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Book Review: Inventing the Victorians
Jan. 15th, 2021 02:51 pmMatthew Sweet’s Inventing the Victorians: What We Think We Know about Them and Why We’re Wrong is actually a reread, or at least a partial reread. At any rate, in high school I read the chapter about early motion pictures often enough to remember Sweet’s meditation about Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Thomas Hardy sitting in movie theaters in their twilight years, “eating their vanilla ice cream with little wooden spoons; feeling pleased that the movies have decided to launch a new publicity campaign for the novels they wrote thirty, forty or fifty years before; watching their work on the screen before them, transfigured into light.”
I was perfectly enchanted by the idea of eating vanilla ice cream with a little wooden spoon while watching a movie in the theater. Truly theatrical refreshments have gone downhill.
However, the real reason I got the book again was the chapter on homosexuality, which includes a reference to a passionate male friendship in a Dickens novel (Our Mutual Friend) with an exceedingly lively quote about how much they love each other - or so I thought, only I couldn’t find it in Our Mutual Friend, on account of how its actually in Wilkie Collins Armadale (quoted directly thereafter the passage about Dickens, so you can see how my memory confused the two). The eponymous Armadale’s friend cries,
“I do love him! It will come out of me; I can’t keep it back. I love the very ground he treads on! I would give my life—yes, the life that is precious to me now, because his kindness has made it a happy one—I tell you I would give my life—”
...I intended to read the novel once I ascertained which novel that quote came from, but Armadale is 1000+ pages long and as much as I love that kind of overheated Victorian passion, I’m not sure I’m a thousand pages interested.
I did, however, follow Sweet’s quotes from The Pearl (a Victorian porn magazine) back to their source, now helpfully archived on Wikisource, and you guys, Victorian porn is WILD. If anything Sweet undersold the wildness; he notes that the male characters occasionally have sex with each other, “as a sort of kinky side salad or anticipatory hors d’oeurve to more central acts of carnality with women,” but he did not mention that the women in these same stories are all having sex with each other, too. So you’ll have sequences where a chap who is just so overcome by the manly vigor of his friend’s erection that he just has to blow him then and there, and then they both go to have an orgy with a quartet of girls who have been fondling each other in the meantime.
(In The Sins of the City of the Plain - available on gutenberg.org - which is famous as an early example of homosexual porn, the rent boy Jack Saul occasionally has sex with women, in the same “kinky side salad/anticipatory hors d’oeurve” way that the male characters in other Victorian porn have sex with men.)
The basic assumption seems to be that you, the smutty Victorian porn reader, find everything hot - or else that each individual story needs to offer up a sort of porn smorgasbord, so that any reader can find something that appeals to them, and the readers who aren’t into incest, flagellation, ravishment, etc, are just going to skim till they get to the bits they like again.
I’ve seen a number of theories about why Victorian legislators didn’t outlaw lesbian sex - it occurs to me only as I type that this question rests on the very twentieth-century assumption that they wanted to, or at least would have wanted to if they knew lesbian sex existed, which many historians dourly assume they did not. Post-Pearl, my theory now is that at least a sizable minority of the PMs did know, and never tried to outlaw it because they thought it was super hot.
I was perfectly enchanted by the idea of eating vanilla ice cream with a little wooden spoon while watching a movie in the theater. Truly theatrical refreshments have gone downhill.
However, the real reason I got the book again was the chapter on homosexuality, which includes a reference to a passionate male friendship in a Dickens novel (Our Mutual Friend) with an exceedingly lively quote about how much they love each other - or so I thought, only I couldn’t find it in Our Mutual Friend, on account of how its actually in Wilkie Collins Armadale (quoted directly thereafter the passage about Dickens, so you can see how my memory confused the two). The eponymous Armadale’s friend cries,
“I do love him! It will come out of me; I can’t keep it back. I love the very ground he treads on! I would give my life—yes, the life that is precious to me now, because his kindness has made it a happy one—I tell you I would give my life—”
...I intended to read the novel once I ascertained which novel that quote came from, but Armadale is 1000+ pages long and as much as I love that kind of overheated Victorian passion, I’m not sure I’m a thousand pages interested.
I did, however, follow Sweet’s quotes from The Pearl (a Victorian porn magazine) back to their source, now helpfully archived on Wikisource, and you guys, Victorian porn is WILD. If anything Sweet undersold the wildness; he notes that the male characters occasionally have sex with each other, “as a sort of kinky side salad or anticipatory hors d’oeurve to more central acts of carnality with women,” but he did not mention that the women in these same stories are all having sex with each other, too. So you’ll have sequences where a chap who is just so overcome by the manly vigor of his friend’s erection that he just has to blow him then and there, and then they both go to have an orgy with a quartet of girls who have been fondling each other in the meantime.
(In The Sins of the City of the Plain - available on gutenberg.org - which is famous as an early example of homosexual porn, the rent boy Jack Saul occasionally has sex with women, in the same “kinky side salad/anticipatory hors d’oeurve” way that the male characters in other Victorian porn have sex with men.)
The basic assumption seems to be that you, the smutty Victorian porn reader, find everything hot - or else that each individual story needs to offer up a sort of porn smorgasbord, so that any reader can find something that appeals to them, and the readers who aren’t into incest, flagellation, ravishment, etc, are just going to skim till they get to the bits they like again.
I’ve seen a number of theories about why Victorian legislators didn’t outlaw lesbian sex - it occurs to me only as I type that this question rests on the very twentieth-century assumption that they wanted to, or at least would have wanted to if they knew lesbian sex existed, which many historians dourly assume they did not. Post-Pearl, my theory now is that at least a sizable minority of the PMs did know, and never tried to outlaw it because they thought it was super hot.
