Billie Melman takes us on a panoramic voyage of the 'culture of history' which developed in England after the French Revolution. She vividly recovers unexplored aspects of popular history, and unpicks notions of the uncosy past, a place of pleasurable horror and sensationalism, which survived into the 1950s.

Billie Melman was educated in Tel Aviv and London. She is Professor of Modern History at Tel Aviv University. She has written extensively on British popular culture, British orientalism and the culture of colonialism, on history and memory, and on gender.

• Part I - The French Connection: History and Culture After the Revolution


• 1: History as a Chamber of Horrors: the French Revolution in Madame Tussaud's


• 2: History as a Panorama: Spectacle and the People in Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution


• 3: The Past as an Urban Place: Mid-Victorian Images of Revolution and Governance


• Part II - History as a Dungeon: Tudor Revivals and Urban Culture


• 4: Who Owns the Tower of London? The Production and Consumptions of a Historical Monument


• 5: Lady Jane: Torture, Gender and the Re-Invention of the Tudors


• Part III- Elizabethan Revivals, Consumption and Mass Democracy in the Modern Century


• 6: Buy Tudor: The Historical Film as a Mass Commodity


• 7: The Queen's Two Bodies; the King's Body: History, Monarchy and Stardom, 1933-53


• Part IV- History and Glamour: The French Revolution and Modern Living 1900-1940


• 8: The Revolution, Aristocrats and the People: The Returns of the Scarlet Pimpernel, 1900-1935


• Part V- New Elizabethans? Postwar Culture and Failed Histories


• 9: Gloriana 1953: Failed Evocations of the Past


• Conclusion


• Bibliography