda (3:06)

I'm Hannah Skoda. I'm fellow and Tutor in Late medieval history at St John's College in Oxford.

Rana Mitter (3:11)

And I'm Rana Mitter. I'm St. Lee Chair in US Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Matt Alton (3:19)

Hannah and Rana, thank you so much as always for being with us. Next week sees the launch of the BBC's new series the Celebrity Traitors, which, as the name suggests, a range of famous faces playing the reality deception game. They include Tom Daly, Claire Balding, and most relevantly for our purposes, the historian David Olashogga. This is really interesting for us to talk about in terms of the relationship between historians and celebrity and I suppose what happens when historians become famous figures in their own right. To boil it down to perhaps an over simple question, just to kick us off, do you think that historians should be celebrities?

Hannah Skoda (3:55)

I'm not sure whether I know whether historians should or shouldn't be celebrities, but I was going backwards in time and thinking a little bit about historians in previous centuries who've achieved a sort of celebrity status. And recently I've been treating myself to reading some of the novels of Harrison Ainsworth, who's largely a forgotten figure now, but in the mid 19th century he even outsold Dickens at one stage. He was immensely popular and he was a historical novelist. So he wrote a whole series of extremely detailed historical novels on topics which he was passionate about. And he had a very explicit goal in mind which was to contribute to public interest in heritage sites and also to sort of provoke more public investment into the restoration of those sites. So, for example, in 1841 he published a novel called the Tower of London. And it opens with quite an extensive preface where he tells us that one of his goals is to stimulate the restoration of the Tower and its more extensive opening to the public. He says buildings like this are the property of the nation and they should be open to national inspection. And then he says the day, he hopes the day is not far off when all really worth seeing will be accessible. And then he launches into this wild romance tale of the very, very short reign of Lady Jane Grey. But it's interspersed with incredibly detailed architectural descriptions of what you would see if you went to visit the Tower. And I think in many ways Harrison Ainsworth was almost single handedly responsible for provoking a kind of outpouring of interest in the Tower. Visitor numbers increased dramatically. But all this was part of a. A kind of early to mid 19th century obsession with thinking about heritage, about history, and thinking about it quite often with a sort of Gothic flavour to it. So the horrors of the Tower really appealed to people and one can think of lots of other contexts as well in which this interest in history in the 19th century was all about ghosts and spectres of the past and full of romance and adventure. So, for example, by 1851, the Tower of London had a dedicated ticket office because the visitor numbers had increased quite so dramatically and people would come and they'd look at what they believed was the block on which Anne Boleyn had laid her head to be executed. Which actually wasn't. One thing I find particularly interesting is that this kind of outpouring of interest in history in the early 19th century, quite, quite a lot of it was really very dubious and a lot of it with this kind of Gothic y horror sort of dimension, really produced a kind of sensationalisation of the past in a way that I find quite problematic now. So, for example, if we think about the history of torture, lots of visitors were very, very keen to see as much kind of gory torture paraphernalia as possible. But actually we discover that a lot of these torture instruments were pretty much invented in the 19th century in order to appeal to these early tour who were coming to visit them. They weren't actually used in the Middle Ages. So the thumbscrew, for example, people did not use that in the Middle Ages. There's very little evidence of this going on. And that raises, I think, another whole set of questions about how we reconcile a sense of historical integrity with a sense of what history's doing as entertainment. I think in that period, in the 19th century, they really went for it in terms of the entertainment dimension. And I think now, particularly in kind of heritage context and presenting these sites to the public, people really worry a lot more about how to sort of manage this kind of tension of sort of public appetite for really sensationalised history, but also trying to present a history which is sensitive, sensitive to the experiences of victims in the past, but also sensitive to historical realities. Right. It's not okay to distort things in order to make things more entertaining. So historians are always treading this really fine line and it's a tension that I think remains really current.

Rana Mitter (8:17)

So I'm thinking Matt's original question, you know, should historians become celebrities? Well, first of all I think this is not really in the historian's hands. I mean, the thing is that lots of historians I'm sure would love to be celebrities, but it's a combination of the fickle finger of fate and also some questions like, you know, such as the, the timeliness of the topic that they're interested in. I mean, for instance, historians of certain topics, such as the Middle east after 911 or with present day, for instance, I think probably found that their work suddenly becomes a great interest because of current affairs. But I suspect that becoming a celebrity is a bit serendipitous. You're never quite sure which of the particular fates are going to come together and actually give you that particular moment in the sun, or sometimes quite long moment in the sun. But having said that, I think the way in which that kind of historian, celebrity or celebrity historian has emerged in the 20th century give some indications of why it happens. And if we're saying should in the sense of, you know, is there some greater public good that comes for it? I'm going to try and make a case for yes, and I'll explain why.

Matt Alton (9:26)

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