Inventing the Victorians

It was inevitable I would one day pick up Matthew Sweet’s Inventing the Victorians: What We Think We Know About Them and Why We’re Wrong because my interests tend toward that direction anyway. I’m glad, though, I was able to read it now when I have time to digest it. The research is impressive, the level of analysis keen, and it sticks to its thesis solidly, setting it apart from other general interest (but still excellent) historical studies like Liza Picard’s Elizabeth’s London, Maureen Waller’s 1700: Scenes from a London Life and Adrian Tinniswood’s By Permission of Heaven: The True Story of Great Fire of London. Maybe it’s best first to announce my own “credentials” (or rather, I suppose, prejudices):

Victorian things that interest me and I have studied and the works they have produced
Mesmerism/hypnotism/spiritualism (The Mesmerist, a radio play)
Murderers (such as Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, Jack the Ripper, and death masks of the same) (“Frailty,” a poem, "The Code," a short story) particularly women murderers (Kate Webster, the Liverpool black widows, Madeline Smith & Adelaide Bartlett) (“A Visit to the Waxworks” a paper/short story)
Sideshows and freak exhibits (particularly as relating to the 1893 World’s Fair, as well as Anna Swan & PT Barnum) (“Where You Were,” “Origins,” “Dwarves Without Giants”)
women’s sexuality (“The Cravings Proper to Her Sex?,” paper)
costume (innumerable paper doll sets)
The Great Exhibition of 1851(The Mesmerist)
tea in the nineteenth century (Chanoyu, a long poem)

So I’d like to think Sweet was somewhat preaching to the choir in my case, but that’s not entirely true. Of the things he says the Victorians invented, I didn’t know about the following: the fax machine, vending machines, the petrol-driven car[1], commercially-produced hardcore pornography, plastic, free universal education, environmentalism, fish and chips, and paper bags. In both his introduction and conclusion, Sweet immediately attacks the stereotypical visions of the Victorians, centering on some well-known myths. The phrase “Lie back and think of England,” he says, actually comes from a diary of 1912, debunking at least partially the image of the enslaved Victorian woman (my first exposure to it, interestingly, was from a wry Billy Bragg lyric: “how can you lie there and think of England / when you don’t even know who’s on the team?”).

Though I knew that Victorians really didn’t have aversions to seeing uncovered piano legs, at last I found a source for this, an 1839 Dictionary of America (amusingly the American reputation for prudishness goes back this far, when it is jokingly asserted that we cannot even discuss legs without our modesty being offended). As for the oft-cited text of William Acton that argues that women are not really troubled by sexual feelings, Sweet notes it would be as foolish to take this as representative of a common perception as in thinking Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus is representative of the modern attitude. In quoting from a 1918 TLS, Sweet asserts his personal passion for the Victorians: “We live in a world that they [the Victorians] built for us, and though we may laugh at them, we should love them too.” Needless to say, I am glad Sweet does not single me out for having spread vicious lies about the Victorians, as he does to other authors I’ve read, including Daniel Poole and Fraser Harrison.

The book starts off with a bang by leading us through the Victorian love of amusement. Sweet draws, of course, parallels with our own age: “It suggests a culture drunk with a sense of its own success, its dizzying complexity; a population goggling at the endless opportunities for spectacular pleasure made possible by those qualities.” He quite rightly cites the Factory Act of 1847 for creating mandatory holidays and therefore more leisure time. In addition to all kinds of games, concerts, panoramas, waxworks, and variations on photo-stereoscopics, he notes the popularity of “sensation drama” (the word wasn’t invented until mid-century). I have to laugh when he cites the “helicopter moment” in Miss Saigon, which, if you haven’t seen it, is when a combination of sound effects, lighting, and half a helicopter shell convince you on stage is an actual helicopter. If you look deeply enough into the history of another Brit “opera-cal,” Phantom, you find Parisians were recreating spectacles of fire, water, and even bringing live horses onstage in the 1830s in their theatres, in addition to the examples Sweet cites. There is a long and drawn-out example of the all-but-forgotten acrobat Blondin who performed many feats on a high wire over Niagara Falls (Sweet has to visit a States-side Ripley’s Believe It Or Not to find the last souvenirs of Blondin’s sensational triumph). So many tall tales were coming over from America, it’s understandable that until Blondin got to Britain there were some skeptics. (A Times correspondent who rode the train through Georgia came away with the belief that “Southern passengers fought regular duels to the death.” The Wild West, indeed.) Even to this twenty-first century person, I feel Blondin’s feats defy belief.

