Matthew Sweet thinks that we have got the Victorians all wrong.
They were by no means, he argues, the prudish, prejudiced and prim
paragons in which we have been encouraged to believe, committed to
abstinence, self-help and moderation. Instead they invented, and
even perfected, the sex and shopping culture which is said to be
the creation of the late 20th century. Far more sexually liberated
than we give them credit for, they were probably less hypocritical
about such matters into the bargain, and the image of their age as
necessarily more religious, misogynist and violent than our own is
by no means always supported by the evidence. Instead the
Victorians anticipated much that we now take for granted and
deserve credit for many of the norms, both good and bad, which we
accept without a second thought. What recent commentators have
chosen to characterize as 'Victorian values', therefore, represent
a partial appropriation of attitudes to be found among certain
sections of this society at certain times, which by no means amount
to a characterization of the prevalent tone of the culture as a
whole. In Sweet's account we can cruise with rent-boys, dip into
hard-core porn, visit shopping malls, watch voyeuristic
entertainment, and so realize that we may indeed be heirs to the
Victorians but not in the ways that Sir Keith Joseph had in mind.
(Kirkus UK)
Suppose that everything we think we know about 'The Victorians' is
wrong? That we have persistently misrepresented the culture of the
Victorian era, perhaps to make ourselves feel more satisfyingly
liberal and sophisticated? What if they were much more fun than we
ever suspected? Matthew Sweet's Inventing the Victorians has some
revelatory - and entertaining - answers for us. As Sweet shows us
in this brilliant study, many of the concepts that strike us as
terrifically new - political spin-doctoring, extravagant publicity
stunts, hardcore pornography, anxieties about the impact of popular
culture upon children - are Victorian inventions. Most of the
pleasures that we imagine to be our own, the Victorians enjoyed
first: the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the amusement
arcade, the crime novel and the sensational newspaper report. They
were engaged in a well-nigh continuous search for bigger and better
thrills. If Queen Victoria wasn't amused, then she was in a very
small minority . . . Matthew Sweet's book is an attempt to
re-imagine the Victorians; to suggest new ways of looking at
received ideas about their culture; to distinguish myth from
reality; to generate the possibility of a new relationship between
the lives of nineteenth-century people and our own.
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