Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet

by Matthew Sweet

"Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, a whirlwind tour thru the soul of the 19th century & a round debunking of assumptions about it. The Victorians have been victims of the "the enormous condescension of posterity," in historian E.P. Thompson's phrase. Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank & over-furnished, when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud in business. We have Victorians pegged-as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical &, worst of all, earnest. How wrong we are, argues this illuminating look at our ancestors. In this, the year of the centenary of Queen Victoria's death, Sweet thinks again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd & by images of unfettered capitalism & grinding poverty. Not only are we wrong about the Victorians, we're indebted to them. Their age & our's remain closely intertwined. They invented the theme part, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel & the sensational newspaper. 21st century smugness about how far we've evolved is misplaced. Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent & less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian; the love that dared not speak its name declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the 1st internat'l cricket match was played between an English & an Australian team composed of aborigines. Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways & the latest conveniences (by 1869, there were image-capable telegraphs; in 1873 a store had a machine that dispensed milk to after-hours' shoppers). The reflection we find in the mirror of the 19th century is our own. We inhabit buildings built by them; some use their sewer system & ride their rails. We dismiss them because they're the age against whom we've defined our own.List of Inventing the VictoriansThe Sensation Seekers The First Picture Show The Boer War, Brought to You by BovrilThe Gutter & the Stars I Knew My Doctor Was A Serial Killer BecauseLast Exit to Shadwell The Archaeology of Good BehaviourCheck Out Your Chintz A Defence of the Freak Show Presumed Innocent Whatever Happened to Patriarchy? Monomaniacs of Love Prince Albert's Prince Albert Liberating the VictoriansNotesAcknowledgementsIndex

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Victorian, 19th Century, Historical, Research, British Literature

Paperback

First published October 20, 2001

About the author

Matthew Sweet is an English journalist, broadcaster, author, and cultural historian. A graduate of the University of Oxford, where he earned a doctorate on Wilkie Collins, he has contributed to The Oxford Companion to English Literature and served as a film and television critic for The Independent on Sunday.
Sweet has written extensively on British cinema, most notably in Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema (2005), a history of Shepperton Studios and the early British film industry, which was later adapted into a television documentary. His other books include Inventing the Victorians (2001), which challenges common misconceptions about the Victorian era, and The West End Front (2011), a history of London’s grand hotels during World War II. He has also explored Cold War intrigue in Operation Chaos (2018).
A prominent broadcaster, Sweet has presented numerous BBC television and radio programmes, including Silent Britain, Checking into History, and British Film Forever. He is the host of BBC Radio 3’s Sound of Cinema, which examines film scores and composers, and has been a regular presenter on Free Thinking (formerly Night Waves). His BBC Radio 4 series The Philosopher's Arms explores philosophical themes before a live audience.
A lifelong Doctor Who fan, Sweet has written several audio dramas and short stories set in the Doctor Who universe and has presented numerous documentaries on the series, including Me, You and Doctor Who for the 50th anniversary. He has also conducted in-depth interviews with key figures from the show for its DVD and Blu-ray releases.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Matthew Sweet's Inventing the Victorians attempts much, and often succeeds; it also stumbles and falls too often on its face. To me, the problem is that Sweet isn't sure whether he wants to be an investigative journalist, an academic historian or a clever and slightly acidic raconteur.

There is much to recommend in this book. It offers insight into the lives, myths and reality of our Victorian ancestors. There is solid research and references to many authors. I do wonder, however, what Sweet would have done without Virginia Woolf's writing. Sweet does break down many of the 21C preconceptions of the staid, boring and excessively repressed Victorians we hold.

On the other hand, Sweet cannot seem to refrain from making some rather caustic, silly or innuendo-embued comments. Do we really have to know how he attended a Monica Lewinsky book signing and how he handed her a cheque in an envelope to test whether she would cash it? Did the chapter really have to end with a comment about cigars? This stepping out from - or would it be into - the colour of sophomoric journalism degraded the overall value and tone of the text.

I would recommend this book to anyone to read. There would, however, be a clear caveat. You can judge much of this book by its cover.

