History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Front matter

Victorian Afterimages

Kate Mitchell JÉ

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Contents

Acknowledgements viii Introduction: ‘I told you we’d been invaded by Victoriana’ 1 1 Memory Texts: History, Fiction and the Historical Imaginary 12 Contemporary Victorian(ism)s 39

A Fertile Excess: Waterland, Desire and the Historical Sublime 63 4 (Dis)Possessing Knowledge: A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance 93 5 ‘Making it seem like it’s authentic’: the Faux-Victorian Novel as Cultural Memory in Affinity and Fingersmith 117 6 ‘The alluring patina of loss’: Photography, Memory, and

Memory Texts in Sixty Lights and Afterimage 143 Conclusion: ‘What will count as history?’ 177 Notes 184 Select Bibliography 195 vii

II

The 1980s was not the only historical moment Foucault shared with Margaret Thatcher. They shared, too, a revisiting of the Victorian era, with Thatcher urging a return to ‘Victorian values’.t However, her images of the era, and the agenda of sexual and cultural politics that they served, were diametrically opposed to Foucault’s own. Whereas Foucault described the ways in which, since the nineteenth century, sexualities are produced through discourse and labelled normal or deviant, Thatcher reasserted the traditional and naturalised boundaries between normalcy and deviancy, morality and perversity in her campaign for family values. This approach is encapsulated in the (in)famous Clause 28 of the Local Government Act (1986), passed during her third term of office, which sought to prevent local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’, particularly as a ‘pretended family relationship’ (qtd. in Weeks, 1991: 137). Thatcher’s invocation of the Victorian era centred upon her particular re-creation of the Victorian family, with the heterosexual marriage relationship as the permissible locus for sexual activity.

Hers was a return to the type of vision of the Victorian era that the work of scholars like Foucault and Marcus had, since the 1960s, attempted to revise. Indeed, Tristram Hunt, in a 2001 article for The Australian Financial Review, explicitly links Thatcher’s visions of Victorian England with those of Lytton Strachey as they appeared in Eminent Victorians, arguing that together they ‘managed to gut the reputation of the Victorian era’. He suggests that Thatcher’s ‘fond reminiscences of her parsimonious grandmother condemned the 19th century to being considered a time of cloying evangelicalism, repression and illiberalism’ (Hunt, 2001: 6). She produced such images of the Victorians as a rhetorical basis for her campaign of family values which was intended to counteract what she saw as the permissiveness that had grown during and since the 1960s. Once again the Victorian era was called upon to provide a contrast with the present and, as in the 1940s and 1950s, the Victorian era was the celebrated period.

Thatcher used the term ‘Victorian values’ as a measure against which to identify the social ills of her milieu — a regulated economy, welfare dependency and the decline of the family - and to advocate a return to laissez faire economics, to a reliance upon individual charity and to strong family discipline. This would, as Gary Day suggests, ‘revive Britain’s flagging fortunes and restore her place in the world’ (Day, 1998: 1-2). She contrasted a corrupt present with an idyllic and highly romanticised past, characterised by stability and strength, constructing the Victorian period as all that was other to contemporary culture.

Thatcher’s use of the Victorian period is characterised by an ahistorical nostalgia, in which the ‘Victorian’ floats free of its temporal location in the nineteenth century and simply stands in for a series of ideals. Raphael Samuel argues:

The past here occupies an allegorical rather than temporal space. It is a testimony to the decline in manners and morals, a mirror to our failings, a measure of absence. It also answers to one of the most universal myths, which has both its left-wing and right-wing variants, the notion that once upon a time things were simpler and the people were at one with themselves. (Samuel, 1992: 18)

Thatcher’s Victorian idyll was peopled with industrious, honest and morally upright citizens; hard-working artisans who rose slowly through diligence. The ‘Victorian’ values she extolled were those of thrift, charity, independence and hard work. In a much-quoted interview with Peter Allen she praised the upbringing she was given by a Victorian grandmother and used it to delineate Victorian values as she wished to exploit them:

you were taught to work jolly hard, you were taught to improve yourself, you were taught self-reliance, you were taught to live within your income, you were taught that cleanliness is next to godliness, you were taught self-respect, you were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour, you were taught tremendous pride in your country, you were taught to be a good member of your community. (Thatcher, 1983b)

