Just How ‘Victorian’ Were the Victorians?

In his very personal “My German Question,” Peter Gay showed how his family, German middle-class Jews, thrived in the 1930s; how, between occasional tremors, they kept on thriving for a while even after Hitler took power; and how, barely in time, a Cuban visa saved them from perdition. The book is so resonant because its protagonists are not sequestered in some ghetto of hallowed prey. The author shares their humanity with ours, a poignant mix of heart and hope and fallibility.

His memoir was a piece of moonlighting. After all, Gay’s day job is that of eminent historian. But in his case (not the first such, of course) autobiographical circumstance seems to animate professional impulse. That would apply especially to Gay’s massive work “The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud.” His five-volume study grants a sort of Cuban visa to the entire Western middle class, thriving through its Victorian heyday to the brink of World War I and the precipices of the psychoanalyzed unconscious.

But what Gay saves the Victorians from in that study is not history but other historians; specifically, as he puts it, from “post-modern merchants of subjectivism.” He appears to consider them intellectual janissaries loosed by the counterculture to assassinate the values of the establishment’s progenitor, namely the 19th century bourgeoisie. Gay’s attempt at image rehab was exhaustively detailed and industriously nuanced. He mined many social labyrinths and visited far-flung byways to acquit the Victorians, not without tactical reservations, of the charge of being repressed materialistic hypocrites. In the end, he pronounced their character to be the noble, stalwart, if somewhat sooty, engine of progress.

It’s an argument heroic not only in scope but in valor. Gay is a tireless champion of so difficult a cause. Certainly he produced an imposing reference work, no matter how a reader might judge its conclusions. “Schnitzler’s Century” is like a shorter, slighter echo of Gay’s brave manifesto of redemption. But Gay protests in the preface that “Schnitzler’s Century” is not “merely a Reader’s Digest condensation of the bulky texts that preceded it” because he added new material and “complicated” his previous reinterpretation of Victorian culture.

True, the fine patina of his style is much closer to, say, Thomas Babington Macaulay than to pop magazines. But his additions only add without deepening. He cites as new evidence of the Victorian age’s vitality and energy, for example, the instructions in the English Woman’s Domestic Magazine on how to kill a turtle for turtle soup. Does this prove that the Victorian lady was much more of an unfettered, free sensuous spirit than previously thought? I just can’t summon enough Freudian ingenuity to follow him here.

As for the “complications,” Gay’s chief one is implicit in the title. The Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler had a teenage confrontation with his father when Schnitzler senior read his son’s diary without permission. Gay returns to the episode again and again as a thematic refrain encompassing the Victorian age. The young Schnitzler would develop into a virtuoso of the dramaturgy of fin de siecle role-playing. For Gay, Schnitzler is “a credible and resourceful witness to the middle-class world” whose life adds a narrative thread to his book, which he describes as the “biography of a class.” Yet this single incident with his father, tacked on as insistent, ponderous ostinato, strikes no organic roots and so fails to inspirit Gay’s undertaking.

What remains, then? The iteration of Gay’s plea that the Victorians have not only been unjustly charged with prissiness but have also contributed more to society through cultural investments than they ever inflicted with their relentless materialism. Well, let me quote on this subject a Victorian contemporary who formed his opinion not through scholarly inference, as Gay does here, but by direct, firsthand observation during a visit to 19th century England:

“There should be a temperance in making cloth as well as in eating. A man should not be a silkworm nor a nation a tent of caterpillars. The robust rural Saxon degenerates in the mills to the Leicester stockingers, to the imbecile Manchester spinner--far on the way to be spiders and needles.... In true England all is false and forged.... In view of these injuries some compensation has been attempted in England. A part of the money earned returns to the brain to buy schools, libraries, bishops, astronomers, chemists, artists with; and part to repair the wrongs of intemperate weaving by hospitals, savings banks, Mechanics Institutes, public grounds and other charities and amenities. But the antidotes are frighteningly inadequate, and the evil requires a deeper cure....”

Writing this in his “English Traits,” Ralph Waldo Emerson is but one in a chorus of eyewitnesses of comparable credentials and lamentations who beg to differ. “Gentlemen of England,” John Ruskin importuned, “if you would ever have your country breathe the pure air of heaven again and receive a soul into her body instead of rotting into a carcase ... you must teach her that all the true greatness she ever had, she won while her fields were green and her faces ruddy....” The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is another:

... all is seared with trade; trade; bleared, smeared with toil

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell; the soil

is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod ...

As well as Victoria’s poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson:

... why are we weighed upon with heaviness,

and utterly consumed with sharp distress,

while all things else have rest from weariness?

All things have rest; why should we toil alone,

we only toil, who are the first of things,

and make perpetual moan,

still from one sorrow to another thrown ... .

And William Wordsworth:

The World is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in nature that is ours...

For this, for everything we are out of tune ...

Gay records Matthew Arnold’s plaint (“this strange disease of modern life, / With its sick hurry, its divided aims ... “) along with John Stuart Mill’s shudder over “the sabbathless pursuit of wealth.” But for him, such grousing by these writers only takes “a part for the whole, casualties for the norm.” He speculates that many of the negative descriptions of the Victorian soul might be a consequence simply of “the unprecedented attention that physicians were paying to female complaints,” which “... made neurasthenia more eye-catching than before.”

He also attributes the dark moods of that era to that historical constant (and irritant) known as change. It is of course the quality of the change that largely defines the quality of an era. Gay hurries through this paramount issue in a few pages in which the benefits of the Victorian transition receive sharper focus than its harms.

His coda acclaims the Victorian age as “an admirable century” whereas “one thinks back on the 20th century with horror.” So swiftly, so smoothly, then, was the horrible sired by the admirable? There is some novel demonology here. There is also much competent hagiography. Only the historiography is wanting.