[Stephen Goldenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you believe that the Victorians were so prudish that they covered up their table and piano legs with chintz, that Queen Victoria refused to believe that lesbians existed or that Prince Albert had a ring through his penis, then you need to read this book to put you straight. Matthew Sweet not only debunks these myths but also shows how many aspects (particularly the worst ones) of modern day society had their foundations in the Victorian era. Things such as the worst excesses of advertising and cold calling, the cult of celebrity, the fascination with serial killers and violent crime, the prevalence of paedophilia.
This is well-written popular history with a wealth of fascinating anecdotes many of which will be new even to readers who already have some knowledge of the period. Ultimately, the book is a bit too populist to make a thorough enough case for its main premise - that historians often often promulgate the worst and most basic stereotypes of the previous era to make people of the present day feel better about themselves. He entertainingly shows how this will be done for our present new Elizabethan era in the final chapter.

[Wealhtheow · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sweet sets out to prove that the Victorians were not so different from us. He has a point: they were the beginning of the current industrialized, urban-oriented society we live in today. To this day many of the phrases, assumptions, and phenomena (sex scandals as news, professional sports teams, advertising techniques) from that era remain.
Unfortunately, Sweet is good at research but bad and piecing it together. He lards the text with heaps of anecdotes and snide asides, makes wild assumptions, then contradicts himself only paragraphs later. His logic is faulty at best, and laughably insane at worst. One chapter he maintained that prostitution was not as common as historians think; the very next chapter he talks about how very prevelent prostitution was, and how this proves that Victorians were open minded about sex. He also spends at least 20% of the book talking about current events in a very hack-journalist sort of way: half the chapter on Victoria journalists' use of sex to sell newspapers is actually about Sweet's momentary glimpse of Monica Lewinsky. The chapter closes with a cigar joke. God I hate him.


"Although Virginia Woolf claimed to have found her visit to the movies in January 1915 'very boring,' it is doubtful whether she would have found the freedom to cut and splice the chronology of her narratives without the example of the cinematograph." wtf? don't mess with the Woolf. Almost every chapter contains an attempt to chip away at the Bloomsbury group--luckily Sweet sucks, so it's hard to take his nuggets of cruelety and poor logic seriously.
Note: According to the British Board of Film Censors, in 1912, the list of 22 reasons for which a film might be cut or censored included "medical operations," indecorous dancing," "native customs in foreign lands abhorrent to British ideas," staggering drunkards," or "funerals."

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps no other era in British history is subject to quite as much stereotyping and myth-making as that of the Victorians. We acknowledge the contribution they made to our lives, the legacy they have bequeathed in the forms of bridges, buildings, roads, museums and theatres, the Empire, but to a very large extent we still dismiss what they represented to themselves.

As Matthew Sweet ably points out,,the Victorians are what we define ourselves against. It is in rebelling against Victorian strictures that we have created our supposedly more free, more permissive, more relaxed, modern society. After all, that's how we see the Victorians, isn't it? Stodgy. Uptight. Repressed. Hypocritical. Humourless. Patriarchal. Straight-laced. Everything we aspire not to be be.

But Sweet explodes a lot of these myths, highlighting exhaustively just how wrong much of this actually is. He chronicles Victorian attitudes to sex, crime, drugs, pornography, the family, children, sensational journalism, publicity stunts, homosexuality - much of which appears surprisingly 'modern' to our eyes. When one ventures off the beaten path of historical research, there is an astonishing wealth of material still housed in libraries, museums and archives that demonstrate how often the Victorians were there ahead of us in the search for the new and modern. Perhaps we owe more to the Victorians than just our architecture and infrastructure...

[Jae Jaggart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across this title when I read an interview with John Logan, creator/writer of the TV series Penny Dreadful. He rated it pretty highly and given the incredible sense of authenticity Penny Dreadful (set in the early 1890's possesses - even if the characters aren't real!:) it was a must-read. It proved to be fantastic for the smaller, everyday historical details that fall through the gaps in a lot of non-fic books on the period, no matter how good they are, and gives a great sense of, and tons of info on the everyday life and times – together with the bigger issues and events. It's well written, so if you're interested in the period, you'll enjoy it. It explodes a few cliches of Victorian life we have, and for anyone writing about the times, it's also an excellent reference.

[George Fowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3⭐️-3.5⭐️] Found this very interesting. Would recommend to anyone with keen interest in Victorians. Liked some chapters more than others, found the ones on murder, freak shows, childhood innocence really interesting but was surprised at how engaged I was with a chapter about advertising. The chapters read as very casual essays. Some of the language and references date it as 2001. Occasional annoying interjections of authors own attitude, but overall a good read.

