Who were the Victorians?

- Difficult not to agree with Marxist historians who foreground this importance of classes

- Applied in a variety of ways

- Politically charged - is it all about celebrating Victoria?

- The term "Victorian" is therefore not straightforward" p.4

- 1837-1901

- Backlash and ridicule in the Edwardian period

- Victorians demonstrated their murdunity by having no links with the past

- Edwardians felt the Victorians led repressed life

- We live in the houses the Victorians built, our cities are often shaped by Victorian ideas of design and usage

- Difficult to define what a "Victorian" is - convenient shorthand

- No agreement as to when it begins and ends

- Did it end in 1901, 1914 or 1960

- Richard Price - nothing necessarily distinct about the Victorian period - merely a continuation of earlier trends - argues that importance of the "long eighteenth century"

- Three phases:
1. Early Victorian, 1830-1848
2. Mid-Victorian, 1848-1867
3. Late Victorian, 1867-1901

- Shift from Victorian to Edwardian = important

- The dates could change in the future

- 'we should regard the word as an invitation to think deeply about the nineteenth century rather than as a definitive statement about it'

- Victorian studies characterised by interdisciplinary approaches

- 'academic discussion had never been totally unrelated to the wider public interest in the Victorians' p.37

- Victorians viewed with 'disdain and contempt' fashionable to heap scorn on the Victorians from 1890s onwards - especially from literal to modernism

- Halevy - French historian, developed liberal - left analysis of 19th Century - part of group resisting "celebratory" Victorian histories

- Shaped initial interpretations of the Victorians

- Victorians painted as repressed, "controlled" beings who were "tormented by the demands of the libido" pg 8

- Bloomsbury group - liberal and bohemian lifestyle

- Anti-Victorianism the order of the day

- Victorians a source of admiration?

- Much to learn from their example of hard work and self-sacrifice - Industrial Revolution especially impressive

- Post-war Britain governed by 'Victorians'

- 1950s Britain - a class society

- 1951 festival of Britain - Echo's Great Exhibition - a cultural dialogue was established between the post war present and the Victorian past p.13

- Shift in the way Victorians understood - cultural explanations increasingly prized - less emphasis on class and social structure

- Increased emphasis placed on historical analysis that foregrounded the importance of Gender, Imperialism, Science, Crime, Religion etc

- Religious census 1851: nonconformity almost as strong as Anglican church attendance among working classes

- Yet, Brown sceptical of the idea that urbanisation led to secularisation - builds on Cox's "diffusive Christianity" so religiosity outside church

- Religion adapted and changes as urbanisation gathered pace, Brown argues that "modernity" should not be exposed to secularisation  

- Idea of separate spheres v. important in women's & gender history

- Davidoff and Hall argue that gender was central to the making of the English middle class

- Family Fortunes one of the first "gender" histories, based on case studies of Essex and Birmingham middle-class family life

- New patterns of social behaviour that emphasised seperate spheres eps. religious rivals  

- Historical processes denied refashioned as social reforms 

- Prostitute seen as "gateway" to criminal underworld 

- "Fallen woman" - outside of patriarchy?

- Challenging public vs private - a public form of sexuality - sexuality as a commodity 

- Nead: increased visibility of prostitutes seen as part of British imperial "decline"

- 'Prostitution was defined as the most threatening manifestation of moral degradation and was regarded as a meta-system which could erode and destroy the nation' p.349

- Victorians feared sexuality - but perversely drawn towards it? (Freud) prostitutes problematic because contributed to growing number of women in public spaces

- Walkowitz - 1880s onwards - moral panics relating to sexual danger

- 1888 "Jack the Ripper" killed at least six prostitutes - "Ripperology" - conspiracy theories/morbid fascination. Walkowitz writing in shadow of "Yorkshire Ripper", Peter Sutcliffe - reaction against sensationalist writings - not trying to uncover identity of Ripper - rather what the killings mean - argues that they were an attack on the presence of women in the public sphere

- Attack on working classes? Was the Ripper a doctor? (Precision of Mutilation)