This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/12/be-victorian-review-ruth-goodman
The article has changed 3 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| How to be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman – review | How to be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman – review |
| (2 months later) | |
| In August 1839, when Queen Victoria was just out of her teens, the 13th Earl of Eglinton convened a medieval tournament on his estate in Ayrshire. Thousands turned up in fancy dress to witness the cream of Scots aristocracy, canned in brass armour, tilting at each other on horseback. The rain poured. The mud grew thick. Water sluiced through the banqueting facilities. The knights struggled to keep in the saddle. The event was, in the words of one tough critic whose descendants doubtless spent a lot of time in the cheap seats at the Glasgow Empire, "the most magnificent abortion that has been witnessed for two centuries". | In August 1839, when Queen Victoria was just out of her teens, the 13th Earl of Eglinton convened a medieval tournament on his estate in Ayrshire. Thousands turned up in fancy dress to witness the cream of Scots aristocracy, canned in brass armour, tilting at each other on horseback. The rain poured. The mud grew thick. Water sluiced through the banqueting facilities. The knights struggled to keep in the saddle. The event was, in the words of one tough critic whose descendants doubtless spent a lot of time in the cheap seats at the Glasgow Empire, "the most magnificent abortion that has been witnessed for two centuries". |
| Is historical re-enactment a research technique or a party game? A way of occupying the sensory world of our ancestors – or an excuse for frustrated moderns to conduct themselves in a way they would not dare attempt in normal trousers? Ruth Goodman is in the first camp and has a CV to prove it. She has separated curds and whey like Tess Durbeyfield, handled the chemical stimulants that roared through the brain of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, overturned an Edwardian tractor and dug for victory against the Nazis – all without troubling the fabric of the space-time continuum. BBC camera crews recorded her labours for Victorian Pharmacy, Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm and Wartime Farm; TV tie-in hardbacks followed. Her new book, How to be a Victorian – sturdy, Beetonian, compendious – has bigger ambitions. It aims to be "history from the inside out" – to answer the question, "what was it really like to be alive in a different time and place?" | Is historical re-enactment a research technique or a party game? A way of occupying the sensory world of our ancestors – or an excuse for frustrated moderns to conduct themselves in a way they would not dare attempt in normal trousers? Ruth Goodman is in the first camp and has a CV to prove it. She has separated curds and whey like Tess Durbeyfield, handled the chemical stimulants that roared through the brain of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, overturned an Edwardian tractor and dug for victory against the Nazis – all without troubling the fabric of the space-time continuum. BBC camera crews recorded her labours for Victorian Pharmacy, Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm and Wartime Farm; TV tie-in hardbacks followed. Her new book, How to be a Victorian – sturdy, Beetonian, compendious – has bigger ambitions. It aims to be "history from the inside out" – to answer the question, "what was it really like to be alive in a different time and place?" |
| Goodman's method is a form of object divination. She handles Victorian materials, uses Victorian tools, wears and repairs Victorian clothes, in the hope that a kind of sympathetic magic will collapse the distance between the 19th century and the 21st. She has brushed her teeth with soot and scoured her pans with brick dust. (Both triumphs.) She has styled her hair with rice starch and rectified spirit. ("Very easy to make up and apply.") She once forswore washing with water for four months. (Nobody noticed, leading her to doubt the received idea that people in the past were more malodorous that their present-day counterparts.) | Goodman's method is a form of object divination. She handles Victorian materials, uses Victorian tools, wears and repairs Victorian clothes, in the hope that a kind of sympathetic magic will collapse the distance between the 19th century and the 21st. She has brushed her teeth with soot and scoured her pans with brick dust. (Both triumphs.) She has styled her hair with rice starch and rectified spirit. ("Very easy to make up and apply.") She once forswore washing with water for four months. (Nobody noticed, leading her to doubt the received idea that people in the past were more malodorous that their present-day counterparts.) |
| The best work in How to be a Victorian lies in Goodman's quiet demilitarisation of the corset – one of the most vicious ideological battlegrounds in Victorian studies. In the 1970s, when academia was busily formalising the Hammer horror view of the 19th century as a police state of the sensibility, the corset was identified as an instrument of patriarchal control: the gimp-mask that reminded Victorian women who their masters were. The academic Hélène E Roberts, for instance, argued that it "helped mould female behaviour to the role of the 'exquisite slave'" – but her ideas, and those of other writers in this field, were shaped by an overly literal interpretation of the evidence. | The best work in How to be a Victorian lies in Goodman's quiet demilitarisation of the corset – one of the most vicious ideological battlegrounds in Victorian studies. In the 1970s, when academia was busily formalising the Hammer horror view of the 19th century as a police state of the sensibility, the corset was identified as an instrument of patriarchal control: the gimp-mask that reminded Victorian women who their masters were. The academic Hélène E Roberts, for instance, argued that it "helped mould female behaviour to the role of the 'exquisite slave'" – but her ideas, and those of other writers in this field, were shaped by an overly literal interpretation of the evidence. |
