Inventing the Victorians

I found this book to be fascinating, informative, and quite thought-provoking. Matthew Sweet is a true historian, who brings to bear a keen eye to his topic. Sweet's handling of the subject of the Victorians is so deft, rooted not only in primary sources, but also in an understanding of the ways in which ideas are formed throughout various historical eras. I love the way he deciphers evidence and clues, and connects the formation of interpretations of the past to specific eras (thereby uncovering their origins and intent.) One rarely reads history that is so probing and so thought-provoking. A wonderful book! I look forward to reading more of Sweet's excellent work.

This is a light, airy read. It has a distinct British feel to it. This work is filled to the brim with very thoroughly investigated research. Yet, somehow, it doesn't at all turn into a bore in the way that so many other historical comparisons do. It definitely puts a different spin on my view of the Victorian era, most specifically, Victorian England. After all, that's really what the book is about. So I suppose the author hit his mark!

Matthew Sweet did a great job to reinvent the images of the Victorians as we know them. Sweet convincingly presents the vivid portrait of the people who loved fun and thrills as we do now. His scope is a little wider than it should be, but his book provides fascinating views on the Victorian world. See the following examples. Many believe today that the Victorians were so prudish that they covered the legs of a piano with clothe. Matthew Sweet, showing a contemporary illustration of a piano with uncovered legs, gives us a more reasonable explanation about the popular myth of the covered piano legs. In other places of his book, Sweet shows substantial amount of evidences about the Victorian's attitudes about sex, which are ironically more liberated than those of the Bloomsbury set who ridiculed the preceding generations. Many popular ideas about the 19th century England are challenged -- like our ideas about thier male-dominated family -- and Matthew Sweet successfully debunks them. Not that the book is preachy or didactic. Far from it. The book is always readable and never fails to be interesting with the intriguing historical anecdotes about the first junk mail (coming from a dentist), ancestors of modern cinema, craze about celebrity, and sensationalism of tabroids, all of which we inherited from the Victorians. For all the readable sentences and the notes the book provides, you may not like some parts of 'Inventing the Victorains.' I'm not talking about the content, but the style of composing the book. Each chapter begins with modern topics as introductory part in a bit far-fetched way. To tell the Victorians' fascination about the visual arts, Matthew Sweet begins with his own episodes about the 2000 Cannes Film Festival where he witnessed some new techiniques. Even Monica Lewinsky's promotional tour in England (where the author met her at a bookshop) is used to introduce one chapter. Do we need that, even if he made a point putting these two things -- old and new -- side by side? It depends. And the topics dealt here are many, too many, you might say. Many names appear fleetingly, but in many cases I am afraid you (and I) never heard of them before. To describe the cinematic innovation, he writes "cinemascope, 3-D, Smell-o-Vision, 'Emergo' ... and 'Percepto'" before citing the name of 'The Blair Witch Project' and Marchant/Ivory films. And they are all in one chapter. If you don't know director William Castle and his films, you don't know what the 'Emergo' vision is like. Well, just a quibble. Fortunately, however, you just can just skip over these minor things. Actually, most part of the book is both erudite and entertaining, feat few people can achieve. Episodes quoted here are often about interior decoration, cooking, sex scandals, media circus, porno, and even serial killers, topics we all are familiar to. Recommended to anyone who is interested in this era.

Sweet provides good refutation for some of the unfortunate images of the Victorian world (Sweet demonstrates that some Victorians allowed naked piano legs!). :-) He offers delightful, detailed accounts of Victorian tightrope walkers (Blondin), opium sellers, "freaks," and homosexuals, among others. However, 232 pages of anecdotes and examples just does not provide enough range to demonstrate that "Everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." It is a huge topic, rather larger than this quite enjoyable book.

I consider myself something of a minor student of the Victorian era, and when I hear pundits and commentators disparaging the Victorians, they often seemed to me to be talking in terms of stereotypes, rather than reality. Apparently, this same observation has aroused Matthew Sweet to write this monograph, to set the record straight. Herein, Mr. Sweet looks at what the Victorians were really like, and how they lived lives surprisingly similar to modern Britons. The book contains chapters on such things as Victorian freak shows, pornography, morals, and so much more.I found this book to be a quite fascinating history, one that covers subjects rarely found in other history books. The author left very few stones unturned, covering subjects with a surprising frankness. My one complaint against this book is that I did find the chapters a little too long, with the author dragging out the subject to near exhaustion. However, I must say that that is a matter of taste, and another reader might quite enjoy the depth of detail.So, if you are interested in the Victorians, and what the Victorian world was *really* like, then I highly recommend that you get this book!