Victorians and After

...Unlike the Victorian age, the reign of Edward was too short to establish a distinctive set of tastes and attitudes in which a generation or two could be raised...

...QUEEN VICTORIA had the dramatic sense to die in January of 1901, three weeks into the new century...

...Or, to put it more positively, we are everything that they were not...

...a homely middle-class folk heroine to most or, as many think of her today, a figure of somber repression who, denied pleasure, denied it to others by not being amused...

...Much of Queen Victoria s Secrets deals with clothing...

...On the other hand, she was a woman, and consequently (queen or not) oppressed, silenced, marginalized...

...The same sentence unfortunately appears at the beginning of the jacket blurb...

...Intellectuals started sneering at the middle class and its values before Queen Victoria died...

...We believe in openness, lack of concealment...

...Not enough that the laws governing heterosexual love be rescinded...

...To consider Queen Victoria as the quintessential Victorian requires a recognition that she had a hand in defining that category and in fitting herself to it...

...At the beginning of our century, as Virginia Woolf said, human nature changed...

...Such expressions as 'people like Queen Victoria' or 'that sort of woman' could not be used about her...

...Beginning well before Lytton Strachey's debunking book Eminent Victorians (1918), which ridiculed even Florence Nightingale, 20th-century people have been congratulating themselves endlessly for not being Victorian...

...That life is now threatened largely because the children of the present Queen flout so publicly the middle-class values that every monarch but two since Victoria has conscientiously represented...

...By choosing to identify with the former rather than the latter, Victoria and Albert gave the monarchy another century or more of vigorous life in a democratic age...

...The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins were until recently included in the 20th-century section of the most prominent anthology of English literature, although Hopkins died in 1889...

...Queen Victoria, whose name gave rise to the uncomplimentary adjective, reigned over England, Scotland, Ireland, and a growing number of colonies from 1837 to 1901...

...the other chose to abdicate after 11 months...

...he died in 1861...

...The working classes would honor their betters, would know their place in the great divine order of things...

...Or so many late-20th-century feminists would say, adding their own must-have-beens to the pile...

...They'd demand that the laws governing homosexual love be rescinded as well...

...In the early 19th century its presumably solid values displaced those of the frivolous aristocracy...

...Second Thoughts VICTORIANS AND AFTER BY CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN "ONE THING is pretty cer-tain," wrote Leslie Ste-^^^r phen, the eminently Victorian father of Virginia Woolf, "and in its way comforting, that however far the rage for revivalism may be pushed, nobody will ever want to revive the 19th century...

...Unlike Elizabethan scholars, Victorianists do not regard Victoria as central to her era, though no one denies her function as a cultural icon...

...Although the book is packed with detail, Paterson's interpretation of the Edwardian decade as a whole is conventional to the point of cliche: "As long as the grand old Queen reposed on her throne, the rule of respect and restraint would prevail in the land...

...What happened to editing...

...Not simply a passive or static symbol, however, Victoria performed cultural work for her age...

...Yet the adjective has been used negatively too long to change its ways...

...In particular, we have been praising ourselves for 90 years for being sexually liberated...

...Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, who started their careers as Edwardians, peaked much later...

...The real discontinuity came in 1914, not 1901...

...We have little in common with them besides the desire not to be Victorians...

...In Edwardians: London Life and Letters, 1901-1914 (Ivan R. Dee, 330 pp., 31 illus., $27.50), John Paterson, a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, recounts some of this transition...

...Paterson tells a lot about all three...

...Performed cultural work" means in this case that she influenced the values of the age in an active, more or less conscious fashion...

...In principle, though, he was right...

...The Victorians, who lived immediately before our century began, were everything that we are not...

...That hand was extended in a variety of directions, sometimes (as the book's title implies) gloved in secrecy...

...So far as I know, nobody has yet made a determined effort to remove Queen Victoria herself from the Victorian age and position her as a rebel against the period that bears her name...

...While she was a young queen she helped form taste and fashion...

...What did these Edwardian women want...

...In a few years we will see what people think about the 20th...

...Just as the Victorians symbolize everything we repudiate, so, in this version of history, the Edwardians—the first 20th-century people—are our beloved elder siblings...

...Victorian" has been a term of abuse for almost a hundred years...

...This odd dependence of the 20th century on the 19th as a negative source of identity, a reversing mirror, is especially revealed in the study of literature...

...When her doctor advised abstinence after she had borne nine children, she is reported to have exclaimed, "Oh, Doctor, can I have no more fun in bed...

...She was certainly bossy (how could a monarch not be...

...Ceremonial triumphs like the opening of the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, largely organized by the Prince Consort, made the royal household appear modern and entrepreneurial...

...Victorian writers or literary works singled out for admiration are invariably described as "modern," more typical of our day than of their own...

...No other century suffers from this all-embracing repudiation...

...Why should young women wear formal dress and attend formal dinners and exchange formal speech with formal young men and become in due time their formal young wives...

...As her private secretary put it, "Never in her life could she be confused with anyone else, nor will be in history...

...We like informality in all areas of life...

...Why should they follow the modes and manners of their parents and grandparents...

...Queen Victoria's Secrets (Columbia, 254 pp., 57 illus., $27.95) by Adrienne Munich, a professor of women's studies at the State University of New York's Stony Brook campus, takes the opposite view that Queen Victoria (with her husband's help, to be sure) exerted more power over the age than historians have generally thought...

...Never before or since the Victorian era has the middle class enjoyed such prestige and confidence...

...It was, however, the young men and women of middle-class standing who led the brave fight against the old social order and its rules and restrictions...

...Historians generally regard her as a conscientious public figure who had little understanding of the historical changes that took place during her lifetime...

...How did the 19th century, at least the last two-thirds of it, get such an unattractive reputation...

...The first decade of the 20th century— perhaps one should say its first 14 years —was a time of sparkling if not always profound experimentation in art, politics and social life...

...Every quality we dislike—the opposite of every quality we have or would like to have—is projected backward onto the Victorians...

...therefore the Victorians were hypocritical...

...The versatility of the middle-class queen, the variety of costumes into which she could be fitted, nonetheless made her a historical force in her own right...

...The brief decade when Edward VII was on the throne produced an impressive amount of good art and literature, though it is hard to believe that the old Queen's death had anything to do with it...

...but hardly hypocritical, and far from sexually repressed...

...Like any long-reigning constitutional monarch, Victoria influenced her ministers, although the power of the monarchy was less at the end of her life than it had been at the beginning...

...Therefore the Victorians must have been repressed...

...At the same time, the Queen and Prince Albert were forever dressing up as ancient Britons, medieval royalty, romantic Highland Scots, or other characters who figured in the more or less fanciful historical image the monarchy wished to portray...

...Stephen failed to anticipate Margaret Thatcher, the producers of "Masterpiece Theater," and others who for various reasons find some features of his century more appealing than their own...

...Both of the exceptions were named Edward...

...After her came the Edwardians, some of whom were already rebelling against Victorian attitudes and initiated the long 20th-century habit of comparing oneself favorably with what were then parents and are now great-great-grandparents...

...Confound Victoria, and the slimy inhibitions/She loosed on all us Anglo-Saxon creatures," wrote the American poet Amy Lowell...

...He gets off on the wrong foot by stating in his second sentence that the Queen died in September...

...therefore we emphasize their black woolen suits, their rituals, their sense of decorum...

...Most of the leading writers of the time (Paterson has a lot to say about Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, H.G...

...Ultimately," Munich maintains, "she became iconic: a figure of benevolent, maternal imperialism to some, a virago of chaotic desires to others...

...Arthur Hugh Clough, a less well known poet, is typically praised today by being compared with T. S. Eliot...

...The unpopularity of those values in sophisticated circles is one reason the Victorians today have such a poor image...

...To these damning qualities people on the Left would add patriarchal and imperialistic, among other ideological blemishes...

...Can an author who makes a small but significant error of fact at the very beginning be trusted in larger matters of interpretation...

...The novels of George Meredith, the social writings of William Morris, the Alice books of Lewis Carroll are all wrenched out of their adverse historical context: ahead of their time, they anticipated us...

...Wells) had begun their careers as Victorians and would continue as Georgians...

...But everything was cut short by the decisive event of modern times, World War I. Whatever images we project backward out of present needs, the chasm that lies between us and the Edwardians is wider than the break marked by the death of Queen Victoria and the turn of the century...

...Therein perhaps lies the clue...

...Each of these partial images survived because it served some interest, whether Victorian or 20th-century...

...The vote, of course, and personal autonomy, but especially "sexual freedom...

...In popular usage it means fussy, bossy, hypocritical, and above all sexually repressed...

...Whatever the Edwardians may have thought of themselves, however attractive late-20th-century critics find them as spiritual forebears, their experience is just as remote from ours as that of their parents...

...Fancy-dress occasions aside, the royal family increasingly chose to represent itself—which among other things meant dress itself—in a domestic, middle-class guise...

...One died after a reign of less than 10 years...