Arguing that Thatcher was highly selective in her invocation of ‘Victorian values’, Samuel contrasts the Victorian Britain of Thatcher’s rhetoric with that described in the oral histories and accounts given by those of her generation and earlier. Rather than focusing upon frugality, hard work and discipline, these accounts emphasise a sense of joy, of fun and of community:

in working-class accounts of the ‘good old days’, ... it is the images of sociability that prevail - the sing-songs in the pubs, the funeral processions, the ‘knees-up’ street parties, the summer outings. The canvas is crowded with characters; street performers will sometimes get a page or two to themselves and there may be a whole chapter for Whitsun or Bank Holiday. Shopping is remembered for its cheapness ... People are forever in and out of each other’s houses... (Samuel, 1992: 18)

In these accounts, too, the Victorian era is celebrated in contrast to the present, and painted as an idyllic, simpler time. Yet Thatcher’s Victorian idyll is very different to the Eden constructed by these oral histories. Her version, Samuel observes, is ‘altogether more severe. Her lost Eden is one where resources were scarce and careful husbandry was needed to ensure survival. She remembers her childhood not for its pleasures but for its lessons in application and self-control’ (ibid.: 19). In its focus upon hard work, discipline and their rewards, argues Samuel, Thatcher’s Victorian Britain is similar to that of Asa Briggs’, ‘one of the “new way” social historians who, by their scholarly work, prepared the way for the rehabilitation of Victorian Values’; for both it is the ‘age of improvement’ (ibid.: 22). Of course, the oral histories with which Samuel debunks Thatcher’s image of Victorian Britain are also highly selective, for all that Samuel makes their status as recorded memories the pledge of their authenticity. The details in these oral histories might differ from those of Thatcher’s, but in each the Victorian era represents a benchmark from which we have regressed. The period is marked in terms of difference, alterity.

In keeping with their temporal dislocation, Thatcher cast her Victorian values as universal and enduring, claiming that ‘all of these things are Victorian values ... They are also perennial values’ (Thatcher, 1983b). In this move, as Samuel argues, ‘Victorian Values thus passed from the real past of recorded history to timeless “tradition”’ (Samuel, 1992: 18). This claim of universality only points to the significance that Thatcher did alight upon a specific piece of Britain’s history for its cultural cache; she did not, primarily, promote the values as perennial but rather marketed them as Victorian. Writing in 1987, James Walvin argues:

Few could deny that late Victorian Britain was one of the world’s leading powers, at the peak of economic and imperial achievement. Britannia not only ruled the waves but she ruled vast tracts of the globe’s surface, and her industries — pioneering and (as it seemed) unmatched — dominated the markets of the world. (Walvin, 1987: 4)

Rather paradoxically, since it functioned primarily to contrast the Victorian period with a disappointing present, to the extent that her rhetoric aligned Thatcher herself to the image of past industrial, military and economic success, it also suggested a tradition, or a lineage, for the kind of radical politics she was advocating. The Victorian era was at once the inverse of her 1980s present, and its heritage.

