Living In The Past

As long as I could pop in and out I’d like to go back and visit my Grandparents Grt Grandparents and go way back to Grandparents x? To see how they lived and where I came from.
Of course I’d need clothes from those times and old money and i would like to take some gifts and stuff to make their lives easier.
Then it would all get complicated and I might change time and disappear altogether !

If I had money I would like to have lived in the Victorian era, but only if I were rich.

If I had health and a certain amount of wealth, perhaps it would be interesting to live in Edwardian times.

Some things in the past will have been good but, on the whole, I like the mod-cons of today etc. etc.

Not everything in modern life is an improvement but I am glad that, in reality, I live now and not in the time of my Grandparents.

I'm very interested in Victorian and Edwardian history. I'd like to time travel but I don't want to lose my central heating, dentist, doctors, health cover. Running water - cleanliness etc - soft lot aren't we!

i would like to be a fly on the wall back in time,,,so long as there were no fly swats back then....lol

I wouldn't want to be around prior to the development of anaesthesia and antiseptics. Maybe the Edwardian age, although I would have to be rich and a man. Not young enough to be conscripted in the upcoming First World War, though.

In reality, of course, I would be dead as I have had various illnesses that needed antibiotics and complex surgery. Wouldn't want to be without vaccines either. On the other hand, it would be nice to live in a world that isn't being destroyed by humanity.

I too would think about being an Edwardian - described as the last long golden afternoon of the British nation, before the first world war and everything going upside down. I would have needed to be rich of course; a miserable time if you weren't - perhaps a Downton Abbey lifestyle. That said I would probably have hated it and in fact I'm happy where I am in the great span of time.

I would like to go back to the Highlands before the clearances just for a visit. In our glen there were over two thousand people who were all driven out to tiny pieces of barren land near the coast and their homes burnt down. Only the stone foundations remained. I used to play in one near our croft house as a child. Most of their animals died because they had nothing to feed them. I would like to see what the valley was like before and how people lived before the year of the burnings in 1829. A few people were able to return in the first years of the twentieth century, my grandparents among them, but only a few families in a small part of the strath. What would it have been like with lots of people and fields and homes? I used to think and wonder about this as a child.

I am fascinated by local history, and would love to go back in time in my home town and local city, to see how it developed. I know roughly what has happened over the years, but I would love to see how ordinary people lived, go into the houses that photos only ever show from the outside, hear the voices and smell the smells of life through the ages.

It would be even better if I could talk to the people without spooking them, and find out what they thought about the world they lived in.

I'm in a few local history groups on Facebook, and most of the photos are from Victorian and Edwardian times, as that was when cameras came into their own. There are a lot of photos of people who are shabbily dressed by modern standards, and a lot of the comments are always 'poor things', 'hard times in those days', and so on. I'm not suggesting that working people had it easy, but they were real people, who laughed, lived and loved just as we do, and I think that to reduce them to 'unfortunates' is disrespectful and, well, reductive. I would love to find out their own points of view, and whether they felt disadvantaged or that their lives were just the way people lived.

So, sign me up for the time machine tour! .

I would find it hard to go back as a privileged woman in another era.
I already consider myself privileged in this era in that I have a roof over my head, a cupboard full of food and people who love me... The idea that I could enjoy being amongst the wealthy but have no control over what I did with my good fortune and finances (and maybe had to watch others struggling in terrible conditions right in front of me) I think would be awful.

FannyCornforth

Maggiemaybe how passionate and romantic!

It was, Fanny. Though it sadly put paid to any chance I had of living a life of ease and luxury.

2019. Life in the past was so different

moobox ???

moobox

2019. Life in the past was so different

That's the best answer !

Perhaps we could all go back to cave person days and bring our sons and daughters up to respect each other, kill and cook the dinosaur together and let the women invent the wheel.

Good one moobox

It's easy to have a nostalgic, romantic view of life in the past. Especially, the way it's portrayed in films on TV.

In reality, there was so much suffering, though. Child mortality, filthy living conditions, back breaking work, no NHS, plagues and famines - so, no thanks (not enjoying the current plague either).

I’ve always wanted to go back in time and go to The Great Exhibition. So I suppose that’s when I’d have to live. I often have to remind myself that everyone living in the past thought that they had advanced from the people that had lived before them. That their time was modern and new. I’m sure that at the time of the Great Exhibition many things were new and exciting and the possibilities for the future were endless.

Most members of Gransnet are women – although we do have some grandpas. Being a women was not good in the past for a hugely long time with little freedom of choice if you came from a rich family, little opportunity if you were poor.

For all their infamous raiding and plundering, the Vikings who attacked from Scandinavia might have been just a
bunch of lonely-hearted bachelors

Those must have been exciting times, although having just watched "Blood of the Clans" on TV, they would have been best advised to steer clear of Scotland!

At any period in the past, social attitudes would be unacceptable to us, what we would see as the casual cruelty, brutal violence, lack of proper medical facilities. In fact everything would be unpleasant to an extent to totally overshadow any perceived attractions.

My family were mainly agricultural labourers in the midlands or Irish catholic peasants or factory workers. When I first discovered the extent of their poverty, it made me weep. Go back to it myself, in any period, Please, no.

I would like to go back to being 17 in 1966. I would want the same group of friends with me. I only want to stay for a week.
Just to see if it was as much fun as my memory tells me it was.

No, Andyf* you would meet disillusionment and disappointment, I think we all remember the best from the events that looking back seem the happiest in our lives and forget all the problems we and they were also dealing with.

MOnica, that’s another reason I’d like to go back. To deal with those problems the way I should have done at the time, in a more confident way. I might need two weeks instead of one though. ?

But then you would be a different person and may well have had a totally different life - and it does not necessarily mean that it would be a better or more enjoyable life. We continue to make good.bad decisions throughout life and if you can put one right, you may have later made an even worse one.

It is a hackneyed quote because it is so very right 'The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there'. Let sleeping dogs lie, even in wistful desires to go back.