The Value of Victorians

Our unedifying temporal arrogance

One of the most prevalent modern shibboleths is the idea that ‘Victorian values’ were a bad thing or simply a case of abject hypocrisy from a society far less enlightened than our own. It’s impossible to watch any modern TV show or film set in the Victorian era without receiving this message. Indeed, the Victorian and even the Edwardian era that immediately followed are now deployed as lazy shorthand for a whole host of things we are supposed to have only one opinion about.

If a modern ‘progressive’ writer, actor, producer or director wants to batter particular loathed groups today-for example men, white Europeans, Christians, straight people or Donald Trump fans-all they have to do to really ram home those points is to present the standard Marxist manufactured view of the 19th and very early 20th centuries.

It’s hard to envisage another era that has been so dominated by hatred of it’s fairly recent past as ours is, and so arrogant and dismissive of things about which it knows so little and has indeed striven rather hard to forget. The average person in the Victorian Age knew, I suspect, a lot more about the era preceding it than we do about the Victorian Age, and what it did know, it knew more accurately. Almost everything our society thinks about the centuries prior to our own is filtered first through fiction, and second through an ideological narrative of sustained self-loathing which is inherently ignorant and barbarous.

Watch any modern TV show set or partly set in the 19th century. The first thing that will strike the objective viewer will probably be something regarding the stunning inaccuracies caused by modern woke casting decisions. Even rural village settings will present us with a roll-call at the United Nations or heart of New York in 2023 racial mix. This will be nothing like an accurate depiction of the time, and will also be used to bring in as many modern thoughts on topics like racism as possible. The casting will be this way to give a deliberate message about today, with no respect or interest in the actual past for what is ostensibly a fiction about that past. There will be a complete contempt for the very notion that a depiction should try to physically reflect what would have been the reality of that time, and this will be doubled by a complete disinterest in any thinking of the time either.

In other words, there will be a supreme laziness about the past and about depicting it. There will be no interest in understanding it, and no interest in accurately portraying it. Black people and Asian and Oriental people will be in places they would not have been, in numbers they would not have been, in occupations they would not have held. And there will always be a weird schizophrenia about whether anyone notices or comments on this. In many instances, people who would realistically have commented on a black face for example in a Victorian or even an earlier Georgian ballroom won’t say a thing. If something is said, it will be said in a modern idiom with a crude modern message, purely to prompt some other character (the one played by an ethnic minority cast member, usually) to give a devastating modern idiom, modern sensibility put-down in reply.

The whole thing will be embarrassingly written in the style of a polemic by an emotional fourteen year old who has been studying the life of Malcolm X under the guidance of a twenty year old with purple hair.

And what it will present about the earlier century will be a jumble of tropes and cliches so worn by over use that they become mere reflex rather than any individual or notable choices of scenery, costume and aesthetic. The view presented, the props used, will be the exact same whether it’s a story about Jack the Ripper, Dracula, David Copperfield or Florence Nightingale, and whether it’s a time hopping episode of Dr Who or a supposedly serious work on The Peterloo Massacre.

In all cases a few very simple prejudices will abound. It will be saying that the period in question was racist, sexist and homophobic, that ethnic minorities were routinely abused (but also could serve as the Chief of Police or as a cruel mill owning magnate or as Queen Victoria without anyone noticing), that everyone was either fabulously wealthy or impossibly poor, that hierarchy was everywhere and that every single rule, expectation and custom made no sense at all to anyone except as a means of oppression. It will pretend that whipping peasants, cutting off their hands or raping their daughters was as easily conducted and as little prone to legal consequence by the gentleman of the 19th century as it was by the Norman conqueror of the 11th century.

It will say that the 19th century was patriarchal, hidebound, inflexible, bigoted and ignorant, but that one could immediately identify the few ‘good people’ of the period by the fact that they would be dressed in rags, incredibly decent and chirpy, and played by an actor whose real name is more likely to be Mohammed than Matthew.

And goodness, whether from Mohammed or another cast member, would consist of sounding an awful lot like the editorial columns and readers letters of The Guardian newspaper, circa 2023. With added, RADA trained feeling, of course.

Virtually all of what I’m describing was on display, for instance, the last time I bothered to book a theater ticket. It was an RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) Dickensian mashup. I recall the performances being lively and energetic, but I also remember that Bob Cratchet’s family managed to have, from memory, an Asian dad, a black mum, and a mix of wildly diverse white and ethnic minority children, all with no explanation of this racial miracle.

We see the same miracle, by the way, not just in the depictions of the schizophrenic super-racially conscious/not racially conscious at all 19th century, but also modern takes on what were originally European medieval analogous fantasy settings such as Westeros, Middle Earth, and whatever the ‘Wheel of Time’ setting is called (Robert Jordan said he thought of the setting as analogous to the 17th century, but it seems considerably earlier from the depictions of farming, fishing and transport in the TV series).

When this manifests in either a fictional fantasy setting or an earlier ‘real’ one, it’s telling us that the writers want to ignore basic biological and historical realities (cultures with slow transport links and an agrarian, feudal system don’t have very mixed populations, and even in very mixed populations a white and black couple do not produce an Oriental baby). The modern message, and the pretext that modern levels of diversity have been the human norm in all circumstances, trumps verisimilitude and basic reason.