Yet if referencing Victorian values allowed her to fashion herself as a traditionalist, then behind that façade even a glimmer of real faith in the Victorian era and its achievements can hardly be discerned. Although she promoted frugality and thrift under the rubric of Victorian values, she did not attempt to curtail consumer credit and household debt actually grew throughout the 1980s. Samuel argues that ‘if her precepts had been taken seriously, the economy would have been in ruins ... Frugality and thrift, in short, so far from staging a come-back during Mrs. Thatcher’s period of office, all but disappeared’ (ibid.: 22-3). While urging a return to Victorian values, Thatcher proceeded to wage war against Britain’s traditional industries. Her rhetoric praised and upheld the traditional, but in practice she undertook a far-reaching program of modernisation (ibid.: 10-11). While praising the Victorians and advocating a return to ‘their’ values, she attacked such Victorian establishments as the public service ethic, the Universities, the Bar, the House of Lords and the Church of England, and she deregulated the City of London. Indeed, as Samuel suggests, even her use of the phrase itself alternated between positive and pejorative: ‘Marxism, she liked to say, was a Victorian, or mid-Victorian ideology; and she criticised nineteenth-century paternalism as propounded by Disraeli as anachronistic’ (ibid.: 9). Thus, Samuel argues that ‘the rhetoric of Victorian Values could be seen as an example of what the post-modernists call “double coding” and sociologists “cognitive dissonance” — i.e of words which say one thing, while meaning another and camouflaging, or concealing, a third’ (ibid.: 24). Thatcher’s return to Victorian values was a political ploy that enabled her to appear to be protecting stability and tradition when in fact she sought change, transformation and the new. Behind the appearance of a staunch and inflexible traditionalist was a ruthless innovator and behind reference to ‘Victorian values’ was a programme for vast change.

Thus, Walvin attributes the appeal of Victorian values in Thatcher’s Britain to their ephemeral quality. ‘Victorian values’, as espoused by Thatcher, was a purely rhetorical phenomenon which could metamorphose to include or exclude virtues as deemed desirable in a given situation. ‘Roll[ing] easily from the tongue ... It is an idea which has the virtue of defying easy definition, yet people have no trouble knowing exactly what it means. It is a concept which has been divorced from its historical roots, representing instead a simple code of good behaviour and decent ideals’ (Walvin, 1987: 6). They functioned this way too for neoconservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb who, though she eschews the term ‘values’ itself, also castigates the culture of late twentieth-century Britain by referencing its Victorian past. In contrast to the sanitised, romanticised view of the Victorian era tapped by Thatcher, Himmelfarb’s valorisation of Victorian ‘virtues’ depends upon a characterisation of the period as an endless cycle of poverty, hunger, drudgery and misery; it is the moral strictures of the period that provide a buffer for such experiences. Like Thatcher, she denounces the twentieth century for a regression in values and moral progress. In the Victorian era, she maintains, even if many people did not live the ideals they espoused, they at least still held ideals. She argues that today, we do not espouse any ideals, which is evident in the transmutation of the word ‘virtues’ into its contemporary corollary, ‘values’, which can be ‘beliefs, opinions, attitudes, feelings, habits, conventions, preferences, prejudices, even idiosyncrasies — whatever an individual, group or society happen to value at any time, for any reason’ (Himmelfarb, 1995: 11-12).

In contrast to the Victorians, we appear relativistic, without recourse to the authoritative weight of virtues. In a ‘relativistic’ society, Himmelfarb argues, morals, virtues and judgements become only a matter of individual taste or opinion and do not form a firm foundation against which to measure cultural features or behaviour, undermining the confidence with which such judgements could, in any case, be made (ibid.: 11). Asserting our reluctance to speak in terms of moral absolutes, she produces the Victorian era, in contrast, as a time when ‘moral principles and judgments were as much a part of social discourse as of private discourse, and as much a part of public policy as of personal life’ (ibid.: 241). Invoking ‘Victorian virtues’ thus becomes an indispensable means of speaking with the language of morality in contemporary culture. The historian can intervene instructively, Himmelfarb suggests, ‘to remind us of a time, not so long, ago, when all societies, liberal as well as conservative, affirmed values different from our own’ (ibid.: 249). She charges history with the role of ‘reminding us of our gains and losses — our considerable gains in material goods, political liberty, social mobility, racial and sexual equality - and our no less considerable losses in moral well-being’ (ibid.: 253).

