There is a peculiar kind of homesickness that begins with a film. For two hours, another century feels inhabitable. The rooms are beautiful, the conversations seem worth listening to, and even waiting for a letter has an air of consequence. Then the end credits roll, your phone lights up, and the present feels a little less enchanting than it did before.
Of course, a feeling of wistfulness does not require a period drama. An old photograph or a song recorded decades before you were born can produce the same effect. Suddenly, you are longing for a summer you never spent anywhere, among people you never knew. It is an odd proposition: how can we miss something we have never had?
Researchers have a term for this kind of attachment. A study published in the Journal of Business Research examines “vicarious nostalgia,” describing an experience that involves fantasies about past eras alongside an emotional response. When studying the nostalgia evoked by advertising, the researchers found that this experience could strengthen perceptions of a brand’s heritage and the audience’s emotional attachment to it. Although the study concerns marketing, the findings can be considered within a variety of contexts. A past does not have to belong to us personally to be emotionally compelling.
That leaves a more interesting question than whether the feeling is possible. What, exactly, are we longing for?
Sometimes the appeal is unmistakably aesthetic. A room lit by candles offers a different atmosphere than one lit by a laptop. There is pleasure in the elaborate clothes of a period film, just as there is in the imperfect grain of an old home video. An aesthetic can suggest an entire way of living. The candlelit room promises intimacy. The handwritten letter implies patience. The blurry photograph seems to belong to a moment someone experienced without immediately checking whether it was worth posting.
These associations are interpretations, rather than evidence that life was better then. Still, they help explain why the objects can feel so evocative. We may be drawn to what they appear to make possible: attention that is undivided, romance that takes its time, an afternoon that does not need to become content.
Research on personal nostalgia offers some context for that desire for connection. In a 2016 paper published in Emotion, researchers found, across six experiments, that nostalgia could strengthen a sense of continuity between the past and present by increasing feelings of social connectedness. Those experiments focused on people’s own memories, so they cannot explain why someone longs for Regency England. They do, however, suggest that nostalgia can serve an emotional purpose beyond fondness for the way things used to look. My suspicion is that some of our affection for imagined eras begins with a similar wish to feel situated somewhere among people and rituals that make sense to us.
With their detailed depictions of other worlds, books and films can provide that somewhere. After spending enough time inside a fictional world, its drawing rooms become familiar; you know where the characters sit and what a particular silence means. A reader can develop an attachment to a place long before considering whether she would actually enjoy living there. Admiring the world of an Austen adaptation is considerably easier when someone else has already arranged the house, selected the music and ensured that the most interesting people will arrive before dinner.
Social media can compress that invitation into a few seconds. A montage of old footage set to a melancholy song gives an era an emotional coherence that no actual decade could sustain. In the version we scroll through, the clothes coordinate with the interiors, and the people seem to inhabit precisely the atmosphere we want. There is little space for the uneventful afternoon or the person who found the whole thing tedious. The past arrives already edited.
Meanwhile, we experience the present in its entirety. It includes the beautiful evening, but also the unanswered email and the dishes waiting afterward. Comparing that life with a carefully assembled version of another era is an uneven exercise. The imagined past can offer the pleasures of familiarity without the inconvenience of having actually been there.
There is also the question of whose past we are imagining. The life of a wealthy heroine in a country house is one perspective, but it is not a definitive portrait of everyone’s experience. A beautiful costume tells us very little about who could choose what to wear, or what opportunities were available to them once they left the house. It is possible to admire a world’s aesthetic while recognizing that its social arrangements might have made our own lives far more circumscribed.
None of this makes the longing foolish, however! It may simply be more useful as a clue than as a verdict on the century we inhabit. If the appeal is a slower conversation, we can leave our phones out of it. If it is the romance of receiving a letter, someone has to write the first one. The qualities we admire do not all require a different birth year.
Perhaps what we miss is a life in which those pleasures seem to happen naturally. Bringing them into the present takes a little more deliberation. But there is something hopeful about discovering that the world we long for contains things we can still choose.
We can’t return to an era we never lived through. We can, however, pay attention to what keeps inviting us there.