New Approaches to Social History. Myth, Memory, And Place: Monmouth and Bath 1750-1900‪.‬

1. A Hard and Soft Social History In the post-war decades in Britain, social history, in what may be called its heroic age, was new and fashionable, and could expect to attract devotees by virtue of these qualities alone. From the later twentieth century, the baton for novelty passed to other sub-disciplines such as cultural and gender history. But the change was not simply one of fashion. It represented a major shift in approach from a "hard" to a "soft" social history. Much of the social history of the heroic age was empirical in character, and almost all was built around a notion of social structure, particularly class structure, drawn from Marxist theory. During the 1970s and 1980s, the certainties which underpinned this approach began to dissolve, and in particular the appeal of a class-based analysis of society declined. Growing emphasis was placed on the mental and imaginative sphere in society, on imagery and representation, and on qualitative modes of investigation. What was once hard and definite became soft and malleable, capable of multiple configurations and meanings. Beliefs and ideas were no longer firmly moored to structures; indeed, society itself became increasingly seen as a cultural construct. (1) This paper takes as its starting-point the rich possibilities for social history opened up by the cultural turn. It does so by exploring the interaction of three phenomena that have attracted a good deal of attention, myth, memory and place, (2) and by engaging in a form of micro-history. Two towns in the South-West of Britain, Monmouth and Bath, are investigated, and two very particular sites within or adjacent to them, the Kymin and the Circus. Both sites were created in the mid to late Georgian period, and in various ways are texts of their time, means through which it is possible to explore contemporary beliefs and identities, and the ways in which these were constructed. The meaning of these sites was neither uniform nor fixed, but ambivalent, polysemous, and changeable. The interaction of myth, memory, and place reflects the way a 'soft' social history has opened up new avenues for exploring society and its core beliefs. However, to what extent such an approach constitutes a genuine social history, as opposed say to cultural history or cultural anthropology, is a debatable point. It is arguable that social history requires at the very least an implicit model of society, with some sense of a social structure. The essays published in the fall 2003 issue of the Journal of Social History, drawn from the first conference reassessing the position of social history, contain, as Peter Stearns notes, "frequent reference to the need to revive attention to social class, as a corrective to the frequent quirkiness of the cultural turn." (3) Moreover, Jurgen Kocka argues that a new "social turn" may be imminent, and that social historians insist that "conditions and consequences, structures and processes have to be taken seriously and brought back in." But significantly, he also claims that in any return to social history "it will not be the social history of the 60s and 70s. Rather it will be a social history after the linguistic turn. It will have to incorporate ingredients from political and cultural history, analyse social phenomena as constructed, combine structure, agency and perception." (4) In a similar spirit Peter Burke has recently suggested that "we are witnessing the emergence of a hybrid genre," merging social history and the New Cultural History, and expressed the hope "that in what we may call a 'post-postmodern age', connections will be re-established." (5) This paper concludes, therefore, by arguing that the identities explored in it are not socially neutral, but are located in particular social structures, and are inextricably associated with establishing elite and class identities. The implication from this is that the way forward for social history is not an abandonment of the principles which unde