Himmelfarb’s Victorian period is more securely tied to its temporal location and she is careful to present a more balanced account of the era than Thatcher’s selectivity. Indeed, she catalogues the faults of the Victorian period, in terms of its ‘social and sexual discriminations, class rigidities and political inequalities, autocratic men, submissive women, and overly disciplined children, constraints, restrictions, and abuses of all kinds’ but goes on to suggest that ‘there is also much [in the period] that might appeal to even a modern, liberated spirit ... the importance of an ethos that does not denigrate or so thoroughly relativize values as to make them ineffectual and meaningless’ (ibid.: 249-50).

Whether she is applauding the period’s superior morality or deploring the abuses that somehow coexisted with this morality, as surely as Thatcher’s, Himmelfarb’s own return to the Victorian period is predicated upon the assertion of absolute difference. Implicit is the idea that there is a break or rupture between present and the past that utterly divides the two, so that scarcely a mark remains, at the present time, of the attitudes, institutions, values and cultural features of the Victorian era. If vestigial remnants persist, they serve only to highlight our ‘otherness’ and, indeed, our inferiority. Our memories of the Victorians are, therefore, ‘rather like an amputated limb that still seems to throb when the weather is bad’ (ibid.: 221). For Himmelfarb as for Thatcher, to assert continuities between the Victorian era and contemporary culture would be to destabilise the images of total contrast and undermine its use as an ‘other’ against which our culture can be denigrated.

HI

Culturally, Thatcher’s appeal to Victorian values coincided with the boom of the ‘heritage industry’, a term coined by Robert Hewison to describe the expansion and convergence of a number of cultural institutions to remake the past as entertainment (see Hewison, 1987: 221). It coincided, too, with heated and protracted debates about the historical value of this industry. Indeed, John Gardiner argues that these debates were partly a response to Thatcher’s call for a return to Victorian values, ‘conflating her suspect use of history with the nostalgia they identified all around them’ (Gardiner, 2004: 176). And Suzanne Keen suggests that against the backdrop of the economic slump of the Thatcher years ‘an emphasis on a more positive past can seem a natural reflex, an understandable impulse of nostalgia, a calculated program on the part of conservative politicians, or a pernicious evasion of responsibility for the present and future’ (Keen, 2001: 103). For the heritage industry is usually associated with the promotion of a celebratory narrative, focusing on elements of the past that the nation can cherish, defend and in which it may take pride. It is not focused on any one aspect of Britain’s past; indeed, it has been roundly criticised by some scholars who argue that it promotes a generalised view of the past, in which the particularities of different eras are flattened. Here the specificities of recorded history become ‘timeless tradition’ (see Samuel, 1994: 139). Gardiner suggests that in some ways it makes no sense to talk about the Victorian period in relation to the heritage industry because here excitement attaches to ‘atmosphere’, the frisson of ‘olden times’, more than to ‘conscious connection with a particular age’. He argues that ‘[a] stroll around any “Past Times” shop (the chain was founded in 1986) or the large gift shop at the Victoria and Albert Museum will confirm how comfortably imitation Victoriana nestles alongside artefacts from other periods when it is being sold to the public’ (Gardiner, 2004: 168).

The 1980s and 1990s were marked by a mania for collecting Victorian artefacts, fostered by the rehabilitation of Victoriana in the 1950s and 1960s (as the last generations of Victorians passed away and the secondhand market flooded with their jewellery, clothing and furniture (see Gardiner, 2004)) and boosted by an increasingly consumer-driven economy. Money from the National Trust was contributed to the restoration of privately owned Victorian terraces and mansions, elevating them to the status of ‘period residences’, in the name of preserving national heritage. ‘Heritage’ colours and styles became popular for home furnishings and soon became known as ‘the Laura Ashley look’, and open-air and industrial museums multiplied. All of these factors, as Samuel suggests, ‘had the effect, so far as popular taste was concerned, of rehabilitating the notion of the Victorian and associating it not with squalor and grime, but on the contrary with goodness and beauty, purity and truth’ (Samuel, 1992: 14).