Less convincing, I find, is Sweet’s insistence on the cinema as a Victorian genre. Though he makes the very good point that Victorian authors such as Hardy and Mary Elizabeth Braddon saw their books made into films (“The catalogue reads like some eccentric rewrite of the ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’; six Jane Eyres, nine Dr Jekyll and Mr Hydes, ten Uncle Tom’s Cabins, ten East Lynnes”) the films in question weren’t made until 1913, 1910, 1915, 1919, 1925, etc. I admire the amount of research he’s put in, and his findings that probably no one ran screaming from L’Arrivée d’un train (the Victorians were more savvy than that!) cast into doubt the chestnut that 1920s movie-goers ran screaming from Lon Chaney unmasked as the Phantom.

The first spam, Sweet contends, was generated in1865, by telegraph, and it goes like this: “Messrs Gabriel, dentists, Harley-street, Cavendish-square. Until October Messrs. Gabriel’s professional attendance at 27 Harley-street, will be 10 till 5.” A shrewd marketing ploy by ballsy Victorian businessman, people began getting showered by telegrams advertising all sorts of services and products. Sweet says that the average street in the nineteenth century was more advertising-heavy than one today (principally the ads being on handbills in massive circulation). “Product placement,” he notes, “was pioneered by French novels in which the characters would call into real shops and celebrate the qualities of their products.” Reading this, I thought about Captain Jack in “Bad Wolf” telling Trinny and Susannah that his jeans were from Top Shop and how I hovered on the fringes of Top Shops across Wales, not daring to go in ‘cause I didn’t have the money, but thinking about this product placement nonetheless. I really like the section of the book that talks about Victorian personal ads. I had seen a few of these before in American newspapers of the period from the collections at the Center for Southwest Research where I used to work, but Sweet dug up some real gems: “Laha, tired of the quiet and monotonous life of a country girl, wishes to become the wife of an actor, and go upon the stage. She is nineteen, pretty, more fair than dark, and rather brilliant-looking by candlelight” (1866). I am also very tempted to use the 1853-4 vogue for encrypted newspaper messages in a story.

Obviously the chapter “I Knew My Doctor Was a Serial Killer Because . . .” (as long as the Doctor isn’t a serial killer!) was of interest to me. I disagree that Victorian murder takes on a “Christmassy” feel, but I will agree with the sort of nostalgia it induces, as brought up by George Orwell in “Decline of the English Murder”: “Murder was something the Victorians did with style.” This is certainly the feeling one gets reading Richard Altick’s rather morbidly enjoyable Victorian Studies in Scarlet. I tried to figure out before why all other murder should leave me (suitably) cold but I get intrigued by Victorian gore—I must just be a horrible person. It was, of course, the Victorians who produced Madame Tussaud’s—which I’ve still never seen—and its Chamber of Horrors, so they too mirror us in our morbid obsessions. Victorian broadsides, as both Sweet and other authors such as Jill Newton Ainsley, Mary S. Hartman, and Judith Knelman note, were incredibly popular and prolific, producing such winners as: Horrible Case of Starvation of a Child “who was starved by its parents, till it actually ate its finger-ends as well as the skin off its feet” (1833).

In addition to those who killed with knives, others such as Dr. Palmer preferred poison—as did Dr. Cream and those acid-splashing Frenchwomen who sought to maim, not kill, with engraving acid (I’m not kidding). Though I suppose I feel an amount of embarrassment in Sweet’s indictment of Ripperologists: “These days, you can take a guided tour of the East End alleys where Jolly Jack sliced up his victims. Women’s groups occasionally protest, but the tour organizers show no sign of giving in to such pressure.” It was a horrible night, raining and freezing, and there’s really very little left of nineteenth-century Whitechapel other than the Ten Bells pub, but still I followed Donald Rumbelow on his tour so he could tell me about prostitutes getting hacked to bits. The first time I took Gothic Horror as a course, before I co-taught it, we did a unit on Jack the Ripper where we had to pick a suspect and convince everyone why our suspect did it. You can only stare at the Mary Kelly picture so many times before even you, as an interested party, get sick. Priding myself now, after years of occasional study plus the East End tour, I still found out something about the case that I didn’t know: in August 1888, with Mary Kelly still alive, there was already a waxworks exhibition of the Ripper’s crimes—and Sweet makes the very good point that the murderer was probably there admiring his work.

