ABSTRACT
We generalise confidently about the people we call the Victorians, although a moment’s thought should make us realise how partial and unsatisfactory such generalisations are likely to be. The period is, in the first place, a very long one: Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901 and even within the narrower limits of the present study a statement about the early Victorian period (1830–c. 1850) is likely to need modification for the mid-Victorians (c. 1850–c. 1870), and may not be true at all for the later Victorians (c. 1870–c. 1890). Then generalisations about the Victorians (including my own) tend to be unduly derived from the society’s public discourse about itself, which, since this was the great age of the middle classes and they had most at stake in that discourse, was predominantly middle-class, masculine, and metropolitan. Then again the surviving record is, relatively speaking, so very full. Time has winnowed the products of earlier periods to a quintessence of style, but the artefacts of Victorian Britain are still all around us in their baffling stylistic variety. The painting, architecture, and design of the period pose problems not only of evaluation but of definition: in an age of such fertile revivalism, is it possible to speak of a Victorian style at all?