| Exhibit A in this case was often a lengthy correspondence in the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, in which readers compared notes on whalebone and tight-lacing – with such feverish enthusiasm that it now seems safe to conclude that the letters pages of the EDM were hijacked by a gang of sniggering fetishists, not all of whom may have been the women they claimed to be. Goodman understands this history of overinterpretation, and having put in many corseted hours on her TV farm and pharmacy, comes to a simple and authoritative conclusion. "When I think now of a Victorian woman lacing up her corset, tying her garters and buttoning her dress, I think of a woman dressing sensibly for a hard day of work ahead." | Exhibit A in this case was often a lengthy correspondence in the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, in which readers compared notes on whalebone and tight-lacing – with such feverish enthusiasm that it now seems safe to conclude that the letters pages of the EDM were hijacked by a gang of sniggering fetishists, not all of whom may have been the women they claimed to be. Goodman understands this history of overinterpretation, and having put in many corseted hours on her TV farm and pharmacy, comes to a simple and authoritative conclusion. "When I think now of a Victorian woman lacing up her corset, tying her garters and buttoning her dress, I think of a woman dressing sensibly for a hard day of work ahead." |
| Her authority drains away, however, when dealing with less material aspects of Victorian life, the sort that can't be deduced from a sickle, snood or tincture. "Even within a family setting," she writes, "few women were willing to be naked in the kitchen." (If she has discovered evidence for a historical shift in levels of British kitchen nudity, I'd like to see it.) "Most parents firmly believed that allowing their daughters to jump out of trees and to cartwheel in the street was unforgivable and irresponsible parenting." (Statistics on the circumscribed lives of modern children would suggest we agree.) "Fear of masturbation became close to a national obsession." (How close? Not very. But it might look that way if you read through the cranky little pamphlets on the subject.) Like many studies of the 19th century, Goodman's book illustrates the dangers of overestimating the influence of didactic literature. If historians fail to kick this habit, then our world will be recalled as one in which parents left babies to cry until they learned that crying was futile; where everyone cooked Jamie's mustard chicken, followed the sex tips in Cosmopolitan and cultivated The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. At some future visitor attraction, this caricature may imprison us all. | Her authority drains away, however, when dealing with less material aspects of Victorian life, the sort that can't be deduced from a sickle, snood or tincture. "Even within a family setting," she writes, "few women were willing to be naked in the kitchen." (If she has discovered evidence for a historical shift in levels of British kitchen nudity, I'd like to see it.) "Most parents firmly believed that allowing their daughters to jump out of trees and to cartwheel in the street was unforgivable and irresponsible parenting." (Statistics on the circumscribed lives of modern children would suggest we agree.) "Fear of masturbation became close to a national obsession." (How close? Not very. But it might look that way if you read through the cranky little pamphlets on the subject.) Like many studies of the 19th century, Goodman's book illustrates the dangers of overestimating the influence of didactic literature. If historians fail to kick this habit, then our world will be recalled as one in which parents left babies to cry until they learned that crying was futile; where everyone cooked Jamie's mustard chicken, followed the sex tips in Cosmopolitan and cultivated The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. At some future visitor attraction, this caricature may imprison us all. |
| The history of historical re-enactment offers a forceful lesson: it is a better guide to the preoccupations of the present than the reality of yesterday. The pioneering TV example, Living in the Past, now looks less like an exploration of Iron Age life than another case of the survivalist strain in 1970s British culture. The most recent, Turn Back Time: The High Street, is less about discovering lost ways of life than working through our guilt at having been seduced away from our local tradespeople. The most such acts of mimicry can yield is, I suspect, a fragile and possibly illusory sense of contact with the experiential world of our ancestors. When you look above shopfronts and see, over the tide of fibreglass, a run of unaltered 19th-century windows, that sense of the proximity of the past is also a measure of its painful distance. But the instinct to do this at all might be a 19th-century innovation. Those wet spectators at the Eglinton Tournament knew it. How can you be a Victorian? Crave the experiences of the long dead. Be prepared to wear fancy dress. | The history of historical re-enactment offers a forceful lesson: it is a better guide to the preoccupations of the present than the reality of yesterday. The pioneering TV example, Living in the Past, now looks less like an exploration of Iron Age life than another case of the survivalist strain in 1970s British culture. The most recent, Turn Back Time: The High Street, is less about discovering lost ways of life than working through our guilt at having been seduced away from our local tradespeople. The most such acts of mimicry can yield is, I suspect, a fragile and possibly illusory sense of contact with the experiential world of our ancestors. When you look above shopfronts and see, over the tide of fibreglass, a run of unaltered 19th-century windows, that sense of the proximity of the past is also a measure of its painful distance. But the instinct to do this at all might be a 19th-century innovation. Those wet spectators at the Eglinton Tournament knew it. How can you be a Victorian? Crave the experiences of the long dead. Be prepared to wear fancy dress. |
| • Matthew Sweet's books include Inventing the Victorians, published by Faber. | • Matthew Sweet's books include Inventing the Victorians, published by Faber. |
| Write your review of this or any other book, find out what other readers thought or add it to your lists | Write your review of this or any other book, find out what other readers thought or add it to your lists |
| Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |