£1m grant goes to four university departments working in unprecedented collaboration to uncover how the Victorians tampered with the past and changed history.

Much of the past is filtered to us through Victorian eyes. It is therefore crucial to our true understanding of history to find out to what extent they did, or did not, reinvent the past.

A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge has been awarded more than £1 million by the Leverhulme Trust to do just this. This is an unusually large grant for arts research. The researchers are working in an unprecented cross-disciplinary team of academics from no less than four university departments (Classics, History, English and History and Philosophy of Science) on a major project entitled ‘Abandoning the Past’. It will take five years to complete.

The project, which starts in October 2006, will explore how history changed under the Victorians. The Victorian era has been chosen by the team “as the 19th century is when history really started to matter, and to affect the lives of people in all parts of society. It was a time of extraordinary change,” says Mary Beard, Professor of Classics, “when new pasts were created and old ones abandoned”.

This was the era when new theories and discoveries, from the ‘Origin of Species’ to the uncovering of the biblical city of Nineveh, presented a dazzling array of different versions of the past. The Victorians also came up with new methods of understanding it: museums, archaeological digs, displays of model dinosaurs, and much more. They created the major institutions and their accompanying ideologies which still have a major presence in our lives today.

‘Abandoning the past’ will ask questions such as: how was religious belief affected when ancient biblical cities were being uncovered, while, at the same time, theories of evolution were emerging? Were museums an enrichment of culture or an albatross around its neck? Why do we tend to look at what was there – the stars of the Victorian era like William Morris – but not look at the absence of things – the ancient buildings and landscapes that the Victorians destroyed? Why bother to read Latin and Greek? And how did novelists and painters contribute to these debates? How did they affect the men, women and children in the swelling cities, shops and factories?

This project promises to have a significant impact on modern debates, from the role of ‘heritage’ to ideas of citizenship and multi-culturalism. “The British have been wrestling with these ideas for 150 years and we can learn from what the Victorians thought,” says Professor Beard.

To make contact with the directors of the project please email: enquiries@victorians.group.cam.ac.uk

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