Guide to a Foreign Past

As far as clichés about the study of history go, ‘The past is a foreign country’ is not too bad. We tend, though, to omit the second and more interesting half of the original version. The complete first sentence of L P Harley’s novel about love, class and innocence lost in late-Victorian England, The Go-Between (1953) reads: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ But do they, really? And, if so, just how differently, in fact, did people do things in that peculiar foreign country that this adage invites us to think of as ‘the past’?