Restaging the Past is the first collection devoted to the study of pageants in Britain, ranging from their Edwardian origins to the present day. In the twentieth century, people all across Britain succumbed to “pageant fever.” Thousands of people dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from local history, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between 1900 and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns, and tiny villages, and engaged a wide range of organizations and social groups, from Women’s Institutes to political parties, schools to churches, and even youth organizations.
 
Pageants were community events, bringing people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians, and other writers, and as a result were featured repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, the contributors argue that it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change—and, they show, because of its former prominence, some lingering signs of “pageant fever” can still be seen in Britain today.
 

1. Introduction Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Alexander Hutton and Paul Readman 2. Yorkshire Historical Pageants before the First World War Keith Johnston 3. A National Church Tells its Story: The English Church Pageant of 1909  Arthur Burns  4. The Pomp of Obliteration: G. K. Chesterton and the Edwardian Pageant Revival  Michael Shallcross  5.  Historical Pageants, Citizenship and the Performance of Women’s History before Second-Wave Feminism  Zoë Thomas  6. Nobility, Duty and Courage: Propaganda and Inspiration in Interwar Women’s and Girls’ Pageants   Amy Binns  7. Historical Pageants, Neo-Romanticism and the City in Interwar Britain Tom Hulme  8. ‘A Chorus of Greek Poignancy’: Communism, Class and Pageantry in Interwar South Wales Daryl Leeworthy  9. The ‘Quite Ordinary Man’ at the Pageant: History, Community and Local Identity in the 1951 Festival of Britain Alexander Hutton  10. ‘The Scots Pageant’: The Arbroath Abbey Pageants 1947–2005  Linda Fleming  11. After the Show is Over … Souvenirs and Mementos: The Material Culture of Historical Pageants Ellie Reid  12.     ‘The Story of Us’? Kynren and the Uses of the Past Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alexander Hutton and Paul Readman  13.     Afterword Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Alexander Hutton and Paul Readman Index