Inventing the Victorians [Paperback]

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A profoundly stimulating and entertaining book. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'This is a profoundly stimulating and entertaining book'. D. J. Taylor, Sunday Times; 'Matthew Sweet has opened a blast of fresh air into the hothouse of Victorian studies. His book is packed with weird and wonderful information'. Spectator; 'He tells his revisionist version exceedingly well, describing a lurid thrill-seeking populace avid for sensation. Colourful characters parade through chapters that demonstrate how innovative, fast-paced, diverse and radical the era was. Sweet has turned his scholarly research through the detritus of high and low 19th-century culture into a page-turning piece of pop-culture history... A darned good read, and no mistake,' Big Issue

'Inventing the Victorians is highly enjoyable and thought-provoking..' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'This is a profoundly stimulating and entertaining book..it also manages to expose, however indirectly, a longstanding mental confidence trick.' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Painstakingly researched and written in a lively, accessible style, this is fascinating reading. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A darned good read, and no mistake. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

(Matthew Sweet's) engaging new study. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Suppose that everything we think we know about 'The Victorians' is wrong? That we have persistently misrepresented their culture, perhaps to make ourselves feel more satisfyingly liberal and sophisticated? What if they were much more fun than we ever suspected?

As Matthew Sweet shows us in this brilliant study, many of the concepts that strike us as terrifically new - political spin-doctoring, extravagant publicity stunts, hardcore pornography, anxieties about the impact of popular culture upon children - are Victorian inventions. Most of the pleasures that we imagine to be our own, the Victorians enjoyed first: the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the amusement arcade, the crime novel and the sensational newspaper report. They were engaged in a well-nigh continuous search for bigger and better thrills. If Queen Victoria wasn't amused, then she was in a very small minority . . .

Matthew Sweet's book is an attempt to re-imagine the Victorians; to suggest new ways of looking at received ideas about their culture; to distinguish myth from reality; to generate the possibility of a new relationship between the lives of 19th-century people and our own.

In 1918, Lytton Strachey declared that 'the history of the Victorian age will never be written. We know too much about it.' But he wasn't quite right. The real problem is this: we have systematically forgotten many of the most interesting and distinctive aspects of the period, and much of what we think we know about it is utterly false; fabricated in the twentieth century and lazily accepted as truth ever since.
Spot the deliberate fiction on this list: Queen Victoria had a Nigerian god-daughter; William Gladstone once knocked back so much laudanum that he had to go to Baden Baden to recuperate; the flourishing Victorian porn industry was founded by a group of Chartists who wanted to use sexually explicit material to hasten the British Revolution; Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, negotiated a fifty-fifty box office split with his management team; Britain's first black professional footballer was Arthur Wharton, who played in goal for Preston North End and Rotherham in the 1880s and 90s; Sarah Grand, the author of the phenomenal 1890s bestseller The Heavenly Twins, fronted a publicity campaign for Sanatogen; sexually, Oscar Wilde was a pretty regular Victorian guy.
As this radical, myth-busting reassessment of the Victorians and their world demonstrates, the answer is none of the above.

Matthew Sweet presents Night Waves and Freethinking on BBC Radio 3, and is the summer presenter of The Film Programme on Radio Four. He is the author of Inventing the Victorians and Shepperton Babylon, which he adapted as a film for BBC Four. His TV programmes include Silent Britain, A Brief History of Fun, The Age of Excess, Truly, Madly, Cheaply and The Rules of Film Noir. .