From the academia to the screen: academic history and the house of guiness

 To say the least, history is always around us, and this is no less true when it comes to visual media. This autumn, Netflix has launched what I hope will be a blockbuster series in the form of House of Guinness. The series portrays the life of the famous Irish brewing family and the political conflicts of late 1860s Dublin.




History is often used as a kind of projection surface for our own fantasies and ideas about how the past might have been. To recreate history on TV therefore means, to some extent, that we colonize — in this case — 19th-century Ireland with people who think in modern ways. What we see on screen is thus not the past as it actually was, but our contemporary conception of it.

As a historian, I love historical series and movies. Even though they never truly portray the past accurately, they still provide entertainment and, to some degree, represent the past as we want it to be, rather than how it actually was. Another interesting aspect is that I have seen, over the course of my own life, how new perspectives in academic history often find their way into visual media.

The story in House of Guinness has several intertwining layers. On one hand, we see an unruly Catholic working class, in conflict not only with their Protestant counterparts but also, to a lesser extent, with their employers. The Guinness brewery itself becomes a target, viewed by some as a symbol of the Protestant wealthy majority. In this tension, we can clearly see the influence of modern historical research, which portrays the working class as heterogeneous rather than homogeneous — a group united by class interest, yet divided by religion and national identity.

On the other hand, the upper class has its own struggles. We meet aristocrats who are people of dreams and desires, but who remain trapped by the rigid standards of their own social world. In this regard, the Guinness family’s butler, Mr. Potter, is particularly interesting, as he insists that his employers strictly adhere to aristocratic norms. In doing so, he helps create a kind of gilded cage — one that the family themselves can never truly escape.

In the end, what academic history has contributed to this series is perspective. Popular or “folk” history often serves its own purpose, fostering a sense of unity within a single group, but it tends to fall short when it comes to complexity and nuance. House of Guinness, however, offers both — and besides, a series that combines deep discussions of sexual norms with Irish folk punk can hardly go wrong.

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