ABSTRACT
Can we, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, understand vulgarity, “the thing” Victorians knew when they saw it? Was it a natural drive that needed to be covered over, repressed, or subdued by refined behavior? Or was the desire to hide such impulses itself a sign of the vulgar pretension that Ruskin identified as over-scrupulousness? Was vulgarity a presence or an absence? Was it an excess or a deficiency? Did it mark, as many nineteenth-century essays suggest, egoism and upstart social tendencies? Or was it true that “all vulgarity simply results from a want of self-confidence” (Helps 146)? Such questions recurred insistently over the course of the nineteenth century. William Morris’s 1896 avowal that he became a socialist because of “the eyeless vulgarity which has destroyed art, the one solace of labour” (13) echoes the social critiques of earlier aesthetic critics like Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Arnold as well as the discussions of vulgarity that circulated in diverse nineteenth-century venues including dictionaries, conduct books, grammars, fiction, reviews of art, and newspaper columns. The essays in Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture explore an array of texts in order to map out some of the myriad meanings vulgarity assumed as it came to prominence as a term of critical opprobrium. Our contributors chart the twists and turns of Victorian prose as it attempted both to acknowledge and suppress, to see and remain blind to, the vulgarity writers feared was inextricably interwoven into the roots of nineteenth-century English culture.
