Introduction: Writing the Victorians

Abstract

‘The history of the Victorian age will never be written. We know too much about it’, or so Lytton Strachey declared in the preface to his book Eminent Victorians in 1918 (p. 10). Yet since the death of Queen Victoria more than 100 years ago, the history of the Victorian era has been continuously rewritten. Indeed, Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was itself part of a Modernist rewriting that reflected an oedipal desire to emphasize the distance between the Victorians and the Modernists. As J. B. Bullen writes, ‘For [Strachey], and for many of [his] contemporaries, “Victorian” was a way of distinguishing [his] own attitudes from those of [his] parents’ (p. 2). Bullen recognizes that ‘Victorian’ here is a connotative, rather than merely denotative, term; what the Modernists sought to distance themselves from were the systems of ‘repression, realism, materialism, and laissez-faire capitalism’ that they felt characterized the Victorian period (p. 2). Confirming the oedipal nature of this relationship, Bullen suggests that the Modernist drive to assert difference from the Victorian generation was ‘so strident that it now seems […] like the nursery tantrums of children rebelling against the despotic regime of their parents’ (p. 2).