Castles in the Air

I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past...’ wrote Henry James in his preface to The Aspern Papers, ‘a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table.’ The idea of the past as literally visitable is an immensely seductive one: when I first read James’s passage, I found that it elegantly summed up a pleasure which I had felt strongly since childhood, and still as a historian feel strongly today. It is true that James preferred his past to consist of ‘the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries’. My own first visit, the kindling of my historical imagination as it was to develop over the next sixty years, took me, on the contrary, to the further distance of history: a ruined castle uninhabited for over 300 years.