Past and Present

Perhaps the best response I can make to Donald is precisely to attempt a bit of "musing on ideas Victorian and contemporary," and the recently aired PBS series The 1900 House would seem to provide the perfect opportunity to do so, if only because it brings the relation between the Victorian and the contemporary so clearly into view. Originally broadcast during the summer of 2000, The 1900 House is a four-part series that documents the experiences of a modern British family who agreed to live in a house restored to its condition in, as the title suggests, the year 1900. ¹⁷ Paul and Joyce Bowler and their four children thus spent three months exploring life as "Victorians," including dressing in contemporary clothing, eating "Victorian food," doing without most familiar appliances and household products, and, finally, ignoring the fact that their living conditions were sufficiently late Victorian as to be, really, more Modern than Victorian to begin with. Now, two things seem to have emerged from this experiment: an incredible anxiety about authenticity (both in the sense of an obsessional attention to period detail and in the sense that the resulting lifestyle produced a good deal of stress for the family) and rather a lot of whining, largely by Joyce, who was stuck trying to clean the house using what now seem to be archaic methods. I will admit that it would initially appear to be a very long way from Joyce's battles with "the fluff" (the much-hated Victorian dust bunnies that appeared on a daily basis) to the issue of a queer sexual ethics, but I would argue that the Bowlers' travails are precisely germane to the issues raised by Donald, especially in the context of an issue of Victorian Poetry containing a cluster of essays on Victorian sexualities and desires. As I hope to show, the Bowlers' attempt to live as Victorians suggests the extent to which material circumstances shape how people view the world, and this, in turn, raises questions about the nature, in fact about the very possibility, of ethics. Not entirely coincidentally, as we will see, it also raises questions about what we mean when we use the phrase "Victorian sexualities and desires," questions that the essays collected here will serve, in part, to answer.

What Does A Victorian Want?

To begin with, then, we can simply say that the Bowlers didn't seem to have enjoyed the experience all that much. Even after they'd adjusted to things like corsets and shaving with a straight razor, they confronted another problem: boredom. After two months of playing cards in the evenings, they finally discovered Victorian periodicals, although they seemed to find The Illustrated London News valuable primarily for its advertisements of recently developed products, such as the typewriter and the Brownie camera. For her part, when Catherine, the sixteen-year old, was presented with The Girl's Own Paper, she pronounced it "rubbish": "No sex, no drugs, no alcohol, nothing. Nothing of interest whatsoever," and, despite the self-conscious posing implicit in such a remark, Catherine did seem to be genuinely disaffected with life in 1900. In an effort to relieve Catherine's ennui, a piano teacher was brought in, and she was given lessons, but she found them uninteresting, rather petulantly insisting that she'd vastly prefer to go out clubbing or over to a friend's house for a video and a pizza. As she very succinctly put it, "I don't particularly want to know what a Victorian girl my age would want to do." Interestingly, most of the Bowlers seem to have missed music.

All of which suggests the rather obvious point that the Bowlers were not Victorians. Since the news in The Illustrated London News is now history, it cannot really be read with the interest it would have generated at the time. We know how everything came out, or, more likely, we don't know and don't care. Similarly, but rather more subtly...