June 20, 2007
The Victorians Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:25 AM EST The lower-left corner of the homepage of this website always features a “Today In History” section, and today it notes that this is the anniversary of Victoria’s accession to the throne. When I was a boy, Victorian was a word of cheap and easy abuse. It seemed to mean a combination of madly priggish, moralistic, absurdly formal, hostile to pleasure, phobic about sex, and broadly hypocritical. While always depicted as inevitably dying, Victorianism was simultaneously imagined to be very much alive, because it was still worth attacking. In my high school, a much-loved English teacher would recommend Lytton Strachey’s 1918 classic Eminent Victorians as a delicious and deadly attack on a common foe. Victorianism was despised without being feared; in most cases, Victorian was a word one used with a sneer or a snigger; we knew of no other culture to which we felt so lazily (rather than earnestly) superior. In 1969, when I was 18, George MacDonald Fraser published Flashman, taking off from a Victorian classic, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), a copy of which existed in my parent’s house, although unread by me. The book, marketed as a deadly comic attack on the Victorians, was an immense success and had a long series of sequels. Read with even modest care, though, it was simultaneously an attack on the Victorians and a loving and very knowledgeable celebration of them: Fraser’s Victorians had some vices we lacked in the same form—pretty gross sexual hypocrisy, for example, and remarkably ill-regulated workplaces, also more overt racism—but they also possessed astonishing virtues—courage, earnestness, prodigious energy, and moral seriousness. The books, copiously footnoted, jokey, at times sexy, quite learned, usually adventure stories in exotic settings, became a bit more formulaic as the series went on, but that mix of attitudes about the Victorians stayed mixed, and if anything it was the joking about Victorian vices that aged first. Meanwhile, the libertine spirit of the early 1960s, which made such easy jokes about Victorian sexual prudery, developed some neo-pruderies of its own, and the Victorians seemed more and more an irretrievable past, hence less worth mocking. Inside the academy, truly loathing the Victorians became a more specialized passion, one pursued most industriously by post-colonialists, for whom Victorian imperialism was the worst of crimes, and by the occasional harder-line Marxist preserved in amber, for whom Victorian famines were the moral equivalents of Hitler’s and Stalin’s industrial-scale killing sprees. In 1995, the science-fiction author Neal Stephenson wrote a novel, , The Diamond Age, that included a much-admired subculture called neo-Victorian. This year a development deal was announced: George Clooney is producing a six-part miniseries. This seems to me to be a sign of the times. The Victorians, still alive and vigorously despised in my adolescence, and more or less vanished during my adult life, are suddenly something we can look at with admiration. It is not that they are finally conceded to be gone, so that we can look at them with dispassion. Watching their fate evolve through their treatment in popular cultural materials, it turns out that there is a case to be made for missing them.
|
