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12/11/2004 Archived Entry: "Inventing the Victorians"

Book Review

Inventing the Victorians: What we think we know about them and why we're wrong.
by Matthew Sweet

I grew up in a Victorian house. A late Victorian house, built in 1885 or so, but distinctly Victorian nevertheless. I left that house when I was only eight or nine years old, but being enveloped by such an emphatically out of time structure did have its effects on me. Victorian architecture looks "right" to me. My father learned to dislike the house, and I think this was partially because my father belonged to a generation which grew up reacting to Victorianism. So while I was taught by my childhood home that Victorian architecture was good (though a bit drafty) my father taught me that most of the nineteenth century was a grim wold of repression and absurd fashions.
I suppose I had my doubts both ways. Certainly the 1960s -- which my father also disliked -- seemed like more fun than the 1860's. That being said, the cramped, over-decorated, and frighteningly industrialized world before World War I was more understandable to me. Deep inside, I was cheering on the Victorians when my father was making fun of crinolines during masterpiece theatre. It is true however, they were a fire hazard.
Matthew Sweet has explained to me why I've been made to feel just a little stupid and stunted for enjoying the Victorians. Inventing the Victorians explains that there was a sort of vast twentieth century conspiracy to make Victorians look bad. Why? Because it makes the modern world seem distinctly smarter, more progressive, and powered by loftier mores. The likes of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey did much to trash the Victorians.
Sweet, in a good introduction, thirteen essays, and an excellent conclusion, helps give a more rounded, and more interesting understanding of Victorian life and thinking. There are some things which seem just uncomfortable and weird like men who would have play marriages with little girls, with parental permission, to things all to easy to relate to like being annoyed by telegraph-based spam.
Statistics lie, but so do words, and sometimes statistics can give insight. Between 1851 and 1881 there were more British children under the age of fifteen than adults. Much of the Victorian era (1837-1901) was a world of children. It was a time when the general public's understanding of children became our understanding. We should remember that the Victorian period was the period in which laws regulating the use of child labor became major political movements. It was Victorian wisdom that saw that even if a child can do a job well, it doesn't mean the child should being doing the job.
Victorian's liked to have fun. They went to the beach, and dressed up, danced, enjoyed new technology, and hung out at amusement parks looking to find a date. At the same time they had crushing social problems, and the government addressed these problems. Social progress came slowly, and the governments stumbled on occasion. It was a messy time, but England did not suffer a revolution. The Victorian powers expanded the electorate enormously. No, not to woman, but on the whole the Victorian period was a time of gradually increasing emancipation for women, and loss of power for the landed gentry.
They were us. There was no great leap from Victorianism to the modern world that happened in 1902, or 1911, or 1915, or anytime. Very few of the core values of the modern English population, or American population are different than the Victorians. It's not something to be ashamed of either. Really, it's not.

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