This mania for original and replicated Victorian material culture has been associated with uncritical nostalgia for a past that never existed, as Miriam Bailin argues: ‘Belonging to another time and to other circumstances, and thus ineluctably value-laden, they also have the talismanic power to evoke whatever we long for as if it were something we’ve lost ...’ (Bailin, 2002: 44). Bailin contrasts our obsession with Victoriana to the Victorians’ own mania for revivalism which she describes as being an adaptation of the old to new uses, with the emphasis being on the new object. Whereas they valued the new object created by the mixture of old and new, she suggests, ‘the current mania for reproduction and revival is characterized by a reverent attachment to the past as aura and ideal’ (ibid.). Her study of the magazines, newsletters and catalogues that purvey Victoriana suggests their dependence upon a nostalgic invocation of ‘a gentler more romantic time’ (ibid.: 38).5

For its detractors, the heritage industry generally is accused of being ahistorical, of cultivating a depthless desire for the generalised past with little interest in historical understanding; selective, nostalgic and depthless and, as such, is opposed to history. The lines of demarcation in the history-heritage debate thus fall similarly to those of other debates that animate this book, including the opposition of history and memory and, crucially, history and fiction. Keen argues that this debate evinces ‘a hierarchy of values in which history (detached, scholarly, dispassionate, accurate) trumps heritage (nostalgic, dysfunctional, inexact)’.

However, just as historical fiction is sometimes privileged over history, sometimes, in a reversal of values, ‘heritage (popular, inspiring, authentic, belonging to us all) outdoes history (academic, hyper-specialized, politically correct, irrelevant)’ (Keen, 2001: 98).

The last two decades of the twentieth century also saw a shift in historians’ construction of the Victorians, participating in and contributing to popular fascination. Like the attitude fostered by the heritage industry, their histories are flavoured by affection for the Victorians. However, an increasing number of historians rejected the characterisation of Victorian culture in terms of its difference and distance, focusing instead upon the connections between the Victorians and ourselves. Indeed, Kucich and Sadoff suggest that one reason for the preponderance of neo-Victorian engagements is the way in which Victorian culture appears in many respects to anticipate our own, ‘providing multiple eligible sites for theorizing [cultural] emergence’ (Kucich and Sadoff, 2000: xv). Historians Gary Day, Richard Gilmour, Nadine Holdsworth, Matthew Sweet and others highlight similarity more than difference, continuity more than rupture in constructing our relationship to the Victorian past. Their scholarship appears, in part, a response to the absolute alterity posited by politicians such as Thatcher and historians such as Himmelfarb. Sweet and Day, particularly, challenge the particular version of Victorian values promulgated by Thatcher. Day not only argues, along the same lines as Samuel, that Thatcher was necessarily selective in what she chose to represent as Victorian values (state intervention, he suggests, is as Victorian as lassez faire), but also that to speak of a ‘return’ to these values is erroneous: ‘the idea of a return to Victorian values assumed that they have faded away into history, requiring a deliberate act to revive them. However, it is possible to argue that Victorian values have never ceased to be a shaping force throughout the twentieth century’ (Day, 1998: 2; see also Sweet, 2001). In many ways, then, this approach appears absolutely opposed to that of Thatcher and Himmelfarb. Yet, it, too, makes the Victorians key figures for establishing our identity today. It is simply founded upon similarity instead of difference.

In her article ‘Haven’t I Seen You Somewhere Before?,’ literary critic Nadine Holdsworth makes our consumer culture a product of the Victorian period, arguing that a ‘preoccupation with style over substance and an emphasis on pleasure through visual excess is not the sole domain of the contemporary age. The Victorian era also heralded a demand for impressive visual spectacle which rejected the principle of utility ... ’ (Holdsworth, 1998: 197). Thomas Richards propounds a similar argument in his The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (1990). He argues that the Great Exhibition of 1851 heralded the beginning of ‘modern’ perceptions of the commodity. Tracing the origins of advertising back into the Victorian period, he claims that it was with the Great Exhibition that the appetite for the spectacle began. He argues that at this event, designed to celebrate the dignity of production, the commodity ‘came alive’ and began to function in society apart from human agency as it is seen to do today. Prior to this time the commodity had been mundane, neutral, only itself, not symbolic. In the second half of the nineteenth century the commodity assumed the central significance it still has today and the cogs of capitalism, and a resultant consumer culture, had already begun to operate: ‘In the short space of time between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the First World War, the commodity became and has remained the one subject of mass culture, the centerpiece of everyday life, the focal point of all representation, the dead center of the modern world’ (Richards, 1990: 1). According to Richards, despite its not being held for profit, The Great Exhibition was also the point at which entrepreneurs realised that there was money to be made from representing the commodity. Advertising dominated in this commodity culture, and, as in contemporary culture, it colonised the body through an ever-multiplying number of therapeutic commodities which opened all of the body to marketing. ‘The body had become the prevailing icon of commodity culture, and there was no turning back’ (Richards, 1990: 205).

