Book Review: Inventing the Victorians

[osprey_archer]

Matthew 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.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

Oh, Armadale's great (and it's definitely not 1000+ pages, even though it is long - more like 400-600 without going to check - what edition were you looking at?!) - it is well worth a read. Wilkie Collins generally is, and Armadale manages to have more people of the same name than any book should, for reasons, and also Lydia Gwilt, who would be worth it even if it were 1000+ pages.

But I do tend to love Wilkie Collins, it's true.

[legionseagle]

Several of whom swap names randomly in the middle! Armadale is wonderful. And, yes, Lydia Gwilt.

[osprey_archer]

I may have Blue Screen of Deathed at the actual page count and simply remembered it as Very Long. However, it has occurred to me that this would be a good year to read some Very Long books (now that the library is doing curbside-only pickup, I have LOTS of time to read at work), so if I'm going to tackle Armadale now is the time.

I've also meant to read The Woman in White for aaaages... Not sure why I didn't get on that after I read The Moonstone, but so it goes.

[thisbluespirit]

I love Wilkie Collins, so I would just say, yes, yes, also The Woman in White (Marian = ♥) and No Name. But Armadale is good fun - it takes a while to get going (you know these Victorian authors) but when it does it is great. And you will then understand how complicated a statement this is: The eponymous Armadale’s friend cries :lol:

[kore]

Oh oh read Woman in White first, I loved Armadale but WIW is amazing.

[osprey_archer]

TBH that sounds like an argument to read Armadale first, otherwise I might just spend the entirety of the book pining for Marian.

[kore]

Yes, Armadale is awesome! And def not 1,000 pages. Collins does write long, but I find his books also fly by really quickly, he's great at pacing.

I read that book on the Victorians!....decades ago, so I remember diddly-squat about it now, sigh.

Oh man I think I read some Pearl excerpts in The Other Victorians (my intro to Victorian porn!) and you are right it is totally WILD. And "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" totally reminds me of AO3 readers. "There's a chapter where there's a lot of spanking but it's tagged and you can just skip it."

[osprey_archer]

I am fascinated to hear that The Other Victorians quotes from the Pearl, because Sweet mentions that the author of The Other Victorians argued that there was almost no homosexual porn in Victorian times, and... it's right there in the Pearl! Not even slightly subtle!

Maybe the author of The Other Victorians just sort of ignored that because there's so much non-homosexual sex going on, too. "Must be at least 50% homosexual by weight to count" or something.

[kore]

"Must be at least 50% homosexual by weight to count" or something.

//dies

(LOL, I could also just be remembering wrong, which is far more plausible, sadly)

[osprey_archer]

TBH mid-century academics were VERY good at ignoring anything vaguely gay, so maybe he did write about the Pearl and DID somehow ignore the male-on-male blowjob. It happened while the guys were talking about a girl, so that makes it straight???

[skygiants]

I love the mental image of Victorian authors hanging out in a movie theater watching adaptations of their work with snacks, that's intensely charming!

[osprey_archer]

Concept: a late Victorian author, incensed by the silent film adaptation, tosses aside the little wooden spoon and stalks over to Have Words with the director (who is at the screening because... it's the first showing, or something). Romance... ensues???

[skygiants]

ROMANCE ENSUES! Perhaps the conclusion is a collaboration on an adaptation of another one of the late Victorian author's works that marries both the original Vision and the glowing possibilities of the new form, as they learn to see the value in each other's viewpoints?

[osprey_archer]

Of course! How else could it possibly end?

[littlerhymes]

Seconding the view that Armadale is good but not as good as the Woman in White, and Wilkie Collins is a very readable dude imo. He understood the appeal of good pacy thriller!

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.

And they couldn't even ctrl+f their way through the text, smh. You just had to sit there, nibbling at every course, even the ones you were allergic to, or at the very least sit there politely until the dish was taken away.

[osprey_archer]

I think I had better read Armadale first because otherwise I will spend the whole book pining for Marian from The Woman in White. (As I recall, this was my reasoning for starting with The Moonstone a few years back. It only sets you up for disappointment to start with the best one.)

"God, not ANOTHER de-virginization," groans the irritated Victorian reader, who is just here for some flagellation. "Haven't they deflowered all the virgins in the neighborhood yet?" *flips forward three pages* "No, here's another, God."

[anna_wing]

Goodness, yes, I remember coming across a compilation from "The Pearl" and giving up about a third of the way through from sheer mental exhaustion trying to keep up with who was doing what to whom in what order. It did occur to me that people who could dance until dawn in clothes weighing multiple kilogramnes were obviously very fit...

[osprey_archer]

I feel like the only possible way to read The Pearl is a little bit at a time. Otherwise it just becomes a confusing sexy kaleidoscope.

Yeah, though! They must have been pretty lively to dance until dawn in those heavy clothes! So clearly without clothes they could go even longer...

[lokifan]

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.

They still do those in British theatres (not cinemas, asaik). I love them :D

[osprey_archer]

WHAT. No one ever told me this! I could have gone to a British theater while I was studying abroad and eaten vanilla ice cream with a little wooden spoon???? An opportunity wasted.