Contradictions of an era

The Victorians

A.N. Wilson

W.W. Norton: 724 pp., $35

The title character in Kingsley Amis’ still-stinging “Lucky Jim” describes his professor’s wife as the kind of person who admires books on the French written by Englishmen. Perhaps there should also be a category for people who confirm their prejudices by reading books on the past written by vividly opinionated, widely but superficially informed, rambling, fussy, robustly simple-minded, rancorous, articulate amateurs. If not, if this category is unpopulated, bad luck to A.N. Wilson and his lengthy twiddling with the past called “The Victorians.” It is not a book without rewards for those willing to search, but I think you would receive more pleasure from mastering pingpong and entering tournaments.

Wilson’s plan is attractive enough: He writes as an entertainer, saying he would not dream of rivaling professional historians. He has devised what he calls, after G.M. Young’s 1936 classic, “a portrait of an age.” Deliberately quirky in his choice of subjects, Wilson sneaks up on the Victorians, presenting such oddities as hairdressing and spiritualism, children’s literature and funerals, even the queen’s libido -- “she was highly sexed.”

Still, a good 95% of this long book is given over to standard stuff: Little anecdotes, politics (with a very small “p”), chronicles of events and judgments on well-known people. There are 43 short chapters, suitable for bathroom reading, grouped in decade-by-decade clumps, running from 1830 to 1900. All too many of them either drive very poorly over old ground or stop off with forgotten figures and events without giving us a context for understanding them. Wilson has storytelling gifts, but here they are put in the service of a project that demands, even as popular history, more than the gift of gab.

His thesis is that the Victorians had an elastic ability to live with contradictions, even in the midst of blinding change. Simple-minded and judgmental, we miss all that. Wilson, “while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense[s] them judging us.” So far, so self-congratulatory, but he repeatedly sets up straw men -- one of which is a link between British imperialism and repressed homosexuality -- only to offer fake correctives to opinions no one would hold anyhow. He caps this trick with irritating little lectures: “It is easy for those who come in after time to say what is wrong with a society, or a country, not their own.”

By such moves, Wilson clears the way for private crotchets, vigorously blunt and baseless judgments: John Ruskin is “the greatest art critic of the age (or any age)”; Wagner “a genius of incomparable power”; the Irish people have no quarrel with the English people (if they only knew) but simply with the English government; India would never have been colonized without the massive “consent” of the inhabitants.

Granted, the idea that the Victorians could live comfortably with contradictions is engaging. When Wilson leaves it there, he is usually inoffensive; but he seldom leaves it there. His casual work has revisionist ambitions, directed toward returning history to no-nonsense solidity, where things are, by George, what they seem -- what? In discussing Victorian institutional cruelty (imperialism, industrial horrors), for instance, he says, with oomph, “even in the midst of the abuses, there was a significant number of people behaving benevolently.” He calls this benevolent group “another Britain,” never imagining that the rapacity existed in a symbiotic relationship with charity where, as today, dribbles of giving provide the lie needed by capitalists with lots to gain and no impulse to give more than would fill the odd pocket or two.

Perhaps there is such a thing as accepting things a little too generously at face value. On the other hand, I don’t mind Wilson holding forth on anything under the sun and am tickled when he starts snarling at how uneducated the current queen is, how modern Britain is “a place where nothing quite works properly,” how modern popular journalism is “prurient, self-righteous, spiteful, and pompous.” But it is a weak compliment to say a writer is fun only when he forgets his subject.

And that’s neither fair nor quite true, though one could say that, even within his subject, he is worth attending to only when he forgets his blather about “balance” and reminders that the past is a strange place. Wilson rests his claim to sophistication on the oft-used formula: A is true but so is B, and the Victorians liked it that way. Tiresome stuff, and that’s too bad, because he can write terrific angry prose, almost all of it generated by his quite ahistorical fury at Victorian inhumanity.

Take this: “An Englishman protecting his grossly selfish way of life with a huge apparatus of police and military, prepared to gun down the starving, is maintaining law and order. An Irishman retaliating is a terrorist.” On the Crimean War, he is similarly muscular: “If a plague-ridden army commanded by whiskery, bottle-nosed old roues made unlikely material for heroic literature, the public was perfectly prepared to hear and see what it chose.” “[They were] loud in their advocacy of the abolitionist cause,” he writes of British abolitionists, “but only after they had made millions out of a system which had depended ... on American slave labour to harvest, English child labour to manufacture, cheap cotton goods.”

Wilson is also entertaining when he turns to oddities, quoting “The Hairdresser’s Journal,” for instance, on the rampaging street vandals “who would set upon young women, sheer them” and run. Equally arresting, in a Jerry Springer sort of way, are his pages on the development of cigarette smoking and on Victorian funerals, where what today “would appear extravagant for the obsequies of a head of state, were matters of routine, when burying a grocer or doctor.”

But such gems are rare. Wilson is adequate when discussing the surface of political history. The rest is best left unread. He routinely dismisses what most scholars (and, from all we can tell, most Victorians) might regard as serious: the Tractarian controversies, he decides, are “Lilliputian”; “Marx was wrong,” he intones, “to consider the proletariat to be the equivalent of a slave class”; Lewis Carroll was “a dry old stick of a man” who “did not really have sympathy for children at all”; Thomas Huxley was “a materialist Don Quixote tilting at religious windmills.”

His views on science are trivial, which is a considerable weakness in an age in which science entered so centrally into public life. He treats sexuality with a prudishness the Victorians themselves would have found hilarious, telling us that some novels “exude unwholesome sexual feelings,” a phrase so prissy one wishes Gilbert and Sullivan could have worked on it. Freud is not mentioned, apart from a couple of wisecracks, and Darwin is seen as nothing but a Malthusian. The literary criticism is in the best tradition of sneering hammerheadedness: All modern literary critics strain to understand texts like Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” when it is plainly and “actually” about self-indulgence.

Wilson’s ardent advocacy of common sense surfaces in his strangely passionate championing of Charles Kingsley, whose belief that the slogan “God is love” reconciled science and religion Wilson finds telling. He even backs Kingsley in what everyone else has seen as an absurdly one-sided battle with John Henry Newman. Kingsley, Wilson says, was “thinking about larger issues.” Yes, one wants to say, but was he thinking well? He admires Kingsley’s “straightforwardness,” which makes one believe he would find a way to declare Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura the winner in a debate with, say, Kierkegaard.

When Wilson does find an idea he’s proud of, he tends to strangle it. In discussing Africa, Fabianist socialism and virtually every liberal reform movement, he offers as his bottom line the idea that the brutalizers and the reformers share a patronizing view of the oppressed and want to improve not so much their conditions as them. In such moments he reminds one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ comic portrait of the Robert Browning type of Englishman, rising from the table, mouth full of bread and cheese, pounding the board and sputtering, “Let’s have no more damned nonsense!” Who can deny that a quirky, undisciplined, theoretically ignorant work might still command our attention were it presided over by a rare and magisterial mind? But here it ain’t.