Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain: An Image of Truth, by Martha Vandrei

Abstract

Reviewed by: Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain: An Image of Truth by Martha Vandrei Arianne Chernock (bio) Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain: An Image of Truth, by Martha Vandrei; pp. xi + 233. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, £60.00, $74.00. Victorianists are probably familiar with Queen Boudica. That is because Boudica—the leader of the ancient Iceni tribe who staged a bloody rebellion against the Romans in AD 61 in retaliation for the enslavement of her family and rape of her two daughters—figured prominently in nineteenth-century British life. Victorian children committed William Cowper's Boadicea: An Ode (1782) to memory, while archaeological enthusiasts surveyed Hampstead Heath searching for Boudica's remains. In 1898, Thomas Thornycroft's imposing statue of Boudica was erected at the end of Westminster Bridge, within a stone's throw of Parliament—surely a sign of Boudica's primacy of place in Victorian culture. For a nation headed by a female sovereign and committed to imperial expansion, the draw was obvious. Boudica provided a useable past. Or so the story goes. Martha Vandrei wants to shake up this narrative. In her ambitious if at times unwieldy Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain: An Image of Truth, Vandrei situates Boudica in the broader sweep of history and insists that the Victorian fascination with the ancient queen was nothing new. Yes, Boudica provided a convenient predecessor to Queen Victoria; Victorians on occasion referred to Boudica as Victoria I. And yes, she anchored Britons' late-nineteenth-century imperial ambitions. But Britons had long been intrigued by Boudica, "one of the first named figures in British history" (83). Since the Elizabethan period, Vandrei shows, they had been [End Page 324] playing out Boudica's life on both the page and stage, to different ends and with different purposes. Continuity, rather than rupture, drives Vandrei's account. Building on some of the themes introduced by Jodi Mikalachki in her The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (1998), Vandrei proposes that we use Boudica as a lens through which to view how Britons across the centuries have wrestled with and attempted to project meaning onto their past. In this sense, Vandrei is as much concerned with Boudica in particular as with the rise of so-called historical culture in Britain. By looking at the ways in which various writers, poets, playwrights, sculptors, and artists engaged with Boudica over time, Vandrei contends, we learn much about the formation of the historical discipline. It is here that the subtitle for Vandrei's book—"an image of truth"—becomes crucially important. Boudica, Vandrei argues, played a key role in helping Britons determine what distinguished history (with its claims to truth and authenticity, and emphasis on evidence) from other forms of knowledge. These are weighty themes, and Vandrei grounds them by homing in on specific moments: the dynamic relationship between dramatic performances and prose histories of Boudica in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the politicization of Boudica's story in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, Boudica and the nineteenth-century search for "brave female hero[es]" through which to interpret and legitimate Queen Victoria's reign, and Boudica's place in early cinema (115). Along the way, Vandrei makes some surprising—and welcome—interventions. We learn, for example, that Britons were producing so-called serious history long before the rise of an alleged history market in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We also discover that these histories were being produced in all sorts of locations and that critics and audiences, as well as authors, helped to shape the meanings attached to Boudica's story. We also develop a greater appreciation for the role of theater in the rise of the field of history. In the process, Vandrei also provides a nuanced assessment of Victorians' own complex relationship with Boudica. She shows that Victorians were not always enthusiastic in their embrace of Boudica and that the queen's connection to Victorian imperialism could be quite strained. During the Indian Uprisng of 1857, for example, Britons struggled to determine if Boudica should be invoked on the side of the colonial ruler or the...