Victorian past

In his TLS review of Andrew Sanders’s In the Olden Time: Victorians and the British Past, AN Wilson suggests that Dickens was representative of his age in his “open hatred of the post, and his perky lower-middle-class joy in nowadays.”

Not all Victorians shared Dickens’s progressivism: “Ruskin deplored Dickens’s anti-historicism, seeing him as ‘a pure modernist – a leader of the steam-whistle party par excellence – and he had no understanding of any power of antiquity except a sort of jackdaw sentiment for cathedral towers.’ Yet Ruskin himself, though half-persuaded by Cobbett that pre-Reformation England was more justly ordered than the world of the new rich who despoiled the monasteries, would no more have wanted to live in the Middle Ages than would Dickens.”

One marker of the Victorian attitude to the past is their willingness to clear out old buildings to make way for new. Wilson makes the arresting observation that “They breezily and shamelessly destroyed more fine Wren churches in the City of London than did Hitler.” And he provides a list:

“St George Botolph Lane, St Dionis Backchurch, St Bartholomew Exchange, St Benet Gracechurch, St Olave, Old Jewry, St Michael Wood Street and many others all went to make room for banks or railway stations.”

Even Pugin doesn’t really provide counter-evidence: “Pugin, in this respect, with his popularizing of fake medieval Gothic, and his bemoaning of Georgian architecture, had scarcely more interest in the real past, with its patina of changing experience, than had Dickens.”

The Victorians were a lot like us, but Wilson locates a difference in the fact that “we fool ourselves, whereas they were quite blatant about recreating a past they must have known to be invented.” Victorian uses of Shakespeare serve as an example: “They were less interested in the plays, or the man of the theatre, than they were in his works as poems to be read, fantasies to be superimposed on their own generation, and fleshed out by Pre-Raphaelite ‘stunners’ or young Victorian men in obvious fancy dress . . . .Sanders meditates fruitfully on the fact that the Victorians treated Shakespearean plays as food for the imagination. Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ tellingly reveals a moment in Hamlet which in the play happens offstage [though narrated vividly, in a painterly way, by Gertrude – PJL], rather as Tennyson made a poem about the fate of Mariana in her Moated Grange – another offstage moment, this time from Measure for Measure.”

The one fault that Wilson finds in the book is the lack of attention to Scott: “Scott was, in many senses, the inventor of the British past as far as the Victorians were concerned. Before him, it had simply not been there. Newman acknowledged the influence of Scott on his boyhood imagination, a fact which helped fashion the neo-medievalism of the so-called Catholic Revival of the 1830s. Any of the Gothic Revival architects would similarly have acknowledged their debt to Scott. For Ruskin, Scott was king.”

That is a paragraph worth unpacking in a short monograph.