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Matthew Sweet's
Inventing the Victorians sets out to rescue the Victorians from their prudish and stuffy reputation. A century after Queen Victoria's death there is a scramble to re-evaluate and explode many of the myths attached to Victorian Britain which started with Lytton Strachey's
Eminent Victorians (1913) and have been cultivated ever since by assorted Freudian analysts, feminists, strait-laced historians, political spin-doctors (remember Margaret Thatcher's "Victorian values") and lazy media types. Through a 13-chapter tour of the wilder side of 19th-century Britain--theatrical spectacle, contact ads, WT Stead's investigative journalism, opium dens, etiquette and cookery books, freak shows, boys' adventure stories and the amusing tale of what Prince Albert kept in his pants--Sweet argues the case for the Victorians being more sexually liberated, more obsessed with sensational events and public lives and for being greater consumers of narcotics, pornography and the bizarre than they have ever been given credit. They were, in other words, more like us than we realise. What a depressing thought. This book is a fun read: it is clever, informative and provocative, although too often the journalist inside the author leaps from a suggestive idea to a monstrous exaggeration. Matthew Sweet is not of course the first to unveil the Victorians. Some readers may wonder whether yet another account is really required of the Rugeley murders, the "Elephant Man", Walter's
Secret Life, and the Victorian dependence on opium. And as for Prince Albert--his nether regions have long been the subject of scholarly discussion-lists on North American Victorian Studies Web sites. But the time is right to relocate the Victorians and Sweet's book does just that. --
Miles Taylor
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From Publishers Weekly
Commonly perceived as stodgy, stern, pious, humorless and deeply repressed, Victorians are frequently invoked in contemporary society as embodiments of everything their more liberated descendants are not. But this perception, Sweet suggests, is far from accurate. Noting that our image of the Victorians is based on a very selective range of materials, Sweet, a British writer, argues that we have almost willfully developed a distorted idea of 19th-century society largely in order to flatter ourselves with the belief that our own age is far more enlightened. Working with a wide-ranging array of documents letters, diaries, newspapers, novels and plays Sweet sets out to prove that the Victorians not only were in some ways more progressive, more sophisticated and less neurotic than we are, they also had a lot more fun than we give them credit for. To that end, he leads readers on a whirlwind tour through the more outr aspects of Victorian life and culture, demonstrating that the 19th century was in many respects as much an era of thrill-seeking, sexual liberation and social upheaval as our own time. While he's arguably as selective in his own source materials and interpretations as are those whose perspective he seeks to debunk, Sweet does paint a more complex picture of the Victorians than we're used to seeing; this is a lively, entertaining trip through a side of 19th-century society most of us are probably unfamiliar with. 16 pages of b&w photos.
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