Inventing the Victorians : what we think we know about them and why we're wrong 9780312283261, 0312283261
338 16 24MB
English Pages [292] Year 2001
Recommend Papers
- Author / Uploaded
- Matthew Sweet
File loading please wait...
Citation preview
isbn 0-312-28326-1
S
U P P O S J5 T H A T E V K K Y Y 1 1 INO ••
-
•
we think we know about the \ ictorians is w ro n g .” So begins Inventing
f
the Victorians by M atthew Sweet, a com pact
and m ind-bending w birlw hind tour through
:|*c--
the soul o f the n in eteen th century, and a
'3# -
round debunking of our assumptions about
||f '
it. In the words of historian E. P. Thompson, 1
,f§^~
the V ictorians h ave been victim s o f th e .
.
.
"enorm ous con d escen sion of posterity/'
L jf|j_
Locked in the draw ing room , theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stulti-
^
fying, dank, and over-furnislied, and w hen b ehavior conform ed so rigorously to propri-
'f^'~
eties th at the repressed results put F reud into business. We think we h ave the Victorians pegged as self-righteous, im perialist, .
.
.
S'?
. .
racist, m aterialist, hypocritical, and, w orst of all, earnest. Oil, how wrong we are, argues M atthew
&
Sweet in this highly entertaining, provoca-
f# -
tive, and illum inating look at our great- and
|^_
great-great-grandparents. In this, the year
|-
of the centenary of Queen V ictoria’s death,
if|^
Sw eet forces us to th in k again about h er
j'pf-
.
y
.
century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, J r * the Elephant Man, Sw eeney Todd, and the
||*b-
images of unfettered capitalism and grind-
||;
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
'k--
invented the theme park, the shopping m all,
i||
the m ovies, the penny arcade, the ro lle r
jf|r
»%-
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
(