I have referred a number of times to Simon Schama's A History of Britain. Try as you might, you will not find a history series that succeeds in the same fashion in bringing to the past and its people to life. I haven't seen even fictional treatments of famous events from British history that excite and inspire me in the same fashion as Schama's presentation.
It is an entrancing series. It makes you understand how---quoting now from Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis's great comic novel of a failed history lecturer---"properly taught, history could do people a hell of a lot of good." In all my years of schooling, I have had one professor of history who knew how to teach it. I didn't like him, but I loved his course.
FHe understood what Schama understands: that to understand the events of the past, you need to understand the background against which so many truly horrible people (not only in England, but everywhere) slugged it out to see who would own the power and the money. We had to read horribly dull accounts of gruesome battles---quoting a character from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey now---"all the men so good for nothing and hardly any women." But in class, his lectures were well-written and well-told accounts of the lives of ordinary people (I still remember most of his lecture on day to day life during the Plague Years).
Simon Schama does it better than anyone. He brings to his accounts such energy and eloquence that you feel as if you were hearing the stories fresh and at first hand. "He gives the facts flesh and blood," Nick suggested. We were discussing how completely inadequate is the cliche "He brings it to life" is to convey to a person who isn't especially interested in learning the history of Britain why he or she should purchase this series and watch it from beginning to end----or, if not that, rent it from NetFlix or Blockbuster.
I consider the $75 Nick spent to buy this series to be among our best investments ever. It's a lot of fascination for the money and I imagine we'll be watching it again and again over the years. Tonight, having finished one hour's worth of Schama's series, I begged for another. "It's too late; we'll watch another tomorrow," said Nick. Nick is extremely fond of reading history and of watching documentaries, whereas I...am not.
For me to remember names and dates, I need to have a reason to care. For me to care, I need to understand the context. I need to know what the great events meant in their time, other than a shift in power from one rich/greedy/self-serving/self-righteous bastard to another. I need to know what the bastards in question were hoping to accomplish and why (to the extent that the "why" can ever be known) they thought they had the right to try to accomplish it.
I need a sense of the huge world-changing issues that were hanging in the balance at the decisive moments. One of Schama's gifts is to make you see how those key moments evolved and to see the key events that evolved from them. Another is to provide some insight, to the extent such insight is possible, into the people who contrived to bring them about. E.g., what if King Richard II's trigger-happy mate hadn't lunged at big Wat Tyler on his little horse at the critical moment? What if Tyler had survived and the Peasant Rebellion had succeeded? The entire history of Britain, and therefore of the entire world, would have unfolded in an unimaginably different fashion.
Somehow, when Schama unfolds his verbal tapestries you get the odd glimpse of the other side, where everything is woven together and the ends are hanging loose; the blurrier side of reality that reflects not only what was, but what might have been; the roads not taken; the paths not pursued; the victories not won. In short: fascinating stuff, that will change the way you think and feel about History, considered as a subject, as a field, and as a pursuit.
To Simon Schama, then, our warmest thanks, and our hopes that he will inspire others in his field to teach events within their broader context and with equal energy and passion.
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