[The_Full_Brontë · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haiku:

Dr. Sweet excels
debunking myth after myth.
People never change.

[Miri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Intriguing, but somewhat problematic as books go. I didn't like the lack of distinctions made between good and bad aspects of victorian society (though the book was aiming not to judge I guess?) I felt that, if this had been a more serious academic book, it would've been forced to investigated its own own claims in more detail and unpack its examples. As it was, it was a popular history book so it ended up keeping the complacency and insider-ish tone of certain academic works, without any of the rigour that excuses that genre. Overall contained some interesting anecdotes but didn't try to unpack the psychological and subjective aspects of these stories with much nuance.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

smasing! engaging, informative and full of interesting anecdotes.

[Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Matthew Sweet is a journalist and not a historian and that comes through in several ways in his work, first he is a more interesting writer than a lot of history writers, not such a stodgy style. But on the downside he has the tendency to link lots of things to how they are today, he also tends to be much more of a biographer than I really like. Still for anyone interested in the Victorian age I'd really recommend this book. He takes a look at what he considers to be the fallacy of Victorian England and tries to correct peoples impressions of the Victorians instead of being stuffy and boring making them seem more colorful and human.

The first couple chapters are a little dull, talking about "sensation seekers", the invention of movies and advertising. It's like he's slowly trying to bring people around to his ideas. However it is on the more controversial chapters that Sweet really shines. The chapter on Opium use was be far the best thing in the book. He looked at the literary references to Opium dens in London and traced them back to only two in one courtyard. After debunking the myth of Victorian Opium dens he then went on to portray a culture where Opium use was still high, where it could be easily obtained from the chemists, and was consumed legally and frequently.

Other interesting chapters that he wrote about were tackling such issues as freak shows, pedophilia, pornography, and sexuality. His dealings with sexuality were a little disappointing though he did have some interesting things to say about Oscar Wilde. The chapter on freaks was interesting. His argument was that the freaks were celebrated for their deformities and in some ways it was much healthier than say, Jerry Springer. But he pointed out that they were some the highest paid entertainers of the time and often were able to retire very comfortably.

One thing that Sweet did repeatedly and that seemed a little strange to me was to complain almost unendingly about the ideas of Virginia Woolfe and the "Bloomsbury set". His argument seemed to be that moderns were responsible for creating the idea of the stuffy Victorian and took them as his particular scapegoats. Conversly he seemed to have an unquestioning admiration for Wilkie Collins who got mentioned a tremendous ammount.

Despite it's short comings it was interesting, insightful and an entertaining read. Not really great history, but a lot of fun.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fast-paced, detailed, overstated and very British, this book attacks common notions about the Victorian era, which is to say the 19th century, in the English-speaking world. It also branches off into diatribes against contemporary social critics and politicians in the UK who either extoll the supposed characteristics of the period (Tories) or decry them (Labour).
This would presumably be a light read for a contemporary English person. For an American not steeped in BBC television it presents some small difficulties, so much be assumed as regards popular culture, then and now.
I picked this up at a church thrift store in Fairfax, California. I'll probably pass it on to an English friend.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m very sympathetic towards Matthew Sweet’s agenda and reasons for writing this book. He is a great debunker by nature and he has his teeth into something real here. We should love the Victorians as ourselves (which might mean not too excessively). But mocking disdain for the Bloomsbury set and sympathetic popularism succeed up to a point - what a priggish snob Virginia Woolf emerges as! It’s often too journalistic (great if you like BBC R4’s The Long View) and the arguments sometimes wander. He clearly mistrusts academia but a bit more theoretical rigour might have aided his thesis.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm interested in history but lack the staying power for a heavy history book: I enjoyed the way this was presented - the book approaches the Victorians through different aspects of social history with a nice balance between detail and overview. I particularly enjoyed the fascination with high wires and thrill seeking: interesting that it seeems to be coming back into fashion!

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Think of everything you know about the Victorian era then ignore it. Sweet sets out to dispel all the stereotypes that have been handed down about our 19th century forebears. He tackles such subjects as entertainment, family life and sexuality. This was very interesting although I didn't agree with all the arguments he put forward.

