Pen & Sword Review: Not So Virtuous Victorians, by Michelle Rosenberg & Sonia D. Picker

Blurb

What springs to mind when you think of British Victorian men and women? Manners, manners and more manners. Behaviour that was as rigid and constricted as the corsets women wore. From iron-knicker sexual prudery to men so uptight they furtively released their pent up emotions in opium dens and prostitute hot spots. All, of course, exaggerated clichés worthy of a Victorian melodrama. Each generation loves to think it is better than the last and loves to look aghast at the horrifying trends of their ancestors. But are we really any different?

This glimpse at life for Victorian men and women might make millennials think again. Men and women were expected to live very differently from one another with clearly defined roles regardless of class. However, lift the skirts a little and not only will you see that they didn’t wear knickers but they were far less repressed than the persistent stereotypes would have us believe. The Victorians were as weird and wonderful as we are today. From fatal beauty tips to truly hysterical cures for hysteria to grave robbers playing skittles with human bones, we have cherry picked some of the more entertaining glimpses into the lives led by our Victorian brothers and sisters.

My Review

This book arrived yesterday, and being only 80 pages, I took it to bed to read last night. It only took two hours. I wasn’t impressed. I know they’ve only ‘cherry-picked’ bits from the period, but it is a shallow book.

From an academic’s perspective, the authors quote extensively from other writers but don’t attribute them in any way that might allow the reader to find the source and read more. They clearly believe, and repeat ad nauseum, the myth about corsets being tight laced and impossible to move in. From the accounts of multiple dress historians, I know this isn’t true, and that corsets were essential underpinnings for their clothing, and working women could move around quite easily in them. I recommend the work of Bernadette Banner‘s video on the subject.

They also repeat the myth that Victoria refused to include lesbianism in the law that made male homosexuality illegal because she didn’t believe such things could happen. The truth is, even in the 19th century a monarch could not mess with laws put through Parliament. They sign off the laws, they don’t make them.

They also consistently used the wrong pronouns for Dr James Barry and suggested the pregnancy he had was from a relationship with a colleague, when there is evidence that when he was a teenager, before becoming Dr James Barry, he had been raped by an uncle and his mother raised the subsequent daughter.

I really am not impressed by this book, and to be honest it’s not the first book I’ve had from Pen & Sword recently that has been disappointing. In a few weeks I shall be reviewing another that is supremely distressing to me because it is so badly written. I don’t normally review books I don’t enjoy but sometimes I need to get things off my chest. I really dislike it when authors don’t cite their sources and repeat myths/lies/bad history. Pen & Sword need to up their editing game.