Next Sweet attacks the received wisdom about London opium dens, as seen in, for example, From Hell. Sweet traces these places back to probably two shops and the recycling of a few writers’ words; Sir John Bowring took issue with Dickens’ depiction in Edwin Drood of an opium pipe. Dickens insisted he had written it as he had seen it; Bowring replied, “No doubt the Chinaman whom he described had accommodated himself to English usage, and that our great and faithful dramatist here as elsewhere most correctly pourtrayed a piece of actual life.” I am very amused that Sweet mentions these “sinister visions” of the Chinese working themselves into Conan Doyle and Doctor Who (as he undoubtedly must mean “Talons of Weng-Chiang.” I’ve been threatening to write a study of how Victorians are depicted in Doctor Who, and now I may just have to go through with it). I’m intrigued by Hannah Johnston, “Chinese Emma,” who married Ah Sing and helped him run his opium business. There’s another story.

More prosaic, we learn once again that laudanum’s the thing, opium could be purchased for a penny at your local chemist’s, that Mariani is wine fortified with cocaine (I learned at eleven years old that Coca Cola used to contain cocaine). I’m delighted that Sweet puts in an aside about the dangers of green tea. I learned in Roy Moxham’s Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire that eighteenth-century teas imported into England (black tea) were doctored and full of lovely dyes and/or other substances, but I didn’t realize the same thing was going on with green tea in the nineteenth.

Next are debunked attitudes to the Victorians as overly polite and obsessed with protocol for the sake of protocol. Very enjoyable is the section on Victorian Days at Llandrindod Wells. I confess it was something I wanted to visit, but the way Sweet describes it—“anything that fitted this basic pattern of nostalgic comfort—even if it had nothing to do with the nineteenth century”—makes me think of a sort of Victorian Fair going on at the Crystal Palace grounds in July when I was there. Needless to say I ditched it for the dinosaurs! I personally never had the impression that Victorian food was boring or staid (probably because they invented afternoon tea and I could eat that all the time) but I didn’t know that the first vegetarian restaurant opened in 1849. Gleefully The Rough Guide to Wales proclaimed that curry was the British food of choice in 2006; little did they know curry restaurants preceded fish and chips in London. Another jab at Americans: “American advice manuals published in the 1830s and 1840s say nothing wrong in eating off your knife—‘provided you do it neatly and do not put in large mouthfuls, or close your lips tightly over the blade.’”

One section of the book that I wasn’t really looking forward to was the one on Victorian interiors and furniture, but it actually caused me to have a revelation. One of my favorite catalogs to look through is The Victorian Trading Company, based in Lenexa, Kansas, which stocks clothes, furniture, knickknacks, food, artwork, stationery, all based on the assumption it’s “Victorian” when some of it has nothing to do with the Victorian. I was most surprised when I called up to a place an order to be greeted by, first, someone calling himself Robert Louis Stevenson, and then Charles Dickens! Clearly the predilection for Victorian knickknacks has permeated me more than I thought.

Next was the chapter I knew I was going to find fascinating, “In Defence of the Freak Show.” I must agree with Sweet that “the post-Victorian media has so successfully suppressed images of human physical deformity” in a way that, exploitative or not, the nineteenth century did not. (I find it interesting, though, that of all the photos Sweet could have chosen to illustrate this chapter, he chose the relatively tame wedding photo of Tom and Lavinia Thumb. To be sure, he wanted to illustrate the high and cultivated status of many “freaks” like the Thumbs, but perhaps he could have chosen one of the many bearded ladies in correct Belle Époque dress with gorgeous long hair and a bushy beard? Why not the Fee Jee Mermaid, which he discusses later, or the many talented pairs of Siamese Twins?) Speaking of Tom Thumb, I saw his wedding suit in the Orlando Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, certainly the highlight of that visit.

Ever since I got a book on Ripley for my eleventh birthday, I have been interested in “freaks” and cryptozoology and stuff like that. I don’t know why exactly. So the Fee Jee Mermaid (which Sweet correctly notes was falsely advertised as a voluptuous siren when it was actually a monkey and a fish sewn together) and Joice Heth (another of Barnum’s brilliant PR examples) were familiar to me. I would like to hope that if Sweet read my short story about the life of Canadian giant Anna Swan, he would be gratified to see that I describe her life with Barnum—singing and playing the piano for delighted, genteel audiences—as much happier than being teased at school and constantly outgrowing her clothes. I think Sweet makes an extremely shrewd point in noting that the freak show has gone to the cinema, not least of all with Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932). As for the poor Elephant Man, I’ve never actually seen the movie or the play, which would seem very strange for someone as big a Phantom fan as I am. Interestingly, Susan Kay most certainly invokes the image of the freak show as exploitative and cruel (which is of course picked up in the 2004 film) in Phantom (1992), whereas Leroux seems to think Erik’s most painful time was having his mother make him masks and basically be cruel to him. Oh dear, I seem to have digressed.

