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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 befo
by acabal 5y ago
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-victorians https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lytton-strachey/eminent-vi...)
- nonrandomstring 5y ago> 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.
- zozbot234 5y agoWere 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.
- pram 5y agoCalling 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.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoI 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.
- simulate-me 5y agoIt’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.
- ashtonkem 5y agoYou 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.
- truffdog 5y agoMy 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.
- rnd0 5y ago>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.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> 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.