This assertion of continuities between Victorian visual culture and our own can be traced in a number of neo-Victorian novels that link the origins of photography to our own image-obsessed society. Examples of such novels include Lynne Truss’ Tennyson’s Gift (1996), Robert Solé’s The Photographer’s Wife (1999), Ross Gilfillan’s The Edge of the Crowd (2001), Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me (2001), Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights (2004) and Susan Barrett’s Fixing Shadows (2005). Fiona Shaw’s novel, The Sweetest Thing (2003), explores the birth of the iconic image in the Victorian era, stemming from the introduction and popularisation of photography, and dramatises early uses of advertising in the Victorian period. Imitating the style and plot of Victorian sensation fiction, with echoes of Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White in particular, the novel explores the creation and consumption of various types of images, comparing three ostensibly different types of photographic images: Samuel Ransome’s collection of photographs of working-class women, which he keeps in albums in his room, Mr Benbow’s pornographic photographs, which are sold to the men who commission them, and the photographs William Ransome uses for his advertisements for cocoa and chocolates. Each of these images circulates and reproduces promiscuously, accruing meanings in excess of their original purpose. Their production and consumption are entwined with a burgeoning capitalism galvanised by the introduction of photography in advertising. William Ransome’s rationale for using photographic images of Harriet to sell his chocolates appeals to an increasing public appetite for the visual, and for imagistic invocations of pleasure, instead of information in their consumer choices:

my plan is a girl. Not an imaginary girl, but a real one. Not only a painted picture, but also a photograph. A real girl. If we put a girl on our boxes, we will sell them faster than we can imagine. She will become the Wetherby’s girl and when people look at her, and she is pretty and pure and smiling, like someone they might like to know, they will think of us, and they will buy our cocoa (165) ... [if] when you drank a glass of smooth cocoa, its froth catching in your beard, if you had one, its sweet warmth caressing your throat, you thought of the girl? Would not that be a clever thing? (234)

Here, the commodity, the tin of cocoa or box of chocolates, comes alive, symbolic of something else. The photograph of a girl stands in for the girl herself, becoming ‘a girl on our boxes’ (165), with the implication being that she is coeval with her image and that consumers will acquire her when they purchase the cocoa or chocolates. Throughout the novel the Victorian era is produced as the origin of our advertising practices and types of image-production and, ultimately, as the foundation for the consumer culture we inhabit today.

