Inventing the Victorians

Perhaps no other era in British history is subject to quite as much stereotyping and myth-making as that of the Victorians. We acknowledge the contribution they made to our lives, the legacy they have bequeathed in the forms of bridges, buildings, roads, museums and theatres, the Empire, but to a very large extent we still dismiss what they represented to themselves.As Matthew Sweet ably points out,,the Victorians are what we define ourselves against. It is in rebelling against Victorian strictures that we have created our supposedly more free, more permissive, more relaxed, modern society. After all, that's how we see the Victorians, isn't it? Stodgy. Uptight. Repressed. Hypocritical. Humourless. Patriarchal. Straight-laced. Everything we aspire not to be be.But Sweet explodes a lot of these myths, highlighting exhaustively just how wrong much of this actually is. He chronicles Victorian attitudes to sex, crime, drugs, pornography, the family, children, sensational journalism, publicity stunts, homosexuality - much of which appears surprisingly 'modern' to our eyes. When one ventures off the beaten path of historical research, there is an astonishing wealth of material still housed in libraries, museums and archives that demonstrate how often the Victorians were there ahead of us in the search for the new and modern. Perhaps we owe more to the Victorians than just our architecture and infrastructure...

Inventing the Victorians is a journalist's reappraisal of Victorian life and culture, following a century of modernism which tried to separate itself from the Victorian world as much as possible. Sweet's conclusion -- which is well argued with strong examples -- is that our passions, interests and concerns, far from being a contrast to those of the Victorians, are a continuation of what they did and thought. On the way he explodes a number of myths, including the infamous table-leg story.The Victorians are famous for being prudish, hypocritical, and without much of a sense of humour. Much of this, argues Matthew Sweet, follows from Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians which, written as part manifesto for the Bloomsbury set, demonstrated how they were the opposite of the values espoused by Woolf and co.The most famous example of Victorian prudery -- and the author explores it in depth -- is the alleged practise of covering the table legs in upholstery because they looked too much like a woman's legs and thereby caused problems in the male libido. In reality, there are no actual examples of this happening. Sweet traces the story of it back to the English satirically accusing the Americans of such prurience, and later examples of the Americans returning the compliment by making the same allegation about the UK.From here, Matthew Sweet makes a tour-de-force of comparisons between contemporary and Victorian attitudes, culminating in the parallels between Harold Shipman and the 19th century Rugely Poisoner. Not only were the crimes in almost every respect identical -- a GP who prescribed deadly medicines in order to obtain the inheritances of old ladies -- but the media and public response was pretty much the same as well.Ultimately, this is a book of journalism written to prove a point, rather than a nuanced history weighing of the various positions. That said, Sweet does make a very compelling case, and it is hard to see the Victorians in quite the same light as well. The underlying picture of the age which he presents tallies with the latest social history view, for example presented in Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain.If you're a fan of the Victorians and have spent a lot of time on Victorian social history, there is probably little in this book which will be new for you, and you probably already came to the same conclusions yourself. If you're a more general reader, though, this will be a real eye-opener to a century which is often disparaged and seldom understood.

This is an interesting and readable overturning of the hoary old chestnuts and cliches that non-specialists resort to when wanting to denigrate Victorian society as stuffy and static.However, as previous reviewers have said, if you are knowledgeable about Victorian history, then you will already be aware that piano legs were not swathed in muslin for modesty's sake, and that Victorian society and the Victorian novel were quite as full of sex as any other, but even so, I still found this an interesting read, although I would take issue with Sweet's lack of nuance in his assessment of the position of women. Not to be unfair on him, though, I think such lack of subtlety in the arguments in this area is partly due to the constraints of a short book surveying a wide field, and attempting to counter received popular wisdom and unreflective opinion by vividly highlighting instances of where the opposite is true.Although Sweet is academically qualified, this is not an academic book, but one for the general reader, written persuasively and entertainingly to advance his opinions (which are not unsound). As another reviewer pointed out, it is not an academic book, in the sense of evenhandedly balancing a range of detailed sources or focusing in detail on a specific area, but all the same it would be an interesting overview for a new student to read, in that he introduces a range of ideas and does indicate his sources, both primary and secondary. From the academic point of view, though, it is important to remember that the book is over ten years old at the time of writing, and many secondary sources even older, so there have been developments in academic thinking since then.But this is neither here nor there for the general reader - if you have any sort of interest in Victorian history, this book is certainly worth reading, and if you are not well versed in the subject you will find the overturning of the cliched version of nineteenth-century history you have read over the years both entertaining and amusing by turns. And if you consider yourself an expert, Sweet has uncovered all sorts of interesting obscurities which ensure that there is something new for everyone!

