Raphael Samuel

He may have crystallised our image of the Victorian Christmas, but is there a Dickens for all our seasons? Raphael Samuel embarks on an investigation of how film and stage treatments of his work illuminated changing attitudes to the inheritance of 19th-century Britain.

A new form of antiquarianism? Celebrating experience at the expense of analysis? The sort of history Socialists write? Rescuing the past from the enormous 'condescension of posterity'? Mobilising popular enthusiasm? What is social history? Seven historians answer...