Who were the Victorians?
- Created by: jojo10834
- Created on: 01-03-17 11:02
Class
- Difficult not to agree with Marxist historians who foreground this importance of classes
- Applied in a variety of ways
- Politically charged - is it all about celebrating Victoria?
- The term "Victorian" is therefore not straightforward" p.4
Beginnings and Endings
- 1837-1901
- Backlash and ridicule in the Edwardian period
- Victorians demonstrated their murdunity by having no links with the past
- Edwardians felt the Victorians led repressed life
Legacy
- We live in the houses the Victorians built, our cities are often shaped by Victorian ideas of design and usage
Terminology
- Difficult to define what a "Victorian" is - convenient shorthand
- No agreement as to when it begins and ends
- Did it end in 1901, 1914 or 1960
- Richard Price - nothing necessarily distinct about the Victorian period - merely a continuation of earlier trends - argues that importance of the "long eighteenth century"
Periodisation
- Three phases:
1. Early Victorian, 1830-1848
2. Mid-Victorian, 1848-1867
3. Late Victorian, 1867-1901
- Shift from Victorian to Edwardian = important
- The dates could change in the future
Should we abandon the term "Victorian"
- 'we should regard the word as an invitation to think deeply about the nineteenth century rather than as a definitive statement about it'
- Victorian studies characterised by interdisciplinary approaches
- 'academic discussion had never been totally unrelated to the wider public interest in the Victorians' p.37
1901-1945 "Age of Recrimination"
- Victorians viewed with 'disdain and contempt' fashionable to heap scorn on the Victorians from 1890s onwards - especially from literal to modernism
- Halevy - French historian, developed liberal - left analysis of 19th Century - part of group resisting "celebratory" Victorian histories
Freud
- Shaped initial interpretations of the Victorians
- Victorians painted as repressed, "controlled" beings who were "tormented by the demands of the libido" pg 8
- Bloomsbury group - liberal and bohemian lifestyle
- Anti-Victorianism the order of the day
1945-1980 "Age of Evaluation"
- Victorians a source of admiration?
- Much to learn from their example of hard work and self-sacrifice - Industrial Revolution especially impressive
- Post-war Britain governed by 'Victorians'
- 1950s Britain - a class society
- 1951 festival of Britain - Echo's Great Exhibition - a cultural dialogue was established between the post war present and the Victorian past p.13
1980s onwards: "the Age of Representations"
- Shift in the way Victorians understood - cultural explanations increasingly prized - less emphasis on class and social structure
- Increased emphasis placed on historical analysis that foregrounded the importance of Gender, Imperialism, Science, Crime, Religion etc
Callum Brown - Religion
- Religious census 1851: nonconformity almost as strong as Anglican church attendance among working classes
- Yet, Brown sceptical of the idea that urbanisation led to secularisation - builds on Cox's "diffusive Christianity" so religiosity outside church
- Religion adapted and changes as urbanisation gathered pace, Brown argues that "modernity" should not be exposed to secularisation
Davidoff & Hall - Gender
- Idea of separate spheres v. important in women's & gender history
- Davidoff and Hall argue that gender was central to the making of the English middle class
- Family Fortunes one of the first "gender" histories, based on case studies of Essex and Birmingham middle-class family life
- New patterns of social behaviour that emphasised seperate spheres eps. religious rivals
- Historical processes denied refashioned as social reforms
Lynda Nead - Prostitution
- Prostitute seen as "gateway" to criminal underworld
- "Fallen woman" - outside of patriarchy?
- Challenging public vs private - a public form of sexuality - sexuality as a commodity
- Nead: increased visibility of prostitutes seen as part of British imperial "decline"
- 'Prostitution was defined as the most threatening manifestation of moral degradation and was regarded as a meta-system which could erode and destroy the nation' p.349
Judith Walkowitz - Jack the Ripper
- Victorians feared sexuality - but perversely drawn towards it? (Freud) prostitutes problematic because contributed to growing number of women in public spaces
- Walkowitz - 1880s onwards - moral panics relating to sexual danger
- 1888 "Jack the Ripper" killed at least six prostitutes - "Ripperology" - conspiracy theories/morbid fascination. Walkowitz writing in shadow of "Yorkshire Ripper", Peter Sutcliffe - reaction against sensationalist writings - not trying to uncover identity of Ripper - rather what the killings mean - argues that they were an attack on the presence of women in the public sphere
- Attack on working classes? Was the Ripper a doctor? (Precision of Mutilation)
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