learning journal 3: thoughts on history

There is one dilemma that we discussed in class as we discussed the history of England:

How do you summarize London's history into such a short time? 

It's impossible, surely, to summarize thousands of years of London's history into a few class periods--I'm not entirely convinced that it could happen thoroughly in a semester.

That aside, the most important question I came away considering is this: how I will connect the history of London with my own project? I don't know that I've entirely figured out the answer, but I know that the most important way that history will interact with my own project is by studying the history of the essayists that I will be reading. In literature courses, we typically turn to authors' lives and the times they lived in to get an idea of the context in which the text was written. So by studying the history of the essayists I'll be reading, I can connect their personal history with events and happenings that were occurring as they lived and worked and wrote. The ways that these authors intersected with general history of London (and England in general) will be good ground for analysis and discovery.

For example, studying the life of Charles Lamb will tell you that he was was born in 1775 and died in 1834. His parents had seven children, only three of which lived to adulthood. When Lamb was twenty, he experienced a horrible tragedy in his family life: his sister Mary, in a bout of temporary insanity, stabbed to death their mother and critically wounded their father. Because of her mental illness, she was released from prison, and Charles ended up taking care of her his whole life. Because of the shock, Lamb ended up having a mental breakdown himself and spending time in the asylum. What would be interesting to study historically with this specific story from his life is to look at how mental illness was treated and handled during that time period. Because my project is to write in the style of the classical British essay, this information may not seem completely vital, but it's interesting to get a larger picture of the authors I'm going to be studying. 

Especially considering the fact that with all Charles Lamb wrote about his life, he never once mentioned his family tragedy.

Interesting.