Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Foster review – the past isn’t a foreign place

The historian’s wide-ranging exploration of wistful reminiscence cautiously champions its benefits to society and challenges the view that it is dangerous and foolish

Agnes Arnold-Forster was once a very nostalgic child. An avid reader of Enid Blyton novels, she tells us, she unsuccessfully begged her parents to “divert me from my 1990s London primary to a boarding school in 1950s Cornwall”. Although her training as an academic historian naturally taught her to be suspicious of such yearnings for an imaginary past, she has now written a book that combines wide-ranging historical analysis with a (cautious) “defence of nostalgia”.

While neuroscientists sometimes treat emotions as human universals, historians are keen to show how the words we use to describe our feelings, and indeed the feelings themselves, change with the times. “Nostalgia was one of the most studied medical conditions of the 19th century,” Arnold-Forster explains, believed to cause “palpitations and unexplained ruptures in the skin” as well as depression and disturbed sleep. It was first diagnosed among 17th-century Swiss mercenaries and referred to “a kind of pathological patriotic love, an intense and dangerous homesickness”. (Since sufferers were assumed to be missing the pure mountain air, one doctor suggested they should be put in tall towers to recuperate.) It was not until the early 20th century that homesickness and nostalgia in the current sense began to be seen as distinct.

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