[Sasha · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read too many books by actual historians of the Victorian era to be impressed by this book by a journalist. The premise - that the Victorian's were not so different from us, were in many ways less pathologized, and in fact shaped our culture, is a solid one; unfortunately, Sweet's main emphasis seems to be on trying to provide shock value ... much like the advertisers and journalists he describes in both the nineteenth century and the current day. He is overly focused on a few stereotypes, which he works to dispel by presenting counter-examples; there is little citation of a range of primary sources to provide an overview of the varied currents of Victorian society, and almost no investigation of how class distinctions impacted attitudes to each "sensation" he investigates. His focus seems to be far too much on criticizing contemporary people rather than understanding Victorian people. He also imposes a lot of modern understandings on Victorian attitudes, even though that's exactly what he claims he is trying to rectify. A good example of this is his extended discourse on how modern science can explain why Victorian ladies were encouraged not to eat cheese at a dinner party ... with no reflection on the fact that most likely, no lady wanted the gentlemen she dined with to see her eating cheese and imagine her being gassy later, or that gassiness in a corset would be extra uncomfortable. Come to think of it, Sweet doesn't discuss corsets at all - which is a real oversight, since the modern association of corsets with societal domination of women is easily disproved by primary sources throughout the Victorian era...

It's not a terrible read (although there is far too much emphasis on pornography), but I'm gravely concerned by how many creatives cite this as their primary sources of research for their books, TV shows, and movies set in the Victorian era. Take everything in this book with a massive grain of salt.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book deconstructing the myths about Victorians created by the 20th Century. It is fascinating to see how the previous century constructed itself in opposition to the Victorian era, creating a distorted / false version of that era while it actually went backward on some topics (such as women for example).

I had mixed feeling about the style, which is a mix of history & journalism. The references to the present are sometimes interesting to illustrate the similarities between the Victorian and us (and thus, how much modernity owns to that period), and participate to make the style more lively and pleasant to read, but they also are sometimes irrelevant (such as the Monica Lewinsky parts).

What I liked about the book is that it enters in depth into historical details of the Victorian era (it might lack, at some times, of a more general analysis), it is a great complement of other History books I have read on this topic.

I regretted the absence of a bibliography. There are footnotes to indicate the sources of some parts of the book, however I was disappointed to find that a few facts did not have footnotes and were thus impossible to check (I realized that as I would have liked to deepen some topics mentioned by the author, but could not find their origin).

But it is overall a pleasant read if you are interested in the Victorian era.

[Margarita · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book back in 2003 and I've attempted to read it on a handful of occasions. While I love the thesis (the Victorians aren't as we stereotypically have understood them to be), I didn't think the actual book did a complete job of tying the information back to the original thesis. While well-researched and chock full of detail, I was left feeling incredibly frustrated. There is no context given; no clear attempt is made to articulate first what these firmly rooted Victorian stereotypes are or why or how they came to be. Without this context, the information shared doesn't actual tie back to any kind of concrete argument; it flounders. Stylistically, the writing is detailed, but dry, and without any tie back to the proposed thesis, I found myself skimming a good chunk of this book.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

One thing kind of weird about this book — so it’s written to dispel the common notions that us modern folk have of the Victorians...but the thing is, the people who are ignorant of the true nature of the nineteenth century are probably not the type of people who are going to pick this book up and read it. Who is most likely going to read a book called inventing the Victorians? People who are already interested in them and therefore already have a more nuanced understanding of them. So a lot of this book felt a little patronizing or know it all-y to me. Like, ‘oh yeah, well did you know that the Victorians didn’t actually do/think/believe _____?’ Yup, I did.

But otherwise some interesting facts in here, exhaustive use of pretty obscure primary sources, and a thoughtful approach to these people and this time I love so much.

[Bea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let's face it- the Victorians get a bad rap. 'Victorian' has come to mean stuffy, prudish, self-important, moralizing, misogynistic, hypocritical and sexually repressed. Matthew Sweet sets out to show as that, actually, the Victorians were a lot more varied and complicated than all that. For the most part he makes his argument convincingly. In a few areas I felt he was overreaching, or didn't offer wide enough evidence. Overall, though, it was a good read and backs up my long held belief that people, no matter what era they lived in, are just people. Rather than hate the Victorians, Sweet strives to strives to show us that they are a lot more like us than we realize.