I never really thought of Victorians as mean to children; for some reason I see porcelain dolls, Little Women, and boys with Little Lord Flaunteroy outfits when I think of Victorian children. Someone must think of Victorians as mean, as it’s another stereotype Sweet battles against. He reminds us that, of course, it was only after Rousseau’s Émile (1762) that children were thought of as sweet and innocent and childhood to be savored. “To take issue with it today,” says Sweet, “is to invite mistrust.” Indeed, I can only think of the Edwardian Headmaster in “Family of Blood” who gets killed because of his inability to process that a girl-child with a balloon might be a killer. Sweet concedes, of course, that some Victorians were nasty to children—such as baby farmers, where payment was made to starve an unwanted child to death (for some reason this conjures up the same practical attitude to death as the scene in Wuthering Heights of Hareton strangling puppies because there isn’t enough food to see them through the winter). It seems, according to Sweet, that Dickens’ novels are partially responsible for the “gallery of child-crushers”; he rather condescendingly suggests Dickens was obsessed in this area because he had to labor in a glue factory as a twelve-year-old (much, I suspect, as O. Henry kept writing horrible aunts in his stories because he had horrible aunts).

Sweet brings up a very good point in the following chapter—how come we still read Lewis Carroll when we know he photographed young girls in the nude? Oxfordian cult of girls or no, a rather astonishing fact Sweet presents is that only in 1889 was the age of consent in California was raised to fourteen from ten. Black-and-white depictions of the inappropriateness of relations between men and children are all the rage (spot the pedophile being gruesomely punished in “Small Worlds”). Meanwhile, Sweet shows us that the seeds of emancipation for women were sown in the nineteenth century, though results were slow to follow. While I am sure he is correct in saying “telegraphic offices on both sides of the Atlantic preferred to engage women,” (though my own great-grandfather was a telegrapher in Chicago) perhaps they did so because they could pay women less? The previous books I mentioned about the Elizabethan and post-Restoration eras have similar facts about women being employed in trades; one can only think we make big leaps forward and then curtail ourselves yet again. Still, I don’t think Sweet can deny that until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, women had little legal recourse especially in cases of mistreatment. I am glad, though, that he sends up books such as The Rules (1995), which I’ve had shoved into my face as a way of securing a husband (though admittedly I can understand how a girl could be so desperate as to take at face-value the messages in that book!) as neo-conservative self-help books.

Finally we conclude with what I think Sweet sees as the saucy end to his thesis, Victorian sexuality. He is quite right to bring up that “the term ‘homosexual’ was coined in 1868 . . . did not get into print in English until 1892” and that “Victorian sexuality was much less systemized and tribalist than our own[2].” While Sweet makes his case, I think, that Wilde was not a standalone martyr, before his time as Velvet Goldmine implies (well, Velvet Goldmine implies he was an alien so I don’t know if you can take that seriously), the truth is he did go to jail and his career was ruined! I am glad Sweet finally puts to rest the rather absurd story that a Prince Albert piercing is so-named because Prince Albert had one, in order to wear really tight trousers (I read this, actually, in a history of piercings again, at the Center for Southwest Research).

In general, Inventing the Victorians succeeds utterly in its arguments, and entertains, enlightens, and provokes. The notes are extensive, though I wish there was a selected bibliography as well, though I realize many of the sources are fairly rare. Sweet’s level of analysis is, as I said, extremely developed. The only time I think he strays somewhat is when he tries to be self-consciously poetic, usually at the end of chapters or when describing the Crystal Palace as “Joseph Paxton’s flatpack glass cathedral to global capitalism.” I could barely put this down. I will most certainly be buying this book.


[1] They had electric cars, of course, at the dawn of the twentieth century, marketed primarily to women for short drives, but they didn’t really catch on.
[2] Have you filled out a British application for employment lately? I don’t recall ever seeing a U.S. one ask for your sexual preference, even if it is on the anonymous, statistic-taking section.