The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values by Gertrude Himmelfarb (review)

336 BOOK REVIEWS The De-Moralization ofSociety: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. By GERTRUDE HiMMELFARB. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Pp. 314. $24 (paper). If there were a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Words, its members would undoubtedly be protesting the unfair treatment that has been meted out to that much-abused adjective, "Victorian." (Meanwhile, the Sub-Committee on False Claims and Deceptive Practices would be casting a cold eye on the broken promises of "Romantic," but that is a story for another day.) Except in the phrases "Victorian literature" and (sometimes) "Victorian architecture," "Victorian" has largely degenerated into a shorthand for a certain combination of priggishness and prudery. My dictionary duly notes in its first definition that the word pertains to the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). But its second definition is more to the point: "Exhibiting qualities, as moral severity or hypocrisy, middle-class stuffiness, and pompous conservatism" that are "usually associated" with that period. In fact, an inventory of what is usually meant by "Victorian" would include just about every sin currently enrolled on the Index of political incorrectness. The Victorians, we are told, were guilty of being patriarchal, imperialistic, sexist, elitist, racist, classist, and Eurocentric. They were also grossly materialistic and, sin of sins, sexually repressed. For many years, the eminent historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has been providing an antidote to these distorting prejudices. In two classic studies about poverty in the Victorian period, she has shown that the popular image of Dickensian squalor-epitomized by the figure of young Oliver Twist in the workhouse-must be supplemented by the countless reform movements that proliferated in Victorian England and that did so much to relieve the condition of the poor and the working class. In this new collection of essays, The De-Moralization of Society, Professor Himmelfarb continues to correct our understanding of the many received ideas that have accumulated around the word "Victorian." Consider the piano leg. If there is a single image that crystallizes the popular conception of Victorian prudery and sexual squeamishness, it is the image of piano legs decorously swathed in pantaloons. How refreshing to learn from Professor Himmelfarb that those piano legs-like such other "Victorian" kinks as home libraries in which male authors were rigorously segregated from female authors-were generally "the invention of satirists, foisted by the English on gullible Americans and perpetuated by unwary historians ." (The covered piano legs, for example, originated with a traveler to America who reported seeing a piano in a girls' school sporting "modest little trousers with frills at the bottom" [15].) BOOK REVIEWS 337 Again and again in these essays, Professor Himmelfarb invites us to peek behind a stereotype or cliche or presupposition. Most of us think that we have a pretty good idea of what feminism is. But in her thoughtful essay "Feminism, Victorian Style," Professor Himmelfarb shows that the real history is more complicated, and more various, than we might have appreciated. Given the common stereotype of patriarchal Victorian society, it may seem odd to say that feminism is itself a Victorian phenomenon. Yet the word-and the smorgasbord of movements, principles, and sentiments that the word names-is of Victorian provenance. Most contemporary readers will be surprised , too, to discover the positions that many eminent female Victorians took on women's issues. For example, when the movement to give women the vote gained momentum, there seemed to be as many women opposing female suffrage as there were supporting it. The feminist Millicent Fawcett campaigned tirelessly to secure the vote for women; but those opposing it included such luminaries as George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Margaret Oliphant, Florence Nightingale, and even the socialist Beatrice Webb (99-101). There was a similar diversity on the controversial question of birth control. Detailing this diversity, Professor Himmelfarb observes that "One is reminded once again that Victorian feminists were not all of a kind and did not all subscribe to the same 'program'" (123). Or consider that hearty myth that the guiding ethos of Victorian life was "ruthlessly materialistic, acquisitive, and self-centered," not to say cruel, exploitative, and unfeeling (143). Professor Himmelfarb is not...