[Aaron Eames · Rating 4 out of 5]

A welcome corrective to the conflation of the diverse, dynamic culture of the nineteenth century with the 1-D definition of all things starchy and repressed suggested by the adjective ‘Victorian’. Sweet, sweeping the subjects of sex, the cinema, the freak show, and advertising, repeatedly overturns our received notions. While his journalist’s eye occasionally settles too easily on the sensational (he surely cannot have meant to imply that Oscar Wilde willingly allowed his name to be used on an advert for "Madame Fontaine’s Bosom Beautifier"), Sweet has produced a thoroughly-researched and elegantly iconoclastic exposé of our misapprehensions about tophatted history.

[Paula · Rating 1 out of 5]

All I can say is that I was not sure if this book was joking or not. Really disturbing is the fact that most of his sources are secondary and really recent. Also, the "Presumed Innocent" chapter I just couldn't believe...if I understood it correctly it sounded like it was advocating the intimate courtship of very young girls with full grown men! Admittedly I read this after I heard him rip apart another book from that era, and now I know why he did...it debunks his fantasy view of the Victorian Period. I will never say don't read a book, that would be censorship, but definitely be ready, this one is quite unsettling for those who live in reality and no just a little bit about history.

[Kirstin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
If you're at all interested in the era, this piece is definitely worth a read. It would be neat to have a second edition released as well, as this retrospective is pushing twenty years old. 😱 Then perhaps Matthew Sweet could remedy the fact that he uses the phrase sex workers literally once, and prostitute about eighty times, and while an entire chapter of the book is dedicated to homosexuality in the era, it only devotes all of two sentences to lesbianism. Also, the book felt very really cut down at times, so maybe with a new edition, readers could get an even more thorough look into Victorian Britain.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t necessarily love the “everything we know is wrong!” vibe (some of it we DID know was wrong), but I did appreciate this argument’s connection to/ as a denouncement of political manipulation of the Victorian narrative by Thatcherian regimes.

I actually learned a lot, including the fact that Asians were elected to Parliament during the Victorian era. The Victorians & Race is something I’m very interested in since we never discussed it in any of my twenty+ Victorian classes, with the exception of Heathcliff in WUTHERING HEIGHTS (and even that was about a 5 second conversation).

[Holly Katz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book thirteen of 2023.
I don’t remember in which of my previously read books this one was mentioned, but of course I jumped at the possibility of looking at the seemingly repressed Victorians from a different angle. Matthew Sweet makes the case that they were much more open-minded and progressive than we give them credit for, and illustrates this with lots and lots of colourful examples.
I’m not wholly convinced and expect the truth to be somewhere in the middle, but it was entertaining and instructional none the less, although I take some slight issue with some of his flippancy.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can you write a work of history that is both exhaustive yet concise? Matthew Sweet certainly tries, and the result manages to be interesting, fascinating, funny & wistful. Reading it through from cover to cover can feel like Victorian overload; much better to dip into particular chapters, which cover a range of topics. Sweet manages to gently question everything you think you knew about the denizens of the 19th century; a worthy & entertaining voyage of discovery and scholarship.

[Greg Huber · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and engaging look into how little we really know about the Victorians. Stuck-up they were not; In fact, those dirty birds were salacious and just as fascinating with modern technology as we are. In some cases, we're pretty much stuck on the same moving pictures. Great way to dispel some of those notions kicking around with your last history class and a LOT more amusing than a textbook. Keeping this one on the display shelf. =)

[Patrizia Gallo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting facts and anecdotes here, but I think the way of telling them was not my cup of tea
The first chapters above all where kinda like info dumping of names and dates, little else to make them really interesting.
As I said, not my cup of the, just here and there there was something like social commentary about the whys which was what I was looking for from the start.
I call it a missed opportunity.

[Holley Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this - not the standard stuff at all. Sweet lifts the lid on music halls, orphans, medicine, murder, newspapers, pornography, publicity, circuses - and other more 'social history' corners of Victoriana that don't always get a look in. Not at all what we think we already know about our great great grandparents!

[April-Jane Rowan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is all about busting the myth that the Victorians were more straight laced than we are today. It shows how many things we take for granted started in that era. Like sensational news reports, pornographic photography and true crime memoirs to name a few.
While this wasn't a perfect read for me I still enjoyed having all this information in one book for reference.

[Megan Gilchrist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting take on the impact of Victorian society on our society today, and how we perceive and interpret the impact of the past. I enjoyed the book overall, but found the last few chapters especially a bit disjointed. Overall, an interesting read.