Das vorliegende Buch von Matthew Sweet liefert eine Analyse der Unterschiede zwischen unserer heutigen Wahrnehmung des Viktorianischen Zeitalters und den tatsächlich vorhandenen politischen und gesellschaftlichen Strukturen in Großbritannien in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Für den deutschen Leser ist dabei weniger das Widerlegen der vielen populären Mythen über die Zeit spannend. Waren die Viktorianer nun wirklich so viktorianisch im Liebesleben? Eigentlich egal, Sex gab es schließlich immer, jedenfalls ist keine ungewöhnlich niedrige Geburtenrate aus der Zeit überliefert. Aber Berichte über die besondere Rolle von Prostitution in London im 19. Jahrhundert, die Bigotterie der Zeitgenossen, die Künstler, die das Thema auf besondere Art dargestellt haben (Wilde, Beardsley, Sickert usw.) sind schon spannend zu lesen. Das Buch verrät einen ungewöhnlichen Arbeitsaufwand. Es ist entstanden, in dem der Autor viele Sekundär- und Primärquellen über das Alltagsleben auswertet, um das Lebensgefühl des späten 19. Jahrhunderts für den Leser nachvollziehbar zu machen.Aber auch jenseits des Themas Sex spürt Sweet interessantes auf. Es ist das erste Zeitalter mit Massenmedien, die der heutigen Presse vergleichbar sind. Drogen und andere Genussmittel spielen eine große Rolle. Es bildet sich eine Unterhaltungskultur mit Spektakeln und Sensationen. Und auch das Verbrechen, insbesondere in der Form des berühmten Serienmörders, prägt die Wahrnehmung der Zeit. Und auch über gutes Benehmen, über das Verhältnis von Mann und Frau und die romantische Liebe gibt es viel zu erzählen. Man gewinnt den Eindruck, dass unsere normale, bürgerliche Massenkultur in dieser Zeit entstanden ist, und das hier auch die Ursprünge für vieles liegt, was wir heute für normal und alltäglich halten.Eine vergleichbare Analyse über die Kulturgeschichte unseres Landes im Wilhelminischen Kaiserreich würde ich auch sehr gerne lesen.

Sweet gelingt es, die Vorstellung von den bis zur Neurose verklemmten Viktorianern nahezu vollständig als historische Fiktion zu widerlegen: anhand von historischen Quellen und Ursachenforschung zur Herkunft bestimmter Motive (wie z.B. der keusch verhüllten Tischbeine) entwirft er ein überzeugendes Gegenbild zu landläufigen Klischees um das 19. Jahrhundert. Absolut lesenswert, und nicht nur für Anglistikstudenten ein Augenöffner.

The book is entertaining, but could have benefited from a good editor. It is speculation, supported by anecdotes, rather than a true historical analysis. It lacks statistical evidence to back its assertions, relying on famous examples. The tone varies from conversational to thesis like. That said, it’s thought provoking, and the anecdotes are engaging.

Matthew Sweet did a great job to reinvent the images of the Victorians as we know them. Sweet convincingly presents the vivid portrait of the people who loved fun and thrills as we do now. His scope is a little wider than it should be, but his book provides fascinating views on the Victorian world.See the following examples. Many believe today that the Victorians were so prudish that they covered the legs of a piano with clothe. Matthew Sweet, showing a contemporary illustration of a piano with uncovered legs, gives us a more reasonable explanation about the popular myth of the covered piano legs. In other places of his book, Sweet shows substantial amount of evidences about the Victorian's attitudes about sex, which are ironically more liberated than those of the Bloomsbury set who ridiculed the preceding generations.Many popular ideas about the 19th century England are challenged -- like our ideas about thier male-dominated family -- and Matthew Sweet successfully debunks them. Not that the book is preachy or didactic. Far from it. The book is always readable and never fails to be interesting with the intriguing historical anecdotes about the first junk mail (coming from a dentist), ancestors of modern cinema, craze about celebrity, and sensationalism of tabroids, all of which we inherited from the Victorians.For all the readable sentences and the notes the book provides, you may not like some parts of 'Inventing the Victorains.' I'm not talking about the content, but the style of composing the book. Each chapter begins with modern topics as introductory part in a bit far-fetched way. To tell the Victorians' fascination about the visual arts, Matthew Sweet begins with his own episodes about the 2000 Cannes Film Festival where he witnessed some new techiniques. Even Monica Lewinsky's promotional tour in England (where the author met her at a bookshop) is used to introduce one chapter. Do we need that, even if he made a point putting these two things -- old and new -- side by side? It depends.And the topics dealt here are many, too many, you might say. Many names appear fleetingly, but in many cases I am afraid you (and I) never heard of them before. To describe the cinematic innovation, he writes "cinemascope, 3-D, Smell-o-Vision, 'Emergo' ... and 'Percepto'" before citing the name of 'The Blair Witch Project' and Marchant/Ivory films. And they are all in one chapter. If you don't know director William Castle and his films, you don't know what the 'Emergo' vision is like. Well, just a quibble.Fortunately, however, you just can just skip over these minor things. Actually, most part of the book is both erudite and entertaining, feat few people can achieve. Episodes quoted here are often about interior decoration, cooking, sex scandals, media circus, porno, and even serial killers, topics we all are familiar to. Recommended to anyone who is interested in this era.

Read this several years ago, glad to find my own copy. Bursts our modern view of the Victorians big time! We have much to thank them for.... well written, not in a dry text book style as some histories are wont to be, keeps our attention.

Sweet provides good refutation for some of the unfortunate images of the Victorian world (Sweet demonstrates that some Victorians allowed naked piano legs!). :-) He offers delightful, detailed accounts of Victorian tightrope walkers (Blondin), opium sellers, "freaks," and homosexuals, among others. However, 232 pages of anecdotes and examples just does not provide enough range to demonstrate that "Everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." It is a huge topic, rather larger than this quite enjoyable book.

After seeing the author 's interview in the extras for Penny Dreadful I was really interested in reading his work. BUT this book is dry. The author has such a passion when speaking about the subject...it just does not transfer onto the page.

A little bit too textbook for me, but read what interested me and the purchase was worth it. It will appeal to the detail oriented reader.

Rather than giving an understanding of the Victorians overall, the author concentrates on the shocking, bizarre and extreme aspects of society. I wouldn't have minded if these had been included as part of the total picture, but they weren't. The writing was also convoluted and kind of dull, despite the subject matter. The author also concentrated on British Victorians, though other countries such as the U.S remembers the era an people of that period also as Victorian.

I guess I expected Matthew Street to really pull the roof off of Victorian London and its time, but it did not, for me. It starts out slowly and doesn't pick up much from there. Maybe I know more about that time than I gave myself credit for knowing? It was just okay.