ABSTRACT
Hypocrisy — professing a thing while doing its opposite, living one life by day and another by night. That some Victorians were hypocrites is undoubted — all ages have them — but the level of hypocrisy was not constant throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. Already in 1822 Sir Walter Scott, author of Ivanhoe, said people must pay ‘a tax to appearances’. Many of the charges of hypocrisy grow out of the activities of people who did not consider themselves Respectable and did not accept Respectables’ standards; these people, not the Respectables, are the hypocrites. Throughout the eighteenth century not everything occurred in the open and by 1830 the seriousness of Respectability forced more activities behind doors. Lady Holland, divorced in 1797, had married her lover, Lord Holland, and he was in the Whig Cabinets of the 1830s but not all hostesses welcomed them. By the 1850s the gap between appearances and reality, between ideals and actions, was small for Respectables. The high ideal of married life — and it was as high as it ever had been or was to be — comprised the core of Victorian life. Though never including everyone in any class, Respectable society started at the top of the economic scale and permeated all levels until it reached those with too little money to afford its necessary trappings. In the 1850s and 1860s, Hippolyte Taine was told that only one aristocrat was unfaithful, such was the standard of the day. (Taine's informant was wrong.) 1 No idea sweeps all before it and Respectability was no exception.
