Historic England’s proposal to celebrate the places where “ordinary people” have worked, lived or socialised is very welcome
In his 1939 poem The Unknown Citizen, WH Auden imagines a composite of a working man built of public records – union lists, social psychology notes, health-card, insurance policies. A man so well-behaved and average and compliant (“he held the proper opinions for the time of year … our teachers report he never interfered with their education”) that he must be happy: “Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.” The state erects a marble statue of him, calls it JS/07 M 378, and moves on.
But of course the point is that statistics cannot capture the warp and weft of actual lives lived, the things that matter. It is true that the so-called everyday is now far more noticed and celebrated in literature, music, drama, academia and politics than before (though the recent Brexit-driven attempt to set “ordinary” in opposition to “elites” and “experts” cannot be called an especially positive advance). And Auden’s poem was in fact written two years after the launch of that extraordinary testament to ordinary lives, the Mass Observation project. However, it is still the case that the nation’s monuments – stately homes, castles, statues – overwhelmingly memorialise the small percentage of the population with a lot of money, for whom official history is a family affair. Auden’s ironies still bite.
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