17.1: Victorian Culture

Equally momentous shifts in culture and learning occurred during the 19th Century. The cultural era is known as “Victorianism,” named after the British Queen Victoria, who presided over the zenith of British power and the height of British imperialism. Her astonishingly long reign, from 1837 to 1901, coincided with the triumph of bourgeois norms of behavior among self-understood elites.

Figure 17.1.1: Queen Victoria, the symbolic matriarch of Western culture in the nineteenth century.

Victorianism was the culture of top hats, dresses that covered every inch of the female body, rigid gender norms, and an almost pathological fear of sexuality. Its defining characteristic was the desire for security from the influence of the lower classes. Class divisions were made visible in the clothing and manners of individuals, with each class outfitted in distinct “uniforms”. Indeed, one’s hat indicated one’s income and class membership. The bourgeoisie increasingly mixed with the old nobility, and came to assert a self-confident vision of a single European culture that, they thought, should dominate the world. Social elites insisted that scientific progress, economic growth, and their own increasing political power were all results of the superiority of European civilization, a civilization that had reached its pinnacle due to their own ingenuity. By the latter decades of the century, they characterized that superiority in racial terms.

According to the great Victorian psychologist Sigmund Freud, Victorianism was fundamentally about the repression of natural instincts. Three threats were present in the lives of social elites: the threat of sexual impropriety, the threat of financial failure, the threat of immoral behavior being discovered in public. All of these threats were tied to shame. Further, Victorianism was connected to Christian piety. The impulse to tie morality to a code of shame was secularized in the Victorian era to apply to everything, especially in economics. Simply put, there was a moral connection between virtue and economic success. The wealthy came to regard their social and economic status as proof of their strong ethical character, not just luck, connections, or hard work. Thus, Victorian culture included a belief in the existence of good and evil in the moral character of individuals, traits that science, they thought, should be able to identify just as it was now able to identify bacteria.

The Victorian bourgeoisie accused the working class of inherent weakness and turpitude. According to this social class, as the labor movements and socialist parties grew, the demands of the working class for shortened working days spoke not to their exhaustion and exploitation, but to their laziness and lack of work ethic. The Victorian bourgeoisie were the champions of the notion that everyone got what they deserved and that science itself would eventually ratify the social order. What the Victorian elite feared more than anything was that the working class would somehow overwhelm them, through a communist revolution or by simply "breeding" out of control. They tended to fear a concomitant national decline, sometimes even imagining that Western Civilization itself had reached its pinnacle and was doomed to degenerate.

There were remarkable contrasts between the ideology of Victorian life and its lived reality. Even though much of the fear of social degeneration was exaggerated, alcoholism became much more common and drug use spread. Cocaine was regarded as a medicinal pick-me-up, and respectable diners sometimes finished meals with strawberries dipped in ether. Many novels critiqued the hypocrisy of social elites and their pretensions to rectitude. Two classics of horror writing, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula, are both about the monsters that lurked within bourgeois society, just under the surface of their respectable exteriors.