Anti-Victorianism
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Anti-Victorianism is a variety of (often extremely different) negative responses to either all things Victorian, or to any particular phenomenon attributed (rightly or wrongly) exclusively to the Victorian era.
An example of a term which was coined to epitomise certain anti-victorian sentiments was Horror Victorianorum.
However, this latinate term has itself become so much of a Victorianism-related historical feature that it has joined the canon of literary things (both directly and indirectly) connected to discussions of the Victorians, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the term from the very thing to which it is a response.
Many of the leading figures often described as being anti-Victorians, including Lewis Carroll, Lytton Strachey, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Pugin, are often lumped together with the very phenomena that they saw themselves as rejecting; mostly for reasons of historical confusion, but often by the expedient of brevity ("Victorian" being a term for both a chronological era and a range of sentiments and cultural phenomena).
Anti-Victorian sentiments fell into three main camps:
- Those that saw the Victorians as being "too modern", too disrespectful of tradition, too draconian in their preparedness to introduce "progress" at the expense of (not) preserving anything in its original or traditional form.
- Those that saw the Victorians as being too "revivalist" (and thus, at least from the perspective of anti-revivalist criticism, Victorianism was essentially superficial, "lacking in its own character") with such features as the Gothic Revival being cited as examples of this. Nonetheless, as an example of the historical confusion associated with anti-Victorianism, Gothic Revival (of which Pugin is seen as perhaps the greatest exponent) was itself originally seen as a prime example of anti-Victorianism, just as much as it is seen as a definitive example of Victorianism today.
- Those that saw the Victorians as being too conservative; this anti-conservatism was the sentiment of the original group of Anti-Victorians, a group which included both pro- and anti-revivalists.
Modern and postmodern critics of both Victorianism and anti-Victorianism have since tended to see revivalism as being an intrinsic contingent of conservatism (and more recently, of modernism), but the first great Anti-Victorian debates (conducted by those now inevitably seen as being Victorians) presented these sentiments (conservatism and revivalism) as being quite distinct and polarised.
A prominent "Anti-anti-Victorian" was poet laureate Sir John Betjeman who, in his highly successful broadcasting career, sought to ridicule the dismissal of supposed "Victorian Monstrosities" as he commented sympathetically on the 19th-century Victorian churches of Cornwall.
Other anti-Victorian sentiments saw the Victorians as being, in no particular order (with proponents of these criticisms hyperlinked):
- repressed (Freud)
- repressive (Bertrand Russell)
- bombastic (lacking subtlety in architecture and design)
- puritanical
- excessively mechanistic
- hypocritical (Dickens, Wilde)
- unrealistically optimistic ("Panglossian") about progress
- arrogant
- paternalistic
- unhygenic
- deferential
- inferior footballers
- industrial
- hegemonistic
- class-obsessesd
- mercenary
- scientistic
- imperialist
- xenophobic
- exploitative
- cynical
- insensitive (this was something that would have been dismissed out of hand at the time; most Victorians tended to see themselves as being extremely, perhaps even excessively sensisitive, by comparison with their predecessors)
- technological
- meritocratic (not initially seen as a virtue by all)
- aristocratic (although the Victorian era is often also seen as being the era when aristocracy began to decline)
The extent to which any of these features may or may not be true of any earlier, contemporary, or subsequent era or culture, forms a key part of the current pro- and anti-Victorian debate, as well as being germane to any discussion about what it was that uniquely characterised Victorianism.
