THE VICTORIANS IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR. Simon Joyce. 213pp. Ohio University Press. Paperback, $22.95; distributed in the UK. by Eurospan. Pounds 14.95. 978 0 8214 1762 1
When Margaret Thatcher advocated a return to "Victorian values" in 1983, what did she have in mind? Her rhetorical stance seemed to amalgamate received ideas about hard work, self-help and moral duty in the nineteenth century. It was not in her interest to acknowledge that the "Victorians" she praised were composed of a wide range of groups and individuals whose histories and attitudes spanned almost as many continents as they did decades. It was certainly a successful sound bite; neither Thatcher nor the electorate paid too much attention to Neil Kinnock's rejoinder that the Victorian age had been as dishevelled as it was highly developed.
Simon Joyce's provocative study The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror examines the twentieth-century cultural conditions that led to the vision of a golden age of integrity, a vision so dominant that it could be used as a political rallying cry.
He shows how the Bloomsbury Group rewrote the intellectual legacies of their parents, rejecting Dickensian networks of social sympathy in order to celebrate interiority and individualism. Although Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians
(1918) did admit to the piebald variety of the recent past, the Bloomsbury consensus saw the Victorian period as monochrome and monolithic.
Joyce offers a fascinating range of case studies of writers, film-makers and politicians who have appropriated the culture and ideas of the nineteenth century in the wake of English Modernism. He writes engagingly about the bashfulness that tempers the nostalgic drift of novels by E. M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh, and about the way that "heritage cinema" has overlooked the complexity of these texts; the media's celebration and yearning for the past is seen as "colluding with a Thatcherite agenda". He examines the contradictions in the neo-Conservative longing for this Victorian fantasy which has been advertised simultaneously as "an age of collectivism and as one of laissez-faire individualism". The expansive remit of this book is both a strength and an occasional frustration; its final chapter on the neo-Dickensian novel is suggestive rather than exhaustive. Nonetheless, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror is a rich work that suggests why those eminent Victorians remain so immanent.
