The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror, and: Victoriana: Histories, Fiction, Criticism (review)

Freud famously said that those who do not understand the past are condemned to repeat it. How well, then, do we understand our fascination with the Victorians? That is the subject of Simon Joyce’s The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror and Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana.

Joyce argues that, despite what we have learnt about the period from Queen Victoria’s ascension in 1837 to her death in 1901, our conception of ‘the Victorian’ has essentially stayed the same: imperialism; the industrial revolution; the separation of public and private spheres, a hypocritical attitude to sex and ‘an ascendant hegemony of bourgeois values’ (5). We may excavate those who have been excluded from the historical record, and Steven Marcus’ landmark study The Other Victorians (1966) is exemplary in this respect, but such a procedure ‘presumes a normative definition against which “otherness” can be mentioned’ (6). Marcus, for example, argued that the view of human sexuality found in pornography was the mirror image of the official view of Victorian sexuality. The problem is that he does not question this ‘official’ view which others, most notably Michel Foucault, have shown to be deeply suspect. Far from repressing sexuality, the Victorians found numerous ways to express it in discourses from morality to medicine.

Even if we try a different tack, such as seeking out those elements of nineteenth-century society and culture that anticipate aspects of our own such as sensation, advertising and drug use, our idea of it remains unchanged. And to see the present as a reflection of the past, continues Joyce, blurs the distinction between the two, eroding our sense of history, which is already weak because of our tendency to talk of ‘the spirit of an age’ or to view it as a series of binary oppositions. ‘The Victorians believed in individual enterprise’ choruses one group; ‘no’, choruses another, ‘they believed in state intervention’.

‘We never see ourselves as others see us’ opines Mrs Nickleby, and we certainly don’t see the Victorians as they saw themselves. Rather, we glimpse them in our ‘rearview mirror’, distorted, distant, but never quite disappearing and sometimes too close for comfort. Despite various attempts, we have never escaped the nineteenth century to arrive at a ‘full-fledged moment of modernism’ (Joyce 165). It lies within our reach but beyond our grasp. And so, perhaps, we can best understand the Victorian ‘as a kind of style’ (8), subject to the vicissitudes of twentieth-century fashion.

Kaplan is interested in the aesthetic pleasure we get from invoking the Victorians. She agrees with Joyce that, despite various attempts, particularly by the high modernists, to separate ourselves from the Victorians, we are still under their spell. As both ‘origin’ and ‘anachronism’ they tell us where we have come from and how far. But we also look back to the nineteenth century with a certain nostalgia. Television adaptations of the novels of Dickens, George Eliot or Mrs Gaskell portray relatively harmonious communities that are sorely lacking in our own society. We sigh for the lost values of self-reliance and social responsibility, forgetting the factory system, child labour, poverty, squalor, ignorance and brutality. Like Joyce, Caplan complains of the decay of historical understanding. We have discarded the depth model of time and live, as Lady Bracknell famously remarked, in an age of surfaces. What Kaplan calls ‘Victoriana’, the whole range of representations and reproductions of the period, is an attempt to remedy this situation by highlighting ‘the suppressed histories of gender and sexuality, race and empire’ (3). As Joyce has observed, these unearthings often leave our fundamental idea of our period intact, but Kaplan also wants to investigate the ‘high degree of affect involved in reading and writing about the Victorian past’ (5), as this transcends the conventional categories of historical enquiry.

Both writers...