How did the Victorians become a reference point for joyless prudery? | Hacker News Reader

How did the Victorians become a reference point for joyless prudery?

historytoday.com

85 pointsapollinaire52 comments

Doing work for Standard Ebooks has led me to read a lot of Victorian literature, and over time I've grown to appreciate the era in ways I hadn't thought of before.

While it's true that, like any era in history, there were real negative aspects - prudery, inescapable classism, imperialism, and so on - the Victorians were also some of the most forward-thinking and hopeful inhabitants of that foreign country of the past, fascinated by the possibility of self-improvement and the hopeful forward march of civilization and the fruits it can bear.

In a long history of the world marked by bloody, distracted despots ruling over subjugated peasants in grinding poverty, lit with brief, individual sparks of genius that slowly advanced civilization, the Victorians were maybe the first Western society - maybe anywhere - that devoted itself to relentless self-improvement as a moral imperative.

In Eminent Victorians alone, we have the biography of the woman who almost single-handedly modernized nursing into what we can still recognize as "nursing" today, and pioneered new uses of statistics; and the biography of the man who invented the modern boarding school, revolutionized "public" schooling and academic excellence, and made school sports the centerpiece that led it to becoming today's billion-dollar industry. That's not to mention the Origin of Species, Lister advancing antiseptics and sanitation, Pasteur, Bell, Babbage - the list goes on.

Maybe they were humorless prudes - though history may look back on today's outrage-fueled society as equally censorious - but we should at least respect them for their indelible mark as a society interested in actually improving itself, instead of maintaining the millenia-old status quo of boozy, gambling aristocrats cruelly ruling over the peasantry.

(Eminent Victorians is, by the way, an excellent read - fresh, light, engaging, and genuinely funny: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lytton-strachey/eminent-vi...)

> but we should at least respect them for their indelible mark as a society interested in actually improving itself

A resonance for hackers should be the origin of the "quintessential engineer", like Brunel and Telford - stove pipe hats, steam-punk lab, recklessly building bridges beyond all reasonable ambition, skirting the bleeding edge of mechanics and material science - which are still standing today.

Move slow and build things.

And the poverty I mention (above) was of course a catalyst for many of the great reformers, Bentham and company... definitely a mixed age.

Were the Victorians really a classist society, though? If anything, they probably were the first 'mass' society where a basic worldview and perspective wrt. standards of moral and ethical behavior was shared irrespective of social strata, which would make them a rather "classless" society at least in a Marxist-influenced sense. Modern societies are certainly very different - morality and virtue tend to be regarded there as an explicitly upper class concern, and to be viewed elsewhere as mere tiresome "virtue signaling" of some kind or another.

Calling Victorian England classless in a “Marxist” sense is pretty rich, considering Engels impressions of their working class pretty much led to the development of Communism.

I mean, have you seen Downton Abbey? (Not Victorian I know, but if anything the show highlights how morals are changing from the Victorian ideals of the past).

I know it's a fictional show, but the fact that one's lot it life is largely a result of who your parents are (and to a lesser degree who you marry) would certainly point to it being a "classist" society, even if all of the classes generally agree on this hereditary status.

It’s disturbing that historical fiction, especially television, is so often used as evidence of some type of historical precedent. Regardless of the subject’s accuracy, television shows are ultimately written to evoke an emotional response which can’t help but color the viewers perception of the historical events. For instance, in Downton Abbey, part of the drama involves the relationship between the staff and the nobility. The focus on this specific type of relationship may make the viewer believe it was more or less prominent than in reality.

You see a similar thing with fantasy television being interpreted as evidence towards non-fantastical elements of medieval life, when they really represent our modern feelings towards the past more than anything else.

If you want an alternative example, the same argument applies to India's caste system.

If people agree that the caste system is correct, is it still classist? I'd say yes, because it enforces the maintenance of classes, and assigns people different opportunities based on their class.

The substance of the opinions matter more than the consensus

But the caste system was explicitly based on the idea that people in different "castes" cannot possibly relate to one another. By contrast, one of the most recurrent themes in Victorian-age fiction is the trope that even "low-class" people can oftentimes embody supposedly-'elite' moral values and standards of behavior a lot better than actual members of the elite do. Thus essentially flipping the whole idea of virtue signaling on its head.

> is so often used as evidence of some type of historical precedent.

Wait till you see Bridgerton. Ive had a teenage girl mentionthe series of an example of "how things were".

The sad/bizarre thing is that I've seen a number of serious articles/commentery that Queen Charlotte was actually black or biracial, which is basically invented nonsense. Even if you give too much credence to a piece of her ancestry 15 generations back, given all the intermarriage of European royalty, most of Europe's royals have Madragana as an ancestor, including King George III.

I think this is especially sad because there are much more fascinating true stories of European nobility with Sub-Saharan ancestry, e.g. the famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin's great grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was black.

The series is consciously playing with race. Certainly Charlotte didn't look like that, but her slightly-mixed racial background was inspiration for designing the character that way. Similarly, her costuming is patterned after pre-revolutionary France.

Other Regency-period movies are probably more accurate with respect to people's complexions -- pasty white, uniform, and bland. Bridgerton isn't designed to give you a photograph of what you might see were you in the Regency court.

Rather, it's designed to give you a sense of what it might have felt like: diverse, colorful, exciting. To focus on Charlotte's face is to miss the ways in which everything about the show is inauthentic -- the clothing, the language, the dances -- but also deeply in love with the period that inspires it. The couldn't have played with the tropes so consistently without knowing them very, very well.

There is also a lot more to be said about the way real race affected real people at the time. We should have more TV shows and movies, rather than this being the only one.

Can we just take a moment to appreciate the small band accompanyment that covers modern music while maintaining respect to the original.

> Ive had a teenage girl mentionthe series of an example of "how things were".

Hell, there are people who say that about Game of Thrones. Enough for it to be a somewhat regular topic on ACOUP.

I agree with you, but I was basically joking about Downton Abbey. Main point was that your opportunity being largely determined by your birth circumstances in the UK in Victorian (and, honestly, much later - ever see the Up! series, which is not fiction) times is very well supported by non-fiction sources.

It's known as "generalizing from fictional evidence", https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...

In the right hands some fiction is perhaps the best evidence for some history. As Engels (who was mentioned elsewhere in this thread) says:

> I have learned more [from novelist Honoré de Balzac] than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together.

Speaking more generally, in the right hands all fiction provides fantastic evidence for some history. As Lenin says about Tolstoy:

> The contradictions in Tolstoy's views are not contradictions inherent in his personal views alone, but are a reflection of the extremely complex, contradictory conditions, social influences and historical traditions which determined the psychology of various classes and various sections of Russian society in the post-Reform, but pre-revolutionary era.

> That is why a correct appraisal [!] of Tolstoy can be made only from the viewpoint of the class which has proved, by its political role and its struggle during the first denouement of these contradictions, at a time of revolution, that it is destined to be the leader in the struggle for the people's liberty and for the emancipation of the masses from exploitation—the class which has proved its selfless devotion to the cause of democracy and its ability to fight against the limitations and inconsistency of bourgeois (including peasant) democracy; such an appraisal is possible only from the viewpoint of the Social-Democratic proletariat.

How this applies to Downton Abbey or Bridgerton is an interesting dilemma. I seriously doubt most people who watch these shows are equipped to make the "correct appraisal."

Why are you assuming that Engels and Lenin made the "correct appraisal?" To me, these examples illustrate that they both used fiction inappropriately. Just because Engels and Lenin are notable humans doesn't make them infallible.

Imagine you were having a discussion with someone about some topic, and your discussion partner said:

> I have learned more from [some novelist] than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians [who study the topic].

Would you really consider that a well-reasoned opinion?

There's no need to imagine anything, here's the discussion Engels was having: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/letters/88_...

He's replying to an aspiring author who sees Engels as an authority on the matter, and he's giving an account of the structure of a new genre of literature (realism) and using its greatest representative (Balzac) to do so. Presumably she takes Engels to be an authority for the same reason many do today: he's one of the best read people to have lived and he was on the frontier of every domain of science for which he had utility. (See the lasting impact of his Anti-Dühring.)

My intent was to provide an entry point into the rich domain of Marxist literary theory by the authority of two of its most important progenitors. Engels and Lenin were crucial in developing an apparently important way of studying and creating history. I figured this is a relevant addition to the conversation because I am gesturing to a positive answer to the gaping question that you opened: what is it that makes a historical interpretation "correct"? Unless perhaps your intent was to leave it agape, which is fit for the postmodernist ideological realm in which Downton Abbey and Bridgerton were written in the first place.

George Orwell’s ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ is an argument for socialism in the social context of the time, and presents an intensely classist society, published 36 years after Victoria died.

It’s a very interesting book: a snapshot of how people lived, whose lives were rarely portrayed in literature.

Not to mention “Down and out in Paris and London”. Again, as you say, intensely classist.

As was 1984... were there any Orwell books that weren't classist?

Indeed, though 1984 is ostensibly fiction, as is Animal Farm. Down and Out is gripping because there is no such excuse. Workhouses existed. He wrote in reaction to his times and he did not invent that much…

> morality and virtue tend to be regarded there as an explicitly upper class concern, and to be viewed elsewhere as mere tiresome "virtue signaling" of some kind or another.

This is a very unfair comparison. The working class regard a certain kind of white leftism, one completely removed from the actual concerns of the working class, as "virtue signalling". It's extremely arrogant to assume one's own views constitute the entirely of "morality and virtue"; different people have different morals.

> Were the Victorians really a classist society, though?

Yes, and it was one of the most classist societies that existed.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Victorian-era

My hazy recollection of Eminent Victorians is that the tone was a little meaner- Florence Nightingale working her assistants to exhaustion, the foolishly earnest priest grappling with the soul of Anglicanism- people too crazed and earnest for this world.

>Maybe they were humorless prudes - though history may look back on today's outrage-fueled society as equally censorious

Hell to the yeah they will. My only question is what future historians will point at as the beginning of this era of repression.

> the Victorians were maybe the first Western society - maybe anywhere - that devoted itself to relentless self-improvement as a moral imperative

I've been reading up on Metternich era recently, and this element of British society in the post-Napoleonic era--one of security for and peace on the British Isles, education and wealth for its population and a virtual monopoly on the high seas--has fascinated me. Both for its uniqueness, as well as for its elusiveness in modern historical dialect.

One question, derived from a limited understanding is whether we should view it as self-improvement if so much is dependent on exploitation

Why not?

From an English perspective I have to say the average perception of Victorians is more about social inequality and child abuse. Images of workhouses and gruel, small boys being beasted up chimneys, toothless 14 year-old "match girls" wandering the night calling "Blow ya for a penny guv".

Really, immodestly clothed piano legs showing too much ankle pale in comparison to Dickensian tales of ruffians, rats and cockneys.

But then TFA is really saying the same as I am, that both mythologies are constructed in opposition to one another, and in hindsight that all cultures ('Modernity' in this case) construct themseves in relation to something else - something they are not.

Everybody's clever nowadays. And so terribly modern.

They may or may not have had that puritanical fear that someone, somewhere was enjoying themselves, but their legacy as a cruel, grasping and intolerant society has become clearer.

Their wars in Burma and against the Zulus were out and out money grabs. Famines in India and Ireland can be directly attributed to their colonial indifference. And they gladly tried to foister Opium addiction on the Chinese to get their grubby hands on tea and porcelain.

I have read "Eminent Victorians", but might I suggest that some of the people described there are best shown in "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and the "Flashman" novels? Novels always seem closer to history, somehow, and it's a shame that Fraser never worked the cardinal into his tapestry.

I agree. Those two works are an interesting takes on Victorian life from two different eras and world views. Thomas Hughes's contemporary novel was hugely popular, even until the mid to late 20th Century, as an ideal for the moral development of boys. The Flashman Papers is a satire from the late 1960s onwards that uses Tom Brown's bully, Flashman, as a device to lampoon the British Empire. Personally, I find Fraser's Flashman brilliant, an antithetical depiction of the Victorian age that was traditionally populated with military heroes and intrepid explorers that were likely to be anything but moral.

Any Tom Brown fans may be interested in the little known (justifiably) sequel, which takes Tom to Oxford:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26851/26851-h/26851-h.htm

Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens discusses this, and the wonderful dissonance we see between this (often Edwardian influenced) view of late Victorian strictures and the torrid reality. As long as your mistress stayed away from the bright lights, you could dally all day long.

The regency was wonderful. Bridgerton is fantasy but what really happened is equally bizarre. Victorian moral rectitude Was a reaction to a more simple, honest regency view of morals.

I recommend reading “The World of Yesterday” by Stefan Zweig.

A remarkable book for seeing the transformation from the Victorian era into modern day.

Was just reading Max Weber's The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism where he investigates the development of modern capitalism and its complex relationship with different Christian denominations (especially between the Catholics and Protestants). On the general (mis)understanding of Protestantism (as in 1920s) he writes:

> …that the spirit of hard work, of progress, or whatever else it may be called, the awakening of which one is inclined to ascribe to Protestantism, must not be understood, as there is a tendency to do, as joy of living nor in any other sense as connected with the Enlightenment. The old Protestantism of Luther, Calvin, Knox, Voet, had precious little to do with what to-day is called progress.

And with regards to the English:

> Montesquieu says (Esprit des Lois, Book XX, chap. 7) of the English that they “had progressed the farthest of all peoples of the world in three important things: in piety, in commerce, and in freedom”

The protestant puritan history is probably where the reputation for prudery comes from. The Roman Catholics knew how to party, buying indulgences to forgive sins and continuing to celebrate roman festivals under the guise of Catholic holidays. The Protestant Puritans wanted to put an end to these festivals as well as marriage festivals and funeral traditions. They accomplished this in England with the 1642 Directory for the Public Worship of God based on puritan ideas. Since the festivals were not prescribed by the bible, they were to be replaced with Bible study and prayer. During the Interrugnum from 1649 to 1660 England was basically under Cromwell's puritanical military dictatorship until the Restoration of the effectively Catholic monarchy, which restored and soon increased religious freedoms.

Was it those little vases on stands and portraits of ill children praying?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4p0uw42cdo

It's not complicated -- whatever they were like in private, their writings (in particular novels) clearly show that they were unable to publicly confront basic facts about human life. And that is not a good thing for a novel. In Britain that influence lasted until the first world war. I know it's not "interesting" to repeat cliches like I'm repeating, but they're true aren't they?

> their writings (in particular novels) clearly show that they were unable to publicly confront basic facts about human life. And that is not a good thing for a novel.

Could you elaborate on this, especially with what basic facts are missing? My view on literature is optimistic about telling particular truths about society. For example, "Wuthering Heights" [0] looks like quite an honest view of society. Then again, this may be an exception more than the rule for that particular time period (I'm not personally sure, as I haven't read many books from that time period, versus others).

[o] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuthering_Heights

sex!

> whatever they were like in private, their writings (in particular novels) clearly show that they were unable to publicly confront basic facts about human life

not so different from today.

Could you elaborate? Today in western democracies we have literature addressing almost every imaginable condition and human activity. Certainly basic aspects of humanity such as sex which the victorians felt completely unable to contemplate.

I wonder the same about Americans

Because of the Protestant foundations of our country.

i've seen "joyless prudery" reference the Puritans more than any other group personally

Are they? In my country it's Christian Protestants. The Netherlands is a post religious country now but there was a real belief not so long ago that everyone was predestined for hell or heaven and you couldn't do anything about it. Protestants make Catholics look sane.

>The Netherlands is a post religious country

Perhaps the Dutch were predestined to end up that way.

Calvinism is evil.

joyless prudes who ran military taxation across the entire globe. Perhaps they ran from the excess of Rome, while emphasizing the exhortatian to power? Military and civil administration is best done without "joy" right, to maximize other qualities?

A level deeper past this cynical snark - many civiliations have embraced "joy", arts, culture, outsiders, wisdom, mystical things.. all sorts of variations.. but somehow the public attention is called back to the centers of military power, and their "trouble" .. Let's call the Emporer without clothes.. the military and economic might of the Victorians were a marvel at the level of Rome itself, and, what cost? what human cost..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com