Even with more racially and ethnically realistic casting, we’d still be having very modern statements spouted by these supposed inhabitants of earlier or fictional times, since modern writers not only use these fictions as political platforms they also aren’t very good at it. The most simplistic messages on race, gender, sexuality or social structure are thrust into narratives seemingly with no regard for who is saying them, why they would say them at that particularly point, and why a fire-breathing dragon or a mock medieval king or Edgar Allan Poe in 1848 would be impressed with these exclusively 21st century truisms anyway.

What the depiction will never, ever try to do is show a more complex, compelling, interesting, cliche busting depiction of the 19th century. That would destroy the ease with which the 19th century and its ‘wickedness’ stands in for the ‘wicked’ people (such as conservatives who value the past) the leftist writers are attacking today.

But any actual familiarity with the period will tell someone that the cliches are quite often exactly the opposite of what was really going on. The whole of the 19th century and into the early 20th century, for example, witnessed arguably the most rapid, radical, sweeping changes in technology and daily life and individual rights and working conditions and life expectancy and social culture and aesthetics and fashion and everything ever seen up to that point. The Dickensian cliche and the hidebound hierarchy era of film and TV was actually a period of explosive change, not stasis, not oppressed and inflexible rigidity but bewilderingly swift progress.

People who lived in the period were astounded by the changes, particularly in terms of technology. People went from horses, carts and carriages to steamboats, trains, early submarines and early aviation in this sort of time-frame. In the US they went from Wild West frontier towns of tents and prospectors to vast modern cities with street lighting. Journeys that had taken months were reduced to weeks and then, via flight, a single day. Kings were deposed, empires fell, whole nations had their boundaries reshaped, working class men and even women acquired the vote.

And yes, racial diversity increased, but nowhere near to the ridiculous extent or in the biology defying ways now depicted.

In other words the vision we are presented with of the 19th century could hardly be less accurate than it now is, and far more illustrative of our contemporary prejudice and ignorance than it is of any actual prejudice and ignorance in the time being portrayed. It’s a sort of time supremacism at work, telling everyone that our period (a period in which people are actively taught to be more ignorant than they were when they started a university degree) is so much better than the eras that shaped it. And all based on both knowing nothing and wanting to know nothing, all based on shoving our words in past mouths, all built by actively seeking to view the history of the world through a narrow and distorting lens of both an unusually ignorant ideology and a contempt for the past which serves as a founding principle of the attitudes of the present.

Nowhere is this ignorance and unwarranted sense of superiority more evident than in the idea that the Victorians and Edwardians were cruel deniers of progress whereas 21st century Harvard educated gender fluid Democrats or latte sipping London metrosexuals are better, brighter and bolder than any Victorian was. This is people who can barely deal with ordering a coffee without having a breakdown and barely frame an intelligible sentence in their native tongue telling us that they are better than people who spoke 9 languages and discovered the source of the Nile.

Any cursory examination of late 19th century art compared with the random splashes and fecal matter in tins and unmade beds and ‘found’ urinals of modern art explodes the narrative of improvement from then to now. Any awareness of the fact that it was the Victorians who ended the international slave trade and the Victorians who started ending child labor and the Victorians who more and more expanded the vote shames the lazy, unthinking and historically inaccurate idea that there was nothing but snobbery, oppression and exploitation going on in that period.

One of the reasons we know about Victorian sins is because other Victorians were decrying, exposing and ending them. One of the reasons we inherited more rights in everything from the hours we work to the age we begin and end working is that Victorians gave us those rights. We loathe slavery because Victorians were the first modern people to loathe slavery and get rid of it. We respect female equality because Victorians and Edwardians more and more insisted that we should.

And while doing all this at home, while inventing a modernity that made all of us today far more comfortable than they were, with far easier lives than they had, these looked down upon Victorian and Edwardian imperialists were also building roads, schools, hospitals, ports, bridges, and railways all around the globe, bequeathing a vast infrastructure legacy so beneficial and of such worth and utility that much of it is still in use today.

As an American friend of mine has remarked, wherever the British Empire went, it improved. Anyone who really knows the past knows that this statement is largely true, and that the exceptions were almost invariably criticized and agonized over by the Victorians themselves long before they became the 5 minute checklist of old crimes for the woke progressives of today (and usually the only events those people can name from the 19th century).

The legislative record alone is one of things getting better, of real progress. More rights, more representation, more accountability, less corruption….all moving in a positive direction in that period, and all unarguably moving in the opposite direction today.

Most of those who talk about Victorian values (piety, humility, hard work, stoicism, courage, honesty, respect to one’s parents, politeness, self restraint, respectability) with a sneer, who see the Edwardians who ended up dying on battlefields in France and Belgium as simply effete snobs, who have this programmed contempt for the past, themselves present as individuals significantly less worthy, less intelligent, less knowledgeable, less capable of self restraint and self sacrifice, less able to improve their own lives or those of others, less genuinely moral and less useful, productive and decent as human beings, than the ancestor they mock and the generations they despise.

The 21st century adult who sneers at the 19th century quite frequently could not complete the homework assignments given to 10 year olds in the time he or she mocks. It’s instructive to look at old school test papers from the late Victorian and Edwardian period, or even at the kind of clubs and societies miners and factory workers joined in what little spare time they had, or at the drawing books and craft goods produced by children of the period, and then compare all these to what an average adult can do today.

Doing so leads to one conclusion, and it is this:

Pygmies are really not in the best position to spit on giants.