ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the repetition in popular accounts of the Victorians and their era of certain specific “scandals” or “sensations” and the overlooking or neglect of others. Some account will be given of extensively reported events which, if not entirely forgotten and which may have received occasional historiographical attention, have not really become part of more popular perceptions. Suggestions will be made as to why this might be. The scandalous involvement of famous, notorious, aristocratic, and royal individuals has accorded a place in the popular historical imagination. This has also generated the production of persistent conspiracy theories, such as claims of a “hush-up” over the Cleveland Street affair because Prince Eddy was allegedly a habitué. An apparently coherent narrative trajectory also makes for a prolonged shelf life. Such scandals corroborate and/or contradict general assumptions about “the Victorians.” There are also some things which are now scandals, as it were, about the Victorians, produced by the discovery or wider circulation of sources since their day. One example is Isaac Baker Brown who is probably a great deal more notorious now than he was, except in very limited circles, in the 1860s. The retrospective creation of suppositious Victorian scandals is also considered.
