Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet
This is the book referenced by Liza Picard when discussing the old cliché of Victorian piano legs that I mentioned a few months ago. Her report of the story is a little inaccurate: that particular exaggeration was apparently first used by the Victorians themselves, in reference to the perceived prudery of contemporary America, but was, ironically, modified over the years to refer back to its originators.
Inventing the Victorians is packed with stuff like this, and barely a page passes without some mangy old canard being blown out of the water. It isn’t purposeless pedantry either, as can be seen towards the end of the book when the author starts laying into the resurgent middle-classes in the 1980s
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…the retrogressives of the dwarf conifer belt, people who fantasized that the nineteenth century was a place where being as mean-minded, greedy and philistine as they were was broadly celebrated. For these people, Victorian Britain was a Tory paradise ruined by the arrival of Walter Gropius, the blacks and the gays, but which, with enough diligence, could be resurrected on their own Tudorbethan close, behind PVC leaded windows, blindfolded with a copy of the Daily Mail. The bad standing of the Victorians with Britain’s liberal intellectual classes exists in an inverse ratio to the approval which they receive from the inhabitants of Llandrindod Wells. (p229)
Matthew Sweet spends most of his book systematically demolishing the misconceptions surrounding the Victorians, gleefully skewering fib upon lie whilst touring the universe of our common idea of 19th century Britain at breakneck speed, his aim being to humanise the men and women who quite literally built so much of the country we inhabit today.
In one chapter he dissects the myth of the opium den, of which there were very few. After all, opium was freely available in any pharmacy, with the result that a significant proportion of Victorian Britain was habitually smacked out of its tree all the time. He explores the growth of the advertising industry and traces electronic junk mail to its true origin, an unsolicited mass-telegram in Belgravia sent almost 115 years before DEC spammed the ARPANET. Later, in an exploration of Victorian cuisine, we discover that the first curry house opened in 1809, 50 years before the first chippy. The book is packed with similar facts and stories, all serving to undermine and explode myth and legend.
It turns out that the Victorians weren’t all humourless prudes either. Some had an extremely broad tolerance for the tasteless: take the origin of the term “Sweet F. A.”, as sick as any number of the Maddie jokes thrown up in places like b3ta. Fanny Adams was an 8 year old girl who was brutally butchered by a passing psychopath, a murder which captured national attention. Her name was subsequently adopted by sailors in the navy when referring to their unappetising mutton rations, and the term passed into common usage, losing its original edge and meaning over time, until it came to signify anything of little import.
Whilst they certainly had their Mrs Grundys, pontificating about the perpetual decline in standards, so do we. Far from being scandalised by the furniture, Victorian Britain harboured a lively porn industry, and society was anything but united in condemnation of homosexuality. There is even a suggestion that the laws that led to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde were added to the statute books by mistake.
Sweet does not romanticise their society as a rational, liberal utopia either. Rather, viewed through the lens of this excellent little book, the Victorians appear imperfect and diverse. They seem to have been ultimately quite similar to ourselves, less a gadget or two and plus one global empire acquired as a technological superpower. It may even be possible that their domination of their time is what led us to create the distorted image of repressed, buttoned-up stuffiness, in order that we might feel less inadequate when viewing our own relative achievements.