Catch Inventing The Victorians By Matthew Sweet Expressed As Print

bought this book back inand I've attempted to read it on a handful of occasions, While I love the thesis the Victorians aren't as we stereotypically have understood them to be, I didn't think the actual book did a complete job of tying the information back to the original thesis.
While wellresearched and chock full of detail, I was left feeling incredibly frustrated, There is no context given no clear attempt is made to articulate first what these firmly rooted Victorian stereotypes are or why or how they came to be.
Without this context, the information shared doesn't actual tie back to any kind of concrete argument it flounders, Stylistically, the writing is detailed, but dry, and without any tie back to the proposed thesis, I found myself skimming a good chunk of this book.
A welcome corrective to the conflation of the diverse, dynamic culture of the nineteenth century with theD definition of all things starchy and repressed suggested by the adjective Victorian.
Sweet, sweeping the subjects of sex, the cinema, the freak show, and advertising, repeatedly overturns our received notions, While his journalists eye occasionally settles too easily on the sensational he surely cannot have meant to imply that Oscar Wilde willingly allowed his name to be used on an advert for "Madame Fontaines Bosom Beautifier", Sweet has produced a thoroughlyresearched and elegantly iconoclastic exposé of our misapprehensions about tophatted history.
This is all about busting the myth that the Victorians were more straight laced than we are today, It shows how many things we take for granted started in that era, Like sensational news reports, pornographic photography and true crime memoirs to name a few,
While this wasn't a perfect read for me I still enjoyed having all this information in one book for reference.
Interesting take on the impact of Victorian society on our society today, and how we perceive and interpret the impact of the past.
I enjoyed the book overall, but found the last few chapters especially a bit disjointed, Overall, an interesting read. Matthew Sweet's Inventing the Victorians attempts much, and often succeeds it also stumbles and falls too often on its face.
To me, the problem is that Sweet isn't sure whether he wants to be an investigative journalist, an academic historian or a clever and slightly acidic raconteur.


There is much to recommend in this book, It offers insight into the lives, myths and reality of our Victorian ancestors, There is solid research and references to many authors, I do wonder, however, what Sweet would have done without Virginia Woolf's writing, Sweet does break down many of theC preconceptions of the staid, boring and excessively repressed Victorians we hold.


On the other hand, Sweet cannot seem to refrain from making some rather caustic, silly or innuendoembued comments.
Do we really have to know how he attended a Monica Lewinsky book signing and how he handed her a cheque in an envelope to test whether she would cash it Did the chapter really have to end with a comment about cigars This stepping out from or would it be into the colour of sophomoric journalism degraded the overall value and tone of the text.


I would recommend this book to anyone to read, There would, however, be a clear caveat, You can judge much of this book by its cover, Thoroughly enjoyed this not the standard stuff

at all, Sweet lifts the lid on music halls, orphans, medicine, murder, newspapers, pornography, publicity, circuses and other more 'social history' corners of Victoriana that don't always get a look in.
Not at all what we think we already know about our great great grandparents! I was having a fine time until I got to the lateinbook chapter about how patriarchy in Victorian times wasn't so bad.
I mean, come on! Women worked! They finally got to have custody of their children! They didn't have to wait two years after being deserted to get a divorce! And men questioned their masculinity, so clearly it wasn't patriarchal!

Which.
Just.

What the entire fuck,

It definitely did not make me want to read the following chapter on how it wasn't so bad to be queer in the same period.


And, honestly, that chapter made me question the rest of the book, If Sweet was willing to completely ignore the cultural conventions and expectations of the time to justify the Victorian period not being patriarchal, did he cut corners the same way in other chapters to be right about his point Suppose that everything we think we know about 'The Victorians' is wrong That we have persistently misrepresented the culture of the Victorian era, perhaps to make ourselves feel more satisfyingly liberal and sophisticated What if they were much more fun than we ever suspected Matthew Sweet's Inventing the Victorians has some revelatory and entertaining answers for us.


As Sweet shows us in this brilliant study, many of the concepts that strike us as terrifically new political spindoctoring, extravagant publicity stunts, hardcore pornography, anxieties about the impact of popular culture upon children are Victorian inventions.
Most of the pleasures that we imagine to be our own, the Victorians enjoyed first: the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the amusement arcade, the crime novel and the sensational newspaper report.
They were engaged in a wellnigh continuous search for bigger and better thrills, If Queen Victoria wasn't amused, then she was in a very small minority, . .

Matthew Sweet's book is an attempt to reimagine the Victorians to suggest new ways of looking at received ideas about their culture to distinguish myth from reality to generate the possibility of a new relationship between the lives of nineteenthcentury people and our own.
Some interesting facts and anecdotes here, but I think the way of telling them was not my cup of tea
The first chapters above all where kinda like info dumping of names and dates, little else to make them really interesting.

As I said, not my cup of the, just here and there there was something like social commentary about the whys which was what I was looking for from the start.

I call it a missed opportunity,.stars
If you're at all interested in the era, this piece is definitely worth a read, It would be neat to have a second edition released as well, as this retrospective is pushing twenty years old.
Then perhaps Matthew Sweet could remedy the fact that he uses the phrase sex workers literally once, and prostitute about eighty times, and while an entire chapter of the book is dedicated to homosexuality in the era, it only devotes all of two sentences to lesbianism.
Also, the book felt very really cut down at times, so maybe with a new edition, readers could get an even more thorough look into Victorian Britain.
I'm interested in history but lack the staying power for a heavy history book: I enjoyed the way this was presented the book approaches the Victorians through different aspects of social history with a nice balance between detail and overview.
I particularly enjoyed the fascination with high wires and thrill seeking: interesting that it seeems to be coming back into fashion! If you believe that the Victorians were so prudish that they covered up their table and piano legs with chintz, that Queen Victoria refused to believe that lesbians existed or that Prince Albert had a ring through his penis, then you need to read this book to put you straight.
Matthew Sweet not only debunks these myths but also shows how many aspects particularly the worst ones of modern day society had their foundations in the Victorian era.
Things such as the worst excesses of advertising and cold calling, the cult of celebrity, the fascination with serial killers and violent crime, the prevalence of paedophilia.

This is wellwritten popular history with a wealth of fascinating anecdotes many of which will be new even to readers who already have some knowledge of the period.
Ultimately, the book is a bit too populist to make a thorough enough case for its main premise that historians often often promulgate the worst and most basic stereotypes of the previous era to make people of the present day feel better about themselves.
He entertainingly shows how this will be done for our present new Elizabethan era in the final chapter, One thing kind of weird about this book so its written to dispel the common notions that us modern folk have of the Victorians.
. . but the thing is, the people who are ignorant of the true nature of the nineteenth century are probably not the type of people who are going to pick this book up and read it.
Who is most likely going to read a book called inventing the Victorians People who are already interested in them and therefore already have a more nuanced understanding of them.
So a lot of this book felt a little patronizing or know it ally to me, Like, oh yeah, well did you know that the Victorians didnt actually do/think/believe Yup, I did,

But otherwise some interesting facts in here, exhaustive use of pretty obscure primary sources, and a thoughtful approach to these people and this time I love so much.
.