Matthew Sweet begins Inventing the Victorians

with a sentence that should send a chill down your spine:

“Suppose that everything we know about the Victorians is

wrong.” Horrors! Have we all been wasting our time for the

last hundred years? Will more paper than

Jarndyce v. Jarndyce produced be heading for the recycling bin?

Here’s Sweet’s late-breaking newsflash: Victorians

liked to have a good time, including in bed, and they didn’t

really put bloomers on their piano legs. The popularity of these

vile canards is all the fault of the Freudians and the

Bloomsburies and their (and our) craven need to prove our

“modernity” by positing the Myth of the Stodgy Victorian.

This is news?

Debunking misconceptions like these has been the chief occupation of

Victorianists since at least the 1950s. Steven Marcus’s book The Other

Victorians came out in 1966 and since then the

impulse to prove the randiness of Victorians has produced its own

library. Consider, for example, the Case of the Modest Piano

Leg: scholars haven’t fallen for that

chestnut in years. I know clarifying essays from 1974 and 1977 as

well as

a quick sideswipe from Gertrude

Himmelfarb in 1994, none of which Sweet cites although he traces

the same trail and quotes the same sources they do.

So what poor ignorant savages require Sweet as a missionary

of