Inventing the Victorians : what we think we know about them and why we're wrong 9780312283261, 0312283261
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English Pages [292] Year 2001
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- Matthew Sweet
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isbn 0-312-28326-1
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U P P O S J5 T H A T E V K K Y Y 1 1 INO ••
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we think we know about the \ ictorians is w ro n g .” So begins Inventing
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the Victorians by M atthew Sweet, a com pact
and m ind-bending w birlw hind tour through
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the soul o f the n in eteen th century, and a
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round debunking of our assumptions about
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it. In the words of historian E. P. Thompson, 1
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the V ictorians h ave been victim s o f th e .
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"enorm ous con d escen sion of posterity/'
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Locked in the draw ing room , theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stulti-
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fying, dank, and over-furnislied, and w hen b ehavior conform ed so rigorously to propri-
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eties th at the repressed results put F reud into business. We think we h ave the Victorians pegged as self-righteous, im perialist, .
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racist, m aterialist, hypocritical, and, w orst of all, earnest. Oil, how wrong we are, argues M atthew
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Sweet in this highly entertaining, provoca-
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tive, and illum inating look at our great- and
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great-great-grandparents. In this, the year
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of the centenary of Queen V ictoria’s death,
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Sw eet forces us to th in k again about h er
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century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, J r * the Elephant Man, Sw eeney Todd, and the
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images of unfettered capitalism and grind-
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ing poverty. Sw eet believes not only that w e’re wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them . In w ays we h ave been . * slow to acknowledge, th eir age and our ow n & rem ain closely intertw ined. The Victorians
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invented the theme park, the shopping m all,
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the m ovies, the penny arcade, the ro lle r
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coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational new spaper story. Sw eet also argues that oui' tw e n ty -firs t-c e n tu rv sm ugness about how far we have evolved j> m isplaced. The Victorians were less rani-t■I ihais (hais we are, less
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