The Victorian Temper Revisited

Abstract

WHEN we recall that the infant Victoria was christened Alexandrina and then almost as an afterthought Alexandrina Victoria, we may wonder whether we might have had another image of the Victorian era, had the first name rather than the second prevailed. There were assuredly Alexandrian (not to say Alexandrinian) elements in Victorian life and letters, if that label connotes either the sort of remote pedantic erudition practiced by George Eliot's Mr. Casaubon or the indolent sensuous decadence that permeates Oscar Wilde's Sphinx. But Alexandrian, in whatever sense we take it, is in nowise as vague or inclusive as the epithet which has long obscured many appraisals of nineteenth-century culture. In writing The Victorian Temper twenty years ago I sought first of all to challenge the connotations, virtually all disparaging, of Victorianism. My method was simply to assemble blurred and contradictory uses of the term, that is, in effect, to align current indictments of the age and its attitudes, to let them by their own overstatement cancel each other out, and then to indicate that, at all events, nearly all of the charges were anticipated by the Victorians themselves, who, despite their Edwardian and Georgian reputation for complacency, had an enviable capacity for self-criticism. My intention was to help clear the way for a more objective and less apologetic view of a literature which, withstanding all virulent attack, seemed to me of peculiar strength, variety and charm. To be detached in one's regard, to insist like the best social historians of the period on a strictly denotative use of was to make room for a more patient understanding and eventually a quickened sympathy. Already I saw among scholars an increasing interest in things Victorian, expressed both in some admirable new editions and in carefully measured revaluations of standard authors; but I had no suspicion at the time that the next two decades would make the period one of the principal areas of literary research and criticism. Nor did I foresee the more popular