Billie Melman's book begins by turning over the leaves of a scrapbook history of England compiled in the mid-twentieth century, which is ‘linear but rambling and taking many diversions according to … fancy and interest’. It is a characterization that suits her work, a capacious, insightful but frustrating survey of English uses of the past from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In nine roughly chronological chapters, Melman presents the ‘culture of history’ as a growth in the mass consumption of historical images and artefacts, examining how ‘impresarios’ and ‘entrepreneurs’ packaged and sold visions of the French Revolution and Tudor England to a metropolitan public. Gore and horror – guillotines, scaffolds, and dungeons – initially predominated in these visions, but they softened over time as the relationship between state and people became increasingly harmonious. Nineteenth-century crowds relished Madame Tussaud's severed heads and Harrison Ainsworth's bloodstained Tower of London; twentieth-century cinemagoers preferred Leslie Howard's Scarlet Pimpernel and Charles Laughton's jolly Henry VIII.

Emphasizing the market enables Melman to speak usefully of the past's presence in a ‘majority’ culture, which is defined as what most people saw or read, and to stress the agency of ordinary consumers in defining and using history. Her first case study of Madame Tussaud's waxwork museum exemplifies the theme: its paying visitors treated its exhibits as a playground, even picnicking in Napoleon's carriage. Melman emphasizes that social and political elites were unsuccessful in directing or restricting the motions of people who had paid their money and could take their choice. Although toying with interpretations of museums as sites of Foucauldian manipulation and stressing the ‘phobic suspicion’ of urban crowds displayed by administrators of historic monuments, she concludes that efforts to police paying customers either failed or became less politicized over time. The duke of Wellington feared that visiting crowds might pillage the Tower of London; a century later, officials merely fretted that they might litter it with lunch boxes.

Markets also subvert cultural hierarchies. To the dismay of the guardians of national culture, foreigners, women, Jews, and homosexuals – Baroness Orczy, Alexander Korda, and Lytton Strachey among others – excelled at selling history. Indeed, the ‘history men’, members of the nascent historical profession, appear ineffectual figures by comparison, who were unable to beat and were often obliged to join the impresarios at their own game. Melman thus suggests that Carlyle's panoramic French Revolution made him a highbrow equivalent of the urban showmen who exhibited panoramas and notes that J. E. Neale applauded Flora Robson's celluloid Elizabeth I.

Commercialization was slow to bring about the genuine democratization of history. It took sustained technological progress, especially the invention of film, to create a historical ‘culture for democracy’. Melman is also impressed by Bourdieu's gloomy theory of ‘distinction’, which argues that cultural markets always tend to stratify their public along lines of taste. Yet she is refreshingly optimistic about the ability of common readers and viewers to criticize and customize works by their nominal betters. Rather like Jonathan Rose in The intellectual life of the British working classes (2001), she lets them surprise us. Thus if Melman primly notes the ‘unacceptable parts’ of Carlyle's ‘writing on race, and women and gender’, she also notes that he inspired feminist readers.

The book's shortcomings reflect its ambitions. Its case studies are not really a convincing ‘synecdoche’ for English historical consciousness. Melman's vibrant marketplace only has two stalls – the French Revolution and the Tudors – and she does not fully justify her claim that they were ‘privileged’ pasts. Moreover, she strains too hard to challenge a dominant conception of the English (and still more the British) as united by a whig narrative of continuous progress in civil and religious liberties and imperial and material power, or by a compensating nostalgia for all that was rural and homespun. She strings together images that show the English in thrall to a past that was urban, ‘uncosy’, and ‘arbitrary’. Yet stating that the past was imagined as a chamber of horrors or a scaffold is no more convincing than to argue that it was dominated by images of ‘Country’. Such claims ignore the popularity of monuments and representations expressive of very different hopes and anxieties: a primeval swamp or Westminster Abbey for example; the Colosseum or the Holy Land. Even if the Parisian guillotine and the Tudor scaffold were ‘privileged’, it is questionable whether they were genuine alternatives to whig confidence in progress, for that tradition's strength has always been its ability to entertain and thus exorcise fears about the collapse of its ideals.

In presenting the culture of history as a modern, libertarian space, Melman risks divorcing it from the fragile but real continuities toasted by the great Victorian historians. It becomes a rootless commodity, spun from the daydreams of dwellers in ‘mega cities’ and changing with every reform bill. Even if a metropolitan history market sprang into being with industrializing modernity, the memories and convictions it dealt in were surely older and less malleable than implied here. Melman's emphasis on consumption leaves almost no space to discuss Protestantism, perhaps the most important source of such memories. The exception, a chapter on representations of Lady Jane Grey, is more interested in the ‘feminization of the dungeon’ than in the Reformation. The culture of history is therefore not an authoritative guide to English historical consciousness, but it is a lively and richly illustrated guide to its more arresting popular manifestations.