REPRESENTING THE PAST: Costumed guides in historic houses with Valerie Krips

In many historic houses today costumed guides invite the visitor to enter a past period.  What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? Does it enable the visitor to better understand the past, or does it create a fictional account of it?

Dr Valerie Krips is Associate Professor Emerita of the English Department of the University of Pittsburgh, and Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.  She has been a consultant to the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, Castle Howard in Yorkshire, and Shugborough in Staffordshire.  The author of The Presence of the Past: Memory, History and Childhood in Postwar Britain, she is completing a book on cultural memory.