Inventing the Victorians - Softcover

Sweet, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571206638 ISBN 13: 9780571206636

Publisher: Gardners Books, 2002

Synopsis

Suppose that everything we think we know about 'The Victorians' is wrong? That we have persistently misrepresented their culture, perhaps to make ourselves feel more satisfyingly liberal and sophisticated? What if they were much more fun than we ever suspected? As Matthew Sweet shows us in this brilliant study, many of the concepts that strike us as terrifically new - political spin-doctoring, extravagant publicity stunts, hardcore pornography, anxieties about the impact of popular culture upon children - are Victorian inventions. Most of the pleasures that we imagine to be our own, the Victorians enjoyed first: the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the amusement arcade, the crime novel and the sensational newspaper report. They were engaged in a well-nigh continuous search for bigger and better thrills. If Queen Victoria wasn't amused, then she was in a very small minority ...Matthew Sweet's book is an attempt to re-imagine the Victorians; to suggest new ways of looking at received ideas about their culture; to distinguish myth from reality; to generate the possibility of a new relationship between the lives of 19th-century people and our own.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew Sweet presents Night Waves and Freethinking on BBC Radio 3, and is the summer presenter of The Film Programme on Radio Four. He is the author of Inventing the Victorians and Shepperton Babylon, which he adapted as a film for BBC Four. His TV programmes include Silent Britain, A Brief History of Fun, The Age of Excess, Truly, Madly, Cheaply and The Rules of Film Noir.

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From Publishers Weekly

Commonly perceived as stodgy, stern, pious, humorless and deeply repressed, Victorians are frequently invoked in contemporary society as embodiments of everything their more liberated descendants are not. But this perception, Sweet suggests, is far from accurate. Noting that our image of the Victorians is based on a very selective range of materials, Sweet, a British writer, argues that we have almost willfully developed a distorted idea of 19th-century society largely in order to flatter ourselves with the belief that our own age is far more enlightened. Working with a wide-ranging array of documents letters, diaries, newspapers, novels and plays Sweet sets out to prove that the Victorians not only were in some ways more progressive, more sophisticated and less neurotic than we are, they also had a lot more fun than we give them credit for. To that end, he leads readers on a whirlwind tour through the more outr‚ aspects of Victorian life and culture, demonstrating that the 19th century was in many respects as much an era of thrill-seeking, sexual liberation and social upheaval as our own time. While he's arguably as selective in his own source materials and interpretations as are those whose perspective he seeks to debunk, Sweet does paint a more complex picture of the Victorians than we're used to seeing; this is a lively, entertaining trip through a side of 19th-century society most of us are probably unfamiliar with. 16 pages of b&w photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Gardners Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0571206638
• ISBN 13: 9780571206636
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288