Gary Day, too, constructs our relationship to the Victorians in terms of continuity; that of Victorian values and of ‘the Victorian condition itself: ‘what we understand as modernity and postmodernity can simply be seen as different facets of Victorianism’ (Day, 1998: 2). He argues that whereas Jürgen Habermas claimed that the division of substantive reason into science, morality and art, so that each becomes the domain of the expert to the exclusion of others, is characteristic of modernity, this is ‘equally the feature of the Victorian period’, in which the reform in universities and in technical education had led to increasing specialisation, undermining the ‘synthesis’ of knowledge (ibid.). And whereas Lyotard distinguished between modernity and postmodernity by identifying the use of metadiscourses to legitimate knowledge with the former, and the suspicion of such metanarratives with the latter, Day argues that both attitudes were manifest in the Victorian era. He cites the legitmising importance of the metanarrative of human progress to the study of the natural world and to technological development on the one hand, and Walter Pater’s claim that ‘his age was distinguished from the ancient “by its cultivation of the ‘relative’ in place of the absolute”,’ on the other (ibid.). Similarly, Gilmour points to the 1870s Vernacular Revival as an example of this cultivation of the relative. The Revival, he claims, was ‘part of a larger awakening to the virtues of regional life, of the homely and the local’ that can be identified as a reaction to the accelerating change brought about by increasing industrialisation, urbanisation and mass production (Gilmour, 1993: 230). These changes transformed the Victorians’ experience of everyday life in ways that can appear quite similar to the impact made by the technological advancements of postmodernity. Just as in contemporary culture the introduction of the information and development of web and web 2.0 technologies continues to transform communication and information systems at a rapid rate, the Victorians were witness to, and participants in, vast developments in their own communication structure. These included the building of an extensive railway system, the development of the efficient ‘penny post’ and the proliferation of newspapers and journals, all of which produced a saturation of information comparable, in its impact upon everyday life, to the technological developments that have transformed contemporary culture.

This, continuist, approach to constructing the relationship between the Victorians and ourselves is perhaps epitomised by the fascinating work of Matthew Sweet which, he claims, ‘aims to expose the Victorianness of the world in which we live; to demonstrate that the nineteenth century is still out there, ready to be explored’ (Sweet, 2001: xxii). His work ‘liberates’ the Victorians from the ‘utterly false’ stories about the period that have stood in place of the truth and argues that these have been perpetuated because we prefer to think of the Victorians as the ‘figures against whom we have rebelled’, and to suggest otherwise is to undermine one of the ‘founding myths of modernity’ (ibid.: 230-1). His study persuasively argues that there are connections between the Victorians and ourselves, that ‘they built a world for us to live in’ (ibid.). He writes poetically about the effect of continuing to live in Victorian urban spaces, suggesting that ‘there are places where the Victorian past will rush to meet you’, places that are ‘luminous with a sense of the 1890s’ (ibid.: 222). His is an engaging investigation of some lesser known Victorian figures, such as Blondin the acrobat, and offers alternative approaches to features of the Victorian period that often receive bad press today, such as the freak show. Rather than a study of ‘other’ Victorians and their practices, however, Sweet argues that these are more typical of the Victorian period than hitherto imagined. Attempting to debunk various stereotypes about the period, Sweet suggests that Victorian culture was as rich and difficult and complex and pleasurable as our own; that the Victorians shaped our lives and sensibilities in countless unacknowledged ways; that they are still with us, walking our pavements, drinking in our bars, living in our houses, reading our newspapers, inhabiting our bodies. (ibid.: xxiii)

He argues that the Victorians bequeathed to us many cultural features we think of as uniquely ours, such as the theme park and shopping mall, investigative journalism and political spin-doctoring, free education and pornography (ibid.: xi-xii). However, having convincingly established the manifold similarities between Victorian culture and our own, and the ways in which they have undoubtedly shaped us, he goes further, at least rhetorically, to efface any difference altogether. His assertions, above, that the nineteenth century still exists to be explored, and that the Victorians are still with us, which can still, perhaps, be construed as suggesting that there are elements of the Victorian still visible in our otherwise unique culture today, slide into the final, summarising declaration: ‘We are the Victorians. We should love them. We should thank them. We should love them’ (ibid.: 232). Here the risk of continuism is clear: it tends to suppress otherness just as alteritism suppresses continuities. Effectively, this final statement papers over the textured Victorian period he has offered us throughout the rest of his book. Not only are the Victorians coextensive with ourselves, but our attitude toward an era which, by Sweet’s own contention, was multifariously ‘good and bad’, should be surprisingly homogenous. The diverse and multi-layered identity bestowed upon the Victorian era in the preceding pages dissolves into a conflation of the period with our own. In the process our own, contemporary culture is also flattened and rendered stable, even static. We are the Victorians and we should be singularly grateful to them and even love them.