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WHISTLING SHADE |
In my family’s photo collection is a picture of two of my cousins posing shirtless. Their naked chests have been subtly colored in by a magic marker—the work of my grandmother. Though born in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, she is in my mind the embodiment of the Victorian— her shadowy, high-ceilinged, rich velvet dining room where we ate on good china, her long dresses and stockings that prevented even the glimpse of (heavens!) a bare ankle, her gentle stoicism, and even her firm belief in evolution. (Because, she would inform the minister, that was “just the way God did things.”)
To the actual Victorians, of course, their era was far from antique or grandmotherly. It was a time of great progress, particularly in science and technology, and also of social upheaval. When Queen Victorian ascended the throne in 1837, the Victorian age had in a sense already begun (historians often date it to the Reform Act of 1832 and the ground-breaking Slavery Abolition Act of 1833). In France, Louis Daguerre was already experimenting with early photographic techniques, and steam locomotives were being built. Yet Byron had only been dead some dozen years, and there were still veterans of Waterloo hobbling around. Into this flux of years came an eighteen-year-old girl in open rebellion against her mother, with a bit of a crush on her Saxon cousin, Prince Albert. The young queen quickly had her mother banished to a remote wing in Buckingham Palace, and proposed marriage to Albert. The couple had nine children; their quiet respectability was a welcome change from George IV (the Prince Regent of the Regency era) with his mistresses and lavish lifestyle. It was Albert, with his straight-laced morals and spotless character, who set the tone of the age. When he died in 1861 the queen went into deep mourning, and the later Victorian era began. By the time of her own death in 1901, motor cars and electric lighting had become common, telephones were in vogue, and primitive films could be seen in penny arcades with Edison’s Kinetoscope.
1910 was the center of a maelstrom of progress that is now difficult for us to imagine. We live in a time period of decelerating change; it’s been twenty years since the last major technological breakthroughs, the Internet and cell phones, became widespread. By contrast the years between 1900 and 1920 saw the emergence of radio, automobiles, electric lights, the washing machine, the refrigerator, and the motion picture, as well as the first airplanes and modern computers. The Victorians were on the windward side of this sea storm. The increasing industrialization of the 19th century, in particular, transformed lives—often not for the better. As Elizabeth Gaskell writes in Mary Barton:
At all times it is a bewildering thing to the poor weaver to see his employer removing from house to house, each one grander than the last, till he ends in building one more magnificent than all, or withdraws his money from the concern, or sells his mill to buy an estate in the country, while all the time the weaver, who thinks he and his fellows are the real makers of this wealth, is struggling on for bread for their children, through the vicissitudes of lowered wages, short hours, fewer hands employed, &c.
Many Victorian authors—Gaskell included—felt the need to meet these upheavals head-on, bringing before the reading public’s notice the lives of those trapped beneath Capitalism’s dark underbelly. Others, like the Pre-Raphaelites, could be seen as escapists, withdrawing into a purely aesthetic world of medieval knights, fairies and angels.
The Victorian’s literary legacy is deep and widespread— and novels like Hard Times and The Mill on the Floss have only increased in relevancy since the Great Recession (see Thomas R. Smith’s “Reading Dickens in the Second 19th Century” in this issue). Though the Romantics were a hard act to follow, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Tennyson and the Brownings are nearly a match for Scott, Austen, Byron, Keats and Wordsworth. Many classics read in schools (Treasure Island, Great Expectations, Middlemarch) are creations of this period; we feel at home with Victorian notions of privacy, individual freedom, worker’s rights and scientific rationalism. Present day environmental and organic food movements contain echoes of Ruskin, and New Age beliefs have strong parallels to 19th Century Spritualism. Though Queen Victoria (and my grandmother, for that matter) would probably be scandalized by Desperate Housewives and the spring break scene at Fort Lauderdale, the fact remains: we’re more like them than we think.
- Joel Van Valin