Customer Reviews

Living in the Past: Life in Victorian Times

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The more complete title is "Life in Victorian Times IN ENGLAND." This starts with Queen Victoria's birth/coronation and ends with her death. Her title of "Grandmother of Europe" never comes up. The work emphasizes Charles Dickens and never mentions Emile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, or other writers on the Continent. In a similar fashion, I had been taught that the Victorian age ended because of Freud, Marx, and World War I; again, this work says it ended with the Queen.

The film "Titanic" has been praised because it spoke about the upper class and the poor on the vessel. Similarly here, this work describes the lower, middle, and upper classes in Britain. It's easy for me to think that the Victorian age was marked by privilege and thus they wasted time on frivolous things, somewhat like how Americans wasted money on Beanie Babies in the successful 1990s.

Unfortunately, there is scant mention of women and gender. The women's studies that I read suggested that Victorian women were praised, and restricted, for doing frou-frou, superficial stuff. The work only briefly refers to the Victorian age as a time of peace, almost a "pax britannica." Though empire is mentioned, the racism and regionalism that empires practice does not come up at all. Michel Foucault's repressive hypothesis never comes up either.

There was a modern, female scholar interviewed here that I appreciated. She said something to the effect of: "The age was a time of invention and radical change. We moderns would have trouble surviving in the start of the era, but would probably do okay by the end of it." There is an actor interpreting Dickens and I thought his performance just killed time.

This work can be seen as scant or cursory. However, it would be an excellent viewing piece for high school history and English classes.