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Victorian Poses
| Article
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17508 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1990 |
2,147 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Wolfe
Gregory Wolfe is the founder and coeditor of Image: A Journal
of the Arts and Religion, and a frequent contributor to The
World & I. |
A VICTORIAN PORTRAIT
Asa Briggs and Archie Miles
New York: Harper & Row, 1989
220 pp., $ 29.95
The Victorian era has been making something of a comeback in the last few years. But this resurgence of interest and respect for the culture of Victoria's reign comes after decades of hard press. Like almost any other epoch in history, the Victorian age was scorned by its immediate successors. In Britain, the writers who made up the Bloomsbury group spent much of their literary energy deriding the hypocrisy, priggishness, and philistinism of their parents' generation. Bloomsburyite Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918), with its witty, satirical, and iconoclastic approach to such figures as Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Henry E. Manning, and Thomas Arnold, set the tone of elegant condescension toward the Victorians which took a half century to reverse.
But a century after they trod the earth, those stuffy parsons, statesmen, and educators continue to exercise a powerful influence over our institutions and values. A number of political commentators, for example, have pointed out the affinities of such world leaders as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for the Victorian values of self-reliance, hard work, and the sacred duty of economic advancement, (Hostile critics simply call Reagan and Thatcher social Darwinists.) In the recent debates over the quality and scope of higher education, crusaders like William Bennett and E.D. Hirsch have upheld Matthew Arnold's definitions of culture, first made in the 1850s, against those who wish to deny the centrality of the classics of Western
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