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 enlightenment? If you run through his many footnotes, Sweet’s sources of stupidity on Victorianess come from popular journalism (such as a piece on woodworking in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution), a press release for a TV documentary on sex, and a recent English IKEA catalogue.

Still, Sweet’s admirable-sounding aim is to restore a “rich and difficult and complex” view of Victorian culture. Here’s a partial list of Victorian contributions to modern life that Sweet thinks are underappreciated:  

IVF treatment, for example. Or the fax machine. Or the football [soccer] league, political spin-doctoring, extravagant publicity stunts, heated curling tongs, vending machines, the electric iron, the petrol-driven car, the suburban housing estate, feminism, the London Underground, DIY [do it yourself], investigative journalism, commercially-produced hardcore pornography, instantaneous transcontinental communications networks, high-rise public housing, plastic, free universal education, product placement, fish and chips, X-ray technology, microbiology, sex contact ads, paper bags, Christmas crackers, junk e-mail (by telegram, but still just as annoying), global capitalism, interior design and Sanatogen.

This list is so amusing that I feel like a spoilsport in puncturing Sweet’s balloon. But here goes. Telegrams are not, in fact, what we mean by e-mail at all. “Instantaneous transcontinental communications networks” is just a fancy way of referring to telegraphs. By “fax machine” I think he’s referring to the telegraphs capable of transmitting images that date from about the 1870s; the “vending machines” he cites seem to boil down to one milk dispenser at a London branch of Sainsbury’s. Athens surely saw its own political spin-doctoring, Rome had its high-rise apartment buildings, and sex contact ads (still preserved at Pompeii) must have made their first appearance east of Eden. What this list does show in miniature is Sweet’s smoke and mirrors. It is true (as far as I know) that Victorians invented Christmas crackers and paper bags; it is not true (in any way that anyone cares about) that they invented feminism and global capitalism. The only way Sweet’s sensationalistic claims can work, after all, is to blur distinctions between the huge and the minuscule, the important and the trivial, so as to render them all equal.

Sweet’s book might not be smart but it does have its pleasures, especially if you’re interested in freak shows, murders, opium houses, and the like. I learned some new things (the chapters about the tightrope walker Blondin and advertising gimmicks are quite good) and laughed over some news stories, but scholars have been both more systematic and more synthetic in going over similar material. (I’d recommend anything by the admirable polymath Richard Altick, particularly in this context Victorian Studies in Scarlet which first appeared in 1970.) As a further plus, the book is also usually free of the jargon that is one of the extremely dubious pleasures of reading most academic essays on Victorian underwear. Still, life is short, books are numerous. Few readers, I think, will find any compelling reason to take up Inventing the Victorians.

St. Martin’s identifies Sweet on the book jacket as “a journalist whose work appears frequently in The Independent and The Guardian”; interestingly unmentioned is his thesis on the sensation fiction of the 1860s (no surprises there). Clearly scholarship is not on anyone’s ticket, and Sweet carefully displays his street cred by frequenting a penis-piercing parlour in the name of Prince Albert research. And the trade-off for the absence of academese is the presence of drum-rolling lines like “It is time for the freakish history of the nineteenth century to be reclaimed.”

Sweet’s choice of subjects, his attitude toward them, and the peculiar pop tone of this book give us a way of measuring both the trickle-down effect of psychoanalysis and contemporary literary theory and the trickle-up effect of ’60s educational policies like “make it relevant” (accordingly Sweet begins his chapter on the Victorian reporting of sex scandals with his pointless encounter with Monica Lewinsky). For although Sweet doesn’t talk like a post-structuralist, mocks psychoanalysis, and roasts Lytton Strachey, this book would be impossible without them.

Freud’s great contributions to the twentieth-century included an attitude (smugly knowing better than you about yourself), an object of study (taking the previously marginal, such as a dream, a joke, or a slip of the tongue, as a central object of study), and, above all, the uncontradictable theory. Freud reveals himself in a 1911 footnote to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900):

A little time ago I heard that a psychologist whose views are somewhat different from ours had remarked to one of us that, when all was said and done, we did undoubtedly exaggerate the hidden sexual significance of dreams: his own commonest dream was of going upstairs, and surely there could not be anything sexual in that. We were put on the alert by this objection, and began to turn our attention to the appearance of steps, staircases and ladders in dreams, and were soon in a position to show that staircases (and analogous things) were unquestionably symbols of copulation.

