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Religion See other Religion Articles Title: Stern fathers, religious zealots and prudes? How we got the Victorians wrong As the myth of the strict Victorian father is dispelled, the writer and historian A.N. Wilson says this is not the only way we have misconstrued the Victorian era Having spent much of my adult life studying the Victorian age, I have often been puzzled by the clichés and stereotypes of the Victorians that are so often repeated, not only in journalism but even in serious history books. We are asked to believe that they were all amazingly puritanical, hung up on sex, so afraid of the erotic that they covered up chair legs with upholstery in case the word “leg” led their thoughts astray. A recent book by social historian Dr Julie-Marie Strange has surveyed over 250 memoirs and innumerable other bits of evidence to shed light on “Fatherhood and the British Working Class”. The picture that emerges from her study is very different indeed from the stereotype of what we imagine stern Victorian males to have been like. Although it was commonplace for mothers to scare their children, for example, by promising that Father would hit or strap them when he came home from work, Dr Strange has actually found almost no evidence Victorian fathers hit their children any more often than we do – perhaps rather less, in fact. It seems as though David Beckham and Jamie Oliver were not the first generation of “new dads”. There were plenty of kindly Victorian men who loved their children and were loved in return. But this is not the only way in which we may have been getting the Victorians wrong all these years. Despite the puritanical stereotype, they were in many ways more relaxed about the human body than we are. Not long ago I read in the news that some naked bathers were being threatened by some local authority for having commited an act of indecency – just by skinny-dipping. How different from the Victorians, who regularly bathed naked. The Reverend Francis Kilvert, one of their best diarists, described going to Weston-super- Mare in the 1870s and watching the crowds, all naked, gambolling in the water. “There was a delicious feeling of freedom in stripping in the open air, and running naked down to the sea”, he wrote. Indeed, it was when he saw bathers wearing costumes that he felt shocked : the bathing costume implied there was something smutty about having been naked. We are often told that the Victorians had a cruel justice system and, yes, they had the death penalty. But when two eight-year-old working class boys, Peter Barratt and James Bradley, killed an infant in 1861, in circumstances eerily similar to the death of Jamie Bulger in 1993, there was far less hue and cry than in our press. The two little killers, who were found guilty, were deemed too young to be murderers. They were sent to a reformatory school for five yars for manslaughter and were then spirited away. One imagines they joined the army. Both the judicial system and the press took an enlightened view of the tragedy and there was no newspaper witch-hunt as there regularly is of the killers of Bulger. It is often said that the Victorians were all religious maniacs, Biblical literalists who were shocked to the core by Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. In fact, many of Darwin’s keenest supporters were broad-minded clergymen, such as Charles Kingsley, author of the Water Babies. Those who opposed Darwin most vociferously were the scientific establishment of his day, not the Church. In his memoirs of Victorian childhood, G.K.Chesterton remarked that by the 1890s, “atheism was the religion of the suburbs”. I once toured London’s East End with a very old clergyman who could remember the days just after the First World War. Pointing to a huge church, I said, “Built in the age of faith!” “Not so”, replied the priest. “Built by a rich priest as a propaganda exercise. No one but no one ever attended that huge building. The services were always empty.” But surely we know that the Queen was “not amused.” Victoria, we are told, was a prude if ever there was one, never laughed, and was completely pompous, Having just written a biography of her, I saw how those who edited her letters wanted to present an image of her to the world that was quite unlike her real self. She had a keen sense of humour and was always getting the giggles. And she was indulgent towards her friends when they fell in love or got into scrapes. When the mad Marquess of Queensberry, who persecuted Oscar Wilde, accused the Liberal Prime Minister of being gay, the Queen, who did not know whether this was true or false, sensibly advised Lord Rosebery to go abroad until the fuss died down. She loved Rosebery, despite believing his views were practically Communist, and the two would sit beside one another on a sofa and roar with laughter as they gossiped about public figures. So where did this dour image of the Victorian age come from? How did we get the idea that they were all puritanical, unsmiling, and cruel? When Bertrand Russell, the famous philosopher, was jailed during the First World War for being a conscientious objector, his warder was surprised to hear laughter coming from his cell. He went in and saw Russell reading a volume by his friend Lytton Strachey, called “Eminent Victorians”. Russell, the grandson of the Liberal Prime Minister Lord John Russell, had experienced an austere upbringing, largely at the hands of a rather frightening grandmother. Strachey saw many such alarming parent figures in the upper class world to which he and Russell belonged, and when they grew up and formed the friendship group that came to be known as the Bloomsbury Set, they determined to lampoon everything about the Victorians. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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