In this week’s TLS – A note from the History editor

From its very beginnings, the story of America has resisted “attempts to
impose a particular shape and meaning”, in the words of Amanda Foreman.
Reviewing the Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s collection of essays on
American origins, Foreman observes that, from Captain John Smith in
Jamestown in the early 1600s, to successive American Presidents in their
inaugural speeches, “truth has been, not the standard-bearer of history, but
the servant of politics”. Lepore’s own approach to her country’s past
responds to overarching views of a nation imbued with manifest destiny by
breaking them down into “microhistories”. These studies of past lives take
“small mysteries about a person’s life as a means to exploring the culture”.

The larger mysteries of the brain are Raymond Tallis’s subject, specifically
the advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging, and how much they can
tell us. Some contributors to a collection on the subject are running before
they can walk, worrying about the legal and ethical implications of reading
a person’s thoughts before any such thing is within the realms of
possibility.

The frontiers of science, and as yet unrealized breakthroughs, are perhaps
more properly the province of science fiction. Michael Saler addresses a new
edition and critical study of one of the first examples of the genre, Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley. Though “packaged as a philosophic novel”, and taking in
classical and Christian tropes as well as the more familiar Gothic,
Shelley’s precocious production (she was nineteen when she wrote it) was
also an exploration of the scientific cutting edge. Luigi Galvani and
Humphry Davy would have been sources of inspiration, as would her husband
Percy’s own dabblings in experimental chemistry.

The popularity of fictional versions of servants’ lives, from Upstairs,
Downstairs to Downton Abbey, has made the task of recovering the
realities of lives in service even more worthwhile. Paul Addison finds that
Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants is “social history at its most
humane and perceptive”.

David Horspool

 

NB See the TLS website for our Poem of the Week, "Song" by George Barker, and the contents page in full for this week's issue.