But the historian goes to the Archive to be at home as well as to be alone … Alone in the Archive, in the counting house of dreams, the historian opens the bundles … The Archive is this kind of place, that is to do with longing and appropriation. It is to do with wanting things that are put together, collected, collated, named in lists and indices; a place where a whole world, a social order, may be imagined by the recurrence of a name in a register, through a scrap of paper, or some other little piece of flotsam.

Carolyn Steedman, 2002