No matter how much we protest that something—anything—is not about sex, a canny Freudian can always claim we’re repressing it. Dissent has been paralyzed. In our day, Freud’s moves have been rechoreographed for cultural studies, deconstruction, the New Historicism, and so forth, in which obscure events are presented as revealing crucial trends—all the more significant, of course, for having been hitherto intellectually “repressed” by a hegemonic academic elite. Sweet castigates Freud for thinking that Victorians were repressed, but, perhaps unbeknownst to himself, he has adopted Freud’s attitude and techniques.

One of Freud’s first English readers, Lytton Strachey, is Sweet’s main intellectual villain. Sweet identifies Eminent Victorians, Strachey’s “poison-pen letter to the past,” as doing “more than any other text to fix the twentieth century’s attitude to the nineteenth.” The book solidified the view that Victorians were stodgy, their beds filled with “bugs and disasters” (Strachey’s phrase) and provided the disinfectant—ridicule. Further, Strachey deliberately (Oedipally?) distorted the Victorians to create a vision of his generation as brave oppositional figures, rebels, Moderns. This has been the standard view of Eminent Victorians since its appearance at the end of the First World War. It’s not news. What might be news to Sweet is how much his own tone, as well as parts of his scattershot method, echoes Strachey. Strachey trained as an historian—his dissertation was on Warren Hastings and the Begum of Oudh (not, although it sounds like it, one of Strachey’s jokes)—and his outrageousness was carefully calibrated. Even as early as 1912, Strachey wrote Lady Ottoline Morrell that he planned to write “from a slightly cynical standpoint.” The onset of the war only hardened his resolve, and his counter-weapons to that older generation of blunderers were doubles entendres and cheating.

In a way—a Cretan way—Strachey plays fair: he tells you all decisions will be arbitrary and final. So we shouldn’t be surprised that although he claimed to be dipping his “little bucket” randomly into the Great Victorian Ocean, he cheated once again and in fact showed us four figures chosen as representative of the Victorian authority he loathed: an ecclesiastic (Cardinal Manning), an educational authority (Thomas Arnold), a woman of action (Florence Nightingale), and a man of action (General Gordon). Sweet’s bucket is bigger than Strachey’s, but the lucky dip is still rigged. Sweet’s representatives of Victorian England are “the bisexual pornography in which the two heroes indulge in guiltless sex with each other before climbing into bed with the two heroines; the children’s adventure serial starring a cross-dressing teenage boy; the advertisements that wooed people like you and me into meetings with personalities like Julia Pastrana the Baboon Lady, Miss Atkinson the Pig Woman and the Bipenis Boy.” I don’t know about you, but I’m not ponying up for Julia Pastrana.

It is at moments like these (and there are many) that Sweet’s debt to the Modernity he castigates is clear. For he is not making a plausible argument that he is recreating a curious side of Victorian life. He is arguing both that such figures and activities constituted part of the Victorian mainstream and that they are positive goods. And he’s also arguing that we should lap them up because they’re really just like the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Jerry Springer Show, and similar entertainments we happily feed on. Sweet pretends to find our age inferior to the nineteenth century, but precisely what he finds praiseworthy about Victorians is how they’re “just like us”: tattooed drug-taking mall-crawlers. If he’s right, there’s new force to Walt Kelly’s words “We have seen the enemy, and he is us.”

Fortunately, Sweet is wrong. Despite the bucketloads of circumstantial social detail crammed into his book, it’s a profoundly ahistorical and inhuman work. The pleasures he so lovingly enumerates—the children’s toys, opium dens, freak shows, and penis rings—are all physical ones. He displays no interest in mentioning, let alone understanding, the no less intense intellectual or spiritual pleasures of the age, or domestic life outside of interior decoration. He has indeed invented his own Victorians, but they are automata without soul or mind. I think, in fact, Sweet should reconsider his relationship with Strachey, for he’s already writing according to Strachey’s motto in Eminent Victorians: “Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian.” Sweet’s book demonstrates that the spirit of the marginal has left the enclosed groves of academe and is walking the world at large. And that really is chilling news.

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