The Buried Life of Things: How Objects Made History in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Simon Goldhill offers a fresh and exciting perspective on how the Victorians used material culture to express their sense of the past in an age of progress, especially the biblical past and the past of classical antiquity. From Pompeian skulls on a writer's desk, to religious paraphernalia in churches, new photographic images of the Holy Land and the remaking of the cityscape of Jerusalem and Britain, Goldhill explores the remarkable way in which the nineteenth century's sense of history was reinvented through things. The Buried Life of Things shows how new technologies changed how history was discovered and analysed, and how material objects could flare into significance in bitter controversies, and then fade into obscurity and disregard again. This book offers a new route into understanding the Victorians' complex and often bizarre attempts to use their past to express their own modernity.

Author: Simon Goldhill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 12/18/2014
Pages: 268
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 9.80h x 6.70w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781107087484

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2015

About the Author
Goldhill, Simon: - Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek, University of Cambridge; John Harvard Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Cambridge; Director of the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities; Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His internationally award-winning books include Jerusalem, City of Longing (2008), Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity (2011) and Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (2012).