[HN Gopher] How did the Victorians become a reference point for ...
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How did the Victorians become a reference point for joyless
prudery?
Author : apollinaire
Score : 50 points
Date : 2022-04-03 04:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| I recommend reading "The World of Yesterday" by Stefan Zweig.
|
| A remarkable book for seeing the transformation from the
| Victorian era into modern day.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| joyless prudes who ran military taxation across the entire globe.
| Perhaps they ran from the excess of Rome, while emphasizing the
| exhortatian to power? Military and civil administration is best
| done without "joy" right, to maximize other qualities?
|
| A level deeper past this cynical snark - many civiliations have
| embraced "joy", arts, culture, outsiders, wisdom, mystical
| things.. all sorts of variations.. but somehow the public
| attention is called back to the centers of military power, and
| their "trouble" .. Let's call the Emporer without clothes.. the
| military and economic might of the Victorians were a marvel at
| the level of Rome itself, and, what cost? what human cost..
| [deleted]
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I think Edwardians should be grouped in with them. This is the
| era when, in the USA at least, we created all the myths we teach
| our kids and decided how people in our society should act. So for
| example:
|
| How to celebrate Christmas? Just the way implied in "Night Before
| Christmas".
|
| How should a good college look? Gothic!
|
| How should women act? Send them to "finishing school".
|
| What was George Washington like? He never told a lie.
|
| etc.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I have read "Eminent Victorians", but might I suggest that some
| of the people described there are best shown in "Tom Brown's
| Schooldays" and the "Flashman" novels? Novels always seem closer
| to history, somehow, and it's a shame that Fraser never worked
| the cardinal into his tapestry.
| acabal wrote:
| 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-vi...)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Were 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.
| ggm wrote:
| Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens discusses this, and the
| wonderful dissonance we see between this (often Edwardian
| influenced) view of late Victorian strictures and the torrid
| reality. As long as your mistress stayed away from the bright
| lights, you could dally all day long.
|
| The regency was wonderful. Bridgerton is fantasy but what really
| happened is equally bizarre. Victorian moral rectitude Was a
| reaction to a more simple, honest regency view of morals.
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| Was just reading Max Weber's The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit
| of Capitalism where he investigates the development of modern
| capitalism and its complex relationship with different Christian
| denominations (especially between the Catholics and Protestants).
| On the general (mis)understanding of Protestantism (as in 1920s)
| he writes:
|
| > ...that the spirit of hard work, of progress, or whatever else
| it may be called, the awakening of which one is inclined to
| ascribe to Protestantism, must not be understood, as there is a
| tendency to do, as joy of living nor in any other sense as
| connected with the Enlightenment. The old Protestantism of
| Luther, Calvin, Knox, Voet, had precious little to do with what
| to-day is called progress.
|
| And with regards to the English:
|
| > Montesquieu says (Esprit des Lois, Book XX, chap. 7) of the
| English that they "had progressed the farthest of all peoples of
| the world in three important things: in piety, in commerce, and
| in freedom"
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| From an English perspective I have to say the average perception
| of Victorians is more about social inequality and child abuse.
| Images of workhouses and gruel, small boys being beasted up
| chimneys, toothless 14 year-old "match girls" wandering the night
| calling "Blow ya for a penny guv".
|
| Really, immodestly clothed piano legs showing too much ankle pale
| in comparison to Dickensian tales of ruffians, rats and cockneys.
|
| But then TFA is really saying the same as I am, that both
| mythologies are constructed in opposition to one another, and in
| hindsight that all cultures ('Modernity' in this case) construct
| themseves in relation to something else - something they are
| _not_.
|
| Everybody's clever nowadays. And so terribly modern.
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