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A review by wealhtheow
Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet
2.0
Sweet sets out to prove that the Victorians were not so different from us. He has a point: they were the beginning of the current industrialized, urban-oriented society we live in today. To this day many of the phrases, assumptions, and phenomena (sex scandals as news, professional sports teams, advertising techniques) from that era remain.
Unfortunately, Sweet is good at research but bad and piecing it together. He lards the text with heaps of anecdotes and snide asides, makes wild assumptions, then contradicts himself only paragraphs later. His logic is faulty at best, and laughably insane at worst. One chapter he maintained that prostitution was not as common as historians think; the very next chapter he talks about how very prevelent prostitution was, and how this proves that Victorians were open minded about sex. He also spends at least 20% of the book talking about current events in a very hack-journalist sort of way: half the chapter on Victoria journalists' use of sex to sell newspapers is actually about Sweet's momentary glimpse of Monica Lewinsky. The chapter closes with a cigar joke. God I hate him.
"Although Virginia Woolf claimed to have found her visit to the movies in January 1915 'very boring,' it is doubtful whether she would have found the freedom to cut and splice the chronology of her narratives without the example of the cinematograph." wtf? don't mess with the Woolf. Almost every chapter contains an attempt to chip away at the Bloomsbury group--luckily Sweet sucks, so it's hard to take his nuggets of cruelety and poor logic seriously.
Note: According to the British Board of Film Censors, in 1912, the list of 22 reasons for which a film might be cut or censored included "medical operations," indecorous dancing," "native customs in foreign lands abhorrent to British ideas," staggering drunkards," or "funerals."
Unfortunately, Sweet is good at research but bad and piecing it together. He lards the text with heaps of anecdotes and snide asides, makes wild assumptions, then contradicts himself only paragraphs later. His logic is faulty at best, and laughably insane at worst. One chapter he maintained that prostitution was not as common as historians think; the very next chapter he talks about how very prevelent prostitution was, and how this proves that Victorians were open minded about sex. He also spends at least 20% of the book talking about current events in a very hack-journalist sort of way: half the chapter on Victoria journalists' use of sex to sell newspapers is actually about Sweet's momentary glimpse of Monica Lewinsky. The chapter closes with a cigar joke. God I hate him.
"Although Virginia Woolf claimed to have found her visit to the movies in January 1915 'very boring,' it is doubtful whether she would have found the freedom to cut and splice the chronology of her narratives without the example of the cinematograph." wtf? don't mess with the Woolf. Almost every chapter contains an attempt to chip away at the Bloomsbury group--luckily Sweet sucks, so it's hard to take his nuggets of cruelety and poor logic seriously.
Note: According to the British Board of Film Censors, in 1912, the list of 22 reasons for which a film might be cut or censored included "medical operations," indecorous dancing," "native customs in foreign lands abhorrent to British ideas," staggering drunkards," or "funerals."