History in Miniature

Abstract

Chapter 6, ‘History in Miniature’, focuses on the weekly illustrated miscellanies of the 1820s and 1830s to see how they presented the past and created a sense of virtual historicity for a new readership. Images of the geographically and historically remote were presented as novelties and ‘news’ and the chapter looks at toys and other miniature representations of historical events too. Did people understand history as a series of singular and spectacular ‘fixed’ events? Or did the gradually embedding seriality of their daily practices create instead a more pliant, plastic, and permeable idea of history as a forming and formative process in which they could participate? This chapter considers the scalar strategies by which popular print and material culture put the past ‘within reach’ and suggests how different forms of miniaturization helped people to negotiate the dizzying possibilities of a global scale.