Volume 42, Number 19 · November 30, 1995
Victoria's Secret
By Richard Jenkyns
When Passion Reigned: Sex and the Victorians
by Patricia Anderson
BasicBooks, 209 pp., $23.00
The Naked Heart
by Peter Gay
Norton, 463 pp., $29.95
Sixty or seventy years ago the word 'Victorian' was used by many cultivated people as a term of abuse: it seemed self-evident that the Victorians' art was either hideous or odiously sentimental, and their prudishness a moral deformity. Walking through Kensington Gardens, the philosopher and historian R.G. Collingwood had a revelation: as he looked at the Albert Memorial, he decided that ugliness could be a spiritual evil; not to be disgusted by this monstrosity was to be stunted as a human being. Yet in the 1960s it was being used on posters to lure tourists to London. The superior persons who sneered at the Victorians may have suspected, at moments, that time would exercise its usual softening effect, and that as the years went by, the Victorian ghastliness would join ducking stools and Jacobean screens and the six wives of Henry VIII among the jumble of the past—things not admirable or beautiful, but stored up as quaint parts of the national memory.
Review, 3928 words
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